I am a storyteller by trade. And yet, I have hoarded my own story in my mouth for months and months because I did not know how to tell it. My coursework in Narrative Studies and Music Industry has been a split study of comparative literature and creative writing, designed by myself to intricately align and unravel my voice as a storyteller, and above all, a transborder music artist. Throughout my past three years as an international student from Hong Kong, I have absorbed works from a multiplicity of mediums, genres, and authors, all the while contemplating their relationship with the poetics of the Orient. And still, I felt mute. And still, I watched how long this voice of mine could hold its breath and longed for its release.
In my junior year, a poetry writing workshop led by Dr. Anna Journey allowed me to come face to face with the poetics of the grotesque. I began to feel a new tenderness towards my voice, raw and unfamiliar. Then, come senior year, a comparative literature class on psychoanalysis and the arts taught by Dr. Mia du Plessis compounded and erupted this newfound tenderness of mine.
In this major statement, with a close focus on poetry, I will engage in the critical study of various texts and write creatively to answer: What is the Poetics of Chinese American femininity? Over time, this question had fractured into a two-pronged answer, both of which I embodied and was accountable for: the Grotesque and Ornamentalism. First, the etymology of the word “grotesque” is linked to the word “grotto”— “the English word derives from the Italian pittura grottesca, meaning a work (or painting) found in a grotto and refers to the rooms in ancient buildings in Rome which were excavated to reveal murals in a grotesque style” (Edwards and Graulund 5). In the contemporary, the grotesque collapses monstrosity, disharmony and transgression, attraction and repulsion, laughter, and colonialism such that it gives voice to the aloneness and suffocation of misfits. Second, Anne Cheng’s Ornamentalism communicates a theory of being that contours the scope of ornamentation’s intersection with orientalist logic and personhood. It poses questions regarding the distinctive ways in which Asiatic femininity is imagined, visualized, adorned, and submerged through the minute, the sartorial, the decorative, and the prosthetic (read more about ornamentalism in my essay: “The Public Intellectual: Anne Anlin Cheng”).
Soon, I discovered the parallels between the Grotesque’s pilgrimatic gratification of sifting through the labyrinth for rocks of decorative shapes and patterns of pigment for “art,” and Ornamentalism’s colonial attribution of materialness and corporeality to perceptions of Asiatic “personhood.” I came to a strong feeling: But people are not rocks. In view of that, my major statement will intersperse the critical and the creative, the answer and the internalization of the answer, and hopefully make sense of the conditions of life and intimacy, and by extension the poetics of Chinese American femininity by braiding the two.
My deep dive into the Classical grotesque led me to an unsurprising conclusion—there exists no Classical allusion or myth on the foundation of the Asiatic grotesque, let alone the Chinese grotesque. The oriental grotesque, like Asiatic femininity that is derivative of white femininity, floats on the surfaces of the Classical grotesque. It has no core; it is a projected screen, an ephemeral specter. Then, a turn of events. As I investigated the Classical, I inversely stumbled upon its ornamentalism: the Medusa image, a symbol of monstrous femininity. According to Greek mythology, Medusa was a young and beautiful woman who served as a virgin priestess for Athena, the goddess of wisdom. After Poseidon, the god of the sea, brutally raped Medusa, the infuriated Athena transformed her into a winged gorgon with snakes for hair that would turn humans into stone with just one glance. Mounting the image of Medusa’s head on shields, the ancient Greeks ornamented and exploited the transgressive power of Medusa’s pain. Today, this corruption and misapplication of the decorative quality of the Medusa image, mother of the grotesque, proves to be maintained in Versace’s logo and their men’s ashtray.
So, I synthesized the grotesque and its ornamentalism and created a term: Orna-Grotesquerie. The Orna-grotesque is the containment, packaging, and distribution of the power of the grotesque. Conceived in good, authentic hands, it is the speech and breath of pain; it allows the loneliness inside of us to explode through our skin and flow into the world like a gentle river running. In bad hands, it reduces and diminishes trauma; it reigns grotesquerie itself back into pattern, a mere ornamentation on the surfaces of rocks, shields, and logos, a design that can be restrained and assigned colonial function.
During the design of the different phases of my statement, I have cemented Omi and Winant’s definition of “the racial project” from Racial Formation in the United States in my mind:
Racial projects do the ideological ‘work’ of making these links. A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning.
The Other, or, the grotesque, has always been constructed through a white colonial lens that inherently sexualizes exotic figures and renders them static and stereotyped for white consumption. This major statement is a direct act of protest against the exploitation of the Orna-grotesque. It is also a project of racial formation that occurs through the productive wielding of my own Orna-grotesquerie, one that treats art as a social agent to disrupt and relink structure and representation.
In the critical phase of this project, I read academic writing, some of which I have already encountered and made companionship with in my past Narrative Studies classes. I read texts from distinguished authors and philosophers: Anne Anlin Cheng, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Franz Fanon, Justin Edwards, and Rune Graulund. I also read texts from anthropologists and historians: Lisa Lowe, Nancy Davis, Christopher Bush, and Patricia Simons.
As I weaved all these texts into conversation, surrounded by books and words and language, all the fierce minds of the world bound in leather and vellum, I felt my tenderness towards my voice rise and rise, into passion, rage, and despair. I felt when Oscar Wilde said, “I’m tired of myself tonight, I should like to be someone else” and when Sylvia Plath said, “I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart.” I directed this burning energy and came up with the following concerns and inquiries that all the academic texts have led me to ask about Chinese American femininity:
What are the histories of the Chinese American woman? Does it matter? What is her perspective?
How can we navigate and negotiate the position of the Chinese American woman within the
theatrical spectacle?
How do we exist within the gaze of desire and violence? What role did/does the Chinese
American woman play? What roles can she play for the future and what does that look like?
The second phase involved creative exploration. My voice as an artist has permanently been confronted with the language of my colonizers, but these burning questions have torched my anxieties that manifested in silence. I decided to come alive again in the irreconcilably irrefutable semiotics of poetry. My poem consists of a series of embodiments and psychoanalytical associations, from Cheng’s self-conscious gaze of the “yellow woman,” Lacan’s theory of the Other and the mirror stage, Kristeva’s notion of poetry’s abjection, to Fanon’s racial epidermal schema. My racial project demands a philosophy of avowed disavowal in face of my personal Otherness. It puts my very own Chinese American femininity and my conceptions of my own boundaries on the chopping block. Above all, it calls for me to plunge headfirst from the double social psychosis of cognizance and manifestation to open myself up to the violence, vulnerability, and vibrancy of my own barren flesh. It is a process of internalization, healing, and reincarnation. And that is the key to understanding the beating heart of this statement.
In “The Public Intellectual: Anne Anlin Cheng,” I analyzed the visual histories of Western media and its material and ideological imaginations of Chinese femininity within Afong Moy’s The Chinese Lady.
Fig. 3. Afong Moy, The Chinese Lady (1835). The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. New York Public Library Digital Collection.
The exact regularity and symmetrical composition of the Chinese Lady’s seated figure elucidates the anguished solemnity of the portraiture and reveals the material and immaterial dimensions of the Chinese American female figure that function as a representation of a sacramental rite upon importation. The still-life, stylized quality and centrality of the Chinese Lady’s confinement in the frame harkens to oriental marriage iconography and serves as a tangible manifestation of the events surrounding the importation of Chinese women by merchant traders, and thus illuminates the ceremonial and socio-political purposes of women of color in portraiture—the Chinese American female figure, with hair “gathered up in a knot held with a pin with a special hair-pinning ceremony… at marriage… to open the face,” was abstracted and packaged not only for entertainment and Western consumption, but also as a carrier of biosocial lifecycles (Davis 57).
Yet, Afong Moy’s grotesquerie in The Chinese Lady ultimately stabs the Western phantasma of the corporeal Chinese American feminine “Self.” The lady gazes directly outwards of the frame at the viewer and diverges from the 17th century’s painterly conventions of the de-eroticized, averted female eyes that stemmed from the castration anxieties of “love’s fatal glance” in the Western world (Simons 21). While the unacceptance and marginalization of Chinese American women have consequently controlled and institutionalized them against a state of transitivity, condemned by textual and visual media to become nothing but stagnant caricatures, Moy’s eyes gaze piercingly back at media’s exhaustive classification of femininity and its incessant perverse desire to taste exoticness, purity, and mystery. Wielding and ornamenting her personal grotesquerie, Afong Moy catalyzes visual abjection and generates ethical clarity in the spaces where debilitating ignorance lies. Inspired by the combination of the visual, sensorial, and semiotic grotesque that merge and convolute as desire and repulsion at the site of the lady’s inscrutable feet in the print, I then ask: What would the semantic look like behind the visual language of the projected screen that is The Chinese Lady?
Despite having been advertised to remain in the US for only two years, historical sources indicate Moy stayed for at least eighteen years before disappearing (from records). Though not much is known about her, she has been a speculative figure of empowerment for Chinese diasporic artists, theorists, and writers. As such, I intended to lend my voice to the textualization of her visual Orna-grotesquerie. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva points to the expansive textual power of poetry: “An absorption of work, a withholding of effort, a deletion of abstraction, so that thanks to them but without stating them, and through them, an affect bursts out, in sound and outcry, bordering close on drive and abjection as well as fascination. Bordering on the unnamable” (Kristeva 203–204).
In my following creative statement, I aimed to poeticize the condition of denigration within Moy’s unspoken Chinese American femininity and to establish the grotesque dialectic between aversion and attraction, a dialogue produced from the vibrational contact between the repulsion from and desire for the abject, as well as the conscious, abject subject’s willful refusal of the colonization of “yellow” femininity. I aimed to conceive and articulate new potentialities for hierarchies of gender, sexual orientation, and racial identification. I aimed to communicate Orna-Grotesquerie’s enactment of violence and border on what Kristeva describes “unnamable.” Borne from the histories of the Chinese trade and the exclusionary exotification of Chinese female bodies, as in The Chinese Lady, the “yellow woman” is not simply “an example of the embodiment of a racial imaginary, but a site at which the logic of embodiment itself was worked through” (Bush 79). My pencil was thus sharpened: the “yellow woman” itself must function as the focal site for the reconstruction of colonial power dynamics.
In Ornamentalism, Cheng coins the term “sushi principle,” by which she describes “a driving impulse in the text that reveals and revels in the delirious conflation between meat and flesh on the multiple levels of consumption, aesthetics, and affect” (110). She ends her exposition with the suggestion that “the sushi principle is the eruption of the logic of ornamentalism in the realm of cuisine.” With Cheng’s sushi principle in mind, I intended to this question: how do I imbue and erupt the flesh of the Chinese American woman with critical agency with literature?
My major statement, “They Weren’t Society People,” scrutinizes the gluttonous white consumer and epitomizes the sushi principle to announce my artistic proclamation against the material realities of the Chinese American female figure that is tethered to colonial sexualization and depersonalization. Borrowing Fanon’s analysis on the relationship of Black masculinity with whiteness and the kind of pathology it creates, I synthesized my own interpretation of Oriental femininity’s relationship with whiteness within the “racial epidermal schema” to conceptualize my project of relentless self-identification and self-reinvention of organic personhood in my final poem (Fanon 112). The dynamic exchange between ontological imaginations cast onto the Chinese female figure and her behavior is not only framed by, but also deeply permeated by her built environment. Thereby, my poem not only unfolds the multiple historical layers of the displacement of Asiatic skin into ornamentation, but it also examines cognitive sources of colonization and exploitation and refuses the alienation of the Asian female body who is always “seen as an immigrant, as the foreigner-within, even when born in the US and the descendant of generations born here before” (Lowe 5–6).
Upon my journey of poetics, or Orna-grotesquerie, I have come to an answer: We must learn to wield the power of one’s own grotesquerie. What it means with my poetry, is to move from hyperreality into pseudo-fiction to source substantial truth within the Self, to disidentify from the equally solipsistic and righteous fear and rage among the unwieldy interface between the consumer and the Stockholm syndrome of the consumed, and to self-mobilize from the mirror image of the “Chinese Lady” into metaphysical liberation. The de-ornamentation and humanization of Chinese American femininity is the atavistic poem that bursts with the shattered mirror, where the ego surrenders its image to contemplate itself in the Other and to sing life into the hearts of its newfound body of decolonization and modernity.
They Weren’t Society People by Callie Lau
I was a nude model for the House of the Orient.
At dinner parties sometimes
They’d make the waiter bring me out and they’d
Bawl me out in front of the other guests.
They weren’t society people.
They ate portraits of withering fruits
And archaeological ceramics from the East
And abstract faces of philosophers with dementia.
They were divine succubus.
They devoured the illicit shape of my tongue,
The smell of the iron in my blood and the rot of internal wounds.
Their cheap paint will never rub off my rich skin.
One day in walks the man in charge
Of the chamber. It was him. He was Lord Succubus.
He told me I belonged to him.
That he was the only one to sculpt wild in my eyes
And staple tame on my mouth.
He said now I’m going to teach you what I
Learned in Rome one summer.
Lord, I’m nobody’s flesh.
I put a latex apple in his muzzle
And hogtied his companions up against the wet frescoes
And told them I was going to show them what I learned
In the House of Jade one year.
Judgment hailed on the Obscene Chapel that shrill night.
"They weren’t Society People” paints a scene of high society snobbery through the lens of a disenfranchised Chinese American nude model. In stanza one, the lines “At dinner parties sometimes / They’d make the waiter bring me out and they’d / Bawl me out in front of the other guests” satirize the frivolous values and hierarchies of power within the US’s capitalistic society and underscore the emptiness, ennui, and casual cruelty of the upper class. The crude diction in “Bawl me out” renders a distortion and illumination of the speaker’s flesh and recalls Cheng’s sushi principle that discloses the infuriating social dynamics that hyper-recognize, abstract, obfuscate, and consume Asiatic femininity:
Too lusciously beautiful to eat and too lusciously beautiful not to eat: the always unsettling complicity between aesthetics and consumption marks but one of the many paradoxes that the sushi eater sustains. It is about accepting the literal and the esoteric at the same time. It is about holding on to the idea of preparation and the hope of spontaneity. It is about imbibing the ocean and art in one mouthful. It insists on a decorativeness that invites destruction. What is painstakingly curated on the plate rubs up uncomfortably and tantalizingly against the rawness of its eating. Sushi and its naked sibling, sashimi, offer adventures in flirtation, throwing their consumers into teasing contact with the limits and prohibitions of nature, health, sociality, culture, and politics. As the at-once exotic and commonplace culinary choice, sushi symptomizes the technology of racial formation often at work in American food cultures (108–109).
The monostich in the second stanza, “They weren’t society people,” pierces through the ironic rhetoric of white civilization and posits the barbarism of colonial “cooking” of human culture, an act of savagery that locks itself in an infernal circle of indistinguishableness between edible meat and inedible flesh. The speaker’s sardonic diction in “They ate portraits of withering fruits / And archaeological ceramics from the Orient / And abstract faces of philosophers with dementia” in stanza three further ironizes the absurd modesty and sophistication of the colonial powers and exposes their ludicrous romanticization of decay, racial disparity, and mental illness. In stanza four, the line “They were divine succubus” pushes the speaker’s usage of the grotesque caricature and functions to “inspire laughter by exposing the hypocrisy, desire, greed, lust and gluttonous appetites associated with grotesque bodies” (Edwards and Graulund 101). In stanza five, the line “They devoured the illicit shape of my tongue” not only summons Cheng’s sushi principle that compounds the haunting semblance between edible and inedible bodies, but it also delineates the colonizing historical practices of oriental exotification that certify the existence of Chinese American femininity yet threaten its dismemberment. Yet, the semiotic inversion in the line “Their cheap paint will never rub off my rich skin” stamps the poem’s resistance against acts of “epistemic violence [in which the Other’s] own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed” (Fanon, xii). Here, the speaker proves to refuse the White man’s eyes that break up the Oriental woman’s body. As she embodies the sushi principle’s negative capability and glares from the “gap between [her] own biological attachment to, yet ontological detachment from, her own meatness,” the solution to the sushi crisis begins brewing within her self-determinism that both fixes her and allows her to imagine herself as free (Cheng 115).
Additionally, I imbued my poem with Lacan’s theory of the mirror image that is interpreted synonymously with the monikers of the “yellow woman.” He states that the subject’s contradictory and phantasmatic position within language (the symbolic order that contains the act of naming) is “anticipated in the biological urge of the human specifies to identify mimetically with an ideal ‘imago’ reflected, for instance, a mirror image” (Lacan 149). In my creative writing, the “nude model,” or the Chinese Lady, scintillates between fantasy and reality within the religious diction of “divine succubus” and the fifth stanza’s grotesque poetic coalescence of tongues, blood, internal rot, and skin. This surrealist, purgatory state of the speaker’s psyche reveals Lacan’s notion of the colonial mirror image—the speaker’s Chinese American femininity is “lodged within a dialectic composed of a yearning for the ideal image contrasted with a sense of ‘lack’ that is born of an inevitable failure to obtain and become this ideal” (Lacan 149).
In the sixth stanza, the speaker communicates a vision of the “Western metaphysic of Man” that challenges and displaces the complicity of the Asiatic female’s colonial relation with the white gaze: “One day in walks in the man in charge / Of the chamber. It was him. He was Lord Succubus” (Fanon, xii). The absence of peril and the presence of derision in the speaker’s tone of recognition disempowers the faceless and nameless cruelty of “Lord Succubus.” The lines “He told me I belonged to him” and “That he was the only one to sculpt wild in my eyes / And staple tame on my mouth” extrapolates his painterly pleasure that arises out of the conceptions of his superiority and the comparative economic infirmity of the “wild” speaker, and thus reflects the colonial insistence on domination over Otherness through disruptive effects on Oriental ontology and femininity and its sushi principle. Yet, the confessional tone in “Lord, I’m nobody’s flesh” of stanza eight once again stamps the speaker’s rejection against the tethering of her flesh to the dark shadows of colonized bodies and images.
Last, the lines “I put a latex apple in his muzzle / And hogtied his companions up against the wet frescoes” resemble the celebratory, domestic imagery of a festive apple in a pig’s mouth, and as a result, enacts revenge on Lord Succubus’s dehumanization of the female speaker’s body as an object to be “tamed.” As the speaker “[tells] them [she] was going to show them what [she] learned / In the House of Jade one year,” she reclaims agency over her Chinese American femininity through an excess of grotesque transgressions with the “latex apple,” “hogties,” and “wet frescoes” that are “both destructive and revelatory because it exposes the [subject-object] boundary” (Edwards and Graulund 75). Using obscene, voyeuristic euphemism, the speaker incites an exaggerated, provocative scene of comical vengeance.
Overall, by incorporating a jarring tone of excruciating clarity and relinquishment in the speaker’s narrative, the poem moralizes Western civility and its “Society People” with an attitude of indignation and rebellion—the Chinese American female subject “sees the fantasy of sovereignty constructed by the symbolic order” and refuses to participate in this colonial, epistemological construction of her Self (Lacan 150). “They Weren’t Society People” impels that within the forcefield of desire, the Chinese American female body must recognize its limitations and decapitations of her value and potentiality in order to fracture the “little reality” of the colonized that is built upon the mirror-stage of identification (Lacan 153). As the poeticized Chinese Lady’s laughter rings in the “Obscene Chapel” with a sense of reanimation that is both malicious and liberatory, the speaker reverses the locales of the consumed and the consumer, racial inferiority and superiority, and the Eurocentric rhetoric of barbarism and civility in a carnivalesque freakshow manner that seals the poem in a true form of righteous grotesquerie.
My major statement, “Orna-Grotesquerie: The Poetics of Chinese American Femininity,” is an enunciative textual expedition on authenticity within the oriental feminine. “They weren’t Society People” expresses an authenticity within its Orna-grotesquerie that is now its own cherished possession and enacts persecutions on untruths that have never been more free. It suggests that Chinese American femininity is not an integral entity or a stable site, but instead, a palimpsest of identifications, laminated and layered and encoded with internal incongruities.
Initially, I asked: “What is the Poetics of Chinese American femininity?” In my creative stage, as I answer this question and uncover the very human pains and traumas behind racial abstractions that have culturally mummified the Asiatic woman, I have come to a conclusion: My self-identification, or disidentification, includes but is not limited to our wounds— the possibilities of reincarnation and reanimation lie equally in our temperance, rage, sophistication, honesty, joy, and most of all, healing. And now, without burden, mounted on nothingness and infinity, I can begin to sing for the question: “What can be the poetics of my Chinese American femininity?”
Looking at beebadoobee, NIKI, BLACKPINK, Mitski, and Rina Sawayama, I see a permeation of Asian female pop stars in the Western sphere that is not only a result of digital media circulation and the progression of cultural awareness but also of strategic branding of Oriental visuals and hybridized sound representations. I love these pop stars. I also hope that they are conscious of the positioning of their agencies amidst the shifting global focus on “Asianness” as a positive commodity.
What I will do for myself and my art, how I Wield my Orna-grotesquerie and carve my shards of semiotic rocks, I only have these laws for:
Fight.
Be heavy.
Be radiant.
Works Cited
Bush, Christopher. “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” Representations (Berkeley, Calif.), vol. 99, no. 1, 2007, pp. 74–98, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2007.99.1.74.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Davis, Nancy E. The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America. Oxford University Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190645236.001.0001.
Edwards, Justin D., and Rune Graulund. Grotesque. Routledge, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203383438.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1967.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists: A Critical Reader, edited by Christopher Kul-Want, translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 149–157. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822379010.
Omi, Michael., and Howard. Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed., Routledge, 1994.
Simons, Patricia. “Women in Frames: The Eye, the Gaze, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture.” History workshop 25 (1988): 4–24. Print.
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