Community, then, is the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated about critical political priorities; and it is the product of interpretation, interpretation based on an attention to history (Martin and Mohanty 210).
Home, for many people on the margins, is, to paraphrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, that which we cannot not want. It stands for a safe place, where there is no need to explain oneself to outsiders; it stands for community; more problematically, it can elicit a nostalgia for a past golden age that never was, a nostalgia that elides exclusion, power relations, and difference.
Motifs of home animate works by peoples in diaspora, often peoples of color, who may have no permanent home, people on the margins such as gays and lesbians, for whom home was rarely if ever safe, and women and children, where the “haven” of home can be a site of violence and oppression. Martin and Mohanty focus on the narrative production of home and identity by white Southern lesbian writer Minnie Bruce Pratt.
Their problematic recognizes the desire for safety and the construction of an identity while it interrogates that construction, noting its suppression of differences within, highlighting its always provisional nature, and examining its enmeshment in networks of power.
Pratt, Martin, and Mohanty highlight the necessity and inevitability of a desire for a home in an inhospitable world, the accompanying dangers of that desire, and the continuing need to create homes for ourselves. I take up the problematic of home and community as racial and ethnic identities, produced and created through narrative, discourse, and performance. The site is Asian American theater in Los Angeles, more specifically, a play called Doughball” a December 1990-January 1991 production at East/West Players in Los Angeles, the oldest existing Asian American theater company in the country.
Perry Miyake, a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American from Venice, California, wrote the play, and the production starred Steve Park, the Korean grocer from Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, and formerly a regular on the television comedy In Living Color. I examine the narrative and performative production of home as a work of collective memory and as a safe place in the text, in the production itself, and in the specific site of East West Players and of Asian American theater in Los Angeles.
The essay ends with the implications of productions like Doughball for a cultural politics, addressing particularly the question of the political weight of realist representation. The narrative and performative production of home, community and identity is a particularly urgent issue in the case of Asian Americans.
The term “Asian American” itself bears the marks of the civilrights and student struggles of the 1960s. It was created to displace the term Oriental, a word eschewed for its stereotypical associations with exoticism, despotism, and inscrutability, and for its reinscription of the East/West binary defining the East in terms of the West.
Minimally, Asia names a continent, not some phantasmatic landscape. “Asian American,” then, is an historically specific, constructed, political identity, a specific response to a particular historical situation in North America, where people of Asian descent are lumped together regardless of national origin, and where violence, racism, prejudice against any Asian American becomes an act of violence against all Asian Americans.
“Asian American,” then, is above all a coalitional and, as I have argued, a performative identity. Given this particular sedimented history, Asian Americans have a specific relation to the notion of home. For mainland Asian Americans, surely one of the most insistent features of our particular oppression is our ineradicable foreignness.
The fiftieth anniversary of the forced imprisonment of Japanese Americans was commemorated in 1992. Certainly the incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps was attributable at least in part to this elision of Japanese Americans with Japanese nationals, a savagely ironic situation, given that exclusion laws prevented Issei, the immigrant generation, from becoming citizens until the passage of the MacCarran-Walter Act in 1952.
No matter how many generations Asian Americans are resident here, no matter how articulate we seem, we inevitably attract the comment, “Oh, you speak English so well,” or its equivalent, “Where are you from?” which somehow never seems to be adequately answered by Oregon or Illinois or New Jersey. The question, “Where are you really from?” is sure to follow.
We continue to see this elision of Asian and Asian American in a historically specific climate nuanced by events including World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Japan-bashing, anti-Communist ideologies, and post-1965 immigration from Asia. In the Los Angeles Times, this 1991 article appeared, headlined “Japanese-Americans Stung by Vandalism at Center.”
Members of a judo class were shocked when they arrived recently at a JapaneseAmerican community center in Norwalk and discovered ‘Go Back to Asia’ and other epithets smeared on the walls in white paint. It was the third time in a week that the center had been vandalized …. it was the racial graffiti that stirred painful memories for some of the older members of the Southeast Japanese Community Center who recall being taken from their homes during World War II (Avila).
Nor is it only Japanese Americans who suffer from the confusion of Asian with Asian American. The emblematic case, a “mournful reference point, (Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians 301) am~mg Asian Americans, is that of Vincent Chin, the Chinese American engineer beaten to death with baseball bats by two unemployed “all-American” white auto workers who blamed Japan for their plight.
Given the continuing confusion of Asians with Asian Americans, perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most insistent themes in Asian American literature and theater is a preoccupation with the claiming of America as home. This motif animates the work of countless Asian American artists: Maxine Hong Kingston, Shawn Wong, Jessica Hagedorn, among others.
Perhaps it is most eloquently encapsulated in a poem from Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes (1976). Yamada is a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese American, and as the title suggests, the volume deals mostly with experiences from the concentration camps where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.
She ends the volume with a poem called “Mirror Mirror,” a dialogue with her son Doug.
People keep asking me where I come from says my son.
Trouble is I’m american on the inside and oriental on the outside
No Doug
Tum that outside in
THIS is what American looks like
As a resonant postlude to this book thematizing the dislocation of the camps, the poem functions as a testimony to the ongoing legacy of the camps: the continuing racism defining America as white, and the internalization of that definition by young people of color.
Equally, it stands as an affirmation of an Asian American identity. Yamada thus refigures America, recognizing that one need not be Euro to be American. Even more fundamentally, Asian American playwrights problematize notions of a singular home and of a singular identity.
Dislocation, contradiction, unforeseen cultural possiblities, multiple geographies of identity exceeding the boundaries of nation-states, emerge as motifs. Jessica Hagedorn, Filipina American musician, performer, and writer, states in her introduction to her play Tenement Lover: In all my writing there are always these characters who have a sense of displacement, a sense of being in self-exile, belonging nowhere-or anywhere.
I think these themes are the human story. When it comes down to it it’s all about finding shelter, finding your identity. I don’t care whether you’re an immigrant or native-born, you’re discovering who and what and where you are all the time. When I think of home now I mean three places. The San Francisco Bay area really colored my work. New York is where I live.
But Manila will always have a hold on me. What is the threshold of my dreams? I really don’t think of myself as a citizen of one country but as a citizen of the world (79). For Hagedorn, multiple, site-specific identities enable her to transcend the boundaries of nation-states, yet also create contradiction and dislocation.
The notion of belonging to the world subverts and refigures any singular notion of identity and rootedness in only one place, where stable geography reproduces the stability of the bounded monad, the singular self. Rey Chow says it this way: “The question, ‘When are you going home?’ can be responded to in the following manner: home is here, in my migranthood” (Chow 48).
David Henry Hwang captures the traces of history in Asian American identities in his one-act play As the Crow Flies. Mrs. Chan, a Chinese American grandmother, narrates her complex geography of identity: The day I arrive in America, I do not feel sorry. I do not miss the Philippine. I do not look forward live in America. Just like, I do not miss China, when I leave it many years ago–go live in Philippine.
Just like, I do not miss Manila, when Japanese take our home during wartime, and we are all have to move to Baguio, and live in haunted house. It is all same to me. Go, one home to the next, one city to another, nation to nation, across ocean big and small. We are born traveling. We travel-all our lives. I am not looking for a home. I know there is none … (104).
This relentlessly antinostalgic passage arises from a realism born of having “no options,” in Hwang’s words. Geopolitical upheaval, dislocation and migration have been a way of life for Mrs. Chan, even if she is now comfortably ensconced in her upper-middle-class suburb.
Hwang treats the cleavages of class, race, and different sedimented histories as they operate in the lives of Mrs. Chan and her African American housekeeper, Hannah. Neither has a home, but whereas for Mrs. Chan home is an impossibility because of constant dislocation, migration, and endless travel, Hannah’s situation stands at the opposite extreme.
This passage is narrated by Hannah’s alter ego/ghost, Sandra Smith: She spends most of her life wanderin’ from one beau”tiful house to the next, knowing intimately every detail, but never layin’ down her head in any of ’em.
She’s what they call a good woman. Men know it, rich folks know it. Every place is beautiful, ‘cept the place where she lives. Home is a dark room, she knows it well, knows its limits. She knows she can’t travel nowhere without returnin’ to that room once the sun goes down. Home is fixed, it does not move, even as the rest of the world circles ’round and ’round, picking up speed (105–6).
Home here spells confinement, loss, and the relentless fixity of the intersections of gender, racial, and class oppression that secure and maintain Hannah’s position as a domestic. The endless and relentless migration of Mrs. Chan’s life is counterpointed to the relentless fixity and closure of Hannah’s, articulating the differences of race, class, and history that separate the women.
Though in unequal class relation, neither woman has options, and each asserts her triumph over the need for a home. Their shared bleak realism, their cauterization of nostalgic desire, are belied by the yearning Mrs. Chan and Hannah both feel for home, one that, according to Hwang, can only be “metaphysical.” Luredindeed, impelled-by the promise of home, they pursue the crow, the bringer of disaster:
They run on faith now, passing through territories uncharted, following the sound of their suffering. And it is in this way that they pass through their lives. Hardly noticing that they’ve entered. Without stopping to note its passing. Just following a crow, with single dedication, forgetting how they started, or why they’re chasing, or even what may happen if they catch it. Running without pause or pleasure, past the point of their beginning (107). Having no other options in life, having neither home nor the luxury to indulge in the desire for home, they cannot erase their longing. For them, home is attainable only in death.
Perry Miyake’s Doughball was produced at East West Players as a Christmas play during December of 1990 and January of 1991. The review in The Los Angeles Times characterized the production as “uneven.” Though some of the acting was favorably reviewed, the closing sentence reveals the reviewer’s ambivalence: “The title refers to a game of chance played at the annual Venice carnivals fondly rekindled here, but with only random, not tight focus” (1990).
Although this is not precisely a pan of the play, and though the reviewer does much to credit the acting of several of the key members of the cast, the impression is of yet another earnest, well-intentioned but not fully realized production.
The lead actor, Steve Park, had been among a group of Asian American actors who had spoken at teach-in protesting the performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the Claremont Colleges. Kondro should further preface my reactions by saying that the playwright and I are exactly the same age and that I went to the performance with a friend of Basque descent from my hometown in Oregon, who graduated from high school a year after I did. (”The Bascos and the Buddhaheads used to run together,” as he so eloquently put it.)
Expecting clumsy earnestness, my friend and I (Kondro) found a production of incredible intensity, authenticity, and luminosity. As the play began, my skepticism ebbed as I felt transported into the space and time of my high school.
My friend and I kept looking at each other in amazement: “My God, that’s Mrs. Y—!” “And they’re like B— and R—!” We could rename all the characters, because we knew them all. And I laughed at that production the way I have rarely laughed before or since: I laughed the laughter of recognition. As the play continued, I was even more startled by the two young women in the play, uncanny refractions of my own high school self:
one, the bookish valedictorian with a crush on the protagonist David; the other, the protagonist’s dream girl, who herself dreamed of leaving her confining world for Stanford and for France. Emerging from the theater, felt slightly drunk, as though the intensity of the experience had been too much for my body to assimilate.
Then it struck me forcibly: Asian Americans never laugh the laughter of recognition because we are systematically erased from view. We never see ourselves portrayed the way we see ourselves. Small wonder I experienced this play with almost physical force, in my whole being. Small wonder I spent the subsequent week in a fog, musing about the place of Stanford and of France as utopian landscapes for Sansei girls.
And small wonder that mainstream critics were unable to understand the play fully. Instead of exoticism, they were exposed to the less spectacular, but infinitely more resonant, small truths of everyday life: the truths of home. As I felt with M. Butteifly, I was consumed by urgency to write about this play, to document its resonance, for never in my life have I seen anything so “true” to “my experience.”
Now, what might such a reaction mean? Rather than simply taking that experience as transparent or foundational, poststructuralist suspicion of notions like truth, authenticity, and experience, require a critical interrogation of those terms. What writing or performative practices created the effects of authenticity or verisimilitude? How can we account for the discursive production of a culturally essentialist Japanese American identity? In other words, just what was so homey about this play?
First, and most important, there was no exoticism, still a rarity when Asian Americans are depicted in mainstream venues. In Doughball, there were no fake Oriental accents, no Asian women as wilting flowers, no quasi-Japanese music, no Oriental splendor. Steve Park explained it to me this way: … “I think Asian American theater tries to pander to the white audience too much.
And that’s what I liked about Doughball; there was no sense of that in Doughball.” I think this may be a critical factor in the lukewarm mainstream reception of the play. For a Japanese American, the absence of Japonaiserie means we can see ourselves represented “authentically,” not as whites with an exotic veneer, but as normal, everyday Japanese Americans.
A key feature producing authenticity effects is the sensuousness of language: its textures, its familiarity, its evocative power. Especially resonant for Sansei, who as a rule do not grow up speaking Japanese, is what one might call “family Japanese”: phrases for food, words about the body and bodily function, epithets signalling intense feeling, phrases that bring a start of recognition and stir memory. Take this example, from David’s irrepressible mother:
YUKI
I was over there, but Frank had to go benjo, so I’m here now! Oh, Wayne, did you get some udon? They’re probably running out so you better get some if you want some! (57)
Yuki uses the word benjo, a very rough slang word for bathroom, one that would raise eyebrows in contemporary Japan for its crudity.
It is, however, a word that most Sansei would know. In Japan, it would be particularly horrifying to hear an urban woman saying this; for me, it elicits childhood memories. The energetic admonition to eat, with udon, noodles, as the lure, eloquently captures the interactional styles of many tough, dynamic Nisei women.
To the credit of Miyake and of Alice Kushida, who gave a vibrant, unerringly “authentic” performance, Yuki embodied this energetic toughness. Another exchange enacts a particularly Sansei identity:
ERIC
Ooh, negative vibes, man. Bad bachi …,
DAVID
Okay, we’ll hang out here and if she shows, cool (24).
This is quintessential West Coast Sansei language: the California slang combined with a reference to Japanese American family talk; bachi as divine retribution-bachi ga ataru, bachi will strike, you’ll be punished, for some misdeed. It can also used be as a disciplinary admonition, especially for young children, as in: “Don’t touch that-it’s dirty, it’s bachi.”
Derogatory epithets are another linguistic practice spurring memory; these Japanese phrases occur only among intimate relations with friends, family, and the Japanese American community-after all, these are the only people who can understand the insult. Two fathers speak:
MITS
Who’s crying? I don’i cry. I complain a lot, hut I don’t cry.
FRANK
Yes, you, monkutare (24).
The tare here is a particularly rough, rustic suffix. Monku means “complaint,” so monkutare is a complainer, a kvetch. The suffix is combined with other words to create salty epithets associated with family and friends in the Japanese American community, for only intimates can fight in this way or understand the insult: unkotare, shithead, a term appearing in the play, and bakatare, stupid idiot.
These expressions are extremely crude and regionally provincial; middle-class Tokyo residents would laugh at their quaintness. Accordingly, these expressions define for Japanese Americans a particularly familial world that is neither Euro-American nor Japanese, but Japanese American. Small epiphanies and moments of recognition like these demonstrate the role of linguistic practices in defining a community.
These languages in Japanese American plays enable the creation of a Japanese American identity transcending a particular family’s idiosyncrasies. As an Asian American, often one does not know what is peculiar to one’s family and what is common to a larger community. Or, if you believe that you are engaging in practices that are typical of your ethnic group, you still may not be sure “what is Chinese tradition and what is the movies” (Kingston 6).
What these linguistic practices accomplish is to create the sense of recognition and authenticity, asserting and affirming one’s belonging to a family and to a distinct culture. The play discursively produces home and community just as forcefully through its embeddedness in a specific geography: Venice, California. When the play went into production, Perry Miyake took the actors on a tour of the part of Venice where he grew up.
This is not the Venice of rollerblading and Muscle Beach and Dennis Hopper, but the Japanese American and Chicano Venice on Centinela Avenue, the Venice of Mago’s, the fast-food joint where you can still get avocado cha-shu burgers and teriyaki burritos, of the funky, 50s drugstore where the boys used to stand for hours reading comics, of Kenny’s Cafe, where you can enjoy Hawaiian Japanese favorites like Spam-fried rice and Portuguese sausage and eggs.
The play itself occurs during a summer carnival at the Japanese American Community Center in Venice, still a lively hub of community activity. This Venice has a lived-in feeling of family and communities that have existed for at least a generation; artsy glitz has little purchase here. Doughball attempts to write this Venice into collective memory.
A fourth element in the discursive production of home arises from the resonance of sensory memory, and through its deployment, a Proustian evocation of a world. In particular, foods, sounds, and smells serve as symbolic vehicles of ethnic identity. One eloquent example is a monologue delivered by Wayne, the protagonist’s cousin, a Vietnam vet who is mostly mute until David decides he wants to join the army and go fight in Vietnam.
To discourage David, Wayne speaks, uttering this soliloquy on home: I love the smell of rice cooking in the evening. It don’t smell like death no more. I sit in our kitchen, on the same old chair I sat on since I was a kid. Mom’s at the sink chopping vegetables, wearing that same old apron she always wears. Dad comes in the back door and stomps off his boots in the back porch.
There’s hamburger okazu on the stove. Hamburger okazu. Poor man’s sukiyaki. Same or shit I was so sick of eating six days a week before and now I can’t wait. Hamburger, onions, green onion, string beans, eggplant, sugarshoyu, tofu, and that wiggly shit that looks like worms. All cooking in that big or black cast-iron frying pan.
I smell the rice cooking. I hear the lid rattling on the rice cooker. Sun’s going down outside the kitchen window. And I can’t believe I’m back. Mom puts a big bowl of okazu in front of me, raw egg on the side, chawan full of hot rice in my left hand, hashi in my right. Dad says, ‘Itadakimasu,’ and nothing ever tasted better.
So I eat. I savor. I enjoy. And I don’t look up ’cause there’s tears in my eyes. I’m home. Goddammit, I’m home (94-5). Just as a world emerged from Proust’s teacup and his tisane-drenched madeleine, so an entire landscape of memory arises from the cast-iron pan full of hamburger okazu, memories that go beyond the Venice. community, certainly to “mine” in Oregon and I suspect to others as well.
Sounds-the rattling of the rice cooker, the stomping of the boots-the smells of rice, the cast-iron pan and the description of the food in it, the phrases offragmentary Japanese most Sansei know-hashi, “chopsticks,” chawan “rice bowl,” okazu, a meat and vegetables main dish, as well as the hot rice and raw egg, indispensable accoutrements to sukiyaki-create family and home from memory, inscribing a larger set of practices that define Japanese American culture.
Through the erasure of exoticism, through linguistic practices, and through exploring the evocative power of sensory memory, Perry Miyake and Doughball created a Japanese American community and culture. As he put it:
DAVID
I miss this. Being somewhere where you don’t have to explain yourself, and what you are.
ANDREA
Home (101).
Given this, what more does one say about the discursive production of home in a naturalistic play such as this? What kind of political weight can it sustain? Recent work of poststructuralist feminist critics attempts to assess the political consequences of deploying certain kinds of narrative strategies. Some have argued for the subversive potential of particular strategies that tend to privilege particular tactics in advance.
For example, Catherine Belsey argues that expressive realism is associated with the constitution of author and reader as autonomous, whole subjects; with certain Aristotelian notions of art as mimesis; and with a particular moment in the development of capitalism. Realist representation minimizes contradiction.
The conventional narrative structure introduces disruptions in the social order, and then through plot and character development-a development that elicits audience identification-the play or text arrives at a narrative closure that re-establishes order. For Belsey this forecloses political possibilities and leaves codes of representation intact. Jill Dolan, a feminist critic of theater, also tropes realism as politically conservative and inadequate to the kind of materialist feminist theatrical practice she envisions as subversive.
Her argument is given particular weight by her analysis of several plays that deal with lesbian issues, in which the realist narrative inevitably leads to a closure in which the lesbian-in particular the butch lesbian-ends up dead, vilified, recuperated to the heterosexual norm, or some combination of the above (1988, 1990).
Both she and Belsey would call for a text that problematizes the process of representation, foregrounding contradiction and disrupting easy identification. One way of doing so would be through Brechtian alienation effects, calling attention to the theatricality of theatrical production:
for example, having the actors address the audience “out of their roles” or undercutting psychological realism by staging a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes that cannot be recuperated into a smoothly flowing narrative line. Certainly such critiques of realist representation are incisive and well taken.
Realism can lull the spectator into an overly easy identification that reinscribes the whole subject who freely chooses to give herlhis labor and to exercise “free choice” in consuming the products of capitalism. As Belsey eloquently argues: The ideology of liberal humanism assumes a world of non-contradictory (and therefore fundamentally unalterable) individuals whose unfettered consciousness is the origin of meaning, knowledge, and action.
It is in the interest of this ideology above all to suppress the role of language in the construction of the subject, and its own role in the interpellation of the subject, and to present the individual as a free, unified, autonomous subjectivity. Classic realism, still the dominant popular mode in literature, film and television drama, roughly coincides chronologically with the epoch of industrial capitalism.
It performs … the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding (67).
Given what can be described only as cogent and incisive critiques, one must then ask whether Doughball is indeed simply a fond rekindling of memories. Is it merely nostalgic? Does it inscribe a golden age, a mythical community that fails to see its own exclusions and never really existed? Does it rely on a realism that privileges narrative closure and an insidious reinscription of the whole subject? And must that realism be transcended and disrupted in order to be politically subversive?
First, there is inevitably a sense in which Doughball and other realist narratives can be read as having this conservative political weight. Doughball relies on psychological realism and on the production of the familiar; without a doubt it elicits the “identification” of the spectator.
Any narrative is exclusionary in some ways, and this is most definitely a Sansei man~ text, privileging a male point of view of that historical period, and in its warm nostalgia it idealizes to some extent this very problematic moment in history and in the life of the protagonist. Critics indeed focused on the play’s nostalgia, finding it aesthetically and politically retrograde.
Miyake countered with the following: “The reviewers are all intellect, no heart. I write from the heart. They see that and they say, ‘Oh that’s just sentimental … nostalgic. Ping [Wu, an Asian American actor who has been active in the Miss Saigon protests] was saying, ‘So what if it’s nostalgic; it’s our nostalgia.’ They expect us to be satisfied with their nostalgia” (personal communication).
I think Miyake and Ping Wu are on to something here, and that the issue is considerably more complex. We must ask who is creating this nostalgic home, for whom, and for what purpose. Morley and Robins point out the politically insidious construction of a European homeland, a home that would enshrine Eurocentrism and shore up defensive boundaries against threats from non-Europeans in what they call “a fortress identity” (3).
How different this seems, for example, from Black lesbian feminist Barbara Smith’s invocation of home, the house on 132nd Street off Kinsman in Cleveland, where she learned about feminism from the women in her household. Hers is a home that stands for claiming one’s Blackness, a claim that one does not leave “the race” when one is a feminist or a lesbian (xxii). The questions of who and for whom are crucial in these examples.
The Heimat is part of a fortress identity addressing (white, northern) Europeans, an attempt by the center to retain its power. Differently positioned, Barbara Smith’s home is a safe place for other African Americans and lesbians. And Perry Miyake implicitly addresses Asian American, and specifically Japanese American viewers without explaining and without exoticizing for a mainstream audience. To reiterate Steve Park’s comment, there was no “pandering to a white audience” in this instance.
Perhaps at this particular historical moment one kind of political intervention would subvert precisely in its verisimilitude, in its “authentic” representation of a “reality” of marginal peoples in ways not captured in dominant cultural representations. Perhaps, in these instances, it is precisely the realism of the narrative that is politically effective.
Further, perhaps the term “realism” itself must be problematized and opened to the play of historically and culturally specific power relations. The speaker’s position, the intended audience, the stakes, and the larger discursive fields of history and power through which meanings are constituted are not mere contexts that nuance an essentialized meaning; rather, these are essential in determining the political weight of any narrative strategy.
Indeed, I would argue that the authenticity effects and conventional narrative line of Doughball support a politically urgent project: a Sansei’s attempt to write Sansei identity into existence. My own experience of drunkenness from the laughter of recognition was followed by anger that Asian Americans in general, Japanese Americans, Sansei (as we get more and more ethnic- and generation-specific), are systematically erased from representation in mainstream media.
Perhaps worse, when we are depicted it is only in the most stereotyped way, thus subjecting us to psychological violence rather than offering affirmation–or even recognition of a fully human existence. Miyake himself said this, in a statement both apocalyptic and poignant:
[F]or once, wegot to present ourselves as we are, onstage. I believe we haven’t yet defined ourselves onstage and I really do fear that a whole generation of Asian Americans, us Sanseis, will be ignored not only by the mainstream media, but by ourselves, meaning Asian American theater groups, simply because we are too far removed from the immigrant experience, and we will become extinct without a trace of our art, our self-expression, to be remembered by. (personal communication)
Again, though this statement could be taken as disingenuous given the relatively large number of Sansei men whose work has been produced in Asian American theaters, his statement for me captured the urgent necessity fueling the desire to “write ourselves into existence.” Miyake writes for himself and for other Japanese Americans first; his implied spectator is not from the dominant culture.
The question of realism, then, must be a question of realisms in the plural, realisms deployed by positioned subjects with different stakes, who constitute themselves within shifting fields of power and history. The realist impulse in Doughball is equally linked to a sense of urgency arising from the specificity of geography and place, and the historical circumstances in which Miyake writes.
He desires to write a moment into history, for his play is an act of collective memory, a nostalgic remembrance of the time when there was a community. Miyake was born and grew up in Venice, left it for a number of years, then returned. He commented on the changes: “It just got to be a less friendly place, and it was strange to be living at home and feeling sort of out of place. I wanted to capture that time again in high school, because no one else was writing about that period, our generation” (interview).
With preservation and historical memory as goals, Miyake actually creates a history and a community by paying his respects to his experience. His Venice is poised between relocation and redevelopment, a moment of seeming calm and safety before other forces disrupt it anew. It is also the midst of the Vietnam War, and the everyday concerns of the boys-girls, mostly-are shadowed by the specter of the draft. David, the protagonist, and Mits, his father, talk about changes in the community:
MITS
Boy, I’m getting too old for this. Maybe next year they’ll just have some kinda high-tone, kanemochi, black-tie dinner and skip the carnival.
DAVID
Skip the carnival?
MITS
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION
They gotta raise big bucks to build a new community center. Pave this parking lot over.
DAVID
They gotta have a carnival. Where are all the junior-high kids gonna hang out?
MITS
The way they’re talking about getting rid of all the old stuff. Japan’s getting rich, starting to whaddayacallit? -redevelop Little Tokyo, just move all the Issei out. They don’t give a damn about us.
DAVID
Yeah, but this is Venice.
MITS
Maybe we’re too small for them to get their paws on. We still gOlla rebuild this place. Judo dojo’s falling apart. This place is old. (looks arouncl) We stayed here when we got outta camp and finally came back.
DAVID
Where?
MIl’S
Here. (points to porch) Dojo was the mess hall. (points USL) Kitchen was in the same place. (points USC) All the families stayed in the rooms where the offices are until they found a place to live. (looks arouncl) They even had to put up tents in the parking lot. No room for everybody coming back out here. That’s how old this place is. Falling apart.
DAVID
I could do without the dirt.
MITS
Nah, when this place is all cement, it’s gonna be too cold. Too clean. Lose touch. (83-4).
Relocation and impending dislocation are themes here, and in an interesting way this passage enacts the contradictions of Japanese American identity. The site of the community center holds memories of dislocation from imprisonment and of coming home.
At the moment of the play, it provides the funky, downhome space for the creation of Japanese American community in events like the summer carnivals or Obon festivals. But it is disintegrating, as the memories fade and the community disperses. And the new threat is symbolized by Japan. Accordingly, Japanese Americans find themselves caught between, if you will.
The grounds of the Venice Japanese Community Center have in fact been paved over and he views part of his mission as preserving in memory the time when it was exactly that, a provisional safety zone amidst past and impending dislocation. In order to assess these moves to write history and identity and to analyze the political weight of plays like Doughball, one must consider elements of production.
The process of putting up the play mirrored this creation of a provisional home for the cast, crew, and playwright. At first plagued by various illnesses, injuries, car accidents, deaths in families (Miyake himself lost a close relative), and by an initially tense relationship between actors and the director, Patricia Yasutake, the cast built solidarity through the production.
Lissa Ling Lee, who played Andrea, the class valedictorian, described the atmosphere:
This experience was unique, everyone here was very supportive of each other, which is usually not the case in Hollywood. I think because we were Asian American actors, we had more of a need to see this project come together, rather than ourselves shine. So we tried to help each other. It was very different. I can’t compare it to anything else.
The cast had occasional reunions and, in Steve Park’s words, “after the show we’d do Doughball things, like Doughball went to see Hedda Gabler, and we were going to try to go see Canton (Jazz Club) together, but it was overbooked. .. That’s rare, that after the show we’ll be like, ‘Oh let’s do this together.’
” The themes of the play and the actual production in which initial strife led to solidarity among cast, crew, and writer created a shared, provisional home that writes Asian American identity. The home of Doughball can be further placed in the context of sites such as East West Players, the oldest Asian American theater troupe in the country.
Over the years the company has sponsored workshops and classes in various aspects of theatrical production including acting, and now, playwriting, a way of producing producers of Asian American identity. The first David Henry Hwang Playwriters’ Institute presented in April of 1992 staged readings of the first plays, portions of or complete one-acts, from the Institute. (Among the fledging playwrights was this author.)
Partially a participant-observation technique, enrolling was also encouraged and inspired by the work of writers like Perry Miyake and by the vibrant Asian American theater and performance art scene in Los Angeles. Doughball’s geography of identity and creation of home must also be located within Los Angeles, perhaps the center for the production of Asian American art and culture at this historical moment.
Other vibrant Asian American theater companies exist in San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle, but the relative stability and continuity of an organization like East West Players, the relative receptiveness to Asian American theater in mainstream venues such as the Mark Taper Forum, as well as in smaller, Equitywaiver theaters and alternative performance art spaces like Highways, make Los Angeles an exciting place to be now for a person of color and an Asian American.
California at large should continue to be a key locale for cultural production by peoples of color, as whites in the state are rapidly becoming a plurality rather than a majority, and as diasporic communities and communities of color continue to create, narrate, and perform themselves. Given these multiple layerings of home, community, and identity, I want to argue for the political weight of plays like Doughball.
Three points must be underlined here. One has to do with the question of audience reception and realist representation. Seeing theater and performance of, by, and about Asian Americans-whether the narrative strategy is realist, non-realist, avant-garde, or some combination of strategies-has among its potential effects the empowering of other Asian Americans.
The question of realist representation, then, must take into account not only narrative strategy, but also effects on actual audience members, mindful of an historical context in which there is a general subversiveness in simply being able to see progressive plays by and about people of color. Second, I wanted to gesture toward the implications of such moves for anthropological ethnography. As more of us anthropologists from the borderlands go “home” to study our own communities, we will probably see increasing elisions of boundaries between ethnography and minority discourse, in which writing ethnography becomes another way of writing our own identities and communities.
And writing that identity in the context of writing one’s scholarly work creates a narrative space in the dominant discourse, a space that could refigure the disciplines as home for us (cf. Kondo, forthcoming). Certainly, “going home”-not only to study one’s own community, with all the asymmetries of power thatterm implies, but also to help create it-gives one a wholly different relationship to the usual anthropological project of distanced observation and studying down.
The distant ethnographer/observer can become a participant fully engaged in a common struggle of great political urgency, in which we can contribute as much as we receive. Finally, the debate about the political effects of realist representation must move beyond the familiar positions based on binarized and dehistoricized notions of realism and avant-gardism.
The lulling of the spectator into the transparency of reality, the reinscription of the whole subject, the elicition of nostalgia that masks oppression and difference are all recognizable effects of realism. Other approaches that call attention to the representational frame itself also draw predictable charges: elitism and lack of accessibility to large audiences. Usually the counterattack is to argue that realism is just as constructed as other forms of representation, and that to consider avant-garde representation beyond mainstream audiences is itself an elitist presupposition (Trinh 1991, 87–8).
Perhaps these questions cannot be answered in the terms in which they are posed. Rather, they must be answered specifically, and in reference to particular productions, texts, audiences, venues. For though I think the work of feminist poststructuralist literary critics like Belsey and Dolan is on the mark in many ways, I think the prescriptive nature of those readings is unwarranted given their purely formal and textual basis and their essentialized reading of realism.
That is, the literary critic, through her analysis of formal properties of the text, can trace out the political weight of certain textual strategies for an idealized conventional audience. But doing so elides the question of realisms in the plural, received and interpreted by diverse, multiply positioned audiences, in all their complex and contradictory messiness.
I cannot call myself a typical viewer of Doughball, but I do want to highlight the fact that talking about Doughballied in my case not (only) to an idealization of a Japanese American community that never was, but to rage and anger that Asian Americans generally, and Japanese Americans specifically, are so seldom depicted “realistically” in the media.
That is, precisely the realist moves in Doughball spurred me to action: provoking a problematizing of representations of Asian Americans by the dominant culture, motivating the writing of this paper and, in part, my decision to take the playwriting class. The realism of Doughball heightened the felt necessity to create homes for ourselves, however problematic and provisional, figuring home not as an essentialized space of identity, but as a historically, culturally specific construct inseparable from power relations.
Rather than privileging certain representational strategies in advance, I am arguing for a more complex view of the relationship between aesthetics and politics and for more thoroughgoing studies of reception that would go beyond the positing of the idealized author and the idealized audience, positioning sites, venues, productions, and audiences within larger matrices of power, history, and culture.
Though Doughball does not attempt to subvert codes of realist representation, I think one must seek its political and aesthetic value elsewhere: for example, precisely in its deployment of reality effects. It underlines the salience of Chela Sandoval’s incisive analysis of “oppositional consciousness” in U.S. Third World feminism. She describes the contextually specific tactics Third World feminists engage, arguing that one cannot necessarily privilege in advance and for all time the utility of any particular tactic.
“Differential consciousness” is a mode of “weaving ‘between and among’ oppositional ideologies” (14), and it mobilizes a “tactical subjectivity with the capacity of recentering depending upon the kinds of oppression to be confronted” (ibid.). Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin make a similar point: Basic to the (at least implicit) disavowal of conventionally realist and autobiographical narrative by deconstructionist critics is the assumption that difference can emerge only through self-referential language, i.e., through certain relatively specific formal operations present in the text or performed upon it.
Our reading of Pratt’s narrative contends that a so-called conventional narrative such as Pratt’s is not only useful but essential in addressing the politically and theoretically urgent questions surrounding identity politics (194). I want to concur with Sandoval and with Martin and Mohanty and end by saying that Perry Miyake’s Doughball draws our attention to the constructedness of home, identity, and culture, underlining the necessity for people on the margins to create, produce, and assert our identities.
Its specific locations (Venice, East West Players, and Los Angeles), its framing by a particular history of dislocation, (the Vietnam War and urban redevelopment) underscore the historically and politically constructed nature of those identities. Indeed, as I stated at the outset, the term “Asian American” itself is inextricable from history and politics, as an identity forged through the student struggles of the ’60s-before then, after all, we were merely “Orientals.”
Asian American theater, including productions like Doughball, and sites like East West Players, Highways, Pan Asian Repertory in New York, Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco, continue to explore the aesthetic and political possibilities of such identities.
However problematic the notion of home, whatever differences within are effaced, and however provisional that home may be, Doughball, East West, Los Angeles, and my ongoing experiences as a documentor and perhaps producer of Asian American theater highlight for me the continued urgency to create our homes and our identities for ourselves.
As Elaine Kim has argued, “claiming America for Asian Americans means inventing a new identity” (147). Such an identity would be neither Asian nor American if the latter means “European,” nor does it mean hyphenated “Asian American,” if that means riding on the hyphen “between two worlds.”
Rather, I think Asian American playwrights, writers, and artists are creating identities that defy binary categorization into “Asian” or “American” or into some mediating third term. They are articulating for Asian Americans something new, something that exceeds previous categories.
Despite the human suffering incurred through dislocation, incarceration, and diaspora, the historical experiences of Asian Americans can become a source of strength, the openness of identity a field of possibility.
As performance artist Dan Kwong urged us, we must continue to “tell our stories,” we must continue to write ourselves into existence.