SOURCE: Shin, Andrew. “Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Golden Gate.” MELUS 27, no. 1 (spring 2002): 177-97.

[In the following essay, Shin argues that M. Butterfly and Golden Gate both function as powerful critiques of traditional Western notions of masculinity.]

It has been barely thirty years since the inception of ethnic studies programs at San Francisco State University in 1968 and Berkeley in 1969, yet movements that seek to dismantle the liberationist energies of the 1960s—whether in the form of reinstating traditional curricula or reversing civil rights policies—are well underway. In California, the passage of Proposition 209 repealed the use of racial quotas in college admissions, resulting in an immediate and drastic reduction in the freshmen enrollment of African American and Hispanic American students at California's major universities. Ward Connerly, who spearheaded the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative, has recently suggested sitting in on ethnic studies courses at Berkeley to determine whether they indeed promote racial and ethnic awareness or in fact foment radical separatism among students.¹ Ironically, Connerly's neoconservative meliorism ignores the brief history of ethnic studies programs, which emerged from the anti-war protest to challenge traditional constructions of American history that elided the contributions of ethnic minorities.

This reaction against ethnic studies coincides with the emergence of the newest thing in lit crit/cultural studies: whiteness studies. Whiteness studies purports to denaturalize whiteness by incorporating a constructivist perspective and unmasking the ideological parameters of whiteness: to make visible an invisible norm. The best studies within the genre, such as David Roediger's, suggest how the working class in the nineteenth century constructed itself as white in relation to a racial other, emphasizing the constitutive reliance of the mainstream on the marginal. In this view, the whitening of an ethnicized working class occurs through a master-slave dialectic sustained politically by working-class resistance to pro-abolition alliances and through cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy. (See Roediger, Wages; Lott, Love; and Ignatiev.) Paradoxically, various genealogies locate the inception of whiteness studies in the very period when challenges to a normative whiteness coalesced: second-wave feminism assumed an arguably self-conscious turn when women of color questioned its white, middle-class perspective (see Frankenberg, White Women 2-3); and, to some extent, the advent of whiteness studies can be attributed to ethnic studies traditionally conceived, which distinguishes the experiences of those ethnic groups subject to racialization, emphasizing the power differentials that obtain among diverse ethnicities in a nation of ethnics. It must be stressed, however, that the cultural nationalist ethos of ethnic studies was very much a response to the racialization—and racist treatment—of ethnic groups based on phenotype.

But the prominence of whiteness studies at this historical conjuncture raises as many questions as it answers because in some forms it is disturbingly indistinguishable from mainstream studies and can be readily accommodated to a rubric that, by virtue of reclaiming the margin, recenters whiteness as the primary object of study, along with an attendant realignment of institutional power and resources.² But whether we identify its emergence in second-wave feminism's self-conscious swerve, or as a reaction formation to exclusionary ethnic programs, whiteness studies becomes a defence of the status quo when it loses its critical self-consciousness, whether conjoined with feminist, queer, or postcolonial discourses. An analysis of whiteness, however, converges in salutary ways with these very discourses—specifically in the context of paradigms of masquerade, mimicry, and the butch-femme couple—in the work of David Henry Hwang, to which I now turn.

Celebrated since its premiere on February 10, 1988 at the National Theatre in Washington D.C., David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly has been a cynosure for cultural debate on race and sexuality; less well known is Hwang's 1994 screenplay Golden Gate, dismissed in most accounts as a commercial and critical failure. Indeed discussions of Hwang's work focus on M. Butterfly, a drama that its detractors have variously stigmatized as misogynist, homophobic, and chauvinistic about the West.³ That this work has come under such vituperative scrutiny is hardly surprising given the demands of Asian American audiences for positive images of Asian Americans. This is merely another instance in a venerable tradition of conflict over the representation of ethnicity; consider, for example, the debates over the uses of the protest novel; Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint; the representation of masculinity in ethnic women's fiction of the 1980s; and, most recently, the depiction of Filipino sexuality in Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging.⁴

But if we consider M. Butterfly in conjunction with an analysis of Golden Gate, Hwang's condemnation of Western masculinity emerges powerfully, identifying him as a critic, rather than a celebrant, of Western culture. Both works dislocate moral and sexual agency from a normative white male body and offer provocations to postcolonial and queer discourses by reconceiving notions of acting and imposture. M. Butterfly turns upon the masquerade, generally aligned with feminist and lesbian discussions of cultural subversion, which, by generating a distance between the woman and her image, installs her within the semiotic system as subject rather than object. But in the tragedy's gay context, playing the woman does not prove liberatory, and the masquerade's capacity for contestation is paralyzed. Golden Gate relocates Fanonian mimicry, the classic account of Europe's relationship to its colonies, from the third world to Hoover's America: whereas in Fanon, the native can never close the gap between himself and the colonial power he emulates, a conative situation that renders his pursuit of agency farcical, in Golden Gate this incommensurability constitutes the necessary condition for the creation of an American social conscience.

The psychoanalytic tradition of masquerade began with Joan Riviere's conception of womanliness as reaction formation in the aftermath of the intellectual woman's theft of masculinity. Mary Ann Doane, in an influential article, reslants the masquerade, giving it a subversive, feminist alignment by introducing the notion of artifice and performance: “The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade's resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness … as, precisely, imagistic” (25).⁵ Sue-Ellen Case, in a later essay, further wrests the feminist subject from biology and resituates her in the butch-femme couple who “constantly seduce[s] the sign system, through flirtation and inconstancy into the light fondle of artifice” (295). But in the gay realm of M. Butterfly the liberatory promptings of performance and artifice reach an impasse because the success of this project hinges on a contract between partners that is not available to the gay couple manqué.

Unlike Doane and Case, Frantz Fanon theorizes performance as dystopic insofar as it presupposes a lack that must be concealed: the colonized subject mistakes European agency for empowerment, imitating the colonial authority, an activity that exacerbates the gap he would close and ends in humiliation and neurosis.⁶ Hwang dramatizes the incongruity of performance as the traumatic inception of conscience: in Golden Gate the recent Asian immigrant provides the ego-ideal, not, however, in the sense that Chinese national life is presented as superior to that of America. Rather, the Chinese union organizer embodies the American norm, for he upholds the democratic values which are traduced by America's indigenous citizens, in this case, FBI agents. The incommensurability between Kevin Walker, the virile G-man, and the Asian immigrant he tragically emulates gives Walker a praiseworthy, rather than comic, incompleteness.

Both M. Butterfly and Golden Gate dismantle the sexual mythology informing Orientalism, deconstructing the oppositions that structure the worlds of East and West. Hwang's works do not simply elaborate these poststructuralist moves; each addresses a specific historical context: M. Butterfly interprets the Vietnam era through the metaphor of the gay male body, while Golden Gate dramatizes McCarthyism in terms of Asian American masculinity and homosocial desire. These works criticize the sexual and ethical construction of Western masculinity through the deviance of two white principals who challenge the cultural roles available to them. The French diplomat's fantasy of the perfect Oriental woman mediates homosexual desire in the face of pervasive homophobia, masking the wish to be the woman with the more acceptable desire for possession. Similarly, the FBI agent refuses the imperatives of his office, assuming the role of the Chinese American labor organizer whom he has destroyed, thus constructing his identity according to an ethical standard in violent opposition to Hoover and McCarthyism. Rather than offering positive images of Asian Americans, a virtually impossible task given the competing demands of various audiences, Hwang turns Orientalism against the West's own interests, opening up a world of proliferating masks in which two white men reinvent themselves by donning the personae of the East. Hwang thus invests the image with greater importance than the symbol, the realm of custom, convention, law.

M. Butterfly reverses Giovanni Puccini's 1904 adaptation of David Belasco in order to analyze the psychosexual drama underlying the enigmatic twenty-year affair between Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat stationed in Beijing, and Shi Peipu, a Chinese opera singer and spy, an interval during which Boursicot claims not to have known that his lover was a man.⁷ Puccini's Madame Butterfly dramatizes the beauty and self-sacrifice of Cio-Cio San, the devoted Japanese woman who waits three years for her American husband and commits ritual suicide upon discovering that he has taken an American wife.⁸ Hwang's play adapts the real-life drama of Boursicot and Shi Peipu to reinterpret one of the West's most enduring tales of sentimental racism. Most critics of M. Butterfly adopt some version of psychoanalytic poststructuralism in reading it as a critique of Orientalism, an inversion of Puccini in which the French diplomat assumes the role of Butterfly and commits seppuku, a reception that Hwang's own characterization of the play as a “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly” both predicts and elicits.⁹

Two recent Asian American scholars have faulted this approach as imbricated in racism and homophobia. James Moy, one of the play's more acute critics, observes that Hwang's deconstruction fails because, in inverting the cultural positioning of the characters, Rene Gallimard and Song Liling, the tragedy inadequately displaces the very Orientalist stereotypes it seeks to dismantle, reproducing Asian characters who are “laughable and grossly disfigured … now doubly displaced into the new order of stereotypical representations created by Asian-Americans” (“Repositioning” 55); whether this strategy is unwitting or collusive with the demands of an Anglo-American marketplace remains in question. Quentin Lee, however, criticizes Moy's desire for positive images of Asian Americans as an example of what he terms Occidentalism—the celebration of Western masculinity as heterosexual mastery—a prejudice that he attributes to Hwang as well: such an argument inflects Song Liling's final incarnation in a Giorgio Armani suit as an obeisance to these norms.¹⁰ Lee wants the field of Asian American representation to be elastic and expansive enough to accommodate articulations of gay Asian American desire; however, Moy and other conscientious ethnic critics might characterize this position as reactionary inasmuch as it can play into, rather than contest, the feminizing rhetoric of Orientalism. Because both camps insist on making Song Liling representative of Asian American men, they censure Hwang's cultural politics as pernicious.

Moy and Lee's observations foreground the complexity of representing Asian American identity according to notions of appropriate role models. An identity politics that strives for a eugenics of representation is doomed to fail because every positive image calls to mind the stereotype it seeks to correct; moreover, the very desire to delimit the field of representation bespeaks both arrogance and a poverty of imagination, suggesting its imbrication in discourses of ethnic and racial authenticity. I argue, instead, that M. Butterfly does not confront Orientalist stereotypes so much as indirectly renovate them by exposing the sexual and ethical limitations of Western masculinity as traditionally conceived: that is, Hwang writes as a Westerner with an interest in the East. He does not valorize Western masculinity as a model to be imitated; rather, in dramatizing Rene Gallimard's failed construction of a gay identity through the stereotype of an Asian woman, the mask of a gay Asian opera singer in Communist China, he exposes the prison-house of heterosexism.

Moy inadvertently identifies the most important level of dramatic signification: “As audiences leave the theater, then, racial/sexual identity is not an issue; rather, most are simply incredulous at how for twenty years Gallimard could have confused Song's rectum for a vagina” (“Repositioning” 54). The audience's incredulity justly assumes centrality, for Gallimard's confusion articulates the values of a culture that deems gay sexuality impermissible. Hwang's “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly” thus reads as a palimpsest of repressed homoeroticism, elaborating the construction of a marginalized sexuality that must go unrecognized. Given his acculturation in a national heterosexism, Gallimard's fascination with Butterfly defends against the perception of his homosexuality: mimetic desire, the wish to be the perfect woman, converges with Orientalism, for the fantasy invokes an ideal in Butterfly; a Western woman would not be adequate to this desire as evidenced by Gallimard's interaction with Renee, the Danish student with whom he has an affair. Even as he welcomes Renee's lack of inhibition, likening her to the women in the girlie magazines as “picture perfect,” he muses, “But is it possible for a woman to be too uninhibited, too willing, so as to seem almost too … masculine?” (54). Later, Gallimard confirms that Renee is not his real object of desire, but simply the instrument through which he exercises mastery over Butterfly: “I kept up our affair … because of Butterfly. … It was her tears and her silence that excited me, every time I visited Renee” (56). Feminist autonomy, with its elision of fear, shame, and submissiveness, has desecrated Western womanhood.¹¹

Hwang introduces the notion of misrecognition early on, as Gallimard, in the aftermath of standing trial for treason, observes several Parisians discussing his sexual faux pas:

MAN 1:
He never touched her with his hands?
MAN 2:
Perhaps he did, and simply misidentified the equipment. A compelling case for sex education in the schools.
WOMAN:
To protect the National Security—the Church can't argue with that.
MAN 1:
That's impossible! How could he not know?
MAN 2:
Simple ignorance.
MAN 1:
For twenty years?
MAN 2:
Time flies when you're being stupid.
MAN 1:
That's impossible! How could he not know?
WOMAN:
Well, I thought the French were ladies' men.
MAN 2:
It seems Monsieur Gallimard was overly anxious to live up to his national reputation.

(3)

Gallimard's humiliation in the face of this public discussion of his sexuality throws into high relief the difference in the assumptions of Western masculinity and Orientalist fantasy, a difference theatrically enacted through dissonant musical styles as well as in the contrast between the brightly-lit space of the parlor and the penumbral prison with its Orientalist decor symbolizing Gallimard's fantasy life. As Gallimard muses, “It's an enchanted space I occupy. The French—we know how to run a prison” (2). But this enchanted space does not simply confine and closet: it discloses the assimilation of Gallimard's erotic identity to a tragic fairy tale, tragic because ultimately he cannot disenchant himself into material social practice. The theatrical manipulation of lights emphasizes Gallimard's retrospection as scopophilic fantasy, rather than social performance. The interlocutors offer a post-mortem on Gallimard's folly, identifying the coercive structure of French sexual politics at the same time that they highlight the possible reinflection of these stereotypes: in their language game to be a ladies' man assumes heterosexual practices, but the play will begin to open up a different register of meaning: being a ladies' man comes to signify a gay man who articulates his sexuality by identifying with a woman's body.

Hwang dramatizes Gallimard's sexual identity through an accretion of details, from Gallimard's youthful induction into the world of sex to his affair with Song Liling. For instance, Gallimard's memory of discovering his uncle's “girlie magazines”: “The first time I saw them in his closet … all lined up—my body shook. Not with lust—no, with power. Here were women—a shelfful—who would do exactly as I wanted” (10). But Hwang problematizes the notion of power: Gallimard's “version of Madame Butterfly” (9) reveals that he is aroused by a fantasy of inhabitation rather than possession, an orientation indicated by the semantic ambiguity of the “as” in the phrase “do exactly as I wanted”; however, he cannot give voice to this wish because the magazine's displays are rampantly heterosexual, offering an unsuitable mise en scène for his fantasy life. His “hot skin,” suggestive of erotic investment in masquerade, and his “soft penis” are the disjunctive symptoms of a fantasy constructed to deflect recognition of homosexual desire in the face of its very expression.

Later, Gallimard's memory of his first actual sexual encounter, orchestrated by a schoolfriend Marc, reinforces the sleight of dreamwork:

GALLIMARD:
My arms were pinned to the dirt.
MARC:
She loved the superior position. A girl ahead of her time.
GALLIMARD:
I looked up, and there was this woman … bouncing up and down on my loins.
MARC:
Screaming, right?
GALLIMARD:
Screaming … and pounding my butt up and down into the Dirt. … And in the middle of this, the leaves were getting into my mouth, my legs were losing circulation, I thought, ‘God. So this is it?’

(33)

Gallimard clearly occupies the feminine position in this parody of a woman's sexual initiation as the passive, sexually disenfranchised partner; however, not only are the partners' respective positions important, but also the material reality of their bodies: copulating with a woman stimulates Gallimard's homosexual fantasy because it so completely disguises it, even from himself. Marc's query, “You didn't have a good time?”, and Gallimard's stuttering, overemphatic reply, “No, that's not what I—I had a great time! … Yeah. Really … I did” (33-34), merely reinforce Gallimard's reluctant participation in a heterosexual economy. The encounter both stimulates and safeguards the homosexual fantasy of assimilating himself to a woman's body through which Gallimard constructs a gay identity for himself, but it also accentuates the humiliation western culture attributes to the woman's posture and body: “pounding my butt up and down into the dirt … the leaves were getting into my mouth, my legs were losing circulation” (33). Gallimard's revelation, “So this is it?” (33), underscores the problem of his womanly investiture: masquerade, based on donning the female body, differs from the material performance of costume and gesture elaborated by Doane and Case, for its fundamentalism returns Gallimard to the contiguity of image and body (with the attendant accrual of shame) that the masquerade was designed to contest. Hence Gallimard's flight into the reaction formation of Western manhood.

Gallimard's virile display depends on exaggerating gender stereotypes; hence he assumes a masterful role in relation to Song as expressed in the metaphor, “I began to wonder: had I, too, caught a butterfly who would writhe on a needle?” (32), and his virtuosity elicits Song's gift of “shame” (35): more than conventional modesty, shame testifies to female masochism. Even more interesting, however, is Gallimard's interpretation of “friendship”: “Better, but I don't like the way she calls me ‘friend.’ When a woman calls a man her ‘friend,’ she's calling him a eunuch or a homosexual” (35). Gallimard's victory in the arena of sexual politics gains him the admiration and envy of his colleagues and immediately advances his career, for, shortly thereafter, the French ambassador promotes him to vice-consul, a position from which he can exert his newfound mastery on French foreign policy in Vietnam.

Gallimard's unconscious masquerade rouses a compensatory military adventurism, for buoyed by his conquest of Butterfly, he interprets Dien Bien Phu and the loss of Indochina as a failure of French will, suggesting that “[t]he Orientals simply want to be associated with whoever shows the most strength and power … Orientals will always submit to a greater force” (45-46), a judgment that aligns the Vietnamese with female masochism and draws invidious comparisons between French and American virility. In truth, though, the artful Song has manipulated the French diplomat from the start, transmitting strategic information teased from the unwitting Gallimard to the Communist government in China. Here, the masquerade seems to fortify gender and ethnocentric stereotypes: Song engages in espionage through a familiar combination of feminine and national guile to facilitate Chinese power, a project in keeping with the West's paranoid construction of Oriental treachery and inscrutability to achieve China's international domination. It must be emphasized, however, that this representation of Song is an element of Gallimard's fantasy.

Gallimard here enacts gender, as Judith Butler puts it, “a corporeal style, an ‘act’ … both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ itself carries the double-meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential.’”¹² Gallimard's mimic identity is realized in the mirror: “alone, in my cell, I have long since faced the truth … Love warped my judgment, blinded my eyes, rearranged the very lines on my face … until I could look in the mirror and see nothing but … a woman” (92). Ultimately, Gallimard identifies himself with the shame of the image, being unable to capitalize on the artifice of masquerade, unlike Song, who associates womanliness with the freedom of imagination, performativity, and non-referentiality. Where Song acts out his homoerotic impulses by repeatedly reinventing himself through drag—a necessary strategy for a gay Asian man subject to the double bind of Orientalism and a homophobic culture—for Gallimard, recognition of the feminine nature of his desires repulses him and prefaces self-annihilation: “The love of a Butterfly can withstand many things—unfaithfulness, loss, even abandonment. But how can it face the one sin that implies all others? The devastating knowledge that, underneath it all, the object of her love was nothing more, nothing less than … a man” (92). Deprived of the fetishistic fantasy that enabled him to express his femininity and sensuality covertly, characteristics degrading to Western men, Gallimard comes face to face with his homosexuality. In assuming the caparison of Butterfly, Gallimard acknowledges the truth, but in literalizing desire through drag, he loses the fantasy: all that remains to him is the queen, the grotesquery of an aging French man in garish makeup.

In this ritual suicide, James Moy simply sees another enactment of an Asian man dying on the Western stage, a trope in which Asian American “racial desire” is disturbingly implicated: “it is clear that in the popular consciousness Asianness has fled from the real into the realm of representational desire. Unfortunately … the representational Asia carries with it a requirement of self-destruction. Indeed … only through its death, or representational self-effacement, does Asia become real for Western audiences” (“The Death of Asia” 356).¹³ But Moy's reduction of M. Butterfly to an Asian death drive fails to acknowledge its reinscription of the uncanny in the West. Where Moy interprets Gallimard's suicide as an Asian death, I reverse this reading: Gallimard kills himself, as a white man, because he can no longer defend against knowledge of his homosexuality in the homophobic West.

M. Butterfly thus dramatizes the disclosure of queer identity through feminine performance, an emphasis that thinkers such as Leo Bersani have decried, for whom theories of performativity elide queer identities by softpedaling a defining sexual preference: “in rejecting the essentializing identities derived from sexual preference, they mount a resistance to homophobia in which the agent of resistance has been erased: there is no longer any homosexual subject to oppose the homophobic subject” (Homos 56). In his view, theories of queer sexuality that resist specific articulations of desire undermine the possibility of a radical politics based on a specific sexuality. For Bersani, the “dead seriousness of the gay commitment to machismo” leads to the “potential for loving identification with the gay man's enemies” and the paradox of an object-choice whose lineaments are familiarly masculine: “a fantasy-luxury that is at once inevitable and no longer permissible” (“Is the Rectum” 208). In M. Butterfly Gallimard experiences precisely this aporia because he refuses the liberatory possibilities of masquerade: in his hands, masquerade degenerates into camp, a form of parody that derides femininity in asserting the gay man's masculinity. Gallimard's death thus challenges the “reabsorption of gay male identity into the canons of masculinity” (Michasiw 168) and suggests a revaluation of feminist insights in the elaboration of a gay aesthetic.¹⁴

If M. Butterfly dramatizes a gay man's construction of his sexual identity through an Orientalist fantasy, Hwang's original screenplay Golden Gate narrates the assimilation of a white FBI agent to the identity of the Chinese American activist he destroys.¹⁵ Hwang situates his tale in post-WWII America, analyzing the legacy of McCarthyism from 1952 to 1968 through the metaphor of Asian American masculinity and homosociality. The film contextualizes the FBI's power in the 1950s through the prerogatives of the masterful, heterosexual white G-man Kevin Walker, who enjoys the privileges of a world constructed in his image, a hegemony that the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s will challenge.

The film proper opens by depicting two virtually identical figures trudging single file toward the Golden Gate Bridge, here presented as a symbol both of connection and radical disunion. This sequence forecasts the trajectory of Walker's career and his imaginative assimilation to the body of his former enemy, a process that witnesses his transformation into the Chinaman, a stereotype reinflected from its proverbial degradation into a symbol of political agency. Golden Gate thus consists of two broad movements that reflect the obverse fates of the principals: Chen's destruction and Walker's ascension, followed by Walker's destruction and the restoration of Chen's name, a pattern that exemplifies what Sau-ling Wong has identified as a prominent trope in Asian American literature: “By projecting undesirable ‘Asianness’ outward onto a double—what I term a racial shadow—one renders alien what is, in fact, literally inalienable, thereby disowning and distancing it” (78). Hwang, however, deconstructs the terms of Wong's “racial shadow”: here, Chen is not the alien who emphasizes Walker's centrality, but as the film will show, comes to embody the American ideal; for his part, Walker gradually becomes the Chinaman, a role reinflected as heroic by film's end.

Early on, Walker's white girlfriend frames the question that will define his life: law or justice? The film suggests the gap between law and justice, dramatizing the FBI's perversion of the law in order to prosecute Americans of Chinese descent. Walker's initial allegiance to the law regardless of its justness emphasizes his moral hollowness in contrast to the moral agency of the characters who occupy the margins of society, the middle-class white woman and the Chinese American man. The film will begin to debunk the G-men's self-idealization in Walker and Pirelli's initial encounter with Chen Jung Song, a labor organizer unionizing laundry workers in San Francisco's Chinatown who turns the tables on the G-men, depicting them as greenhorns. When Pirelli asks, “Speakee English?”, Chen responds, “You talk funny boy,” and chastises Walker for his ignorance of Chinese custom, which reverses the conventions of European patronymics by putting the last name first. Chen diminishes the G-men by mimicking their linguistic style and adroitly redirecting Pirelli's aggressive bigotry, pointing out that Pirelli cannot manage to keep spaghetti off his tie, a remark that casts the Italian American as an FOB.

In this battle over manhood, Chen—quick, flip, and arrogant—embodies American style more believably than the FBI men. Here, although he is the recent immigrant, Chen acts as the democratic ideal, who, unlike Hoover's men, is conversant with the Constitution. The manhood of the agents is further impugned by Hoover, who occupies the position of Freud's primal chief, hoarder of all masculinity. The FBI agents do not embody the claims of law or power; instead, they are Hoover's minions, mimick men, members of his seraglio.¹⁶ Accordingly, Walker attempts to build a bogus case against Chen as a subversive, and although he eventually comes to realize the injustice of this act and wants to abandon the case, his superiors will not let matters rest, and he finds himself at the mercy of the process that he originally instigated. Unwilling to do the right thing, to act in accord with conscience because it will mean ejection from the FBI, he complies with Hoover's agenda: loyalty to the job, the symbol of his puissance, ensures his hollowness.

Chen is successfully framed, sent to San Quentin for ten years on questionable charges of engaging in trade with a Communist country, when his only crime has been to organize a local campaign to support indigent relatives in China. Upon his release from prison, Chen finds he has no place in the community, for he is shunned as a troublemaker by the Chinese. In one of the more powerful scenes, he vents his rage and shame by overturning a can of garbage on his head. This moment inaugurates the new meaning of the term Chinaman, referring at once to a despised ethnicity as well as to the status of the complete outsider, the alienated subject without a country. In the climactic encounter between Chen and Walker, who is assigned to keep Chen under surveillance, they confront each other on the Golden Gate bridge where Chen anathematizes Walker: “Fuck you G-man. The only reason you follow me is because I'm a Chinaman. Fuck your crippled mother. Fuck your eyes out. I curse you be a Chinaman. No longer human. Stranger to your kin.” Refusing Walker's belated offer of help, Chen asserts, “I make my own changes now. Chinaman.” Cut off from the Chinese American community, Chen jumps to his death off the bridge, fulfilling his own ominous prophecy.

The film transforms the meaning of Chinaman, a change that takes place through the course of Walker's surveillance of Chen and influences his disposition toward Chen, the Bureau, and the circumstances of his personal life. Indeed, Walker's very appearance and self-presentation reflect this change. Where Freud writes that “[t]he ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (16), Hwang complicates this observation suggestively. From the beginning, Golden Gate places tremendous emphasis on appearance as integral to the creation of the ego-ideal. One of the early scenes depicts a youthful, lordly Kevin Walker walking purposefully toward the FBI building. As the narrator observes, “He thought he was a killer in the looks department. That's all it takes to convince most people,” a perception seconded by the receptionist, who, upon being asked by Walker how she knew he was FBI, suggests that it was the “attitude.” In 1952, such men, like Walker and his partner, Ron Pirelli, “the life of everyone's party,” occupy center stage in a world they create, where “lights blazed high” and every G-man is entitled to a “dame on each arm.” The epitome of Western masculinity, Walker's beauty proves foundational to his sense of mastery, and this illusion contrasts forcefully with Chen's self-defilement as waste.

Initially, Walker's gaze literalizes the patriarchal authority of the FBI, which has effectively objectified Chen, stripping him of agency. The realm of gaze and image is complicated by the advent of the word when Walker attends Chen's funeral. Overwhelmed with guilt, he befriends Chen's daughter Marilyn, and masquerading as her father's San Quentin lawyer, begins to construct a history of Chen's life, offering this narrative as a gift to the daughter, alienated from the legacy as well as from the man who incarcerated in prison has maintained only a shadowy presence in her life. In this new situation, able to “form a picture of a man at last,” Walker comes to admire Chen: he falls in love with the story he tells of Chen that becomes the ego-ideal to which he conforms his own life, a figuration of heroic beauty that supplants his original narcissistic manhood. Here, to imagine the man means to become the man, an imperative that puts Walker in conflict with the FBI and the racist structure of American society. The film challenges the West's constructions of manhood by rehabilitating the image of Chen, who, as the Asian American man, comes to embody the best of Western manhood: agency committed to justice. But the film also shows that society does not see him as such: it sees only an FOB, a supernumerary worker in a cheap laundromat, a potential Communist agitator. Chen's situation is clear, but it is occluded by racism; Walker's, by contrast, is incoherent.

Like Marilyn, Walker wants to serve Chen's cause, but he can do so only by breaking the professional code of the FBI and leaking Chen's files to her: “I'm not even waiting for the people. I'm already gone. … Here are the cheat notes for the poli-sci exam.” He seizes his chance to make restitution even though it means giving up his professional privilege and ultimately his place in society. When Pirelli, his former partner, learns of his betrayal of the FBI's case files, he cries, “Do I even know you anymore? Yuri, Ho Chi Minh, or just plain moron?” Walker can attribute the loss of the files to professional incompetence or to a betrayal of J. Edgar Hoover's America. Either way, he loses professional status and, no longer recognized by his colleagues, he finds he has no place in society: like Chen, he becomes a Chinaman, but unlike Chen, the condition is not thrust upon him; instead, he embraces it. “My name is Chen Jung Song,” he says, a change signalled by the background strains of the Chinese flute.

Having suppressed a fictional Communist plot in the 1950s, he now martyrs himself to Berkeley's Asian American rights movement. Walker can emulate Chen, but never restore him to his proper place: this is the trauma that stimulates the formation of a social conscience in him. Inevitably, Walker comes to understand that he can only restore Chen by taking his place, that is, by leaking the files that clear Chen and implicate himself in shameful practice, the one act that gives moral dimension to his life. Like Chen before him, he repairs to the Golden Gate bridge, the scene of Chen's suicidal recognition that there was no place for him in this society; the bridge functions as a site of alienation, breaking faith with the immigrants' dream of the Gold Mountain. Walker, too, commits suicide here, keeping faith with his ideal, but having performed his sacrifice, he restores the Golden Gate to its traditional symbolism as a bridge between East and West. Indeed, through Chen, the immigrant man, Walker comes to understand the meaning of justice and the enlightenment principles of his own country.

Both Golden Gate and M. Butterfly dramatize the terminus of Western masculinity: the French diplomat is shackled by the West's representation of its political power through heterosexual norms, which exclude him, thus his recourse to the fantasmal body of an Oriental woman. But when Rene Gallimard's fantasy assumes material form, when this unconscious body becomes conscious, it becomes parodic, a situation that he finds untenable and ultimately destroys him. On the other hand, Kevin Walker's admiration of Chen is fully conscious, and the idealized body of the Chinaman becomes the norm to which he tries to conform his own life. Walker achieves manhood and moral agency by conforming to his ego-ideal, the Asian American activist, a condition that leads to a racial harlequinade; ultimately, he is perceived as a professional failure, a buffoon. His ego-ideal remains the projection to which he can aspire but never appropriate as his own.

Notes

1. See Lavilla, “Connerly.” Ling-chi Wang, the Chair of Ethnic Studies at Berkeley, has suggested merging ethnic studies with American studies. See Walsh.

2. Two recent anthologies address this issue in different ways: Roediger's Black on White focuses on black writers' interpretation of whiteness; Frankenberg's Displacing Whiteness encompasses a multiethnic range of writers. Two journals have recently published special white issues, The Minnesota Review and Transition. All the contributors to the White issue of Transition are black, except for Walter Benn Michaels, whose piece argues that anti-essentialism is merely another essentialism, and seems to have been included as an example of white scholarly condescension. For an incisive critique of Michaels's views as elaborated in an earlier study, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, see Lott's “The New Cosmopolitanism,” 121-27. Bhabha suggests that this “blizzard of ‘whiteness’ studies cannot be understood without being situated in the precarious balance between old left and cultural left, between the national and the cosmopolitan, selfishness and sadism” (“The White Stuff” 24).

3. Hwang's very success has garnered his work significant criticism from scholars of Asian American literature, much of it specifically focused on the representation of Asian America in M. Butterfly, ranging from suggestions alleging Hwang's politically reactionary misappropriation of Chinese mythology to Orientalism, misogyny, and homophobia. These views are represented by Chin; Moy, “David Henry Hwang's”; Cody; and Quentin Lee.

4. Set in Hawaii, Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging dramatizes a Filipino Japanese man's rape of his nieces and sodomy of a Japanese American youth. At the 1998 annual Association for Asian American Studies Conference in Oahu, the Filipino American Studies Caucus initiated a successful resolution to rescind the Association's literary award to the Japanese American author. In the aftermath of the decision, many board members resigned, citing fears over personal liability. Interestingly, virtually all the discussants in Hawaii ignored the fact that the character is part Japanese. See Lavilla, “Book” and Yamanaka's response in Tanner (17).

5. See Doane's response to commentaries on “Film and the Masquerade.”

6. See Fanon, especially chapters 1, 4, and 6. Since Fanon, who argued that mimicry is the inevitable outcome of ideological assimilation, leading racial others to the alienating impasse of simply emulating or failing to measure up to the colonizer's values, debates about colonial mimicry have focused on its uses for cultural autonomy. See Irigaray, 338-44; and Bhabha, “Of Mimicry.” For a discussion of M. Butterfly in the context of postcolonial theories of mimicry, see Josephine Lee, 105-20.

7. The story first broke in The New York Times, 11 May 1986. For a good summary, including interviews with the principals, see Wadler.

8. Belasco's one-act play, which enjoyed a five-year run in New York City, was itself an adaptation of Long's short story that appeared in Century Magazine in 1898. Eaton's popular A Japanese Nightingale (1901), was adapted for the stage and performed in New York to compete with the Belasco play. An Anglo-Chinese Eurasian, Eaton wrote under the fictional Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna to capitalize on the prevailing cult of japonisme. For a useful overview of the inception and transformations of the Butterfly story from Pierre Loti to Hwang, see Lye 269-70.

9. Hwang's own characterization, “Afterword,” M. Butterfly, 95. All references to the play will be to this edition, incorporated hereafter parenthetically in the text. See Skloot, Kondo, and Kehde.

10. Quentin Lee and Eng are among the first to interpret M. Butterfly specifically as a narrative of homosexuality: Lee situates his reading in what he uncharitably calls an “outing” of Hwang (52); Eng attempts to establish a dialogue between Asian America and queer theory (131-52). Moy's characterization of characters from M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die as “disfigured” (55) assumes a certain homophobic tinge, insofar as Song Liling and Vincent Chang, the Japanese man masquerading as a Chinese actor in Yankee Dawg, are gay.

11. A comparison with Barthes's S/Z, which decodes Balzac's novel, Sarrasine, is especially instructive here. The immediate difference between Gallimard falling in love with a transvestite and Sarrasine's attraction to the castrato La Zambinella is obviated by the realization that in both cases anatomy hardly matters: Gallimard and Sarrasine love what they fantasize. Barthes's denaturalizing of the readerly—we do not read, we re-read—can be invoked to emphasize the always already imbrication of Gallimard's fantasy formation in cultural codes, here expressed as a form of Orientalism. For an insightful comparison of the two works, see Garber.

12. Butler, 272-73. Gallimard here also exemplifies Garber's characterization of the transvestite as a figure who “functions simultaneously as a mark of gender undecidability and as an indication of category crisis” (“Phantoms,” 238). See also Sedgwick.

13. Clement suggests that Cio-Cio San becomes Japanese by virtue of her theatrical death (58).

14. Michasiw suggests D. A. Miller and Michael Moon's reabsorption in orthodox masculinity, witnessed in their recuperation of military metaphors in their critique of Susan Sontag, who, in their view, depoliticizes gay sexuality (164-68).

15. The film generally received poor reviews. See Maslin and Kaufman. These reviews unanimously suggest that British director John Madden could not execute Hwang's ambitious script, a judgment with which I cannot concur. Maslin mounts perhaps the most interesting criticism, when she observes that Hwang's script is better-suited to the stage than the screen, tacitly suggesting that he work in the genre with which he is most familiar. But it seems to me that even a rudimentary understanding of Chinese culture would reveal the high level of craft in both the script and the direction.

16. Hwang's screenplay gestures toward the persistent rumors of Hoover's homosexuality in the 1950s.

I wish to thank Barbara Judson for her incisive contributions to this essay.

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