Staging the Orient

I grew up in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. My father was born in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. His family were Nationalists who escaped to Taiwan in 1949. He came to the United States in 1963, when there were still quotas restricting Chinese entry. The legend is that the family paid a fortune teller to ask whether he would get in, and the fortune teller said, “Tell them you want to study computers.” He did in fact end up studying computers, and had a long career in the semiconductor industry. My mother was born in the US and was of Irish descent. I am half-Asian, half-Caucasian. That mixture was not as common then as it is today; people were frequently confused when they met me and would ask, “What are you?” or “What is your nationality?” They did not mean my citizenship; they meant my ethnic heritage. In fact, I was never particularly offended or traumatized by this question (and still am not): in some ways I appreciated the curiosity. Still, it made me aware of how deeply ingrained people’s ideas about race and ethnicity are, and how deep the need to know—to the point that some people may even find it difficult to talk to someone else without knowing what race they are.

The end of 2020 has been particularly eventful in American academic institutions. Can you discuss the strikes in support of racial equity at Bryn Mawr where you work, and what this told us about the situation in the US?

What triggered your curiosity about the roles and manifestations of Orientalism in cinema?

Did you focus on specific barriers? Can you tell us a little more—like what kind of typologies of movies you were interested in, what periods?

There's also a back and forth with France and England. Film noir tends to be based on American hardboiled detective stories by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain. But the genre of film that comes from those adaptations was identified by French film critics and retroactively applied. It was the way they were received in France that created the genre.

You can divide it into interiors and exteriors. In the interiors you might see Buddhist statuary used in a purely decorative way, silk tapestries, incense bowls, a very cluttered, crowded mise-en-scène filled with porcelain vases. It’s a lot about textures. Critics saw that and said, ‘Oh you know this was just the fashion at the time, this was what people were, how they were decorating their homes.’ But that's not entirely true. It was a very specific aesthetic, and it is a bit unusual that so many film noirs use that aesthetic when something is amiss, when a crime has been committed. Costuming is obviously important. In The Big Sleep, when Carmen is found drugged in a bordello-like house, she is wearing a cheongsam with dragons embroidered on it. It's gratuitous. It doesn't really make sense in terms of the plot. It's a way of sending a message, of signifying through objects. Regarding exteriors, we can take the example of Lau Wai’s The Memories of Tomorrow (2018), featured in Ying Xiang. There's one picture with a collage of different Chinatowns, perhaps from around the world. There are signs everywhere, overlapping banners, a Labyrinth-like city space. This is the image of Chinatowns inherited from films like The Lady from Shanghai (1947) directed by Orson Welles, which was actually filmed in San Francisco's Chinatown but is edited in such a way that the space feels very confusing. There are Dutch angles, there are shots that take place through windows. It's difficult to tell where you stand in relationship to what. Why is this trope of being lost, or spatially disoriented, associated with East Asia? Over the holidays I watched Sudden Fear (1952), and there is a scene with Orientalist ceramics decorating Joan Crawford’s home. I thought: ‘There it is again.’ For no reason.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer (1879) is the example often taught in art history of a particular strain of Orientalism that has to do with the Near East as opposed to the Far East. You can analyze the figures in it, or point of view. You can also think about the mise-en-scène—mosaics, colors, tiles—that, in a way, dominates the painting, taking up more space than the figures. It’s a way of thinking with Said that gets away from that original text, which was not really about visual art and aesthetics, but rather the power dynamic of knowledge and how that could be used in a propagandistic way to support imperial activity and war. The history of the relationship between the US and China in the twentieth century is very different from that of the Middle East Said writes about. In a way, it's transposing the theory to another purpose.

There's a chapter in the book about Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), made during the Hollywood Renaissance. It's a neo-noir film, a revival of the film noir genre and set in the 1940s. This chapter also includes Blade Runner (1982), which has some of the tropes of film noir: Harrison Ford's voiceover, a search to solve a mystery that turns out to be within oneself. That's the plot of a lot of these stories: the Western, usually male detective searching for the corruption, crime, or mystery in Chinatown, or a woman, or a Chinese character, when the mystery is in fact within himself. Details in the mise-en-scène provide clues throughout; the clues in Blade Runner that Deckard is in fact a replicant are these little origami figurines left like bread crumbs, indicating that he is a fabrication, a fantastic imaginary creature.

It sets up a certain kind of imagination of Asia, and a projection of the future—a future that takes place in Asia, or is closely related to Asia. We see that a lot in the cyberpunk literature, for instance. Did you dig deeper into these speculations about the future being something that happens somewhere in Asia?

And also, with respect to the rise of video games, manga—these new objects of consumption, consisting of animated images linked to the Asian side of the world?

Can you talk about China: Through the Looking Glass (2015), at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York?

Looking back I wish that I had thought more carefully about the distinctions among different forms of appropriation. On the one hand you have, say, outright racist propaganda, or pseudoscience, or disinformation that is deliberately circulated in order to perpetuate negative stereotypes. That would be the worst case of this phenomenon. And then you might have characterizations that come from mass media that propagate these stereotypes for fun or profit, reinforcing a colonial or imperialist attitude, making money through theft and distortion. It gets more complicated with unconscious, unintentional examples, even fetishistic or exoticizing ones, where the problem is ignorance. It’s still a problem, but some contemporary social media commentary lumps all those things into the same basket. I think we need to have a slightly more nuanced view, first of all so that we are on firm ground when we do make a legitimate critique and call for a boycott, but also because every culture is hybrid. There's no such thing as a pure authentic culture. If we say, this isn't pure, it's not authentic, it's canceled, we end up with really not much left. It ignores the material conditions of production. If we want to talk about inequality in the fashion industry, rather than criticizing a designer who borrows a certain aesthetic motif, why not think about labor practices in sweatshops? We can and should do both, certainly.

Did this exhibition give you some keys to understanding the influence of Western culture in the Asian fashion world?

Did this exhibition also target the Chinese market, and Chinese people visiting New York?

After Black Lives Matter the perception of race in fashion has been completely reconsidered.

I was fascinated with Anna May Wong as the first star Hollywood actress of Asian descent, on whom I recently wrote an article mentioned earlier. She starts off as a poor girl in Los Angeles and then spends time in London, Berlin, and Paris. She crosses between film, fine art, and fashion and is transgressive. Sometimes these figures from the past show that history is not always a narrative of progress. She became a camp icon: Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson—many post-War artists took up her image and her persona.

I'm a bit of an internet pessimist. There are wonderful things that happen there in the arts and culture—for example, Guo Pei deservingly placed in the global spotlight. But the algorithms that sort content are designed to addict users to react to sensationalized, provocative stories. The internet needs to be regulated—not just by censoring or removing particular content, but by changing the algorithms themselves. Or at least making them transparent.

That is exactly what I'm hoping to do. I am writing a book about Silicon Valley that is partially a memoir of growing up there at the dawn of the computer era. Silicon Valley is a suburban place that was labeled a cultural wasteland. In fact, there's much fascinating history there. It was an incredibly diverse place because it drew immigrants from all over the world who had specialties and who were able to work in the computer manufacturing industry, designing circuit boards and silicon wafers, semiconductors, in a very specific kind of hybrid culture. My book is really about the hardware era. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and even into the early 90s, Silicon Valley was about hardware. Today when we think of the tech industry, 99% of that is software or app development. We don't think about the people who, like my father, were physics majors who studied solid state electronics and designed the machines. The people who flocked to Silicon Valley initially were scientists and engineers. It wasn't about necessarily making a quick buck on a startup with venture capital; it began with older companies that had been making vacuum cleaners or what have you and shifted. That’s the early part of the story that I want to tell, and to talk about how diverse that industry actually was—maybe not in terms of gender, there weren't very many women involved—but it was it was an industry full of immigrants. There's a chapter about a woman named Sarah Winchester who was the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Manufacturing Company—one of the first companies to create an automatic weapon, which was used heavily in the war against Native Americans during the Western settlement of the American continent. After her husband and daughter died, she became an eccentric woman, a spiritualist who held seances in her home. She moved to San Jose, CA and bought a ranch. She was also an entrepreneur and inventor. She had hydraulic elevators in her home. She was also a real estate developer. In a way, she anticipates the odd mixture of mysticism and capitalism that’s associated with contemporary tech culture: these guys who take mushrooms or LSD and dream up new companies. This Silicon Valley culture, I want to claim, originates in the nineteenth century, and even perhaps before that. There's also a chapter about the phrase ‘Go West, young man,’ a rallying cry for settler colonialism in the US in the nineteenth century. It has undergone many different transformations. It is the title of several films: one by Buster Keaton, another by the Marx Brothers, and one by Mae West. In the 1970s, the Village People created a disco song called ‘Go West,’ which was in turn covered by the Pet Shop Boys in 1990; they made it about the fall of the Berlin Wall. What is this West that everyone is supposed to go to? It’s quite similar to my Orientalism book, because I’m claiming it’s a fictional West—it is a fantasy West, not a real place.