The Tao of S: America's Chinee and the Chinese Century in Literature and Film PDF
Preview The Tao of S: America's Chinee and the Chinese Century in Literature and Film
the tao of s East-West Encounters in Literature and Cultural Studies SerieS editorS Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu, Paul Allen Miller, Chi-she Li This series is jointly published by the University of South Carolina Press and the National Taiwan University Press. ▶ Also of Interest Digitalizing the Global Text: Philosophy, Literature, and Culture Edited by Paul Allen Miller the tao of s America’s Chinee & the Chinese Century in Literature and Film Sheng-mei Ma © 2022 Sheng-mei Ma Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 Published by the National Taiwan University Press Taipei City, Taiwan 100047 www.uscpress.com press.ntu.edu.tw/index_en.php Manufactured in Taiwan 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/. ISBN 978-1-64336-307-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-64336-308-0 (ebook) GPN 1011100330 Front cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray. Image by rawpixel.com Contents Series Editor’s Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Tao of S 1 Part I ▶ California Dreamin’ Chapter 1: Sinophobia/Sinophilia, circa 1870–2020, Harte–Trump 9 Chapter 2: Oriental High Gone to P(l)ot: Philip K. Dick and Counterculture Pilgrims 29 Chapter 3: Afro-Asian Filmic Duet 43 Part II ▶ Asian America Awakenin’ Chapter 4: Pacific Envy of Crazy Rich Asians 61 Chapter 5: From A(sian) to Z(ombie): Ling Ma’s Severance Package for the China Bug 74 Chapter 6: Asian America Double Tonguing 90 Chapter 7: “LONG LIVE the waste!”: Junk Food Bites Back in Jung’s Approved for Adoption 109 Part III ▶ The Chinese Century Chapter 8: Online Bingeing of Free Chinese TV Bound to Soft Power: Entrance Exam Series and Sino-Fi 123 Chapter 9: The Wolf’s Substitute Family in Chinese TV Series: Social Realism and Wuxia Fantasy 147 Chapter 10: Soul Mates Can’t Mate: Homoerotic Tease in Annibaobei and Derek Tsang 164 Chapter 11: Private Slant Eye Getting Bigger, Faster, even Beijinger 177 Notes 207 Works Cited 219 Index 235 Series Editor’s Preface Sheng-mei Ma’s The Tao of S is the first single-authored book of the new interdis- ciplinary and collaborative book series, East-West Encounters in Literature and Cultural Studies, copublished by the University of South Carolina Press and the National Taiwan University Press. The series seeks to trace the reality of cultural interactions and proffer new global perspectives. Tao (道), denoting “principle” and “direction” in Chinese, well sets the tone and paves the path for the series. Perceived pictorially as in the Taoist circle (☯), Tao conjoins two contesting forces yin and yang, east and west, earth and heaven, black and white, or two oppositions in the rather ambivalent, elegant curve S. Epistemically an encounter is often as- sociated with hostile factions crisscrossing, conflating, encroaching, or conflicting, but the ambiguous yet powerful S, as the tao itself, engenders multiple readings beyond a rigid binarism, while fusing the jarring oppositions into certain harmo- nious renegotiation. Ma’s clever strategy of accentuating the S as a site–sight of cultural encounters elevates the literary rhetoric to a yet higher level of philosophical, epistemologi- cal rethinking, thereby allowing the dialectic twain Asia and America—or what Ma calls “search and rescue”—to reposition how the East, the West, and the Globe stand against–for each other at this critical juncture of millennial global history. Certainly, Ma’s trope of the Oriental “slant” of “one’s own shadow slanting East- ward or Westward” can also slant toward a Dickinsonian “certain slant of light” to shed light on more volumes to publish. This monograph is a textual globetrotter, spanning one hundred fifty years of Anglo-America’s and China’s cultural polem- ics and traveling extensively from China to Pacific Asia, to Europe and to America, from the US East Coast to the Midwest to the West Coast, and from literature to film to pop culture. Ma’s The Tao of S traces the long-standing love-and-hate, Sinophobia-cum-Sinophilia complex, nascent in Harte’s fin-de-siècle Sino-American encounter, to 2020 “post-racial” America. It is a milestone bridging current East Asian and Anglophone scholarly debates to address a global readership across continents. The Tao of S, published symbolically during the ongoing pandemic, ush- ers us to new reflections on the intimate relationship between Western and East- ern borders among discursive and disruptive categories and taxonomies. This first single-authored monograph of the series will help scholars, researchers, students, viii Series Editor’s Preface and teachers open new cultural vistas and produce groundbreaking work on East- West and global contacts, blazing a trail for cutting-edge research as we revisit beyond Orientalism, Occidentalism, globalism, and their beyond. Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu Series Editor Acknowledgments Out of a personal desire for homecoming after decades in diaspora, I was fortunate to have found this joint venture in the series, East-West Encounters in Literature and Cultural Studies, by the University of South Carolina Press and the National Taiwan University Press, particularly Richard Brown, the UofSC Press’s director. An early draft of chapter 3 was published in Texts and Contexts of Migration in Africa and Beyond (2021).
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