Reflections

I'm not going to lie, I came into this class thinking that I had a solid, foundational understanding of the concepts of race, labor, and migration, and the close relationships between them. However, this knowledge was rudimentary at best, with very little scholarly work behind it. I came into this class wanting to learn about these concepts within an academic structure, and I have not been disappointed. While this is kind of knowledge (experiential, listening to oral histories of my peers/family/friends/etc) carries just as much weight as scholarly, peer-reviewed work, it was great to have historical background reading to help place my "anecdotal" knowledge within a historical milieu. The writings by Hortense Spillers and Mae Ngai, as well as the reprints of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Angelo Hearden's works really resonated with me and I enjoyed them very much. I really appreciate my expanded knowledge of these concepts and their historical contexts as conveyed through both the primary and secondary readings for this class. In addition, the balance of and emphasis on both academic articles and fictional work helped make this class more enriching for me. This class has been a great confirmation of how little I knew (and how much I have yet to learn), which is the best kind of learning experience one can have.

“On Mortality Again” - Maxine Hong Kingston

“The last deed of Maui the Trickster, the Polynesian demigod who played jokes, pushed the sky higher, roped the sun with braided pubic hair from his mother, pulled the land up out of the ocean, and brought fire to earth, was to seek immortality for men and women by stealing it from Hina of the Night. He instructed the people, the beasts, the birds, and the elements to be silent. Hunters walked through forests and fishermen waited in this same silence. In silence the snarer caught birds alive, plucked the few red feathers, and released them; the seer read the clouds, heard spirits and did not disturb them. Children learned and worked silently. There was a chant that could hardly be discerned from silence. Maui dived into the ocean, where he found great Hina asleep. Through her vagina like a door, he entered her body. He took her heart in his arms. He had started tunneling out feet first when a bird, at the sight of his legs wiggling out of the vagina, laughed. Hina awoke and shut herself, and Maui died” (Kingston 122).

Critical questions: How does myth, be it Chinese or American or something else entirely, function in Kingston’s China Men? Does Kingston construct a new mythology of immigrant Chinese men? How does this specific myth of Maui and Hina reflect the subjugation and taming of the land as told in the larger myth of “The Great-Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains”?

In this vignette, it is possible to read the figure of Maui as a colonizing force. With the express purpose of seeking immortality, he instructs and persuades those around him to remain silent while he attempts to steal Hina’s heart (in the least romantic sense possible). The use of “silence” as a literary device calls to mind the complicity in this act by many different parties. Hunters, fishermen, bird snarers, and children all wait for Maui to bring them immortality. It is interesting to note that hunters, fishermen, and bird snarers all share a singular purpose - to maintain their livelihoods through dependence on natural resources, much like the Chinese laborers on the sugar cane plantations.

Maui’s death-by-entrapment-in-a-mythical body signals a kind of deus ex machina solution against the attempt to steal Hina’s life force. The use of the deus ex machina as a literary device is often seen as a cop out, while in myth, the deus ex machina offers a clean-cut ending to an otherwise complex and difficult story. Unfortunately, there is no solution that can be mandated by divinity, and there can be no quick fix or quick stop to the process of colonizing - literally stealing the immortality of the land.

This vignette is fascinating to me because as the closing vignette of “The Great-Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains,” it mirrors the closing vignette of the previous section, “The Ghostmate.” Both tell stories of men being “taken in” by women. In “The Ghostmate,” the travelling man is taken into the beautiful house of a beautiful woman, and stays for too long - when he returns to the “real” world, he discovers that his family is gone, and the beautiful woman’s house is instead a tombstone. In “On Mortality Again,” Maui is consumed by Hina and he dies. I believe that these short vignettes and retold traditional myths, when interspersed with the stories of various fathers and grandfathers, act as a kind of validation of Kingston’s myths.

Does the “X” in X-Files stand for “xenophobia?”

Almost every single police procedural show on primetime television will have an episode dedicated to the linked topics of illegality and immigration. Like Law and Order: SVU’s “Debt,” The X-Files’ “Teliko” and “El Mundo Gira” also incorporate these themes. However, while Law and Order: SVU attempts to give a fair if not detached portrayal of the issues that undocumented sex workers face, the X-Files uses the figure of the migrant laborer or the immigrant as the “Monster of the Week,” dehumanizing and othering these figures and the people who are associated with them.

“El Mundo Gira” (Season 4, Episode 11) begins in a migrant labor camp near Fresno, California, where an undocumented laborer has been found dead. Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate the death, as the woman’s face has been eaten away. The culprit is a fungal infection brought into the country from Mexico by another male undocumented laborer, who is quickly infecting the rest of the people in the camp. Mulder and Scully race to apprehend and give the man an antidote to the fungus, but he crosses the border back into Mexico, still infected. In “Teliko,” (Season 4, Episode 3) an immigrant man named Samuel Aboah from Burkina Faso tries to obtain his citizenship papers while living with an expired tourist visa so he can get a job in New York. It is revealed that he is the “last of an endangered tribe” that lacks a pituitary gland and must kill and eat other people’s pituitary glands to survive.1 Aboah murders several people for their pituitary glands while trying to obtain citizenship in America, eventually being shot in a standoff with Scully. As she types up the report, she wonders if a cure for Aboah’s condition can be found, but resigns herself to the xenophobia that would prevent such a cure from being discovered.

In both of these episodes, the figure of the illegal/undocumented immigrant has brought with them a form of life-threatening destruction to America. The fact that each “antagonist” or “Monster of the Week” is made to be an “illegal” person in the United States speaks to the casual xenophobia that pervades these two episodes. Combine this with the fact that each “monster” (fungus and a hunger for pituitary glands, respectively) has a foreign origin, and suddenly The X-Files has built a case against illegal immigration. Unfortunately, because The X-Files never made itself a hard-hitting exposé of any criminal underworld a la Law and Order: SVU, The X-Files hides behind its status as a science fiction show to avoid addressing its racist and xenophobic tendencies.

Racialized Labor in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is known for its heavy-handed dialogues around the issues of rape, domestic violence, and murder. It’s use of New York City as its setting allows the Special Victims Unit to visit victims from all walks of life, creating an unusually high number of episodes showing areas or situations in New York that would otherwise be ignored on primetime television.1 In an episode entitled “Debt,” (Season 6, Episode 2) the focus is on a missing undocumented Chinese sex worker and her abandoned daughter. The episode later reveals an illegal prostitution ring of undocumented Chinese women.
Sex work is profession that is indeed racialized, and the forced labor of women of color (particularly undocumented women of color) as sex workers is one that cannot be ignored.2 The exclusion of Chinese women from late nineteenth-century America because of their presumed position as prostitutes has persisted to today. Chinese women are indeed allowed in America, but the expectation of East Asian women to be submissive or sexually available is an indication of the pervasiveness of this additional myth of racialized labor.
The topic of “illegality” is going to be brought up next week, but I think this episode of Law and Order: SVU shows that the issues of racialized labor and illegality, in pop culture or otherwise, intersect more often than we give them credit for. The women’s status as undocumented and “illegal” in America as well as their illegal labor puts them in the most precarious position - and yet, the storyline of the episode and each ensemble cast member does not stop to think about the precarious situation. There is no discussion of the systemic injustices - both in the context of America and in the global context of American-East Asian relations - that force many women into these positions, nor is there any solution provided to change or stop these systems. Law and Order: SVU’s propensity for schadenfreude only allows its ensemble cast to enter into these dire situations, arrest a few bad guys, and then wipe their hands clean of the whole effort. While I acknowledge Law and Order's efforts to include the stories of violence against the marginalized and underprivileged, the lack of commitment to these issues (as well as lionizing the police as an institution) and lack of deconstruction of the racialization of sex work/labor makes it less-than-favorable source in pop culture.

1. However, one must consider the fact that the stories of these neighborhoods or people do not seem important for primetime television unless they contain some element of tragedy. Television shows like Law and Order and Orange is the New Black only legitimize these stories if visited from an outsider’s point of view (cops and privileged white women, respectively).
2. Many of the racist fetishes that exist today hearken back to “archaic” racial dynamics and have lasting effects on the views of women of color in sexual contexts. One need only look at websites like creepywhiteguys.com or statistics of women of color victimized by human trafficking and domestic and sexual violence. It is telling that the main clients of this episode’s illegal prostitution ring are white men who look specifically for Chinese women to fulfill their sexual and relationship fantasies.