In her new book, Gina Marchetti expands the boundaries of Asian and Asian American media scholarship by shifting the focus from that of fixed identities to that of the concept of diaspora. Split into two parts, “Part I: The Black Pacific” and “Part II: Sex, Gender, and Generation in Diaspora,” Marchetti's book takes on an eclectic grouping of films, from Jackie Chan movies, to a PBS documentary about an African American lesbian in Taiwan, to queer, U.S. independent film and video, without adhering to established paradigms of a more classical national cinema or ethnic studies perspective. Marchetti's argument, therefore, is not concerned with ethnic Chinese in isolation, but rather with how film depicts Chinese people in relation to other ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities as they travel through a U.S. context.
One might ask why one would choose, in a study of Chinese diasporic images on U.S. screens, to focus exclusively on their confrontation with black and queer identities. For Marchetti, such a question itself reveals a problematic assumption: that any foreign entity, diasporic or otherwise, is only valid in its confrontation with whiteness and straightness. Indeed, The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens dispenses with discussion of the “white, heteronormative center” completely. As America is both literally and metaphorically the site of so much dynamism—immigration, civil rights, gay rights—it would be amiss not to explore how Chinese diasporic identity has shaped and been shaped by similarly marginalized, fluid identities. This is Marchetti's project, and an intriguing and important one, at that.
In part I, Marchetti explores the longstanding relationship between Chinese-language martial arts films and African American popular culture. Particularly worthy of discussion on this point are films such as Rumble in the Bronx (Stanley Tong, 1995); Rush Hour I, II, and III (Brett Ratner, 1998, 2001, and 2007); and The Karate Kid (Harald Zwart, 2010), which dramatize the connections between an Asian martial arts master played by Jackie Chan and his black co-stars. Though these films suggest a racial solidarity against whites and the contingency of Hong Kong as a disappearing place similar to the spatial marginalization of the black ghetto, Jet Li's infamous lack of romantic consummation with Aaliyah in Romeo Must Die (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2000) shows how in Hollywood, “fantasies of dissent titillate as they always have, but stay safely boxed in by a racial and sexual status quo that proves resistant to radical change” (p. 79).
On the opposite end of the spectrum of Hollywood fantasy, Yvette Welbon's documentary Remembering Wei-Yi Feng, Remembering Myself (1995) meditates on the linkages between the filmmaker, as an African American, Vassar-educated lesbian living and working in Taiwan, and her grandmother, who immigrated to the United States from Honduras as a young woman, working in unskilled labor in the early twentieth century. In contrast to the black/Chinese pairings in Hollywood, which offer neat multicultural fantasies, Welbon's film relays the conundrum of simultaneously being “valued as foreigners” and “stigmatized as strangers” (p. 95) and the resulting fluidity of empowerment and disempowerment that diaspora enables.
Part II begins with an excellent and focused analysis of Ang Lee's highly successful and influential The Wedding Banquet (1993) and uses this to meditate on the trope of the Chinese wedding banquet in a variety of commercial and independent films. Though The Wedding Banquet presents the perfect storm for diasporic and seemingly progressive themes to play out, the farce that ensues, and which is neatly wrapped up in the classical narrative, turns out not at all to be “the radical multiculturalism of the interracial, transnational ménage a trois” but a capitulation to “a very conservative sense of Chinese customs and Confucian values” (p. 126).
Analyses of queer and feminist alternatives to the mythical Chinese wedding banquet follow in a variety of forms and settings, including the work of independent video artists Richard Fung and Ming-Yuen S. Ma, who are transnational but based in North America. Unlike The Wedding Banquet, in which “the political dynamic of the interracial romance remains unresolved” (p. 132), Fung and Ma present work in which “the Chinese patriarch becomes the queer sojourner, and his existence serves as a critique of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and phallocentrism as well as homophobia throughout Greater China” (p. 138). The book rounds out this discussion with shorter analyses of a range of low-, medium-, and high-budget feature films, such as Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, 1993), Double Happiness (Mina Shum, 1994), Siao Yu (Sylvia Chang, 1995), Shopping for Fangs (Justin Lin and Quentin Lee, 1997), and the independent video work of Kip Fulbeck, which addresses diaspora's relationship to biraciality.
An added bonus to the analyses are interviews with filmmakers and authors that give another perspective to the films. This book makes an excellent addition to the slowly growing body of important scholarship on Asian and Asian American media studies in that it exemplifies, in its own methods and assumptions, the open boundaries inherent to this field.
