ABSTRACT
Out of the ashes of nineteenth-and twentieth-century colonialism, Asia seems to have been in ascent for some decades prior to the new millennium, elevating the modern self, transcending the old and traditional. However, given the long shadow cast across modern film and literature, this upward mobility is inescapably escapist, a flight from itself, or self-alienation. Such ambivalence over “Aerial Asia” splits off into Asian America, whose American identity and empowerment are constructed, in part, on a floating, imaginary Asia. Asian American aerialist traverses the Pacific Ocean parallel to the course of Western Orientalist. Not far from either levitates Asia in flight, Orientalized Ariel in service to the white master.1 This book traces these wisps of dream rising out of Asia, Asian Diaspora in the West, and Asian America. From Asia to Asian Diaspora to Asian America and elsewhere, Aerial Asia evinces a continuum, like three movements in a symphony, rather than discrete, unrelated identities. Given that any flight must take off from and land somewhere, both readiness and cessation of flight are already pregnant with physical and psychic dynamism, motion and stillness interlocked. Aerial Asia thus dreams on, aloft, yet with a keen, albeit subconscious, dread of awakening to reality. The elusiveness of modern dream-self threatens to turn self-transcendence into a mere trance, one’s rootedness via, in effect, aerial roots. Some racist joke has it that Orientals cannot roll their “r,” which invari-
ably stiffens into “l,” as in “flied lice” mangled by that proverbial Chinese restaurateur, bucktoothed and all. Asia “in flight” puns, Orientally, with Asia “in fright,” its ecstatic soaring unwittingly yoked with vertiginous fleeing. Bigotry aside, the doubleness of flight is not unique to the Asian modern self. A human is a land animal with winged dreams, eager to take off to transcend this existence, fancying an arc skyward, in denial or in defiance of the cage of body and life’s course downward, into the ground. The “s” in “winged dreams” zigzags like a bolt of thunder, each dream blinding and deafening for a short while. The solid mass that is the body touches the earth, which is itself suspended in the air; the body’s sense of power and mastery arises oftentimes from absent-minded, “out-of-body” daydreaming. Accordingly, pre-, modern, or post-, Asian or non-, we never see the world for what it is, only through the stained glass of the mind. Nor do we see the self for what it is, like our eyes
unable to gaze into themselves. A mirror gives reflections of things, not thingness, which shifts restively between a transcendent spirituality and nothingness, between God and Death. The self, truth be told, rarely soars above all else; it exists in relation to
others, even when it is alone with mental images of loved or hated ones, with lifelong fixations or random turns of the mind. (To call up images at all requires connectivity of brain synapses.) The self pursues both with equal passion, either to possess the object of desire and kill its independence or to banish the object of loathing, which means housing it in one’s heart in the first place. Either scenario seeks the demise of the other as the other, which only haunts the self with increasing vengeance. The implicit kinship of love and hate surfaces in the dying words of the archvillain Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Extending her hand to Jen, her disciple who betrayed her and whom she attempted to poison, Jade Fox mourns: “Wo weiyi de qing, wo weiyi de chou” (My only flesh, my only foe). The symmetrical duizhang (tonal and verbal parallelism) of Jade Fox’s words bears out the duality of chou, meaning enmity and vengeance as well as compatibility, repulsion as well as attraction. The classical script of chou consists of two adjacent zhui (short-tailed bird) flanking yen (talk or words), as if two birds engage in a dialogue. Indeed, the classical ideogram denotes not only opposition but also counterpoint. Such is the conundrum of chou with its ready reversal of love and hate, flight from self and fright of the unknown-out there and in here. Ang Lee’s characterization echoes Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), where the “object-love” is introjected or narcissistically incorporated, resulting in “self torments of melancholiacs” (161-62), including the homicidal/suicidal Jade Fox.2
