05: on representation & bad art

marguerite duras's the lover, love hard, asian representation, and other unsexy thoughts

On Sunday, I finished Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, a book that has been on my to-read list for years. I forgot when I first learned of its radical romantic premise, but naturally, I was intrigued. Set in French colonial-era Vietnam, the 1984 novella details the year-long affair between a 15-year-old French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover, who is twelve years her senior.

I am a sucker for unfulfilled romance, and The Lover has a listless, melancholic quality common among my favorite novels. I read it generously, and in retrospect, am glad to have held off on reading it, as I suspect my initial interest in the book stemmed almost entirely from its racial politics, which would’ve colored my perception of its artistic merits. If I had read The Lover through the myopic lens of representation, I likely would’ve been deterred from appreciating its other aspects: the prose; the haunting settings; the winding, dream-like narration, wherein the girl oscillates between first and third-person, as if she is consciously dissociating and coming to, while recounting old memories and mind-images.

While reading, I often thought about how The Lover would be received if it was published today, with Asian American readers as a demographic to attract and appease. The story, I imagine, would be judged on its portrayal of Asian manhood in relation to white womanhood: how it navigates and attempts to shatter — no matter how weakly — sticky social taboos. Each interaction and line of dialogue between the interracial lovers would be dissected and scrutinized. Perhaps the Chinese man’s heart-wrenching desire would be diluted into an erotic-less symbol of “white worship.” 

Duras might be condemned for indulging her Asian fetish. Or, she might be praised for it, as Maxine Hong Kingston did in her 1997 introduction of the book: “It is wonderful that the beloved be a Chinese man, and that the naked masculine body in [the 1959 film] Hiroshima Mon Amour belongs to a Japanese man. Marguerite Duras honors the Asian male as sexy being, beautiful, and worthy of art and love.”

The Lover, despite Duras’s titular dedication, is not centered on the Chinese lover. In fact, he is not even introduced as Chinese. He is first seen as “a very elegant man,” dressed in “the light tussore suit of the Saigon bankers.” Only then does the girl remark: “He’s not a white man.” The man is a supporting character in the French girl’s diaristic, coming-of-age tale. Her voice, at times, is solipsistic. She learns of desire and how it offers “a pleasure unto death.” She seeks out the Chinese lover. She reciprocates his affection. It is her first act of selfish rebellion. She transforms with love. Given their twelve-year age gap, the book contains the power dynamics of Nabokov’s Lolita, but none of its unsettling delusions. We never learn of the older lover’s motivations or his inner thoughts. We just know what he has told the girl, which she relays onto the page.

There was a time when I would’ve interpreted this as a fault. One could argue that Duras failed to write from the perspective of a person unlike her, failed to encapsulate the essence of the Asian lovers in Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Lover. Her lovers are imperfect, all-too-willing romantics, but they are driven by very human motives (love! escapism! pride! class!) not bound up solely in their racial identity.

There was a time when I would’ve fixated on the racial oddities in the text. Interpreted the girl’s disdainful remark of the Chinese man’s hairlessness and softness as racially-tinged disgust. Recognized the family’s refusal to speak to the Chinese lover, even as he takes them out to eat at fine establishments, as blatant racism. Instead, I took note of these characterizations as fact, a reality of the racial circumstances of 1930s Vietnam.

The French girl and the Chinese man have diametrically different privileges and weaknesses. The girl, by virtue of being white, exists in a class of her own above the Asian natives. She is seen as the colonizer’s daughter. Despite this, her family is poor: Her eldest brother is addicted to gambling, while her mother wastes away with depression. The Chinese lover is from a wealthy family that leases out property to Vietnamese natives. He has studied business abroad in Paris, and is chauffeured around Indochina in a black limousine. He is, like the French girl, a temporary visitor in Vietnam. And so Duras’s subversions of power, from the lovers’ age to race to wealth, are all the more interesting.

The affair’s subversiveness led me to think about the odd state of “Asian representation” in American media, and how such a love story might not be read so favorably today. Instead, Hollywood feeds us yellow stories and yellow faces for the sake of their yellowness. There is a flatness to these common portrayals and tropes in some recent Asian American films. It is, though, worth discerning between the purely commercial endeavors, like Shang-Chi and Love Hard, and those that can afford to be experimentally expressive or “indie,” for lack of a better word. Still, even in Alan Yang’s Tigertail (2020), a coming-to-America immigrant drama that desperately attempts to be an Edward Yang film, the stories feel lackluster, the characters not fully formed, and the dialogue hollow (Yang relied on translators to do the heavy narrative lifting). And these aspects are exacerbated by Yang’s juvenile knowledge of Taiwan, a country he has only visited twice.

In his analysis of the 2021 film Passing, the writer Brandon Taylor condemns this insipid quality common in representational art: “The characters have no real motivations. At least none we truly see. The characters have no insides. No interior states. And in such, it becomes a movie not even really about passing. It’s a movie about our contemporary hyper fixation on the exterior of racial theater.”

Representation, or to borrow Taylor’s phrase, “racial theater,” is such an arbitrary metric to assess films and books and art. Why do we so visibly place this bizarre burden — which determines a work’s worth or its artistic merit on the basis of racial, gendered, or sexual identification — at the heart of the contemporary stories we tell and consume? Representation can be meaningful and moving, but it shouldn’t be a work’s sole function. Instead, it risks defining the subjects and stories by their other-ness, at the expense of reinforcing existing paradigms of whiteness.

We have, however, grown so accustomed in assessing art through this framework. We fail to recognize the whiteness inherent in this thinking. The representation discourse that centers Hollywood and reigning white institutions upholds the racial status quo, and demands that “non-white” works be juxtaposed as different, to be judged on the merits of diversity. And to that end, Hollywood and these white institutions see Asian American art as an international commodity, a vehicle to rake in profits from abroad.

Consider the banana. It is an analogous term that describes an Asian person who is “yellow on the outside and white on the inside.” As crude as the analogy is, I think it is the best way to describe Asian Americana. I don’t mean it as a condemnation, but a neutral observation. There is an American-ness to our lives, thoughts, and beliefs that is baffling and unfamiliar to an overseas Asian audience, which is why Chinese viewers didn’t care for either The Farewell or Shang-Chi, two very different “Asian American” films. And so there’s this presumed duty that Asian Americans have to uplift and praise all kinds of works by the diaspora. The implied message is: We have to support our own because white people won’t, and overseas Asians can’t care less.

I want honest, vulnerable, and experimental Asian American art that will make me laugh, cry, and cringe, and I won’t curb my criticism, out of some presumed duty to the culture, because of a supposed lack of said art or viable representation. Yes, Hollywood and book publishing and journalism have historically overlooked Asians, but what of the artists and writers and actors and filmmakers working in the margins? I find it shocking how, generally speaking, the Asian diaspora has such historical amnesia even for groundbreaking works that were made only ten to twenty years ago, like Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and Alice Wu’s lesbian rom-com Saving Face (2004).

The existing pop culture narrative often gives little credit to lesser-known Western works with Asian stars. I wouldn’t call it erasure, but rather, a casual forgetfulness by a white film culture that cares little for non-white figures. Instead, pop culture fixates on the feel-good nature of achieving “firsts” for cultural clout. This creates a familiar underdog narrative, like Hollywood’s longstanding effort at emasculating Asian male roles, which effaces works that don’t fit into these neat categorizations. In turn, the diaspora is trapped by this narrative. We feed on this bowl of half-truths and malnourished facts.

After watching Hiroshima Mon Amour, I went on a deep-dive of interracial Asian representation in cinema, and it was strange to realize that these depictions, rare as they were, extended back to the 1950s, during a time when such desire was illicit or, at the very least, frowned upon. Love, as Duras so deftly reveals in The Lover, is an arrangement of power. Most modern works fall into the trap of becoming too aware of such dynamics; Love Hard is a blandly silly holiday movie that attempts to eke out a moralizing argument about loving people for who they are, not what they look like. To this I say: This is peak representation for non-hot people — not Asians and especially not hot Asians.

Films like Hiroshima and The Crimson Kimono are not as boxed in by these constraints, which creates an illusion of progressiveness even though they were produced during a time when racism was rampant. (The Crimson Kimono is a 1959 noir film starring James Shigeta; he plays a Japanese American detective that falls in love with a white woman, who is also the romantic interest of his (white) partner.) More recently, we have Jet Li in the 2000 martial arts film Romeo Must Die with a young Aaliyah as his Juliet, and the British ballet dancer Chi Cao in Mao’s Last Dancer (2009).

(One could also argue that Asian women have had, historically speaking, less favorable romantic portrayals in films, but I’m not in the mood to engage with MRAsian tomfoolery!)

The characters in these films, regardless of race, do not flagellate their sense of racial self-awareness, and the non-Asian characters do not act as if their motivations and desires are in service of a greater narrative of social equality. (Cue Nina Dobrev’s character yelling: Yes I have dated a Chinese man! He was born in Beijing and amazing in bed!)

Anyways, I am quite tired of people cloaking their endorsement of poorly-made representational art by declaring that “[THIS MAINSTREAM ASIAN MOVIE] was everything I needed as a teen,” or “[THIS MAINSTREAM ASIAN MOVIE] made me feel so seen,” as if the Asian American indie film circuit or Mission nightclub doesn’t exist. It’s a performative impulse — I get it. But it also highlights the narrowness of how Asian Americana wishes to be perceived.

I think Asian American literature is leaps and bounds ahead of mainstream film in terms of compelling storytelling. Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, for example, is a short story collection that attempts to transcend the familiarity of Asian American-ness, while acknowledging the Hmong people’s trauma-filled history. The characters are young and queer. They do drugs. They are violent and messy, but also loving and forgiving.

I’m currently reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, lended to me by fellow hot Asian writer gal Jade Song. The collection was written in 17th century China, but the stories grapple with the psychological, the supernatural (ghosts, fox-spirits) and the erotic (sex with humans and spirits, dildos, love potions).

But because I guess no one cares to read anymore, this discussion — of being and feeling seen — is largely limited to film and television. A true shame. The Sympathizer and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous are receiving movie adaptations, which is exciting, but even then, these works will probably be judged on a rubric of representation. Our intellectual ancestors do be rolling in their graves!

Clearly, this is something I can go on and on about, so I’ll leave y’all with a TikTok about what kind of Asian you are based on your favorite Asian novel. (It’s made by my friend Hairol Ma, another fellow hot Asian writer gal.)

Okay, ONE LAST THOUGHT. TWO pieces of anti-Asian news this week! I have recently learned that director Paul Thomas Anderson committed a racism against Asians in Licorice Pizza, which I was excited to watch for one of the HAIM sisters??? And this Asian girlboss-billionaire is bad to her employees despite running a start-up that purports to care about mental health! Lots to unpack here. Anyways, fear not: I will be watching the PTA film, sprinkling licorice on my slice of ‘za, and reporting back how egregious (or fantastic) it is. Ta!