ABSTRACT
Feeling empty is to fill with longing for something, someone; feeling full is to be empty of space, potentiality. Obsession is the hunger that overruns; satiation builds toward revulsion and gagging. Affectively, empty and full, to be gutted and to be glutted, are one. Tears of the Asian diaspora crystallize this node of paradox. Tears brim from the eyes after emotions flood the diasporic body over a felt loss, an absence. Tears give the clue to Asian diaspora’s emptiness as well as fullness. A broken string of pearls rolling down the cheek, Asian diaspora flows from somewhere, Asia possibly, drenching America, England, Australia, and elsewhere. Whence came these diasporic teardrops, and where do they go? In theory, Asian diaspora is no different from human life in that it grows
and gains as much as it loses. What one gains in experience and even wisdom comes at the price of youth, let alone folly and depression replacing innocence and naiveté. Unless something had been lost, it cannot be found, in recollection. Whatever is retrieved can always be undone. More dynamically, just as gain accrues ongoing gaining, loss entails ceaseless losing. The two interlocked, gaining presupposes gaining loss, and losing presumes gaining memories of what one has lost. Put simply, gaining is losing, and vice versa. Forever in flux, never static and still, the formula of life in general and Asian diaspora in particular reads:
Loss = losing = gaining loss = gaining = gain,
which goes in reverse as well. Translated into identity politics and strategic essentializing, however, this
theory equalizing gain and loss may be deemed quaintly poetic and, heaven forbid, “so very Oriental” by some of its own constituents. Certain children of Asian diaspora, including those Asian Americans who feel defensive and under siege about their identity, are keen on fixing in place, and solidifying Asian American Culture out of, an amorphous Asian diaspora. They freeze diasporic experiences in the same way photographers capture models at their most marketable at the expense of the collective whole of Asian diaspora beyond the photographic frames, however brilliant the shots.
Specifically, morphing between an alleged origin and assimilationism, Asian Diaspora Culture practiced by these children of Asian diaspora resorts to what I call “empathetic nostalgia” to recoup an origin waiting to be made and to defer assimilationism that has already begun. “Empathetic,” after all, contains the word “pathetic”: ethnic nostalgia risks lapsing into an inadequate, empty gesture, almost a self-parody like chic “ethnic lit,” derided by Nam Le, who nevertheless performs it self-reflexively in The Boat (2008).1
Ideally, empathy evacuates the heart to house the other, which can just as well mean filling the heart with the phantasmagoric other. Unwittingly invoking the banal duality of yin and yang, both imaginaries pivot on a self-righteous fallacy tangentially related to the reality of the other’s lived experiences. At its most dubious, empathetic nostalgia from children of diaspora resembles visions of a glass eye, nightmarishly lucid, arising from a blind eyehole.2 The diasporic reality of displacement and (self-)alienation is transubstantiated into bittersweet pleasure for a multicultural, global readership. Psychic trauma and physical deformity of Asian diaspora turn into the source of magic to enlighten a sterile, technological West, as Jhumpa Lahiri (2003) writes in The Namesake, where tears seep through the orifice of an eyehole, on the protagonist’s left shoe. Shoelaces are to thread through eyeholes or eyelets. One unfilled hole
denotes a glitch, a Freudian slip that is most revealing, for the space, however small it may be, opens up like the nothingness of a keyhole or peephole into the subconsciousness of the wearer of the shoes-the burden of loss in diaspora, the vapor of gain. Laozi (Lao Tzu) has expounded in the late spring and fall period the inextricability of space and functionality, non-being and being. Chapter 11 in his Tao Te Ching states:
