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Hyphenation generation
Rosane Rocher reflects on ten years of cultural change on campus

IN 1994 ROSANE ROCHER, of the Department of South Asia Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed a seminar on "New Directions in South Asian Studies" with a paper called "Reconstituting South Asian Studies for a Diasporic Age." She signaled a major shift in the student audience and subject-matter of South Asian Studies and called for a redefinition of the field, saying: "We can no longer teach South Asian Studies as a foreign subject, but we must view it as a form of ethnic studies, much as Jewish studies has been taught in ways that are not dominated by either world-civilization or antiquarian concerns, or by a location in the Near East. A majority of our students are no longer intellectual adventurers with an eye peeled for an exotic India, but young people who struggle to recover the cultural heritage from which they have been separated by a primary and secondary school curriculum that remains western and Eurocentric." The Women's Review asked her to reflect on the changes in her field and her students since she wrote those words.

RR: Things have changed, and I have changed. Many of the scholars I referred to in that paper were what I called at that point diasporic individuals, people like Gayatri Spivak or Chandra Mohanty or Arjun Appadurai who had come typically as students from South Asia. Now there's a younger generation of scholars of South Asian background. Some still come from South Asia, but they have had a different experience of the American scene, because now there is a South Asian community, on campuses and elsewhere, which has made for a different type of experience compared to coming as a foreign student and being only one of a handful on a particular campus, with little in the way of an extramural South Asian community. These younger scholars seem to feel more of a sense of continuity between concerns here in the United States and in South Asia. They don't feel quite such a need to be spokespersons for South Asian countries; they are not the isolated representatives of South Asia in the United States as the older generation may have been. They have perhaps more interest in issues of race, general social equality in this country, not just in postcolonial issues.

WR: They're post-postcolonial?

Exactly. Some may still be teaching postcolonial literature, but they no longer have an experience of colonial times. I think they also have fewer scars, if any, from the Partition of India; they tend to be more South Asians and less Indians or Pakistanis.

Another thing that has changed is that now we have on our faculty young scholars who are South Asian American, who were brought up here. They may be doing South Asian studies, but from a different perspective, because their experiences have been shaped both by an ethnic culture and by an American identity. It's an American rather than a South Asian consciousness. Of course these are scholars and they are used to thinking from a variety of viewpoints, but still their backgrounds are bound to impact their general attitude.

When I wrote that paper, there was a gap between the South Asian Studies faculty who I argued should recontextualize their work and their second-generation ethnic students. Now we have some homegrown South Asian American faculty, and there's more seamlessness--these young scholars are more like our students. In our students themselves I see a tremendous change. Whereas when I started off in this business I saw South Asian American students addressing issues of discomfort, worrying a lot whether they were too American or too Indian and how to reconcile these apparent disparities, right now they seem to be much more comfortable in being ethnic Americans. It doesn't diminish their interest in South Asia; students want to learn about the country of their parents. Many of them attend study-abroad programs in South Asia and travel there on family visits. But it's definitely the country of their parents, it's not their own country.

How different is this from the older patterns of European immigration, which usually stressed assimilation?

Unlike most people of European background, people from South Asia are visibly different from majority Americans, and so whether they want it or not they are forced to make the link with South Asia. Europeans who grew up here don't get asked constantly "Where are you from?" Most South Asian parents in this country now are themselves first-generation immigrants, and they feel so tremendously the loss of their culture that they try to create opportunities for their children to acquire it, in ways that go beyond forcing it down their throats. There are community organizations, youth groups which students have more say in organizing, Bollywood movies, ethnic dances like the bhangra which was originally a folk dance from Punjab, but has been totally altered so that now there's a bhangra party scene that's hugely popular among students here. The community has become so much larger that students feel less bound to march in closed ranks.

Do you see any of these changes as gendered in any way?

It's interesting to me that it's very often assumed that there will be a majority of females in ethnic studies classes, which is not the case. As far as I can see, there's about an equal number of students of both genders in these classes, whether the classes are about South Asia or about ethnicity right here. But that may vary on different campuses.

At costly institutions like Penn, the parents put an extreme financial investment into their children's education. The women who come to Penn to study are as much expected to be achievers, in an educational and professional sense, as their male counterparts; they're under the same pressure to become doctors, engineers, MBAs. It may be quite different at colleges attended by students from families in which limited resources may go to support the sons' education first, but I couldn't speak to that from personal experience. In terms of professional aspirations, I don't see any less pressure on the women students here than I do on the men, but in terms of social behavior, women are supposed still to be more proper South Asians--not to be too loud or immodest, for example. Though of course parents' desires and the reality of their children's lives are not the same by a long shot.

Another gender difference arises in the performance of ethnicity: at least before they come to college, girls tend to get pressured to take lessons in Indian dance and that kind of thing, whereas boys do not. That women bear a greater burden of cultural maintenance is something we hear out of the mouths of students themselves. Students of course think a lot about dating and marriage. Typically the girls in high school experience much more parental control over their dating than their male counterparts, there's no doubt about that. Once they're in college I don't see any great difference in their behavior. But when they think of marriage, and whether to marry within the community or not, very different patterns reveal themselves. Increasingly both males and females are much more interested in marrying within the South Asian American community. The community is larger now, there are enough choices. But what hasn't changed is that young people typically want partners with whom their parents feel comfortable and whom they would accept, and that very often translates into people from the same community. The preference seems to be on both sides for other ethnic South Asians. But what parents may consider matters most about a potential partner, in terms of caste and even region of origin, matters far less to the young people, who now consider themselves South Asian Americans or at most Indian Americans, not Gujarati or Punjabi.

In India caste seems so fundamental and so difficult to break, but from what you're saying it's as if it magically vanishes when people leave India. Why does that happen?

I'm still puzzled by that. It's not that students feel that it doesn't exist or that their parents are not conscious of it. But when they themselves choose partners it seems that the main thing is that they be other South Asian Americans, and caste plays very little role. It's hard to judge this, because what I report on is mostly what students say, and I have no way to check what they eventually do, but when they are asked to rank-order particular features that they want in partners, "common interests" is always in first place, and a broad common ethnicity comes high, but caste is rarely mentioned. If I say, "What about caste?" they'll reply "Oh yes, caste. Yeah, our parents consider that very important." "Our parents consider that very important" can be an excuse--not for all of them, mind you, but many--to voice an opinion they feel other Americans might think regrettable. It's not necessarily that they are divorced from such considerations, but definitely it doesn't rank high on their scale. And less and less so, I would say. But then the same is increasingly true in urban India as well.

Is this also gender-specific?

When you ask them, for example, whether they expect to raise their children in their South Asian culture, you get different answers. Normally, the young women will say "Well, that will depend on whom I marry; if I marry a South Asian definitely, if not, it will be difficult." The young men say "I feel it's very important and that's why I want a South Asian woman because she has to take the lead on that." It's still the expectation that the women will take primary charge of passing on the culture.

Another thing that has changed about the South Asian American community is that it has become more diverse in terms of class. It used to be, even into the '90s, that most of the people who immigrated from South Asia were highly trained professionals, but that has changed. Students, even if they don't belong to the newer, less affluent class, are very much aware of its existence, and it makes for a different type of emphasis on race as a link between groups that otherwise would not move in the same circles.

So race trumps class or economic background, as it trumps caste and trumps gender.

Perhaps not in terms of marriage, where class seems to be a common parameter, whatever the ethnicity. South Asians are no different in that respect. But otherwise, yes. there appears to be an increasing cross-class sensitivity. Vijay Prashad makes the case for a racial consciousness in a book called The Karma of Brown Folk, which of course is a play on DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk. The events of September 11 may have increased students' awareness of this--that it doesn't matter what your profession is, you are not safe from possible discrimination or worse. After September 11, my sense is that students' immediate reaction was to close ranks and protect those people who might face discrimination. What was interesting to me was that the Asian American community (I'm not just speaking of South Asians) rallied to the support of Arab Americans, even before there were any racially motivated incidents. They knew right away that there was going to be racial profiling.

There is a very interesting group on our campus named Sangam, which is concerned with social issues with regard to South Asia and South Asians in the United States. They discuss all kinds of things that some might consider controversial, such as issues of sexuality. That's another big change from nine or ten years ago--then when anyone mentioned that there might be South Asian gays, there was total disbelief, whereas now students have absolutely no doubt about it, and it's very much accepted. I'm just amazed at the change in so little time.

So race is also trumping sexuality?

Perhaps, though I'm not sure how one should feel about the fact that everything is so racialized.

It sounds, though, from what you're reporting that for many South Asian Americans that's preferable to dispersal or loss of racial identity.

Right. There's another consequence of this that you see on campus. South Asians have been slow in embracing and in being embraced by the general Asian American movement, which started of course with East Asians. Since South Asians don't look a bit like East Asians, are not confused generally with East Asians, there has not been that immediacy of alliance. But more and more now the students recognize that once you overlook the different appearance, the reality of the experience is very much the same. So there is much more coalition building. It's by no means identification with East Asians, but more a sense of building strategic alliances, for specific objectives. It used to be that South Asians felt that they had to go it alone. And while that's still pretty much the attitude of the parents, the kids seem not to feel that they are so alone.

Note: The text of Rosane Rocher's 1994 paper, "Reconstituting South Asian Studies for a Diasporic Age," is available on-line at http://asnic.utexas.edu/asnic/ sagar/fall.1994/rosane.rocher.art.html.

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Who's Chinese?
Gish Jen explores the gendered terms of our traveling cultures

By Rachel Lee

I hang onto "travel" as a term of cultural comparison, precisely because of its historical taintedness, its associations with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege...frontiers...and the like. I prefer it to the more apparently neutral, and "theoretical," terms such as "displacement," which can make the drawing of equivalences across historical experiences too easy. --James Clifford, "Traveling Cultures"

Asian American critics have, similarly, been concerned with the politics of naming, but from a slightly different perspective. They have inquired into the politics of renaming Asians in the US as long-term settlers against the more common belief that they have been sojourners--perpetual aliens whose origin and destiny lie in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Pakistan and so forth. They also have a distinct preference for terms other than the globe-trotting "traveler" to describe their subjects' immigrant, ethnic, minority and refugee experiences. Is the term "travel" elastic enough to stretch from the field of cultural anthropology to that of Asian American studies, and can we learn from those stretch marks? How fat can the term become, and can we see any gendered significance to the way those stretch marks have been configured thus far and the way they might be reconfigured in the future?

Gish Jen's exquisite comic depictions of several intercultural contact zones include not only expected places such as Manhattan and Shandong, but less cosmopolitan centers such as surburban Connecticut. Typical American, her first novel, explores the social mobility and decline of the immigrant Chang family, using Gatsbyesque allusions to evoke America's violent love affair with movement and speed. In her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land, an American-born Chinese girl becomes unsettled romantically, physically and psychically by a Japanese foreign student whose family's journey to New York is itself a testament to the wider networks of transnational capital. Taking an opposite trajectory, in Jen's latest book, the story collection Who's Irish, "Duncan in China" presents the pilgrimage of an "overseas Chinese" to the homeland. The title story features a Chinese immigrant matriarch's displacement from her daughter's home. And in "Birthmates," Art Woo encounters the denizens of a welfare hotel, an underclass of urban American society whose immobility makes starkly visible Woo's own contrastive business travel.

Jen's work is simultaneously a literature of travel, an Asian American portraiture and a cultural record of migration and displacement, in terms of both its transpacific production and its (multicultural) reception in diaspora-crossed venues such as New York. The rich itineraries of her fiction require us once again to wrestle with what counts as travel and to think comparatively across different textures of transit, mobility and dwelling.

Obviously, the short space of this forum does not allow me to address all of Jen's works. Allow me instead to focus on the title story from this recent collection. This story confronts a localized form of feminine displacement which, I will argue, requires us to examine the gendered presumptions of our traveling theories. It appears on the surface to be a humorous narrative of geographic displacement, but Jen hides a brutishness inside its wit.

In "Who's Irish," Jen turns to metropolitan ethnography. The field is the Shea household somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States (likely Boston or New York), a site of overlapping levels of migration. The plot builds toward the dramatic ouster of a Chinese matriarch from her grown daughter's house--the most localized displacement in the narrative. Notably, transpacific immigration to the US forms the larger context of this parental displacement, and transpacific as well as transatlantic migration (particularly Irish immigration to the US) set in motion the struggle over norms of femininity and maternal care that provide the ostensible rationale for the matriarch's ouster.

The unnamed first-person narrator of the story, a Chinese grandmother, lives with her daughter Natalie, vice-president of a bank, and Natalie's unemployed Irish American husband, John Shea. Struggling with the "wild" behavior of her toddler-age granddaughter, Sophie, the narrator blames the child's Irish heritage, claiming that "I am not exaggerate: millions of children in China, not one act like this." The narrator spanks Sophie, against the explicit wishes of her parents, and is asked to leave the household. She moves in with Bess Shea, John's mother, who is eager for "some female company," having been surrounded all her life by boys (she has four sons and no daughters).

Even as she renders the dramatic center of her story a struggle between a mother and a daughter (and granddaughter), Jen mines a buried intercultural history of travel, contact and labor competition between the Chinese and Irish diasporas in the United States. According to historian Robert Lee, "More than other groups, Irish workers perceived themselves directly threatened by the Chinese in California. Driven out of mining, railroad building, and agriculture, Chinese in California often displaced Irish immigrant workers in manufacturing, laundering, and domestic occupations. As Chinese entered the manufacturing labor market, employers directly and often favorably compared them to Irish immigrant workers," a comparison that Jen's narrator repeats:

I always thought Irish people are like Chinese people, work so hard on the railroad, but now I know why the Chinese beat the Irish. Of course, not all Irish are like the Shea family... My daughter tell me I should not say Irish this, Irish that... I just happen to mention about the Shea family, an interesting fact: four brothers in the family, and not one of them work. (pp. 3-4)

The narrator's displacement from her daughter's home, on the one hand, allegorizes the fragility of her national status as a Chinese in America: throughout the story, Natalie's mother speaks her mind but at the risk of being deported. On the other hand, there is the risk of interpreting too strenuously the national significance of the narrator's displacement, for she is displaced not only as a Chinese but also as a Chinese woman. Jen's story compels us to interrogate what counts as travel, and what counts as the most traumatic of identificatory dislocations. What scale of territorial or communal dwelling matters most for female immigrants or for women in diaspora?

THE REMOVAL OF THE NARRATOR from her daughter's home--the flouting of codes of filial duty and extended family--may be in itself the most traumatic of dislocations, more violent perhaps than another transpacific crossing. It is worth recollecting that the first few sentences of the story, in which the narrator is introduced to the reader, identify the narrator in terms of her kin relations, first to her granddaughter, then to her daughter and finally to her husband. The narrator also evokes her connections to China, but here Chineseness, I would argue, signifies less a single territorial homeland than an extended familial network of customary ranks--appropriate gendered and generational behaviors. Examining long-standing transnational networks of Chinese across the Pacific, Aihwa Ong suggests that "[Chinese] subjectivity is at once deterritorialized in relation to a particular country, though highly localized in relation to family." Home is any place where one's family resides: thus dwelling in multiple countries--simultaneously, a dislocation from any one national territory--is not altogether unusual or tragic for the Chinese. The real threat is the prospect of dwelling not outside the nation but outside one's clan or extended kin. "A crazy idea," the narrator says, to "go to live with someone else's family."

The displacement of Natalie's mother is preceded by a new vocabulary of gendered familial relations. She remarks on American idioms that reconstruct social relations so that elderly mothers must take care of their grown daughters instead of the reverse: "In China, daughter take care of mother. Here it is the other way around. Mother help daughter...otherwise daughter complain mother is not supportive. I tell daughter, We do not have this word in Chinese, supportive." The narrator battles with both this one word and the restructured Chinese family it implies. Her fiercest resistance is to the maternal disrespect expressed by Sophie's acquisition of a bodily language of kicking and slinging mud at mommies. Ironically, Natalie--a mother herself--tacitly sanctions such attacks on mommies, by expelling her own mother from the household and resettling her with Bess Shea, John's mother.

A skilled adapter of classic American myths, Jen breathes new life into that time-worn melodrama of beset manhood by creating a quasi-utopian frontier of female horizontal comradeship, once the narrator's moves into Bess's household--formerly a wilderness of unemployed Irish American men. The two elderly women bond through their shared retorts to Bess's grown sons, who "hang around all the time, asking when will I go home." Bess's reply that her Chinese in-law is "a permanent resident... She isn't going anywhere" evokes an idiom of the Immigration and Naturalization Service--a state institution that regulates even as it creates new national subjects. Jen enlists the idioms of national regulation (belonging) to suggest their power to rewrite vertical, antagonistic female relations (daughters struggling against wicked mothers and grandmothers) into egalitarian sororal bonds. The narrator remarks that Bess's "talk just stick. I don't know how Bess Shea learn to use her words, but sometimes I hear what she say a long time later. Permanent resident. Not going anywhere. Over and over I hear it, the voice of Bess." These--the final words of the story--return the reader to the power of a discourse, a talk that sticks, a talk that repositions the subject in a national territory and in utopian horizontal terms.

Yet at the story's conclusion, Bess and Natalie's mother are far from floating away on a raft, new symbols of the interracial bonding that can happen once women get outside the constraints of "sivilization." The talk that sticks in the end--and which clears a space out from under the encircling demands of the boys--is that of permanent resident, of territorial rootedness, of placement and dwelling. Travel may not be the sign of freedom one expects. And it is questionable whether Bess and the narrator have conquered the deep-seated gendered divisions of labor and devaluation of domestic/maternal care. Without having addressed key gendered conundrums--why it is that the role of babysitting is assigned "naturally" to the Chinese grandmother when there is also an available parent, John Shea, to take on that job--and without having addressed the strictures of femininity (of impossible womanhood) that punish both Sophie and her grandmother for acting fierce, wild, or physically combative, the women of "Who's Irish" would seem to be stuck in, at best, a hazardous freedom, permanent residents as allowed under national laws but confronted by the menace implied by the boys "surround[ing] you after a while."

The story suggests that familial bonds are not adequate to combating the fragile status of Chinese (women) in America. The narrator's biological links and cultural bonds to her daughter do not defeat the threats to expel her (to send her back). By contrast, Bess successfully rebuts her sons' suggestions that the narrator is only a sojourner by renaming her a permanent resident. The narrator is transformed by territorial modes of identification: she becomes "honorary Irish."

IN ANSWERING THE QUESTION of why the Irish found "a place in American society while the Chinese did not," Robert Lee calls attention to the status of the Irish as "free white persons" that made them "eligible for naturalization [thus providing] access to the legal and political systems." Becoming Irish, then, is not only a learning of the legal and political terminology of the US nation-state but also a refiguring of the rights of the immigrant laborer. When Natalie's mother adjusts to her new identity as a permanent resident, her reidentification in Irish terms, she is also no longer subject to implicit demands continually to prove herself economically useful to her hosts (working as their babysitter for nothing) in order to earn her right to dwell. Territorial identity disrupts familial identity by incorporating those who dwell in the US republic as political (national) subjects regardless of how hard they work--or so goes the liberal rhetoric of American nationalism. The good feelings produced at the conclusion of "Who's Irish" are a function of our believing in that American (national) liberalism, in the face of the entire structure of the narrative that emphasizes the Chinese woman's successive exclusions from her daughter's household. Will we be seduced by such American habits and convictions?

One of the many kinds of travel Jen engages in her stories is the unsettling of home implied not only in literal leave-takings of members from households but also in reconfigurations of the family structure following intercultural pressures. It may seem like an ugly stretch to call the latter "travel," but as feminist geographers have noted, unless we also take into account dwelling and placement, and the way in which mobility has far-reaching effects even for those who've never been outside their hometowns, we unwittingly sustain a focus on privileged forms of travel, the kind undertaken most often by white men, at the risk of missing how a gendered and Third World lens reformulates the kinds of questions and narratives we find appropriate to our very discussion of displacement, immigration and our modes of engagement with other cultures.

The lexicon learned in "Who's Irish" is not just that of "permanent resident" but also the vocabulary of "supportive" and "attack on mommies"--a language that simultaneously restructures relations between women and solidifies inequivalences between women and men. How do we translate terms such as travel to a gendered terrain? What do we do when the phrase "lady travelers" doesn't fit our Chinese matriarch's tale of being forced out of the home or when "we do not have... words" to speak a Chinese woman's form of displacement even as she stays in one place? These are the issues toward which Jen's fiction stretches our imaginations, and these are the issues around which we orbit today.

Note: A longer version of this essay was presented at a conference on "Traveling Cultures" held at Barnard College/Columbia University in April 2000.

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When worlds collide
Kum-Kum Bhavnani finds a growing fascination in the classroom with the links between North and South

Kum-Kum Bhavnani teaches sociology and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Feminism and "Race," an anthology of essays published last year by Oxford University Press, and was appointed in 2000 as the first editor of a new journal, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, with editorial offices at Smith College in Northampton, MA. Like many of the contributors to this issue, Kum-Kum Bhavnani's own life intersects with her teaching and research in a variety of ways. The Women's Review asked her to talk about her background and the work she does now.

Can you tell us how you came to be where you are now?

I think of myself as a perpetual immigrant. My family moved from India to England about forty years ago; I went to school and university in England, eventually getting a Ph.D. at Cambridge University in the mid-eighties. I was also very active then in anti-racist work, in women's liberation as we called it then, as well as in trade union work. After my Ph.D I got a job at Bradford University in England in the applied social studies department, and it was also around that time that I started to publish some of my thinking on racism and feminist thought, especially with Meg Coulson.

I came to the US in 1991, after I'd taught at Bradford for four years, to the University of California at Santa Barbara's sociology department. I liked the department, I thought this would be fun to do for a few years, and I had never imagined that I would stay forever. But I met my partner here, and now that we have children, it's unlikely that we would ever move back to England.

I do most of my teaching on women in the third world, but my background in racism and feminist studies means that I'm constantly trying to make links between the third world and the first world. The minute you say third world and first world, you create a binary, an opposition which I simultaneously want to undo so that the interconnections are seen.

How might you do that?

I'm hoping to find a filmmaker to work on a research project with me, to make a film about what lessons feminists in the first world can draw from the successes of certain actions and organizations of feminists in the third world. I'm thinking of four organizations in particular: SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association, in India; the women's group of Xapuri in Brazil, which developed at the same time as the rubber-tappers' union; Women in Black in Israel; and Tostan, a group that worked to eliminate female genital mutilation in Senegal. Those four groups are success stories from different parts of the world, and I want to talk to women who've been active in them, to see what those of us who live in the first world can learn about how they think about inequality, resistance and change.

Do you have a notion yet of what kinds of lessons those would be? What do you think first world feminists could learn from these groups?

I'm still a bit of a social scientist, and I don't want to anticipate what the women will say before I've talked with them. However, I think one thing that Western feminists often fail to acknowledge these days is the state and its often very contradictory role in relation to women. The state makes laws that ensure that women are constantly defined as dependents, as one instance. Demands are made of government to do things--for example, increase prison sentences to protect women from domestic violence--but as soon as you make those demands you are also relying on a racist prison-judicial system and a state that is implicated in creating and reproducing the causes of such violence. It's not straightforward: you can't simply call on the state and, similarly, you can't simply reject the state.

So you're suggesting that a key thing about the four groups you've mentioned is that they're calling on the state, in a sense, but they're not relying on the state.

Yes, I think the groups are working with the state and working against the state. Now if you look at Tostan, in Senegal, women actually went from area to area, habitation to habitation, village to village, town to town, talking to people and saying, "Look, we don't agree with female genital cutting--we are the women, and we don't agree with it," and persuading people, including community leaders, to support them. As a result of this, pressure was put on the government to ban female genital cutting. Tostan was not relying on the state to create the ban. Rather, they worked with people to change their minds, and then looked to the state to implement this change of mind. It was a cultural shift that was achieved, and is not merely the state passing a law and then saying this must be followed.

You're on leave from UCSB and teaching at Smith College this year. Can you talk about how you introduce this kind of material into your courses, and how students react?

I'm a visiting professor at Smith, where I'm editing Meridians. When I was asked to apply to be the first full-time editor of the journal I was quite excited because the idea of the journal captures exactly what I'm trying to do: to make links between the national and the international and the global, while not forgetting race or racism. What a brilliant idea [Smith President] Ruth Simmons had, along with the women at Smith who created the particularities of Meridians.

I also teach one course a semester. One of the courses I've been teaching is "Women's Struggles and Resistances," whose idea was initiated at Santa Barbara by Nancy Gallagher, a history professor. In that course I examine the agency of women in the third world through topics like employment, nationalism, religion and sexuality; we look together at how women have struggled over these issues in third world countries.

One of the things I'm unhappy with in my course is that I'm tired of centering Europe or the US in my teaching. I want to center the third world, but the minute you start to do that, you start to create an opposition between Us and Them. However much I try to show the links between the two, that what happens here in the USA and other parts of the first world is related to what happens in another part of the world, it's very hard to escape from an Us and a Them mentality.

Are there readings you've found useful to help undo that, or ways of discussing the material that begin to break it down?

There are some books that try to do that, for example Amrita Basu's collection The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective, or Carla Freeman's book, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean. I have also found Grace Chang's Disposable Domestics and Pierrette Hondagneu Sotelo's book Domésticas helpful. Sex work is a good topic for doing this--for example, Kamala Kempadoo's work--as is the work of Ifi Amadiume and Molara Ogundipe on issues related to the African continent. Finally, A. Sivanandan's discussion of "xeno-racism," racism towards foreigners (in the journal Race and Class), is very important to engage with.

Films sometimes work better than readings, for they can make an issue become immediate. I show a lot of films in my classes, moving videos like Love, Women and Flowers and Amazon Sisters, which tell us about the lives of women in Colombia's flower industry and in the Amazon rainforests. When Mother Comes Home for Christmas is an excellent film about a woman from Sri Lanka who goes to Greece as a domestic worker; but it's two hours long, which makes it hard to show in a class.

There is enormous interest in this material. When I first started teaching at Santa Barbara in 1991, all my courses were internationally oriented, because that was the way I'd always taught, but students weren't really interested except in the US and the UK. Since about 1996, I have seen a sea-change. Students come flocking, wanting to know about parts of the world other than the USA. Perhaps it has something to do with the buzzwords of globalization. For me this increased interest is exciting, because it means that as more students come in, we can think together how to get away from the Us and Them mentality.

There's one point I want to be sure we don't give up in the talk about globalization and everyone wanting to be cosmopolitan: there's a danger of forgetting that racism continues to exist. That's why--although it's fallen out of fashion--I like the way we used to use "black" in Britain to refer to all people of color. I like that because it was a way of saying look, this is about racism, it's not about a literal color. I'm not always successful, but I try to talk in my classes about how the third world is racialized. In all this talk about the diaspora and links across the world, I wouldn't want to lose sight of the persistence of racism, either in the first world or embodied in the way indigenous peoples are treated all over the world.

The students are interested, committed, really wanting to get away from the ethnocentrism and racism of the feminist thinking of the seventies. I'm not saying that everyone is always successful in doing it, but they're often willing to look at it, rather than feeling defensive about their role. They're prepared to engage.

It's interesting that you report such positive responses, because many people who teach these subjects say they encounter resistance and defensiveness from students about the US role in the world.

I think I've been fortunate, and also my students self-select--these courses are not required courses. I don't want to say there aren't students who are defensive or hostile; the thing is that given the composition of the classroom, those students are often asked to interrogate their reactions, and that's what I enjoy. One student could ask a question like "How can anyone say that I'm responsible for poverty?" and there is a critical mass of other students who then enter the discussion. What I enjoy is that the students are prepared to talk to each other about these issues.

In my "Women, Culture, Development" class at UCSB one semester, a group of students, guided by two graduate students, put on an alternative fashion show. They did a lot of research on sweatshops, fashion, the global economy, and finally produced a wonderful 45-minute performance with dance, mime, music, starting with fashion in the first world, looking at how it's created, then moving on to why fashion is important for women, and how this links into a global economy. The last part of their performance was the alternative fashion show. For example, a student would model a t-shirt, and the commentary would be, "So and so is wearing a t-shirt created by a cooperative of women who pay themselves wages and have health benefits..." and so on. They looked at the reasons why fashion is so important and they then showed how to change it. The students did this project by themselves; all I did was to introduce the idea.

Do you find that being perceived as Asian affects the way students relate to you and the course material?

That's certainly one reason why people take my courses, or don't take my courses. I'm an Asian woman, but I have an English accent, and those can work against each other. In the US, "Asian American" has not intuitively included South Asians until very recently. So I'm not really seen as Asian American because I'm Indian, and I have an English accent which is seen as high-class. But I am categorized. "She will be very radical." "She will say things to challenge us, make us uncomfortable." "Because she's Asian..." they might not say it, but the suggestion can be there of a chip on my shoulder.

How would you compare teaching here and teaching in the UK?

Well, apart from the differences in student preparation and class size and so on, a big difference is that students are more used to people like me in England.

As teachers or just in general?

In general, but not as university lecturers, at least not when I was there, though that might have changed within the last ten years. Students at Bradford who had a South Asian background would come and talk to me--they'd ask me, "Miss, how come you're not married?" or "How did you get to have this job?" or "Doesn't your mum get cross with you for not living at home?"--wanting identification, which was very nice. I have that here, but in a different way. Students of color will come and talk to me, but the issues will be different. What will often unite us is an intimate experience of racism, often different in content depending on ethnicity, but it is still an intimate knowledge of racism.

Whereas in England the students were looking more for a role model?

Yes. And they do here, more and more. Now I've been here ten years, I think more students see me as a role model, because I've become more Americanized in ways that I can't notice. I should say I don't like the idea of role models or mentors because I think that can set up an expectation that the way in which the mentor has done something is the only way. It can close off discussion. When students come and talk to me, of course I talk about what I've done in my life, but I also say to them, "Listen, there are many other ways to do it. You don't have to be just like me."

Can you say something about the intellectual or political differences between students in the UK and your students here?

One difference is that until comparatively recently, students in the US had hardly any notion of a world outside the US, because the US doesn't have a history of colonization in the way that England and much of Europe does. In England, people know about colonization--they were part of it--they know there's a world out there. US students can be insulated, though now I think that's beginning to change.

I wonder if the Internet has some role in that.

A good point. I think the Internet has been crucial, just because the information is so readily available, and also because it's not organized into bounded subjects and categories in the way that books, which I love, are organized in a library.

Overall, I want to say that I enjoy my teaching and writing very much--to be in touch with people on a daily basis who value the importance of discussing ideas, who are desperate to change the world, and who are respectful is a pleasure that can be hard to surpass.

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Human sacrifices
What happens when women migrate and leave families behind? The recent history of the Philippines raises some troubling questions

By Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is the author of the recently published Servants of Globalization, a groundbreaking study of Filipina domestic workers in Italy. She has since gone on to study the children of those women, left behind--usually in the care of yet poorer women--in the Philippines. The Women's Review asked her to talk about the highlights of her research and its implications for women's global migration in the long term.

IN THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY, care is one of the largest raw materials extracted from the South to the North. Care is now the primary exported product of the Philippines. How did this come about? In the 1980s the Marcos government instituted a series of agreements with other governments to accept Filipino workers, the aim being to accumulate hard-currency income to help pay down the national debt. But just as these agreements were being put in place, the traditional market for male manual labor, especially in the oil industries and merchant marine, began to dry up, and the unexpected consequence of those agreements was that it was women who began to take up jobs overseas. They began to go to the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Europe. Now two-thirds of Filipino overseas workers are women. And two-thirds of those women are domestic workers, while many of the rest are nurses or service workers of some other kind. Almost all their earnings are sent home to their families: foreign remittances from migrant workers--most of them domestic workers--are the economy's largest source of foreign currency, which amounted to almost $7 billion in 1999.

The enormous foreign debt and its economic effects are what ultimately drives many workers overseas, even when their living conditions are not absolutely desperate (and in fact the poorest of the poor are not the ones who migrate, but the ones with some means and skills). Reduced public services of all kinds result from the constriction of the economy due to the need to divert funds to debt servicing. Many of the women who migrate are from middle-class families. They go because they want to preserve their standard of living, and especially to provide their children with a good education and health care--and because public spending has been so drastically reduced, this means expensive private education and health care. Women in the Philippines have traditionally worked outside the home, but their wages average 32 percent of men's, meaning that even when both parents work, their combined income is not enough to pay for the services that will maintain class position.

In short, a middle-class family cannot earn enough in the Philippines to avoid downward mobility, and available work overseas is primarily care work: the paradox that Filipinas face is that to provide for their children's long-term welfare, they have to leave them behind, often not seeing them for years at a time. Employment contracts of five years or more, with little time off and no provision for visits home, are common. So much of the mothers' income is sent back to the Philippines that going home to see family is an unaffordable luxury. The mothers can only provide one kind of care at the expense of the other.

What happens to the children? They are cared for either by female relatives or by women too poor to emigrate in search of work. The mothers try to keep in touch by phone and email, sometimes calling several times a week. When a child has problems at school, for example, the mother will try to solve them--attempting in effect to mother at a distance. But what almost never happens is that the fathers of these children get involved more fully in caring for them and raising them. (In fact, often the fathers themselves work away from home elsewhere in the Philippines, only coming home at weekends.)

THERE HAS BEEN CONSIDERABLE public alarm in the Philippines about the effects that the absence of mothers has on their families. Remember that these women are caring full-time for their employers' families, sending home remittances which help pay down foreign debt and keep up the family standard of living, and trying to maintain ties with their own children over years of separation. But the media and government demonize them as delinquent and uncaring, destroyers of home and family. They equate the absence of the biological mother with abandonment, and predict that the children of these transnational families will inevitably become liabilities to society.

In contrast to the media caricature, I've found that these children do not necessarily lose all familial support when their mothers migrate. In particular, it seems that children who believe that their migrant mothers are struggling for the sake of the family's collective mobility are less likely to feel abandoned and more likely to accept their mother's efforts to sustain close relations from a distance. Theresa Bascara, a college student whose mother has worked as a domestic in Hong Kong since 1984, told me that her mother was an inspiration to her--"She is the one suffering over there, so the least I can give back to her is doing well in school," is how she put it.

The Filipino government's current response is to insist that these women return home, because their absence is undermining the family. But of course they offer no suggestions for what they will do when they return, let alone show any recognition for the conditions forcing them to work overseas or of their contribution to servicing the debt. At the same time, there has been no public discussion of fathers' obligations, and no sign that the gendered division of labor is being re-evaluated in the light of this radical change in labor patterns. The assumption continues to be that family care work is women's work.

Calling for the return migration of mothers is neither economically plausible nor egalitarian. The "care crisis" is real, but it's distorted by the media into a mechanism for morally disciplining women and for resisting the changes in gender roles in the family that might otherwise be brought about by increasing dependence on their foreign remittances. Demonizing migrant women as bad mothers promotes the view that a return to the nuclear family is the only viable solution to the difficulties of children in transnational families. It redirects attention away from the real needs of children in these families--for instance, the need to improve mechanisms of communication between members of split-apart families, or the need to increase the larger community's accountability for the welfare of these children. Of course it also ignores the ability of children themselves to adjust to the challenges brought by the conversion of their families to transnational households.

What else would improve matters? Most obviously, wiping out the foreign debt would allow the government to reintroduce public services--a solution that would also work in other countries in similar straits, such as Argentina. The root cause of this particular form or migration would then disappear. Needless to say, short of canceling the foreign debt, the change that would have the biggest impact of all would be for both Filipino men and men in the receiving nations around the world to start doing their share of the housework and childcare--which would reduce the demand for these service workers in the first place.

But as long as that does not happen, and migration continues to be the only way for families to survive, the host countries ought to regulate domestic and other service labor. A requirement that employers give their employees an annual period of extended leave and subsidized travel home is now in place for some typically male jobs, for example seamen in the merchant marine service in Hong Kong, where a minimum of two months off per year and subsidized travel home for family visits is mandatory as part of a standard contract. Implementing the same kind of contract for domestic workers would make a huge difference.

A second-best strategy would be to allow workers to bring their families with them. This is permitted on a temporary basis now in Italy, for example. But this is not a long-term solution; Filipina women in Europe say they don't want to bring their children up there, because of the xenophobia and racism they face. If they settled permanently, patterns of discrimination would condemn their children to service jobs in turn, whereas the reason the mother migrates in the first place is to protect her children from downward mobility.

While large-scale reforms either of the global economy or male behavior are unlikely to be introduced in the foreseeable future, the host societies of Filipina domestic workers can certainly be held more accountable for the welfare of these workers and their families. Migrant domestic workers should receive the same rights as other citizens who are contributing to the economic growth of receiving nations. Employers benefit from the separation of the migrant domestic from her own family, and they ought to develop a sense of accountability for these women's children. What Arlie Hochschild calls a "care deficit"--the dwindling supply and increasing demand for care--plagues families in industrialized nations. These Filipinas are the ones who are helping reduce that "care deficit," and their own children are paying the price.

Note: An essay by Rhacel Parreñas, "The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational Families in the New Global Economy," which expands on the discussion in this talk, is forthcoming in Global Woman, edited by Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich (New York: Metropolis, 2002).

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Pedagogies of resonance
How can American literature speak to an Asian audience?

By King-Kok Cheung

I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE with you my experiences of teaching American literature in the Far East and my attempts at making American literature resonate in Asia. Because of my own specialty in ethnic American literature and my own interest in fostering interracial understanding in the United States, I have been especially concerned with how to make issues about race compelling to Asian audiences, which at first sight look so homogeneous. Lecturing on Asian American literature is in some way the easiest way to capture Asian audiences, because they often identify racially with the Asian American characters. But what I find most challenging and gratifying is when the same audiences move from empathizing with the oppressed minorities to seeing themselves as the dominating majority.

Four literary themes in particular have provoked critical self-reflections in Far Eastern audiences. The first is the legacy of a buried history. While racial minorities in the US have been re-opening buried historical chapters such as the decimation of Native Americans and the Japanese American internment, many unspeakable chapters in Asian history still remain hushed to this day. The second theme is that of hate crimes. Many students tend to think that racism is simply a matter of personal preference or distaste. By telling them--whether through literature or current events--about physical injuries suffered by people of color, students can better understand the grave import of racial prejudice, both in the United States and in their own country. Perhaps worse than hate crimes is self-hatred, which is another theme I invoke through literature to reveal the psychological impact of racial inequality. The last theme is that of the Asian American model minority. While we Asian Americanists denounce this concept as a stereotype and a myth in the United States, it is my impression that many students in the Far East still conform to many of the characteristics associated with the model minority.

In 1999 I gave a lecture on African American and Asian American literature in Kobe, Japan. I organized that lecture around three pairs of texts. The first pair consists of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks on Emmett Till and a poem by Miriam Ching Louie on Yoshihiro Hattori. The second pair was an episode from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and an episode from Kingston's The Woman Warrior. The third pair was made up of parallel passages from Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go and John Okada's No-No Boy. I wanted to highlight both the parallel concerns and the different approaches of the African American and Asian American authors.

There is probably just as much prejudice against blacks in Asia as in the United States. The pairing of texts was a conscious strategy I used to highlight the parallel predicament of the Asian American and African American characters and to allow the audience to transfer their empathy from the Asian American to the African American characters. The poems by Brooks and Louie are both about actual hate crimes. Yoshihiro Hattori was a sixteen-year-old Japanese exchange student in the US who happened to press the wrong door bell on his way to a Halloween Party and was shot to death by a white man in Louisiana in 1992. Everyone in the Japanese audience was familiar with the Hattori incident, which had stirred up enormous anger in Japan. The audience was much less familiar with the case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was tortured to death in 1955 by two white men after "talking fresh" to a white woman in Mississippi. I showed film footage about the murder of this dashing black boy, which brought many members of the audience to tears. Juxtaposing the two poems about the killing of the two teenage boys was my way of using an incident of utmost concern to the Japanese audience to slide in a broader awareness of the impact of racial prejudice, and to prompt my audience to think about similar prejudice in their own society.

The pairing of these texts also allowed me to illustrate what I believed to be the contrasting tendencies of African American and Asian American writers in dealing with themes of discrimination and assimilation. I argued that works by Asian American authors convey much greater hope and optimism than works by their African American counterparts, who are much more critical of American society and much less restrained when expressing anger and despair. I illustrated the difference by using two symbolic scenes from The Woman Warrior and The Bluest Eye.

The narrators in both of these books are acutely aware of their difference as girls of color growing up in the United States. Both Maxine in The Woman Warrior and Claudia in The Bluest Eye suffer from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis white girls. However, the ways in which they respond to their situations are strikingly different, as evident in two parallel scenes: Claudia's treatment of white dolls and Maxine's treatment of a silent Chinese girl. Claudia reacts against society's unequal treatment of white and black girls by tearing apart "white baby dolls." Knowing that she can never measure up to the white norms of female beauty, she resents the white dolls that epitomize that beauty. She tells the reader: "the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, 'Awwwwww,' but not for me?"

Claudia turns her anger outward, against white dolls and blonde girls. The narrator in The Woman Warrior, by contrast, turns her anger inward, against her own kind, as in the scene in which she tortures a mute Chinese girl in her class, trying to force her to speak. Maxine's valorization of speech indicates her unquestioning acceptance of the American norm. Speech in this context has a valence similar to "the bluest eye" in Morrison's novel. Maxine's savagery toward the "mute" girl, which pointedly takes place in an "American" school, is reminiscent of the psychological violence suffered by the very dark-skinned Pecola in The Bluest Eye. What Maxine so vehemently detests in her classmate is not just her refusal to speak, but "her China doll haircut," her "straight hair turning with her head, not swinging side to side like the pretty girls." In other words, she hates the mute girl because she so reminds the narrator of her own Chinese ethnicity. The scene thus reflects Maxine's virulent self-contempt at being Chinese. Horrible as Claudia's acts of mutilating white dolls are, they are less debilitating than what I consider to be Maxine's self-flagellation.

These texts (and the others I discussed in that talk) illustrate a striking difference between Asian American and African American literature. Asian American writers tend to attribute their difficulties in assimilation to their ethnic or cultural difference, whereas African American writers tend to ascribe such difficulties to racism, to the structural inequality in American society. Although texts such as The Woman Warrior and No-No Boy also reflect social inequality, their strategies of resistance are much more subdued and indirect than those found in The Bluest Eye and If He Hollers Let Him Go, so that readers of the Asian American texts tend to overlook the undercurrents of protest against racism altogether. The difference in these texts and their reception may have roots in existing stereotypes such as Asian model minority versus black rebels and hoodlums, white publishers' expectations, and the unequal social and material positions of Asian Americans and African Americans. Asian American writers may have so internalized the myth of the model minority that they blame themselves--their ethnicity, their culture, or Asian patriarchy--rather than American society for their marginal status. Mainstream publishers, in turn, may be more open to works by Asian American writers that do not challenge white racism, for the myth of the model minority is so pervasive that the reading public seems to feel that Asian Americans have no right to protest. Finally, it is also undeniable that Asian Americans, not hobbled by a history of slavery and enforced illiteracy, have been able to make much greater socioeconomic advances than have African Americans who, even today, must still overcome many obstacles.

I SHALL END BY DISCUSSING my experience of teaching these texts here at Hong Kong University during the last four months. The students in Hong Kong are all too ready to condemn white racism and empathize with the Asian American or African American characters in these texts. However, they did not once see themselves as the dominating majority. When I asked them toward the end of the course whether they found the interracial dynamics represented in ethnic American literature relevant to their lives in Hong Kong, they responded that they did not feel the sting of racism because just about everyone in Hong Kong is Chinese. Yet I have not passed a single day in Hong Kong without running into Filipinas, Asian Indians, or Vietnamese, not to mention Caucasians and Blacks. So I was puzzled by the extent to which these racial minorities are invisible to my students. When I pressed them further on whether they have any Indian friends or whether they would consider marrying an Indian, more disturbing sentiments surfaced about how these people look different, speak an alien language, and stick together. I told them that these are exactly the kind of comments made by European Americans concerning Asian Americans and that we have always considered these remarks to be racist.

I also found it difficult to make my Hong Kong students see the insidious aspects of the concept of the Asian American model minority. Although this stereotype has been regarded as a myth concocted by white conservatives, I have to acknowledge that many people in the Far East, including my students in Hong Kong, do subscribe to the values attributed to the model minority: obeying authority, studying hard, staying out of politics. So I found myself spending the last portion of my course turning the table around by making my Hong Kong students see themselves as both the oppressive majority and the model majority.

I believe that in teaching American literature transnationally, we should also elicit a transnational perspective on American literature. I have tried to disturb a smug or facile reading of American literature in Asia through a range of "transnational" pedagogies. One strategy is that of juxtaposition. The provocative pairing of Asian American and African American texts is used not only to transfer Asian students' empathy for the Asian American characters to the African American characters but also to make them distinguish and respond to different minority experiences. My favorite is the strategy of reflection or inversion: those of us who are specialists in American ethnic literature tend to adopt a critical attitude toward the dominant white culture. But such an attitude can play into chauvinistic or anti-American and anti-democratic sentiments in some Asian countries, leading to complacency rather than self-examination. I would prefer that my Asian audiences discover in American ethnic literature a mirror of their own societies.

Literary texts by people of color can speak to Asian audiences in at least two ways. These works can prompt Asian students to deplore white racism and identify with the Asian American or African American characters. These works can also prompt Asian students to uncover their own buried histories, to reflect on the unequal power relations in their own countries, to resist the racism that is no less deep-rooted in Asia than in the United States, and to question their own subscription to the tenets of the model minority.

Note: A longer version of this essay was presented to the International Conference on American Literary Studies in Asia: Teaching and Research, January 5, 2001.

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• Linda Gardiner lgardiner@wellesley.edu
• The Women's Review of Books
• Created: January 24th 2002
• Last Updated: March 20th 2002
• Expires: No expiration