Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Gabrielpillai, Matilda
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This study represents the scandal of current colonial racist ideologizing by focusing on the American Orientalizing project in Singapore. It argues that, in the era of global capitalism and post-colonial theory, the new colonialist epistemologies rely on collaborations between the ruling classes of the 'third world' and 'first world' as well as a rhetoric of 'native' nationalism to contain threatening non-Western economic success and to create 'third world' populations and governments that will not resist the continuation of the Western/American colonizing project. Using a Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytical theory of hegemony, of a "libidinal politics" which focuses on the role of desire in national culture, this thesis shows that the Singapore government has used American Orientalist ideology to effect disempowering cultural changes in the people. Examining political and literary texts, I argue that the Singapore government quotes American notions of 'Oriental' difference to keep "dangerous Western (liberal) influences" from 'ethnically contaminating' the nation, and that it has hegemonized an 'Asian'/'Confucianist' nationalism by hystericizing and repressing the people's desire, leading Singaporeans to disavow their location in a post-modern world. The Orientalizing of Singapore, where Chinese identity has been produced as a masquerade of Western culture, has also generated a crisis in male identity, involving an inward-looking escapist cultural narcissism that blocks a positive response to historical realities. Paradoxically, the claim to a non-Western modernity has also been used to suppress ethnic difference by producing ethnicity as 'fetish.' The East/West discourse that emerged from the caning of an American teenager, Michael Fay, in Singapore is used to reveal the entrapment of Singapore's 'Oriental' national identity in American colonial desire, and to argue that the perceived East Asian 'cultural confidence' often spoken about today overlooks the fact that such cultural certitude accrues from the East entering into the West's fantasy scenarios and staging itself as the other's object of desire. This thesis suggests that current 'post-colonial' claims to "ethnic, non-Western" modernisms be viewed with some skepticism as possibly involving the ventriloquistic 'passing' of Western colonial ideology as the voice of the 'racial other.'
22147860 bytes
application/pdf
ORIENTALIZING SINGAPORE: PSYCHOANALYZING THE DISCOURSE OF 'NON-WESTERN MODERNITY' by MATILDA GABRIELPILLAI B.A., The University of Singapore, 1978 B A. Hons., The University of Singapore, 1979 M.A., The University of Reading, 1988 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English Literature) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA August 1997 © Matilda Gabrielpillai, 1997 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of / £ y \ ^ The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date W r l c t . DE-6 (2/88) 11 Abstract This study represents the scandal of current colonial racist ideologizing by focusing on the American Orientalizing project in Singapore. It argues that, in the era of global capitalism and post-colonial theory, the new colonialist epistemologies rely on collaborations between the ruling classes of the 'third world' and 'first world' as well as a rhetoric of 'native' nationalism to contain threatening non-Western economic success and to create 'third world' populations and governments that will not resist the continuation of the Western/American colonizing project. Using a Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytical theory of hegemony, of a "libidinal politics" which focuses on the role of desire in national culture, this thesis shows that the Singapore government has used American Orientalist ideology to effect disempowering cultural changes in the people. Examining political and literary texts, I argue that the Singapore government quotes American notions of 'Oriental' difference to keep "dangerous Western (liberal) influences" from 'ethnically contaminating' the nation, and that it has hegemonized an 'Asian'/'Confucianist' nationalism by hystericizing and repressing the people's desire, leading Singaporeans to disavow their location in a post-modern world. The Orientalizing of Singapore, where Chinese identity has been produced as a masquerade of Western culture, has also generated a crisis in male identity, involving an inward-looking escapist cultural narcissism that blocks a positive response to historical realities. Paradoxically, the claim to a non-Western modernity has also been used to suppress ethnic difference by producing ethnicity as 'fetish.' The East/West discourse that emerged from the caning of an American teenager, Michael Fay, in Singapore is used to reveal the entrapment of Singapore's 'Oriental' national identity in American colonial desire, and to argue that the perceived East Asian 'cultural confidence' often spoken about today overlooks the fact that such cultural certitude accrues from the East entering into the West's fantasy scenarios and staging itself as the other's object of desire. This thesis suggests that current 'post-colonial' claims to "ethnic, non-Western" modernisms be viewed with some skepticism as possibly involving the ventriloquistic 'passing' of Western colonial ideology as the voice of the 'racial other.' iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iv Acknowledgments v Chapter One Introduction: 'Non-Western Modernity' as American Orientalism 1 Chapter Two Orientalizing the Nation: The National Ideology Project 58 Chapter Three Disciplining Post-Colonial Identity: Reading the Michael Fay Caning Incident 120 Chapter Four Imagining Chinese Identity: Fictional Revisions of State Ideology 183 Chapter Five The Cut at the Center: Male Identity in Crisis in Singaporean Drama 299 Conclusion 382 Works Cited or Consulted 389 Acknowledgments This has been, in many ways, a lonely project, involving self-exile. But it has also been tremendously crowded with people from my past. Ironically, the people I am most indebted to are also those that I rail against. This work would not have been possible without the opportunities given to me to work in Singapore's media organizations and semi-government bodies, which provided an inside view of the business of creating and disseminating national meanings. I am also grateful to the work of Slavoj Zizek, which has enabled me to get past disciplinary parameters that only serve to fragment consciousness and perpetuate oppressions. More immediately, I would like to record my appreciation for the valuable feedback and encouragement provided by my thesis committee of Margery Fee, Richard Cavell and Tineke Hellwig. To Margery Fee, who was always available during moments of anxiety, I owe a world of thanks. Patricia Merrivale kept me from narrow approaches to post-colonial studies. Khoo Gaik Cheng provided a forum in which to grasp the complexity of questions concerning national 'native' identity and non-Western difference in the Southeast Asian context. Rosemary Leach smoothened my path through the Ph.D. program. Theatreworks kindly provided me with draft manuscripts of Kuo Pao Kun's play, The Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, and Tan Tarn How's play, Six of the Best. I have the good fortune of thanking two families for emotional support. I am indebted to the Jamais, especially Farahnazz and Naheeda, for the good times I have had in Vancouver. My family in Singapore, I appreciate for having put up with my long absence and trying demands for money. Chapter One Introduction: 'Non-Western Modernity' as American Orientalism Since the 1980s, the discourse of an alternative 'Confucian' non-Western modernity has been rapidly gaining ascendance and has been viewed as a sign of the rising cultural confidence of East Asian nations. As Arif Dirlik notes, after half a century as a defunct ideology, "Confucianism began to reappear as a central ideological concern. For more than a decade now, the airwaves over the Pacific, from Singapore to the headquarters of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Washington, D.C., have been filled with talk of Confucius" ("Confucius" 229). Described as one of the most prolific intellectual industries of the 1980s, the discourse of Confucianism has commanded international partication, but it is the East Asian countries who have most heavily invested (culturally and financially) in its promotion, says Dirlik ("Confucius" 23 8).1 In China, a rejection of Confucianism during the Mao Zedong era was reversed with the leader's death in 1976 and the retreat from revolutionary communism. Over 1,000 articles on Confucianism were produced in the 1980s in China alone and conferences on Confucianism have been held annually since 1978. In 1984, a Confucian foundation was established in China. In South Korea, Confucianism, despite a troubled existence during the 1960s and 1970s when former President Pak Chung-hee had regarded it a hindrance to the republic's industrialization, is now promoted by the state and forms part of the national discourse of 'Koreanness.'4 Taiwan and Hongkong academics have also contributed to the discussion. The discourse of Confucianism as offering an alternative 'Chinese' modernity to counter Eurocentric notions of modernity was taken up perhaps most dramatically in Singapore, where Confucianist values were extolled almost on a daily basis in the early 1980s in the local media. In 1982, eight foreign specialists (including Harvard and Yale professors) were hired to design a Confucian curriculum as part 2 of a moral education program for schools, while in 1983, Singapore set up the Institute of East Asian Philosophies to promote and reinterpret Confucianism.5 In the 1990s, 'Confucianist' ideologies were used in Singapore as the basis of a new state-promoted 'Asian nativist' nationalism.6 Two markedly different readings of this phenomenon of Confucianist revival are currently competing for dominance. There is, on the one hand, as mentioned above, a sanguine tendency to view this new discourse as an assertion of post-colonial Chinese cultural confidence, as a valid effort to break the West's cultural power by speaking modernity in another language. The other interpretation posits the Confucianist revival as a Western neo-colonial strategy employed for American penetration into China's market and further exploitation of the newly industrialized economies in the Pacific Rim. This critical metanarrative deconstructs the claim of a new Chinese cultural confidence by representing the Confucian revival as a direct heir of Western 'Orientalism.' The East, it claims, is now involved in a "self-Orientalization" that repeats the terms of the earlier colonialist epistemology.7 Historicizing the discourse of Confucian-style modernization, Dirlik says that what is being revived is not so much Confucianism as it is "the ideological legacy of societies that can claim recent ascendancy within Global Capitalism and, indeed, in some measure, are responsible for creating the practices that characterize Global Capitalism" ("Confucius" 230). The coincidence of the rise of the East Asian economies with the stagnation of capital accumulation in the West, undermined the Eurocentric teleology of capitalism as well. As a discourse, Dirlik says, Confucianism arose in the West, not in East Asia, Dirlik and was "structured" by "the question of capitalism, its new situation [the decentering by global capitalism] and its contradictions" ("Confucius" 237). The discourse of Confucianist modernization was, according to Dirlik's metanarrative, constructed to accommodate an ideology that would cure the 'ills' of capitalism, for example the politics of civil society (union politics, the women's movement, youth movements, ethnic politics, etc.), essential for a well-developed democracy but fast becoming hindrances to capitalism in the West (Dirlik, "Confucius" 251). As a functional ideology answering to the Western quest for "new models of social control and 3 management of the exploitation of labor" (Dirlik, "Confucius" 268), an 'Orientalized' Confucianism became the vehicle that could be used to legitimize social engineering, discipline and control of the working classes, women and minorities, and, generally, subjugation of the population to the government and ruling class. For critics such as Samir Amin and Dirlik, the "modern" brand of Confucianism touted today is an American construct that responds to the needs of international trade and politics, one that is neither post-colonial nor Confucian. Dirlik goes so far as to suggest that the Confucian revival is at least one instance where post-colonial critique, which attempts to challenge Eurocentricity by recovering native pasts, can itself be ideologically caught in the very structures of power it claims to resist ("Confucius" 230). In other words, 'post-colonial' notions of ethnic identity and cultural difference can, in fact, produce neo-colonial cultural configurations, a claim that this thesis will support. But the admitted entanglement of post-coloniality with neo-imperialism in the era of global capitalism, the intersection of the desires of the ruling classes in the West and the rising East, perhaps makes such deconstructive criticism ineffectual in dismantling such neo-colonial ideologies. Illustrating the neo-colonial meanings and intentions of such seemingly post-colonial discourses of identity as the Confucian revival still leaves intact the questions of post-colonial desire and cultural difference, the latter being one of the only strategies left to assert sovereignty and equality with the West on the bargaining table. The revelation that this cultural 'difference' was constructed by the West and generated by a cultural crisis in the West does not subtract from the East's libidinal enjoyment in perceiving itself as the fantasy figure of Western desire, reminiscent of the exoticization of Chinese culture in Chinoiserie and of the fetishization of Asian women in accordance with Western male desire; even awareness of the falsity of post-colonial consciousness cannot erase the real space that has been here opened up for geo-cultural negotiation. The (colonial) history of the territorialization of the desire of the non-Western subject as well as the dominance of Western knowledge in this deconstructive discourse also tends to mitigate the scandal of Western authorization of Eastern identity. The 4 ideological critique of the anti-Orientalists, it can be said, is itself no less marked through and through by ideology in insisting that authentic post-colonial critique should be anti-capitalist: opponents could equally locate in this another neo-colonial ruse to guarantee the marginalization of the non-Western world, particularly those currently rising to prominence as centers of capital. The impotence of such anti-Orientalist criticism lies also in its neglect of the question of how the Confucian revival has taken hold in the countries concerned. The common person's surprising lack of resistance towards, and even identification with, such a discursive regime, which is inscribed with both the power of the West and that of East Asian governments, needs to be addressed for a more complete dismantling of the discourse. Anti-Orientalism critiques circulate primarily in the elite intellectual market-place, targeting already-converted academics or precisely those academics most resistant to such criticism, the Western and Eastern academics invested in disseminating the Confucianist discourse. The common person who is the victim of such ideological maneuvers aimed at decimating his rights, the factory worker in Singapore or even the school teacher capable of transmitting critical knowledge, doesn't have access to this anti-Orientalist discourse: in Singapore, for instance, any such critical point-of-view would not get a hearing in the media. Then, there is the tendency to totalize the ideological meanings and effects of the Confucian revival in all the East Asian states without considering the different historicities of the discourse in each state. The forms by which the discourse is hegemonized in each state, the means by which the ideology is materialized, and its dependence on the prior cultural history of the nation may well imply important differences in its operation as a discursive regime of power. For instance in the 1980s, the discourse of Confucianism attempted to direct Singaporeans away from 'Western' democratic culture by emphasizing their ethnic cultures. In the 1990s, however, the discourse of Confucianism and its related discourse of Asian values are being used to suppress or control ethnic identifications—the government's emphasis on Asian cultures in the earlier decade had resulted in a resurgence of interest in religion, which the government tried to regulate by promoting an 'AsianVConfucianist' nationalism that had very little real 5 'ethnic' content. Racial politics in Singapore have led to Confucianism being dislocated from meanings of 'Chinese' identity (whereas in the other East Asian states, Confucianism thrives on this association). Instead, in Singapore, Confucianism is 'Asianized,' functioning as a metonym for Asian culture and works to homogenize the cultures of disparate ethnic and religious groups, the Chinese, Malays, Indians, o Eurasians, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus. Again, in the other East Asian states, the Confucian revival does not enter into the arena of inter-ethnic politics (except that of West versus East) as it does in Singapore. The application of discourse analysis to the Confucianist revival in East Asia, the tracing of its connections to other discourses, the examination of the conditions that made its emergence possible, the singling out of the themes of the discourse and the isolation of its conceptual strategies certainly render more transparent its operations as a regime of power. Probably the most fertile manner in which to begin such a genealogical approach involves the identification of the objects of knowledge of the discourse. Restricting myself to the deployment and development of the discourse in Singapore, I found that here there were at least two apparent objects of knowledge that had been targeted. One was knowledge of Singaporean national culture, of the most basic values that guided citizens from all walks of life and from various ethnic/religious backgrounds. The other object whose truth had to be seized was that of the cultural/value system that would maximize the nation's economic performance. But the discourse was delimited from the start by treating these two objects as if they were the same. Many circumstances made this assumption possible and necessary. Singapore's brilliant economic performance through the 1960s and 1970s combined with Western ideas, especially Weberism, which had earlier causally connected culture (Protestantism) with economic success, made it appear obvious that there was something of a winning formula to Singapore culture. The entire discourse could not have been possible without the publication of Herman Kahn's two books in 1979, World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond and The Japanese Challenge. In World Economic Development. Kahn had linked the successful economic performance of East Asian countries with the "Confucianist ethic" 6 which created "dedicated, motivated, responsible, and educated individuals" who had "an enhanced sense of commitment, organizational identity, and loyalty to various institutions" (122). Though Singapore's political leaders would have realized that this analysis erroneously displaced credit from their own daring and bold strategies of industrialization as well as Singaporeans' own sense of developmental urgency onto an absent Confucianist culture, they promptly grasped Kahn's and other neo-Orientalists' sub-text: that the rate of economic growth would slow down (not just in East Asia but in the US too) unless ways and means were found to contain 'disruptive' cultural influences (demands for equity and representation by marginalized groups). Confucianism then, re-interpreted in the American way, was as good a tool as any to discipline the work force and pre-empt inconvenient radical democratic politics. It had other factors in its favor too such as its reliance on the cultural pride of the majority Chinese population: it would win the approval and co-operation of Singapore's very powerful clan associations and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce; and it would further Singapore's efforts at penetrating the mainland Chinese market. Singapore accordingly joined in the international project of re-reading Confucius so as to find in him native cultural legitimization for an enhancement of state power that could reach beyond the boundaries of democratic institutions. As soon as it could, it also inserted Confucianism into the school system. At this point in the early 1980s, however, the Confucianizing of Singapore culture was also developed as part of a general move to ethnicize the multiracial population. The learning of one's ethnic language was now mandatory, and university admission was restricted to effectively bilingual (English and mother tongue) students. Schools also began a compulsory religious knowledge program. The ethnicizing program, of which Confucianism was a major element, was clearly aimed at culturally alienating the population from a politics of radical democracy and from liberalism, both of which were ethnicized as 'Western' and hence dismissed out of hand as culturally inappropriate for Singapore. But at the same time, and unconnected to the 'ethnicization' of the population, other means involving changes in economic and political institutions were employed to achieve the same effects of putting into 7 place a new political culture that was less oriented towards principles of democracy. Principles of pragmatic government and instrumental rationality rather than democratic rights began pervasively to constitute the domain of validity of political, economic and social organization, including that of sexuality. These were legitimized by recent American scholarship which re-applied Weber-style culturalist accounts of economic performance in explaining Japan's post-war success. In line with this, labor power and press freedom, for instance, were curbed during the late 1970s and early 1980s and justified on the basis that labor disputes, a free press and freedom in the circulation of information would hinder the nation's economic progress. Labor unions had been united under the umbrella of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) but in 1982, the Trade Union Amendment Act was passed, which made the function of organizing and representing members a secondary objective for unions: first consideration was to be given to promoting rapport between workers and employers. Workers were also to be encouraged to identify more closely with the interests of their employers. The relationship between the ruling party and NTUC are openly admitted to be "symbiotic," and the relationship become closer in the 1980s as union leaders were co-opted into the ruling party. Also, in the 1980s, union strength was eroded when large, general unions were converted into house or industry unions. Since the early 1970s, annual wage recommendations have been negotiated by a tripartite council of government, labor union and employers' federation.9 During this period, former government ministers or seconded top civil servants were appointed as chair to the board of newspaper organizations (radio and television stations were already under government control). Beginning in the late 1970s, education was subjected to increasing rationalization and hierarchy: students were streamed into the monolingual, normal, express and gifted programs according to their 'learning ability' as determined by interminable testing (it was considered that neither class and ethnic differences nor socio-cultural environment impacted on this 'learning ability'). Resources for vocational and tertiary education were also distributed according to projections of industry's labor needs. 8 The 1980s was Singapore's decade of statistics. When it was found (according to statistics) that Singapore's female university graduates had either found less familial routes to self-fulfillment than marriage and motherhood or that they were postponing these, a government organization, the Social Development Unit, was set up to persuade such women of the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, and to introduce them to suitable men. Graduate women were also enticed into reproducing beyond the usually recommended two children: for example, the third child of a female university graduate could hope to get into a good school whereas the third child of a working class woman would be assigned low-priority status in school placement. Throughout the 1980s, the nation also saw the increased application of principles of pragmatism, instrumental rationalization and eugenics to social, political, labor and cultural issues. The National Productivity Board spearheaded and supervised a massive program whereby workers competed to increase their productivity and develop their skills at 'team' work. The factory floor was saturated with Work Improvement Teams. Everything, even cultural representation, was reduced to the 'bottom-line' as Masters in Business Administration took control of organizations, including the media. The domain of politics was not to remain untouched by this corporatization of life. Government soon became only a matter of making decisions based on statistics. As such, Singapore's first-generation political leaders of lawyers, writers, journalists and labor activists stepped down to make way for technocrats, corporate financial controllers, bankers, industrialists and military personnel. Rationalization meant compartmentalization, the tightening of boundaries between disciplines and discourses. Even as radical politics and new knowledges the world over were interrogating old divisions and classification systems, in Singapore, politics was heralded as the domain of politicians and parliament. In 1989, religious claims were barred from the political domain by the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act. Earlier, amendments had been made to legislation regarding the registration of societies in order to prevent organizations which are not political parties from making statements on issues which are outside the purview of their declared functions and constituencies (Chua, 9 Communitarian 196). Henceforth, a citizen had to be a member of a political party in order to critique government actions and policies. Even then, no indemnity was provided for opposition politicians' criticism, not even at election rallies or in parliament (they could be sued for slander/defamation or be found guilty of contempt of Parliament). Political representation in Singapore is democratic in form but its spirit has been tamed. When two opposition politicians were elected in 1984, breaking the People's Action Party's total domination of Parliament for two decades, Lee Kuan Yew, then prime minister, suggested that the one-man one-vote system may not be adequate for Singapore. Though democratic elections still continue, curtailment of opposition parties, and modifications made to institutions of democracy amount to a mockery of democratic representation.10 But the two, culturalism and pragmatics did come together in one discursive field in the 1980s. This decade saw the proliferation of the discourse of race and the linking of this discourse to that of pragmatic government. Racist stereotyping that duplicated colonial stereotyping of days gone by was normalized again in this decade as its premises were repeated ad nauseam by political leaders and given due uncritical attention in the media. Unequal distribution of wealth was analyzed not along the axes of class but of race, and public debate in the media discussed economic performance in terms of cultural values, religion, and racial traits (uncannily similar to Weberism). Accordingly, Malays were found to be the poorest ethnic group, and colonial anthropology suggested the reasons for this: their 'laziness' and an Islamic culture that discouraged positive attitudes towards modernization and economic progress! Again, their non-stellar performance in education was attributed to lack of ambition due to Islam and their supposed preference for a rural lifestyle. Their comparatively different colonial economic history from that of other racial/ethnic groups,was never considered to be a factor.11 The discourse linking race/ethnicity to economic performance also precluded the possibility of viewing Malays' and other ethnic minority groups' poor economic performance as a failure of government or of perceiving the structural presence of racism within the social/economic system. Population control was also organized 10 on a racial basis: Malays were found to be reproducing at a faster rate than other racial/ethnic groups and were advised to bring down their birth rates. Political representation was racialized during this period too. For the first time, in the 1988 election, certain constituencies were restricted to political representation by candidates from specific ethnic/racial groups. In the group constituencies, the teams of three or four fielded by each party had to comprise candidates from the various racial groups, Chinese, Malay and Indian. Only politicians of the appropriate skin color could address particular ethnic/racial issues (which were sometimes unjustifiably racialized, for instance, poverty and some social problems were treated as 'racial' problems). Community development was also racially organized. The Malays were provided with an organization that would see to their social, cultural, educational and economic needs, headed by a Malay minister. In time, the Chinese and Indians were also given separate self-help organizations. But if political representation was racialized, it was also pragmaticized so that the various ethnic groups received representation in proportion to the size of their community. In practice, this often ran contrary to the democratic principle of equal representation (political and cultural) of minority groups. For instance, disparate viewpoints on issues affecting the majority Chinese population are more completely aired in parliament and their implications fully debated, whereas minority concerns often receive token attention, and are more easily brought in line with state interests. The discourse of race has also had the effect of fragmenting Singapore into separate racial/ethnic enclaves—though race/ethnicity became a matter of continuous public discussion and was considered the source of all types of 'truth' and knowledge, the practice of ethnic culture itself became increasingly de-politicized and privatized. Ang and Stratton properly trace this body of practice to the divide-and-rule colonial strategy employed by the British in Malaya (77). But it was the publication of George Lodge and Ezra Vogel's book National Ideology and Competitiveness in 1987 that allowed the Singapore government to use the discourse of race/ethnicity more completely as an instrument of political control. Discourse analysis allows us to place this book 11 within a discourse stretching back to the 1970s where conservatives in the West/US sought to displace the location of liberalism and conservatism from the axis of democracy to that of economic utility. It was a strategy aimed at allowing the public to forget the contradiction between democracy and right-wing ideology, and to remember instead the connection between the latter and economic success. Weber was re-cited for the purpose. The themes of the discourse were the same-culture (not violence nor systematic exploitation of the 'other') determined economic performance, and a pragmatic culture guaranteed economic success. Weber's discourse obviously aimed at evading the split in interests between the white capitalist and white labor by substituting race interests for class interests. The structural links between capitalism and colonialism permitted the solution whereby the 'racial other' was placed between the white capitalist and the white worker and declared to be the common enemy. But in Weber, the concept of a national culture, the inversion of colonial racial othering onto the self, also offered a regulatory technology whereby the nation could be simultaneously homogenized (taken beyond class struggle and minority politics) and steered towards greater capital accumulation—but first culture had itself to be rationalized, rendered the same as instrumental rationality. White Protestant (rationalist) ethnicity/culture/race then was used to cover over the class differences between the white capitalist and the worker in a discursive sleight of hand where cultural description slipped into cultural prescription— because all whites were the same (pragmatic, Protestant, rationalist), they had to be made the same. According to this account, ethnic culture was equated with original (and hence authentic) identity but modern life could make one 'forget' it; hence, re-ethnicization was a process whereby one was brought into contact with one's true self. Lodge and Vogel's (and now Samuel Huntington's) more recent discourses are remarkably similar to Weber's in that they view Chinese 'Confucianist' culture in terms similar to the latter's discussion of the cultural superiority of the Protestant religion. But where Weber had represented Confucianism as the 'other' to Protestantism, the neo-Orientalists depict Confucianist values as similar to Protestant ethics. But, again, the 'racial other' is used as the mediating element to resolve a split between the white classes. Only, this time around, the 'racial other' is not the enticing 12 object of colonial exploitation but a possible subject of future exploitation of the West. Again, culturalist economics emerges as the answer of a perceived threat to colonial domination to the question of domestic problems posed in the metropolis. For Singapore's political leaders, Lodge and Vogel's concept of national ideology tactically dissolved the obstruction posed by a multi-cultural/multiracial society to social/cultural engineering. Weber's discourse was restricted to cultural homogenization/rationalization of a mono-cultural/mono-racial society, and pre-1987 neo-Orientalism had re-applied Weberian discourse to an East Asian context constructed as monoculturally neo-Confucianist. Thus, prior to 1987, the ideology of 'Confucianism' (re-interpreted as the same as Protestant ethics) could only be used to culturalize the majority racial group, the Chinese. Now, however, the concept of a national ideology made possible the idea of a coherent, central (hence national) culture that crossed racial/ethnic boundaries. (This development of Weber's discourse in late twentieth-century US was no doubt influenced by the changing racial composition and racial ideologies of America.) Also, Lodge and Vogel's simple binaristic typology of world cultures as "communitarian" and "individualistic" (an uncanny repetition in the sphere of cultural anthropology of the Western political binaries of toryism and liberalism) and their totalization of all Asian cultures as "communitarian" made it possible for the government to embark on a program of cultural homogenization and rationalization by identifying a set of core "Asian values" as common to all ethnic/racial groups in Singapore. Additionally, this set of values was represented as the same as the already rationalized and orientalized Confucianism. Thus, the Confucianization (cultural rationalization) of the entire nation could now proceed under the banner of "Asianization." Since Lodge and Vogel had not only linked culture but national cultural coherence to economic performance, cultural reproduction now entered more properly the domain of pragmatic government. As I have indicated, during the late 1970s and the 1980s, the two technologies of ethnic culture and instrumental rationality or pragmatic government were largely deployed separately as regimes of power. Now the state attempted to put in place a specific "national ideology" where 'Asian/Confucian' values exactly duplicated the terms of Western right-wing (pragmatic), anti-democratic ideology: the core Confucian/Asian values were described as the prioritization of society's interests over those of the self; o f placing the nation (read state) above ethnic communitarian and familial claims; that government would proceed on the basis of "consensus" and not "contention"; that society should aim for racial "tolerance" (a displacement o f a previous post-independence emphasis on racial "equality"). 1 2 It was characteristic that Singapore leaders never considered deploying the concept o f national ideology until it received authorization by the West. A t least two newly formed post-colonial nations, Malaysia and Indonesia, had already preceded the West in inventing and using the concept of a national ideology—but for a genuine post-colonial purpose o f allowing important aspects o f indigenous culture and religion (Islam) to share political center-stage with Western principles of democracy. 1 3 Singapore leaders however quickly made up for this negligence by suddenly paying attention to Malaysia 's Rukunegara and Indonesia's Pancasila. These two national ideologies were not discursive technologies aimed at producing economically efficient citizens, but their post-colonial character was used to pass off Singapore's own project o f a national ideology as also post-colonial, as an assertion o f cultural difference from the West. But Singapore's own proposed national ideology conspicuously lacked real ethnic content. In fact, it sought to weaken rather than strengthen the political status of ethnic claims, as I w i l l argue in chapter 2. However, the form and rhetoric of the Malaysian and Indonesian concept of national ideology provided a useful strategy whereby non-ethnic practices such as political quietism and authoritarianism could be legitimized through their 'ethnicization.' Despite the 'anti-colonial ' rhetoric o f the Confucian revival, there are continuities between this discourse and that of colonial racist epistemologies/anthropologies. Adrian Chan has documented the appropriation o f this American discourse by East Asian governments for purposes o f political legitimization/control. He has also related this to the genealogy of Confucianism in dynastic and communist China. The enunciative modality of the discourse shows it to be a neo-colonial technology of power that relies for its success on participation from the East Asian ruling class and on political 14 rhetoric. The generators of the discourse are American conservatives with close links to US government (Samuel Huntington, for instance, was an adviser on foreign policy to President Clinton); the proliferators and disseminators of the discourse are East Asian intellectuals, though the dominant ones such as Tu Wei-ming are American nationals. East Asian political leaders take up the discourse and depend on political rhetoric to effect the verbal, logical and metaphorical slippages that cover up the discourse's multitudinous contradictions and the obsolescence of its concepts. In Singapore, conceptual contradictions in the discourse include the simultaneous upholding of the concepts of ethnic identity (cultural singularity or difference of Chinese, Malays and Indians), and of Asian identity (cultural sameness or lack of difference). The Singapore government's deployment of the discourse in bringing about major cultural changes in the population has relied on the transformation of colonial 'description' of the 'other' into a prescription for 'native' identity. Here, two deeply contradictory concepts of identity as essence and as construction illogically come together in a trumped up national ideology—where Singaporeans are exhorted to behave (perform) their identity as 'Asians'/'Confucianists' because they are essentially 'Asians' and 'Confucianists.' The discourse, while ostensibly using the rhetoric of post-colonial identity, is structured by colonial epistemologies that naturalize racial/ethnic difference. Ignoring historical facts, it also repeats colonial representations of Chinese/Asian people as the 'other' to the West: that Chinese and Asians subscribe to authority; that they don't believe in equal rights since their cultures emphasize hierarchical relations both at the familial and social/political levels; that they sacrifice individual interests to those of the family and the community. The discourse's domain of validity (the Foucaultian concept referring to the means used by a discourse to ascertain the truth/falsity of its statements) turns on a colonial anthropology that dehistoricizes and essentializes cultures, and frames knowledge of cultures reductively and erroneously in terms only of their alterity to the West. I am not suggesting that Singapore's political leaders have been duped by Western neo-Orientalists into misrecognising their continued colonial subjugation as post-colonial subversion. Rather, they 15 recognized the usefulness of Western neo-Orientalist racist culturalism as a strategy to banish and pre-empt resistance politics from the Singapore scene. Colonial, binaristic 'whites versus the rest' notions of race/ethnicity, mediated by post-colonial discourses of'native' identity, have allowed them to racially 'other' resistance politics as 'Western' and to ethnicize authoritarian politics as 'Asian.' A comment by Dr. Goh Keng Swee in the early 1970s illustrates Singapore's political leaders' quite different, non-Orientalist perception of Singapore culture. Dr. Goh had said in 1972: If we are honest with ourselves, I think that we can detect in contemporary Singapore a strange but striking similarity of intellectual climate and social values with Victorian England, together with much of the cruelties and hypocrisies of that age. (Qtd. in Hill and Lian 195) Yet Dr. Goh as Education Minister then went on to lead the project to 'Confucianize' Singapore youth in schools in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It is not difficult to find a British, colonial discursive heritage in the Singapore government's call to Singaporeans to return to their native cultures. We recall that in Culture and Anarchy. Arnold circumscribes culture in an elitist fashion as the traditional, the "best that is thought and known" by a society, which also gave a people their national/racial identity. As Said observes in Culture and Imperialism, this concept of culture allows people to "differentiate 'us' from 'them,' almost always with some degree of xenophobia" (xiii). "[Rjecent 'returns' to culture and tradition," he adds, "accompany rigorous codes of intellectual and moral behaviour that are opposed to the permissiveness associated with such relatively liberal philosophies as multiculturalism and hybridity" (xiii). In the same work, Said contextualizes Arnold's notion of culture within the discourses of British imperialism and domestic politics: in 1865, the year before Arnold published his seminal work, he had spoken for the British Governor of Jamaica's retaliatory massacre of Jamaican Blacks and the declaration of martial law; Culture and Anarchy is also "set plumb in the middle of the Hyde Park Riots of 1867, and what Arnold had to say about culture was specifically believed to be a deterrent to rampant 16 disorder—colonial, Irish, domestic" (130). In Singapore, the elitist Arnoldian concept of culture was deployed in a discourse that sought to exclude 'Western' concepts of democratic rights as well as the cultural claims of minority ethnic groups from national culture. It also privileged an upper-class Chinese culture and attempted to foreclose cultural and political changes ensuing from the nation's location within global capitalism and the transnational flow of information/culture. By suggesting that cultural hybridity (Westernization) and change meant cultural erosion, cultural inauthenticity and a lack of moral vigor, the Arnoldian discourse of culture was used to shut out influences of women's movements, radical identity politics and other threats to state power. Weber's and the neo-Orientalists' pragmatization/rationalization of culture also permitted the objectivization of national culture and race/ethnicity. Cultural identity was, it would seem, a palpable and coherent object, a collection of values, rather than a complex of relations often between contradictory values with different historicities or subjectivity viewed as process, that changed over time. As object then, cultural identity could be manufactured and synthesized and spoken of in terms of mathematical and Platonic logic. Singapore's discourse of cultural identity and ethnicity often relied on conceptual procedures of intervention that involved the application of the rules of mathematical discourse. For instance, Asian identity was represented as that which was common (the lowest common factor) between the various Chinese, Malay and Indian ethnic cultures, as a discrete element present in all these cultures—as if cultures were a conglomeration of separate and non-related parts. As in Platonic discourse, the generic character of an object (where it was the same as all other objects in its class) was also the object's essence, the core of its being. The similarity of certain values in all the Asian cultures, that which was generic to them, became their 'essence,' the characteristic aspects of an Asian identity. Just as the dialectics of culture/ethnicity were ousted from the discourse, so too was the concept of modernity de-dialectized. According to this discourse, modernity transformed ethnic culture/tradition but not to the extent of changing its 'essence.' Modernity and tradition then were viewed as compatible, 17 and 'modernized tradition,' it would seem, was not a nonsensical concept. Thus Confucianism/Asian values could be modernized without alteration of its 'essence'—again, there was appeal to the operations of synthesis and integration as if modernity and tradition were systems of compatible parts that could be interchanged for each other without causing structural disruption. One recognizes the concepts of engineering re-applied to the social domain. It is never acknowledged in this discourse that it only admits one particular meaning of modernity—where it functions as a euphemism for capitalism. Banished outside the discourse are the meanings of modernity that are associated with radical democratic politics and other progressive political/social/cultural ideologies; of modernity as anti-despotism, anti-feudalism, etc. The central themes of American neo-Orientalism, the connection between national culture and economic performance and the importance of cultural coherence for the latter, themselves dictated that the only possible authorities for this discourse could be the government/political leaders. They were the only group of people who could claim expertise in both culture and economics. At the outset then, any pure cultural knowledge was marginal to the discourse as was pure economics. Since the discourse bridged a non-perceptual field (culture) and the visible, positive arena of economics, it could not utilize the epistemological methods of science. It had to rely largely on the rhetorical modes of narrative and interpretation. Placed in the hands of political leaders, it also relied on political rhetoric. Thus, it is not surprising that the public discourse of national ideology, of Asian/Confucian identity in Singapore often depended on translating/transporting very different concepts/objects from one field of meaning into another. For example, the similarities between Confucianism and Malay culture were established, first by pointing out that the Confucianist emphasis on obedience to the king was the same as the contemporary practice of "communitarianism," of placing society's interests before self; and, then, by arguing that this Confucianist notion of righteous behavior was the same as Malay villagers' political culture of gotong-royong. These translations elide the differences in mode of production and political organization (dynastic politics here equals village politics equals modern national politics) and hence 18 testify to their status as pseudo-knowledge. Again, the discourse's status as a pseudo-knowledge is suggested by the fact that its speaking of the 'truths' of Malay, Chinese and Indian culture has rarely involved the citing of discourse from these culture's major texts—this tends to suggest rather the incommensurability between the archives of Asian ethnic cultures/religions and that of these contemporary interpretations of Asian identity. Rather, the discourse has involved emotional rather than intellectual appeal. Foucaultian discourse analysis applied here shows the alarming coming together of colonial anthropology, colonial political ideologies (including eugenics) and the post-colonial discourse of identity as a relatively new technology of power in formerly colonized societies. Involving a collaboration (at least in interests) between the ruling classes here and those in the West, a silent 'contract' appears to have been drawn up where the post-colonial society benefits economically and the state's power is enhanced in the era of global capitalism, but not so much as to disturb Western dominance. Yet current Foucaultian critiques of this discourse made inside as well as outside the nation appear to have been unsuccessful in dismantling it. The use of national culture as a political and economic instrument continues unabated in Singapore together with the expansion of the politicized domain of national culture into the private sphere, to include not just political ideologies but also family values. Despite this increased and oppressive intrusion into the life of the Singaporean, and the authoritarian image it has gained in the international press (dutifully reported in the local media as instances of Western bullying), the ruling party went on to grab all the seats at the January 1997 elections and increased its share of the votes. It would seem then, as post-Marxist psychoanalytical critic Slavoj Zizek has already pointed out in his essay "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?," that there is a large gap between a subject's critical knowledge of the operations of an ideology and the desire to hold on to that ideology. Foucaultian discourse analysis then can only deliver us to that which Zizek defines in the same essay as the point of "enlightened false consciousness" (29), where the subjects of ideology "know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as i f they did not know" (32). A s Zizek points out here, such critical unmasking of an ideology, of the conditions that determined it, the knowledge of the ways in which the ideology distorts the real conditions o f existence, still leaves intact the seemingly 'post-ideological' phenomenon o f "cynical reason" where the subject of ideology (usually a member o f the ruling class who benefits from the ideology) "recognizes . . . the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but. . . still finds reasons to retain the mask" (29). The ideology of cynical wisdom then counters such anti-ideological "probity, integrity" by conceiving these "as a supreme form of dishonesty," viewing "morals as a supreme form of profligacy" and "truth as the most effective form of a l ie" (30). Since mere knowledge of ideology's misrepresentation of social reality is not sufficient to dismantle the ideology, Zizek reworks the classical definition of ideology in "How D i d Marx Invent the Symptom?" and suggests an approach which provides a place for discourse analysis but which also goes beyond it. The illusion (misrecognition) of ideology, he says, lies not on the side o f knowledge (of knowing what one is doing) but on the side of social reality, of activity (doing): although people know what they are doing, they still do it "as i f they do not know it. If, as Zizek says, "the fundamental level of ideology . . . is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that o f an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality i t s e l f (33), then production o f knowledge o f an ideology's distortions of social reality w i l l only prompt the social unconscious to rework its fantasy to once again accommodate the same desire and the same activity. A n y revelation o f social facts that contradict an ideology's representation o f reality w i l l only be recycled as arguments in its favor, as in cynical wisdom: it w i l l not disturb the hold (through desire) that the ideology has on the subject. The more productive approach of ideological critique would be to decipher our desire as it articulates itself in the fantasy-framework and expose how ideology as social fantasy functions to enable us to escape a deadlock in our desire (where we seek to negotiate our own desire with the contradictory desire of the big Other, the Symbolic Order, the political-social-cultural-historical environment we are caught in). 20 The most crucial contribution Zizek makes to Marxist symptomal readings of the ideological text (made possible by Lacanian articulation of Freudian theory with semiotics) is to treat the ideological text as fantasy, with important implications for ideological critique in general and for the role of the cultural critic as political interventionist/activist.14 In what follows, I will venture to defend my decision to combine Foucaultian discourse analysis with Zizek's theory of ideology to investigate recent developments in Singapore's discourse of national identity, an approach to cultural study attempted by Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." We are already familiar with the fecundity of Foucaultian analysis in allowing one to see the 'big picture' of a discourse, often leading us to make unexpected discoveries about the epistemological and historical 'roots' of an ideology (by tracing its concepts, objects and themes to previous bodies of knowledge), and to map the route by which discourse transforms itself from an incorporeality of knowledge into a materiality, operating as a regime of power that acts on the bodies of people. But it does have its limitation such as its treatment of ideological critique as involving only an epistemological deconstruction and not also a dismantling of desire. I will argue that Zizek's post-Marxist application of psychoanalytical theory in ideology critique compensates for some of the limits of discourse analysis; that the two theoretical approaches are complementary, not contradictory as Foucault claims. Zizek's approach to political critique is especially useful in moving beyond the historical/Western constraints of discourse analysis by working into its perspective, the difference of post-colonial subjectivity, and post-colonial identifications, not to mention its potential for beginning an inquiry into the post-colonial unconscious as a cultural and material determinant.15 I will also attempt to differentiate Zizek's methodology from that of previous Marxist and non-Marxist appropriations of Lacanian theory for cultural studies. Reserving Zizek's theorization of the element of enjoyment in ideology for later, I will begin instead by differentiating Zizek's psychoanalytical theory from that of more conventional, previous applications of Lacanian theory to cultural studies. By doing so, I hope to provide the reader with a background to key concepts of Zizek's methodology. 21 In Zizek's reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is not that division between social/public and private (individual) fantasy formations or between political doctrine and the literary and mass-cultural texts that represent it that one finds in previous Lacanian approaches to cultural studies. If we recall, Freud privileged literary over other discourses as relating to the phantasmatic, to the unconscious, to the world of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, a distinction further developed by Julia Kristeva. She related poetical language to the revolutionary workings of the imaginary, which she feminized. These distinctions rely on the positing of the unconscious and imaginary as 'irrational,' 'illusionary' or 'dreamlike' opposing them to reason, the 'real' and the positivity of knowledge. Literature and cultural texts were considered to be products of fantasy in that they involved imaginary identifications that were more motivated by the unconscious than were other discourses. Political and economic discourses, by contrast, located in the domain of the symbolic, were perceived as involving a distantiation from the unconscious since it entered into relations with social reality and social motives, and relied on reason to produce the real as a system of relations of similarities and differences. The further division of literary and other modes of cultural representation into individual versus collective fantasy also limited Lacanian criticism of culture to being only a reading, on an analogical level, of private fantasy, which translated into social fantasy only when deciphered as a trend in cultural representation. James Donald rehearses the older position in "On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies," describing cultural theory and psychoanalytical theory as two separate discourses, where culture and the subject, social relations and psychic reality are mismatches (1-9). Donald's identification of the key question for cultural theory as being the failure of ideology is the theoretic conclusion that was always-already his theoretic premise that there is a sacred area in the subject that the ideological does not touch (7). Since, according to Donald, cultural texts contain symptoms of the failure of ideology to take the full measure of subjectivity, the application of psychoanalytical theory to cultural studies can only lead us to "awareness of failure of identity in the psyche and closure in the social" (8). This separation, closing off of the category of ideology from subjectivity and the psyche 22 from the social, delimits the treatment of questions of cultural representations of national identity, for example, to their failures, their blockages, a futile venture when the real problem is the ideology's success in political mobilization of the people. Such an approach also implies that the fantasies in individual cultural texts can only be read as analogies of authors' dis/identifications with the nation, reducing the immediate terms of the text (for example, familial relations) to resemblances at another level with questions concerning national dis/identifications rather than as elements constituted, caught within and shaped by the identifications and desires required by the network of the signifying formation that we call the "nation." These problems are surpassed once we realize that all identifications made at the symbolic level, whether in political discourse, in fiction, or in private reverie, are the social.16 There are two types of identifications, the imaginary and the symbolic. While imaginary identifications involve setting oneself aside in identifying completely with the ideal-ego, a person that we misrecognise ourselves as being, symbolic identifications involve a distance of difference. One knows that one is not the person who is one's ego-ideal but rather that one is (or wishes to be) similar to him/her in certain respects. At the symbolic level, one identifies, not with a person, but with a signifying feature, a trait (Zizek, "Che Vuoi?" 104). But, as Zizek points out, an imaginary identification is caught in or derives from a symbolic identification with a particular gaze (as opposed to the image of imaginary identification), the place or position within the Symbolic Order from which we appear to ourselves to be likable. As Zizek says, a woman may imaginarily identify with a feminine image, but the place from which she does so may involve an accession to a paternal injunction ("Che Vuoi?" 106). These symbolic identifications, in that they involve the negotiation of the subject's desire with the lack (desire) of the big Other, are social and ideological. As Jacques-Alain Miller says: On the level of the I, you can without difficulties introduce the social. The I of the ideal can be in a superior and legitimate way constructed as a social and ideological function. It was moreover Lacan himself who did this in his Ecrits: he situates a certain politics in the very foundations of psychology, so that the thesis that all psychology is social can be treated as Lacanian. 1 7 Once it has been established that all identifications are at the level of the social, Zizek is then able to make the theoretical move that all linguistic formations from literature to political and economic discourse are ideological, and further that they are equally determined by the fantasy and the unconscious. Recent readings of Lacanian psychoanalysis by Zizek, Butler, Kaja Silverman and Diana Fuss hence reclaim all semiotic products as fantasy, and theorize symbolic identifications as involving a trafficking between the Symbolic, Imaginary and the unconscious. This includes hysterical discourses which refuse the identifications commanded by the Symbolic Order: as Zizek says, the imaginary identifications of the hysteric are constituted by identifications with a certain gaze of the Other (that outside itself), that gaze which makes the subject likable to itself ("CTze VuoiT 106). Even in the discourse of the neurotic, where the subject's identifications and hence the creation of meanings have stalled at a particular master signifier, the subject still remains the subject of signification and testifies to the alienation of the self by the signifier, the social. In this reading, only psychosis and non-linguistic, corporeal hysterical symptoms make up the outside of symbolic (social) identifications. In psychosis, the unconscious has not split from the ego and the subject is unable to differentiate between the registers of the Symbolic and the Real, so that it regards the word and sign as real objects rather than as signifiers of its place in society. Zizek connects ideology/discourse to the unconscious and fantasy through the concept of subjectivation. The current emphasis on separation and the process of "subjectivation" over that of alienation by the signifier and the interpellation of the subject is due to the inadequacy of the latter concepts in theorizing the "territorialization" (to use a term by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) of desire involved in identification and of the hold that dominant ideologies have on the subject. The Lacanian concept of "alienation" where language (the master signifier of the name-of-the-father) alienates us from being is not yet the formation of the subject. As Bruce Fink says, language merely 24 makes us "place holders" in the Symbolic Order (53). It is with separation from mother-child unity, enforced by the Symbolic Order's incest taboo, that we enter being, by desiring. Desire gives us materiality, allowing us to impact on the world. Before separation from the mother (the mother is not yet the Other), the child sees itself as continuous with the mother. With separation, the subject is divided from the mother's desire (the mother embodies the Other). The subject retains however a rem(a)inder of the lost mother-child unity (the Lacanian objetpetit a), repeating it through fantasy, the psychic imaginary mechanism by which it gives itself an illusory sense of integrity (Fink 59). Confused about what the Other wants of it, the subject solves this mystery of the desire of the Other by interpreting the Other's lack (the Other's desire), substituting the original objet petit a with another object, and offering itself as the Other's object of desire that will fill that lack. The concept of subjectivation stresses that it is not just the subject which is alienated by the signifier: the Other is also barred by the signifier (Zizek, "Che Vuoil'" 122 ). Dominant ideology (the Symbolic Order) emerges by repressing certain meanings. These repressed meanings are the lack (the hole) in the Other. The subject goes through subjectivation by trying to cover up this lack, this hole in the other, doing so by negotiating the repressed meanings with the dominant meanings/values of the Symbolic Order. This work of subjectivation is accomplished by the unconscious, which utilizes fantasy as its discourse. Fantasy, dream, parapraxes, and hysterical symptoms as the discourse of the unconscious (Silverman, Subject 61-86 ) arise in the gap between the Real (the biological, which we can never comprehend in its entirety, including the drives) and the social constitution of reality. Separation effects the process by which our originally objectless libidinal and aggressive drives are controlled, bound, by repression, sublimation and by the assigning of aims/objects (object cathexis), all of which are determined by the Symbolic Order. Desire comprises the bound energy of the drives, which are now accorded object-aims. Before separation, the child relies only on the primary (imaginary, visual) processes of fantasy to fulfill its needs-where hallucinations of desired objects serve just as well as the real thing in securing 25 gratification (where signifier and signified/referent are not yet distinguished). At this stage, only primary identification is involved, where the infant identifies itself with all its objects of pleasure. But beyond separation, the subject is increasingly faced with pressures from the real world. The route to sensual gratification can no longer operate in accordance with the pleasure principle now that pleasure enters into tension with the demands of the Other. Instead, guided by the reality principle, ways and means must be found to obtain the objects of pleasure as well as to ensure the continued and steady provision of pleasure in the face of the desire of the Other. The very maturation of the self and the business of procuring pleasure for oneself depends then on coming to terms with and negotiating the desire of the Other. It involves repressing or controlling certain sources of enjoyment forbidden by society (for instance, the unlimited pursuit of sexual pleasure) and substituting/sublimating other objects for the original mother-child unity (hence, limiting the objectless drives to specific aims). The secondary identifications (at the social/symbolic level) urged by ideologies are phantasmatic representations of the self which utilize the devices of the unconscious, condensation and displacement (already initiated by the primary processes and involving visuality as well as libidinal attachment to objects) as well as metaphor and metonymy (involving language), to effectuate repressions and drive-objectivations (object cathexis). Life heretofore consists of the quest for the missing objetpetit a, where the original objetpetit a, the rem(a)inder of mother-child unity, is endlessly and perpetually sought in a series of object substitutes and displacements, a quest doomed to failure since desire was, in its original state, objectless. Both primary (imaginary) and secondary (linguistic, symbolic) psychic processes participate in the emergence of these object-causes of desire and in the secondary, symbolic identifications they occasion. Except for the neurotic subject who is unable to conceive of the Other's desire as anything but a demand on itself, successful interpellation only occurs with "subjectivation," where the subject makes the Other's desire its own. Zizek describes fantasy as a "screen against the desire of the Other [Symbolic Order]" ("Cfe VuoiT 118). Expressed in the formula $ <> a (the desire of the alienated, barred subject for objet petit a or its substitutes), fantasy, together with dreams, neuroses and hysterical symptoms, is 26 the mechanism which makes subjectivation possible by moving repressed desires/objects of desire (the lack in the Other) from the realm of the censored to signification. In other words, unconscious thoughts/desires/objects sneak back into the symbolic signifying network, as the return of the repressed, disguised (in order to bypass the figurative and literal 'censorship authorities' of the Symbolic Order) via the primary (imaginary, visual) processes of condensation and displacement and the secondary, symbolic 'rational,' linguistic processes of metaphor and metonymy. At this point, it seems as if the fantasy is a 'revolutionary' agent of the unconscious that subverts dominant ideology (Symbolic Order) by introducing into it forbidden, anarchic desire. Rather, the opposite is true. As with hysterical symptoms, fantasy enables the subject to escape from repressed desire by working it into the social signifying network (as ideology), thereby introducing oases of enjoyment in the Symbolic Order or dominant ideology (Zizek, "Che Vuoi?" 121-28). This enables the subject to effect the secondary identifications commanded by the dominant ideology by inserting an element of enjoyment into them. As Silverman says, we are accommodated to symbolic laws and the mode of production by an "ideological facilitation," and we accede to this ideological facilitation through fantasy and "imaginary captation" (Male 2). Ideology then is a creation of fantasy that interprets our symbolic mandate and teaches us how and what to desire. But the Lacanian concept of subjectivation also suggests that the ego/subject is not a free agent but comes into being with an original collaboration with power. Butler usefully describes the nexus of the Symbolic Order and power: it is not a law; that is, contravening it will not produce psychosis. She suggests rather that the Symbolic should be "rethought as a series of normativizing injunctions that secure the borders of sex [and other identifications] through the threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic unlivability" (Bodies 14 -15). Earlier, Butler had already opened the door for regarding the rigid 'laws' of the Symbolic, the taboo against incest, and the heterosexual imperative as themselves phantasmatic creations (Gender 27-8). Current applications of psychoanalytical theory then de-sacralize the Symbolic as being merely the dominant ideology, the one that is in power. 27 Alternative (non-dominant) ideologies then may be conceptualized as a phantasmatic response by which the subject plugs the hole, the lack, in dominant ideology. The meanings repressed by the dominant ideology find a place in the newer, alternative ideology but still remain attached to the primary concepts o f the dominant ideology. A s such, every ideological doctrine defines itself in opposition to another but often repeats the same terms. The oppositional socialist and democratic ideologies remain anchored in the concepts of "justice," "freedom," and the "people," differing only in their interpretations o f these concepts. This is also how alternative ideologies of ecologism or feminism differentiate themselves from each other. But not only is each ideology permeated with the enjoyment o f meanings repressed by the dominant ideology (that is, each ideology is a verbalized hysterical symptom), within itself, every ideology contains its own symptoms (the symptoms within a symptom), where meanings and identifications forbidden by the ideology, its foreclosures as the repressed, traumatic, unsymbolized kernel o f the Real return to the ideology in disguised form, marking, again, moments o f additional enjoyment, o f the subject's investment of desire in the ideology. These symptoms within an ideology contradict the main tenets of an ideology but they are also the points where an ideology is permeated with enjoyment and exerts its hold on the subject. A s Zizek comments, an ideology takes into account its own limitations, its failures, in advance—and paradoxically, these limitations, failures, provide the very support the ideology needs ("Che Vuoi?" 126). Analyzing the figure of the "Jew" as the symptom in Fascist ideology, Zizek comments that the construction of the "Jew" was a symptomatic displacement and condensation from the unconscious of that very repression of social antagonism that constituted Fascist ideology ("Che Vuoi?" 125-28). The "Jew" then marked the contradiction of Fascist ideology, which claimed that society was a united formation, but it also thereby, paradoxically, provided the basis of desire for its support. Foucault forbids the psychoanalytical interpretation of discourse because, as he shows in The History of Sexuality, psychoanalysis served as a technology o f power to support the West's colonialist and capitalist interests, organizing and regulating sexuality and morality, criminalizing and pathologizing 28 identifications, institutionalizing material practices such as surveillance as well as influencing the production of knowledge for these purposes. The History of Sexuality also attempts to discredit "repression" and "unconscious desire" as concepts adequate to understanding the productive, material and political effects of discourse and ideology. He does this by illustrating the inaccuracy of the "repressive hypothesis" of Victorian sexuality, noting that Victorian sexuality in fact involved an unprecedented multiplication and proliferation of sexualities and their discourse. Yet, his narrative is not inconsistent with the theory of ideology-as-symptom which would explain that the Victorian project of repressing and regulating sexuality and its identifications was made possible by the leakage of repressed desire into the project, that the nineteenth-century regulation of sexuality and identifications was precisely accomplished by increasing public interest in the sexual. As Butler argues from Zizek, repression operates as a modality of productive power, so that what is ousted or abjected is produced as the "troubling return" that re-articulates the "symbolic horizon" (Bodies 20-23). The Real is void, unsymbolizable (there is nothing behind the signifier and cultural representation). But the symbolic, constituting itself by repressing certain notions and identifications, creates the Real through these repressions and drive-objectivations as a material force that returns to discourse, modifying it but also penetrating the discourse with enjoyment, which in turn materializes our attachment to the discourse/ideology. We can, however, only know the Real (and the Real of our desire) through its failed symbolizations in discourse, as the symptoms of the Real of our desire. Zizek, she says, theorizes political signifiers (in the case of this dissertation, that of the concepts of communitarian democracy and Asian identity as offered by neo-Orientalist discourse) as performatives which, by becoming sites of phantasmatic investment, effect the power for political mobilization" (Bodies 20-1). With Zizek's theory of subject-formation, identity as performance, as phantasmatic construction, does not involve a free subject and agency. Subjectivity is acquired through the citing of power, where the formation of the I has involved an original complicity with power (Bodies 15). The subject, Butler 29 argues, is constituted through exclusion and abjection, an abjected outside which is inside the subject as its constitutive repudiation (Bodies 8). If identity is performativity in the sense that it cites a dominant cultural construction, then resistance must involve, not the rejection of identifications, but the re-citation of abjected identifications, to force the abject term into re-signification (Bodies 21). We must take stock of the "constitutive exclusions that reconsolidate hegemonic power differentials, exclusions that each articulation (of race with gender, sexuality or class, etc.) was forced to make in order to proceed. This critical reflection will be important in order not to replicate at the level of identity politics the very exclusionary moves that initiated the turn to specific identities in the first place" (Bodies 118). Zizek comes to the politicizing of abjection by another route. He argues that the political hold of ideologies can be eased by revealing these as symptoms, as displacements of our desire. A hysterical symptom, enabling the escape from repressed desire, depends on the disguise of our desires and motives. Decoding it dissolves the symptom and brings the subject of ideology in touch with itself, in identification with its symptom. We also have to unmask the fantasy, the illusion, involved in the 'hysterical' symptoms, that behind the illusion there is really nothing, and thereby dismantle the element of enjoyment embedded in the ideological identifications. Zizek quotes Lacan in insisting that fantasy be traversed, i.e. we must become conscious of the Real of our desire and extricate this from the desire of the Other ("Che Vuoi7' 124-28). Interpellation and subjectivation involve the hystericization of the subject, the questioning of the Other's demand, with ideology (social reality) produced as hysterical symptom, as a coping mechanism, as the response of fantasy in providing a screen for the desire, the lack, the hole, in the Other. That which Lacan defines as hysterical discourse is hysteria that is not brought under control, and involves a failed interpellation, where the subject of knowledge refuses the master's (dominant) discourse and maintains the contradiction between conscious and unconscious (Fink 133). But, ultimately, over and above his/her imaginary identifications, the hysteric identifies with the desire of the Other and makes a transferential illusion. Psychoanalytical decoding of the symptom de-hystericizes the subject and frees it from the 30 transferential illusion. We can only become free agents and extricate ourselves from our constitution in power by knowledge of the unconscious, desire, and the workings of fantasy. Foucault's analysis of sexuality as a discursive construction in The History of Sexuality, despite his denunciation of psychoanalysis, itself could be read as an attempt to de-hystericize the contemporary Western subject of history. Foucault occupies a hermeneutic position inside the space vacated, repressed, by conventional, dominant historical interpretations, to show that the "repressive hypothesis" of Victorian sexuality is itself a symptom, a phantasmatic displacement, disavowal of current repressions that allow the perpetuation of the regime of sexual/gender regulation. The critique of ideology as social fantasy is not inconsistent with discourse analysis, as Zizek observes ("Che Vuoi?" 125). The latter estranges ideology, deconstructing its production of meaning as a spontaneous experience. Discourse analysis produces knowledge of the paths an ideology takes towards meaning. It illustrates how the ideology is constituted as a unified semiotic field by constraining meanings through the discursive mechanism of ideological quilting. Here, the metonymic endless slippage of signifieds, of floating signifiers, is halted by a primary signifier at a certain nodal point (the Lacanian point de capiton quoted by Zizek) that quilts these signifiers and delimits their meanings in terms of each other—where each signifier is reduced to being a metaphor of another signifier. For instance, in the ideology of communism, the concept of "class struggle" symbolically over-determines the meanings of peace, freedom, democracy, feminism, ecologism; but over and above that, the meanings of "class struggle" itself emerges, not as object but as a structural relation, in opposition to meanings contained by the ideology of capitalism. The rigid designator, the name of an ideological doctrine, in this case "communism," the signifier that unifies a given ideological field, is not then a site of plenitude of meaning: rather, it reveals the ideology's emergence from a lack in the Other, that the ideology is only a structural relation of difference (lacks objectal identity) from another ideology. The rigid designator is then the point where ideology's 'objectiveness' is shown to be nothing but a pure signifier (a signifier without a signified), the point where an ideology, meaning, has erupted from non-31 sense, from lack. But as Zizek says, despite an ideology's emergence from desire, it is always striving towards objectivity—to wards constructing an object of desire, an objet petit a for its subjects. This is the "sublime object of ideology," which denies its own phantasmatic, performative character (and comes into being with this disavowal) by producing itself as an object of knowledge (sometimes this can result in a science) and materializing itself in social/political institutions and non-discursive practices. Foucaultian analysis works at identifying the objects and concepts of a discourse and the rules o f their formation, the discourse's strategic choices of themes, and its enunciative modality. These de-familiarize the discourse's semiotics. It also allows us to see that the materialization o f an ideology is the means it uses to hide its nonsensical character, to escape from itself as lack—where the ' real ' 'objective' world around us is merely its organization by the terrorism of the signifier. Through discourse analysis, we view the ideological sublime object, the rigid designator, in its emptiness, seeing behind the representation, the trick of "ideological anamorphosis," an "error in perspective" where nothing appears as something (Zizek, "Che Vuoi?' 99). A genealogical analysis can accomplish that which Zizek describes as "the first task of analysis," which is "to isolate, in a given ideological field, the particular struggle which at the same time determines the horizon of its totality," that is, where the species, the difference in meaning, pretends to be its own universalization or genus, absolute meaning ("Che Vuoi?" 89). Foucault's methodology of comparing and contrasting discourses, his enterprise o f unearthing the genealogy of a discourse, is also useful in uncovering the unacknowledged (though not repressed) meanings o f an ideology. It reveals ideology as symptom, as a system o f the displacement and condensation of previous themes, objects and concepts. But it is psychoanalytical criticism that can take ideological critique further, towards extracting from ideology its kernel of enjoyment, performing the final operation required to disentangle the subject from ideology's desiring hold. This can be done in two stages. First, one has to read a particular ideology as symptom, as that which fills in the lack, inconsistency, of other dominant ideologies. This consists of showing how a contemporary ideology is permeated with enjoyment as the hysterical attempt to escape 32 from (by incorporating) desires repressed by the dominant or previous ideology—by symbolizing the specter, the ghostly intimation of the Real that is repressed in the earlier ideology. Then, one examines the ideology itself for its moments of contradiction, where that which the newer ideology represses returns as hysterical symptoms that paradoxically provides the bases for the ideology's support via enjoyment-where the ideology's lack, its hole or inconsistency turns into the surplus of enjoyment. That which Zizek terms the "spectral analysis" of ideology can be performed by reading ideology as a Freudian dream ("Spectre" 7). Differentiating his concept of ideology from Althusser's, Zizek says that the "fundamental level of ideology . . . is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself" ("How Did Marx" 316). We cannot know the "real state of things" because ideology as fantasy distorts our perception of reality, including the world of objects. The Real can only be known through psychoanalytical criticism as the traumatic Real that ideology attempts to escape via pathological, paranoid beliefs. A method to decipher the Real of our desire, that which structures reality, is then the analytical tool required to 'awaken' us from our ideological dream. When Zizek links ideology to dreams, he is not making an analogy, a metaphorical comparison, but rather asserting the two as identities, as species of the discourse of the unconscious, with structural similarities. Ideology is a dream, is fantasy, in that the repressed, banished into the unconscious, returns and works itself into the signifying network of the Symbolic. Insofar as a dream (ideology) has a manifest content, it is at the level of the Symbolic and of conscious desire. But it also has a latent content, which shows the manifest content (the Symbolic itself) to be a condensation and displacement of other ideas/things/desires/relationships/ofe/e/s petit a. The Symbolic, as has been mentioned, is itself a product of fantasy, an engagement with the Imaginary dimension, its semiotic process using both secondary (linguistic) and primary processes (visual, but also involving childhood memories and attachments to objects) to create meanings. The secondary psychic processes use the resources of language, metaphor and metonymy, to quilt different signifiers (as representatives of objects, subjects, 33 relations) into an identity, while primary psychic processes load some signifiers with affect. An ideology as a "knot of meanings" uses the signification process to phantasmatically represent race/gender/class/sexuality and other separate concepts in terms of each other, limiting and determining their meanings, excluding some meanings and including others. The rhetorical process (as in metaphors and metonyms) also allows one signifier/signified to be displaced, hidden from view, by reference to another signifier/signified, accounting for the duplicity of language, where it means something other than what it says. We can locate the imaginary, latent content of ideology by identifying its nodal points, its points de capiton and disentangling its quilting of meanings. But we have not yet completely approached the structural distortion of reality by ideology as dream, nor decoded its element of enjoyment as hysterical symptom of repressed desire, as the point of deadlock in our desire between a conscious and unconscious/repressed desire—where the dream/ideology gentrifies repressed desire by incorporating it within the signifying network and plugging the hole/lack/inconsistency in the Symbolic Order. Zizek, taking his cue from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, says the latent dream thought is not yet the unconscious ("How Did Marx" 296-300). In ideology, a 'normal' train of thought, seeming to depend only on secondary processes and conscious desire, is already distorted by the primary process of the unconscious because the conscious desire has been short-circuited by an unconscious wish, derived from infancy (involving the libidinal/sexual and aggressive drives) and in a state of repression. It is this distortion that needs to be decoded. Primary processes feature in the semiosis in enabling a signifier, especially the primary signifier or rigid designator to be cathected (invested with desire) and misrecognized as the object-cause of desire, as the objet petit a (at the level of the primary process, words, images, are mistaken for its referent, as the object of desire itself). As opposed to the latent or manifest content of a dream, unconscious desire or the unsymbolizable Real only announces itself in the dream's form itself: 34 This [repressed, unconscious] desire attaches itself to the dream, it intercalates itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text. . . . In other words, its [the desire's] only place is in the form of the dream: the real subject-matter of the dream, the unconscious desire, articulates itself in the dream-work, in the elaboration of its 'latent content. ("How D i d M a r x " 298) One way o f approaching this is to identify and decode as symptom the 'strange' elements in the ideology-dream, those which are its contradictory, unheimlich and/or seemingly unnecesary, superfluous aspects. We need also to examine the thought possibilities that the ideology/dream represses, the repression that is its condition o f emergence. Then we can consider how this repression shapes the dream/ideology, surfacing in objects of desire which are also fetishes (the desired displacements o f the original objet petit a). The psychoanalytic concept of the fetish, a thing/object o f desire that disavows the traumatic absence o f something, substitutes something for the nothing/lack, and, which, paradoxically also marks or commemorates the loss of the original object (Mulvey, Fetishism 5) is important for ideological critique in that it identifies the moments of enjoyment of an ideology which are also related to repressed desire. Symptoms may be differentiated from fetishes in that the former are more symbolically overdetermined, emerging from the process o f condensation where several different meanings are collapsed into one ideological object, whereas the fetish involves displacement. Also , the investment o f desire in the symptom and the enjoyment it procures is less evident to the subject. The subject usually thinks that it hates its symptom whereas it knows, at a conscious level, that it enjoys its fetishes. Structured by both primary and secondary processes, the production of ideology by fantasy allows, as Butler points out, various vectors of power (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) to work together to support the other's imperatives. This means, she says, that racism is not merely an analogy o f misogyny, of gender power, but that the regime of racism often collaborates with the regime of male power and that the heterosexual imperative is also used to secure the borders of race (Bodies 18) . 35 Silverman makes the same point in her description of the operations of fantasy. The Symbolic Order is for her a society's "dominant fiction," which brings together family ideology, including the law of language and the law of kinship structure (the primary ideologies) as well as elements from secondary ideologies that relate to the mode of production (ideologies of race, gender, class, etc.). Within fantasy, the subject assigns itself subject-positions from which to desire. Fantasy also frames and constructs the objects to be desired. But since the central signifier of social unity is the paternal family and its primary signifier of privilege is the phallus, male and female are dominant fiction's most fundamental binary. Other ideological elements (for instance, race or class) exist in a metaphoric relation to the terms of sexual difference. But because the primary and fragile penis-phallus equation requires support from the secondary ideologies, a breakdown of belief in secondary ideologies can cause a crisis in the primary ideologies, and vice-versa (Male 15-51). Zizek also accords the culture of masculinity a central place in ideologies. On one level, the rigid designator that quilts an ideology and gives it its name has the same unconscious logic by which the penis is fetishized and equated with (male) power. If the fetishization of the penis/phallus emerges from the psychic need to disavow castration/lack, so too does the rigid designator as fetish disavow its own emergence from lack by acting as the point of plenitude of meaning. Just as the phallus is signifier of its own absence, the rigid designator too signifies ideology's emptiness, its irruption from nonsense. But for Zizek, the rigid designator, the Lacanian point de capiton, which stabilizes meaning, is the phallic signifier, and the original illusion on which meaning depends, that of selfhood, is already linked to myths of male power. As I hope to show in this thesis, a cultural neurosis, then, inflicted by an ideology on a society, first affects the ideology of male identity. Zizek's account of ideology as social fantasy enables me then to treat political discourse concerning Singapore's national identity (including speeches made by politicians) on the same level as that of Singaporean cultural texts (novels and plays) as phantasmatic representations concerning national identity. It also enables me to distinguish between them as fantasies accruing from dissimilar interests. 36 Further, it allows me to use cultural texts by Singaporean citizens as phantasmatic representations that, unwittingly or otherwise, reveal the real meanings of Singapore's current discourse of national identity i.e. that stage the unsavory demands that this discourse makes on Singaporeans' identifications, which are covered up by the fervent, anti-colonial rhetoric of the ruling political party. This is radically different from previous applications of psychoanalytical criticism to cultural studies where the collective un/conscious is viewed, as I said earlier, as a commonality among individual fantasies that manifests itself as trends in cultural representation. This de-classed, de-gendered, de-sexualized and de-ethnicized reading of the collective un/conscious cannot then reveal the different political pressures that the social/Symbolic Order, in the unity of its desire, makes on different sections of the nation, resulting in them taking on dissimilar subject-positions and trajectories in desire. It is only when the collective unconscious is conceptualized as the difference that is also the same (where the nation as a unity can only come into existence by fragmenting, differentiating the people) that ideology as social fantasy can be analyzed in its complex project of negotiating meanings of gender/race/ethnicity/class/sexuality for the establishment of hegemony. Zizek's theory of ideology also allows the post-colonial indigenous critic to speak from outside the historical conditions of the post-colonial Western diaspora in which Homi K. Bhabha's post-modern deconstructive-psychoanalytical theorization of the nation's ambivalence is situated. Though Bhabha overrides the distinctions between the private and the public, psychic and the social, treating them as metaphors of each other, he poses different problems of binaries, in particular, the opposition he makes between the "pedagogical" and the "performative" ("Dissemination" 139-70). By setting the two off against each other, he argues that the nation is "Janus faced," ambivalent in its doubling and splitting. Yet, for all this ambivalence of the nation, its "ghostly spectral other" that causes a "disjunction in the 'sign' of the social" ("A Question of Survival" ), men do markedly unambivalent things such as taking up arms for their country. Bhabha's deconstructivist project of opening up a space within the discourse of the nation for the resistance of marginalized groups doesn't recognize its own emergence as the 37 subject's phantasmatic answer to the desire of the Other. Dirlik rightly points out that the surfacing of post-colonial criticism in the West has coincided with the economic/political/cultural interests of Western dominance in global capitalism, where multi-culturalism strategically meets economic interests. It also fits into the context of Western political culture. Bhabha's separation of the performative from the pedagogic is itself a disavowal of the possible coming together of the two in post-colonial resistance ideology—where resistance appropriated by official ideology produces sites of enjoyment that can only strengthen dominant ideology's hold on the subject. The "performative" could be the fetish disavowing the lack (of resistance) in the Other. I do not hold that the performative is impossible, but suggest that it doesn't occur as often as Bhabha supposes and that it is usually accompanied by compromise to the desire of the Other. Combining pyschoanalytical criticism with discourse analysis, this thesis examines the American ideology of the new Orientalism as a neo-colonial technology of power that aims at taming the Eastern threat to Western dominance in global capitalism, while also exerting a regulatory function at home. In chapter 2,1 focus on a function the ideology took on at a point where Western power interests intersected with those of the Singapore government: the new Orientalist ideology was used, via a discourse of national identity, to entrench the Singapore government's control of the population, to render them docile, and therefore ever more suitable for colonial exploitation. By reading into that which was repressed by the Singapore government's project to institutionalise a national ideology, an attempt that spanned 1988 to 1991,1 show that the new discourse of national identity emerged from government fear of growing ethnic identifications and notions of radical democratic identifications that were infiltrating from the West, which could only increase with the nation's deeper involvement in global capitalism. These threatened economic performance (or at least the power of the capital-owning class) as well as state power. There was, no doubt, also the additional awareness that global capitalism eroded the power of the state, minimizing its role. The "national ideology" project then was a symptom that served both to deny as well as deal with the threats to state power and to overcome public resistance 38 by taking into account the people's desire. American Orientalism was the discursive means by which the Singapore government strove to repress from public consciousness the fundamental antagonism and difference in interests between the state and the people-that radical democratic politics and ethnic consciousness may be inconvenient for the state but healthy for the nation, and, quite possibly, even positive economic forces. The threat to state power was thus repressed from public consciousness by re-figuring it as a threat of the fragmentation of the nation itself and o f national power, where nation and state became metaphors for each other. The state pre-empted public rejection of its project of loosening the hold o f ethnic culture by fetishing ethnicity itself. The fetishization of Asian values is a key contradiction o f the "national ideology" project and can be identified as a point of jouissance, where enjoyment makes its way into the ideology. If the "national ideology" project aimed at uniting the nation, as it claimed, then why did it take up the ethnicity cause which would only fragment a multi-ethnic nation? I w i l l argue that the escape from the state-people antagonism dictated that the power/unity of the people had to be fragmented but in a controlled manner so that the antagonistic relation to the state could be displaced as antagonistic relations between the people. The concept of "Asian values" was the paradoxical point at which the people could recognize in each other both their self and their 'other.' A complex o f feelings that had been buried and disavowed through the founding years o f the nation, the 1960s to the late 1970s-that o f feelings o f inferiority to the West and ethnic-cultural divestiture, were now reawakened by the state and enabled the people to identify with the government's ethnicity project. Singaporeans' imaginary identifications with their ethnic culture then was rooted in the gaze of the West—a relation of inferiority to the 'other' involves an identification with the symbolic gaze of the 'other,' through which the self is found to be wanting, thereby resulting in hostility as a reaction against and disavowal of the identification. The people's desire for ethnic culture, however, was both tapped and compromised, reconciled with state desire, by the resort to fetishistic illusion—where the anti-democratic ideology o f authoritarianism disguised itself as ethnic culture in the same sil ly way that the breast as fetish is mistaken for the penis. This fetishistic 39 misrecognition o f political authoritarianism as "As ian" was, of course, made possible by American neo-Orientalism, which had conflated the two. The figuring of an ethnicized, Asian modernity is another hysterical symptom in the ideology where the people's desire for moderni ty-which is also the desire for Western, liberal culture emerging from Singapore's increasing affluence and its participation in global capitalism—was compromised. The two desires, for ethnic culture as wel l as (Western) modernity, were then brought together in the fetish of an ethnicized, Asian/Confucianist 'modernity,' where the modernity originally desired, that of progressive political ideals, was displaced by its very opposite, that o f a regressive, authoritarian political culture, and its repression disavowed by misrecognizing it as involving the liberalization of authoritarianism! The notion of a "communitarian democracy," included in the national ideology and borrowed from the West, is yet another interesting symptom that needs to be decoded. I argue that this notion marks Singaporeans' refusal to cut off their dependence on the West and to surrender their recognition of its superiority: this refusal is the contradictory limit o f their assertion of their cultural difference from the West and their anti-colonialism. The trauma that the notion of "communitarian democracy" allows Singaporeans to escape from is not that of losing their ethnic cultures but rather the fearful notion that the assertion o f their cultural difference could involve a cutting off of Western support/recognition. That is why the entire ideology asserting Singaporean national difference from the West depends for its support on its very contradiction: that Singaporean difference be authorized by the West and that in being different from the West, Singaporeans are recognized as only being truly Western, more quintessentially American than the Americans themselves. I develop this argument in chapter 3 within the context of the discourse o f national identity and difference from the West that emerged through the 1994 episode of Singapore's caning of an American expatriate teenager, Michael Fay, for vandalism. Critics such as J. Clammer and Michael H i l l and Lian K w e n Fee have deemed the Singapore government's project of 'ConfucianizingV 'As ian iz ing ' the nation a failure, especially since the National Ideology White Paper, though issued, was never tabled for 40 discussion in Parliament. I argue in this dissertation that the project did not need to be taken any further since its real objective in re-culturalising the people (which was something other than the Confucianizing/Asianizing of the population), was already beginning to work. Literature and drama produced in the 1980s and 1990s, which I will deal with in chapters 4 and 5, provide evidence of this. Meanwhile, in chapter 3,1 argue that the Michael Fay episode, which brought the government into conflict with the Clinton administration, enabled Singaporeans to more completely subjectivate the desire of the Singapore government, to identify their desire with that of the state's. The discourse in Singapore, as it surfaced in the local media, which often also responded to American representations of the event, made the neo-Orientalist ideology's territorialisations of desire more apparent and also unmasked some of its hidden meanings. Coincidentally or otherwise, the event will stand out in Singaporeans' memory as one that made it immensely enjoyable for Singaporeans to identify with the government's authoritarianism. The government was able to legitimize its authoritarianism as a force protecting Singapore's sovereignty so that the Singaporean's drive to self-preservation was equated with state power. But the discourse also revealed that the government's emphasis on Singaporeans' Asian identifications was really a bid to increase disciplinary control of the people (especially through the use of the law), to legitimize an unquestioning attitude to state authority, and to intensify the patriarchal role of government: in the event, the Singapore government and all its ideologues began to look like duplicates of right-wing sections of America, which came out in support. The discourse of the Fay caning will be used analytically as the site that exposes the links between Singapore's new nationalism and its relations with the US. The discourse made starkly visible the role Singaporeans were playing in accepting American neo-Orientalist constructions of themselves: their enjoyment, it would seem, accrued from viewing themselves through the American gaze as its fantasy object of desire, that they were in fact what Americans wished dearly to be but couldn't. The incident also enabled Singaporeans to finally align their desire with that of the state through a displacement of Singaporeans' antagonism to the 41 state/authority onto the American state and its authority~a displacement that also simultaneously allowed them to disavow their American identifications. Newspaper editorials during the Fay episode also made clear some o f the subject-positions Singaporeans had to adopt in order to subjectivate the government's desires, that o f the sado-masochistic and disciplined soldier being among them. The episode also suggests that the new nationalism was disrupting the illusions that make (male) subjectivity possible: the equation o f the symbolic father with the actual father and the penis with the phallus (power). This chapter w i l l approach the problem of a crisis in male subjectivity emerging from state usurpation of the subject's power, a crisis complicated by the sense o f inferiority to the West, but this w i l l be taken up in greater detail in chapter 5. In this chapter, however, I w i l l begin the work of suggesting that there is a difference in the West's utilization o f the discourse o f race as a technology o f power in the era of global capitalism as compared to the days o f Empire. In chapters 4 and 5,1 selectively study the literary works written in English that emerged in Singapore during this period, privileging the texts that subjectivate the state's desire. I restrict myself to works written in English due to my own linguistic incapacities. But English is also the language of the ruling class, who dominate national culture, the nation's dominant language as the medium of instruction, commerce and government, and the original language of state ideology. It also needs to be said here that the state's project of Confucianizing/Asianizing the people, which first begun in the early 1980s, and led to the promotion o f a "National Ideology," was an attempt to radically change and renege on a previous nationalism. From the moment o f the independence movement to the late 1970s, Singaporeans, as a nation comprising multiracial immigrants and an indigenous Malay population, had been persuaded to dis-identify with their motherlands. Instead, they had been urged to view themselves as culturally hybrid, to recognize both their Western colonial heritage as wel l as their ethnic cultures and to acknowledge the transformation of the latter by the diasporic experience. The concept o f 'nativism,' o f 42 ethnic purity, was repressed in this nationalism, and syntheses of the various cultures (as in the 'melting pot' concept of multi-culturalism) had been encouraged. My intention here, as in the previous chapters, is to make evident the successful hegemonization of the new discourse of nationalism and to trace the process by which this was achieved. I examine literary texts in order to rectify a blind spot in previous critique of the Singapore government's attempt to change national identifications where assertions about the success/failure of a dominant ideology such as a nationalism have been made without listening to the voice of the people.18 Literary texts also make manifest the alterations in Singaporeans' identifications and desires that the new nationalism requires. As products of fantasy that identify with the state's desire by assigning new objects of desire and placing the subject within a position from which to desire them, they unmask some of the unacknowledged meanings of the discourse. Within the context of a marked change in nationalist ideology—where identifications and desires encouraged in a previous nationalism become the repressed of the new nationalism—literary texts can also be useful in tracking down short-circuits in meaning, which could be signs of cultural neuroses. In chapter 4,1 focus on a literary genre, the historical novel, which emerged from the 1980s, during the period of the new nationalism. I locate these popular historical novels as cultural representations that try to hegemonize the new nationalism, not only due to their content but also because they were written largely by Singapore's best-known writers who are or were, at the time of writing, connected to the government, especially to the Ministry of Education, which was deeply involved in the project of formulating and promoting the new nationalism. I use these historical novels to argue that the re-interpretation of Singapore history as exclusively involving the Chinese diaspora, where the nation was re-signifed as Chinese, was an integral aspect of the process by which the Singaporean came to cathect the new nationalism. By doing so, I render irrelevant the government's frequent denial of its racist/culturally chauvinist intentions: even if their denials are true, it does not subtract from the new nationalism's racist pull. I argue that the enjoyment procured by the new nationalism is that of the 43 return of the repressed: in the older nationalism emphasising racial/ethnic equality and meritocracy, the majority Chinese population had been forbidden to assert their dominance. A few novels in this genre, such as Philip Jeyaretnam's Abraham's Promise and Rex Shelley's The Shrimp People, have been written by writers from minority groups, countering the Sinicization of Singapore history, but I reserve comment on the extent of their subversion of the new nationalism for another occasion. I also argue that the feminist forms of women's historiography/autobiography that these historical novels have tended to use is symptomatic of a hysterical displacement of repressed feminist desire, that the Sinicization of Singapore history/nationalization is interwoven with its masculinization. With the gaining of national independence and perhaps only by dint of economic circumstance, Singapore women were liberated from the confines of domesticity, and their freedom often operated as signifier of the nation's modernity. But the new nationalism, if it had to be cathected as an assertion of "Chinese" identity, also brought the feminist desires of these writers into conflict with the ethnic desire. They repress and attempt to escape from, negotiate, their feminist desire by feminizing Singapore's Chinese past, but thereby also representing it as a myth of the original abandonment of the female by the male-where even female strength is construed as lack of the male. Anti-feminist content is then symptomatically poured into feminist literary forms, as if to disavow the writers' betrayal of female freedom. Since feminism was, by and large, a Western cultural import, Western culture is implicitly represented in these texts as the force (of modernity) that effeminized Eastern culture, alienating it from its 'manliness,' but also as that which 'perversely' masculinized Chinese women. In many of these texts, the male-female struggle is also the East-West and tradition/modernity struggles, where the female/West is demonized and modernity is feminized, i.e. it requires a (male) completion. The ambivalence of these novels' attitudes towards feminism/the West/modernity remains however: women/the West/modernity remain strong, if not positive, forces, while the patriarchy/the East/tradition, are rendered as mysteries, as the focal point of desire that has not yet visibly manifested itself as object. Since the new nationalism urges ethnic identifications that are beyond Singaporeans' knowledge, given their over-culturalisation by 44 the West and their earlier dis-identifications from their native past, this mysteriousness of the East as object of desire is not surprising. Also, perhaps, the repressed desire for Western culture directs Singaporeans' enjoyment of their ethnic identifications—where these can only be desired on condition that they remain vague, without content, as the signifier without a signified, or where ethnic culture only functions as the fetish that disavows its own absence by substituting it with its own 'other,' in this case, with Western interpretations of ethnic culture. (Perhaps this explains the lack of public concern with the emptiness in the state's description of ethnic culture and with the nonsensical character of the state's discourse of an ethnicized modernity.) These novels also indicate that subjectivation of ethnic culture is accomplished at the level of guilt and shame, painful emotions motivated by the escape from but also commemoration of the enjoyment incurred from wrong-doing. In chapter 5,1 argue that the conflictual economy of desires and identifications between the new and previous nationalisms appear to have plunged at least one section of the ruling class, rising young male urban intellectuals (including the nation's top journalists, who dominate media representation of state ideology) into cultural neurosis. Fink theorizes that interpellation of the subject which does not involve subjectivation is at the level of neurosis, where the desire of the Other cannot be experienced as identical with the subject's desire but as the Other's demand ($<>D) of the subject (72-6). Neurosis occurs, he says, when the master-signifier of the Other's demand cannot be dialectized, brought into relation with other signifiers. For instance, in subjectivation, we often de-sexualize and repress/control libidinal energy by substituting/sublimating it with non-sexual objects such as intellectual activity. In neurosis, the repression is refused, sometimes due to external circumstances that awaken repressed memories. The fantasy cannot, in neurosis, enable the subject to make the substitutions in objet petit a that enable escape from repressed desire. One of the key repressions in patriarchal societies is that of the lack of power of the (male) subject in his castration by the signifier (the Symbolic Order). This is repressed by denying it in a process where the penis serves as signifier of the phallus, as an illusion of the power that the male subject truly lacks. Also, the Symbolic Father is equated with the actual father and castration is 45 'forgotten' through the incest taboo where the son is promised the paternal legacy of the Symbolic Order if he will only denounce his mother and identify with his father (Silverman, Male 40). In neurosis, the male 'subject' cannot perform these illusions: the penis only reminds him of his lack of power. The superego (the repressed memory of his Symbolic/actual father's real power, which unconsciously determines and limits his identifications and desires), has emerged from retirement in the unconscious, so that the male subject cannot phantasmatically misrecognize its obedience of the Other's injunctions as signifier of its own desire and power. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a body of plays were written and produced in Singapore which fixated on the implications of the new nationalism for male subjectivity. These plays try unsuccessfully to reconcile Western norms of masculinity (which had been cathected in the previous nationalism, where the rights of cultural and political self-representation and self-assertion are viewed as masculine characteristics) with Eastern (or what are perceived as Eastern/Confucianist) standards of male identity, which supposedly involve deference to authority. Their attempts however only bring the subject into an encounter with the specter of male lack, which is either hysterically escaped by the adoption of reversionary sexual/gender politics, or by a neurotic halt in the manufacture of meaning. In the former case, a reliance on non-realistic genres of drama symptomatize an inability to deal with historical-cultural realities. Dramatic resolutions of cultural conflicts are only made possible by stereotyped character representations or by the intervention of dream sequences that permit the plays to elide their intellectual inconsistencies. The primary signifier of meaning, the penis/phallus, is placed under close scrutiny by Singapore's journalists, the nation's experts in the manufacture of meaning, and their dramatic work attempts to desperately combat an awareness that the master-signifier signifies nothing. But the same plays simultaneously resort to a contradictory post-modernist deconstruction of meaning. Transvestism is repeatedly figured in these plays as a forbidden Utopia of cultural hybridity (where West and East enter into equivalence with sexual difference), a reminder of happier, past moments of the nation, but it is also the vehicle that allows a post-modern deconstruction of truth, power, and 46 sexual/gender/racial/cultural authenticity. In at least one play, the post-modern disavowal of meaning is then utilized to argue for an identification with the government's desire on the level of subversive mimicry. However, the surgical cut of a sex operation (castration in the male-to-female changeover) is the Real that reminds the reader of the subject's de-masculinization, of the impossibility o f subversive mimicry. In another play, castration (the experience o f male lack) is figured as the only means to recover male power, except that the ensuing power can only be imaginary, since the male body has already been fragmented. Post-modern discourse appears to be the route by which the male Singaporean subject escapes from the trauma that, perhaps, the signifier does mean something, signifying a responsibility to history and to one's desire. In these plays, post-modernity involves the abdication o f post-colonial identity/responsibility. Post-modern discourse permits repressed desires o f resistance, freedom and self-assertion of one's desires (which are tied to male identity) to be expressed and vehemently enjoyed but also to be denied or overcome as excesses in meaning, as fictions. When meaning is conceived as excess, we have the moment o f neurosis itself, with post-modern cultural representation appearing as the disavowal of that neurosis. In Singapore at least, accidentally or otherwise, the American ideological task of turning post-colonial societies into docile markets and sources of labour would seem to be a mission accomplished. In the plays dealt with in chapter five, post-modernity shows up its limitations, at least for the post-colonial subject—it may be the route to disengaging ourselves from the controlling fictions o f power, but it stops short of allowing us to rectify the oppressions of history. Although Foucaultian discourse aided me in my project, it also showed up its limits. A s Spivak has pointed out in "Can the Subaltern Speak?," despite claims that he is moving beyond a historical analysis that is harnessed to the sovereignty of the subject (which does not permit the understanding of history as discontinuous or non-teleological), Foucault does assume that the centered (Western) subject with his unified desire is the agent o f discourse (87 ). Foucault provides a place for desire in his archaeological method, admitting that "discourse may in fact be the place for a phantasmatic representation," and that even knowledges that have crossed the 47 threshold o f scienticity themselves can be internally constituted through the "imaginary practice o f discourse" (Archaeology 68). But his notion of desire, elucidated in a conversation with Gil les Deleuze, 1 9 is, as Spivak observes, that of the desire of a centered subject: it is coherent and monological so that desire can be equated with the interests of the subject, and is transparent. For Foucault, a discursive statement is the place of a unity o f desire, though he substitutes the coherence o f the enunciating subject, the "transmitter of signs," for that of the subject of the statement (Archaeology 92). He only admits contradictory desires at the general level of the discourse, dispersed among some o f its disunities, the "points o f diffraction of the discourse" (where alternative series of statements and alternative, contradictory themes, objects and concepts form in the same discourse), prompting the different affiliations it may make with other discourses and allowing it to serve different functions in a field o f non-discursive practices. This is useful though in showing that alliances o f interest and desire can materially strengthen a discourse, enabling it to function more successfully as a technology o f power. Foucault 's notion o f desire as centered plays an important role in his theorization o f revolutionary agency or consciousness. A revolutionary consciousness, for him, is itself a discursive event, the occurrence o f which depends on the laws of formation of discourse and the capacity these provide for transformation of that discourse and the emergence of a body of revolutionary knowledge (Archaeology 194-95). For Foucault, then, the important question concerns how a revolutionary consciousness became possible-not as a matter o f subjectivity (the psychoanalytic explanation) nor only of economic circumstances (the Marxist explanation)~but as involving the positivity o f a discourse as its condition o f possibility. For the post-colonial subject, however, the matter of split desires, of split subjectivity (where discourse itself has placed him/her in a position of desiring to be the same as the colonizer and different too) almost guarantees that revolutionary consciousness as a unified discursive event w i l l be endlessly deferred, since the subject wants to be in two contradictory places at once, in the place o f colonial subjection and in post-colonial freedom. For him/her, the emancipatory epistemological operation does not just involve identifying the discursive places where power exercises itself as 48 knowledge. The post-colonial subject also needs to know how discourse can work to compromise, manage and constitute desire, and thereby hinder revolution. Zizek ' s examination of discourse as the medium of the generation o f desire has the added advantage of identifying possible future developments in discourse, something that Foucaultian discourse analysis is unable and unwill ing to do. A s Foucault says, an archive emerges in its positivity the greater the chronological distance between it and the subject of investigation so that its discontinuity from our knowledges "separates us from what we can no longer say" (Archaelogy 130). Genealogical analysis then reveals history as 'otherness.' Shaking our faith in the teleology of human consciousness, it shows "our reason" to be "the difference of discourses." Armed with such an agenda, Foucault has no inclination to "sketch out in advance the face that we w i l l have in the future" (Archaeology 130-131). If, as Foucault says, the time of discourse is not the time of an individual speaker o f the discourse—the difference lying in the gap o f the speaker's lack o f knowledge of the rules o f discourse that s/he is playing by (Archaeology 210-1 l)--so is the time of Foucault's discourse and his politics not that o f the post-colonial subject's. The Western subject feels the burden of too much "face" (coherent selfhood) and seeks release from it; the post-colonial subject, on the other hand, suffers from too little "face" (selfhood) and gazes with desire at the future as the place o f identity, o f one's coming into being. The latter then cannot afford to let the future take care of itself and feels anxiety that the present and its state of desire may delimit the future. But, more significantly, my quarrel with Foucault lies in the limitations o f his treatment o f transformations within a discursive formation, given my project's interest in the change that took place 20 in the 1980s and 1990s in Singapore's discourse of national identity. One could describe this change in Singapore's nationalism as merely one involving a different theme or strategic choice (a switch from that o f West-East cultural hybridity to one prioritizing a regressive return to 'ethnic' identity) but where the concepts (of identity) and rules of formation of objects and enunciative modality have remained the same (where, for instance, as in this case, the concept of identity is still tied to notions of hybridity but 49 has merely exchanged component elements from that of West-East to that of Eastern-modern). Or it might concern a discursive transformation that has emerged due to differences in the conditions of enunciation (such as in the non-discursive functions the discourse now serves where cultural identifications have been linked to the cause of economic progress), which may also involve a change in its positivity and a different affiliation to other discourses. For Foucault, contradictions in a discourse enter the subject into different series of statements in the same discourse or into a different positivity altogether. Where the discourse concerns that of identity, these, however, are not the only options as the experiences of post-colonial subjects plunged into cross-culturality have shown. He does not theorize a situation where the subject, split in desire, is caught in the middle of two contradictory series or positivities, unable to fully enter either, unable to reconcile the contradiction. In Foucault's discourse analysis, there are no moments of neurosis, of the inability to re-generate meanings. Foucault also abhors interpretation, the core activity of Zizek's critical methodology, though, as I have suggested, Foucault himself cannot separate historical "description" from "history as interpretation" in The History of Sexuality. But, further, his opposition to history as interpretation, which he identifies with a hermeneutics of history as the progressive linear development of consciousness, appears to be a response to a perception that "subjectivity always lags behind manifest history"~which I take to mean that the level of thought, of cultural awareness of a people is often discontinuous with actual historical events and the 'other' consciousness these reveal (Archaeology 1 2 1 ) . This is, of course, a perception that is limited to Western experience of history: their conquests, their revolutions, their exploitations, their fascisms were, or seemed, often to be in excess of dominant cultural values. Suspecting that an inaccurate definition of subjectivity as hidden, latent and unified in meaning (as the interiority of historical events and texts) may have been the obstacle to genuine historical knowledge, he seeks another definition of subjectivity: where subjectivity, neither individual nor collective, but involving social relations, is that which can only be known in its congealment into the materiality, positivity (exteriority) of a discourse, known only in its manifestations. But for the post-colonial critic, whose experience has 50 been the rather too overwhelming relation between manifest history and subjectivity, where the former has had the latter in its grip, constraining it, crushing it, the more politically liberating move appears to be that o f mapping the oppressive operations of history (as it is solidified in discursive formations and knowledge) so as to release the 'other' repressed subjectivity that could be the agent o f a new history, of new discourses, especially of identity. I hope to show that Zizek 's articulation o f Lacanian psychoanalytical theory with Marxist theory and discourse analysis allows the post-colonial critic to avoid the aporia, the abyss of meaninglessness, that post-modern theory has rendered visible without also falling into the trap of essentialisms. Post-structuralism, as Zizek points out, stresses the aporetic moment, where "the process of enunciation always subverts the utterance" ("Which Subject" 151), as the final moment in signification. It misses thereby the other unconscious but productive half of the signifying act, that where a discursive representation points to another representation that it tries to repress but which is the condition o f the former's emergence. In Zizek 's example, a picture about Lenin's wife in bed with a youth is also a picture about Lenin being out of town, the latter unrepresented event making the former possible. We need not only to look at the field of representation as vorstellung, as that which is positively represented, but also to take into account the signifier's function as the Freudian "vorstellungsreprasentanz" as that which "f i l ls out the place of the missing representation" ("Which Subject" 159). In this way, we can approach the object in the subject, its materiality as desire, where signification fills out the void of the lost objet petit a. Post-structuralism, Zizek says, makes the ultimate assertion of metalanguage by essentializing language as the gap between the signified and the utterance, negating the position from which it makes this statement. The Lacanian theory of signification, in contrast, takes the view that metalanguage is impossible (because the signifier implies its own lack), but it is equally impossible to avoid it. In "The Spectre of Ideology," Zizek theorizes that we can never be outside ideology. But the strategy of reading the repressed as ideological critique allows us to be simultaneously inside and outside the ideology. This is the "empty place" which ideology does not touch, where "al l is not ideology," the 51 place not "occupied by any positively determined reality," from which we can approach the Real o f our desire in its failed symbolization and thereby denounce ideology (17). It is an ethically comforting place for the critic of ideology because it allows her to acknowledge, even become aware of, her own interests while still producing a truthful account of the ideology. Throughout this study, I have been brought into confrontation with my own desires and interests in deconstructing this ideology. A s a woman from a minority ethnic group, further lodged in the cracks between classes (my family lacked the money but had the symbolic currency o f the Western-educated bourgeoisie), I was empowered by the previous nationalism, and, as journalist, became a peripheral member, a hanger-on, of the ruling class. Lacking knowledge of my mother tongue and o f Mandarin, which are now emphasized by the state, the anti-Western rhetoric that regards especially the overly-English educated Singapore Indian with suspicion, as wel l as the government's current emphasis on pragmatic disciplines have compromised my position in the nation. Disempowered by the new nationalism, I have every interest and desire in dismantling the new nationalism. A s an 'outsider,' I was able to immediately identify some of the oppressions and inconsistencies involved in the nationalism, but this did not stop me from wondering about the bias in my work. But the methodology, I found, allowed me to surpass the limitations of my own antagonistic relation to the ideology, to take into account the responses o f other sections o f the Singapore population to the new nationalism—especially by those more invested in and knowledgeable about their ethnic culture than I am—as these are exhibited in their literary works. For instance, some of the literary texts studied here suggest that the inconsistency between capitalism and ethnic cultures is the trauma that Singaporeans seek to avoid—leading them to disavow their fear o f and ambivalence towards their own ethnic cultures through an enjoyable rhetoric o f anti-Westernization. The figure of the white man who stands for both colonialism and capitalism allows anti-colonialism to substitute for anti-capitalism, where anti-colonialism and 'native' identity are paranoid constructions, allowing flight from the repressed awareness o f the antagonism betwen capitalism and ethnic culture. The dissertation has, in a sense, led me to discover myself once again 52 within the nation, to overcome the divisive instrumentality of the new nationalism by recognizing myself in a national 'community' of desire. Given that my dissertation opposes Western constructions of the East as alterity, it displaces the question o f the appropriateness o f using Western theory on post-colonial literature. Such a methodological coyness is already to frame, in advance, post-colonial culture as 'other' to the West, to exclude the historical fact of the intersections of Eastern and Western desire in contemporary capitalism, to do precisely that which has enabled the governments of Singapore, Malaysia and China, among others, to culturalise the human rights issue and deprive their people o f their democractic claims. There is a certain objectivity about the post-Marxist articulation of Lacanian theory that appeals to me, where discourse, the text, is the ground of truth, which reveals itself through its contradictions, superfluities and inconsistencies. The knowledge produced thereby is something more than merely a reflection o f the metanarrative regarding the workings of the unconscious and ideological enjoyment, and can itself generate further knowledge/theory. This is, for example, unlike Fredric Jameson's use of Lacanian theory in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Ac t where ideological critique always delivers us to the Marxist metanarrative of the class struggle as the truth of history. Z izek ' s claim that social antagonism is the traumatic, unsymbolizable Real o f our desire is arrived at through his critical methodology: it is not the conclusion that was always already the premise ("Spectre" 28). But as a universalizing description of desire, it takes in a variety of antagonisms, of class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationalisms (without reducing the race, gender and sexuality struggles to the class struggle, as Marxism does), and allows the theorization of antagonisms to keep pace with history, to discover new geo-cultural locations of subjects, new antagonisms or changes in the forms o f old antagonisms. A universalized theory of subjectivity, desire and cultural representation such as Z izek ' s , which allows the post-colonial subject to assert its otherness from the West but which doesn't also simultaneously deprive it o f claims to the privileges of the Western subject, is needed for more effective 53 post-colonial insurgency. A s my study w i l l show, there is a deadlock in post-colonial desire, between wanting to assert one's post-colonial difference and desiring to be the same as the West. Current post-colonial theory has emphasized the former and denigrated the latter. This desire needs to be openly addressed. A s I see it, an open testimony of desire may permit post-colonial subjects to develop culturally, in accordance with their desire as well as their interests, so that their culture is not always already a paranoid reactionary formation to the West that involves historical dislocation through investment in the archaic. This knowledge o f one's desires could motivate radically new post-colonial cultural formations. 54 Notes I refer to Singapore as an 'East As ian ' nation within the context of the new Orientalist discourse, which has, quite whimsically, effected a geographical and cultural re-classification of Singapore. The new Orientalism associates Singapore with 'East As ian ' nations such as Korea, Taiwan, and China whereas previously Singapore had always been located in Southeast As ia , and still continues to be classified thus by those who refuse the Orientalist construction. This Orientalist re-classification o f Singapore is precisely the bone of my contention. Viewing Singapore as Southeast As ian involves recognizing the history o f its cultural pluralism, its colonial and pre-colonial Malayan heritage and the hybridization of its original ethnic cultures. A l l these are deleted by describing Singapore as 'East As ian , ' which involves privileging its Chinese, 'Confucianist' cultural history, and falsely viewing the nation as culturally homogenous. There is a difference o f opinion concerning the year of origin of the Confucian revival in China. D i r l i k dates it to 1978 ("Confucius" 240). Adrian Chan however argues in "Confucianism and Development" that "back in 1978 when China launched her Economic Reforms, there was no call for the re-emergence of Confucianism. Its advocacy came in 1982 when the reform agenda could not [sic] i longer be subsumed into the First Guiding Principle upon which the government premised its legitimacy" (37). According to Chan, the First Cardinal Principle of Guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, "gives the Chinese Communist Party and its government the exclusive privilege to lead the Chinese society towards an organization whereby its distributions w i l l be according to need and contributions according to ability, as outlined by M a r x " (32). L i n Tongqi, in The Confucian World Observed: A Contemporary Discussion o f Confucian Humanism in East A s i a (Honolulu: The East-West Centre, 1992), 126-7, qtd. in Di r l ik , "Confucius" 238. 55 4 Cho Hae-Joang, "Constructing and Deconstructing 'Koreanness' in 1990s South Korea ," qtd. in Di r l ik , "Confucius" (241). Adrian Chan, "Confucianism" (40-1). 5 K u o , "Confucianism as Political Discourse" (9). This paper provides a detailed chronological account of the 'Confucianizing' of Singapore, relating Singapore's promotion of Confucianism to social engineering. Tracking changes in the terms of the discourse, Kuo ' s genealogy suggests that from the 1990s, 'Confucianism" evolved from being a moral discourse to a political ideology. 6 References to Confucianism w i l l often be placed within single quotation marks in this thesis to indicate a suspicion of the authenticity o f contemporary re-interpretations o f the sage's teachings. This study w i l l suggest that Confucianist discourse in Singapore is an American manufacture. 7 D i r l i k , for instance, says that "basic to the Confucian revival is an effort to propagate a disembodied Confucianism . . . that reproduces the essentializing procedures of Orientalism, this time by the 'Orientals' themselves" ("Confucius" 231). g Some Singaporeans view this as a 'Sinicization' o f the nation. See Eddie C Y Kuo , "Confucianism as Poli t ical Discourse" (10-12). This may be true to the extent that the Confucianist movement in Singapore strengthened Chinese unity in Singapore by promoting the use of Mandarin and increased their awareness of their ethnic identity. It also prioritised a Chinese philosophy. The government's acceptance o f American categorization of Singapore as a 'Confucianist' nation that was culturally similar to China, South Korea, Taiwan and Hongkong 9 Information on the labour movement was taken from Vas i l , "Trade Unions" 164-69. 1 0 For instance, in 1988, under the Group Representative Constituency ( G R C ) scheme, many electoral constituencies were grouped into G R C s comprising at least three constituencies. Interest political parties had to field a slate o f candidates in each district and the party that polls the highest combined votes wins. This placed enormous pressure on opposition parties, requiring them to attract a large number o f viable candidates that only the ruling party could draw given the country's political-social environment. (Professionals would find their career security severely compromised i f they were associated with an 56 opposition party: employers are often, justifiably or not, fearful of reprisals from the ruling party. The Singapore Parliament also has some unelected non-constituency members o f parliament who are invited by the ruling party to sit in Parliament in order to represent certain sectional interests. 1 1 The Indians and Chinese were often penniless immigrants who came to colonial Singapore eager to seize new work and business opportunities in a thriving commercial economy. The Chinese immigrant community was also better organized than other ethnic/racial groups due to its secret societies, which had been in existence in Singapore since the 1840s. During the colonial period, then, the Chinese community had a comparatively stronger share of power, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the colonial authorities ( H i l l and Lian 164). But the colonial administration in Malaya had, throughout the nineteenth-century, "pursued a policy o f discouraging rural Malays from participating in a modern capitalist economy so that they could continue in their traditional role o f food producers . . . for the expanding population in colonial society" ( H i l l and Lian 169). 12 This was the way Singapore's Asian values were described in the government's White Paper on "Shared Values" issued in 1991. See H i l l and Lian 217. 13 See Leo Suryadinata for an account of the Malaysian and Indonesian national ideologies (24-36). 1 4 In Polit ical Unconscious. Jameson restricts the workings of political fantasy to narrative and literary texts. 1 5 Previous ventures into this arena such as by Fanon and JanMohamed (who develops this from Jameson's notion o f the "political unconscious") tend to ghettoize the post-colonial unconscious as a phenomenon that impacts on subjectivity without pursuing its material impact such as in the production of knowledge and/or discourse, nor do these consider the relations between the unconscious and post-colonial response to new colonial technologies of power. 1 6 The following account o f symbolic and imaginary identification is taken largely from Zizek, in particular, his essay "Che Vuoi? " 104-11. See also Fink 83-97; Fuss, Identification 48-51; and Silverman, Subject 73. 57 17 Mil l e r , "Les reponses du reel" Aspects du malaise dans la civilisation (Paris, 1987), 21, qtd. in Zizek, "Che Vuoi" 110. 1 8 C . J. W . - L . Wee's "Staging the New Asia : Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Music , and a Counter-Moderni ty" is at least one exception. 19 "Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Miche l Foucault and Gilles Deleuze," Nelson and Grossberg 271-313. 20 I have restricted my discussion of Foucault to History of Sexuality and Archaeology. Though Madness and Civi l izat ion deals with Foucault's concerns about psychology as a discursive regime of power, he assumes in this work that the 'other,' repressed history can be restored to its original language. Fol lowing Derrida's critique, in his later works, Foucault is more attentive to the implication o f 'otherness' in the language/ideology o f the 'self,' so that, as Robert Young puts it, "he formulates the structures o f power . . . so that the forces of domination and resistance are caught up, sometimes, indistinguishably, within each other" (White 86). In Power/Knowledge. Foucault abandons his concept o f analysing the "archaeology" of knowledge, for the concept of "genealogy" (117), but the idea that, in a general history, different accounts can be given of one event, depending on the series it is located within and the connections the historian makes with other events, was already approached in Archaeology. I find Archaeology useful too as a detailed description of Foucaultian methodology and supplement this with History o f Sexuality, which applies Foucault's concept o f genealogy. Young 's discussion o f changes in Foucaultian theory further provides an important guide to the issues involved in writing post-colonial history (White 69-90). Chapter 2 58 Orientalizing the Nation: The National Ideology Project The Singapore government's discourse about the need to revive the people's Confucianist and other Asian ethnic heritages did not become an issue of national identity until 1988 when the government linked ethnic values to a proposal to formulate a "National Ideology." Critics are correct, in this sense, to categorically separate the earlier government Confucianization program, which occurred between 1979 and the mid-1980s, from the later, post-1988, 'ethnicization' project. This, however, recognizes the discontinuities in the ethnicity-revival projects between the two periods without acknowledging their continuities, which, I argue, lies in the attempt to rationalize the people's cultures and to politicize 'race' as a technology o f state control. On the other hand, current criticism is not sufficiently attentive to the enormity of the gap, the sharp and culturally disorienting break, between identifications urged by the new nationalism and those previously extolled under the previous foundational nationalism, which were dominant for nearly two decades, during the late-1950s to the late-1970s. I f my opposition to the new nationalism is more virulent than the resistant stance adopted by other critics, inclduing indigenous ones, it is also because, unlike them, I view the state's new project of nationalism as immensely successful, as having enticed the people into investing desire in identifications and value systems (definitely not ethnic, as claimed) that are not only contrary to their political, economical and cultural interests but that also involve a betrayal on the part o f the majority race, the dominant gender and the capital-owning class of the rights of minority groups. M y reading of the new nationalism as involving a new regime of state, Chinese racial, male and class power has also placed me outside the tendency to romanticize these so-called ethnic revivalisms as the forging of new "frontier identities" by a post-colonial society or of 59 describing them as "modernizing ideologies," as non-Western revisions of Eurocentric norms of modernity. 1 It is important to stress that my critique o f the new nationalism, in which I refuse to ascribe an empowering post-coloniality to the new ideological formation, emerges from my location within the nation. A s a woman from a minority ethnic group, produced as a citizen by the previous nationalism, and empowered by its emphasis on the equal claim o f all individuals to the space o f national culture-to the extent o f regarding my country with pride as one of the very few in the world that could claim real multi-racial/multi-ethnic communality—I find the new nationalism very distressful. Every utterance by the state promoting the people's ethnic identification, especially talk of Confucianism, left me feeling increasingly alienated from national space. Since I had long been dis-anchored from my ethnic Sri Lankan Tami l culture by the emphasis on Western education and the English language and on ethnic/racial integration, I could not, at the drop of a hat and at the state's injunction, return to my "roots." In addition, the new discourse made me, for the first time, unpleasantly aware o f the color o f my skin as I felt my body rudely tossed from the center of the nation to its margins. I am no longer able to recognize myself in a Singaporean Chinese person as I used to be able to: the racial composition o f my circle of friends has changed over the last few years from having accurately reflected the racial/ethnic composition o f the nation, to being now largely only Christian Sri Lankan and Malay , involving a communal identification with the nation's now-minoritized groups. Where before minority groups hardly ever brought up the question o f racism when speaking to members o f their own group, now it appears to be an inevitable topic of discussion at such private meetings. M y nieces, who attend an elite Singapore school, have a sense of their racial difference and minoritization that I had never myself experienced during the 1960s and 1970s when I had received my primary and secondary education. Other young relatives complain of racial harassment at school, of being taunted even for the 'strangeness' o f their names, while their parents wonder why their Tamil children should be forced daily to recite the national pledge in Mandarin. In the workplace, including public organizations, many 60 Indians in professional fields perceive themselves as being passed over for promotions in favor o f Chinese. This perception, regardless of whether it accurately reflects the situation, testifies to minorities' sense o f their disenfranchisement. Where Singapore institutions of education, including universities, used to offer visible evidence of racial integration in the nation, with multi-racial community being the norm, now one sees only mono-racial enclaves at these same institutions. In the public domain, however, racism and racial polarization are disavowed and are forbidden topics o f discourse, so that minority groups find their real social experience in Singapore at odds with the official and public discussion o f it. I cannot prioritize my private experience and observations as a more truthful account o f the new nationalism than that of another, but I have used it to guide my critique, to open myself to the possibility that there may be another, repressed side to the story of Singapore's new nationalism than that currently told by critics, especially by indigenous critics from the majority race and dominant gender. Hence, my almost instinctive attraction to Zizek 's methodology of ideological critique, since it focuses precisely on the repression o f ideology and knowledge. In using his application of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to political ideologies, where the latter are to be read in terms o f social fantasy, and combining this with Foucaultian discourse analysis, I do, however, claim that I offer a more accurate account o f Singapore's new 'ethnic' nationalism than that provided by current critiques which largely ignore internal, national issues o f racism in claiming this nationalism, with various degrees of ambivalence, as an authentic post-colonial and modern challenge to the West. Instead, I w i l l present an argument that Singapore's new 'As ian ' nationalism is an American manufactured identity construction, a neo-colonial ideology of racial alterity that has arisen as a means of dealing with the economic threat to the metropolis posed by some nations in the East, Japan, South Korea, Hongkong, Taiwan and Singapore. Though it may be a Western ideology of the racial 'other, specifically about East Asian cultural difference, it is a hysterical symptom of the West's repressed desire to move towards right-wing politics in the face of the opposition to capitalism that are produced 61 by liberal political values such as the claims of human rights and the rights of peoples. It is an ideological fantasy of Oriental 'otherness' that works doubly well for the West: it allows them to disavow their own rejection of liberalism and the threat this poses to their civilizational status by projecting it onto the 'other' and reviling the other as the "barbarian." But the alibi o f Eastern cultural difference is also the disguise adopted by that which Immanuel Wallerstein describes as the other, racist and sexist, side o f liberalism, where non-Western people may be denied claims to human rights (such as equality) because they are "culturally different," thereby legitimizing continued Western domination. 21 w i l l develop this argument further in the next chapter since the international discourse concerning the caning o f American teenager Michael Fay in Singapore more properly focalized the East-West dynamics involved in Eastern assertions of their ethnic, Confucianist or Asian identities. In this chapter, I want to argue that American neo-Orientalism displaced Singapore's foundational national myth o f democratic multi-culturalism, and replaced it with a nationalism that encouraged archaic, retrogressive identifications and desires, which eventually caused the people, in the 1990s, to dis-identify, to various degrees, from democracy and a global liberal culture. I w i l l argue that this seemingly 'cultural ' ideology, as it was inscribed by the West and re-inscribed by Singapore, has a deeply political agenda that has little to do with post-colonial subversion. Already in the earlier period (1978 to mid-1980s), we w i l l see that the Orientalizing of Singapore (1978 to the mid-1980s) was attempted within a context where the revival of native/ethnic cultures was instrumental in producing a disciplined workforce and quiescent citizens as wel l as in establishing the Chinese-ness o f Singapore, which had quite a lot to do with the opening up o f China for international trade during this period. This bid at ideologizing however missed its mark as it instead led to some genuine bonding with ethnic cultures, and resulted in ethnic claims coming up against government policies, especially the latter's prioritization o f economic interests over spiritual and ethical issues. But this resurgence of Singaporean desire for the ethnic was both deployed and compromised in the next period of Singapore's Orientalization (from 1988 to the present time) and saw the further Sinicization of Singapore. The National Ideology project w i l l be discussed in 62 some detail here as a significant moment in the successful 'Orientalizing' of the people. The primary texts o f this discourse, in particular three key speeches by ministers involved in the project, w i l l be analyzed to show that this discourse is neither a statement o f post-colonial identity nor that o f an alternative, non-Western modernity. I w i l l also argue that the form of the National Ideology project mirrored its hidden content, that it staged the type of fake consensus and state-controlled c iv i l society participation that the government would henceforth allow its citizens. The route by which the project sought to validate itself as a nationalism revealed anti-ethnicity, anti-modernity, racial polarization (the fragmentation o f the nation) as well as authoritarianism to be its structural features. H i l l and Lian aptly describe multi-racialism as "one of the key reasons Singapore is an independent state today" (93). The origins of Singaporean nationalism and the movement o f independence are closely connected to, even i f only as a reaction against, that o f Malaysia 's . From the late 1940s to the 1960s, it was never envisaged, either by the colonial rulers or by any local groups, that Singapore would one day become a nation in its own right. Nationhood, was, in a sense, forced upon Singapore in 1965 when independent Malaysia rejected it as a member-state. In 1946, when the Brit ish floated the Malayan Union plan of de-colonization, which was to unite the states of the Malay Peninsula and the Straits Settlements (which comprised Singapore, Malacca and Penang, British trading centers that were administered separately from the other primary-producing Malay states), Singapore was not included because its large Chinese population would otherwise disturb the Malay-dominated racial composition o f the mainland. From 1955 to 1963, Singapore was granted self-government though it was still under Bri t ish protection, but all parties involved assumed that eventually Singapore would be part o f Malaysia . Singapore's founding nationalism therefore was linked to the Malayan independence movement and Singapore political leaders were included in negotiations with the Brit ish for Malayan de-colonization. Issues of language and citizenship however fragmented the Malayan independence movement. Britain's 1947 Malayan Union proposal—which suggested granting citizenship by birth and by residence to al l , regardless o f race, with al l citizens having equal rights—fostered the Malay nationalist movement which 63 was represented by the United Malays National Organization ( U M N O ) . The Malays wanted their language as the national and official language. They also wanted citizenship to be restricted to the Malay population, excluding the Chinese who had migrated to Malaya to work in the mines and plantations, so that national culture would be linked firmly to race with the concept of bangsa Melayu or Malay people (which did not even include Indian and Arab Muslims). Accordingly, the British revoked the Malayan Union plan and replaced it in 1948 with the Federation of Malaya Agreement, an exclusively Anglo-Malay proposal. Under this agreement, the sovereignty of the Malay Sultans (monarchs) would be preserved in the new nation, and Malays would be given a special position within it, including dominance in political representation. Citizenship was still to be extended to non-Malays but the qualifications for eligibility, such as knowledge of English and British naturalization, in practice, excluded Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaya who were Chinese-educated and, at this point, unwil l ing to give up Chinese nationality. A Singapore-based political party, the Malayan Democratic Union ( M D U ) , spearheaded opposition to this Anglo -Malay agreement. Together with other parties, including the Communist Party o f Malaya, Chinese business interests and other left-wing groups on the mainland, they formed the Pan-Malayan Counci l for Joint Act ion and drafted their own People's Constitution. This document was to assert a different Malayan nationality, where Malay would be the national and official language and the Malay kings would retain sovereignty, but citizenship'was to guarantee equal rights to all the races. A new nationalism, that of being Melayu (people of Malaya) was upheld where national culture would transcend primordial, racial origins and would be tied instead to the sharing of a common land and a common destiny (though the Malay cultural origins of the nation was to be recognized). The Brit ish rejected the People's Constitution, partly because it was fervently anti-colonial, had the support o f communists, and lacked the approval of Chinese commercial and business concerns (which feared Brit ish reprisals). A t this time too, the Communist Party of Malaya abandoned constitutional struggle for armed insurrection, leading the British to declare a state of emergency, which lasted for five years. The 64 M D U dissolved but its mission o f forming a multiracial, multi-cultural nation was taken up by other less radical parties in Singapore. The issue of a multi-racial nationality was only to be taken up again and with even greater fervor on the mainland in 1963, when Singapore merged with Malaysia. From the 1950s to 1963, the cause of multi-racial nationality and liberal citizenship had further strengthened in Singapore for several reasons. Wi th the instatement of the Communist government in China in 1949, Malaya 's Chinese immigrant population, the Nanyang Chinese, who were China's subjects, 3 previously relatively indifferent to the Malayan nationalist movement, began to abandon any notions of returning to their homeland and to take citizenship issues in Malaya more seriously. In Singapore, where the Chinese population was dominant, its claim for more inclusive citizenship had a greater chance of success than on the mainland, where Malay opposition was strong. Also , during this period, Singapore, though still under Crown sovereignty, with its own separate government, could legislate independently o f Malaya. The Brit ish rejected a proposal by the Chinese Chamber o f Commerce that local citizenship would be extended to residents but without the renunciation of Chinese nationality and where the literacy requirement would include fluency in either Chinese or English. But they did reach a compromise in 1957 with Singapore's coalition government, introducing Singapore's Citizenship Ordinance which was inclusive, unlike that of citizenship on the mainland. Equal rights was offered to all citizens, and naturalization now offered to those who had resided in Singapore for 10 years. The 220,000 China-born in Singapore qualified for citizenship and now had voting rights. In the late 1940s, the M D U ' s formulation of a multi-racial, multi-cultural nationalism had much to do with protecting the interests of the English-speaking middle classes: the Nanyang Chinese at this point had not properly entered into the political arena, and only the English-speaking had voting rights. The M D U ' s brand of nationalism reflected the English-educated middle class' experience of Malayan culture as ethnically hybrid with an Anglo-Malay base. Colonial partiality itself also dictated that Singapore politics was dominated by the English-speaking middle class, especially by the Straits Chinese. But by 65 the 1950s, the communists had infiltrated trade unions and schools in Singapore and politicized Chinese language and ethnic cultural issues. Given the recent enfranchisement o f the dominant Chinese-speaking population, this meant that any party, even i f it had a base of the English-educated, could only hope for power by negotiating the interests of the Chinese-educated population: in the 1950s, the communists communalized student politics, linking it to Chinese education so that student unrest at Chinese schools was a common feature of life; the Chinese student movement was also involved in labor disputes, supporting striking (largely Chinese-educated) bus workers in 1955. Lee Kuan Y e w and his People's Act ion Party (PAP) , the current ruling party, which had Western-educated professionals at its helm, came into power in 1959 by linking with the Communist Party o f Malaya and using their grassroots organizations. But from 1959 to 1963, the People's Act ion Party's policy of multi-culturalism, in addition to appealing to the English-educated middle classes, was also structured by the need to balance Chinese versus Malay claims for political dominance. The P A P , unlike the Barisan Socialis—the former's left-wing faction which broke away from the ruling party in 1961 and had popular Chinese support—opted for merger with Malaysia as a means of quelling Chinese ethnic claims on the island. With an eye towards merger with the Federation of Malaya, the P A P , while claiming the equality o f the four principal cultures (English, Malay, Chinese and Indian) and supporting equal treatment for four streams o f education (English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil), added that Malay should be allowed to develop as the predominant second language of the people, to be the lingua franca, rather than English. Malay was made the national language and Malay education was expanded. Singapore merged with the Federation in 1963 under the Malaysia Agreement, which made Singapore a special state o f the Federation o f Malaysia, with greater autonomy than the other Federation states, but with less than its proportional representation in the Federal legislature. Singapore citizenship was also recognized as different from Malaysian citizenship (which gave more political rights to the Malays) and indicated the gap in the two nationalisms. With merger, the two nationalisms came into conflict in 66 Singapore and caused Sino-Malay communal clashes in 1964. In 1965, the P A P led a united opposition against the U M N O - l e d All iance government of Malaysia 's concept of a Malay nation by organizing a Malaysian Solidarity Convention and championing its multi-racial nationalism' o f a "Malaysian Malaysia ." Having reached out successfully to non-Malay Malaysians, Singapore was now regarded as a serious and irreconcilable threat to Malay dominance, and removed from the Federation. A n ideology of cultural pluralism under democracy (termed a cultural democracy) thus literally caused Singapore's abrupt 'ejection' into nationhood. In Asianising Singapore. Raj Vas i l reflects a dominant perception that Singapore's Asianiz ing project, seen to have started with the emphasis on Confucianism and effective bilingualism in 1978 and currently on-going, is a continuation of the ruling party's commitment to cultural pluralism. He argues that it is a re-interpretation o f the founding nationalism in changing geo-cultural circumstances. Though he takes seriously minority groups' suspicion of the new state policies and nationalist discourse and their fear that the ruling party was backtracking on a commitment to contain Chinese dominance, he treats these as misperceptions. But in many respects, the late-1970s to mid-1980s saw a complete overhaul of the experience o f cultural democracy in Singapore when compared to that of the 1960s to mid-1970s. After separation from Malaysia, in the period from 1965 to the mid-1970s, the ruling P A P government (which has been continuously in power since 1959) pursued a multi-racial/multi-cultural policy that aimed at al lowing the people to freely practise their ethnic culture without this resulting in a fragmented nation of racial/ethnic enclaves: a multi-culturalism that would draw the nation together rather than apart. Fearing a resurgence of exclusivist ethnic claims, especially of Chinese claims to power that was the P A P ' s paramount fear, the party wanted a multi-culturalism that would not involve a "separate but equal" approach which it saw as breeding chauvinism, and leading to "retrogressive identification" with the ancestral motherland rather than with Singapore (Vasi l , Asianising 49). Vas i l , whose account of Singapore's early multi-cultural policy is usefully peppered with interviews of the architects of this nationalism, says that this aim was 67 achieved by inter-related strategies that included "de-emphasizing the Chinese-ness of Singapore," "according the Malays a special position as the bumiputra" (sons o f the soil), where territorial claims by a majority were countered by claims of an indigenous population, "establishing a Singaporean Singapore in which all ethnic groups were accorded an equal status under the constitution," and "creating an English-speaking Singapore" (29-37). In de-emphasizing Singapore's Chinese-ness, the P A P sought to convince the dominant Chinese population not to exert their claims as a majority group but to share equal status and rights with the minorities. Looking forward to a "national cultural pattern" that would form in time, they distinguished a genuine Singaporean culture as a multi-racial polity that was not a "Chinese city-state, a third China" (Vasi l , Asianising 40). The P A P rejected a mono-lingual, mono-cultural approach to national culture, an assimilationist approach of requiring minority groups to surrender their traditional cultures (and take on the culture of the dominant group). Within this context, the promotion o f English as a common language was not tantamount to assimilation (as it is sometimes claimed to be in North America). Since English was not the native language o f any Singaporean group (except for some Eurasians, although many Eurasians had Portuguese rather than British ancestry), it was thought to be a neutral cultural space where various races could meet. Also , the use o f English as the dominant international language of business, of science and technology was essential to the state's plan for Singapore's speedy economic development—where economic success was also seen as a factor that would displace ethnic chauvinism and encourage racial integration. But the emphasis on English was supplemented by a bilingual policy where every student was required, from 1966 onwards, to learn English and one other language, usually his/her mother tongue. Those in English-stream schools would learn English as a first language and their mother-tongue or Malay as a second language, while those in vernacular schools would respectively learn Malay , Chinese or Tamil at first-language level, and English as a second language. Only then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Y e w ' s words can accurately express the paradox o f this bilingualism, where English, the language of the colonizer, would provide the means for de-colonization 68 and for developing an Asian consciousness. In 1969, he told Vas i l in an interview that the bilingual policy was designed so that: [N]obody c a n believe that his own language and culture is the beginning and the end o f the world. . . . There must also be the acknowledgment that no single ethnic group has a monopoly of wisdom and genius. . . . For example, when a Chinese boy learns that his Tami l schoolmate has a language and literature which goes back beyond 3,000 years, he stops to think that Chinese history and civilization are not the beginning and end of human history and civilization. He is then aware that his is only one of several great civilizations in the world. I think this breeds an atmosphere of humility and tolerance, without at the same time being apologetic over one's own background. They know that they are not inadequate, that when the Europeans were still in hunting communities in the forests o f Western Europe, l iving in caves, there were wel l cultivated settlements along the Y e l l o w and Indus Rivers. But introvert smugness, and a few centuries of industrial and technological discovery and progress, have put the Europeans and Americans well ahead of them. (Vasi l , Asianising 56-7) Together with bilingualism, integrated vernacular-English stream schools were established so that students enrolled in vernacular education attended the same schools where English was taught as the primary language and were exposed to students of other races and ethnicities. Racial integration was also accomplished by Singapore's public housing project. The Housing and Development Board, set up in 1961, created only integrated public housing estates and towns that maintained a strict ethnic and social mix, breaking up the racialized district settlements that had developed during the colonial period. A s Vas i l notes, the P A P ' s championing of a multi-racial Malayan culture during the merger years did not translate into the promotion of a specific multi-racial "Singaporean" culture with separation (Asianising 29). This was partly due to nervousness that a Singaporean culture that did not emphasize Ma lay /Mus l im culture might be frowned upon by the largely Malay /Mus l im neighbors. But also, there was uncertainty about how a Singaporean culture might develop, and, in the 1960s and 1970s, a general 69 willingness by the government to allow it to take shape on its own. Nonetheless, there was expectation that a "national cultural pattern" would develop and this was sometimes envisaged as a racially and ethnically hybrid one. Observing to Vas i l in 1969 that each Singaporean had a spiritual and cultural heritage over and above his/her English education, Lee Kuan Y e w had speculated that "over the centuries, something distinctive may emerge, something separate from China, India, or Indonesia, or Br i ta in" (Asianising 54). Certainly English was viewed as a means by which "a national cultural pattern" could be created through a 'fusion' of various cultural elements (Vasi l , Asianising 52). Despite its non-interventionist policy in this regard, the P A P ' s integration policies too seem directed at a national culture that would develop through ethnic integration, not unlike the "melting pot" or in local parlance, rojak4 model of multi-culturalism. "I do not believe one can legislate for integration or assimilation," Lee Kuan Y e w told Vas i l in 1969, but he did speak of an "ethnic assimilation or cultural homogeneity blurring out the cultural boundaries now co-existing" (Vasi l , Asianising 31). V a s i l says that the government's notion of a national culture was linked to cultural integration but that given Malaysian suspicion and the ethnic sensitivities of the various groups, who wanted to maintain their ethnic heritages, the P A P had often to disguise their integrative policies by rhetorical or other practices that also assured Singaporeans that they were maintaining the nation's cultural diversity (Asianising 47). Thus, for instance, while promoting English as the lingua franca, the government ensured that media facilities were divided among the four language streams and that all official documents and notices were available in the four languages. For many Singaporeans during this period and especially for minorities, the P A P government had seemed far ahead o f the rest of the world in overcoming racial/ethnic polarization and producing harmony in a society that was multi-racial as well as multi-religious. Lee Kuan Y e w , in a speech made soon after independence in 1965, gives us a measure of the idealistic and fervent commitment of the P A P to a truly egalitarian multi-culturalism at that time: 70 The problem was how to create a situation where the minority, either in ethnic, linguistic or religious terms, was not conscious that it was a minority, and that the exercise o f its rights as equal citizens with all others was so natural and so accepted by society that it was not conscious o f the fact that it was sharing equal rights with the others in dominant ethnic groups. 5 I f all political ideologies involve some loss, some exclusions, so did Singapore's ideology o f a cultural democracy. Its nationalism, as I have pointed out, emerged in order to cast out both Chinese and Malay claims for political and cultural dominance. It was also a nationalism that protected the interests of the Singapore English-educated middle class, giving them the political and cultural power in the nation's early years. A s a cultural democracy, free practice of ethnic/religious cultures was maintained but ethnic autonomy, as Vas i l points out, did have its limitations. Ethnic autonomy was not allowed to the extent that it promoted ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious chauvinism by any group, damaged inter-ethnic relationships, or jeopardized Singapore's political and economic interests and its foreign relations. To this extent, then, ethnic cultural practice tended to be de-politicized and confined largely to the private domain. It is against this context that one can view post-1978 events and the "Asian iz ing" o f Singapore as discontinuous with the founding nationalism. In the mid-1970s, the government raised the issue o f the increasing Westernization of Singaporeans and their consequent "deculturalization." B y this period, enrollment in vernacular schools had dropped to a minimum, and the majority of young Singaporeans were English-educated, pointing to the overwhelming success of P A P ' s English-language policy. But this, together with the nation's economic success and its openness to the global economy, had resulted in Singaporeans' growing political consciousness. Questions were being raised as to the advisability of a single political power monopolizing political power. Liberal political values were beginning to entice the Singaporean. Opposition representation, even i f minimal, was being widely viewed as necessary to provide a check on what was perceived as the ruling party's increasing arrogance (Vasi l , Asianis ing 69). There was also some consternation about Singapore's consumerist culture. Liberal ideology, with its 71 emphasis on individual rights, and demonized as "individualism" was also viewed as the cause for a trend in job-hopping, where loyalty to the capitalist employer was being threatened (Chua, " M a k i n g " 24). B y 1976, these socio-cultural changes that were the consequence of a full entry into capitalism, and that also posed threats to P A P power, were already beginning to be re-semioticized as issues concerning ethnic identity, as a conference on "Asian Values and Modernization" held at the University o f Singapore in that year testifies. Modern values of effective democracy and consumerism (a cultural product o f capitalism) were represented as the dangerous face of 'Western ' individualism, while ' A s i a n ' values were taken to comprise fi l ial piety, community consciousness, thrift and hard work. While the Chinese press supported the notion of "Asian values," other Singapore intellectuals were lukewarm and skeptical (Chua, "Culture" 15-6). Before 1982, when a comment by Prime Minister Lee to Education Minister Goh Keng Swee started the emphasis on Confucianism, it was the dichotomy of Asian versus Western values (rather than Confucianism versus Western values) that influenced government policy in dealing with the threat o f over-Westernization. Since the 1960s, South-east Asian intellectuals had been influenced by culturalist Weberian theory that linked religion to national ideology and to economic performance. These intellectuals opposed Weber's conclusions regarding the lack of a fit between non-Western cultures and economic performance, but without discarding his methodology or his central theme. Knowledge produced on the link between religion and ideology in South-east A s i a and that between Asian values and economic progress repeated in reverse Weber's East/West cultural dichotomy ( H i l l and Lian 193-4). The P A P too, since the 1960s, had been overwhelmingly guided by Weber's ideology o f instrumental rationality in governance. Wi th schools targeted as important locations for cultural ideologizing, the Goh Education Report was commissioned in 1978. Finding that bilingualism as it then existed had failed in its purpose o f anchoring the people in their ethnic cultures, the report recommended that the most able students be encouraged to take both English and their mother-tongue at first-language level and that the top eight percent o f 72 Chinese medium students at primary schools be invited to attend special Chinese-medium secondary schools under the Special Assistance Plan (SAP) . The top 10 percent o f Chinese medium students at primary schools now attend S A P schools where they study both English and Chinese as first languages. Considered the elite of the student population, they are destined for future leadership positions in government, industry and commerce. In an interview with Vas i l in 1994, present Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said that the S A P schools ensure that "the people at the top are proficient in Chinese and possess the strong virtues of the Chinese society" so that "they w i l l give Singapore its Asian ballast" (Vas i l , Asianising 76). This could not have been said in the late 1970s because the metonymic tropologization o f Chinese culture as Asian culture was only just beginning and would have seemed at odds with the founding nationalism that was still paramount in Singaporeans' cultural memory. B y the 1990s, however, as I w i l l argue, the founding nationalism was successfully displaced from Singaporeans' minds. Together with the annual "Speak Mandarin" campaign launched in 1979, the special emphasis given to Chinese-stream students marked the beginning o f departure from the founding nationalism of equal treatment o f ethnic groups. A s H i l l and Lian observe, "The 1980s may be described as a revitalization o f the [sic] bilingualism and a more vigorous implementation of the policy, with a difference. While Malay and Tami l were still offered . . . the emphasis on bilingualism was now English and Mandarin" (87). Other minority groups were never offered the equivalent of the top-flight S A P Chinese schools, and were not even allowed to learn Mandarin at school, though, with the opening of China at this time, knowledge of Mandarin was clearly going to be profitable in the near future. With the "Speak Mandarin" campaign, the Chinese population in Singapore, now forbidden to speak their various dialects, became united as a true majority. The campaign saw a perceptible increase in the use of Mandarin in daily life as now Chinese working in the service sectors (hospitals, clinics, buses, taxis) were required to be fluent at least in oral Mandarin and to use it whenever possible. 73 A s the decade wore on, the discourse of race, especially that of issues o f language, became increasingly politicized. A s H i l l and Lian note, language, which "had only symbolic significance (enhancing cultural unity) in nation building in the past," has now "evolved into the civic-instrumental management of nationhood" (106-7). A trend was being reversed where the government, which had previously jettisoned issues o f race and ethnicity in favor o f a focus on economic development and the encouragement of a national culturally-integrated environment, now used the discourse o f race as a technology to serve economic interests. The discourse was also seminal in shoring up the state's authority, resisting challenges to it from liberal quarters. It did this in large part by breaking up the unified power o f the people by setting their racial/ethnic differences against each other. Racial/ethnic integration was giving way to its opposite, racial/ethnic polarization. In addition to the emphasis on Mandarin and on Chinese students, the recommendations o f the Ong Report on Mora l Education, which closely followed the Goh Report in 1979, were taken up. Exist ing moral education school programs such as "Education for L i v i n g " and " C i v i c s " taught in English in a multi-racial, multi-cultural context were displaced by a separate moral education program for non-Chinese at primary school, developed by a Jesuit priest, while a Chinese-language program, "Good Ci t izen" was designed especially for the Chinese. Mora l education was co-opted for the purpose o f entrenching state control and overcoming resistance to capitalist inequities by being restricted to ideologies o f 'responsible' citizenship, and focusing on social responsibility and loyalty to country ( H i l l and Lian 199). 6 Further racial separation of the school cohort was to occur in later secondary education when students would be required to pick the option in Religious Knowledge relevant to them: "Hindu Studies," "Buddhist Studies," "Islamic Religious Knowledge," "Wor ld Religions," and, finally, from 1984, "Confucian Ethics." Confucianism appeared suddenly on the Singapore political stage. During the 1979 debate on moral education, and, in the recommendations made, only haphazard reference had been made about Confucianism. But in 1982, when Education Minister Goh had finalized the Religious Knowledge 74 options (where Confucianism did not feature), a suggestion by Prime Minister Lee saw "Confucian Ethics" being added to the list. A few days later, as Eddie C. Y . K u o recounts in "Confucianism as Poli t ical Discourse in Singapore: The Case o f an Incomplete Revitalization Movement," the prime minister at his annual Chinese N e w Year Reception speech, made it apparent that Confucianism was not just to be treated as just another Religious Knowledge option but was to be hailed as the definitive Chinese culture (6). A s one of the Religious Knowledge subjects, it was given a disproportionate share in resource allocation, media coverage and public attention. While the other Religious Knowledge curricula were developed with local expertise, "Confucian Ethics" was developed by a team of overseas (including American) Chinese intellectuals. This, as K u o notes in the same study, in itself reflected "the lack o f an intellectual tradition of Confucianism in Singapore" (6). Di r l ik quotes the then-director of the Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore, Wang M o n g L i n , responsible for developing the "Confucian Ethics" program as saying that "Confucian ethics was a field which we [the government] were not familiar with " ("Confucius" 239). Kuo says that the year 1982 could be called the "year of Confucianism"(7). Confucianism, despite all claims by politicians that it was an indigenous tradition, was practically imported into Singapore. In M a y 1982, the education minister visited the U S and met a number o f Chinese-American professors from leading American universities who were invited to make suggestions for the course in "Confucian Ethics." Their comments, K u o says, were timed to appear in newspaper reports on Sundays in consecutive weeks (7). Eight overseas Confucian scholars then visited Singapore that same year to specify the Confucian doctrines that would be relevant to Singapore. They gave public lectures, conducted seminars, met with the nation's political leaders, appeared on T V forums and in press debates. K u o says that it was decided from the start, and announced by the education minister, that "Confucianism in Singapore w i l l not be merely for the classroom. It w i l l be re-interpreted as a code of personal conduct for modern Singapore and promoted in the form of public debate and discussion over the media" (7). 75 The English press covered the debate with detachment; the Chinese press, with the support o f Chinese interest groups such as the clan associations and the Singapore Chinese Chamber o f Commerce and Industry, sponsored numerous forums, seminars, lectures and conferences on Confucianism throughout the 1980s (Kuo, "Confucianism" 8). The government set up new organizations, including the Institute of East Asian Philosophy ( IEAP) , to support the dissemination of Confucianism. The I E A P was envisaged as an institute that could develop Singapore into an international center for the study o f Confucianism (Kuo, "Confucianism" 9). The Curriculum Development Institute also set up a project team to take charge of the "Confucian Ethics" curriculum and its teaching, and, in 1985, teachers of the program formed a new Association o f Confucian Studies (Kuo, "Confucianism" 9). The "Confucianism" project marked a new stage in the political utilization o f the Orientalist discourse of race. Despite the emphasis placed on Mandarin on a some-are-more-equal-than-others basis between 1978 and 1982, the government's Asianization project had embraced the various ethnic and religious cultures. The space of national culture, which, under the founding nationalism, had usually been figured in terms o f the interstices among the races, was now assumed to be " A s i a n " as the common denominator among all the races. To some extent, the formation of Mendaki, the Counci l on Education for M a l a y / M u s l i m Children to improve educational achievement by Ma lay /Mus l im students and to promote higher education among them countered the emphasis on Mandarin. But Confucianism, touted by the government as the cultural heritage of the Chinese, began more and more to be spoken o f as i f it were the national culture, where "national culture" was no longer objectified as the common psychic space o f all Singaporeans but as the psychic space of the majority. Speeches by political leaders often used first person plural possessive nouns where previously second person and third person possessive nouns had been used in addressing ethnic/race issues, and Chinese-ness began to stand in for Singaporean-ness. Lee Kuan Y e w in his 'inauguration' of Confucianism (at the 1982 Annual Chinese N e w Year Reception speech) had said: Our [Singapore/Chinese parents] task is to implant these [Confucian] traditional values into our children . . . " (my emphasis, qtd. in Kuo , "Confucianism" 6). 76 The identification of the 'race' of Singaporeans with the race o f the nation's leadership was going to be a common feature of public, political discourse in the future. In 1988, for instance, in his promotion of a national ideology, the new Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, said: "Singapore is a high-performance country because we share the same cultural base as the other successful East Asians, that is, Confucian ethic" (qtd. in V a s i l , Asianising 78). It is reasonable to conclude that the conditions of possibility for the emergence o f the Confucianism project were extra-national. A s pointed out, both the Goh and Ong education reports did not stress Confucianism as an indigenous cultural tradition, and it was not among the initial subjects mentioned for moral and religious education. Outside expertise was required to develop the "Confucian Ethics" program because o f the lack of local knowledge of the subject. Despite the support that the Chinese press and other community organizations gave to it, the majority Chinese did not subscribe to the "Confucian Ethics" program, choosing "Buddhist Studies" instead and indicating thereby that Confucianism was not a dominant aspect of their ethnic culture. It is generally agreed by some Singapore academics that Western neo-Orientalist discourse, especially that o f Herman Kahn in World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond, and Ezra Vogel ' s Japan as Number One, influenced the emphasis on Confucianism. But the assumption is often made that the neo-Orientalists' culturalist explanation for the success of the newly industrialized economies is transparent and grounded in truth, that the Singapore government was merely prompted by neo-Orientalism to revive cultural resources the nation already had. The Confucianism project is also treated as i f it were a mere continuation of the Singapore government's Asianizing agenda, which had started in 1982. M y emphasis above on the abrupt manner in which the Confucianist agenda emerged, the mass education o f the public, the need to resort to outside help for curriculum development, as wel l as the explicit recognition given that Confucianism needed to be selectively "re-interpreted" for Singapore's g modern context is geared towards illustrating that neo-Confucianism, or a Confucian modernity, is a recently 'invented' cultural concept of 'Chinese tradition' that the Singapore government has attempted 77 to objectify and synthesize, and finally to materialize in the people because o f the political gains it promises. The turning to American intellectual resources was only to be expected since from the start, the Minister of Education had already quoted the source and authority of his and the Prime Minister 's ' inspiration' in deciding on a "Confucian Ethics" program": new Western knowledge, that particularly generated by Kahn and Vogel , about the East. Apparently, it had been 'discovered' that the success of the four newly industrialized economies, Hongkong, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, had depended on the Confucian tradition that had produced a type of character that made it possible for these countries to achieve spectacular growth. "So in this sense," Goh had said, "there is a direct relevance o f the Confucian ethic as a code o f personal conduct to a country that is trying to achieve fast economic growth in the 20th century, using modern science and technology" (Kuo, "Confucianism" 12). Kahn 's and Vogel ' s books on East Asian success, both published in 1979, were derived from a trend in American scholarship that, as C . J. W . - L . Wee has pointed out, registered "the change in attitude by some academics towards consensus, state direction of enterprise, need for loyalty to the company," ideas which were "antithetical to the notion of free markets" and, one may add, political liberal values ("Clash" 221-2). Vogel ' s and Kahn's explanations of Japan's and East As ia ' s success reversed Weberian Orientalism where Confucianism, which the latter had viewed as the cause o f Eastern economic stagnation, was now summarily offered as the reason for the emergence of new global centers o f modernity in Japan and the NIEs . A s Wee notes, the cultural explanation o f East Asian success displaced economic accounts o f their growth, where, for instance, the transnational ization o f world economy allowed Singapore and Hongkong to act as important centers in the new transnational flows of capital ("Clash" 226). Western multinational companies had increasingly turned away from their home countries to the Newly Industrialized Economies (NIEs) in the 1960s and 1970s as cheap sources o f labor, thereby paradoxically allowing these economies to flourish via colonial exploitation. A l so , the neo-Orientalist accounts erased the fact that, after independence, post-colonial economies, lacking the 78 infrastructure required for industrialization, had to resort to highly planned economic development and tight state control of labor (including disciplining the working force) in order to make their entrance into world capitalism. These economic exigencies were however culturalized by confusing them with Orientalist accounts o f Asian/Confucianist cultures as communitarian in nature, emphasizing authority, discipline and social obligation over individual rights. Kahn and Vogel suggested that modernity, after al l , was culturally relative, and could perhaps be available in ethnic, non-Western versions. Singapore's Confucianizing program, which began in 1982, was a radical departure from its pre-1978 Asianiz ing agenda. The previous multi-cultural, multi-racial national culture was now implici t ly marked as Chinese/Confucianist and departed from the previous more multi-racial, hybridized South-east Asian concept o f national culture. 9 The view held by some in Singapore that the government's agenda o f Confucianizing the people had failed or would remain incomplete (Kuo, "Confucianism" 21) does not adequately comprehend its achievement at the level o f a Sinicization of national culture. 1 0 Poor subscription to the "Confucian Ethics" program (most Chinese students opted for Buddhist Studies) and its subsequent phasing out, together with the entire Religious Knowledge program, as wel l as the change in research direction at the Institute of East Asian Philosophy (which, originally set up in 1983 for study on Confucianism, was, in the 1990s, re-directed towards studying East Asian politics and economics) are cited as evidence of this (Kuo, "Confucianism" 16-19). But as Kuo himself acknowledges, despite the anti-Confucian sentiments o f Chinese-educated Singaporeans influenced by the M a y Fourth (1919) modernist movement in China (which had re-evaluated Chinese tradition in the light o f science and a democratic political culture), and the resistance to Confucianism by English-educated Chinese, who saw it as feudalistic and anti-progressive, many Singapore Chinese, especially the local Chinese press and Chinese community organizations, nevertheless supported the movement as a "campaign to boost the status of Chinese culture and Chinese language" in the nation (13). The Confucianist program, together with the emphasis on Mandarin, had obviously woken desires for Chinese cultural and political dominance, which had been severely repressed, forbidden, in the early decades of nationhood. In chapter 79 4,1 w i l l argue that literature in English written by Singapore Chinese writers in the 1980s illustrate that buried desires o f Chinese dominance re-surfaced as the element that made the state's Confucianist ideology immensely enjoyable, leading to a sudden literary Sinicizing o f Singapore history, o f the founding myths o f the nation. Chua's claim privileges government intentionality over that o f Singaporean Chinese response: [The] suspicion that promotion of Mandarin [and presumably Confucianism too] among the Chinese is at once an attempt to Sinicize Singaporean society and culture is misplaced, for to eliminate racial differences is to eliminate an[sic] mechanism in the government's instrument o f social control. ("Culture" 10) The Sinicization o f Singapore, the viewing of themselves as the dominant race, was the only way Singapore Chinese could be persuaded to identify with government policies and, as such, is an important 'achievement' or meaning of these policies. Western neo-Orientalism produced in the late 1970s and carrying on into the 1980s offered Confucianism as a seductive, tantalizing object of fantasy for the Singapore Chinese in which two contradictory desires of post-colonial subjectivity could seek reconciliation: that of anti-coloniality, of desiring to be different from and superior to the West, and that of wanting to be the same, as good as, the West (to the extent where post-colonial imaginary identification has been colonized by an identification with the symbolic gaze of the West). A s Singapore sociologist Nirmala Purushotam observes in another context, the "other" is still staring at itself via a borrowed mirror ("Discipl ining" 26). A s I w i l l argue in the following chapter, Western authorization of Chinese culture, of Confucianism, was therefore essential to Singapore's Confucianism campaign. But also, imbued with an inherently paradoxical sense of their superiority (since Chinese culture had been judged supreme by Western standards), neo-Orientalism provided Singapore Chinese with an instrument by which they could implici t ly assert their cultural dominance in the national arena. Confucianism could not take, as K u o notes, the "form of a pan-Singaporean national movement" given Singapore's ethnic/racial diversity ("Confucianism" 14). But it 80 could be the invisible instrument by which other races/ethnic cultures could be judged, found lacking, marginalized, and their difference disciplined. A s Purushotam notes, the discipline of race in contemporary Singapore is much more effective than in past periods of Singapore's nationhood ("Discipl ining" 30). Beginning with the 1980s, as perusal of the local daily newspapers w i l l show, all social problems from drug-taking, to divorce, malaise, poor education performance and class inequities have been racialized, with minority groups always implicit ly found to be inferior to the majority race, the Chinese. The Malays especially bore the brunt of the racial disciplining (Chua, "Culture" 11-2). A s H i l l and L ian observe, in the interests of generating a common cultural approach, the government accepted and promoted orthodox (one may add, colonial) explanation of Malay economic backwardness in terms of their cultural values (169). Quoting D . Brown in his 1994 study. The State and Ethnic Politics in South-east A s i a , they say: [T]he government has promoted the acceptance amongst the Malays of the 'Ma lay cultural-weakness orthodoxy,' whereby the Malays are persuaded to see their own internal attributes as responsible for their socio-economic problems, instead of blaming the Chinese or the government. It is the lack o f achievement motivation, or the rural orientation o f Malays which is, in this view, the cause o f their 'predicament.' (169) His involvement in neo-Orientalism saw the visionary o f Singaporean egalitarian multi-culturalism, Lee Kuan Y e w , turn abhorrently racist, and especially despising o f South Asians. Comments such as this were frequently uttered by him to the press from the mid-1980s onwards: N o w supposing instead of being Lee, I 'm a Singham [that is, Tamil] or something, all our time w e ' l l be putting in mortar shells and lobbing each other. N o work w i l l be done and the ground w i l l be totally confused. (Qtd. in Vas i l , Asianising 119) This comment was made after a visit to Pakistan in 1992 and reported in the local press, where he contrasted Singapore's "consensus-seeking [Confucianist] culture" with Pakistan's politics, its "constant sniping" and "endless feuding." This was racialized as South Asian and Lee pointed out that Singapore's 81 South Asians, despite being acclimatized into the consensus-seeking framework of the larger population, the Chinese, nevertheless still wrote more letters to the newspapers than other groups (Vasi l , Asianising 118-9). Government policy in the 1980s also moved increasingly towards polit icizing race, something that had been avoided in the past. Issues o f class, such as poverty, poor education accomplishment, etc. were racialized, and government leaders of the appropriate racial origin were appointed to deal with these ' racial ' issues in a procedure that decentered minority problems from national space. The publication of Lodge and Vogel ' s National Ideology and Competitiveness in 1987 was to further advance the cause of Orientalized 'Confucianism' in Singapore. Lodge and Vogel ' s central thesis was that the degree of ideological coherence of a nation was positively related to its economic performance. Their study of nine countries also apparently influenced them into divining an essential dichotomy among the world's cultures: those that were "communitarian" and those that were "individualistic." The former, apparently, and Chinese/Confucianist culture was among them, were more conducive to economic growth, as the experience of Japan and the NIEs had shown. This new development in colonial thought suggested that now 'Confucianism' could be promoted as a "national" ideology, not only at the level o f the belief system of the dominant racial group, but also as an Asian, and hence, ' t ruly ' Singaporean ideology embracing even the minorities (since it was common 'knowledge' that Asian cultures stressed collective responsibilities over individual rights). A t about this time, suspicion was growing that a religious revival was occurring in the nation, potentially dangerous to state power since such revivals challenge dominant values and disturb economic interests. The government commissioned a series of sociological studies which appeared in 1988 and 1989 and confirmed that many young, English-educated, middle-class Chinese were gravitating towards the Christian charismatic movement while Islamic revivalism was taking a hold on Malays. That from 1990, "Religious Knowledge," including "Confucian Ethics," was struck off the list of compulsory subjects, and the I E A P ' s research interests re-directed elsewhere did not mean that the government was 82 abandoning either 'Confucianism' or its 'Asianiz ing ' agenda. Rather, these, as instruments o f social and political control, were now going to be brought together and more effectively implemented through the "National Ideology" project. This time, however, these two instruments would continue to appeal to racial identifications and communal feeling while simultaneously working to dissolve real ethnic/racial/religious cultural content that could contradict the cause of capitalism and state power. The nation would continue to be fragmented as separate racial enclaves, but would be united in their ' A s i a n ' identity, which the National Ideology would re-define as involving nothing more than "communitarianism," a euphemism for anti-liberal, anti- democratic submission to authority. There is no genuine Asian revivalism or post-coloniality involved in this movement, nor increased government concern to tackle ethnic issues, contrary to the readings of many scholars." In late 1988, Singapore's second-generation post-independence leaders from the ruling party, elected into Parliament a few months earlier, inaugurated their ascendance to power with a bid to formulate a "national ideology" for Singapore. The project was widely viewed as a move to win renewed support for the People's Act ion Party, whose electoral support had diminished to an all-time low, as wel l as to validate the second-generation team as worthy successors to leaders such as Lee Kuan Y e w , Goh Keng Swee and S. Rajaratnam, who had led the nation to independence. Slightly more than two years passed between the first announcement of the project and the eventual publication o f the proposed "National Ideology" in a White Paper in January 1991. Although the Singapore government made a great show of inviting popular participation in drafting a "national ideology" and arriving at it through consensus, it obviously had another agenda in mind: in particular, it already knew in advance what values it wanted enshrined in the national ideology. The project of formulating a national ideology was announced on 28 October 1988 by the then First Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, the leader of the second-generation leadership who was scheduled to assume the helm in a few months ("National Ideology," The Straits Times 29 Oct. 1988). 1 2 The project was touted by the-then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Y e w as one that signified the boldness and new style of 83 the younger generation leaders, a symbol of their intention to share the making o f government policies with the nation. Unfortunately, the exercise only revealed that this new consensual style of politics was to be only a cosmetic improvement on the older, paternalistic ( i f not authoritarian) style of the first-generation leadership: that is, that it was only to look 'as i f there was consensus and participation in the making o f government policy. On 6 December 1988, two months after the initial announcement, Goh, now Act ing Prime Minister, announced that a parliamentary panel under the leadership of First Deputy Prime Minister Brigadier General Lee Hsien Loong (who was also Lee Kuan Y e w ' s son) 1 3 would devise Singapore's "national ideology" after consulting various sections of the population. The committee's work, he said, was "basically to talk to various people, to find out what values they have and . . . formalise it into a very succinct statement" ( " B G Lee," ST 6 Nov . 1988). Barely six weeks after his appointment to the committee, on 28 December 1988, at a point when various ethnic/racial associations as well as schools and private individuals were in the process of debating and submitting views on the national ideology, B G Lee said that the four values that he would like to see enshrined in the national ideology were: 1. place society's needs above those o f the individual; 2. preserve multi-racial and multi-religious tolerance and moderation; 3. uphold the family as a core unit of society; 4. solve problems by consensus rather than contention ("Four," S T 29 Dec. 1988). On 9 January 1989, Parliament was opened with an address by President Wee K i m Wee, who reiterated B G Lee's guidelines for the national ideology (Hi l l and Lian 211). A few days later, B G Lee made one o f the major speeches on the project, authorizing his approach by deferring to the President's guidelines, which exactly^resembled his own earlier proposal ("Westernisation," ST . 12 Jan. 1989). This move was followed on 3 December 1988 by an announcement by Goh that a parliamentary committee, different from B G Lee's committee, would be set up in 1989 to formulate the national ideology after holding public hearings and seeking the views of leaders of the various ethnic communities in order to achieve a broad consensus of views ("Parliamentary Panel," ST 4 Dec. 1988). 84 B G Lee 's committee, he now said, was only "doing preliminary work." This parliamentary committee never materialized. Instead, the next month, in January 1989, Goh said that a Green Paper would be eventually tabled in Parliament for discussion, and that this would be followed by the setting up o f the above-mentioned parliamentary committee, which could include an opposition member o f parliament ( "Green Paper," ST 21 Jan. 1989). Six months later, it was announced that the Green Paper would be coming out early in 1990 and that the government had already asked the Institute of Pol icy Studies to put up a background paper listing some of the alternatives ("Green Paper on National," ST 20 June 1989). N o Green Paper attempting a discussion of the issue was ever presented to parliament. Instead, more than a year later, on 19 December 1990, Goh, now Prime Minister, revealed that a White Paper would be published the next month . The government's White Paper, issued in January 1991, supposedly after discussion with the public, presented the shared values as five components, which were remarkably similar to those stated on 28 December 1988 by B G Lee long before any 'consensus' with the public had been reached. These "shared values" were to be 1. Nation before community and society above self; 2. Fami ly as the basic unit o f society; 3. Regard and community support for the individual; 4. Consensus instead o f contention; 5. Racial and religious harmony (qtd. in H i l l and L ian 217). It appears that, despite the massive appeal for contributions from Singapore's c iv i l society by its ethnic/racial/religious, commercial, and student organizations, some of whom did register opposition to some of the values proposed, the "National Ideology" as it was finally formulated was merely the ideological product of the top echelons o f government. Thorough debate in Parliament appears to have been avoided since a Green Paper was never tabled for parliamentary discussion. But the fact that the White Paper was never acted on, that the "National Ideology" was never legislated, should not be misconstrued as a failure on the part of government to significantly alter the subjectivity, identifications and belief systems of the people. H i l l and Lian claim that the outcome of this project has only been marginally different from that of the previous Asianization program (219) while Chua argues that the government's ideologization has not altered the daily lives o f the people, especially o f the middle-class. 85 He also says that there is a level of cultural resistance where the representation of hybridity in multi-lingual plays and the use of Singlish (a contact language of English influenced by local languages) pits itself against the racial essentialisms propagated by the government ("Culture" 24-6). In the following chapters, I will argue against this through reference to mass cultural texts and public opinion as expressed in the episode regarding the caning of American teenager Michael Fay. First, however, I will rebut this view in a formalist reading of the project. Zizek argues that the repressed Real often reveals itself in the form of a dream/ideological fantasy. In his account of Fascist ideology, for instance, Zizek says that exploitation and domination as real facts of social existence were repressed by celebrating their opposite, a fake, trumped-up community-of-the-people. This community was materialized, created, in the form of rituals and practices such as mass-gatherings, parades and large-scale campaigns to help the needy, and successfully repressed popular awareness of the real absence of community, of social antagonisms ("Spectre" 14). Singapore's "National Ideology" project, too, in its form, aimed at establishing specific and exclusionary parameters for the conceptualization of nation and national identity. Through the government's appeal to the various races to deliberate (separately) on the issue, it ritualized a sense of the nation as a divided body of races who were united only in their "shared values," clearly in a bid to exclude non-racialist or hybrid (especially East-West syncretic) identifications from national space. In accordance with the government's invitation, public responses to the project were made on a racial/religious basis. The Majlis Pusat, an umbrella organization of 45 Malay and Muslim groups made a representation to the Ministry of Education concerning the teaching of these core Asian values ("Use English," ST 14 Dec. 1988). At least four Malay associations held several discussions on the subject with their community ("Malay Groups," SI 13 Jan. 1989). Nine Muslim organizations came together to present their views ("Nine," SI 19 July 1989). Council members from the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan associations met at least twice and made submissions to the government ("Clans," SI 28 Jan. 1989); and 1,800 Chinese business and community leaders from 200 Chinese clan associations and 86 the Singapore Chinese Chamber o f Commerce, attending a banquet dinner, pledged their support to Goh on the proposed national ideology ( " P M Goh on Values," ST 20 Dec. 1990). In addition, the project materialized a form or machinery of passing off a semblance, a show, o f the people's 'participation' as the real thing. The absence of popular and democratic 'participation' was disavowed by offering a fetish of 'participation.' A large part o f the population was reached by the government, making a convincing argument of numbers, but the parameters o f discussion were restricted, and the enunciative authority of the state in leading the 'discussion' was elided. In this performance, the consulting of public opinion was run together with government ideologizing of the public, where popular contributions were elicited at government-organized, government-chaired and therefore government-controlled forums, seminars and conferences. For instance, 13 young professionals were invited to the Minis try of Community Development to give their views in a government-chaired forum; the Ministry of Education planned three forums involving 600 teachers and parents to identify core Asian values and to discuss the teaching of these to children ("Public V i e w Sought," ST 17 Nov . 1988); 120 community leaders, professionals, graduates and pre-university students attended the first of a series of seminars for the Malay community with government officials on the panel ("Malay Forum," ST. 18 Dec. 1988); 100 Indian Musl ims from six associations attended a forum on shared values, which had government representation ("Core Values," ST 30 Jan. 1989); 100 community leaders representing 17 Malay and Mus l im organizations attended a conference ("Musl im Groups," ST 19 Feb. 1989); 60 community workers and leaders attended a forum opened by a P A P member o f parliament ( "Cal l , " S I 27 Mar . 1989); 28 students from 14 junior colleges took part in a session chaired by the government's Feedback Unit ("JC Students Agree," ST_1 June 1989); the annual Volunteers' Conference o f 1990 held a talk and workshop session on the subject after a talk on communitarianism versus individualism delivered by a government minister ("Extracting," ST 6 July 1990); 500 of Singapore's top pre-university students attended a week-long seminar on the government's 87 proposed national ideology, which was opened by junior minister George Yeo , who then delivered one of the three seminal texts of the discourse. Not only did government propagandizing contaminate the process o f public consultation, it was particularly aimed at indoctrinating certain groups: Singapore's elite, community leaders, and leaders o f the student population, influential members o f their particular groups. Remarkably, long before the national ideology was published in the White Paper, discussion had already begun on teaching it in schools. The government organised a series of forums for parents and teachers on the topic ("Asian Values," ST 25 Nov . 1989) and on 20 November 1989, the education minister announced that the core values would be taught at primary school though the teaching programme would not be finalised until all feedback on the "National Ideology" project had been gathered ("Lessons," ST 21 Nov . 1989). Given the scale o f indoctrination-posing-as-consultation, legislation of the "National Ideology" was not then necessary. The Malay community, we note, was also targeted for special attention, perhaps because their religious/cultural belief-systems were more resistant to secular authority than those o f other cultures, and possibly too because this new nationalism was aimed at decentering their place in the nation. A t about this time, the government was also in the midst o f passing the Maintenance o f Religious Harmony B i l l (1990), which curbed the political power of religious leaders in representing their community's non-secular interests. The "National Ideology" project, in effect, staged a mode of "communitarian democratic" representation of the public, which would serve as a model for the government's "consensus without contention" approach to decision-making. 1 4 A s we have noted, strictly speaking there was no need for consultation since the "shared values" had already been formulated. Besides, B G Lee had already said that Singaporeans should "keep the list [of shared values] to the minimum, in order to focus on the key items," presumably those that he had already identified ("Westernisation," ST 12 Jan. 1989). But the 'appearance' o f consultation was obviously to be a central feature of "communitarian democracy." It is 88 important in evaluating the effectiveness of the "National Ideology" project, to treat it as a discourse that was setting paradigms and habits in political discourse for the future. 1 5 One has to be attentive especially to the way the project established new rules of formation o f national identity. Using Zizek ' s method of ideological critique, one has to start by identifying the repressions an ideology attempts to execute and the moments of its contradictions. One particular question that arises about Singapore's new nationalism project is why the government felt it necessary to move beyond its previous successful dependence on the ideology of pragmatism to legitimize its authoritarian politics, and why a new nationalism was targeted as the answer. I venture that the government was responding to an erosion in an affect that governments often rely on, the people's loyalty to the nation, which it was at least partly responsible for with its earlier dabbling in racial politics—which tended to encourage communal identifications rather than national ones. The opposite o f the 'national' is the 'international,' and, in the era of transnational and international capital, state power is challenged. A t the level o f capital accumulation, the economic interests of the individual now conflict with the (pragmatic) economic interests of the nation and the growing income inequities generate antagonism against the government. But, more importantly, the openness to the international economy ushers in progressive ideas from abroad, such as liberalism and radical democratic politics, which, world-wide, was being felt by governments as a contradiction to capitalism and to government power. It was certainly threatening the P A P ' s three-decade hold on power—placing it in a context where the ideology of pragmatism could no longer serve as anti-dote, unless the people could identify with it as an important aspect o f their national culture. Doubtless, the flattery to the government being handed out by American neo-Orientalists, who had placed Singapore as one o f the most progressive post-colonial societies, also allowed the government to easily identify with Orientalist ideology. A s ideological fantasy, the "National Ideology" project attempted to escape from the people's antagonism towards the government by re-semioticizing it as an antagonism towards the nation. Thus claims o f individual rights, of freedom of expression, political representation o f minority needs and de-89 centralization o f state power through the establishment of c iv i l society were projected as forces that threatened the unity of the nation. But the nation also had to be re-conceptualized in such a manner as to place power with the state. A s such, the liberal idea of the nation as a system of relations between people was repressed and the nation was objectified instead, and invested with desire by appeal to primordial, racial identifications and anti-colonial affect, where the latter two were rendered as the same. Ministers ' speeches swung between representing the nation as Singaporeans' racialized body, where international influences o f liberal/radical democratic politics were Westernized and represented as colonial threat to this racialized body, and as mobile object made with sophisticated engineering technology, which naturalized ideologies o f pragmatism/social engineering as an integral part of the body o f the nation. In Goh Chok Tong's opening speech on the project, the over-Westernized Singaporean, by whom Goh meant Singaporeans who were taken up by the value of "individualism," was a 'monster' that had to be routed out o f the nation ("National Ideology," 29 Oct. 1988). Ostensibly, such people or their values had to be banished for both economic and cultural reasons. The Minister racializes individualism as Western, erasing it as a historico-cultural product of capitalism and colonialism, and discusses it as simultaneously as a ' racial ' and 'cultural ' threat where the two were assumed to be one. Individualism (read "liberalism") was an "alien" influence that created a "pseudo-Western" society, words that were polysemous. Over-Westernization created Singapore as both a culturally "pseudo" society (a society lacking in culture) as well as a "pseudo-Western" society ( a society with an inauthentic, borrowed culture, which it could never get the full measure of given its different racial origins). Western culture (individualism, liberalism) then was depicted as a deculturalizing force (that is, it had no value system) that caused a cultural loss to the Singaporean subject on two counts: splitting it from its original and therefore ' real ' cultural origins, as well as desensitizing it to value itself. B G Lee's representation of this loss as Singaporeans being "half-Westernized, i f not three-quarters gone" ("Let's Discuss," S T 31 Oct. 1988) represents the attempt of Singaporeans to cathect liberal values as cultural depletion and self-betrayal. I f B G Lee's expression is read as borrowing from a local Malay expression, "tiga suku" (three 90 quarters), an idiom used to refer to mental degeneration, then racial-cultural (the racial as cultural) loss is also psychological instability. As with Goh, B G Lee represented the Westernization of the Singaporean as a racial-cultural crisis: the danger of "a whole Western outlook just taking us over . . . and it will be a disaster." Yeo's speech at the pre-university seminar mentioned above ("Evolving," ST 20 June 1989), suggests that the "National Ideology" project may be viewed as a representative fantasy of late capitalism where two wealth-creating but antagonistic forces, internationalism and state control sought to be symbolically reconciled. Internationalism enhances capital accumulation by removing the delimiting geographical and cultural boundaries of nations but, as recent history has shown (the international feminist movement, the internationally-organized bid to give blacks self-determination in South Africa, as well as the easier access to progressive literature via international information banks, for instance), it also works to increase democratization of the world's population, which interrupts capital accumulation and further threatens state authority. The "National Ideology" project sought to preserve the economically productive aspect of internationalism without its democratizing, anti-productive force, but it also tried to protect the government from the identity-reconstituting effects of internationalism. Yeo's speech tried to achieve this by 'recognizing' internationalism as a new and life-enhancing force in the world, but simultaneously externalizing it as a force 'outside' the nation that needed to be met appropriately in order that the nation maintained its integrity in this 'encounter' with internationalism. The nation and internationalism were therefore represented as two separate entities, not antagonistic dialectical encounters that transformed each, in an ideological strategy that Zizek describes as a means of escaping from real antagonistic forces by envisioning them as complementary polarities and reconciling them with a third neutral term ("Spectre" 23). For Yeo, that third neutral term that would drive a wedge into the antagonism between internationalism and nationalism was nature itself, the "nature of nations to compete," indeed the nature of nations to exist. 91 Internationalism may make "cultural convergence . . . inevitable" with Americans becoming more like Japanese and vice versa, and the world's cities become increasingly alike, Yeo said, but "the competition among nations" would "continue." Internationalism, therefore, was not to be conceived as an internal, divisive force within the nation, reconstituting national identities from the inside since it could never get beyond the "nature of nations" not just to compete but to exist as 'themselves.' A s an external force, internationalism was discursively produced in a particular manner—it was a beneficial force in that it contained the nuclear threat, expansionistic impulses of the world's nations, and it was working to resolve environmental issues. Internationalism also meant the integration o f the world economy, and again, this did not threaten the nation as an entity. A s Yeo points out, "The more integrated the world becomes, the more global the division of labor, the more trade w i l l grow, the better we can be." B y using the metaphor of "the ark of Noah in the Old Testament" in a move that recalls the colonial argument o f different races as different species of humanity, Yeo sneaks in the meanings of national separateness as the founding gesture of the international organization o f the world. Just as Noah insisted that his ark be representative o f the natural diversity o f the world's species, so too the nation was always already a structural feature of internationalism. Though Yeo explicitly, on the surface of the text, defines internationalism as a presence 'other' to but beneficial to the nation, the deep structures of his speech work in an extra-logical manner to terrify his young addressees (pre-university students) into seeing internationalism in its other aspect as identical to old nationalist imperialism. In this aspect, internationalism is itself a racial nightmare, terrifying in its unpredictability and its monstrous largeness, threatening to the small, non-Western nation. Internationalism, which brought Singapore closer to the rest of the world, also brought it into traumatic encounter with racial/nationalist imperialist ambitions. Thus late capitalism is constructed as "this traumatic period [when] the Soviet Union, as it twists and turns in its efforts to modernize, can remain very dangerous," while "the drama unfolding on a continental scale in China, could wel l "herald an epoch o f dynastic resurgence," and the reaching out of Chinese power into South-east As ia . 92 Strangely, this 'post-colonial' assertion of national identity showed a greater fear on the government's part o f non-Western than o f Western nations. With internationalism, Yeo, said, "competition [would] increasingly shift from the military to the economic," which could mean political dangers for Singapore " i f the Americans leave a power vacuum in South-east A s i a and Asean fragments as a result." Internationalism, in the process, was represented both as natural and as cultural object, so that the scare effect was doubled. It saw superpowers as threatening spatial monoliths, "big boulders ..rolling and knocking into one another [so that Singaporeans] must be very alert to avoid being crushed or damaged." But internationalism was also viewed in terms o f "supertankers and medium-size ships . . . turning and switching lanes," in a way that could be perilous to small nations like Singapore. I f internationalism then could be viewed as a new manifestation of the 'nature' o f 'nations' to exist and expand themselves, then Singapore was vindicated in resorting to nationalism as a solution to its threat~or so the argument goes. Thus its sense o f itself had to be strengthened, or in other words, its plural identities homogenized to present a united front to face this external force. A s Y e o says, "internationalism has its risks because we are still a young nation and our sense of being a nation is not strong. It is because we do not have a strong national identity that we need this seminar on shared values." But i f internationalism was to be controlled or managed as a force o f nature, then Singapore itself needed to marshal its own nature, but getting science, technology and instrumental reason on its side. Thus Singapore could not conceive itself, as supposedly Nepal does, "as a helpless yam" , a "soft yam wedged between the two large boulders of India and China." Rather, Yeo "preferred] the metaphor of a high-powered speedboat to that of a sad potato," to conceptualize Singapore. The tropologization of Singapore as technological product, particularly as an engine, commodified Singapore national identity, but also served to provide a place for the state and its centralized authority within this endeavor of the nation to homogenize its identities. I f Singapore was a small speedboat, then Singaporeans were or had to be a "good crew," i.e. a subordinated group, who sunk their differences in 93 order to perceive of themselves as one, the same, in order to serve the engine. N o doubt, as Yeo says, "to run a tight ship, we need good radars, powerful engines and plentiful reserves o f fuel and other supplies." Significantly, Yeo does not mention the captain of the ship in his nautical analogy, but who can forget his (here, the state's) controlling function. Since "Formula One engines were not easy to maintain," too, vigilance (continuous state policing) would apparently be needed to ensure that the control was perpetually working. Six months earlier, B G Lee Hsien Loong had likened Singapore to aircraft, with the proposed "national ideology" serving it as a "coat of armour" to protect it from "anti-aircraft bullets or rough weather" ("Ideology," ST 19 Jan. 1989). In Y e o ' s speech, the tendency of internationalism (as an internal part o f the nation, as part o f its mode of production) to democratize society and radicalize identities, its interrogation of the subordinate places assigned to women, workers and minority groups within the nation, and its making o f self-realization a matter o f something more than capital accumulation are features and desires that are not represented as part o f internationalism. Instead, this aspect o f internationalism is re-located within the nation itself. A s a historical contingency rather than necessity brought about by the growth o f the middle classes, and viewed as that dreadful "Westernization" of the Singapore, its threat to the nation could, as an internal attitude, be changed, managed [rationalized] to fit into the nation's need to survive/prosper. Yeo ' s speech was the first and only one to explicitly discuss internationalism as a problem. Goh and B G Lee had adopted the different strategy of mis-recognizing it as "Westernization," whereby internationalism was produced as the 'racial other' to the nation and its tendency towards the democratization o f the population combated by the appeal to primordial, racial identifications. In Yeo ' s speech, internationalism is something other than Westernization, but it too conjures up the racial threat. That which appears to be a split in the discourse is actually then the site o f its doubling—multiplying, in the process, people's conviction that a homogenized national identity based on Singapore's difference from the West and centralized state control were necessary for the nation's survival, on at least two counts. 94 The contradictions between imagining the nation in turn as primordial racialized body and as technological, mobile object is one indication that the racializing o f Singapore is a paranoid, hysterical construction o f the government that condenses two incompatible desires, to run away from history by primordializing Singapore subjectivity in terms of race, but also to be a part o f history in modernizing/Westernizing Singaporean culture. The seemingly contradictory tropologization allows the government to escape from and disavow its repressed desire to resist real forces of historical changes that intrude on state power. On the other hand, the government also wants to continue seeing Singapore develop as one of the front guard o f the post-colonial world, which involves participating in the new historical forces of internationalism. A s such, the insistence on racial identity becomes a means by which the government attempted to freeze Singaporeans' subjectivities against the onslaught of liberal ideologies, where their response to new forces of history would be restricted to maximizing economic growth. But these two types of tropes o f the nation as racialized body are condensed metaphors that also reveal the repressed, that race was being essentialized via construction. Hence in ministerial speeches, metaphors of natural phenomena, of the discovery of essences and cultural roots, quickly slip into tropes such as of speedboats and Formula One engines that unwittingly reveal the construction, manufacture, and social engineering, the artificial involved in the production of race as nature. B G Lee unites the two in employing a mixed, nature-culture metaphor when speaking of cultural "roots" as those which "anchor" the subject ("Westernization," ST 12 Jan. 1989). A bridging nature/culture metaphor is that o f "preservation." B G Lee, for instance, speaks of the need to "preserve the heritages of our different communities" ("Westernization," SJT 12 Jan. 1989). I f racial heritages are a natural presence in the society, "preservation" is an artificial process that tampers with nature, halts and freezes the decay of a nature that is already dead. It also keeps nature/racial heritage in a state of aesthetic suspension, a reminder of it as (dead) object of beauty/desire. 95 The revival o f Singaporeans' racial and ethnic identifications would be, as the government already knew from the burgeoning of spiritual, extra-economic interests in the 1980s, itself anti-capitalistic. Thus, "race" is constructed in a particular manner: it is located in the body itself and marked as difference from the West; but it is also rendered as the same as "communitarian" values, an anti-liberal ideological system that requires state authoritarianism and the restriction o f democracy for the maximization o f capital accumulation. A s I w i l l argue, the 'racialization' o f the nation involves the fetishization o f race/ethnicity that disavows and stands in for the government's real attempt to de-racialize and de-ethnicize Singaporeans. Goh urges Singaporeans to "retain" their "Chineseness, Malayness, Indianness or Singaporeanness" as i f ethnicity were a possession that they were born with, a birthright that should not be subject to alteration through the process o f time and history ("National Ideology," ST 29 Oct. 1988). In this speech, history itself is represented as a journey where the subject that arrives at the destination is (or should be) the same as the one who had set out on the journey, where indeed the journey itself and the destination are the same as the subject itself. History, conceptualized in this manner, does not require internal, subjective change. The racialization o f the nation is a strategy that renders the Singaporean subject as object. Thus the journey o f history, the "progress into the 21st century," for Singaporeans, has "As ian bearings" that they must adhere to i f they are to keep themselves from "drifting aimlessly into the future." B G Lee spoke in similar terms: " A s we develop, we become superficially Westernized, cast off from our traditional moorings, drift into banks and shoals, and come to g r i e f ("Westernization," ST 12 Jan. 1989). In B G Lee 's imagining of the nation as an aircraft or bomber ("Ideology," ST 19 Jan 1989), history is figured as a battle against the outside of the nation where survival and victory depend on keeping the machine/nation intact and whole, preserving it in its original state against the vagaries of history. If history had a necessary w i l l , an inevitable teleology, it was that of modernization, and the responsibility of nations to history was to "modernize without losing [their] soul" ("Westernisation," ST 96 12 Jan 1989). Here, modernization which threatens existing cultural forms, is delierately restricted in its meanings and thereby rendered compatible with the objectification and fetishization o f history as the past time o f racial/ethnic purity. Yeo accomplishes this reconciliation by restricting history to the Darwinian terms of struggle for survival: "Our Darwinian duty is to survive and prosper in this new age," he said ("Evolving," 20 June 1989). B G Lee further elaborates on this discursive tactic to protect Singaporeans from 'Western' ideologies by immobil izing, de-historicizing Singaporeans' subjectivities ("Westernisation," ST. 12 Jan 1989). Singapore, according to him, has a fixed subjectivity as it is a "time and a place . . . with a past which we should be proud o f and a future that is ours to make." This temporal and spatial delimitation o f Singapore, which ignores the diasporic cultural experience of immigration and its history o f colonialism in the essentializing of race, is offered as the Singapore "spirit," that which constitutes the nation as an ontology. I f this "spirit of Singapore [were to] disappear, the society [would] dissolve, and the nation [would] be no more," B G Lee warns. In the same speech, he equates national identity with racial identity and this with success by drawing on the Japanese example. "The long term survival of a country," he says, "depends in large measure on a strong sense of identity . . . the Japanese are totally confident that their next generation w i l l preserve a strong Japanese identity and values . . ." ("Westernisation," ST 12 Jan. 1989). He also makes an emotional appeal to the ideology of race as biology while intellectually dismissing it: They [the Japanese] are confident because they are convinced they are a unique people, even to the point o f absurdity. Some Japanese even believe that their intestines are a different length, therefore they cannot eat American beef; that because of the Japanese language, their brains function differently from other peoples,' and so on. Y e o too in his speech to pre-university students is concerned with tying national fervor to racial identifications, in particular appealing to Chinese racial identifications. He begins his speech by using the downfall o f the Han empire to theorize the "tide in the lives of nations which ebbs and flows," eliding 97 the structural differences, politically, economically and culturally between feudal, mono-racial empires and modern, multi-cultural nations ("Evolving," ST 20 June 1990). Y e o urges Singaporeans not to "deny [their] own past," their "cultural and historical experiences," their "roots," yet he reduces all this to a single moment in history, to that point where Singaporeans "were drawn from ancient cultures" "We Must Not Deny," ST 20 June 1990). Here, Singapore's diasporic and colonial history is displaced by a narrative o f its prior racial origins. Yeo contributes to the figuring o f race as both nature and as technology by likening Singapore's multi-racialism to "dissimilar atoms in the crystal lattice" that "improve the overall performance of the crystal" ("Evolving," 20 June 1989). This new racialization o f the nation demanded a backtracking from the previous policy of racial integration, the melting pot approach to multi-culturalism. Racial integration involved viewing national subjectivity as always in the process of becoming, of change, which contradicted the government's strategic move to de-historicize and essentialize Singaporean subjectivity. The melting pot approach would mean that national identity would always be in flux, always evolving, both o f which threatened state control. It also went against the divide-and-rule avenue of state control. Racial integration as public policy also allows a political space to emerge for coalitions among non-racialized interest groups, a cross-cultural solidarity that threatens the government. A melting pot cross-culturalism would also embrace an East-West hybridity. Although the melting-pot approach to multi-culturalism has been critiqued from many angles, it undeniably attempts an empowering cross-cultural interaction, provides places for various cultural components within the central symbolic constellation of the nation, and brings together different communities through a sense of their common history. Theoretically, at least, it also assigns equal weight to al l cultures, including minority cultures. Even i f it inevitably involves a cultural takeover by the dominant or bridging culture, this dominant culture is itself altered in the process by the minority cultures. It also offers a site o f cultural hybridity where national identity can get beyond the divisiveness and polarization o f race, where race could not, as a master-signifier, be used as a weapon o f control. 98 Thus, a large part of the government's ideologizing was directed at differentiating the new racialization of the nation from the melting pot approach, from a cross-cultural national identity. This is evident from the many press articles that dealt with the issue. 1 6 B G Lee deals quite comprehensively with the issue in a parliamentary speech that also reveals the holes and contradictions of the government's ideology as wel l as its hidden agenda ("Melting Pot," ST 18 Jan. 1989). The melting pot approach, he says, would mean a submerging of the customs, attitudes and values of the different races. This, he equates with "deculturalizing," the "squash[ing]" of one's "personal identity," "personal uniqueness," or "ineffable spirit," the last three of which is equated with one's racial identity. Instead he envisions the nation as a cultural mosaic: It [the nation] is a painting, wal l murals, many of them—one Indian dancer, one Chinese lion dance, two Malays, either with a kompang [musical instrument] or doing a Malay dance, an M R T [mass rapid transit] in the background. That is Singapore. That is not a melting pot. That is each community remaining itself. According to B G Lee's logic, racial integration (melting pot) would cause Singaporeans to be divided and fractious, so that they could not form coalitions, whereas racial division would result in national unity! The repression o f Singaporeans' unity is disavowed by displacing it onto the wrong side of the integration/purism divide. B G Lee gives the game away when he claims that the personal uniqueness of Singaporeans as defined by their racial identity would contradictorily give them a "sense o f group solidarity," so that "individuals did not just get ahead one by one but as a team." A n essentialized racial identity is then the means by which Singaporeans' desire to protect their individual rights is made compatible with or the same as protecting the interests of the group. Interestingly, ministers appeared anxious to defer the time when Singaporeans became more alike. B G Lee promises in the same speech that " in time, very gradually, all communities can develop more common, distinctively Singaporean characteristics" (my emphasis, "Westernisation," ST 12 Jan. 1989). For Yeo , Singapore was not a cultural mosaic, but a nation of many "distinct but overlapping circles" 99 ("We Must Not Deny," £ T 20 June 1989). For him, it would take centuries, i f it happened at al l , for these circles to coincide since the "people of Singapore were drawn from ancient races." After 25 years o f nationhood, "the circles have moved closer together and there is more overlap now," he admits. "But at no time," he adds, "should the Government attempt to rub out any particular circle and force people from one circle to move into another as this would provoke the most extreme reaction," contradicting Singapore's early history where such racial integration had not only had incredibly peaceful results but had also reversed previous racial turbulence. "Our preferred effort," he continues, is to "nudge the circles together." It is implicit ly recognized that it is the government who would do this nudging. Placing himself within the context of the nation-wide 'search' for a national ideology, Y e o is able to use the first-person plural possessive noun ambiguously, to over-ride the distinction between the government and the national subject. Race was thus produced as an essentialism, as an object. The objectivization o f racial identity was needed, as I have said, to de-historicize and immobolize national culture but it was also a discursive strategy that allowed values/ideologies not desired by the government to be racialized and their universal application rejected instantaneously. Thus liberalism could be easily racialized and dismissed as "Western." In addition, this objectivization/naturalization of race, as something always already there, covered over the constructional activity of interpretation and translation involved in the production of race, especially the government's role as sole interpreter/translator. This move was also strategic to the fetishization o f race, where race was invested with 'anti-colonial ' and communal desire and disavowed the proposed national ideology's attempt to stifle ' real ' ethnic/racial subjectivity. A s object too, race could be manipulated just as the parts of an object can be changed in a delimited manner yet without altering its 'essence.' This arbitrarily allowed for Asian cultures to be modernized but not liberalized, since the latter involved "Westernization." The objectivization of race also served as the foundation for discovering a 'generic' Asian identity, situated at the place where all the Asian cultures met, as that 100 which they shared in common. A s in Platonic discourse, there is a strategic slippage between the generic and the essential. That exclusion of meanings is the founding gesture of the objectification o f cultures, Eastern and Western, is clear in Goh's opening speech. Goh objectivizes the differences between Eastern and Western values in terms of the difference between textbooks that teach the English language and those that teach Mandarin ("National Ideology," ST 29 Oct. 1988). He notes that while English-language textbooks start by introducing students to objects (the " A is for apple, B is for bal l" routine), Mandarin textbooks begin by teaching students good manners and filial piety. Textuality itself, the most slippery experience of al l , is objectivized, framed with a beginning and an ending, with English constructed as a "textbook" o f things/materiality, while Mandarin is a "textbook" o f values/spirituality. Goh conveniently forgets that English has a phonetic script while Mandarin has a pictorial script and is a tonal language. The function that language pedagogy serves is also forgotten: in Singapore, English is used largely for material activities whereas Mandarin is taught with a bias towards imparting o f values. In the same speech, Goh contrasts Hollywood's Academy Award ceremonies with Taiwan's film awards, noting that in the former, award-winners thank their producers, colleagues and partners while the Taiwanese thank their parents. In a strict process o f selection and erasure o f Asian values, Goh has singled out, yet again, f i l ial piety as a Chinese "value" while gratitude felt towards friends, co-workers and others are Western 'non-values.' (Regular watchers of the Academy Award shows may wish to retort that Americans unfailingly thank their parents and very often God too in these ceremonies!) In both instances, only the ritualized forms of culture, culture as habit, as manners, are identified as "culture." We are excluded from the more dangerous and contradiction-ridden arena of culture as change, as that which generates, sustains and continuously revamps meanings and values. Culture as 'object,' as a totalizable entity, stands in for, and erases, the plurality and revolutionary potential of the real phenomena. 101 The government's attempt to reconcile Confucianism with modernism/democracy is a vital part o f the government's hysterical method of solving the contradictions between democracy and capitalism. 'Confucianism,' constructed in a particular manner, was taken up as that which would reconcile democracy and capitalism as antagonisms, the third 'neutral' term comprising racial/ethnic identifications, especially those of the dominant racial group, the Chinese, which would prioritize capital accumulation over democratic rights and hence diffuse their antagonism. In the process o f re-semiotizing, however, both Confucianism and democracy lost some o f their most significant meanings. Confucianism was objectivized as a cultural object, wil l ful ly neutralized of its political content. Although it had "evolved for a rural, agricultural society," B G Lee took it for granted that it could be "revised to fit an urban, industrial society," while retaining its essence just as democracy could be adapted to Confucianist principles without deconstructing itself ("Westernisation," S I 12 Jan 1989). This assumption is enabled by the discursive construction o f race as being of the body, that it cannot simply be washed out, transformed, by the forces of history. B G Lee proposes that democracy should be Confucianized by placing society's interests over self. He adds that the Confucianist concept o f "government by honourable men, who have the duty to do right for the people, and who have the trust and respect of the population" be substituted for "the Western concept: that a government should be given as limited powers as possible, and always treated with suspicion unless proven otherwise." The racialization of democracy as Western allowed it to be dis-cathected and viewed as a "deculturalizing" force that should only be accepted in moderation, while the racializing of Confucianism as Chinese introduced primordial affect so it could overcome intellectual recourse to its oppressions. In this 'reconciliation,' however, the central meaning of democracy that society's rights should not be used as an excuse to deny the individual his/her rights, is lost. The basis o f democracy that "right" and "wrong" in government policy is non-transparent and can only be determined after the representation o f various interest groups is contradicted by a Confucianist ideology, as B G Lee represents it, where "right" and "wrong" in government policy is assumed to be transparent and easily determined by clear 102 thinking. The Confucianist doctrine o f government, as B G Lee has described it, also assumes, unlike democratic political culture, that individual and group interests are homogenous. But Confucianism too must be democratized and "update[d]," B G Lee says. This may be done by recognizing the insufficiency o f its doctrine that "the people can be made to follow a path o f action but they may not be made to understand it." In a democratic context, then the government's responsibility of seeking public consultation in the determining of policy is displaced into the activity of ideologizing the people into seeing the wisdom of the state's decisions. A s B G Lee puts it, the government must try to make "the population understand and support the goals of the government." Democracy here is denied in the unequal relationship between the people and the government. But Confucianism too loses its face in its 'reconciliation' with democracy and modernity. B G Lee's offering o f a 'modernized' Confucianism as one where the "strictly hierarchical" "traditional Confucian family relationships"~where "sons owe an absolute duty of filial piety and unquestioning obedience to fathers," where "males take precedence over females, brothers over sisters, and the first-born over the second over the third son"—be replaced by the less authoritarian family bonds practiced in modern Singapore, completely displaces the Confucianist family institution. One has to wonder i f this was a strategy to diffuse the strength of the family institution which could contradict state interests. Russell Heng's play, Lest the Demons Get to M e . affirms that in contemporary Singapore familial patriarchal power has been rendered impotent by the patriarchy of the state, which supersedes it. Confucianist precepts of "good," "right" or "honourable" government would also inevitably be transformed beyond recognition in their application within a democratic system, where the ruling party must always play to the ballot-box. In the Confucianist system, "honourable" government idealizes an ' impartial ' determination of the good o f the people, which can only be realized over and above the noise of the rabble, of contentious claims. B y denying the historicity of Confucianism, its generation from particular materialist forces, Confucianism was depoliticized and viewed as ethnic tradition. The function it served in propping up 103 and perpetuating despotism and the hierarchies/subordinations of feudalism, of men over women, emperors over subjects, and patriarchy as a structural feature of society is cleverly elided. But in the reconciliation of Confucianism and democracy, we are left with neither Confucianism nor democracy (except as empty forms), not modernism nor traditionalism, but authoritarian state control where the requirements of the state, of government, ride roughshod over the desires/interests o f the people. The racial objectivization/essentialism of Chinese/Confucianist culture and Western/democratic culture is strategic in covering over the aporias in the discourse of a Confucianist modernity. A s B G Lee says, the government is "not suggesting that Westerners are incapable of selfless service to others, or that there are no selfish people in the Orient. But [nevertheless] there is a real difference between East and West" ("Westernization," SI 12 Jan. 1989). Since Chinese and Western cultures are real 'things,' it also allows the government's role as producer o f these 'things' and cultural interpreter to be well hidden. The notion o f a Confucianist modernism, o f a Confucianist/communitarian democracy, did then provide a discursive regime whereby democracy and Confucianism, modernism and tradition, could always be used against each other, according to the w i l l o f the government. The women's movement for instance could be rejected at the points where it threatens the state or opposes government policy by 17 declaring it un-Confucianist or non-Asian. Conversely, it could be championed as "democratic" and "modern" where it coincided with state goals, including those of capital accumulation often made at the expense of income inequities. If one is not caught in the trap of the fetishization o f Asian cultures that this "National Ideology" project attempted, it becomes quite easy to read the project as a bid to 'Orientalize' the nation. The 'generic' Singaporean Asian identity that the project identified as that cultural space where all the various ethnic heritages met in a community of "shared values" began with the definition o f that space in terms o f Lodge and Vogel ' s concept of a "communitarian democracy" in Ideology and National Competitiveness, where the rights of the individual were to be counter-balanced with the responsibilities and duties o f the citizen toward the nation. The authors had commented that the East Asian economies 104 of the Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese were successful because they adhered to "communitarian" values and thus had strong social cohesion whereas the emphasis on individualism by other societies tended to compromise economic growth. They also said that the national culture o f a people determined "national competitiveness" in a discourse where a nation's success was to be judged solely in terms of its overall economic performance, excluding other determinants such as fair distribution o f income and services and the maintenance of human rights. When Goh publicly announced the issue o f formulating a national ideology, he made it quite clear that Lodge and Vogel were the government's source of inspiration and that Singapore's Asian values were to be interpreted in terms of American 'Orientalized' notions where Chinese identity was to be totalized in terms of the Confucian ethic. In describing this move as necessary to safeguard the nation's economic interests, Goh inadvertently reveals that it had nothing to do with the preservation of Asian values as a post-colonial gesture o f identity. Goh said in his speech that he had been reading "a book, Ideology and National Competitiveness by Harvard University professors George Lodge and Ezra Vogel , who coined the word 'communitarianism'" ("National Ideology," ST 29 Oct. 1988). Summing up Lodge and Vogel ' s ideology, he said that Singapore had to determine which value system—individualism or communitarianism—would be better for the country's competitiveness or survival. He then quoted former prime minister Lee Kuan Y e w ' s comments made a few days earlier that the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese shared a Confucian ethic and had "learnt the valuable lesson that to make the greatest possible progress in the shortest possible time, it is necessary for a people to move in unison. • A n d this implies the need for individuals to make sacrifices for the good of the country and its progress." Singapore, Goh added, shared the same cultural base as that of the other successful East Asians, that is the Confucian ethic. So " i f we [Singaporeans] want to continue to prosper, we must not lose our core values o f hard work, thrift and sacrifice," he said, appealing to the simplistic interpretation of the Confucian ethic by Vogel in his earlier book, The Four Mini-Dragons and other neo-Orientalists. 105 Since Singapore's "shared values" had already been identified before public consultation, and involved an Orientalization of Confucianism as its starting point, the next phase of the project involved disseminating this brand o f Confucianism to Singapore Chinese, and also extending this Orientalization to other Asian cultures, where the latter were re-interpreted as the same as this Orientalized Confucianism. B G Lee's blueprint of the methodology for the identification o f a national ideology of "shared values" warrants close attention. He says: One way is to identify certain abstract values, common to all Singaporeans, which draw on the essence o f each of our heritages, and which all Singaporeans can share. Then we interpret and convey these ideas for each community, in terms of its own cultural and religious traditions. In time, very gradually, all communities can develop more common, distinctively Singaporean characteristics. . . . Which abstract values should we emphasise? I believe we should emphasise non-political, non-religious values. ("Westernization," ST 12 Jan. 1989) In a return of the repressed as irony, B G Lee denies that this is " a disguise for imposing Chinese Confucian values on them [the minorities]." Neither is it the "elevation of Confucian ethics to a national status." "The government," he says, "cannot force Confucianism on the other communities, or even allow it to lead to Chinese chauvinism. The National Ideology could not be Confucianism by another name." But, he adds: Just as the Chinese w i l l interpret the core values of the National ideology in terms o f Confucian teachings, Malays and Musl ims w i l l elaborate them in terms o f Malay traditions and Islamic teachings, and the Indians in term of Indian traditions. I am not an expert in Islam, but I understand from my M u s l i m colleagues that Malays and Musl ims would find nothing unacceptable in the four items of core values . . . they produced verses from the Quran teaching these same points. . . . On the importance o f the community above self, the Malay practice o f gotong-royong is an expression of concern for the well-being o f neighbors, and a sacrifice of 106 personal interest for the common good. The concept of consensus translates directly into the tradition of musyawarah or consultation among the community to decide on a course o f action. In the event, 15 Malay and Mus l im groups, in their submissions to the government, agreed that the proposed shared values were agreeable to their culture, but registered their observation that the central M u s l i m tenet, the belief in God that "[they] hold dearly," was not included in the formulation o f the national ideology ("Musl im Groups," ST 27 Mar. 1989). Cross-cultural forums could have provided a genuine attempt at drawing on shared values that were central to the nation's communities and would have protected minority ethnic cultures from being read as the same as the dominant culture. But this was never to be. B G Lee's methodology instead guaranteed that the aim of identifying shared values that "draw on the essence of each o f our heritages" would degenerate into a search for "shared values" that merely reflected the points of contact o f the major traditions. Highly different cultures are more likely to intersect at points of liminality than at their centers. The peripheral values, the merely "acceptable" values of the various communities were then fetishized in place of core values that were being suppressed. Malays were required, for instance, to think o f gotong-royong, rural village political culture, not Islamic culture, as an essential aspect o f their ethnic tradition. It was thus that the "National Ideology" was made "compatible" with Singapore's Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh and Christian cultures, where only their "non-political, non-religious values" would be accepted into national space. Singapore's cultural diversity as the definitive location o f the nation was now homogenized as "As ian , " where being Asian referred reductively only to the point of translatability o f the component cultures. The government's disavowal that it was Sinicizing the nation did not address the issue that in this activity of translation, the original 'language' used was that of an Orientalized Chineseness, which was then translated into the language of Confucianism. Confucianism was then translated into the 'languages' of the various ethnic/religious groups. A n Orientalized 'Confucianism' then was the 107 dominant term of these 'cross-cultural' translations, so that being Singaporean required non-Chinese groups to represent/constitute themselves as mirror images of the dominant group. The "National Ideology" project could be viewed as a bid to generate many hybrid and multiple forms of 'Confucianism': Malay-Confucianism; Tamil-Confucianism; Eurasian-Confucianism, etc. 1 9 But given the already prior Orientalization of Confucianism by Western/American right-wing ideologues, Singaporeans, when they look into the mirror, w i l l find themselves not mimic Confucianist men, as they feared, but mimic Western anti-liberalists pretending to be Confucianists pretending to be Malay , M u s l i m , Sikh, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, etc. This could explain the tendency to liken contemporary Singapore to retro-America, to America in the '50s, something that repeatedly occurred during the Fay discourse, which I w i l l deal with in the next chapter. In discussing the activity o f translation/interpretation involved in formulating the "shared values," B G Lee makes a significant omission o f the role of the state as interpreter/translator in this venture, and o f the relation between interpretation and construction. In this speech, B G Lee is himself performing interpretation/construction by reading Malay gotong-royong as a prioritization of community interests above individual interests and musyawarah as a form of "consensus without contention." Here, the enunciative authority of the state as a material force that is itself implicated in class/race/gender interests, and as that which defines, in Foucaultian parlance, "the possibilities of reinscription and transcription" of the discourse (Archaeology 103) is hidden and its readings of 'race' rendered transparent. Not only is the political content o f the "shared values" thereby elided, but a discursive practice o f equating the government's subject position with the subject-position of the nation has also been regularized. The government's agenda in this nationalism project, despite its espousal o f the return to racial heritages, should not be differentiated from its simultaneous and similarly anti-traditional, anti-ethnic attempt to disempower religious movements via the introduction o f the Maintenance o f Religious Harmony B i l l in 1990, which was passed in November ( H i l l and Lian 211). A t least two major events and a spate o f surveys on religious activity in the nation prompted this b i l l . In 1987, the government had 108 cracked down on a community of nearly 20 English-educated, middle-class university graduates with connections to the Catholic Church, who were allegedly involved in pro-communist subversion. A government-commissioned study found that there had been a degree of religious revivalism, especially among Christian charismatic churches, and that conversion was concentrated among teenagers, especially English-educated Chinese. Also, in late 1986, the Muslim community had reacted negatively against the government for arranging a visit to Singapore of the Israeli President. The Muslim community had put forward their views that the government should show more sensitivity towards Malay Singaporeans and that there should be more open and mature discussion on such subjects (Hill and Lian 205-6). However, rather than pacifying a religious community's wish that their values be recognized as a valid part of the nation, the government reviled it by ejecting the Muslim system of values outside the nation and replacing it within the arena of the communal, which was considered in this case to be anti-nationalistic and treacherous. BG Lee questioned the national loyalty of Singapore Muslims and said that Malays were not recruited into the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) because of their privileging of communal loyalties over national interests. He had said then: If there is a conflict, if the SAF is called upon to defend the homeland, we don't want to put any of our soldiers in a difficult position where his emotions for the nation may come into conflict with his emotions for his religion, because these are two very strong fundamentals, and if they are not compatible, then they will be two very strong destructive forces in opposite directions. (Hill and Lian 206) Cultural/ethical differences that arise between the government and its people are here constructed as anti-national, where the state is set up as the de facto site of the nation since it is supposedly a culturally neutral place. Ethnic culture here has been assigned the place of the excessive formation that takes away from the nation, causing a 'lack' within it. This approach to race/ethnicity involves a repression of the alternative, liberal view that the government could only be the legitimate site of the nation if it 109 represented/recognized the desires of its various ethnic/cultural communities, which was indeed what the Malay community had asked for and clearly expected. The "National Ideology" project was headed in the same direction then as the Maintenance o f Religious Harmony B i l l but with a different strategy: the suppression of racial/ethnic traditions, especially some o f their non-materialistic emphases, which were to be disavowed by fetishizing race. Such non-materialistic claims were to be further silenced by consigning them to the margins o f the nation. The "national ideology" project aimed at creating a new centralized cultural space in the nation, that o f the Western notion of "communitarianism" translated into the language o f Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity and other ethnic cultures of the nation, which would then displace Singaporeans' current racial/ethnic/religious identifications. These, in turn, would now merely be regarded as identifications with the community, which was differentiated from the nation. Hence, one of the core values emphasizes "nation before community." Another displaces an important stress on racial equality, the founding myth of the nation encapsulated in the National Pledge, with racial "moderation" and racial "harmony," where individuals would be required to stifle their ethnic/racial/religious differences. Though the project relied on an anti-Western rhetoric for its emotional affect, only specific Western values (liberalism, but not capitalist materialism)were being attacked. On the other hand, the project effected a more extensive containment of Asian identity, and a re-construction of it. Asian identity was implici t ly not to be understood in terms of the histories of the rise and fall of empires and dynasties, the South Asian independence movements, the separation of Taiwan from China and recent student unrest in China, since these were not part of the 'ethnic' experience of Singaporeans. A l so , these gave the lie to the claim that "consensus rather than contention" was as an Asian value. Singaporean-Asian heritages were also primordialized by suppressing their historical transformation through capitalism, colonialism and the diasporic experience. 110 These misrepresentations and exclusions of important meanings of racial/ethnic identity were disavowed and displaced by cathecting race as fetish in an appeal to post-colonial sentiment. "The problem of response to Western influence is not unique to Singapore," B G Lee says, adding: Every non-Western developing country faces it—how to modernize without losing its soul, how to transform itself without undermining the basis of the whole society. Not all societies rise to the challenge. In Iran, the Shah tried to modernize his feudal, backward country, but he failed. . . . China, since the 19th century, has undergone periodic cycles o f opening its doors to the West, and then reverting back to being a closed society. . . . The Philippines have accepted Western (particularly American) institutions, such as the press, in toto. Theoretically, they have the highest number of human rights and freedoms of any country in the region. But the outcome has not been blissful. . . . N o w many Filipinos want to cut their psychological ties with the U S , in order to develop their own national spirit. In Japan, after Wor ld War II, General Douglas MacArthur imposed a Western political system on the country. But the Japanese found a way to transform it to function in a very un-Western fashion. The Japanese Diet works very differently from the U S Congress, or the Brit ish Parliament. ("Westernization," ST 12 Jan. 1989) Singapore's national ideology was likened to Malaysia 's Rukunegara and Indonesia's Pancasila, both of which had been created mainly to negotiate the demands of Western democratic and secular institutions with the tenets o f religious, Islamic and indigenous culture. Goh said that Indonesia and Malaysia both have their "own national ideologies which formally state the key axioms and premises on which their societies [were] based" and that Singapore too should have a national ideology o f its own ("National Ideology," SJ_ 29 Oct. 1989). This allowed Singapore's national ideology to be equated with the post-colonial gesture embedded in the national ideologies of these two countries although they were very dissimilar in content. For instance, the Indonesian Pancasila stresses belief in one God , a just and civi l ized society, unity, democracy and social justice, whereas the Malaysian Rukunegara emphasizes Ill belief in God , loyalty to king and country, supremacy of the constitution, rule o f law, mutual respect and good social behaviour as its guiding principles. S Rajaratnam, a former minister of culture, one of the architects o f the founding nationalism of a "Singaporean Singapore" and a member of a minority ethnic group, provided one o f the more lucid moments in the debate. Retired from government, he attacked the phantasmatic nature of the project at the London School of Economics A lumni Association's annual dinner: It is my thesis that the search for roots has not been pursued within the all-embracing non-ethnic concept o f a Singaporean Singapore whose ultimate goal is the creation o f a Singapore identity and not a hotch-potch of wary ethnic strangers. ("Raja," ST 11 Mar. 1990) Singaporeans, he said, had already forged a Singaporean identity out o f the many "identities our immigrant forefathers brought with them." Critiquing the view o f Singapore as an Asian society, he pointed to its heavy Western borrowings. Singapore's political, economic and social institutions were not traditional, he said. Rather, modern Singapore is rooted in Western, scientific, technical, political, economic and legal cultures modified to suit Singapore's needs. Singapore culture, he added, was "a l iving culture which is also plugged to a world culture . . . oriented towards and part o f the unfolding and continually renewing world culture." "Singaporeans," he said, "must remember that this exercise [of searching for roots] is like searching at night for a black hen which may be running around in China, India or in the sands o f Arabia ." The "National Ideology" project set itself the impossible task of reconciling antinomies. Y e o said the nation had to balance democracy with central state control, be cosmopolitan yet nationalistic, efficient yet humane ("Evolving," ST 20 June 1989). As such, rhetorical questions and lyrical language were the prevailing enunciative mode, used to cover over the impossibility of coherent argument. Since the new nationalism was trying to suppress exactly those values which had been already cathected and interiorized by the population in the two decades following independence, repression could only be executed by dissembling. This, complicated perhaps by the guilt incurred in attempting such repressions 112 and dissemblance, very often saw the repressed return as irony in government discourse to split and double its meanings and riddle the project with contradictions. There are numerous examples of these, and I have already pointed out some of these. B G Lee's ironized denial that the government was "not talking about making zombies out o f Singaporeans," for instance, issues from the clash between the new and founding nationalism ( " B G Lee: N o Intention," ST 18 Jan. 1989). According to the older, liberal national culture that emphasized democratic representation, and given the nation's geographical proximity to communist regimes in China and North Korea, any attempt to homogenize the people was suspected as totalitarian indoctrination designed to turn people into idiots. B G Lee adds that the government is not interested in stifling individuality "the way North Koreans squashed the population and other totalitarian governments do . . .," himself placing doubts in people's minds where none had been raised in the public domain. But my favorite example of irony in the discourse occurs when B G Lee likens the activity o f deciding which values should be nationalized to the way World War II scientists identified the problem areas of Brit ish bombers that needed repair. He says that these bombers, examined after their runs, were reinforced in precisely those parts that had escaped hits: Y o u think about that. Y o u put the armour where the holes were not because where the holes were, the aeroplanes came back. Where the holes were not, doesn't mean they were not hit. They crashed straight-away and, therefore, the protection had to be in the wrong places. ("Ideology," ST 19 Jan. 1989) I f ideology is fantasy, this 'dream' reveals the return o f the repressed. B G Lee's discourse is geared towards disavowing the claim that government was meddling with people's subjectivity, and that he in particular was the chief manipulator of national subjectivity, given his role in the "National Ideology" project. But the figure of the scientist repairing bombers is a condensed metaphor that collapses macho heroism with intellectual power, revealing B G Lee's (self) pretensions and perhaps unacknowledged desire in his role as leader of the "National Ideology" project to be a national hero through the use of a 113 highly instrumental and manipulative rationality. The body of the scientist is also the site o f concealment o f a terrifying power: the bomber pilots may be in the thick of action but it is the scientist's expertise here that decides the outcome of violence (just as A l l i e d atomic scientists in Wor ld War II indirectly ended the war with holocausts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). B G Lee's fixation on his task as reinforcing the national subjectivity where "the holes [are] not" also sees the ironized return o f that which the public is not supposed to know: that national culture was not really in need of repair. This is the closest the government comes to revealing that the "National Ideology" project was strictly unnecessary for the nation but was required to buttress the power o f the government/ruling party. His use of the words the "non-obvious places" as that where national ideology should be put to work may also be read as a Freudian slip (over and above the sexual connotations of his discursive circling around "holes"): that the holes were really in another place (in the gap between liberalism and state power/capital accumulation, as I have argued) but it was crucial that their location be dissembled by directing the patching up job to the "non-obvious" places, i.e. national culture. The lack of congruity between tenor (national ideology project) and vehicle (bomber repair) in this metaphor is an integral feature o f B G Lee's ideological fantasy: everyone knows that the structural organization of socio-economic-cultural life is different from that of a bomber's—holes in the former need to be tended to immediately to prevent them from ripping everything apart. But this incongruence is needed to hide from public awareness the intensity of the threat posed to the government and the capitalist class by liberalization/democratization. The minister's fantasy also suggests that the sources o f threat to state power could only be repaired by re-constructing the national body ("where the holes were not"). A s my discussion here has shown, the government attempted to deal with the contradictions between liberalism and state power/capital accumulation by precisely introducing holes where they were not, in the national body, especially in the domain of inter-racial relations. The project is an interesting example of the ability of governments to reconstitute their nation's identity, to wrest it away from its originary founding myths in order to produce a new national 114 subjectivity that would be more amenable to state authoritarianism. It shows how, in these days of late capitalism, o f internationalism and radical democracy, authoritarian governments find other uses for nationalism than that of nation-building. They appropriate its form and function, as a collective expression of the nation's desires and aspirations, to subordinate the nation. It also shows how the discourses o f racial essentialisms, based on neo-colonial racist ideologies, can be used by authoritarian regimes in post-colonial nations to perpetuate the centralization of state power: that, while pretending to be de-colonizing discourses, these enable yet another colonization o f post-colonial subjects. 115 Notes 1 Wee, "Staging" and "Clash" 227. I read Wee as acknowledging some o f the absurdities of the new discourse o f East Asian modernity and, to a certain extent, as skeptical towards the new nationalism as an authentic affirmation o f ethnic identity. But I w i l l further address the limitations o f his approach in later chapters. David Brown links the "National Ideology" project to the "corporatist management of ethnicity" that he notes in Singapore in the 1980s and 1990s. The ruling party came to power in the 1950s by riding the tiger of communism. But, says Brown, "Today's tiger is perceived as ethnicity, and the strategy has been to tame and housetrain the beast through corporatist management" (32). John Clammer perceives the "National Ideology" project as having arisen from the failure o f the philosophy o f pragmatism to regulate the encroachment of Western values. Describing Singaporean culture as "a new culture" ensuing from the mingling of folk cultures with European, Arab, Jewish and indigenous Southeast Asian cultures, he views the "National Ideology" project as "an attempt to shore up a culture and social structure which no longer exists, i f it ever d id" (40-41). In China, for instance, the new colonial Orientalism has provided the state with the ideology required to challenge current norms of human rights as Eurocentric and to ethnicize the state's oppressive regime. In non-Western nations, the disciplining o f the working force arises from the pressures o f Western capitalist domination. But we also note an increasing backtracking on the West's human rights agenda, made possible by the ideology of Eastern cultural difference. In the U S , the linking of trade concessions to human rights observations shows signs o f loosening. A school of thought gaining ascendency in U S political circles is that the West should only go so far as to demand economic liberalism from its trading partners, and not to insist on political liberalization: that the West is only being ' l iberal ' in recognizing the other's difference. It would seem that neo-Orientalism, now spoken by the East, with its American origins almost completely obfuscated, is an ideology that permits the West to view its insistence on the human rights of other peoples as so much non-liberal cultural bullying! 116 The Nanyang Chinese, more recent immigrants to Malaya, still held on to Chinese nationality and sent their children to Chinese vernacular schools. They are to be distinguished from the Straits Chinese, who had been in the country for more than one generation, and whose Chinese culture had been hybridized with native, Malay culture and Brit ish colonial culture. The Straits Chinese were Brit ish subjects and had taken advantage of colonial education, forming much of Singapore's English-educated middle class. Straits Chinese culture, with its Anglo-Malay-Chinese syncretism, is considered by some to be the true representative of South-east Asian culture and/or a model for a multi-racial hybridized national Malayan culture. 4 "Rojak" refers literally to Singaporean dishes which use a wide variety o f meat and vegetarian ingredients, and, which, even in their respective Chinese, Indian and Malay versions, combine cultural influences from other ethnic groups. "Rojak culture" as a trope, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s, was often used locally to refer to Singapore's hybridized culture. 5 Singapore Yearbook (Singapore, 1967) 3-4, qtd. in Vas i l , Asianising 30. 6 In response to the Goh Education Report, Prime Minister Lee had said in a published letter to the education minister on moral education: "[T]he litmus test of a good education is whether it nurtures good citizens who can live, work, contend and cooperate in a civilised way. Is he loyal and patriotic? Is he, when the need arises, a good soldier, ready to defend his country, and so protect his wife and children, and his fellow-citizens? Is he fdial, respectful to elders, law-abiding, humane, and responsible? Does he take care o f his wife and children, and his parents? Is he a good neighbour and a trustworthy friend? Is he tolerant o f Singaporeans o f different races and religions? Is he clean, neat, punctual, and wel l -mannered?" ( H i l l and Lian 89-90). 7 See K u o , "Confucianism" 12; and Chua, "Culture" 18-9. o On mooting the idea of an institute on East Asian philosophy in 1982, education minister Goh Keng Swee had said that "an academy could be established to re-interpret Confucianism in line with [the] changing times" (Kuo, "Confucianism" 9). In meeting the demands of modernism, it was felt that 117 Confucian ethics had to be separated from Confucian political ideology, indicating that those in charge had no concern that the new Confucianism being scrabbled up should accurately reflect the original culture (Kuo, "Confucianism" 15). Chua gives an interesting account of this hybridized culture, where he counters the state's purist notions o f Chinese identity by observing that Chinese spiritual practices have, over generations, been syncretized with pre-Muslim Malay animistic practices ("Culture" 1-4). 1 0 Chua, for instance, says that the "attempt to entrench an elaborate Confucian philosophy in the Singaporea ideological landscape had failed" and was "abandoned" because of the "absence o f Confucianism" as a "foundational idea for the organization o f daily life o f Chinese in Singapore" and the "weakening" o f "belief in the significance of Confucianism as the cultural foundation o f so-called 'East As ian capitalism' " ("Culture" 19-20). 1 1 See H i l l and L ian ; Wee, "Staging" and "Clash"; and Vas i l , Asianising. 12 Straits Times is Singapore's national newspaper: although a public corporation, it is chaired by top (sometimes retired) government officials or ministers. Hence, it is strongly pro-government and, by its own admission, plays an important role in hegemonizing government ideology. It w i l l be referred to in an abbreviated form as ST. 13 Henceforth to be referred to as B G Lee to distinguish him from Lee Kuan Y e w . The title " B G " is an abbreviation o f Brigadier-General, a title used by both Lee Hsien Loong and George Yeo . 1 4 The notion o f a "communitarian democracy" originated in Lodge and Vogel ' s study, Ideology and National Competitiveness. See below. 1 5 In this regard, the recent institutionalizing of government-appointed "non-constituency" members o f parliament can be seen as a discursive legacy of this project. Here, leaders of sectional interests in Singapore ( from the women's movement, trade unions, etc.) are invited to represent their views in Parliament. Their effort however would always only be a semblance/image of oppositional or minority representation since, not representing any political party, they had no real political power. Thus, once 118 again, the image of democratic representation would stand in for and disavow the absence of the real thing. 1 6 See "Westernisation," ST, 12 Jan. 1989; "Western Values," "Death K n e l l , " and "Mel t ing Pot" in ST 18 Jan. 1989; "Singapore Cannot Be Melt ing Pot," Business Times 18 Jan. 1989; "Singapore's B i g Wish , " ST 27 Jan. 1990; "Raja," ST 11 Mar . 1990. 17 In 1994, the P A P sought to introduce restricted legislation against family violence but by appending it to the Women's Charter. A leader of the local feminist movement and a non-constituency member of parliament appointed by the government, Kanwaljit Soin, however, saw this as a delimiting representation o f family violence as a woman's problem and fought in parliament to have it legislated separately. She also wanted spousal abuse to be criminalized. The government argued that this was not appropriate to the Asian family institution. 18 Many interpretations of Confucianism had arisen in China through the two millennia since the sage's death in 479 B . C . A s such, it could be held that there is no exclusive base from which one could theorize about a Confucian ethic. Neither did the Chinese on the mainland always view it as a core component of their ethnic identity. It was disowned by the modernists o f the M a y Fourth movement and again by the communist regime. The Confucian Analects were destroyed during the 1960s' Cultural Revolution. See Chan, "Confucianism" for a history of the philosophy in East As ia . 19 Interestingly, in the 1980s, a visiting Confucian scholar, Hsu Cho Y u n , sought to reasssure minority Singaporeans fearful of Chinese cultural domination with this comment: Confucianism was " a universal system of ethics and a universal way o f life." B y adopting it, Singapore "might wel l become the seed o f a future global culture looked to by other parts of the world" (Vasi l , Asianising 73). Di r l ik says that American Confucianist scholar Tu Wei-ming, who played a leading role in the promotion of Confucianism in Singapore in the 1980s, has stressed Confucianism as a "universalistic humanism that could be reconciled (like Christianity) with different cultural and religious traditions. There is no reason, [Tu] had told a Chinese interviewer, why there could not be, say, an African Confucian" (Dir l ik , "Confucianism" 258). 120 Chapter 3 Disciplining Post-Colonial Identity: Reading the Michael Fay Caning Incident In March 1994, Singapore newspapers reported a legal case concerning a group of expatriate teenagers who had been charged with several counts o f vandalism and causing mischief. Under the Singapore criminal code, vandalism is a crime that carries a mandatory caning sentence of three strokes o f the rotan (cane) for every count. Caning is also the punishment for illegal immigration and numerous other offenses. A s such, it was an unremarkable court case which would have gone unreported or merited at most a filler in the newspaper except for its socio-cultural interest.1 The youths had spray-painted cars belonging to the rich and successful in upper-class neighborhoods. Cars had also been pelted with eggs and their license plates switched. One of the cars vandalized had even belonged to Kanwaljit Soin, a non-constituency member of parliament and leader of the local women's movement, who was married to a local judge. The offenses had been committed in several wi ld sprees. In addition, the youths had gained nothing tangible from their actions: the things stolen, the Singapore flag, taxi signs and other signboards, were public property and had symbolic rather than monetary value. Even on the surface, it seemed like a concerted rebellion against the capital-owning class and the power elite: a snub to wealth, property-ownership and power, including state power. The youths, in addition, were sons of expatriates working in Singapore and attended the Singapore American School, allowing anti-Singaporean motivations to be read into their offenses. Among these youths was an American teenager, Michael Fay. Though the reports didn't mention it at this time, Fay's successful prosecution would make him the first American to be caned in Singapore. 4 This in itself guaranteed the news value o f the case: many newspapers w i l l always report a first-time occurrence of an event. 121 Over the next three months, the case inflated to gigantic proportions, becoming a world-wide topic of public discussion. It was unprecedented, acquiring a scale far bigger than even international quarrels concerning capital punishment of foreign nationals. Looking back, there is indeed a touch of the 'fantastic' about the caning incident, where an American teenager's crime of spray-painting some cars in Singapore sparked off an international conflict that crystallized meanings around the binaries o f East/West, authoritarianism/liberalism, barbarism/civilization and imperialism/colonial uprising. In North America and Singapore, it was an issue taken up almost daily by the mass media. Larry K i n g aired the issue at least twice in his hour-long live show and Phi l Donahue was among American talk-show hosts who discussed the episode. The case made this previously unknown teenager famous, sparking media interest in him even after he had been caned and returned to live in the U S . B y the time the issue died down in M a y with Fay's caning, Singapore had also gained a reputation that differed depending on which part o f the world one was in. In some quarters, especially the post-colonial world, it was well-regarded for its stance against American imperialism. In North America, opinion swung in two directions: either it was considered by liberals to be a barbaric nation and an Orwellian police state with its authoritarianism racialized as Chinese and equated with China's, or it was perceived as a nation with a progressive and enviable attitude towards crime and punishment, a Utopian state where one could walk the streets at night safe from harm and raise one's child in a secure environment. For the critic of discourse, the caning episode offers a site from which to investigate constructions of post-colonial national identity in the era of transnational/international capitalism and to track its relations in desire for the West and identifications with colonial epistemologies. It allows one to differentiate the 'historicity' o f contemporary post-colonial discourses of national identity from the nationalisms arising from post-independence movements and those fashioned in the first years o f nationhood. This is an important task that permits one to factor in the effects o f new geo-cultural organizations o f time and space and new modalities in the circulation of culture/information and political and economic power. • 122 Frantz Fanon and others have shown that de-colonizing nationalisms are always already caught up in and shaped by colonial knowledges, by colonial anthropologies of the racial 'other,' Western territorializations o f desire, as wel l as by the society's political and economic relations to the West. 5 Recent changes in the international organizations o f politics and economics as wel l as domestic transformations in class, gender, sexuality and race relations must then be expected to produce alterations in colonial knowledges and revisions in anthropologies o f the racial 'other' that need not necessarily duplicate 19th and earlier 20th century colonial economies o f desire and identification nor their representations of the Western self and its 'other.' Given their rapid international circulation in a world where Western knowledge still reigns supreme, this is l ikely to impact on post-colonial nationalisms-perhaps radically changing them-which, I have argued, is the case with Singapore. Developments in capitalism too and the protection o f the capital-owning class now see increasing coincidence o f interests and collaborations between Western and post-colonial governments, which, while preserving Western dominance, allows nationalism to become a relatively new technology for a doubled colonization of post-colonial subjects, by the West and by their own government. Singapore is not a typical post-colonial nation and its current nationalism is not offered as a totalizing model for contemporary post-coloniality, but its experience o f a major shift in national identity goes some way in pointing to the need to theorize contemporary post-colonial nationalisms differently from past ones. Especially, the sudden reversions to archaic, retrogressive racial identifications and racial polarizations in post-colonial nationalisms must be contextualized in terms o f these societies' new locations in the circulation o f capital and symbolic currency. I w i l l explore the connections between neo-colonial ideology and Singapore's new 'de-colonizing' nationalism further in this chapter. For the moment, it may be sufficient to note that perhaps the post-colonial critic should, as Di r l ik has already done, regard new post-colonial assertions of identity with some suspicion for the Western imperialist intentions that may be embedded within them. 123 I w i l l argue that the Fay caning was utilized by the Singapore government to re-stage and legitimize its construction o f the nation's Orientalized Asian/Chinese identity as the 'other' to the West. The episode revealed that a state of crisis where the nation's sovereignty was perceived to be under threat was germane to Singaporeans' cathecting of the government's new construction o f national culture. The perception o f Asian culture as superior to that o f the West added to its attraction. I w i l l show that, i f there had been ambivalence towards the government's proposed "shared values," this was eradicated by the Singapore government's conflict with the U S government and media. The perceived threat to the nation's sovereignty saw the people crossing over the nation/government divide to identify its interests and its w i l l with that o f the government. This is known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as the "suture" of the subject to the mandate imposed on it by the symbolic (dominant) order, in this case, that of the Singaporean acceding to the national identifications imposed on it by the government. Silverman recalls M i l l e r ' s description o f suture as "that moment when the subject inserts itself into the symbolic register in the guise of a signifier, and in so doing, gains meaning at the expense of being" (Subject 200). " A given signifier," she adds, (in this case, that o f the signifier "Singaporean" defined in an Orientalized manner) "grants the subject access to the symbolic order, but alienates it not only from its own needs but from its drives. That signifier stands in for the absent subject," (in this case, the absent "Singaporean") "whose lack it can never stop signifying" (200). In suture, similar to interpellation except that it focuses on the aspect o f lack and desire, the signifier " I " (in this case, the " I " as "Singaporean") represents the subject to another signifier, "you" (a "non-Singaporean" in this case, or, an "American"). But the subject finds itself in the symbolic order through an imaginary identification (of itself as a coherent self). In the cinematic model (where the subject identifies with the f i lm's symbolic gaze), says Silverman, as in ideological coercion, suture is effected by the narrative/ideology producing an awareness of lack/castration, causing anxiety, which activates its desire to disavow/overcome that lack by investing in the narrative/ideological fictional resolution/signifiers offered by the symbolic order (201-22). Analyzing the operations o f Alfred 124 Hitchcock's film Psycho. Silverman says it "terrorizes the viewing subject, refusing ever to let it off the hook. That hook is the system of suture . . . " (212). For suture to occur, however, "the code, which produces an imaginary, ideological effect" must disappear from the subject's consciousness; it must be "hidden by the message" so that the subject "absorbs an ideological effect without being aware o f i t ." 6 The 'hooking ' of the Singaporean subject to government ideology depended, I w i l l show, on the discursive creation o f a situation which allowed the Singaporean's fear and suspicion o f government authority to be displaced into fear and suspicion o f Western imperialism. But this fear o f a lost sovereignty that enabled the Singaporean's cathecting o f the government's mandate o f national identification was made invisible in the polls conducted at the end of the incident, which indicated that the people's desire was now united with that of the state's. The media's role in the process of suture was important. A s Roger Fowler observes, the media (perhaps more so than government) possesses many resources with which to hide the institutional nature o f their discourse, to conceal the voice o f authority. It is also able to form, represent or simply assume a consensus among the people, which is crucial for hegemonizing a nationalist ideology (Language 46-65). The suture was also enabled by the compensatory enjoyment the newly constructed national identity offered o f feelings o f cultural superiority to the West. A s I have shown, Singapore's new nationalism borrowed from a Western revision of Orientalism, which, with its suggestion o f alternative, non-European modernities, emerged from Western angst about its cultural superiority in the face o f the growing success o f East Asian economies (Wee, "Clash" 221-2 ). Within neo-Orientalism, the West exhibits, at least superficially, an attitude that it may have something to learn from the East, after a l l . This aspect o f the government's new national identity had not become evident during the "National Ideology" project but the government emphasized this during the caning incident. The media, in particular, the newspaper Straits Times, whose discourse I w i l l examine, played no small role in exploiting this sense o f cultural superiority. 125 But as press reports also show, it was an ambivalent sense of superiority, haunted by contradictory moments o f inferiority to the West and recognition of its higher power. The caning incident was to show that this Singaporean ambivalence originated in the West's own ambivalent inscription o f Eastern 'superiority' in neo-Orientalism. When Singapore began to assert its cultural difference from the West/America by re-staging its recently formulated, Orientalized national identity, it became clear that its claim o f alterity from the West was based on a polarization of liberal values as Western/American and authoritarian state control (or its euphemism, "communitarian democracy"), constructed as Eastern. But the caning incident revealed that this Singaporean/Eastern 'otherness' was also the face o f an 'other' America/West, that which rose up in support of Singapore's authoritarian approach to crime control and its expanded disciplinary control o f the people. Tired o f rising crime rates and ineffectual prosecution o f offenders at home, these 'other' Americans saw in Singapore the Utopia o f a safe society. A s they made their voices heard, Singaporeans, in particular the media, began to view themselves as the fantasy object o f American desire: that they were what Americans wanted to be but couldn't. Singaporeans' validation of state control and their 'anti-colonial ' affirmation of their 'Eastern' identity ironically turned on the enjoyment they gained from being desired and approved of by the West. The caning incident unraveled Singapore's new nationalism, revealing it to be a colonial construct o f subjectivity rather than a decolonized one, as that which produced Singapore as the fantasy object o f American right-wing desires for patriarchal state discipline and control. This enjoyment of 'Eastern ' cultural superiority, however, was riddled with doubt because ' l iberal ' America , the America o f the media, did not take a similar desiring approach to Singapore. For them, Singapore was a barbaric nation which supposedly still employed medieval rituals of public hangings. I w i l l not deal with American discourse except occasionally since my focus is on Singaporean responses to the incident. Suffice it to say for the moment that the American press' representation o f Singapore as Chinese in its 'barbarism' revealed the racism embedded in Western liberalism as wel l as the fear of the 'ye l low threat' that has emerged with the economic challenge to the U S posed by Korea, Taiwan, Japan, 126 China and other Pacific R i m nations. The racist desire of talk-show host Phi l Donahue, for instance, rendered him gullible to the claims o f an American featured guest who claimed that he had been a regular visitor to Singapore and had witnessed such a public hanging—where apparently blood-thirsty Singaporeans had cheered on the hangman. It was later discovered that this American had never been to Singapore. Ien A n g and Jon Stratton argue that Singapore's new modern 'Asianness' is promoted through the construction o f the 'West ' as its 'other.' They also point out that its "self-Orientalizing Occidental opposition to the Western, mirrors the West's persistent neo-Orientalist othering o f modern A s i a " (85). "There is a complicity," they say, "between Western neo-Orientalist discourses . . . and Singaporean discourses o f self-representation" (69). The Singapore-America discourse on the caning incident certainly bears this out. But the discourses o f American and Singaporean national cultures that were generated out o f the caning incident also unmasked a split in the self-representation o f the American embedded within neo-Orientalist discourse itself. Singapore's use o f the neo-Orientalist discourse in staging its identity in the caning incident inadvertently revealed neo-Orientalism as an ideological fantasy located in American cultural anxiety. I say this with particular reference to Lodge and Vogel ' s well-cited book Ideology and National Competitiveness that spawned Singapore's effort to define its 'As i an ' identity. The manner in which Singapore's self-representation split America into two suggests that the neo-Orientalist construction of the Eastern 'other' not only re-articulated old Western racism but that it is also an American attempt to escape from repressed, forbidden, anti-liberal desires for greater state control by projecting them onto the racial 'other.' This allowed Americans not only to disavow their own desires but to also use the racial threat to urge a de-liberalization of America, to offer "communitarian democracy" as economically necessary for the nation. This explains America 's split response to Singapore in the incident, where Singapore was either beheld as a desired image of an American future, or that which bore the anxiety that 127 liberal Amer ica felt about a contemporary threat to its most central values—a threat posed by late capitalism but which is displaced onto the racial 'other' as scapegoat. I w i l l argue that when Singapore asserted its Oriental 'otherness' against the West/America, it was merely offering itself as object of desire for the West, where the 'other' revealed itself as the Western 'self. ' Singapore's statements of a culturally superior, non-Western 'difference' were always framed by Western authorization and its self-representation gazed with desire at Western approval. I w i l l also show that anxiety about male identity worked in this discourse as a condensed, paranoiac metaphor that spoke of a deadlock in Singaporean desire to be both the 'other' and the Western 'self, ' and expressed an inner fear/awe of American power that ironized assertions o f cultural superiority. State authoritarianism/discipline was both eroticized and pathologized (the latter by dissident writers) by inhabiting subject positions assigned by male masochism and/or sodomization within a heterosexual, homosocial context. Singapore's use of the incident to stage its Asian difference from the West also revealed that this involved, at base, nothing more than anti-liberalism, and was not per se anti-Western. The nation's Eastern identity crystallized in the discourse as an equation made with authoritarianism and state discipline o f the social body. The rotan became symbol o f Singapore's Eastern culture, which is ironic because caning in Singapore is strictly a colonial hand-me-down. Throughout the incident, the Singapore government and media reductively represented America 's liberal political culture in terms only o f lax, ineffectual approaches to crime and punishment. Fay's miscreant behavior and American liberals' protest against his caning featured in the Singapore discourse as metonym for liberalism in general. "Liberalism k i l l s " was the underlying message in a newspaper article which argued that U S liberal approaches hampered crime-busting ("Liberal Tradition," ST 16 A p r i l 1994). Lee Kuan Y e w ' s comment that "drugs, violence, unemployment and homelessness, all sorts o f problems" were what made America "hardly safe and peaceful" criminalized all social problems, especially those resulting from 128 unequal wealth distribution and deftly executed a slippage between tight state control o f crime and state policing of all aspects of human life. But Singapore's Occidental demonizing o f the U S rarely moved beyond echoing America 's own self-critical representations made by its right-wing ideologues. The compatibility between Singapore and conservative America that manifested itself in this staging o f Singapore's Oriental identity as wel l as other aspects of this East-West discourse suggest a particular reading o f American neo-Orientalism which w i l l gradually become evident in my discussion o f the caning incident. American neo-Orientalism, especially that articulated by Lodge and Vogel , appears to have arisen as an ideological formation at the intersection of two American cultural anxieties: that o f the geo-cultural threat posed by the rising new economies o f other cultures and races and the interrogation o f America 's own core cultural values of liberal democracy by the economic pressures of late capitalism where further capital accumulation requires anti-liberal approaches to government. A s in previous colonial discourses, race as a source of anxiety is repressed by displacing it into methodology where the 'other' is studied as an object. In Ideology and National Competitiveness. Lodge and Vogel not only misrepresent Taiwanese, Koreans, and Japanese as the same due to their Confucian values, but also interpret this homogenized East Asian culture in terms of Western political interests. A t one level, neo-Orientalism is a pathological ideology that seeks to mitigate Western fears about the newly industrialized economies by representing Asian economic success as due to an ethnic/racial accident rather than to the savvy o f the people, and their ability to respond quickly to the forces o f history. It certainly represses the idea that non-Western people might be better able to play the capitalist game than its originators. According to neo-Orientalism, East Asians would seem to be a never-changing people, whose culture, Confucianism, just fortuitously happened to lend itself to participation in capitalism. But neo-Orientalism should also be situated as an attempt by conservative American ideologues to legitimize right-wing, non-liberal values as 'American, ' and to get their agenda of greater state control past America 's foundational liberal 129 political culture. In "The United States: The Costs o f Ambivalence," Lodge identifies a central ideological ambivalence in American history: From their beginnings in the seventeenth century, Americans have been divided in their devotion to the ideologies o f individualism and communitarianism. They have unquestionably preferred the former . . . but they have moved pragmatically toward the latter to confront problems and seize opportunities. If we look back on U S history, this ambivalence may have been beneficial . . . If we look forward, its benefits are by no means as clear. (103) In the past half a century, he says, "a crescendo of events in the real world, domestically and abroad, has accelerated a drift toward communitarian practices" (103). He identifies "East Asian competition" as being among foreign factors that have influenced this move, adding that competition from East Asian economies provide "considerable evidence that some communitarian nations are more competitive than the United States" (104). Lodge is concerned that even though there has been a "transition to communitarian practices" (119) in the 1980s in the U S , there still remains this ideological ambivalence, which, especially when it pertains to the role o f government, could be "costly" (126). The "practical drift in the direction o f communitarianism was in no sense ideologically motivated," he complains (119). "Its aim was only to solve problems, seize opportunities, and perform more effectively. Even as the slow swing occurred, leaders in al l walks o f life propounded the virtues of traditional individualism: free enterprise, free trade, free markets, the limited state, and the rest" (119). Wi th "tension in American society . . .shaped by an improper fit between its prevailing ideology [liberalism] and a changing wor ld" (137), he hopes that "leaders of government, business, and labor w i l l acknowledge the fundamental law of evolution—adapt or perish—and strive to minimize these crises by using each one to ease the transition to a more effective system" (138) that w i l l overturn the erosion in American national economic competitiveness. B y "effective system," he means, a "communitarian democracy" where, among other things, the government w i l l play a primary role in identifying "the 130 needs o f the community and individual," where the "duties of membership in American society" w i l l be defined, and where individual capabilities w i l l be mobilized around "consensus" rather than the "contract" (138-9). Lodge wants Americans to confront and come to terms with this ideological "ambivalence" rather than to run away from it as it has done in the past (which apparently retards the benefits and operations of "communitarianism"). He himself rejects the strategy some have offered to deal with this ambivalence, that "camouflage was desirable: change practice but keep in place a vei l o f ignorance to prevent the disturbing effects o f the ideological fallout from disrupting that change" (120). Lodge and Vogel have already pastoralized "authoritarianism" by re-baptizing it as "communitarianism." But perhaps the task o f national ideological change in the U S is too hard and requires some form of "camouflage." This is where other cultures prove to be ideologically handy. The authoritarianism/communitarianism can be projected onto other races where these are given a Western name as wel l as a racial/ethnic name. In the case o f East As ia , it can be called alternatively "communitarianism" or "Confucianism." Neo-Orientalism takes Western/American imperialist desire for ever more increased national competitiveness across the cultural border forbidden by liberalism. But by also inscribing it on the Eastern body, specifically the 'Confucianist" body, it is able to offer this body as racial scapegoat for the need to execute an ideological change within the Western self. The doubled inscription of the racial 'other' as both "communitarian" and "Confucianist" means that it can alternate in serving two functions. The term "communitarian" could be allied with capitalist efficiency (and sharable by the West) while "Confucianism" could be seen as the racialized or archaic term, allied with racial otherness. I w i l l argue through my discussion of the caning incident, in particular through Singapore's neo-Orientalist construction o f Eastern identity, that the discourse of neo-Orientalism is a right-wing construction where the East is presented nostalgically in the image o f American culture in its golden age—as one where family values, hard work, thrift and communal solidarity enabled an Utopian existence 131 and also allowed capital accumulation to proceed unhindered. But this mis-representation o f Eastern culture, which is an attempt to extract cultural surplus value from the East, occurs at a site o f American ideologically transgressive entry into the political culture of patriarchal authoritarianism, forbidden by liberalism. However, while neo-Orientalism keeps the East where the West wants it be—forever culturally defensive, working with Western meanings that transform and betray the post-colonial subject into recidivism as these meanings cross the West-East divide—the East's appropriation o f this colonial discourse returns the transgressive moment o f origin back to the West's discourse, where it then cleaves the Western nation in two, questioning American cultural coherence and undermining their sense of cultural superiority. The discourse o f national identity that arose in Singapore surrounding the Fay incident was one of the most definitive moments for Singapore in terms of the articulation o f its national identity. It was the first time that the Singapore government, helped by the media, and using the American discourse o f neo-Orientalism, attempted to stage the identity o f Singapore as the cultural 'other' to the U S . The incident showed that this instrumentalist production of national identity—where the demonized production o f the U S as Singapore's cultural 'other' was used as a strategy to expunge cultural elements from the nation that were not amenable to an authoritarian political culture and to easy social management—depended on American authorization. But discourse produced from this incident also reveals that this national identity is not viable in that it contradicted earlier constructions o f the nation as culturally hybrid. In addition to government statements and press reports, two books w i l l also be examined. 7 The book The Caning of Michae l Fay: The Inside Story by a Singaporean by Gopal Baratham, a Singapore fiction writer and neurosurgeon, provides a platform to examine how the government's construction o f the nation's identity seriously hinders alternative constructions of the nation while lending itself to easy deconstruction. On the other hand, the book The Flogging of Singapore by journalist Asad La t i f bears scrutiny as to the ideological demands made on Singaporeans who wish to identify with the government's proposed Asian national culture. This book, the most elaborate piece of discourse to be 132 produced out o f this incident, tried to authenticate Singapore's ' A s i a n ' identity by re-packaging it as a factual discourse belonging to the genre o f historical reportage. But it inadvertently revealed serious contradictions and ambivalence within the government's construction o f the nation. The state's construction o f national identity significantly began from a moment o f high anxiety, that o f a threat to the nation's political sovereignty, which was created by the government itself and opened up a discursive space for culturally 'othering' or alienating Singapore from the U S . On 3 March 1994, Fay was sentenced to a total of four months' j a i l , six strokes of the cane, and a fine o f $3,500 on two charges o f vandalism, two counts of mischief (for pelting two cars with eggs, switching a license plate and damaging a car door) and one count of dishonestly retaining stolen property (flags, taxi signs and other signboards). Twenty other charges, mainly o f vandalism were taken into consideration. 8 Immediately after sentencing, U S embassy official Ralph Boyce registered the embassy's dissatisfaction with the court findings with a statement released to the press. This was followed the next day by a similar statement from the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore, expressing its consternation. President Clinton's intervention came on 8 March 1994. American official comments from Clinton, the White House and the U S embassy in Singapore showed some attempt to avoid suggestions of threats to political sovereignty. Embassy official Ralph Boyce, for instance, in his first public statement (made to the press immediately after Fay 's sentencing on 3 March 1994), began by acknowledging Singapore's sovereignty in the local administration of justice: "American citizens overseas . . . [were] subject to the laws o f that country," he said ("Reactions to Sentencing," ST 4 Mar . 1994). He was also careful to situate his intervention within the purview of embassy function: the embassy wanted to "ensure that his [Fay's] legal rights under Singapore law were accorded to h im." Nevertheless, there is implicature here: that the Singapore justice system did not protect individuals' rights in the prosecution o f crime; that Fay's prosecution was motivated by anti-Americanism. Commenting directly on the case, he said, "We see a large discrepancy between the offense and the punishment. The cars were not permanently damaged; the paint was removed with 133 thinner. Caning leaves permanent s ca r s . . . . We have made our concerns clear for a youthful first time offender." He added: "We are not going to forecast any possible future diplomatic actions." Boyce 's objection was made from within the terms of the Singapore vandalism law. He approached cultural criticism o f Singapore law, of its legal philosophy, by pointing to the gap between the "offense" and the "punishment," but he moved quickly to modify that as involving an interpretation o f the law rather than its interrogation. The Singapore law on vandalism states that a first-time offender may be excused from mandatory caning o f three strokes on each count i f the offense does not include vandalism by paint or any other indelible substance. Boyce's point was that Fay was a first-time offender and that paint, in this case, was not an indelible substance—it was easily removed with thinner. Boyce used a modality of fact. The embassy's "seefing]" of a discrepancy depends on a series o f facts that are perceptually validated and expressed as a series of independent clauses: the cars were not permanently damaged; the paint was removed with thinner; and caning leaves permanent scars. The nominal "caning" also discursively deletes the relationship between the agent of action/punishment (Singapore) and the object o f punishment (the American citizen). In Boyce 's remarks, then, cultural criticism o f Singapore in terms o f American liberal approaches to punishment was clearly intended but just as clearly, it also aimed to cover over its aggression, occupying a highly ambiguous discursive space. Singapore's Minis try of Home Affairs came back with a more confrontational response, 9 interpreting Boyce 's statement as a criticism of Singapore's culture and as asserting the superiority o f American culture: Unl ike some other societies (read US) which may tolerate acts o f vandalism, Singapore has its own standards o f social order as reflected in our laws. It is because of our tough laws against antisocial crimes that we are able to keep Singapore orderly and relatively crime-free. We do not have a situation where acts o f vandalism are commonplace, as in cities like N e w Y o r k where even police cars are not spared. ("Reactions to Sentencing," ST 4 Mar . 1994) 134 The Ministry, in asserting Singapore's right to make its own laws, made it seem that the U S was denying them this right when Boyce had clearly acknowledged this point of international law. Boyce 's use o f the pronominal "we" was ambiguous: within the context of his statement, it appeared to refer to the embassy, as opposed to American national agency. In the Singapore ministerial statement, "we" marked the attempt right from the beginning of the incident to 'gang up,' to identify the government with the people, state power with national solidarity. The response situated itself as a 'national' rather than government statement directed at the U S . But Singapore agency was also depersonalized in the government statement: it is, in fact, attributed to its laws. Singapore's "standards of social order" were "reflected in [its] laws"; Singapore's "tough laws" were the agent o f Singapore's orderliness and freedom from crime. I f the law was indeed the expression of Singaporean national subjectivity, it was also that which totalized that subjectivity and forbade difference. The ministry's response also interpreted America 's specific interrogation o f the application of the caning sentence in the Fay case as a 'cultural ' question concerning "standards o f social order." It was this culturalizing of the issue that allowed Singapore to 'other' itself from the West and to legitimize this Singapore identity by demonizing the West. The perceived or constructed threat to sovereignty also permitted anti-colonial desire to be invested in this demonization. The press played up the conflictual elements o f the situation: the press report of the Singapore government and U S embassy's statements pitted the two sides against each other by presenting it under a banner headline, "Reactions to Sentencing of American Teenager for Vandalism," of which the Singapore side was titled "1 . The Minis try o f Home Affairs Says The L a w Must Run Its Course," and the U S side was headlined "2. The United States Embassy Says Punishment Doesn't Fit Cr ime." The statement from the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore was ambivalent (US Chamber," 5 Mar . 1994). On the one hand, it deployed an emotional rhetoric: it said it was "shaken by the reported decision to cane the boy," and "simply" could not "understand how the government [could] condone the permanent scarring o f an 18-year-old boy—American or Singaporean—by caning for such an 135 offense." But it also said that it had always supported the Singapore government's "aggressive enforcement o f law and order" and believed it was one of the reasons why Singapore was an attractive place to live and do business. Its statement that "it [was] impossible to predict how this [would] affect American business activity" but that it was "l ikely to cast a cloud over Singapore's international reputation," lent itself to interpretation that it was not planning to push for economic sanctions. In the event, American businesses in Singapore refused to comply with New York Times ' call on them to put pressure on the Singapore government ("Several U S Firms," ST 17 Apr . 1994). President Clinton's intervention came on 8 March 1994, which was made before the case went to appeal in the High Court. His statement, like Boyce 's , tried to anchor American liberal perceptions of the extremity o f the punishment in the application o f Singapore law rather than in critique o f the law itself ("Clinton Says," B_T 9 Mar . 1994). 1 0 He said: " . . . we believe that, based on the facts and treatment o f other cases, similar cases, that this punishment is extreme." Clinton delimited a country's right to enforce its own laws: "We recognize that they have a certain right to enforce their own criminal laws." But this delimitation could have been read as differentiating between correct use of the law and its abuse in the light o f his previous comment, rather than as aggressively challenging the sovereignty o f Singapore law. He vaguely hoped that "somehow, it (the caning sentence) w i l l be reconsidered" (my emphasis). While there is an implied suggestion that the Singapore government intervene in due process of law, Clinton's statement is itself a speech act, appealing directly to the Singapore judiciary who would rule on appeal rather than to the executive arm of government. Clinton's statement aimed at an under-lexicalization o f discourse, where references are generalized and abstract rather than concrete and specific, and it employed a modality o f uncertainty, so that international tension was diffused. 1 1 L ike Boyce, Clinton situated the American position ambivalently: it was a position that acknowledged its own interpretative status ("we believe that, based on the facts of the case"), but also underscored its basis in fact. The facts of the case act as pseudo agents, where circumstances stood in for American national agency. Clinton also personalized America in his appeal to 136 Singapore. He stressed an American introspective, mental transitivity: Americans "believe[d]" that the punishment was extreme and Americans "recognize[d]" that Singapore had a certain right to law enforcement. Singapore's Foreign Affairs ministry's response to Clinton's appeal (at the least, a disguised demand) was softer in tone ("Clinton Says," B T 9 Mar. 1994). It merely reiterated the Home Affairs Minis t ry ' s stance that the government couldn't intervene in the administration of justice, that the law had to run its course. Nonetheless, it contradicted this by making the government's support o f the lower court's findings o f the case quite clear. Comparing sentences handed out in previous cases o f vandalism, it said that these reveal "that the court sentence meted to Fay is neither extreme nor unprecedented." It also said that Fay 's sentencing was the outcome o f a fair and transparent legal process. The earlier Minis try o f Home Affairs ' statement had also indirectly expressed its support of the lower court's findings: it said that the law provided a range o f punishments, and the court had meted out the punishment o f caning, j a i l and a fine after Fay had pleaded guilty to five charges, with 20 other charges taken into consideration. This support was expressed at a time when government comment on the case was inappropriate since the case was going into appeal. The press joined in the state's effort to represent Clinton and Boyce as threatening Singapore's sovereignty. Business Times' report on 9 Mar . 1994 polarized the Singapore and American government's points of view by physically splitting the report, with an adversarial headline: "Cl inton says caning o f vandal is extreme, Singapore government disagrees." The headline and the report represented the issue as a battle of wi l ls . Clinton's statement "that somehow it [the sentence] w i l l be reconsidered" was represented as a prescription of behavior to the Singapore government. A s the following press reports, editorials and government statements w i l l show, the perception of a threat to Singapore sovereignty appeared to be necessary to Singapore's demonization of the West. The U S did keep up pressure throughout the incident but no direct threats were made against Singapore. On 1 A p r i l 1994, 24 U S senators signed a letter appealing for clemency for Fay from the Singapore president 137 ("US Senators," ST 2 Apr . 1994). Fol lowing his earlier intervention, Clinton repeated his opinion one month later that it would be a mistake to cane Fay and urged former U S president George Bush, scheduled for a visit to Singapore, to raise the issue with the government ("Clinton" Mistake," BT_ 15 Apr . 1994). A week later, Clinton suggested that Fay's confession may have been coerced and repeated his objection to caning: "The caning may lead to permanent scars and some people who are caned go into shock. It's much more serious than it sounds," he said ("Not Clear," S I 21 Apr . 1994). But he added that he remained undecided about whether to urge U S businesses in Singapore to put pressure on the 12 government. Bush too declined to push the issue in Singapore. On 10 March 1994, the U S State Department said that its protest launched with the Singapore government "was not a one-time expression. This is something we are continuing to push" ("Fay Case: U S Says," S I 11 Mar . 1994). The very next day, however, the U S Secretary o f State said that American trade with Singapore would not be affected even i f Fay was caned but suggested that the incident might affect Americans planning travel to Singapore ("Trade with Singapore," S I 12 Apr . 1994). For some reason, however, at this stage, Singapore wanted to adopt the subject-position o f disempowered colonial vict im, where its narrative of Occidentalism would be seen as spoken in self-defense. The media war between the U S and Singapore over the case occurred only later in A p r i l , after the Singapore government's adoption o f a recalcitrant stand. But American media responses were cited falsely as that which instigated Singapore's demonizing of the West. A look at the chronology of Singapore media reports shows that Clinton's intervention alone sparked cultural confrontation. Straits Times' editorial o f 10 March 1994, "Spare the Rod, M r Cl inton," for instance, attacked Western culture in response to Clinton's comments only. Columnist K o h Buck Song's editorial on 17 March 1994, which demonized Western/American codes of masculinity, appeared to be self-generated rather than instigated by American hostility ("When To Be Tough," S I ) . The first intimation that the American media were anti-Singaporean came in early A p r i l 1994, for instance in a report on C N N ' s discussion of the issue (Cherian George, "Both Sides N o w , " S I 3 Apr . 1994) and in the 138 article "What U S Columnists Say About Fay's Caning" ( S I 8 Apr . 1994). Prior to this, the Singapore press had represented the American public as supportive of Singapore. 1 3 The Singapore media, and, later, L a t i f s book, repeatedly represented Singapore's hostile response to American state intervention as a defensive and rational confrontation with an aggressive and hysterical American media--where Singapore was depicted as the victim of American cultural i f not political aggression in the media. La t i f deleted all references to the Singapore media's as wel l as the Singapore public 's denunciation o f American culture prior to A p r i l 1994 by recalling the incident thus: To Singaporeans, the case was being blown out of proportion by the American media. It was being transformed into an excuse for the flogging of the tiny state by the world 's remaining superpower. (Flogging 5) Thus, Singapore was represented as an innocent victim rather than an equal opponent in the media war. The representation o f American comment on the matter as a political and cultural threat hardened Singaporeans' attitudes in favor o f the caning sentence, and made any critique o f Singapore laws and punishment seem treacherous to the nation. It encouraged Singaporeans to readily abandon their different subjectivities as private individuals to assert their common identity as national subjects in order to support the nation. A s La t i f noted, some Singaporeans had argued for leniency and questioned the vandalism law in letters to the press sent before Clinton interference, but they hardly did so after it: Nationalist sentiments were in rich evidence among those who wrote to the press to comment on U S pressure. N o matter what many Singaporeans thought about caning-and, as we have seen, there were voices pleading against it—they were united in their opposition to pressure from abroad. Indeed, caning as an issue became entirely subservient to the pressure as an issue. (Flogging 19) L a t i f read American officials' comments as the signifier that hardened Singaporeans' responses. He did not consider the role of the Singapore government and media in representing American involvement in the case as Western imperialism and their manipulation of information as determinants o f Singapore public 's response. A s Baratham noted, a significant letter to the press by the late David Marshall , a 139 former Singapore Chief Minister who had led the nation to self-government, and who was also one of the country's best criminal lawyers, went unpublished (66). Marshall had suggested that Fay 's and other similar cases that involved minor damage to property should have been prosecuted as offenses of mischief (which do not carry a caning sentence) under Section 425 of the Penal Code while the Vandalism A c t be restricted to offenses that concerned major damage. A s the caning incident showed, a perceived threat to sovereignty can be used as a strategy of containment, precluding meanings and positions that go against the government's interests. This also opens up a space for the de-territorializations and re-territorializations o f desire that are part o f imagining, or in this case, re-imagining, the nation's cultural identity. In events involving international conflict and crisis, the immense resources o f the press in shaping and affirming national consensus are often used to construct national identity as the border that separates "us" from "them." In the Fay case, this happened in the U S as well as Singapore. A s the following discussion w i l l make clear, the press used an ideology o f consensus, which Roger Fowler defines as the assumption that the interests o f the population are undivided, to identify the people's values with that of the government's (49). In the incident, one limited group o f values (such as the need for stringent laws and harsh punishment, safety and security, the patriarchal role of the state), repeatedly cited by the press, came to stand in for national values. Between the government and the media, consensus was achieved by the process o f dichotomizing "us" against "them," sometimes literally in split news reports, and by organizing meanings o f "homocentricity," a shared Singaporean world of experience. 1 4 The production o f America by the government and the press proceeded by normalizing values related to political authoritarianism, and setting up as their demonized 'other,' values cherished by liberalism. Masculinization/effeminization was a major strategy by which 'Amer ican ' liberal value systems were demonized and rendered as 'a l ien ' while questionable racial essentialisms were used to 'nativize' local authoritarian political culture. The discourse o f pragmatism played a central role in normalizing 140 Singaporean authoritarian political culture and marking American liberal political ideology with lack, hysteria and irrationality. Singapore's representation of itself as the cultural 'other' to the West duplicated colonial imperialistic discourse. Given, however, that Singapore's 'othering' o f itself against the West, its persistent use o f the West to authorize its own discourse of identity, was a re-staging of American neo-Orientalism, Singapore's search for native post-colonial authority merely resulted in colonial mimicry, a masquerade of colonial authority, that kept returning to the white father it was trying to k i l l . The press and government attempted to semioticize the incident as one of East-West conflict rather than as one about crime and punishment or about c iv i l rights. But their elaboration of Singapore identity pivoted ambivalently around the U S , keeping it obsessively in view. This circling of Singapore identity around U S culture also suggested that the rejection of Western values was merely a displacement o f Singaporeans' deep desire to be like and to locate themselves in the Western 'other.' That is, Singaporean desire had not been suddenly de-colonized nor had it undergone any significant change except in form. Due to this, the 'othering' process produced fractures in Singaporeans' sense o f themselves. Singapore journalists showed a need to assess and affirm Singaporean identity in the mirror of male subjectivity, a sign that the government's demand of them involved deep structural alterations in their system of identifications and desires. A s Silverman notes, secondary ideologies such as those of race, gender, class (and presumably, nation too) are linked to primary ideologies o f sexual identity, and changes in the former threaten belief in the latter (Male 47-8). A s I w i l l show, the recirculation of national identity through the economy of male identity figured the 'colonized' native's cultural self-doubt as well as anxiety over his phallic power to represent, ironically expressed by the nation's chief self-representers, male journalists. A s Bhabha so mischievously notes, masculinity is "an appendix or addition, that, wi l ly -n i l ly , supplements and suspends a ' lack in being '" ("Are Y o u a M a n , " 57). 141 The Straits Times ' editorial on 10 March 1994, "Spare the Rod, M r . Cl inton?" started the ideological task o f culturally alienating American liberal political culture by representing it as a pathological male sexuality that was, contradictorily, both an excess of male sexuality as well as a lack of i t . American intervention, perceived as imperialism, was 'othered' in the language of thuggery: unlike other countries, Britain and Malaysia for instance, which had similar cases pending in Singapore courts, the U S did "not know when to back off," over-reacted, and was unable to give the "cool and dignified" responses that were the proper expression of a normalized, assured masculinity. The newspaper's attempt to culturally de-familiarize and thereby set the cultural parameters for Singaporeans' reading of Clinton's intervention echoed with a sense of fear o f American imperialism as a masculinity gone berserk: Incredulity would be the reaction o f many a Singaporean who learns that the world 's most powerful politician, upon prompting from a reporter's question in the White House . . . has taken a personal interest in a case that involves neither political hostage-taking nor a breach o f national security. This fear sought to tame itself in a phantasmatic strategy where American power, viewed as wi ld masculinity, was represented as a symptom of a lack in masculinity itself, which was constantly seeking to disavow its impotency through (false) images or simulacra of the real thing. Clinton's intervention then embodied a thuggishness that was merely heroics: "Singaporeans who find [Clinton's] intervention objectionable need to understand that heroic gestures go down well with the American public." With this strategy, Clinton was turned, in the Singapore imaginary, into a pathetic 'man, ' a fake Western frontier hero with no masculine free w i l l , who acted according to a script given to him by others, his American constituents: "Poor M r . Cl inton," says Straits Times, who "burdened as he is" by "the strain o f putting out fires abroad (Bosnia, Somalia, difficult relations with China and Japan), and shepherding a controversial health-care package at home," had to stand up "for a fellow American" because "American 142 politicians have to answer to demanding constituents, yes. A subject for political enjoinment [in America] can be as big or as trivial as the public chooses to make it." Poli t ical culture, then, was tied to codes of male sexual identity. In the case o f the U S , its liberalism was contradictorily marked as variously effeminate, untamed male vir i l i ty or as male posturing revealing an underlying impotence. Liberal democracy's placing of the protection of its citizens' individual rights on par with national or international concerns such as health-care, trade and foreign relations and militaristic decisions was not only Americanized and placed in a cultural 'enemy territory,' but it was also pathologized as male hysteria which involved an abuse o f state power. Clinton's representation o f the opinion o f the American public and the liberal media as wel l as the philosophical genealogy where government legitimacy is located in its ability to represent the voice of the people were discredited as masculine posturing. B y contrast, the editorial represented Singapore's political culture as the expression o f a national, self-assured masculinity. This culture was equated with the "stringency" of Singapore's laws, about which, the editorial said, Singaporeans had "no reason to be defensive." Where American political agency was split between the people and the government, Singapore agency was coherent and monolithic, even i f its source was left unidentified: the nation's "aggressive enforcement o f law and order" was "just one of the societal benchmarks it chose to set for i t s e l f (my emphasis). The Singapore government's response, its setting out "the facts of past prosecutions for vandalism and the equal weight o f the law applied, whoever the accused was" was deemed "proper, firm and cl inical , " as opposed to American male hysteria. Singapore's vandalism law and its use of caning was assumed to be the manifestation of an authentic and fixed masculinity. This placed the discussion o f the ethics o f crime and punishment and the possibility of future legal changes outside the discursive domain o f national culture. The editorial however was divided by contradictions that compromised its assertion o f a coherent (hence masculine) Singaporean identity. It also showed that the threat to political sovereignty was the 143 necessary fiction on which Singapore's self-representation depended. Singapore identity was constructed in opposition to American imperialism but the editorial itself admitted that neither Clinton nor embassy officials had claimed that Fay's rights had been violated. It acknowledged that Clinton had confined "his protest to the Singapore government to the caning portion o f the sentence, the part he found 'extreme.'" It also said that Clinton's request that the sentencing be reconsidered "after paying due recognition to Singapore's sovereign right to exercise the law in its jurisdiction" would be taken care o f by the appeal pending against the sentence. These admissions delegitimized the editorial and its masculine definition of Singaporean 'difference,' making these extraneous and false since they contradicted Straits Times ' premise of American aggression and male hysteria. Another moment o f aporia and ambivalence towards the U S occurred when the editorial quoted the American Chamber of Commerce in describing "Singapore's aggressive enforcement o f law and order" as "one of numerous societal benchmarks it [Singapore] chose to set for itself." The editorial defined and authorized Singapore identity exclusively through American words. But the editorial then went on to reject these words, which it had already turned into symbolic capital, by saying that "Singapore neither seeks nor gets chuffed by such observations." ("Chuffed" is Brit ish slang for "delighted.") One week later, Koh ' s editorial more elaborately masculinized Singaporean political culture ("When to be Tough," S T 1 7 Mar) . Here Singapore's 'authentic' male identity was defined in terms o f the disciplining o f the male body and its mind, which were represented as rites o f passage to an adult male subjectivity. Singapore's National Service as wel l as caning employed at school were offered as local institutions/practices that brought this ideal male subjectivity into existence. National Se rv ice -interpreted as an example of a "strict military regimen" that taught people "self-control and respect for others and their property"—was used to reconcile traditional 'macho' notions of male vir i l i ty and bravery (which often involve resistance against authority and class power) with obedience/submission to authority. "Looking back" on his own experience of National Service, K o h recalled the unforgettable "physical and mental stress which combat personnel have to endure." He also "rememberfed] wel l the 144 lessons o f duty and honour, and of marshaling oneself and one's relationship with society." National Service "can alter a man," he said, curbing the aberrant masculinity o f the adolescent male, who, in school, is given to committing anti-social acts such as the destruction of public property. Both National Service as wel l as a school caning of two miscreant youths that K o h witnessed were constructed as rites o f passage for young Singapore men. In Koh ' s narrative, full adult male subjectivity necessarily included an interpellation of young men as national subjects who were then introduced to the "foundations of the[ir] social system." We may conclude then that Singaporean male culture had no place for an anti-establishment, left-wing brand o f male heroism. Koh ' s claim that the "character change" effected by these rites of passage occurred through a "kind o f osmosis—such as one finds in the education system—by which society's values are imbibed subconsciously or unconsciously," is significant. It not only inscribed caning and legalized state discipline o f society, its "tough measures," as the site o f core socio-cultural values (gendered as male) but also revealed an anxiety concerning the male subject's submission. The contention that state discipline worked subconsciously or unconsciously allowed K o h to escape from accusations o f submission. Singapore's national service, with all its meanings of discipline and self-control (i.e. not 'state' control) was contrasted to the Western (and American) welfare system which, because it lacked Singapore's rites o f passage, was constructed as the site of production of an adolescent masculinity that lacked social responsibility or discipline, where the (male) citizen was never allowed to come to full subjectivity. In welfare societies, unlike societies with compulsory army service, young men were "layabouts loitering in the streets, having little respect for others and believing that the state would provide for them." Some o f them even grew up into workers, K o h said, who "worked less hard and engineered [their] own sacking deliberately, because [they] knew [they] would receive more in social security payments i f [they] were fired than i f [they] resigned of their own accord." Thus Fay and America, through their association with the social welfare system, were implicit ly constructed as 145 possessing uninitiated, juvenile male sexualities that were given to acts of "flamboyant public defiance." The language of American liberal criminology—its "tempering [of] justice with mercy," allowing crime-offenders to "repent and recover," and its concern that punishment could cause "psychological and physical scars"~was effeminized, marked as an inability to respond in a true masculine manner to social needs and obligations. Fay came to stand in for this de-masculinized America who, as juvenile delinquent uninitiated into adult masculinity, needed the "escape route" offered by liberal approaches to crime and punishment. Koh even suggested that these two different types of male sexuality were physically different, literally embodying dissimilar nations/cultures. American-type acts of "flamboyant public defiance" were so culturally alien to Singapore that seeing these caused a "shock in (Koh's) system" (unlike caning, which presumably was part of his "system"). Koh's editorial aimed to offer an ideologeme15 of the well-trained soldier to reconcile the Singapore government's authoritarianism and overwhelming control of too many sectors of life with the Singaporean's lack of political agency and full subjectivity. It recoded this authoritarianism as producing an honorable, tough and mature masculinity. Koh, however, even while implicitly claiming for himself an adult male subjectivity, needed an Australian-someone from a "welfare society" who presumably was, if we apply Koh's cultural logic about subjects of welfare states, an untamed male-to instruct him on his country's cultural alterity from the West. If Singaporean masculinity was superior to the West's, Koh's construction of national culture via "how others see you" (the opening words of his article), where one looked into the mirror of the 'other' to find oneself, revealed that this national 'masculinity' lacked the central fiction of conventional masculine culture, the phallic power of self-representation. Singapore's cultural 'other-ing' of itself against the West often appeared to be a contestation between two Western norms of masculinity rather than a conflict between (always abstract and hypothetical) Eastern and Western value systems. On the one side, there was the American untamed/ephebic/pathological masculinity represented by liberalism and, on the other, a self-146 assured/controlled/disciplined/productive masculinity that was identified with political authoritarianism and state discipline of the social body. For Senior Minister Lee Kuan Y e w , America 's liberal approach to crime and punishment, its protection of individuals from state power abuse was the site o f a negative masculinity, more specifically, an abdication of the state's patriarchal function of disciplining its subjects and controlling their behavior. He reinscribed regulatory technologies o f power in patriarchal terms, as the government's duty in protecting society. "The country [US] ," he said, "dares not restrain or punish the individuals, forgiving them for whatever they've done" ("US reaction," ST 13 Apr . 1994). I f under the liberal code o f masculinity, the infringement of c iv i l rights by the government was deemed barbaric, the authoritarian code considered it "tough" and pragmatic, and human rights became an issue, not o f the ethics o f power, but o f the efficacy o f crime control. But Lee also expanded the arena of state policing and discipline as a patriarchal "duty," stretching the familiar parameters o f crime control to include "drugs, violence, unemployment and homelessness, all sorts o f problems." Given the ruling party's history, the last vague reference quite possibly included politically dissenting opinions, as wel l as uncontrolled female fertility or equal rights of citizens to public housing. Quoting the Senior Minister, an article o f 15 A p r i l 1994 declared in its headline that the "Caning o f Fay [was] an issue of criminology, not human rights." Med ia responses that appeared after Lee's comments reproduced his strategy o f Occidentalizing the discourse o f human rights and separating it from the discourse of crime control. 'Amer ican ' liberal masculinity was figured in terms of the nightmare of rampant street crime, threatening to life and limb. One feature represented liberal ideology as an American cultural "tradition" that, despite its idealism, only managed to usher chaos into the streets. It polarized US-Singapore approaches to crime with its headline " U S , Singapore Differ in Attitudes to Law and Order" and its structure, juxtaposing two reports, "Cr ime and Punishment: Singapore" and "Crime and Punishment: U S " ( ST 16 Apr . 1994). Whi le the Singapore approach used "Harsh Punishment to Deter Criminals," as described in the sub-head, the American approach was represented as "Liberal Tradition Hampering] Crime-Busting." The Singapore 147 side o f the feature included a photograph o f a Singapore policeman who had helped a young Singaporean find a job, which the caption told readers was to be interpreted as the "friendly arm of the [Singapore] law, " a representation o f state authority as benevolently patriarchal. The report on Amer ica was accompanied by a photograph o f the grave-site o f two Japanese students who had been shot dead by carjackers in California. The caption, reminding readers that "the right to bear arms is enshrined in U S law," suggested the inherent unrestrained violence of liberal rights which caused injury even to people outside the American nation (Japanese) and to children. Guns, of course, are traditionally associated with male power, and here with a destructive 'rogue male' power. But i f the US-Singapore discourse could be seen as a conflict o f masculine cultures, one male culture (Singapore's) was attempting to beat, but also to entice and seek the approval o f the other, despite the other's often harsh and racist criticism against it. This ambivalence between antipathy to the West/America and desire for it was resolved by Singapore's viewing itself as the object of the other's fantasy, where it adopted a traditionally female rather than a male subject-position. It did this by positioning itself within the circuit o f desire of one section of the American public—those who wanted stricter crime control in the U S , which was also interpreted as a wish for greater state control. American debate over crime and punishment and recent pushes within the country for stricter crime control were re-presented as a questioning, and therefore a discrediting, of liberalism at its national origin. The American psyche was seen to be split, on the one hand, wanting to hold fast to its liberal founding myths, but, on the other, increasingly viewing 'tough' Eastern political culture with desire, a desire that was constructed in one article as "radical" and progressive. But conversely, the article does not recognize the identification of Singaporean desire with American desire: One good illustration o f the American ambivalence about taking tough measures to deal with crime has been the debate over gun control. Attempts to introduce gun controls have been hampered by the fear of appearing too radical and infringing the Second Amendment in the B i l l of Rights. ("US, Singapore Differ," ST 16 Apr . 1994) 148 A s crime rates soared in U S cities, the report said, there was a "backlash o f [anti-liberal] opinion, as shown by the large number of Americans who support Michael Fay's caning." The subtext was that American liberalism was not just an obstruction of strict crime control: it obstructed the fulfillment of American public desire, which supposedly looked with yearning at societies like Singapore: The relatively light sentences in the U S , coupled with the ever-rising as well as greater severity o f crimes, have led to increased calls in recent years to get tough. In a recent survey, 78 percent o f Americans said they wanted tighter gun control. A war against drugs has been declared. . . A n anti-crime B i l l up for Congress approval proposes extending capital punishment to more crimes, as wel l as tougher penalties for federal crimes. The move to get tough on crime is also being taken up by state governments. How many of these proposals eventually get past the legislative tangles at state and federal levels remains to be seen. Thus had the Americans snagged themselves in a tangled liberal web of their own making. Liberal ism, so the argument goes, generated violence. American liberal policies o f rehabilitation, their "sophisticated system of probation," as wel l as the right to bear arms and to be protected from "unreasonable searches and seizures" meant that "one child is kil led with a firearm every six hours," "a handgun injures someone every 20 seconds," "98 percent of crimes committed do not result in a prison sentence" and "only a minority of criminals are convicted and punished." The liberal tradition in America also apparently accounted for 12,489 handgun murders in 1993. The report ended by pointing out that " in the time it [took] to read this article more than 50 Americans would have been injured by handguns." The ineffectiveness of liberal ideology in curbing crime became a metonym for the general impotence of liberalism as a political ideology. B y contrast, Singapore's "utilitarian" approach to law and order was commendable since "the result" was "streets that are safe to walk in day and night and a record on tackling crime that even the harshest critics have acknowledged as one of the best in the world ." 149 A fair number of newspaper reports appeared that documented Western approval o f Singapore's crime control measures. American/Western media responses favorable to Singapore were often published during this period. A feature, "Lesson on Crime from Singapore," condensed pro-Singapore editorial opinion from London Sunday Times. Washington Times. Los Angles Times and International Herald Tribune and also featured a letter sent to Clinton by an American expatriate in Singapore, which urged the American president not to force the issue (ST 18 Mar . 1994). Charles Krauthammer's pro-Singapore editorial in Washington Post was reproduced with the headline "Sense in Singapore's Approach to Punishment" (ST 12 Apr . 1994). A n opinion piece by a former mayor of N e w York , Ed Koch , which had been originally contributed to Global Viewpoin t was also featured in Straits Times and headlined "Br ing Back Caning in U S " (21 Apr . 1994). Koch ' s identification with Lee's attitudes towards the government's patriarchal role in disciplining the people was highlighted. K o c h said: The breakdown of the American family is a fact across the board. If the parent is not there to discipline the children when they do something wrong, by default it must be done by the state as protector o f society. This comment was prominently featured in bold lettering as caption for a posed group picture o f an American neighborhood that accompanied the article: the picture accented the absence o f the American family as the basic unit of community. Then, the article "Caning Defended on C N N " reported that Singapore's Ambassador to the U S had stood up for the nation on American television, on "Larry K i n g L i v e , " and that American and other viewers calling in had supported Singapore's crime control measures. The ambiguous headline also suggested that C N N itself was pro-Singapore on the caning issue. Another article "Americans Back Caning Order in Calls and Letters to Singapore Embassy" said that "Americans [were] hailing a court order for . . . Fay . . . to be flogged" (ST 3 Apr . 1994). In the report, a Singapore embassy spokesman in the U S was quoted as saying that more than 300 phone calls and letters had been received by the embassy, o f which "the vast majority expressed] very strong support for Singapore" though he declined to give percentages. The same article quoted Chicago 150 Tribune as claiming that "scores of [American] readers had written to [it], with 99 percent saying the teenager should be flogged." While Marshall , a prominent Singaporean, had been denied his say in the press (see above), a letter to the editor of Straits Times from Bishop Griffith M a i r from N e w Orleans, who had suggested that " U S can learn from Singapore," had been published ("Punishing Offenders," ST 5 Apr . 1994). Another letter from an American, A . Peter Parsons, from Seattle, who proclaimed that Singapore had "instructed the United States" in crime and punishment, was published with the headline "Singapore's Justice System a Mode l for U S " (ST 8 Apr . 1994). B y contrast, American protest of Singapore's action was represented as merely restricted to the media and some government officials: "a trend that runs counter to the large degree o f support the caning sentence has elicited among many ordinary Americans" ("What U S Columnists Say," ST 8 Apr . 1994). A n editorial by Business Times says that even among the American media, "some writers, like the surprisingly large number of ordinary Americans who have declared their support for the firm action taken against Michael Fay, envy Singapore its safe, clean streets and high degree of lawfulness" ("Let the Commentary," 8 Apr . 1994). Apparently, these American journalists uyearn[ed] for similar conditions" (my emphasis). Another report in Straits Times employed a split headline, where Clinton's "plea to Singapore" was countered with "Ohio residents [from Fay's hometown] favor punishment" ("Fay's Caning," 10 Apr . 1994). In the article "Many Americans Back Caning Despite T V Coverage," Americans are depicted as being "unmoved" by gory representations o f caning on television, "saying that they supported the caning" (ST 12 Apr . 1994). The report concluded by saying that the shows commanded "a remarkable degree of support for the punishment." A n announcer of an American television program was quoted as saying that s/he hoped that Singapore's courts would be more lenient "than our [American] court o f public opinion." Another article featured a side-bar that proclaimed in bold type that "Britons Want Criminals Caned" ("DPP says," S J 22 Apr . 1994). It said that Bri t ish viewers o f "Good Morning Television" wanted caning in Britain even after having seen clips o f a flogging and that Brit ish polls showed support for Singapore. 151 Excerpts of media and public response which supported Singapore and were featured in American and British newspapers were rounded up in the article "Overwhelming Support for Caning Sentence" (ST 23 Apr. 1994). An important speech by the Singapore Law Minister, S. Jayakumar, who argued at an international lawyers' conference for Singapore's right to enforce its own laws, had to share public attention with an accompanying report that claimed in its headline that one "US Lawyer [had been] Impressed with Jaya's Defense" (BT 5 May 1994). American journalist Richard Cohen's comment in Washington Post that the caning controversy was "not about Singapore at all, but about America" was certainly on the mark ("What US Columnists Say," ST 8 Apr. 1994). The representation of the nation as the Western/American object of desire took place alongside the construction of a sense of national besiegement by the US. The latter was necessary to justify the hostile demonization of America, out of which Singaporean difference could be constructed and a unity between people and state produced, but it also underlined the hysterical origins of this national identity and gave the lie to the claim of a Singaporean self-assured masculinity. Even in moments of triumph, the nation was represented in a subordinate subject-position, and presented as "patient" rather than "agent."16 For instance, the strong, unyielding stance taken by the Singapore ambassador to the US, S. R. Nathan, on "Larry King Live" was touted as the "defending]" of caning on CNN ("Caning Defended," ST 28 Mar. 1994). The headline deleted all reference to the Singapore envoy as agent. Yet, asked to comment that Singapore had violated the United Nations Charter on Customary International Law, Nathan had unambiguously moved into attack mode: He said that such declarations were statements of ideals which countries tried to observe within their own laws, and added: "In the case of the United States, you have the death penalty, gas chamber . . . which are probably not consistent with these declarations." A letter to the press described American intervention in its headline as involving "political arm-twisting and loud gestures," playing to the fear of an imperial power that was breaking out of the boundaries of acceptable male behavior ("Political Arm-Twisting," ST 8 Apr. 1994). In another letter to the press, "Time for Fay to Take His Punishment Like a Man," a threat to Singapore power, 152 metaphorized as male power, was disavowed by projecting it on to an American body, Fay 's (ST 8 Apr . 1994). The letter also located male power in receiving rather than handing out punishment. Significantly, Singapore downplayed its role as agent of punishment throughout the incident whereas the American media highlighted this role by representations of the brutal strength o f Singapore floggers ("Americans Told Tales," ST 1 M a y 1994). L a t i f s book, for instance, describes the caning episode in its title as "the flogging o f Singapore," which covers over Singapore's dominant position o f power in disciplining an American body. There was a tendency to avoid representation o f the caning as an inversion o f First World-Third Wor ld relations. Instead, American media responses that represented Singapore as agent of power, even i f it was a "fascist" or "totalitarian" assumption o f power, were reproduced in the local press specifically to deny this role of power. These were re-presented as "tales" that the " U S media told" its public ("Americans Told Tales," S I 1 M a y 1994). In L a t i f s editorial "It's A l l Invectives [sic] and Not Cold Logic , " which responded to U S media commentary on the case, a Singaporean masculinity o f "cold logic" combined with "compassion" and concern for an American public being bullied by its liberal media, recognizable as a Western, gentlemanly masculinity, was opposed to American representations o f a brutal, primitive Singaporean masculinity, o f a nation that had a "barbaric and lawless" system that was compared to archaic, Persian-style methods of torture (ST 8 17 Apr . 1994). K o h too, we note, had offered a well-trained soldier as metaphor o f Singaporean masculinity, not a soldier who had the authority to discipline others. Another report's headline screamed that Singapore had been "under attack" in "Larry K i n g L i v e , " where meanings o f besiegement and subordinate subject-position were semantically doubled, where Singapore was not merely attacked, but also placed "under" in a traditionally female sexual position ("Singapore Under Attack," ST 1 M a y 1994). The law minister's speech mentioned above was reproduced but with the headline "Shouldn't Other Countries Let Singapore Enforce Its Own Laws," which mis-represented the minister's use o f a modality o f truth, and turned his demand into a plea, his assertion into a question (my emphasis, SI 5 M a y 1994). The minister had raised the question of international "respect" for "the right" of a country 153 "to enact and enforce its laws within its jurisdiction." He had concluded his speech by asserting Singapore's right to make decisions concerning crime and punishment. He had said: "Surely it must be the Singapore government and Singaporean people who must decide [on the appropriateness o f its laws]" (my emphasis). The use o f the negative modal auxiliary "shouldn't" expressed doubt over Singapore's sovereignty, while the veiled reference to America in "other countries" as the subject o f the statement combined with the plea for permission from the U S subordinated Singapore sovereignty to American agency. Immediately following the caning, Singapore's ambassador had been called in by the U S State Department to register its protest. The press headlined its report "Fay Caned; State Dept. Summons Singapore Envoy," emphasizing the unequal relation o f power between the two countries, where Singapore was represented as a miscreant youth "summoned" to the headmaster's office. The ambassador, S. R. Nathan, in an interview with the press, linked Singapore's smallness, its subordinate position to America, to the type o f male subjectivity it could afford ("Nathan," ST 7 M a y 1994), thereby revealing previous declarations of a Singaporean self-assured, controlled masculinity to be merely a defensive fantasmatic construction in the face of the other's power. He had said that, compared to the U S , Singapore had to keep things in perspective: Because, i f others are angry and you get agitated, it only reflects your own smallness. Being the representative of a small country, I've got to keep things in perspective and not over-react abruptly or inappropriately. In the aftermath of the caning, the Singapore government and media made a concerted effort to capitalize on the impact the incident had made on Singaporeans' desires and identifications and in setting new paradigms for the discourse o f liberalism versus authoritarianism. These were used to reinforce Singapore's 'neo-Orientalist' identity, which had not been fully cathected by the people during the "National Ideology" project. But the effort also showed that this identification by the people was generated from anxiety regarding the nation's lack of power in the face of American imperialism, which, 154 in turn, caused doubts over male identity that needed to be shored up. It was also made possible by the enjoyment Singaporeans derived from being viewed as the object of desire o f many Americans. The Minister for Information and the Arts, Brigadier-General George Yeo , noted that the incident had had an "unexpected positive side-effect": "It has made us all feel very close together. A certain solidarity has resulted in Singaporeans at home and abroad" ("Clash," ST 10 M a y 1994). Y e o called the incident "a collective education for all Singaporeans, on what it means to be independent and sovereign," stressing "the price that must sometimes be paid for independence and sovereignty." It was implied that heavy state control o f the social body was the "price" that had to be paid for the nation's sovereignty. Singapore reduced Fay 's sentence of six strokes of the cane to four, which it said was a gesture o f good w i l l towards the American government's appeal for clemency. Straits Times ' straw polls found that nearly half o f people interviewed were against the government's reduction of the caning sentence: they saw it as a caving in to American pressure and an undermining o f Singapore's sovereign w i l l . The prime minister, however, interpreted this as a "robust attitude" that indicated Singaporeans' support of "caning as a deterrent" ("Fay Case: P M Not Surprised," ST 8 M a y 1994). In that Singaporeans had seen the reduced sentence as a "compromise" in the "government's moral authority," the prime minister's re-interpretation displaced and disavowed an underlying sense of national powerlessness, equating Singapore's "robust" (male) power with its strict laws and the tight state control this involved. The feature "Crime and Punishment in Singapore: Not Sparing the R o d " deserves special attention in that it was the last comprehensive word on the subject from the Singapore media and recalled the caning incident in terms o f its definition o f Singapore's (neo-Oriental) cultural difference from the West (ST 29 M a y 1994). It attempted to form a consensus, to represent a Singapore that was united in opposition to an Americanized liberalism and supportive o f the government's Orientalized nationalism. A s Fowler points out, the media often relies on the oral mode to express consensus because speech suggests informality (not the voice o f authority) and solidarity (59-65). Divided into different sections, the feature 155 had a 'democratic' feel about it: one article rounded up the issue, but comments from ordinary members of the public, using the Singlish dialect as well as more formal remarks by noted professionals and politicians communicated a national texture. The inclusion of the Singlish dialect was a break from usual practice for a newspaper that addresses itself to the middle-class and predominantly uses formal English. Public opinion was prominently displayed in boxes in bold type so that the sense of conversation, of national dialogue, was reinforced by typography and fragmented text, which Fowler says "breaks up the monologic uniformity, the greyness, of conventional print" and is used by the print media to "suggest the presence of speech" (61-2). The results of national surveys on public opinion of Singapore crime and punishment were depicted in illustrated graphics that ensured access to the reader. Published three weeks after Fay had been caned, the feature also legitimized government and media's re-semioticization of liberal democratic culture and state authoritarianism, and further 'nationalized' this by getting the public to echo such opinions. The feature used Singaporeans' "tough attitude toward crime and punishment," especially their approval of caning as the master signifier of national 'ethnic' character to racially 'other' the nation from the US. The economic and political relations of power between US and Singapore that crystallized Singaporeans' attitudes towards caning were ignored and culturalized instead in such comments as: "the wholly different historical and cultural experience of Asians—and Singaporeans—also explains their attitudes to the caning of Fay, and punishment in general." Racial generalizations were used to support this Asianizing of Singapore's "tough" attitude towards crime. A sociologist, Tan Ern Ser, was quoted as saying that "there has been a strong retributive streak in Asian societies: people believe that those who do wrong should be punished." The claim that "the sort of cynicism towards authority that Americans might consider healthy, is at odds with Asian societies, where the people have, over the ages, been more willing to defer to their leaders," was neither backed by historical evidence nor authorized by cultural experts. Going against the facts of recent history in China where dynasty was replaced by democracy and then by communism in half a century, contradicting the history of the Indian sub-continent, and even 156 Singapore history in the 1940s and 1950s, it merely duplicated American neo-Orientalist constructions of East As ian culture: that East Asians defer to patriarchal state authority; that Chinese culture privileges social duties over individual rights; that it has archaic attitudes towards discipline. This feature also repeated many of the discursive strategies that had been used throughout this discourse: separating issues o f criminology from those of human rights; offering up street crime as the true face o f American liberal political culture. A manager sniffed in Singlish at such liberal concepts as freedom by equating American notions o f freedom with the right to bear arms. He said: In the U S , they want complete freedom. For example, they insist on everybody's right to have guns. Y o u have a gun. So I also have a gun. We get into an argument, and one of us w i l l get shot. What is the point of such freedom. The idea that one could have a liberal democracy and gun control was not raised at a l l . Former U S President Richard N i x o n instead was quoted as saying in his book Beyond Peace, that the criminal justice system had "abysmally failed to deliver what should be the first freedom: freedom from fear." It was assumed that this "first freedom" only involved fear of being the object of a crime: notions o f freedom from wrongful prosecution were thus elided. B y contrast to the U S , Singapore's safe streets were again presented as the Utopian face o f an authoritarian political culture. Davinder Singh, a member o f parliament with the ruling party who is also a lawyer, allowed human rights as signifier to slip under the signified of crime and punishment in his comment: "Singaporeans are aware o f what is going on overseas. They know that in the U S , there is a lot of debate on human rights and personal liberties. But the Singaporean looks at this and he says, where has it got them? They see the end-product of tough measures in Singapore, and they support them." In its task of representing Singaporean identity in terms o f neo-Oriental constructions o f East Asian difference, the feature also unwittingly exposed neo-Orientalism's concept of a "communitarian democracy" as a 'pastoralization' of authoritarian state control, given a modern inflection. American 157 liberalism had by now come to mean, in Singapore, nothing more than ineffective policies towards crime control and prosecution. This American ' l iberalism' was then represented as involving a loss of innocence through its figuration with an American student Tanya Green. Green, dubbed the "fear" girl by American media, had hit the headlines when she had complained to A l Gore about crime in school. The feature reported her as having asked Gore: " W h y do we have to live in fear? W h y can't we just come to school and learn and have fun doing it?" A typical day experienced by Green at school was deployed to construct liberalism as a nightmarish loss o f innocence: [Green] enters school through a metal detector, hangs an identity tag to show that she is a student, climbs the stairs to her class past the scene o f a recent shooting, and cheers in a gymnasium where everyone who comes to a basketball game is frisked. Green's world was contrasted to Singapore, which was "a safe haven o f law and order," a "quiet, urbane city," a society where "children can go to school, or go out at night, without [parents] having to worry." B y implication, Singapore had the security that American parents can only dream of for their children. This picture o f America was framed by what had been ushered outside it: protection o f human rights, freedom of speech, and government responsibility to its citizens' needs. The outside however constituted, the inside so as to split its coherence. The story o f American liberalism as nightmare was made possible because Green was free to express her fear to a top government official, to whom she had access; Gore further promised Green that something would be done about the crime situation so that her cause for complaint would be eliminated. Whereas in the Green story, the frame, the outside, cracks the interior representation o f America as nightmare, in the Utopian picture o f Singapore, the frame exerted its nightmarish presence, contradicting the internal peacefulness which had been constructed as tantalizing to Americans. The outside, excessive state control, intolerable and violent disciplining o f the national body, which were excluded from the representation of Singapore as "safe haven," returns to the inside with the reference to a government that "has always made sure it wielded a big stick," strict crime 158 control that was getting ever more invasive of individuals' rights and criminalizing more aspects of life with its "toughened sentences," introduction o f new offenses, and its "curb[ing of] some rights." The article revealed that apart from stiffening sentences, the government had also taken steps to help the prosecution o f criminals by removing an accused person's right to silence and accepting the testimony of a co-accused person in a trial. The Arms Offences Ac t was also amended to allow the courts to mete out the death penalty to anyone who uses or tries to use a firearm in a crime. The outside (masochism and sadism, a desire for violence and pain) also sneaked inside to disrupt the results of polls that apparently showed that Singaporean attitudes to crime and punishment were "tough." The figures showed that 44 percent of Singaporeans interviewed wanted caning to be extended to women, 35 percent wanted it extended to men above 50, 24 percent wanted males below 16 to be caned, and 56 percent wanted caning to be further applied to non-violent crimes. The graphics that accompanied these statistics, including iconic signifiers of extended arms pointing authoritatively to poll results, suggesting the long arm of the law, and a picture o f a flogger in the act o f caning, were rem[a]inders o f the violence that supposedly made Singapore's Utopian serenity possible. According to the report, in 1986, less than a decade ago, only 26 percent o f Singaporeans interviewed had thought caning an appropriate punishment for vandalism. This number, the report said, had "jumped to 79 percent in the recent poll , probably because Singaporeans felt affronted by the bully-boy tactics adopted by the U S media over the caning of Fay." This itself was an implicit recognition that the people's desire for strong punishment had arisen elsewhere than from the willingness to pay the price for an orderly society or from agreement with government policies. But the jump in numbers could also just as easily be explained in terms of pathology, where hostility towards the U S and rage over its power generated a neurotic desire to champion everything that it supposedly culturally reviled, i.e. authoritarianism. A frustration in anti-colonial desire, in exercising Singapore's sovereign and disciplinary power fully over the U S , may also have re-directed this desire inwards—where the nation's sovereignty and its disciplinary power could 159 only be re-claimed from its people in an extensive socialization of violence. Rather than the signifier of national culture, Singapore's strict laws and the cane were fetishized towards the end o f the incident as that which disavowed and substituted for their absent post-colonial representational power. In many respects, the article orchestrated an identification of the nation's tough laws with its national character. Singapore's tough laws were associated with the nation's top ranking for confidence in safety and security of property assessed in a 1993 World Competitiveness Report. Singapore's strong belief in the deterrent aspect of punishment had supposedly constituted the contemporary state o f the nation: one Singaporean remembered the "days when the streets [of Singapore] were terrorized by secret societies and gangs" and kidnappings occurred on a daily basis. "Nowadays," he said, "you only read about kidnappings overseas." A law lecturer commented that the belief in deterrence had a strong national history, "stretching as far back as 1958." Singapore's strict laws were also represented as that which prevented a reversal into a previous historical nightmare o f social and economic chaos, with the state bathed in benevolence: "In contrast [to U S and U K ) , Singapore has been presided over during the past three decades by a leadership determined to prevent a slide back into the chaos it remembers from not so long ago. . . ." The journalist, Warren Fernandez, spoke confidently on behalf o f the people, and in the process, dictated their desires to them: "It [the government] was aided . . . by the fact that the people shared a similar desire and were wi l l ing to pay the price for an orderly society." Unexpectedly, as the symbol o f national character, the nation's unyielding approach to crime and punishment also became the site of a true Singaporean democracy, as opposed to the inauthenticity of American-style liberal democracy. The feature argued that Singapore's non-liberal approach to crime and punishment reflected public desire and hence was democratic, making it appear as i f the people were agents in drafting Singapore laws, which is definitely not the case. In fact, the report itself undermined this suggestion by representing the government as sole actor in law making: the "government moved swiftly" to amend the Arms Offences A c t to extend the application o f the death penalty; "Concerned about rising crime rates, the Government amended the Penal Code in 1973 to 160 introduce stiffer sentences. . . ." Also the article claimed a sudden emergence o f popular support for Singapore laws as something that was always already in existence. Then, contrasting the Singapore situation with that o f the West, British and American liberal approaches to crime and punishment were described as undemocratic. The article quotes British historian Paul Johnson to support its c laim: "In both countries [US and U K ] . . . power over the administration o f crime and punishment was captured by a liberal elite in the 1950s. . . . What authority actually does about dealing with crime bears no relation at al l to popular wishes," Johnson said, wondering whether on the issue of law and order, "democracy actually workfed] in either country." But this Singaporean claim to a more genuine democracy concealed its own de-liberalized re-interpretation o f democracy. Where liberal democracy emphasizes protection of minority viewpoints/interests/rights, the sharing of power as well as free expression, the democracy associated with Singapore was a democracy of numbers, where the viewpoints/interests o f the majority overrode those of the minority. In this scenario, "equal" rights o f racial/ethnic/gender/class representation is re-read as proportional representation. I f press reports bore any relation to the truth, the people could be seen to have acceded to the government's mandate o f an Asian national identity through the caning incident. The problem was that the threat to sovereignty which had fostered this identification with the government's desire now threatened to taint that identity with national defeat. The government itself emptied the Cabinet's reduction o f the caning sentence from meanings of a bowing-down to American power. In a statement, it said that "to reject [Clinton's] appeal would show an unhelpful disregard for the President and the domestic pressures on him on this issue" ("Government Statement," ST 5 M a y 1994). This concession, however, the statement said, was made "without compromising the principle that persons convicted of vandalism must be caned." Nonetheless, some members o f the public saw the reduced sentence as a victory for American cultural imperialism and a compromise o f Singapore's sovereignty by the government. A n opposition member o f parliament even taunted the ruling party by seeing in the act, "the image o f Government giving in to pressure from a bigger country." He also made an ironic 161 reference to Singapore's "strong" political w i l l . In press interviews, many Singaporeans came out strongly against the reduction ("Did Fay Deserve," ST 6 M a y 1994). Clearly, i f the media's and government's construction o f the nation was to stick, more ideological work needed to be done. Latif, a journalist with Straits Times took this task upon himself. He tried to resolve the government's action as an antinomy~as an act that was both an expression of political sovereignty and a compromise of sovereignty, that is, as a decision to compromise that was made freely. A s such, he was under pressure to disavow American threat to Singapore's sovereignty as this tended to suggest that Singapore acted under pressure. Thus, there was a backtracking on previous media representation o f the incident. American official intervention in the caning was now recalled in terms of a government performing a legitimate duty o f looking after the interests o f a national subject abroad. It was also apparently the response of a friendly nation that was mindful of its bilateral ties with Singapore. But the American media's response to the caning sentence had been threatening: the media had called for economic sanctions against Singapore and urged Americans to protest the decision, even publishing the Singapore envoy's contact number (30-1). La t i f made this media discourse disappear by excluding it as the voice o f the American people. This was done by identifying an ideological divide within the U S , which the caning incident had made very apparent. La t i f depicted the media as part of a liberal elite minority that mis-represented America, which, he said, was really conservative (12), as expressed in opinion polls conducted in the U S about the caning. Thus the American public 's response was selected as the authentic voice of the nation, and the media's aggression placed at the periphery o f the nation: quoting a Straits Times editorial, he said, without self reflection, that the U S media were only "merchants o f hysteria and disinformation" (39). La t i f suggested that Singapore's political and cultural difference represented an "emergence of an alternative, i f not a challenge, to the model of social and political rights epitomized by the U S " (5), but he located that difference in America (of the 1950s) and constructed Singapore as an American object of desire. He said: 162 The truth might be that Middle America is far more conservative than is imagined abroad. Maybe people yearn for far more than is understood—for the America o f an earlier period, when families were less prone to break up, parents were obeyed, the education system was less prone to the vagaries o f experiments and the constraints o f Political Correctness, the streets were safer and society was a lot more cohesive. That America existed as late as in the 1950s and it resembled today's Singapore. Perhaps the [American] support for caning revealed a deep nostalgia for those times; to the extent which [sic] Singapore reminded Americans of those times, they supported its penal system, even though it affected one of their own. ( M y emphasis, 12) One cannot but note the perfect match between L a t i f s (neo-Orientalist) politics and those of conservative Americans: the anti-Political Correctness, fear o f new ideas/pedagogies, the insistence on the obedience o f authority, etc. This ideological divide in America also enabled La t i f to represent the U S state machinery as the one that was under siege (by the liberal media): The U S Administration's public utterances were undoubtedly driven by a need to respond to the uproar created by the U S press, which subjected the Singapore government, and the values it stood for, to hysterical attacks. (55) Thus the American government's words could not coincide with its deeds, and its appearance (of aggression) did not match the reality of its (friendly) relations with the Singapore state. Pressurized by the powerful minority of the liberal elite of America, but mindful of Singapore's strategic economic, political and military importance to the U S , the U S government had apparently to say things that were not what it meant. Contradictions between what the U S government said and what it did were used to prove L a t i f s argument that the U S state had to be seen to appear to be chastising Singapore, though it never truly meant any real threat to its sovereignty. Though Winston Lord chastised Singapore's ambassador to the U S , though Clinton expressed disappointment that the caning sentence was not 163 canceled, though U S Trade Representative Mickey Kantor threatened that America would see to it that Singapore did not host the first meeting of the World Trade Organization, La t i f argued, Amer ica never took anything other than verbal action against Singapore (67-70). The lack o f economic sanctions or o f military intervention was therefore identified as the site o f the U S ' s authentic meaning regarding its attitude towards Singapore's sovereignty, and"this was where a genuine hermeneutic retrieval o f America 's meaning in this situation could supposedly be accomplished. Almost the entire history o f Singapore-US relations was recalled by La t i f to prove that America was an ally. But this strategy of representing Singapore's sovereignty as safe from American threat kept escaping into its opposite meanings, where Singapore was a client-state that was always already hostage to American imperialism. "Economic realities," he said, "determined the political choices Singapore made," and " in those choices, the U S loomed large" in its ability to offer Singapore "modern technological skills, financial resources, industrial expertise and commercial and organizational know-how" (76 ). Singapore's policies of rapid industrialization "crucial for the survival and success o f a small state" tied in, he admitted, to accepting the " U S as an economic leader for the region" (76). L a t i f s comment that American multi-national corporations—which he described as " a centrepiece o f Singapore's strategy o f export-led industrialization"-came to Singapore because "their profit-margins here were higher than they would have been at home," given "Singapore's lower wages," its "attractive tax and other policies," its "harmonious labour relations" and "Singapore's general political stability" was the discourse o f the colonial exploitation of the native, not one o f economic alliance (86-7). It also recalled Lee's comment during the Fay episode that even the very order o f Singapore's streets and its strict crime control measures were necessitated by the need to attract and keep American investment. Lee's statement that Singapore would "abolish effective punishments and treat criminals the way Americans do" only i f Americans were prepared to "underwrite this exercise in human liberty" ("Our Way," ST 21 Apr . 1994) was an admission that even the upholding of Singapore's law in the Fay case, 164 Singapore's strict laws and its centralized state control—the apparent symbols of the nation's sovereignty and its As ian difference—were already inscribed with American power. L a t i f s representation o f Singapore's security strategies and America as a military ally also undermined the validity of the nation's claiming itself as an "As ian" nation, with Asian culture. B y L a t i f s own account, Singapore supported American military presence in A s i a in a bid to contain the power o f As ian blocs: to prevent a possible takeover by "Japanese militaristic nationalism;" to curb "modernised China" from its "quest for global importance, beginning with Southeast-Asia;" and to buffer Indian aspirations for "leadership in the Indian Ocean and beyond." Singapore also needed Amer ica to pre-empt instability arising from challenges to China or Japan posed by "a revitalized Vie tnam" and "a unified Korea" (83-6 ). U S military power then was the very foundation o f Singapore's political sovereignty and that which Singapore used to contain Asian power. The same schism then between appearance and reality, word and deed that was used to turn American imperialism into an illusion returned to wreak its revenge on Singapore's claim to sovereignty. A s La t i f admitted, " in the world of international relations," the equal sovereignty o f nations was merely a "legal one" (i.e. only good on paper). "In actuality, the system is very unequal," he said (71 ). "Smal l states like Singapore," La t i f said, "charting a course in a world where even larger states cannot afford to ignore how powerful states behave, could not but consider its relations with the U S in deciding on the outcome of Fay 's appeal for clemency to the President" (71). Thus, when Singapore said it was sovereign, it could not really mean it! L a t i f then turned to another strategy. He said he would use two previous cases of Singapore's unyielding protection o f its sovereignty in the face of international conflict to show that in the Fay case, Singapore was behaving in character: that its leniency towards Fay was not a buckling to a superpower (91). In 1968, he said, two Indonesian marines were hanged for sabotage activities in Singapore during the Indonesian Confrontasi despite appeal from their government since the incident involved the loss o f lives. The other case concerned Singapore's successful insistence that the U S withdraw a diplomat, 165 whom it accused o f involvement in domestic politics. But the chapter ended with L a t i f denying that there were any similarities between the cases. Singapore did not act in "an inconsistent manner" when it reduced Fay's sentence, La t i f said: as in the other two cases, Singapore had exercised its political w i l l freely (99). Yet, he said, " in contrast (with these incidents), the Fay case did not touch on the issue of sovereignty . . . The marines, the diplomat and the teenager belong to different orders; in responding to each, different sets o f factors came into play" (99). We must conclude then that the two previous cases were only called up to allow the memory of past assertions of political sovereignty to substitute for a present lack o f sovereignty. Unl ike the earlier years of nationhood, "Singapore's de facto sovereignty was now established" so that the "government's decision, whichever way it went" was to be "seen as an exercise in sovereignty, not something that raised doubts about its sovereignty"(95). If Singapore's political sovereignty was self-evident, one wonders why La t i f wrote an entire book to prove it. The journalist asserted the nation's "de facto sovereignty" and claimed that "Fay was not a political issue between the governments o f Singapore and the U S " (95), but also admitted that "the decision on Fay was no less than a foreign policy decision for Singapore," which delimited Singapore's scope for sovereignty. "For a small state like Singapore to survive and prosper," La t i f wrote, "it must operate in the margin o f possibilities created by the larger members o f the international system" (91). L a t i f s book was full o f self-contradictions, which split its discourse of sovereignty, creating an incoherence that was symptomatic o f the impossible nature o f L a t i f s task in representing the reduced sentence as an act of sovereign w i l l . In Jameson's words, "sometimes the wish-fulfill ing imagination does its preparatory work so wel l that the wish, and desire itself, are confounded by the unanswerable resistance o f the Real ." L a t i f s "fantasy demands ultimately raise[d] History itself over against him, as absent cause, as that on which desire [had to] come to g r i e f (Political 183). Few Singaporean voices o f resistance were publicly heard during the caning episode, but one of them was Baratham's. He had written a letter to the press stating his position: he declared American 166 intervention in Fay's case to be "outrageous" and asserted Singapore's right to enforce its laws within its territory ("Are Things More Precious," ST 8 Apr . 1994). But he also urged Singaporeans to reflect "whether caning for non-violent crimes [was] compatible with our [Singaporean] aspirations to build a humane, caring society." Baratham's book disidentified with the definitions o f Singapore's ' A s i a n ' identity that emerged out o f the caning incident. But since this identity was linked to a psychic, ethical split in American culture and involved a cultural 'passing' of American anti-liberalism/authoritarianism as 'As i an , ' Baratham's attempt to construct a counter, non-Orientalized post-colonial identity had him mimicking American liberal discourse. Despite his avowed anti-Americanism, Singaporean desire in this book was still directed at the U S , just as it had been in the media's discourse. In his offering o f a counter identity, Baratham tried to create a de-colonized cultural space where Singaporeans could subscribe to liberal values without, in the process, becoming American mimic men and women. He started this project by refusing the equation o f liberal values with American culture. He refuted American claim to the "moral high ground on human rights and caning" by referring to recent American history: The United States was a country that devastated Vietnam for at least a generation, sustained the corruption and cruelty of Ferdinand Marcos for a quarter o f a century, supported the torture o f the Shah and the savak his secret police inflicted on the people o f Iran, fought a war in the G u l f in the pretence o f territorial integrity for a despot who suddenly had become more important than the one they had earlier propped up, in the interest of cheaper oi l to allow Californians three cars apiece and the means o f polluting the earth. (49) He also linked American liberalism, as it emerged in the Fay case, to an underlying racism. America 's long silence about the detention without trial o f political dissidents in Singapore was contrasted with its recent interest in a relatively minor case o f human rights abuse, the Fay caning,' re-constructing American liberalism as a mode o f cultural imperialism underwritten by white supremacy. American human rights groups' "silence about the Singapore law for the indefinite detention without 167 trial o f political dissidents had been audible" he said (52). But "when an American 's behind was threatened with the cane, al l hell broke loose." He observed that American conception o f human rights had all kinds o f biases, especially of race, class and nationality: "[Hjuman rights, one would assume, applied to al l human-kind, not merely to those who had white skins, especially sensitive behinds, and carried a certain kind o f passport." Since the hegemonic Orientalized nationalism emerged from a rhetoric of anti-Americanism, Baratham required an anti-American stance to authorize his place in the nation, from where he could legitimately subvert the government's discourse of national identity. It was a strategy that forbade American imperialism from serving as the backbone o f Singapore's assertion o f its cultural difference. Baratham refused the culturalization o f Singapore's authoritarianism as its non-Western difference. But i f Baratham re-connected the discourse of crime and punishment with that o f human rights, a connection that had been severed by the nation's politicians, he returned himself to the U S media's position where, as A . M . Rosenthal described it in New York Times, the "issue [was] not only vicious flogging but the other laws o f which that is part and symbol: detentions without trial, administrative imprisonment and 18 political, press and academic control, the whole nasty authoritarian collection." Baratham was caught in a situation where the escape route from 'native' authoritarianism apparently landed him in intellectual colonization by the West. He tried to indigenize the discourse of liberalism, deploying a Singaporean Indian former flogger to Hindu-ize liberal ethics, where the two ethical systems may be viewed in their commonality. The man told Baratham that flogging went against the grain o f Hindu ethics: "After each flogging, I would take time off, go home and have a bath, and go to the Hindu temple to beg God to forgive me my sin. After a few months I could take it no longer and quit" (119). But the question of the 'difference' of Hindu ethics from Western and Christian values is avoided in this attempt to find an East/West simultaneity. We are not told the textual source o f the flogger's Hindu ethics that determined for him that caning was wrong, nor did Baratham pursue the question o f Hindu ethics concerning state disciplinary action. The idea of 168 erasing the repeated committing of a sin by a daily ritual o f confessing also sounds suspiciously Catholic to me. This East-West hybridization however did not contradict Baratham's project o f offering a counter but authentic Singaporean identity. Given Singapore's colonial past, Western cultural influences are a genuine aspect o f national culture: for Baratham, it was the 'As i an ' essentialism that was inauthentic. Asian cultures' pluralism refuses any homogenization, rendering the government's essentialistic construction of Asian culture merely a wil l ful attempt to re-package its tyranny as cultural identity. It also involved a privileging of Chinese culture over other Singapore Asian cultures. Baratham said: It was necessary [for the government] to point out the superiority of an authoritarian system in which few questions were asked and authority, irrespective of what it demanded, respected. This attitude was regarded as particularly Asian, and the term 'As ian values' became fashionable. N o one bothered to ask what these things were that were shared by all of As ia . In the Tobriand Islands, at certain times, girls go on rampage, restrain young men and sit on their faces t i l l they, the girls, were satisfied. In Pakistan, polygamy is acceptable but the eating of pigs is taboo. The reverse applies in the Philippines. In Singapore, wife-beating is an offense but in rural China the proverb has it that a wife is like a horse: " Y o u beat both and you ride both." There is one feature that is common to Asian values, or at least to East Asian ones. It is the respect [for] those in power and those who possess property. (48) Baratham also observed that wife battery and intra-marital rape were accepted by a majority o f Singapore men and women as "part o f our Asian heritage; some even argue an essential ingredient o f the family bond which, in Asian eyes, supersedes individual rights" (85). In Baratham's narrative, liberalism was not only a part of Singapore's Brit ish, colonial heritage, but it was also the nation's founding culture. Lee Kuan Y e w was narratively deposed as father o f the nation and David Marshall , Singapore's first Chief Minister, instated in his place—which was strategic to Baratham's move of de-centering the hegemonic nationalism and re-centering the (liberal) periphery. 169 Marshall 's feat in winning the 1955 Singapore elections, despite being from the Jewish Eurasian minority group in a predominantly Chinese country, was recalled to emphasize the connection between anti-colonialism and liberal values o f political freedom in Singapore history. Marshall 's account of his earlier political career was offered as the voice o f Singaporean anti-colonial liberalism: "I was passionately seeking the freedom of our people, but I did not know how to compromise." After failing to negotiate full independence from the British, Baratham reported, Marshall had resigned, announcing at the time that "the Brit ish have offered us Christmas pudding with arsenic sauce" (88). Baratham's late father, who was a Western-educated doctor and also a "die-hard liberal," was also deployed to represent the nationalistic face of liberalism. Baratham recalled that during the Japanese Occupation o f Singapore, his father had turned down an offer to escape to Australia or India on a troopship: " M y father said, ' N o we are staying because this is our country and whoever occupies it, we w i l l always be its people"'(138). Marshall 's rhetoric of liberal approaches to crime and punishment was contrasted with Lee's carrot-and-stick approach. In an interview with the author, Marshall said: I f the state behaves like beasts, how can you expect our citizens not to resort to violence? If the police behave like thugs, what makes you think the thugs w i l l not behave like policemen? Flogging is barbaric. It is obscene. It cheapens the human individual; it cheapens me to know that there are no less than a thousand human beings being caned every year. . . . I also know that there are 116 human beings queuing up to be hanged. This is very much a black mark against the development o f the civilisation o f our own people . . . .If it[severe punishment] was a deterrent, you would expect offenses for caning to be reduced. On the contrary, there are more sentences o f death than ever before. (89) Lee 's justification of the vandalism law in 1966 was recalled to underline, by contrast, his authoritarian philosophy: "We have a society which, unfortunately, only understands two things—the incentive and the deterrent" (60). 170 Baratham implici t ly represented this authoritarianism as the expression o f a pathological masculinity, one that involved a displaced sexual violence and a suppressed homosexuality. But he displaced this attack on the government's sexuality by projecting it onto another former state flogger, Singham. Singham served as the figure for a demonized Singaporean pragmatism. Self-restrained and fit, "he looked young for his fifty-four years, and though he seemed to like his beer, his belly didn't betray any evidence o f over-indulgence," Baratham said (104). Singham, like so many other Singaporeans, saw himself as an automaton rather than a human being, built to produce at maximum capacity. Not bothered by conscience, Singham took great pride in his job as flogger, identifying with it as expertise. Baratham literally demonizes Singham: "[H]e reminded me of Satan. Not the fire-and-brimstone devil with horns and a tail, but the gentlemanly form the devil is supposed to take when he functions as a tempter of the unwary" (104-5). Baratham allowed Singham's fetishizing of the cane to be read as a signifier of a homoeroticism that was disavowed and displaced into a disguised sexual violence directed against men. Singham said o f his training. The best thing to practise caning on is a banana tree. It has a soft skin which can break with each stroke, but it has layers so one can take off one layer at a time. This countered the press' and other Singaporeans' fetishizing of the cane as symbol o f national unity (see above). Baratham's suggestion of a repressed homosexuality became more evident as Singham described his job in highly sexual terms and obviously derived much sadistic pleasure from it. Though advised to cane on the count, Singham said he generally waited: "I know that prisoners hold in their breath as this reduces the pain. But a man can hold his breath for only so long and as soon as he releases it, I strike" (107). Describing the "individual styles o f floggers," Singham said: There were those who went from overhead and those who preferred the sideways approach. There were those who twirled and those who drew a breath and took careful aim. There were those who 171 took three steps forward and those who stood absolutely sti l l . It was al l a matter o f individual style: some played a serve-and—volley game and some preferred to play from the base-line, some used a lot o f top spin, others preferred the quick s m a s h . . . . Most [victims o f caning] are silent, but some pray, some beg for mercy, others scream. (107) Baratham not only played up the caning as signifier of a disavowed/repressed homosexuality, but was less coy than the media about representing Singapore's caning of Fay as the exercise o f power on a white body. The cover of Baratham's book was unnervingly explicit in representing the racial, sexual and national violence and social submission involved in state discipline, which had long been buried in the discourse. The cover featured a photograph of a white man, stripped and tied to a trestle with his legs spread apart, exposing his naked bottom to a uniformed flogger. With all the visual analogies made to male rape, the cane-which appeared to be in the process of delivering the fourth blow since there were three distinct lines of blood on the white man's bottom—substituted for the penis. The white man's spread-eagled body (which recalled the authority o f the state/police in performing searches) occupied half the picture space and was fully displayed from the back on a white backdrop that allowed the caning vict im's skin color to be highlighted. The flogger's dark body was only half shown and was arranged at the side but foregrounded in order not to deflect the view of the caning vict im's rear-end but also to suggest the priority and power o f the flogger over the other's body. The cover's red and white color scheme were the colors of the Singapore flag. The masthead showed another photograph, the skyline o f the city's harbor and business center, which, by resting on top of the caning photograph, split the former's suggestion of peace, prosperity and modernity and suggested its underpinnings in the racial and sexual violent disciplining of the national body. But in all this, Baratham, despite his anti-American stance, wound up duplicating American media's representations of Singapore and its crime control practices. The latter had represented the Singapore flogger as a mix o f sadism and clinical efficiency, which was what Baratham did. They also represented Asian, especially Chinese, culture as archaic and barbaric and Baratham did not do much to refute this. 172 The liberalism he professed as Singaporean, despite attempts to indigenize it, remained that of the highly privileged Western-educated elite, whose values, he conceded "were different from those o f today's Singaporeans . . . (69). Interviews with Singapore's "people of the coffee-shops," the working-class, who Baratham described as "a segment of Singapore's population whose views rarely make the media" (76 ) did not yield much success. Baratham set up this group of people as those who, though they belonged largely to the majority Chinese race and were uncontaminated by Western culture, did not reflect the government's construction o f East Asian cultural difference. They disagreed with Singapore's strict approach to crime and punishment, he said. But beyond getting one old man to say that all children were given to vandalism, Baratham was unable to nativize the discourse of liberalism through this group of Singaporeans (78). Baratham also tried another strategy of Singaporeanizing liberalism by universalizing or de-culturalizing liberalism. He did this by identifying with Fay's and his mother's pain. Geographical boundaries were crossed as the spring night in St. Louis, Missouri on which Fay was born was likened to a Singapore night: "It was a night, moist and warm, like bodies making love: a Singapore kind o f night. . . " (7). But the conflict between Singapore and the U S , Fay and the Singapore courts, kept showing up the two nations' difference. The night she gave birth to Fay, Randy Fay "had not heard o f that city [Singapore] or the horror it would bring to her and her unborn chi ld" (7). In setting up Randy Fay (now Mrs . Chan) and her son as victims of Singapore law, Baratham romanticized them as Mary and baby Jesus: "There was no way that Randy Fay could anticipate what horrors that circumstances would decree for herself and, worse for her son, the boy with the angelic face. Perhaps, Mary felt the same as she stood on Calvary" (7). In this description, Singapore became Herod persecuting the Jews and Judas betraying Christ: it was the embodiment of evil , compared to American whiter-than-white sons and mothers. This again reflected the demonizing o f Singapore by the American media. Chapter one's title "The Blues o f the B o y from St. Lou is" and the general focus on Fay's predicament also Americanized the victimization o f liberal values in the case. 173 Baratham positioned himself contradictorily in his representation of the case. On the one hand, he was the loyal Singaporean, defending the country against representations o f its national culture as authoritarian, non-liberal. On the other, he was the Singaporean riding to the rescue o f the Americans, Fay and his mother, who were presented as victims. A s Lata Mani has shown, the rescue fantasy expresses the desire o f the subject of fantasy for its object. 1 9 Baratham's sympathy for Fay was evident in his attempt as neurosurgeon to validate the claim that Fay was suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, which had been rejected by the Singapore courts. He described Fay as a " w i l d and enigmatic teenager" to whom Singapore "had to be grateful for making us think again" (33). In chapter 4, titled "Davids and Goliaths," Fay was constructed as a " D a v i d " battling the Singapore state authority, though Singapore too was seen as a "Dav id" battling American power. But Marshall (whose first name was indeed "David") and Baratham, who identified with Marshal l ' s ' views on caning and capital punishment, were also Davids fighting against the Singapore state's unflinching attitudes to harsh punishment. Baratham's doubled representation of himself as a "David , " as Singaporean and as an anti-government liberal, registered an anti-American/pro-America split in his counter-imagining of Singapore identity. In contrast to the state's pathological masculinity (as embodied in the ex-flogger, Singham), the book ventured, through the narrator's authorial personality, to offer a liberalized Singaporean masculinity as one that involved a dialogue with the feminine and the maternal. For instance, Baratham interviewed Soin as a Singaporean feminist, mother, and as one of those whose property was damaged by Fay. He made clear his identification with her oppositional views to caning for non-violent crimes, and to the state's refusal to legislate against intra-marital rape. But the maternalization o f Singaporean (male) liberalism was sought through the author's identification with Fay's (American) mother. Her agony over the caning o f her son was at least twice in the book identified with the author's own pain as a parent: Baratham had one son who had suffered a severe head injury in infancy and another who had committed suicide (8, 26). Among photographs featured in the book was one depicting the author with Fay 's mother. It represented a relationship that was not that of the usual detached, official one between 174 interviewer and interviewee: Mrs . Chan was seated in an armchair, holding a drink, while the author draped his arms around her from the back. I f a desire for camaraderie was circulating here, it was directed from Baratham to Mrs . Chan, not vice-versa. The caning incident made transparent certain aspects o f Singapore's new state-proposed national identity. It connected Singapore's new Orientalized identity to American cultural anxiety and exposed within it the circulation o f American desire. It also showed that Singapore's affirmation o f its 'post-colonial ' ' A s i a n ' difference was always-already contaminated with desire for and approval from the West. The similarities between the values asserted by Singapore and conservative sections o f America, as wel l as the fact that Singapore's recently revised self-representation was scripted by the West/US, suggests that Singapore's 'As i an ' identity is a cultural transvestitism, a passing o f American authoritarianism as Chinese or Asian. The cultural doubling and splitting o f discourse as Singaporean and American self-representations were transported to each other's shores encourage one to think o f neo-Orientalism as a schizoid U S talking back to itself, but using Singapore's voice to ventriloquise and disguise its disavowed self-incriminating, culturally transgressive doubts. In this strategic ventriloquism, the voice of colonial authority is made invisible. In that Singapore constructed itself according to borrowed neo-Oriental notions of East Asian culture, attempting to assert and reinforce its authoritarian politics as cultural difference, neo-Orientalism shows itself to be a neo-colonial ideology that works, in the era of late capitalism, to culturally 'fund' authoritarian regimes in other countries in a manner that clearly furthers the cause of colonial exploitation of the native. In 1993, for instance, at the United Nations Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna, Lee used this American discourse o f Chinese difference to culturalize the issue of human rights, arguing against American linking o f its trade relations to the observance o f human rights in China. Already we see America backing down from its former insistence on human rights, taking economic advantage o f a cultural discourse that it had helped to produce. 175 This theoretical model o f neo-Orientalism and its relation to the discourses of 'post-colonial ' Asian/East Asian national identities and alternative modernities that it has generated is to be distinguished from other readings which proclaim the latter to be a sign o f the new-found cultural confidence o f the East, or as A n g and Stratton describe these, as a "talking back" o f As ia . A n g and Stratton say: While in the past the West could luxuriate in speaking about the rest as a passive, silent other, as in the discourse of Orientalism, the rest is now talking back and interpellating the West on its own terms. In the process, the binary divide between West and non-West is reproduced at the same time that it is updated and . . . "post-modernized. (65-6) Far from interpellating the West on its own terms, the East appears rather to be deploying another form of colonial mimicry and dynamics o f cultural passing than that which is discussed with regard to Brit ish empire and the native. Fuss distinguishes between the two categories o f "mimicry" and "masquerade" (Identification 146-7). In mimicry, she says, imitation is ironized, hyperbolically parodied: that is, imitation is not tantamount to identification. In masquerade, the role is not ironized and involves an unconscious identification with the part being played. While in feminist theory, mimicry "resists and subverts dominant systems of representation by ironizing them," Fuss points out that in post-colonial theory, mimicry is understood not as a "tactic of dissent but as a condition o f domination." But, quoting Bhabha in " O f M i m i c r y and M a n , " Fuss observes that even in that which she identifies as the "mimicry o f subjugation," the native obeying the colonizer's demand to mime non-Western alterity or to mime Western sameness tended to slip from mimicry to mockery, performativity to parody, discrediting colonialism's authorized versions of otherness and undermining the colonizer's elusive self-image (147). In allowing the colonial subject to be in two places at once, the same and the other to the West, "the rents and divisions o f colonial narratives of domination become more visible" and puncture the colonizer's authority (147). 176 The new colonial 'mimicry ' on the other hand disavows itself as imitation and takes itself to be the genuine 'other.' I f it is masquerade as Fuss defines it, rather than mimicry, it is a doubled masquerade in mistaking Western self-representation as the representation o f the non-Western 'other.' Here the colonizer's command to the racial 'other' to mime non-Western alterity is also a (unacknowledged) command to mime the Western self. Where the formerly tricky colonial subject used to be in two places at once, now it is in one place even when it thinks it is in another, in which it is the Western self even when it thinks it is miming non-Western difference. I f as Fuss notes, the borders between the earlier colonial mimicry of subjugation and the mimicry of subversion were permeable, now theorization of these two categories is one category in excess, allowing one to mistake a mimicry o f subjugation for one involving subversion. Current colonial ideologies deploy race as a technology of power and re-territorialize desire in a geo-cultural context where relations of race, class, gender and nation have changed dramatically from the 20 days o f empire. Race as object of knowledge now serves a dual purpose: regulating the behavior of the metropolis as wel l as of the rest of the world. This duality is inscribed in the doubled language o f the discourse, where one signified is split into two signifiers, as with neo-Orientalism where tight state control is "communitarian democracy" in the West and "Confucianism" in the East. A l so , racial identity is no longer constructed exclusively via the Western/'other' binary but also emerges from 'other'/ 'other' binaries (again, constructed by the West and reflecting Western desire and interests): Confucianist, East Asian culture is not only differentiated as non-Western, but it is also that which distinguishes the 'East A s i a n ' as superior to other races. Thus post-colonial desire is re-organized and anti-colonial antipathy is deflected onto the non-West. A s I w i l l show in the next chapter, Singapore literature o f the 1980s was not so much concerned with differentiating post-colonial identity from Western identity as it was with Sinicizing Singapore, displacing earlier multi-cultural and South-east Asian identifications. Baratham's book too indicates that the Orientalizing o f Singapore makes other national identifications, such as the former emphasis on an East-West hybridity, virtually unrepresentable. 177 This difference between new colonial ideologies and preceding ones, between neo-Orientalism and Orientalism, needs to be theorized to provide radically new post-colonial subject-positions. Apply ing the older rubric o f post-colonial identity to new historical circumstances prohibits the post-colonial subject from recognizing transformations in their desires. A s the case o f Singapore has shown, it becomes very easy then for the post-colonial subject to mistake the voice/desire o f the Western 'other' as its own. 178 Notes 1 I realize the difficulties o f definitively describing the cultural base o f a newspaper and its changes over time, o f being familiar with its system of "news value," which determines the selection o f events for publication (Fowler, Language 12). But drawing on my own experience as a former reporter with Straits Times (until 1986) and my occasional coverage of the court beat, I can say with certainty that cases that are considered "unusual" (even i f in terms o f circumstances only rather than the offense itself) or those that involve well-known or otherwise interesting persons are considered to make good court copy. In this case, the cultural interests noted above, the involvement o f foreigners, and the fact that it involved repeated acts o f vandalism added to its news value. 2 See "Teen Vandal ," ST 3 Mar . 1994. 3 See "Teen Vandal ," ST 3 Mar . 1994. 4 Singapore's L a w Minister S. Jayakumar mentions this in a speech. See "Shouldn't Other Countries," ST 5 M a y 1994. ' 5 The Indian independence movement was stirred at least partly by the colonizer's liberal ideologies o f freedom and democracy communicated to the Western-educated post-colonial elite through English education (Viswanathan, Masks 16). The Indian women's reform movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, where Western feminism was co-opted by Indian men to serve as symbol of the 'modernization' of Indian culture, was, again, strongly influenced by Western knowledge and Western notions o f modernity (Tharu and Lali ta, "Literature o f the Reform" 183-86). A s Fanon says, "the dialogue between these political parties [nationalist political parties in the struggle for freedom] and colonialism is never broken off. . . . The native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. . . . Thus there is very easily brought into being a kind o f class of affranchised slaves, or slaves who are individually free" (Wretched 60). 179 6 Daniel Dayan, "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema," Movies and Methods (Berkeley: U of California P, 1976), 449, qtd. in Silverman, Subject 215. 7 A play on the caning incident, Six of the Best, was staged in Singapore in May 1996. I will not deal with it because I only have a rough draft manuscript of the play, which does not even give the play's title. Written by a journalist with Straits Times , Tan Tarn How, it is of interest in its recapitulation of the discourse of Singaporean identity as it was generated from the Fay case. The play features Singaporean and Western characters as colleagues working together in a multinational advertising agency during the time of the Fay case. The characters' different responses to the caning sentence brings buried racial, ethnic, national and sexual/gender conflicts to the surface. As in the local press' discourse, Singapore's cultural difference from the West is tied to differences in codes of masculinity and sexual power as well as to its subordinate position to the West in the circulation of capital. The difference between Singaporean and Western/American masculinity is represented in terms similar to that in Koh's article, "When to be Tough," ST (see below), where national service is described as a rite of passage for Singaporean men while, allegedly, acts of mischief and anti-social behaviour initiate Western adolescents into their particular code of masculinity. The play also reveals the link between masculine self-doubt and anxiety over Western imperialism as part of the dynamics of an Orientalized Singaporean self-representation. Although the play shows an awareness that the state's new nationalism privileges Chinese culture over that of minority ethnic cultures, especially Malay culture, it does not develop this theme. Furthermore, it repeats this privileging of Chinese culture in its own representation of Singaporean national identity via the absence of non-Chinese Singaporeans in the play and its exclusive feature of Chinese dialect as an indigenous language. The connections that Tan makes between masculinity and Singaporean nationalism, however, will be dealt with in the next chapter with regard to other plays staged in the 1990s, including one, The Lady of Soul, which is also by Tan. 8 See "Teen Vandal," SI 4 Mar. 1994: and "US Chamber." Business Times 5 Mar. 1994. 180 I do not want to suggest that the Singapore government and media created the Fay conflict. Looking back on the incident, the American envoy Boyce was certainly determined to turn the caning o f Fay into an international incident. The embassy had unsuccessfully appealed to the govenment before Fay 's case was heard in court ("Reactions to Sentencing," ST 4 Mar . 1994). Fol lowing this, Boyce used the media to force the issue, making a statement to the media immediately after Fay's sentencing and even issuing a transcript o f his statement ("Reactions to Sentencing," ST 4 Mar . 1994). Even i f the Singapore media had ignored the Fay case, Boyce 's statement would have landed on their newsdesk. Clinton's response to the case was prompted by a question posed directly to him by the media at a White House briefing. He confessed ignorance of the case then ("Clinton to Look Into," ST 6 Mar . 1994). In retrospect, given the ambivalence of the U S government's response, where it made strong verbal condemnations o f the caning but without following this up with effective action such as imposing economic sanctions, there is room to think that the U S State Department was merely appearing to pander to public opinion, as La t i f suggests in his book. However, the Singapore government and media did churn out much symbolic capital from a situation that was presented to them. 1 0 Business Times w i l l herafter be referred to as B T . 1 1 The following use of critical linguistics is taken from Fowler (66-90). 1 2 See "Fay Case: A p p l y L a w , " ST 16 Apr . 1994; and "Bush Says," B T 16 Apr . 1994. 1 3 See "Lesson on Crime," ST 18 Mar . 1994; "Caning Defended," ST 28 Mar . 1994; "Americans Back Caning," ST 3 A p r i l 1994. 1 4 Fowler defines "homocentrism" as "meaningfulness" that coincides with "consensus," a "leaning towards topics which are meaningful to readers because they display interests and experiences which 'we ' share in our lives" (53). 1 5 Jameson coined this word to describe a unit o f ideology whereby social contradictions are imaginarily resolved (Political 77-9 ). A n ideologeme, he says "is an amphibious formation" which "as a construct must be susceptible to both a conceptual description and a narrative manifestation all at once." 181 Elaborated, it can take on "the finished appearance of a philosophical system" or "that o f a cultural text" (87). For Jameson, the ideologeme is also that which registers within ideology the complexity o f transactions between the conceptual and the "narrative" or "l ibidinal fantasy." Due to these transactions, the basic unit o f ideology has a "fundamentally narrative character," he says, even where it seems to be "articulated as abstract conceptual beliefs or values" (88). 1 6 A s Fowler describes it, language is structured around two types of participants, patients, who typically have something done to them, and agents, who are in control of the action (73-6). 17 The American viewpoint is that of Joe Murray published in Lufkin (Texas) Da i ly News qtd. in "What U S Columnists Say," SI 8 Apr . 1994. The ' l iberal ' American media's representations o f Singapore were repeatedly racist, especially anti-Chinese. For instance, J im Hoagland, a columnist with Washington Post said: "In looking at this problem with Singapore, it is not incidental that this city-state at the tip o f the Malay peninsula is ruled by ethnic Chinese citizens who have not totally lost the Han emperors' disdain for non-Han cultures." Comparing Singapore's action to China's stand on human rights, he added, "This conflict revolves around thousands of years of institutionalised racism practised by Chinese leaders, from the emperors to the chairman's commissars" (qtd. in Han, "Cane Fay," SI 9 Apr . 1994). Since my focus is on Singapore's constructions o f national identity arising from the caning controversy, I won't be dealing in detail with these. But it must be pointed out that this is one o f the advantageous features of the double-talk o f neo-Orientalist discourse, which showed itself up during the caning incident. A s a so-called "communitarian democracy," Singapore could be held up for American emulation. But as a "Confucianist," Chinese culture, it could also be simultaneously reviled, where liberal American opposition could bypass right-wing American ideologies and project their hatred onto the non-West. 1 8 Qtd. in Latif, "Thinking A l o u d , " SI 23 Apr . 1994. 1 9 M a n i discusses the colonial gaze and its libidinal investments in colonial accounts o f widow-burning in India. She argues that the language o f desire in such colonial accounts suggests the 182 "voyeuristic pleasure of the male gaze, contemplating what it constructs as the wife devoted to her husband in death as in l ife" (400). Motivated by such desire, colonial accounts preferred to re-write women's escapes as "rescue" by colonial male observers. 20 I say this because even a cursory reading o f Huntington's "Clash" suggests that the discourse o f race is being used to cover over and deflect feared ideological challenges to capitalism as well as to produce the world in particular racial blocs in a divide-and-conquer strategy. I f one uses Zizek ' s method o f reading the Real through the repressed, Huntington's article repeats, in what amounts to hysteria, that future causes o f global conflict w i l l be cultural (or "civi l izat ional" as he terms it), not ideological: the latter appears to be the nightmare that he wants to wish away. 183 Chapter 4 Imagining Chinese Identity: Fictional Revisions of State Ideology From the period of the independence movement, the 1940s to the late 1970s, Singapore's English literary production consisted mostly o f poetry and short fiction. Only a handful of novels appeared during this period. Given the massive socio-economic transformation that took place with the end o f colonial rule and the move to enter Singapore into the world economy, the literature of this period dealt largely with issues concerning urban life and modern alienation. In this respect, it was influenced both stylistically and in content by metropolitan literature. British standards o f writing and literary criticism were observed rigidly in literature in the English language. But given Singapore's history as the center o f the Malaysian nationalist literary movement, this imitation o f British literature was counter-balanced with the imagining of post-colonial identity. During the independence movement, Singapore was a significant force in arguing for a new post-colonial literature that would hybridize English with Malay and Chinese. This was known as the Eng-mal-chin movement. Singaporean post-colonial subjectivity was then imagined within the paradigm of an East-West cultural hybridity. Singapore's early short stories written in English represented the nation as a multi-racial society and explored issues common to all ethnic groups. In this, it tended to steer clear o f ethnic-communal issues, which were more frequently addressed in short fiction written in Malay, Tami l and Mandarin. A s Edwin Thumboo observes, Singapore fiction written in English had more o f a potential to reflect national experience: "fiction in English . . . has the best potential to look at the whole of the Singapore experience, seen as a microcosm within which English-speaking Singaporeans—whether Malay, Chinese, Tamil or 'Others'— move" (xvii i ) . 184 A national anthology o f short fiction such as Singapore Short Stories, which was edited in two volumes by a leading Singapore writer, Robert Yeo , and featured stories from 1960 to 1978, shows that it was not unusual then for writers from one ethnic group, even from the majority Chinese population, to represent Singapore culture in terms of the subjectivity o f characters from other, especially minority ethnic groups (Indian and Eurasian). For instance, Stella K o n , a Straits Chinese Singaporean, features a Sinhalese Catholic as her central character in "The Martyrdom of Helena Rodrigues" (13-20), while S. Rajaratnam, a Singaporean o f Sri-Lankan Tamil origins, writes about a Malay character in "The Tiger" (1-8), and Eurasian writer Gregory Nalpon features the relationship between a Pakistani man and a Malay woman in "The Rose and the Silver K e y " (59-65). 1 Discussing the early Singaporean short fiction in English, Thumboo notes that "though it relied on the experience of one individual [the author], the writing in English increasingly included characters from other communities—Malay, Chinese, Tami l , Eurasian, ex-colonial—each with its types and sub-types" (xvii) . During this period, Singaporeans who wrote in English frequently signified the nation's 'otherness' in terms o f the encounter o f Singaporean Asian cultures with Western culture or with other forms o f cross-cultural dialogue (as in a writer o f one ethnic group assuming the subjectivity of another group). Cultural hybridity rather than racial/ethnic purity was the norm of the system of representation o f a multi-racial/multi-ethnic national identity. Ethnic content tended to cross racial boundaries. For instance, as Y e o ' s anthology shows, Chinese ethnic content was generally used only as a trope for issues common to al l the various ethnic communities l iving in Singapore, rather than as a simple reference to Chinese value-systems. In a story such as Catherine L i m ' s "Jade Pendant," jade, an object usually associated with Chinese culture, functions as a signifier of universal meanings o f the class struggle and of intra-familial rivalry (46-53). In Arthur Yap ' s "The Story of a Mask" in the same anthology (37-41), the mask o f make-up used by actors in traditional Chinese opera features as a metaphor for the cultural displacement experienced by immigrants and offers the Chinese opera actor as a figure o f modern alienation. In this signifying operation, traditional symbols o f ethnic culture are made into universals. 185 Malaysian writer and literary critic L l o y d Fernando attests to the tendency on the part o f Singaporean and Malaysian writers in the 1960s to perceive national subjectivity in terms o f cultural displacement and estrangement, cross-culturality and a South-east Asian regional ethnic identity. He says in the introduction to an anthology of Singaporean and Malaysian stories published in 1968, that these stories were of an era that "affirm[ed]" "a fidelity to the region as a whole, a region consisting o f many population groups (not only, let us add at once, racial) each to some extent astray in unfamiliar conditions which demand[ed] a breaking out from old patterns." From the 1940s to the 1970s, Singapore writers in English largely addressed an elite, middle-class literati, who were familiar with Western canonical literature and who expected some conformity to Western standards o f literary excellence. The production o f short fiction was also controlled by the literary groups in the local university. Dudley de Souza and Arthur Yap say that the published short fiction in English of the 1950s and 1960s were mostly undergraduate writings published in journals such as Cauldron (1947-1949) published by the Medical College Union Literary and Debating Society, and N e w Cauldron (1951-1956), published by the Raffles Society of University o f Malaya and Focus (1961 to the present), which was published by the University o f Singapore's Literary Society (765-6). In the 1970s, Commentary, a journal published by the National University of Singapore Society provided an avenue for the publication o f short fiction. University professors o f English such as Thumboo, Ban Kah Choon and Robert Yeo , and others associated with the university such as Geraldine Heng also put together anthologies of short stories in the 1970s. The literature of this period reflected that era's state nationalist ideology, which promoted ethnic integration and cultural pluralism. Wary o f the dangers of ethnic extremism and chauvinism, the People's Ac t ion Party had tried to dissolve identifications with ancestral homelands (Vasi l , Asianising 49). Many o f these facets of Singaporean literary production changed in the 1980s and 1990s. Not only was literature now structured along racial lines, but racial/ethnic themes were an important aspect o f the popularization o f Singapore literature in English during this period. B y the early 1980s, Singapore 186 literary texts were studied in school alongside colonial texts, producing a generation o f young Singaporean consumers o f local fiction. This radically altered the reading public that the Singapore writer in English now had to address. The new audience was younger but also less well-educated, who read for entertainment rather than 'enlightenment.' In the mid-1980s, the Singapore government had also begun promoting aesthetic production as an industry, with plans to turn the nation into an international center of the arts. The Ministry of Information and the Arts began to fund literary and dramatic activity. This move popularized the arts, with artists/writers inevitably pressured to appeal to mass audiences in order to win state sponsorship, but that also inevitably linked cultural production to state ideology. Literature and drama, then, must be seen in this context in their involvement, to a greater or lesser extent, in hegemonizing state ideology. The accent on arts/literature, where consumption of the latter began to be viewed as a symbol o f social 'arr ival ' in a newly developing consumerist culture, also created a new market for local literature in English that was soon to be exploited by new publishing firms. Where, in the 1960s and 1970s, Heinemann A s i a and Graham Brash were among the few publishers of Singapore fiction in English, Times Books International (a sister company of Straits Times) began in a big way in the 1980s to snap up local titles for publication and to develop Singapore writers' talents. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, other companies such as Landmark Books and Flame of the Forest encouraged experimental writing and literature catering for the masses, respectively, and attested to the new popular demand for local fiction. Fict ion then was breaking away from the control o f the university and was directed at a new mass audience. Shirley Geok-Lin L i m says: "Since 1985, while there has been a burgeoning o f local writing that is selling wel l , the genres produced (chiefly ghost-stories, humor books, thrillers and teenage fiction) have done little to inspire critical acceptance" (Nationalism 4). She adds that after 1988, the pace o f local writing published in Singapore increased, with younger writers aiming at a popular and often teenage audience (Nationalism 159). 187 Novels unarguably have greater mass-cultural appeal than poetry. The former were few and far between until the 1970s, but the later 1980s and 1990s saw the sudden production o f novels. These however were historical novels that dealt with Singapore's Chinese-immigrant past, and were contemporaneous with the state's promotion of Chinese culture. Given the nation's predominantly Chinese population, the racial/ethnic cultural theme also guaranteed a large readership. These novels included Stella K o n ' s The Scholar and the Dragon (1986), Christine Su-Chen L i m ' s Gift from the Gods(1990), Goh Sin Tub's The Sin-Kheh (1993) and Catherine L i m ' s The Bondmaid (1995). A s historical novels of a multi-racial nation, they are remarkable for their total absence o f non-Chinese Singaporean characters. Markedly different from the literature produced in the earlier period, they throw aside the exploration of contemporary issues of modern subjectivity in order to seek and define ethnic identity. Ethnic culture is, in these works, unfailingly identified with the past. Suddenly Chinese ethnic culture, even though it is not the same Chinese Confucianist culture being touted by the state, is treated as the dominant, i f not sole, ethnic experience of the Singaporean. Singapore history is represented for the first time as the immigration of the Chinese, with nary any non-Chinese featured in these narratives; often, the encounter with colonial culture is also either erased or minimally represented. On the rare occasion when the ethnic experience of the minorities is approached, it is viewed as that o f the 'other' to the dominant (Chinese) experience. Before these novels appeared however, a trend was already perceptible in Singaporean short fiction in dealing with issues o f Chinese ethnic identity. Catherine L i m ' s short novel The Serpent's Tooth (1982) vilifies a modern Singaporean Chinese woman for her disregard for traditional Chinese culture. The Malay and the Indian is represented here as the racial 'other' and their ethnic present is seen as marked by the negative aspects o f a 'past' Chinese ethnic culture. Here, the lack in Chinese culture (including male sexual abuse of women and the 'primitive') is projected onto the racial 'other,' recalling colonial strategies o f racial 'othering' and stereotyping. Her collections o f short stories, Little Ironies (1979) and "Or Else. The Lightning G o d " and Other Stories (1980), which also deal largely with the erosion o f 188 traditional Chinese cultural values by urban, Western culture, were selected for study at N and O levels in 1987/88 and 1989/90 respectively. Then, as was to be expected, novels dealing with the history o f the 'other' Singapore emerged in response to the Singapore-Chinese historical novels, re-producing the past o f minority ethnic communities. In 1991, Rex Shelley wove the mass cultural appeal o f a spy novel with the story o f Singapore's Eurasian community's contribution to nation-building and its role in Singapore history. In 1993, his story o f the Eurasian community was taken up again in People o f the Pear Tree, this time focusing on its role in indigenous insurgency during the Japanese Occupation o f Singapore. He published another historical novel about the Eurasians, Island in the Center, in 1995. That same year, Phi l ip Jeyaretnam's novel Abraham's Promise was published, which looked at Singapore national political history as a tussle between Chinese and Indian value-systems, featuring a liberal-minded former Tami l opposition politician as the 'other' to national culture. In a crucial scene in the novel, the liberal politics o f the central character, Abraham, a politician during the independence movement is ethnically/racially distinguished as Indian and differentiated from the 'Chinese-ness' o f the political philosophy o f the ruling party. In a frontal attack on the racism of P A P politics, Jeyaretnam pits his protagonist Abraham against a member of the ruling party, a Chinese man Lau Teng Kee, who is extolling the virtues o f East Asians and of Singapore's national culture, which he assumes to be 'Chinese. ' It is a familiar debate about the 'consensual' style of East Asian democracy versus the contentious one of American democracy. Unable to persuade Abraham of his anti-American viewpoint, Lau attacks Abraham racially: "I think Amer ica is a potential threat, because it is they who are scared, scared o f us. They would like nothing better than for us to descend into anarchy or chaos, like . . . " and here he pauses, as i f to make sure that I [Abraham] am listening. " . . . like India or one o f those dark places in Af r i ca . " (74) 189 Then, annoyed when Abraham points out the alliance between Singapore and the U S in the G u l f War and, unable to rebut his opponent, he makes fun o f Abraham's Tami l accent: "They [Americans] [a]re not white knights in shining armour, you know, these American bom-bers as you call them" (75). "Suddenly," Abraham notes, "everyone is laughing": I look around at their faces, reddened by alcohol into a florid harshness. I have spoken other than in their manner of speaking, betraying my upbringing, my Tamil otherness, most o f all my insignificance . . . . I keep the path immediately before me in focus . . . It would not do to faint here, here in the midst o f my enemies. (75) This racial polarization is to be seen in Singapore drama too. In 1988, Michael Chiang's play Beauty Wor ld commanded packed audiences, a first for Singapore theater and the beginnings o f the popularization o f Singapore drama-in-English. The play relied for its appeal in a nostalgic send-up of a vanished Singapore Chinese immigrant culture. Featuring music and lyrics by Singapore pop musician D i c k Lee, it counters colonial Western culture and Western sexuality with the working-class Chinese cabaret culture and raw sexuality of Beauty World , a 1950s Singapore dance club. Chiang's play opens with the Westernized world of post-World War Two Singapore with a woman listening to the music of Eddie Calvert. But a radio play takes us to Beauty World , to Ivy Chan, a young woman from a small town in Malaysia who comes to Singapore and to Beauty World , seeking her father. A s the lyrics o f the closing song remind the audience, "This [Beauty World] is where it [read 'Singapore life'] al l began . . ." (160). The characters at the club eventually leave Beauty World to do things recognized as typical o f modern-day Singapore: one signs up for adult education classes, studies at the polytechnic and winds up a supervisor in a garment factory; another becomes a nurse, who wins a singing talent contest (a reference to a real-life Singapore nurse, who won the annual T V Talentime contest); a dancer leaves the club to work for the Salvation A r m y in caring for orphans, etc. 190 Strangely, an Indian female character, Rosemary, is made to stand for a Westernized female sexuality and Western notions of romantic love, i.e. she is the 'other' to Chinese culture. When Rosemary comes in to Beauty World , looking for Ivy, her friend, a Chinese cabaret dancer rebukes her for her 'otherness': Y o u think you're so very high class / I 'm wondering what's the big fuss/. . . . We l l , Mis s High Class, go back to Indial/Who do you think you are with your aksi [showy upper-class] slang?/You look like a slut, but you've never had a man./Get out of here, take your airs and your class . . . . (142) Rosemary, unlike Ivy, ends up "single in Singapore": while Ivy gets her man, Rosemary meets "the man o f her dreams, only to wake up and find him gone," supposedly done in by her 'Western' unrealistic romantic fantasies (158). The relations between state ideology and Singapore writing are hardly ever examined. A s Shirley L i m 4 points out, this is due in part to influences from colonial New Crit icism which "emphasizes the primary o f the text and locates its meanings in the text's literary, that is, linguistic and formal aspects." The acceptance o f N e w Cri t icism's theorization of genre, devices, stylistic features and linguistic effects, Shirley L i m says, "helped to validate literary criticism as an academic discipline and to support assumptions of 'universal i ty ' inherent in these critical ideas." "[A]n obvious dislocation, a disjuncture of theory and text occurs," she says, "when Western theoretical scholarship is applied wholesale to a body of literature from a radically different history, society and culture." In addition, when the literature is written in the language o f Western literary criticism, in English, that "disjuncture is sometimes masked," especially so when a colonial relationship is involved. This disjuncture, she says, "has negative consequences for the full development o f independent national literary production" (Nationalism 1-2). Within the Singapore context, however, the academy's critical role is drastically constricted since the state covets the task o f defining national identity and national values, and relies on ideological state apparatuses such as the press, education system as wel l as control over cultural production to hegemonize its ideologies. 5 This takes away from the people's agency. K o h Tai Ann ' s well-researched 191 article "Culture and the Ar t s" argues that the state's heavy promotion of cultural activity in the 1980s and 1990s is linked to the government's agenda o f developing national solidarity and shaping national culture so that both ethnic communalism and 'over-Westernization' are contained (717-8). B y promoting the traditional arts o f each racial group, ethnic culture is produced as a "museumization o f an ossified past, a show-case culture" (734), she says, but such past art forms are also used to communicate "cultural messages now rooted in the new orthodoxy of contingent state-derived values" (721). The government's ideological commitment to multiculturalism and a "democratic spirit that eclectically combines a socialist spirit with capitalism practices mean that "cultural values and development are consistently, even insistently, linked to economic development and productivity," she says (720). K o h assesses the relationship between state and cultural production thus: From its historical experience, the P A P government seems to have mastered two hard-learned lessons. One was the importance of gaining the initiative and retaining dominance in the cultural sphere i f it was to win and keep the support o f the majority Chinese as well as other races. Second, that to obtain and maintain this dominance, it must capture institutions for its own use, or create the necessary agencies to institutionalize its own cultural hegemony." (719) 6 Given this situation, the failure of Singapore literary critics to explore the links between state ideology and writing is not then a matter only of submission to the tenets of N e w Cri t ic ism or a matter only concerning the academy. It may stem from a state-directed refusal to share cultural power with writers or with critics. The contemporary and more influential role of the state and the press in shaping and directing public reception o f literary texts also needs to be taken into account. The Singapore academy has moved and is moving towards cross-disciplinarity, attempting more sociological, political readings o f literature. But this institutional effort is delimited by and has to negotiate with the power and w i l l o f the state, as in any other nation. Given the deep penetration of the ideological apparatuses o f the state, it is also more than likely that the academy internalizes state ideology to a greater or lesser extent. In the context of a successful hegemonization o f state ideology, as I have argued that the government has 192 achieved with its Orientalization o f national identity, subversion by university intellectuals is l ikely to be received as anti-nationalistic or pro-American/colonial, placing the academy in a difficult position. I f the local universities have moved beyond N e w Crit icism, the government and media have not, which too conveniently ensures that subversion of state ideology in literature and literary criticism is mimimalized. In ministerial speeches and in cultural policies, the government ensures that the domain o f arts/literature is kept separate from that of politics. 7 The conflict that erupted in 1994/5 between Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and Catherine L i m symptomizes the state's wil l ful de-politicization o f literature. Catherine L i m had, in her then-regular column in Sunday Times (the weekend edition o f Straits Times), commented on public perception o f a division of political style and thinking between Prime Minister Goh and Lee Kuan Y e w , Goh's predecessor, who was now Senior Minister. Goh had a people-oriented approach while Lee had a stern, no-nonsense style, she had said. In her two articles "The Great Affective Divide ," and "One Government, Two Styles," published on 3 September and 20 November 1994, L i m held that public opinion saw Lee rather than the prime minister as holding the reins o f power. In his aggressive response to Catherine L i m , Goh said that L i m should jo in a political party i f she wanted to make such commentary. A report on his response, " P M : N o Erosion o f M y Authority A l l o w e d , " published on 5 December 1994 in Straits Times, said that Goh felt he had: to correct mistaken notions—"in firm language"~to prevent them from taking hold and confusing Singaporeans. He added that in the Asian context, it was important that the authority o f the Prime Minister be upheld, not undermined by "writers on the fringe." If left unchecked, snide comments would, over time, erode the people's respect for the office, he said. Further remarks by the prime minister clarify his reference to the role o f writers in the nation. In January 1995, he said that the government had to set the agenda, and anybody who wanted to make critical commentary had to enter the political fray: 193 Y o u can criticise and we would treat you as i f you have entered the political arena. I f you do not wish to do so; [sic] you want to hide in sanctuaries to criticise the Government, to attack the Government, we 'd say even though you don't want to jo in a party, we would treat you as though you have entered the political arena. I think it's fair because you can't just criticise without expecting us to reply to you in the same manner which [sic] you have attacked us. I f you land a blow on our jaw, you must expect a counter-blow on your solar plexus." ("Those with Agenda," ST 24 Jan. 1995: 1) The reference to "writers on the fringe" is not then a denigration of L i m ' s abilities as a writer, but rather singles out writers in general as a peripheral class, whose activity of cultural production is to be viewed as, and expected to be, non-political. Lee's statement warns that future departures from this rule would be construed by the state as expressions of a 'political agenda,' which supposedly only politicians can possess. The arena o f the cultural (including media discourse) then are/should be "sanctuaries," safe-houses from the rough and tumble of politics. Since L i m had stressed in her articles that she was documenting public opinion, the prime ministerial backlash indirectly suggests that writers could not be counted as being among the nation's representers. Only politicians had this right. 8 Since the national is always political, Prime Minister Goh's remark that L i m had "gone beyond the pale" suggests that the government has sacralized and appropriated for politicians the arena o f national representation ("Catherine L i m : I 'm Not Interested," ST 6 Dec. 1994). Goh's responses quoted above underscore his self-perceived role as controller/regulator of public perception, an authoritarianism that he Asianizes. Throughout the incident, the government never commented on the content of L i m ' s articles: a move that rendered her representation of public perception irrelevant. The media too plays its part in creating a cultural ethos whereby the boundaries between literary activity and the 'pol i t ical ' is maintained. 1 0 It does this in the main by restricting reviews o f local literature to the aesthetic-literary approaches canonized by New Crit icism, distancing even the educated middle-class and professions from newer but more subversive critical methods o f reading offered by the 194 local universities. The typical Straits Times' review of local literature side-steps social issues raised by the texts in order to concentrate on the aesthetic use o f language and the writer's artistry in handling a genre, characterization, etc. In the book review pages of Straits Times, one is hard put to find local literature subjected to a 'Cultural Studies' cri t icism-where the literary text is read as symptom of local culture. Textual meanings are universalized to take the sting out of even the more socially and politically involved and astringent local literary productions and displace any particular critique o f Singapore, as Hannah Pandian's review of Tan Tarn How ' s play Lady of Soul indicates (see chapter 5 ) . " I want to break from this tradition of de-politicizing Singaporean literature to provide the type of reading that Shirley L i m calls for, "nationalist, ethnocentric readings," which she says w i l l correct the biases o f the Brit ish-American critical traditions still taught in post-colonial societies (Nationalism 7). L i m observes that the Singapore writer ideologically removes his/her work from the domain o f the political so that, in terms of reflecting national cultural concerns, the Singapore writer becomes "irrelevant" to his community of readers. This tendency to shrink from the social and political, she says, is due partly to the influence of Western liberal ideology regarding the artist's freedom from social constraints but it also has to do with the role o f the state in Singapore culture: she says that "political and institutional bureaucracies have intruded and to some extent taken over the public and social spheres," so that Singapore writers are deprived of the motivation to engage in these domains (Nationalism 20-1). L i m attempts a symptomatic reading of this supposedly elitist "irrelevance" in Singapore poetry. For instance, she argues that Thumboo's "dual commitment to '(Western) literary tradition' and '(Singapore) society' " as poet and as critic mark the struggle for cultural integrity "that a colonial radically divisive history had fractured" (Nationalism 128-29). In her analysis of Arthur Yap ' s poetry, she moves beyond the usual view o f Yap as an inaccessible poet and interrupts Yap ' s own denial of social and political intentionality to read him as a deeply nationalist writer who responds, though subversively, to state ideology. 195 L i m however appears wary of venturing into the mass-cultural domain where the relationship between state and literature is less mediated: in considering the link between nationalism and literature in English-language writing in Singapore, she chooses only to discuss local poetry. Given the government's attempts to Asianize the national values and subjectivity o f Singaporeans, to dramatically shift identification away from a West-East cultural hybridity, it appears an interesting task to examine the role o f literature and o f writers in hegemonizing state ideology, especially in a context where literature itself is being popularized, and slipping away from university control. A s Jan Gordon points out too in "The 'Second-Tongue M y t h ' : English Poetry in Polylingual Singapore," the bonds between the English-language writer and the ruling elite are strong. In poetry, this "privileged relationship" between poet and government perhaps causes an inability to interrupt government discourse, which is escaped by opening oneself to outside, international rather than national influences (Gordon 63). But in fiction, I w i l l argue, the genre's popular appeal can produce literature that helps to hegemonize state ideology. Also , many of the writers who have engaged in imagining a Singaporean Chinese identity and who take a desiring stance towards the state-devised Asian/Confucianist national identity have been associated with the government, in particular with the Minis try of Education and its Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore (CDIS) , which we recall played a crucial role in attempting to 'Confucianize' the nation. Catherine L i m was formerly a project director with CDIS and Christine L i m too has worked with this organization. Goh Sin Tub has worked both as a teacher and a c iv i l servant while Ovid ia Y u was a teacher before she turned to writing full-time. K o h Tai A n n perceives that the government's promotion of culture for the purposes o f hegemonizing its ideologies, coupled with the failure to develop critical/intellectual resources, allows the government to sets the "dominant tone" in cultural production. Thus, certain "voices or points o f view that in the rapidly changing circumstances of today's world may be more relevant, or even central," are marginalized or rendered inarticulate, while more conservative perspectives involving "inflexible, limited and limiting mental habits" and a "failure of imaginative perception" are preferred. The latter, 196 however, inhibit Singaporeans' ability to respond positively and appropriately to changing historical circumstances (725). It is to be hoped then that socio-political critique o f such cultural texts w i l l deconstruct the hegemonized "tyranny of shared assumptions" and help to reverse stalls in the cultural business o f making meaning. With this intention in mind, I w i l l read some of the above-mentioned novels and short fiction that deal with Chinese ethnic identity in terms o f their relation to the government's discourse o f Singapore's East Asian/Confucianist culture. The Serpent's Tooth and The Bondmaid by Catherine L i m , The Scholar and the Dragon by Stella K o n , Christine L i m ' s Gift from the Gods and Goh Sin Tub's The Sin-Kheh. as well as the short stories " A Dream of China" by Ovidia Y u and Catherine L i m ' s "The Journey" w i l l be discussed as the imaginative and desiring responses o f the Singaporean Chinese writer-in-English to state ideology concerning Chinese ethnic identity and Asian values. The study o f literary works, especially o f texts that support the state's ideology, may wel l prove a more fruitful approach to unearthing the deeper, even hidden meanings o f the state's Asianization and Confucianization programs that are not acknowledged in state discourse and the rhetoric o f the ruling party. Unt i l now, as I have shown in chapter 2, academic discussion of Singapore's new Orientalized nationalism which has remained within the discipline of political science has refused to accede to its racist meanings. V a s i l as wel l as H i l l and Lian do not take seriously the ethnic minorities' perception o f the Asianiz ing programs as an endeavor on the part of the state to Sinicize Singapore and retract an earlier emphasis on cultural pluralism. They also interpret the government's sudden focus in the 1980s on issues o f ethnicity and ethnicity-related policies (such as the "Speak Mandarin" campaign, and the setting up o f special schools for Mandarin-English bilingualism) as merely an openness on the part of the state to discuss questions o f ethnic identity, which they had feared to do in the earlier period o f nation-building. V a s i l further says that the new nationalism is only a new interpretation of the founding principle o f cultural democracy—that the state does not intend a return to Chinese cultural chauvinism that marked the nation's early history. Singaporean academics such as Chua and Puroshotam, who 197 approach the problem from the sociological angle, are more skeptical o f the Asianization/Confucianization program, but they tend to ignore the favorable reception o f this American-Singaporean ideology by Chinese Singaporeans (see chapter 2). B y reading the state's nationalism as it is interpreted by Singaporean Chinese writers, I want to introduce the voice o f the people in the endeavor of imagining their national identity and displace the state's monopoly o f this important discourse of identity. But by necessity, even Singaporeans' favorable imagining o f the state's discourse o f identity must involve some re-interpretation and even mis-interpretation o f state ideology as they filter this nationalism through previously held identifications and desires. Very often, the deep meanings of an ideology only become clear in the narratives it generates, in the way these work out an imaginary resolution of the ideology with other ideologies and with the real conditions o f existence. A s Silverman points out, we are accommodated to symbolic laws and the mode of production by an ideological facilitation, and we accede to this ideological facilitation through fantasy and imaginary captation (Male 2). Fictional narratives plot the path that the ideology must take through other current systems o f thought and belief such as those o f race, class and gender. They also make clear the kind of structuring gaze and the cultural screens we must use in order to perceive the real world through the eyes of the given ideology (Male 48-51). This in turn renders transparent the ideology's " w i l l to totality," the way it operates to shut out certain meanings and to fix others (Male 54). But ideology also has a determining influence on our desire and the construction o f our subjectivity, on how we see ourselves. Silverman argues that ideology works through the identification processes o f the fantasy and the moi (ego) to frame and construct parameters o f desire and to provide myths o f identity and desire. It depends then on fantasy to teach the subject how to adopt a desiring position within it as wel l as to specify the roles and sequences the subject can play within the given ideology, thereby impacting on the formation of identity (Male 15-51). We may then locate the true meaning of state ideology, not in politicians' words as previous academic discussion has done, which must always remain in the realm of speculation, but in the fantasy tableaus and identity myths that politicians' rhetoric 198 encourage. For instance, an ideology must be considered to be racist and anti-feminist i f it directs the subject to desire racial exclusivism and patriarchal control, even i f racial and gender subordination was not intended by the original creator and disseminator o f that ideology. M y study o f the above-mentioned works w i l l show that the subjectivation o f the state's proposed ' A s i a n ' identity has involved, in the Singapore literary imaginary, a politicization o f ethnicity, in particular the Sinicization of Singapore culture, where Singapore history is re-imagined as a mono-cultural Chinese history rather than as a multi-cultural one. It indicates that the state's Asianization/Sinicization program requires Singaporeans to imaginatively move away from the founding myths of the nation, from ideals of cultural pluralism and racial equality, towards ethnic chauvinism. The state may continue to disavow its intentions of Sinicization and racism, o f its prioritizing o f Chinese culture over the minority cultures, but literature produced in these two decades (the 1980s and 1990s) show that the cathecting of state ideology regarding ethnic identity has entailed the marginalization of minority cultures by negating their contributions to national culture, and perceiving Singaporean culture as singularly Chinese. Before I begin to discuss each o f these literary texts in detail, I want to present an overview of some patterns, common features that mark these attempts to imagine Singapore Chinese identity. Firstly, these novels and short fiction responded to the state's emphasis on Chinese identity by inversely representing Singapore Chinese cultural history in terms of low, peasant culture rather than the high culture referred to by the state. On the surface, these novels and short stories appear to be writings o f resistance. Where the state associated Chinese culture with social order, f i l ial piety and structured familial relations, these writings often represent immigrant Chinese culture as socially chaotic as wel l as dysfunctional in its familial relations, unruly in its male sexual licentiousness, and as an oppressive patriarchal culture. Though the texts superficially appear to refuse government constructions o f Chinese ethnic identity, at a deeper level, they work towards switching their readers' perception o f national subjectivity away from that o f multi-culturalism and cultural hybridity to Chinese racial and ethnic identity, directing readers' 199 desire towards that cultural purity. Also , the representation of a low, immigrant culture is part and parcel o f an attempt to shore up the inadequacies, the loopholes and vagueness o f state ideology. It is my contention that Singapore writers' focus on Chinese ethnic identity in these historical novels and short fiction provided the ideological support that was necessary for the state's "As i an i za t i on" or rather Sinicization agenda, where it helped to turn the state's dry and hitherto relatively unfamiliar, reactionary discourse about ethnic roots and tradition into a simulacrum of 'real, ' lived cultural experience, that is, as the imaginary apprehension o f real conditions o f existence. The association o f Singapore Chinese culture with low culture was a means o f getting around social and historical contradictions that hindered an absolute and direct identification with the state's Confucianizing agenda. A s the protagonist o f Christine L i m ' s novel Fistful of Colours. Suwen, notes, Confucianism as the high culture o f imperial China was not a part of the historical experience o f Chinese ethnicity in Singapore: most o f the majority Chinese immigrants were poor peasants who fled China in the 19th and early 20th centuries because they couldn't make a l iv ing there. These immigrants practiced Chinese folk culture rather than Confucianism. Suwen asks her expatriate Scottish friend, Mark: "But don't you think that the richer we get, the more we, Chinese-Singaporeans, talk as i f all our ancestors had come from the educated class in old China? A s i f they had brought with them, high Chinese art and culture? It's all b l u f f . . . . Our immigration records tell a different story. Ninety-nine percent were illiterate coolies. The landless poor of Old China. But we, their descendants are clamouring for a return to the old values which these immigrants brought over. A n d what are these so-called old values? Not your Confucian high ideals, you know. But more o f the survival values. Survival, hard work, thrift, and the acccumulation o f wealth and property." (219) A s I noted in chapter 2, Wang M o n g L i n , director of C D I S , who was involved in developing the "Confucianist Ethics" program for schools, had also said that Confucianism was unfamiliar to Singaporeans. 200 The state's new nationalism also demanded some reversals in the attitudes o f Singapore Chinese towards ethnic culture. The nation's post-colonial English-speaking Chinese elite had been ideologized, through the independence movement and for more than a decade after, to think o f their parent culture as just one aspect o f their national culture (see chapter 2). State ideology o f the 1960s and early 1970s had emphasized that Singapore was not a "third China"-that it was modern, democratic (unlike Communist China), and economically and culturally open (China had a closed-door policy at the time). This degree of dis-identification with China and Chinese culture had caused rifts between the Chinese-educated and English-educated Chinese in Singapore. The latter, especially the successful elite, often thought o f Chinese culture as retrogressive and oppressive, and sometimes even denied their ethnic heritage, as is shown in these works o f fiction. The representation of China as Singapore's 'other' (as we see in Kon ' s novel, The Scholar) had also cultivated a sense of antagonism towards China, which was reinforced by memories o f the communist threat to Singapore and Malaysia: the state itself had often linked the communist movement of the 1940s and 1950s to Chinese communalism (see chapter 2). This dis-identification with China and with many aspects of indigenous Chinese immigrant culture, as wel l as the government's emphasis on education in English, meant that the nation's cultural memories of Chinese ethnicity were being eroded~a fact that the state acknowledged as the "deculturalisation" o f the people, issuing from the emphasis on Western forms o f knowledge, on English education and the nation's openness, economically (and because of that, culturally too) to the West. Given then that the state's injunction to Singaporeans to 're-assume' their Confucianist identities addressed an abyss in cultural memory, an empty imaginary where cultural memory could not offer an appropriate store o f affirming narratives, some o f Singapore's culture producers sought to f i l l this empty place of Chinese ethnicity with meaning, introducing into it the only ethnic experience they could recall or relate to, that of Chinese low, folk culture. Since the state's discourse about Singapore's Confucianist cultural heritage did not correspond with the nation's real cultural experience, one begins to understand that Singaporeans' phantasmatic route to embracing Asian/Chinese/Confucianist identities, to creating 201 new myths o f identity, had to be an indirect and complex route, often involving erasures o f previous cultural identifications and dis-identifications (of colonialism, multi-culturalism and their anti-Chineseness). These 'ethnic' fantasies also often involved the incorporation of desires and processes of identification that contradicted state ideology but which were necessary to overcome or negotiate the resistance o f the English-educated as wel l as to accommodate real facts o f existence. This seeming contradiction o f representing Singaporean Chinese culture as low and working-class rather than as classical or Confucianist, as the state conceived it, was not then resistance to state ideology but rather part o f the form that fantasy had to adopt in order to enable the English-educated Singaporean Chinese subject to make the leap from one cultural complex to another, unfamiliar one. A s I w i l l show especially with Catherine L i m ' s novel Serpent's Tooth and Christine L i m ' s novel, Gift, the portrayal o f low, Chinese culture, the generation o f nostalgic desire for a lost culture and guilt for that loss cleared a path to high, Confucianist culture, getting around the problem of English-speaking Chinese Singaporeans' resistance to ethnic identity. These literary texts may be read as providing the intermediate stage where Singapore writers in English attempted to break with the previous national imaginary, which had centered around multi-culturalism and the avoidance o f ethnic essentialisms, displacing it with a Chinese ethnic imaginary and constructing narratives which taught readers to identify with their 'past' as an ethnic Chinese one. Another feature characterizing the corpus o f historical novels and short stories that were produced in the 1980s and 1990s involves the troping of Chinese ethnic identity as the 'past' of Singapore, as the reminder o f the past within the present. Read as a symptom, this reveals the inability and/or unwillingness o f Singaporean Chinese writers to locate their ethnic identity in the flux o f contemporary life. A s I w i l l show with Y u ' s short story "Dream," this is also a means o f avoiding a confrontation of the differences between traditional Chinese culture with Western culture/capitalism, a refusal to recognize the two as irreconcilable antagonisms. Rey Chow uses Johannes Fabian's concept o f "allochronism to describe this casting of the 'other' in another time" (Woman 30). Ironically, Singapore 202 writers duplicate Eurocentric allochronistic approaches to Chinese culture by using the temporal 'otherness' o f the past to represent Chinese ethnic culture itself as their own 'other,' even while seeking to embrace this 'other' as the self. This framing device of time splits Chinese culture into the past and represents present culture as the "modern." A s Chow says, "It is only through thinking o f the 'other' as sharing our time and speaking to us at the moment of writing that we can find an alternative to allochronism." Chow poses some very pertinent questions for a nation that is seeking to articulate the Asian/Chinese with the modern: "What would it mean to include the [ethnic] 'other,' the object o f inquiry, in a cotemporal, dialogic confrontation with the critical [Western] gaze," she asks, and "how might the argument o f coevalness affect our reading of [Chinese] modernity" (Woman 33). Singapore Chinese writers sidestep these issues in a careful bid not to problematize the state's construction of essentialistic ethnic identities. Further, the novels and short stories stage Singaporean identity quests as quests for ethnic identity, which are, in turn, represented as the quest for a mother, father, or grandparent and for his/her story o f Singapore's past. In Kon ' s novel, the narrator tells the story of his grandfather's past and his contribution to the nation's history. In Christine L i m ' s novel, a young, modern Singapore Chinese woman seeks to understand her mother and to represent her own subjectivity as a response to a maternal past. In Catherine L i m ' s novel Serpent's Tooth, the antagonistic attitudes of 'modern' (Western) Singaporean Chinese towards their ethnic culture is critiqued as a lack o f filial piety and a rejection o f one's patriarchal legacy. Goh's novel is a semi-biography o f the author's grandfather. In Y u ' s story, a young Singapore Chinese woman's journey to China is represented as a coming to terms with her patriarchal legacy, which is defined in racial/ethnic terms. This displacement in literary fantasy of ethnic culture as the story of maternal/paternal origins lends affect to the representation of ethnic identity and naturalizes it, while the modes of fictional autobiography and history work to authorize and 'authenticate' these stories o f the ethnic past. Their situating o f ethnic culture in the past, however, reveals the underlying lack o f real ethnic/Confucianist 203 content in the daily life of the English-educated Chinese Singaporean, which necessitates such a move in the first place. The device of the quest and the third-person perspective from which these stories o f the past are told may also be read as an implicit acknowledgment that no matter how strong the desire to re-claim the ethnic past as their own, none of the writers has a sufficiently strong relation to the past and knowledge o f his/her ethnic culture to assume, even in imagination, the voice and subjectivity o f this ethnic past. For instance, Goh 's narrator never allows his protagonists, the narrator's parents, to speak their private thoughts. Christine L i m ' s novel gives us access to the mind of its protagonist, a young Singapore Chinese modern woman, through the pages of her diary but we are never allowed a glimpse into the mental sanctuary o f her mother or grandparents. These stories asserting ethnic identity then carry a different sub-text: that of the cultural/epistemological alienation o f the speaking subject o f the novel from its 'ethnic' past, where the desire to take on 'Chinese' identity comes up against the limits posed by history. This figuring o f the low-cultural ethnic past as the maternal/paternal past may also be read as a hysterical, pathological formation that not only documents Singaporean Chinese ambivalence towards ethnic culture but also provides the means to escape from that ambivalence. If we recall (see chapter 1), Zizek suggests that every ideology viewed as fantasy contains a point within it that contradicts the ideology's main thesis while paradoxically acting as the basis o f its support. He explains this occurrence in terms o f the repressed ' real ' of ideology, that which is foreclosed or shut off from the ideology, sneaking back into the ideology but in a disguised and resolved form, in a form where it escapes the ideology's censorship, thus providing the ideology with its libidinal support ("How D i d M a r x " 11-16). The repressed ' real ' hence permeates the prevailing ideology in a form that is both acceptable to the latter but which also answers to the subject's desire. Ideology, he says, works like a dream, where forbidden desires escape from the unconscious into the conscious by taking on forms that pass the consciousness' censorship laws, using strategies o f condensation and displacement to disguise their true meanings. This working of the repressed 'real ' into ideology, where the ideology's contradiction is 204 j resolved in an imaginary manner, yields a form that both contradicts and affirms the ideology, and also provides the support for ideology by offering a source o f enjoyment (of repressed desire). It is at this point, Zizek says, that an ideology takes a real hold on the subject, where ideology is successful in interpellating the subject. Without this incorporation o f the repressed ' real ' of desire, the subject cannot be persuaded to invest in a discourse that it knows is lacking and which does not answer to its desire. The Singapore government's conception o f a national identity based on a high Confucianist Chinese culture has led contradictorily to ethnic identity being imagined in terms of a non-Confucianist, low Chinese culture. But this low culture passes through the 'censorship' of state ideology by imagining itself as lack, allowing desire to be re-directed elsewhere (towards Confucianist culture). In addition, this narrative paradigm of ethnic-identity-as-father/mother allows the English-educated, Westernized Singaporean Chinese subject to engage with its own ambivalence to its ethnic culture. The ethnic 'past' represented as low Chinese culture can be identified with and desired as part o f the subject's maternal/paternal heritage but it can also be reviled as an 'inauthentic' or secondary Chinese culture and be 'recalled' in a contradictory mix of love and hate, identification and dis-identification, corresponding with the affect-ridden but conflictual nature of the parent-child relationship. Desire for a more 'authentic,' high (Confucianist) culture is then opened as a way of release from this parent-child conflict, o f release from the burden o f a low ethnic culture viewed as ' lack. ' A s K o n ' s novel, Catherine L i m ' s text Serpent's Tooth and Y u ' s short story w i l l show, the relation established between ethnic identity and paternal/maternal origins makes it possible to exploit feelings o f shame and guilt (in betraying the 'parent' culture), through which Chinese culture is paradoxically and ambivalently invested with desire. Shame and guilt are strange emotions: they allow one to stay in an intermediate state of acknowledging the 'wrong' one has done without going over to the next stage o f deliverance from that 'wrong-doing' by rectification of the act, since such rectification is perceived to be impossible. They are, as such, Jamesonian ideologemes or, in Zizek 's language, the repressed 'real'source o f pleasure hiding in a displaced form, where one is able to hold on to and enjoy the gains 205 from the 'wrongful ' act while disavowing any such pleasure. In the case o f these narratives, shame and guilt allow the Singaporean Chinese subject to be mortified at its betrayal o f its parent culture, leading it to invest desire in the parent culture only through delimited forms such as fetishism, where the benefits o f the betrayal, such as the gains from capitalism and the desire for Western culture to which ethnic culture was betrayed, need not be sacrificed. A s is to be expected, the representation of low-Chinese culture as lack, however, is gendered. A s Silverman notes, we live our relations to the Symbolic Order and the mode o f production through the medium of ideology, but these ideologies depend on the binaries and representation systems o f family ideology, o f the dominant fiction that imagines and sustains sexual difference (Male 34 -35). Male and female, Silverman says, are the dominant fiction's most fundamental binary opposition, and many elements o f ideology exist in a metaphoric relation to these terms o f sexual difference, deriving their conceptual and affective value from that relation. Due largely to the economic circumstances of an under-developed country entering into a speedy program of industrialization, gender roles in Singapore were inevitably transformed, to a greater or lesser degree depending on class and ethnic group locations. With more than half the nation's able-bodied, adult population upon independence comprising women, they were mobilized through the 1960s and 1970s to enter the labor force. Though the bulk of Singapore women worked in factories in minimum-wage jobs, other women broke traditional rules of the sexual division o f labor to enter typically male areas of work, such as medicine, law, and technical and engineering fields. A s Puroshotam notes, the ruling party's five-year-plan for 1959 to 1964 included the pledge to safeguard and promote the rights o f women, a commitment to organize a unified women's movement, to encourage women to participate in politics and administration, to grant women equal rights in marriage and the family and to provide jobs for al l women ("Women" 322). The Women's Charter, protecting women's rights in marriage, was 12 enacted in the early 1960s. Puroshotam and Chan Heng Chee are skeptical that the government's interests in emancipating women and national changes in gender attitudes go beyond economic 206 mobilization but certainly highly-educated women, as were these women writers discussed here, were opened to feminist thought, especially that coming from the West. Women's emancipation, though it was probably decreasingly significant the lower one descended the class ladder, was often also symbolically associated with the nation's 'modernity.' The PAP had always had its own restrictions concerning female emancipation: in 1975, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had said that Singapore women should be educated and become independent but "without too great an upset in traditional family relationships." He had also ruled out legislation as a means of effecting changes in "traditional male dominant Asian societies" since such "change in social attitudes . . . should be allowed to develop 13 naturally. . . ." During the 1970s, women could treat these remarks as overly-paternal counseling and safely ignore them. But in the 1980s and 1990s, women's liberation was increasingly culturalized as Western and alienated as non-Asian in government statements, and unfavorably placed in the discourse of 'Asian'/'Chinese' national identity. Puroshotam notes that government attitudes from the 1980s are "understood to be its new stance towards women" ("Women" 321). The new nationalism then, if it had to be cathected as an assertion of "Chinese" identity, brought the feminist desires of Singapore Chinese women writers into conflict with their desire to assert a post-colonial ethnic identity. Since Singapore Chinese women had already internalized feminist ideals in the earlier period of Singapore history, a simple repression of feminist ideals was not possible. Some sort of engagement with feminism was required in this fantasy of Orientalized Chinese ethnic identity. Zizek is helpful here in theorizing the operation of fantasy in re-ordering identifications and desires in response to changes in the symbolic (dominant) ideology—where that which was approved in a previous period is now subjected to repression. These women writers repress and attempt to escape from their feminist desires by feminizing Singapore's Chinese past, by recognizing, even celebrating Singaporean Chinese immigrant women's strength, endurance and ability to adapt to changing historical circumstances. But this female strength is construed as lack of the male, representing Singapore Chinese history in mythic terms as the original abandonment of the female by the male. The transformation of ethnic culture 207 brought about through the experience of diaspora is here re-imagined as a feminization of Chinese patriarchal culture. Thus, as in Christine Lim's Gift and Catherine Lim's Serpent's Tooth. Singaporean ethnic history is recalled as the mother's history, as that which took place in the absence of the male (father) and which is therefore lacking in (patriarchal) authority. The Sinicizing/Confucianizing of Singaporean identity also then entails its masculinization. In many of these texts, the male/female struggle is metaphorically equated with the East/West and tradition/modernity struggle, where the female/West is demonized and (Western) modernity is feminized, i.e. it requires a (male, hence Chinese/Asian) completion, which refers to the state's ideology regarding 'Asian modernity,' where Western modern cultural norms are to be articulated with Asian traditions. Western culture is implicitly represented in these texts as the force (of modernity) that effeminized Eastern culture, alienating it from its 'manliness,' but also as that which 'perversely' masculinized Chinese women (which is a reference to the state's ideology that women's emancipation is a foreign/Western cultural intrusion). If fantasy is understood via Lacan's formula as a psychic mechanism and formation for plugging the hole of symbolic castration or lack by positing a particular object as the cause of desire (see chapter 1), then these Singapore narratives posit Confucianist culture (either implicitly or explicitly) as the (phallic) object of desire that will answer to the (female) lack in Singaporean Chinese ethnic culture. The demonization of the modern woman in these phantasmatic responses to state ideology reveals the latter's agenda of female oppression: these narratives recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that the subject position from which the Singaporean Chinese woman can desire and identify with Confucianist culture must involve a rejection of feminist ideas and aspirations. But ironically, the state's exhortation to Singaporean Chinese to assume their Confucianist ethnic roots has led to the feminized representation of Singapore subjectivity as 'lack,' where Singapore national culture is viewed in negative terms as a loss in cultural virility, power and self-confidence, as an emasculated culture. The impact of this on Singapore Chinese male subjectivity will be explored in the next chapter. 208 Singapore Chinese women writers also dealt with the repression o f feminist desires and ideologies by packaging their anti-feminist content in a feminist literary form, the woman's (fictional) autobiography— where the repressed ' real ' o f desire returned to the ideology, but in a disguised, 'acceptable' form. Catherine L i m , for instance, demonizes the modern young woman's new-found power in Serpent's Tooth but disavows this anti-feminism through the use o f the feminist form of female autobiography and the female narrative voice. The use o f feminist literary forms, as well as the extolling of Singapore Chinese women's positive qualities, has led to some o f these texts finding their way into post-colonial feminist literary canons, especially in the West where their emphasis on Chinese culture is exoticized as non-Western feminist difference. What is overlooked is the political context of nationalism in which this feminine positivity is embedded, where it represents the nation's lack, the signifier o f the original loss o f the (ethnic) father, o f that which must be re-installed in order to construct the nation's identity within the paradigm of 'normal ' familial ideology. This contradiction between form and content also testifies to a deadlock in Singapore Chinese women writers' desire to accede to state formations o f 'As ian ' / 'Confucian ' national identity: a deadlock not just in the impossible simultaneous desire for feminism as wel l as for a patriarchal ethnic culture, but also in the desire for modernity as wel l as tradition, and for Western culture as wel l as for ethnic culture. Contradictory desires, especially for the post-colonial subject, are a usual fact o f life. But one deals with this relatively healthily either by imaginarily reconciling them or by negotiation. In the case of Singapore women, however, the state is forcing a repression o f one desire (for the modern/feminist) and demanding the retraction of a set o f already-formed identifications. Pushing these desires and identifications into conflict, it promotes paranoid cultural resolutions, which, in Singapore women's fiction, involves female masochism. A s Silverman notes, female masochism is a crucial mechanism for eroticizing women's lack and subordination (Male 189). The feminized representation of Singapore low-Chinese culture, where Singapore women metaphorically flagellate themselves for contaminating a great, original, patriarchal culture, is then a 209 condensed hysterical symptom. It not only allows Singaporeans to escape from their ambiguous feelings towards the ethnic heritage (as mentioned above) but it is also a means for women writers to cope with the demands made by the state's ideology that feminist aspirations and desires be henceforth banished. In many of these texts, the gendering of Singapore Chinese immigrant culture as feminine is also a narrative mechanism for disavowing contradictions between capitalism and Chinese culture. In this strategy, the transformation of an original Chinese culture by capitalism/Western modernity is re-configured as its emasculation by women's empowerment through modernity. This then allows Singapore's Asian/Chinese identity to be viewed as a gender problem (where feminism is seen as threatening ethnic culture) rather than one of de-colonization. These narratives of Chinese identity also often tend to mix the mode of realism with romanticism. Kon's novel, both of Catherine Lim's novels, and Christine Lim's work teem with dreams that surreptitiously speak the unsayable, that which is barred by state ideology, or which register, at least unconsciously, the writer's awareness of contradictions between the ruling party's current ideology and the pro-Western ideologies that were dominant in the early years of the nation. Very often, non-realistic modes of representation also serve to disguise gaps in the writer's knowledge of the ethnic past which s/he is seeking to reclaim. In addition, they mystify Eastern culture. Again, this registers an ambivalent attitude towards Chinese culture: Chinese culture is represented and often eroticized as object of desire but it is an object that is deliberately left vague, undefined, or fetishized. As the signifier without the signified, it does not then threaten Singapore Chinese people's contradictory desire for Western culture/modernity/capitalism. Since the new nationalism urges ethnic identifications that are beyond Singaporeans' knowledge, given their over-culturalisation by the West and a degree of dis-identification from their native past, this mysteriousness of the East as object of desire is not surprising. One final observation that must be made before one proceeds to analysis of specific texts is that concerning the 'moralization' of ethnic identity. We may recall that in Singapore, following the 210 publication of the Goh Education Report in 1979, moral education was made mandatory for young school-goers at the primary level, which was to be taught in the students' mother tongue. This same association of the 'ethnic' with the 'ethical' structures these narratives and their myths of identity. Again, as with the use of non-realistic modes of representation, the resort to a manichean economy of Western/Eastern identity enables complex, contemporary issues of cross-culturality, which challenge the state's resort to cultural essentialisms, to be evaded. Government policies of the 1980s had made the study of Mandarin as well as of Buddhism and Confucianism mandatory for Chinese Singaporean youth at school, while regular bombardment of government ideology against Western values coupled with its Asianizing cultural agenda (in particular its promotion of Confucianism) had made the public very much aware of issues of Chinese ethnic identity. But without the support of cultural texts such as novels, stories, and plays, including television miniseries such as the hugely popular Samsui Women—which was first produced in Mandarin but later dubbed in English and dealt with the history of the immigration of a class of Chinese women to Singapore who worked as manual laborers—it is doubtful that government propagandizing would have been successful on its own in interpellating the nation, especially the Western-educated, English-speaking Chinese elite. But, as I hope to show in the detailed analysis of these literary texts, these novels and short fiction need to be read and decoded as hysterical symptoms. In the words of Zizek, "a symptom is a symbolic, signifying formation," "a kind of cipher, a coded message" which "arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken" ("From Symptom" 73). These texts try to imaginatively fill in and thereby inadvertently unmask the loopholes in state ideology and the discrepancies between the state-proposed national identity and the realities of daily life and desire in contemporary Singapore. These texts also make evident that Singaporean Chinese writers (and perhaps their audience too) subjectivate state ideology (bring their desire in line with the government's) by incorporating long-repressed desires of racial domination in the nation, by Sinicizing Singapore history and erasing the literary/cultural presence of other cultures. The government has denied 211 racist/culturally chauvinist intentions, but these texts show, at least at the popular level, the new nationalism's racist appeal. In the process, too, of cathecting and mis-recognizing the new Orientalism as a genuine post-colonial identity formulation, they show that the new state-proposed national identity requires a violent dislocation in prevailing Singaporean desires and identifications. The Serpent's Tooth (1982) by Catherine Lim Published in the early years of the state's attempt to 'Confucianize' the nation, this short novel is a fantasy of Chinese ethnic identity that does not yet take the form of the ethnic historical novel. The novel centers on a modern, Chinese woman, Angela, who belongs to elite Singapore society. Angela finds that Chinese cultural traditions get in the way of her attempt to raise a perfect, successful Singaporean family and run an ideal Western-style household. She feels especially inconvenienced by her aging mother-in-law, whom she thinks is a bad influence on her children because she imparts Chinese superstitions and other aspects of ethnic culture that Angela considers archaic (in comparison to Western culture and its norms of rationality and scientific knowledge). Though she takes her mother-in-law into her household in a gesture of filial piety, Angela cannot bear the Chinese 'difference' in home aesthetics: her mother-in-law clutters the house and mars her Western home interior with her Chinese ancestral altar. Angela battles to reduce the mother-in-law's cultural influence on her children and also generally tries to prevent norms of Chinese traditional culture from hindering her family's efforts to get ahead in society. Set in the contemporary period, the novel demonizes resistance to Chinese identity as 'modern' female guilt and betrayal of the father's law. Antipathy towards Chinese culture and customs is moralized simply as an eth(n)ic wrong, which is also gendered as female. The negative attitudes of the English-educated, modernized/Westernized Singaporean Chinese are exclusively viewed as a woman's problem and women here take the blame for what would otherwise be seen as a cultural phenomenon caused by historic circumstances, especially those concerning global capitalism's transformation of 2 1 2 social life. Angela 's moves to restrict the encroachment of Chinese culture into her daily Westernized lifestyle, focused in terms o f her relationship with her mother-in-law, is also figured as a child 's betrayal of her parents. Angela 's mother-in-law is an immigrant from China who feels culturally dislocated in modern Singapore, for whom traditional Chinese beliefs serve as an anchor in this sea o f cultural change. Angela however is unable to 'see' this and misrecognizes it as madness, resulting in cruel treatment of the aging, helpless woman, which the reader is encouraged to view as the cause o f the woman's derangement: O l d Mother (as the mother-in-law is referred to in the text) only exhibits madness/senility or signs o f a nervous breakdown when she lives with Angela, talking to a photograph o f her dead husband as i f he were alive and capable of helping her, retreating into memories o f the past, and wandering around town on her own. Out of 'kindness,' Angela removes O l d Mother from her domicile in a public housing flat, owned by her son—where she was allowed to look after her grandchild—and re-situates her in a guest-room in her family home, planning eventually to isolate her in a building removed from the main house, where her relations to the family would be curtailed. Then, when O l d Mother heads to the House O f Death in Sago Lane—where aging, dispossessed Chinese immigrants, lacking family connections, go to die—Angela tracks her down and brings her back home, causing the woman finally to collapse and later die in hospital. Since Angela's mother is never mentioned in the novel, the mother-in-law is to be read as her surrogate mother. Certainly, throughout the novel, Angela refers to Old Mother as "mother." O l d Mother however is not to be simplistically identified as victim o f Eurocentric attitudes which 'other' her culture and ethnic subjectivity. Angela's response to the woman is demonized as relying on Western notions o f rationality. But Catherine L i m ' s perspective on Old Mother-in-Law is not totally sympathetic either: like Angela, her daughter-in-law, she too is not a perfect mother, as the novel makes clear in one episode (45-47). O l d Mother favors her youngest son over her three other sons, causing anguish to the rest and destroying brotherly bonds between them. She thinks to herself o f how "she loved this youngest son o f hers; even his impatience and waywardness brought forth indulgent smiles 213 and laughs, whereas she used sharp words for her other sons and freely knocked her knuckles on their heads." On her favorite son's birthday, she got up early to "make him noodles with pork . . . as well as boil him a big egg, with the shell stained bright red for luck." When the other sons "trooped into the kitchen to watch ," she firmly told them: "The noodles with pork are for A h Siong only, it's his birthday today. . . . "I didn't have any noodles for my birthday," said A h Tiong sullenly, "and no red egg," but his mother waved him aside impatiently and said, " G o back to sleep the rest o f you! It's still early. Don ' t disturb me." B y the time the morning sun rose, A h Siong had already had a big bowl o f steaming hot noodles with minced pork and some pieces of liver as well as the hard-boiled red egg. A h Siong was also given "gift money," and Old Mother did not intervene as he celebrated his birthday by "shout[ing] lustily at his brothers and stampfing] on their feet." The reader cannot but conclude that her unequal treatment and neglect of A h Tiong led him to compensate neurotically by becoming greedy and materialistic later in life, and nursing an obsession to accumulate money. Thus, both Angela and Old Mother are assigned similar positions in L i m ' s myth of Singapore Chinese identity and desire where the nation's Chinese diasporic and post-colonial (modernized) culture is negatively represented in terms of a gendered lack, as that o f a pathological, neurotic effeminization o f an 'authentic' Chinese culture. Modern post-colonial Singaporean Chinese subjectivity is gendered in this novel as female and represented chiefly through its protagonist, Angela. But this subjectivity is further offered as the inverted mirror-image o f a Chinese culture that had already been feminized through the experience of immigration, this first-generation immigrant Chinese subjectivity represented by Old Mother. Angela, standing in for modernization/Westernization, is 'she' who has constituted desire against ethnic culture, while immigrant Chinese culture is represented as the effeminate version o f a prior 'or iginal ' culture, that which has been taken over by 'domineering' women such as Old Mother and deprived o f its vir i l i ty. The antagonistic relationship between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law figures Singapore's Chinese cultural history o f immigration and colonization as continuous so that when Angela 214 pits her desires against those o f her mother-in-law's, she confronts herself since the feminized, Westernized present and the effeminized Chinese past are mirror-images of each other. Angela, figuring modern Singaporean Chinese subjectivity as female, fits the b i l l as phallic mother and wife, where the 'feminine' is the patriarchal gone awry or pathological. Angela represents Singaporean culture as it is popularly conceived: she is the gendered personification o f its ruthlessness, willfulness, greed, and overwhelming ambition. Angela wants total control over her children, plotting their futures and molding them in the image of national modern perfection: she points son Mark in the direction o f scholarly success, molding his desire to win oratorical and essay-writing competitions, and preparing him for the exams that w i l l win him a place in a new Elite College that is being built to groom Singapore's third-generation leadership, a college that significantly w i l l come into existence by displacing a Chinese graveyard, i.e. an ethnic past (180). Daughter Michel le is directed towards a career as national swimmer. Identifying with husband Boon's desires for political and financial success, Angela plots and schemes for him. Her over-investment in 'masculine,' worldly desires however scuttles Boon's chances of being selected for a political career: Boon had been picked by the ruling political party as a possible future member of parliament, but Angela in her anxiety had approached the secretary to the minister in charge of the matter, wanting to know the current status o f the matter, which was viewed as pushy and led to another candidate being selected (148-89). Through Angela, all the ills of capitalism and o f modernism (ruthlessness, avarice, wasteful, conspicuous consumption, commodification, dissolution of family ties, heartless competitiveness, the erosion o f traditional ethnic culture and over-Westernization), seen as the inevitable consequences of the development o f capitalism, are imaginatively misrecognized as owing to the feminization o f society, where the modern woman has acquired an inverted (and perverted) phallic power. Sex and class meanings also intersect as the modern is gendered via Angela as female and upper-class, so that Angela is cast as one who not only wants to destroy the patriarchal ethnic father and occupy his place, but also to annihilate the ethnic, working class culture of her mother-in-law. 215 But this 'feminization' o f Singaporean ethnic culture goes back beyond the modern period in that Angela 's 'phal l ic ' power, represented as a neurotic expression of a repressed envy o f male power, has been passed on to her by her mother-in-law herself. It is O ld Mother who tells Angela the stories about the past licentiousness of Chinese men and their sexual abuse o f women, leading Angela to reductively equate Chinese culture with this abuse o f patriarchal power. O ld Mother herself hates her late husband for the sexual infidelities he had practiced in his lifetime: in her conversations with Angela, she refers to her late husband as the " O l d D e v i l , " the "One-accursed-with-short-life" (21), "the-one-with-gold-in-his-mouth" (28) and as "One-who-is-more-lecherous-than-the-farmyard-rooster" (105). The man-hating identity o f the two women is established when Angela's nightmares about Chinese culture duplicate or take off from Old Mother 's stories. For instance, recalling Old Mother 's story about a rich grand-uncle from a town in China, who raped virgin maid-servants nightly, a story that haunts Angela in her sleep, Angela blames her mother-in-law for her nightmares: The dream—it was definitely more than a dream — Angela put the blame squarely on her mother-in-law . . . Her mother-in-law had told her this story. . . . Angela forgot the context in which this piece of family history was unravelled; perhaps her mother-in-law wanted to share with her contempt with men . . . . (104-5) The 'truth' of the story and the 'truth' o f patriarchal sexual excesses as a feature o f traditional Chinese culture are side-stepped and muddied here as questions o f "context." A l so , modern Singapore Chinese women's dis-identification with Chinese culture is represented as a neurotic response to an oral history passed on to them by their female predecessors, where Singapore's present culture (as feminine) is represented as the past and on-going repression of male subjectivity and male vir i l i ty by women. The theme o f female solidarity (as it is usually represented in feminist narratives) here receives unfavorable, negative treatment. Angela 's nightmares and those o f other modernized/Westernized Singapore women, such as her Eurasian sister-in-law Glor ia and her Chinese friend Mee K i n , are used in the novel to represent 216 Singaporean antipathy towards the ethnic as woman's irrational fear of the patriarchal. These dreams also serve to expose the 'feminist' guilt involved in Singapore's betrayal o f its ethnic cultures. Angela, Glor ia , as wel l as Angela 's confidante, Mee K i n , are typically unable to meet the (patriarchal) gaze of the portrait o f O l d Mother 's late husband, which has been placed prominently on her altar table, without having bad dreams afterwards: The small, piercing eyes in the framed photograph above the altar again compelled her [Angela] to look up. She looked up quickly, then averted the gaze. "Isn't it creepy," she later whispered to Mee K i n . "The old man's eyes seem to follow me everywhere." " M y father-in-law's photo gave me the same eerie feelings," confided Mee K i n . (80) Whi le Angela aborts the gaze, Glor ia uses (Western) Christian symbols such as rosary beads filled with holy water to dispel her guilt and fear and to escape from Chinese ethnic culture: Glor ia looked away from the framed photograph o f the old man. She was sure to have another frightful dream of him; he persisted in coming out of photographs, out of graves and coffins to pursue her. She was never without her rosary at night, each rosary bead filled with the holy water at Lourdes . . . . It was the presence o f the holy water-filled beads that had dispelled those frightful dreams and allowed her, instead, to see herself with her sisters, amidst laughing summer roses and fruit, in faraway happier [Western] lands. (86) Modern (Westernized) antipathy towards Chinese culture is thereby linked with fear o f the Chinese masculine/patriarchal and guilt concerning the rejection, as is sharply communicated by Angela 's inability to sleep peacefully on a restored, antique Chinese four-poster bed belonging to her husband's family. Angela 's modern (Westernized) attitude of exoticizing and commodifying Chinese culture prompts her to gentrify the bed as a status symbol, rather than as an integral part of her history. She has the bed restored and places it in her bedroom. But her fear regarding the patriarchal abuses o f Chinese 217 culture prevents her from domesticating her deep antipathy towards her ethnic identity v ia commodification and results in nightmares. The novel counters Angela 's sexualized/gendered fears of the ethnic as patriarchal abuse o f power with its sexualized/gendered fears regarding the future of Singapore's cultural 'v i r i l i ty , ' using non-realistic modes of representation to hyper-realize these fears. It suggests that the excessive feminization of national culture and the repression of patriarchal power w i l l produce a less-than-virile society in the future, with two different, nightmarish cultural fates, both involving a latent homosexuality. One scenario is that o f the cultural takeover o f Singapore by a demonic, destructive, fascist, anti-Chinese hyper-masculinity. This is to be typified by Old Mother's youngest son, Wee Siong and her grandson, Mark, who is Angela 's favorite son. Wee Siong, whom Old Mother pampered in his childhood with an excess o f maternal desire, grows up to hate his mother's Chinese culture. He assumes instead a Christian identity and wants to obliterate Chinese culture as the non-Christian/Western 'other.' In a dream, Angela sees Wee Siong as a delusional, angry, fanatical and vengeful Christ who returns to destroy Chinese culture and religion (173-8). L i m offers this dream as a phantasmatic return of the repressed: forbidden by his mother from identifying with his father, Wee Siong instead takes on another patriarchal identity, but one that is offered by the West. Wee Siong, incidentally, is unsuccessful in his relations with women. In the representation of Wee Siong in the dream, we may read a reference to the type o f latent homosexuality that Silverman recognizes in Lawrence o f Arabia, where male homosexual desire is repressed and sublimated into identification with male figures, a "reflexive masochism," where the subject is both the victimizer and victim o f sadism (Male 322-28). Certainly, in his verbally abusive letter to Angela, hectoring her about her belief in Chinese geomancy, Wee Siong takes pleasure in the pain that he causes, but it is pain directed circuitously against himself, against his mother, family, and his own ethnic roots: identifying with Christ, he wants to "rescue" his family, but thereby also destroy it (135-7). The novel suggests too that Angela's son Mark, her favorite, w i l l grow up to be like Wee Siong, to betray his mother and his ethnic culture. On her deathbed, Old Mother mistakes Mark for Wee Siong. 218 L i k e Wee Siong, Mark too despises and rejects the maternal: he is nauseated by the very idea of breast-feeding and already, in his school essays, he vilifies Chinese culture as primitive and superstitious, as the 'other' to Western culture. It is also suggested that just as Wee Siong showed so much talent in his youth, only to dissipate it in his adult life, so too Mark, who is a high-flyer in the Singapore school system, w i l l wind up wasting his talent in a neurotic obsession with the repressed patriarchal. The correspondence between son and grandson and between their two mothers, Angela and O l d Mother, indicates that history can only repeat itself i f nothing is done to interrupt this supposed over-feminization of Chinese culture in Singapore. The other fate is figured as an emasculated rather than a hyper-masculine national culture, where all the values associated with the male subjectivity such as rationality, progress, activity can be expected to break down. Angela 's other son, Michael , who is Old Mother 's favorite grandson, figures this fate. Identifying with his grandmother, and, lacking the subject-constitutive law of the father, he is divested of subjectivity: at novel's end, Michael is in hospital having traumatic hallucinations, unable to differentiate the real from the imaginary. A s a seeming consequence of his over-identification with the maternal, Michae l is unable to move beyond the primary processes, to bind the psychic energy o f his drives and render them productive for himself, since secondarization requires the participation o f a fully formed ego, which he lacks. None o f the other major male actants in the novel, all of whom are sons of Angela and O l d Mother, have anything resembling a well-adjusted male identity: O ld Mother 's less favored son Wee Tiong is anally retentive, hoarding money, while another son, Wee Nam (Gloria 's husband) is financially inept and dependent on his elder brother Boon, Angela 's husband. Desire is thereby re-directed in this novel towards the recovery o f the father's law (Confucianism), o f that which w i l l fill out the lack o f this feminized post-colonial culture. 219 In her book Woman and Chinese Modernity; The Politics o f Reading between West and East. Chow emphasizes the primacy o f analyzing the cross-cultural scopophiliac regime o f contemporary texts that represent the ethnic subject. She says: Metaphors and apparatuses o f seeing becoming overwhelmingly important ways o f talking, simply because "seeing" carries with it the connotation o f a demarcation o f ontological boundaries between " s e l f and "other," whether racial, social or sexual. (3) In distinguishing between the "seeing" and "talking" aspects o f films, Chow points out that the focus on "seeing" enables us to ask some important questions: "who is 'seeing' whom and how," and "what are the power relations between the 'subject' and 'object' of the culturally overdetermined 'eye' " (3). Serpent's Tooth is not a f i lm, but it uses an invisible narrator who shows the action rather than commenting on it. The split between Angela 's gaze and that of the narrator's and between Angela 's talking and the novel's seeing play an important semiotic role in the novel that needs to be teased out. The novel, as I have said, avoids authorial/narrative commentary. Though it is told in the third person, it operates differently from the traditional authorial omniscient gaze. The novel has two ethical frames: the inner frame o f the narrative is provided by Angela, but the outer authorial frame invisibly, without talking through the narrative voice, intervenes to expose the former's ethical and psychological inadequacy. Angela 's gaze and, through it, the cultural screen that structures this gaze are pitted against the narrator's gaze and his/her cultural screen that implicit ly pathologize the former and render it as lack and as female hysteria. For example, Angela's perception o f ethnic culture as a "mess" that has to be cleared up, and her judgment of her mother-in-law as demented and primitive is contradicted by the novel's showing o f this "mess" as the inability of the modern Singapore Chinese woman to 'see' the cultural disorientation of a helpless old woman. Angela 's gaze is 'shown' to be insufficient to understand the psychological/cultural predicament o f the old. Vis i t ing her mother-in-law, Angela notes that the physical environment o f Old Mother's home is unhealthy and is a sign of wi l l fu l neglect: the planks over muddy ground that she has to cross to get to Old Mother's house are held down by rusty 220 nails that could infect barefoot children with tetanus; there are cockroaches in the store room; the house is untidy, "a jumble o f urns, joss-stick containers with the ash spilling over, torn prayer paper" (33). Angela 's perception meets its limit in its inability to explain a sight that contradicts this mess. Despite the overwhelming untidiness of Old Mother's home, [T]he altar table for the old man had been newly cleaned; the old man's framed photograph hung above it, and on the table, in neat symmetry, were little cups of tea, plates of oranges and small jars for the joss-sticks. (32-3) Through Angela 's gaze, the reader encounters the limits o f that gaze, and inevitably Angela 's gaze is passed by the reader through a different cultural screen, which judges Angela 's gaze as insensitive, heartless and blind: this non-acknowledged narrative gaze, which the reader identifies with, suggests that Old Mother is obviously mourning her husband's death, and that the untidiness o f her home is a sign o f depression. It appears to me, however, that the narrative cultural screen is just as Western as Angela 's own Westernized gaze of Chinese culture as the 'other,' which is being critiqued. Depression is a Western concept as is the association of untidiness with it. Also , the observations about Old Mother's home are in indirect speech so that one is hard put to decide whether the gaze belongs to the narrator or to Angela's, which helps the narrator to disguise her own ethical viewpoint. The reader is made unaware that there is an ethically-biased structuring gaze. Then the Chinese ancestral altar, which the novel fetishizes at this point as the objet petit a o f the desire for traditional Chinese culture, is literally displaced by Angela, when she re-locates Old Mother and the ancestral altar in her own home. Angela perceives her move o f accommodating O l d Mother as a grand gesture o f kindness and fi l ial piety. She tells her husband: " I 'm really thinking o f your old mother . . . She's already seventy-one years old, a simple, soft-hearted old woman who's quite lost in a society like ours" (75). But the reader's knowledge that Angela is far from sympathetic when discussing Old Mother with Mee K i n turns her kind words into lies. 221 Angela 's words also belie her inner thoughts, which one presumes that she has confided to Mee K i n , who, in turn, has either communicated this to the narrator or is herself narrating the story (see below). Angela is kind and sweet in her words to Old Mother: Mother, you are not wel l . Y o u need someone to take care o f you. When you are well you can return to your house. But for the time being, you stay with Boon and me. M o o i Lan [Angela's maid] can cook for you. . . . Y o u ' v e grown very thin and pale, and that's not good for an old person. W e ' l l take good care o f you. But silently to herself, she thinks of the inconvenience of accommodating Old Mother. She judges however that "she had to do her duty" (77-8). The reader sees, again through Angela's gaze as she shows off Old Mother 's new bedroom to her in-laws, the inadequacy of that gaze: Old Mother is now in a "guest-bedroom," a peripheral area in Angela 's home, where she is treated as guest rather than family. The ancestral altar has not only been marginalized, but visually whisked out of existence: " . . .it was in a neat little corner at the back, hidden from sight by a pretty Chinese screen of four folding panels" (86). We note again, as here with the description o f the location of the altar, the difficulty of distinguishing between the narratorial and Angela 's voice. The author silently critiques Angela's Western Orientalized attitude to Chinese culture: she shows that the Western aestheticization of Chinese culture ("the pretty Chinese screen") is a means of covering up less beautiful but more central Chinese traditions and value-systems. Angela 's attitude to Chinese culture is equated in the scene with Gloria 's strong attachment to Western culture: immediately prior to this scene, Angela 's Eurasian sister-in-law had "admired the [antique Chinese] bed, feeling the richness o f the silken maroon bed-curtains, but [she had] recoiled at the four [presumably phallic] serpents' heads on the bed-posts." But L i m ' s cultural screen is even more deeply entrenched in Western culture than Angela 's is. She certainly is more familiar with the discourse of Orientalism than Angela appears to be. A l s o , L i m privileges a racialized reading o f Angela 's behavior, interpreting it as a pro-222 Western/anti-Chinese act, when Angela's act could just as easily have been read as a conflict between Chinese high and low culture. Angela 's voice and gaze (the saying) is constantly belied, contradicted and incriminated by the representation o f the events themselves (the showing), which lend themselves to viewing through another gaze. This other gaze however never speaks its own (often Western) name. The absence o f a distinctive narrative voice and the invisibility o f the narrator's gaze as a structuring device allows the novel to get away with hiding the subject-position and ideology of the vantage point (and its untenability) from which Angela 's anti-Chinese attitudes are demonized. While Angela's gaze is vi l i f ied, historicized and ethnicized as Western, the novel's gaze itself, its own interests, its history and the Eurocentricity o f its perspective, is unacknowledged. This invisible-narrator technique and the absence of narrative commentary is also symptomatic in another way. A s Zizek says, the unconscious content/repressed desire o f a dream/fantasy is often to be found in the dream/fantasy form than either its manifest or latent content ("How D i d M a r x " 12-3). L i m represses but also thereby reveals her knowledge that her moralistic fantasy designed to cathect state ideology must remain on the imaginary level i f it is to have ideological pull , that it must derive its power from emotional/non-rational responses rather than intellectual ones. The writer/narrator must have been aware, at least at an unconscious level, that entering this ' imaginary' critique o f Angela 's anti-Chineseness into the symbolic order would result in the dissolution o f the fantasy, show up its lack o f epistemic coherence, its falsity to the realities of life in Singapore and bring L i m ' s own desires for capitalism/economic progress, and her own entrenchment in Western culture into conflict with her desire for ethnic identity. For instance, i f L i m had used the narratorial voice to chastise Angela 's 'treacherous' marginalization o f Old Mother and the altar table, she would have had to offer an alternative type o f ethical behavior which would have been either anti-feminist or anti-capitalist or both. I f Angela had chosen to install her mother-in-law at the center of the family, then she would have inevitably had to sacrifice modern capital accumulation and her freedom. Since Old Mother thinks that 223 maid-servants are a sexual temptation to the Master, Angela would have had to give up her job and become a housewife, hence participating in her own subjugation and cutting down on family income. O l d Mother 's habit o f storing things in old biscuit tins and plastic bags and leaving them lying around in full view would have rubbed against Singapore's investing o f Western aesthetics, and put an end to Angela 's and Boon 's dreams of acquiring social and political success. Also , the narrator would then have had to recognize that Angela is morally taking the fall for Old Mother 's cultural dislocation and dispossession, which is caused not only by Angela's lack of understanding, but also by male irresponsibility: O ld Mother 's sons themselves are running away from their parental and ethnic-cultural responsibilities. N o r has the state, despite its rhetoric of Asian culture and f i l ia l piety, provided O l d Mother and women like her, who are the bearers o f ethnic culture, with the economic conditions that would enable their ethnic culture to survive. Narrative commentary would also have had to recognize that Angela 's antipathy to traditional Chinese culture, far from being a female betrayal o f ethnic culture, is a consequence of the woman cathecting the state's (masculine) goals o f economic success and Western notions o f progress. The lack o f narrative commentary in the novel is a signifier that the state's notion o f an 'As ian modernity' is symbolically empty of content. Rather, it can only work by emotional appeal, by displacing modern Singapore society's betrayal o f traditional culture onto women and demonizing them. The hyper-realization of Angela 's voice and gaze, and the rendering o f this gaze and voice as demonic, as pathological lack, substitutes for and attempts to cover over the lack o f real coherent content in the government's ideology regarding Asian modernization. Hence, it is Angela 's hystericized and pathologized voice and gaze that, even though it is interrogated and ironized by the narrator's re-presentation o f events, must dominate the novel. Angela 's perception of ethnic culture as a "mess" that she has to "clear" is a structuring and recurring trope of the novel: in the Prologue, it is mentioned three times, when Angela identifies her problems in a conversation with Mee Kin—the burden o f looking after her mother-in-law, her attempt to free her youngest son Michael from the Chinese superstitions communicated to him by Old Mother, and her task in combating the encroachment o f ethnic values on the free development o f 'modern' values and lifestyles—as a "mess" that had to be "clear[ed]" (1). In describing herself as "the only one left to clear the mess," Angela (and other Singapore women), as wife and mother, not only figures modern Singapore's alienation from Chinese ethnic culture but is also the agent o f the destruction o f that culture (3). "I 've just about cleared the mess," she says (3). When the novel's narrative ends, the epilogue reiterates Angela's framing o f the events as "a mess" that she alone was left to "clear" (183-84). Angela 's ironized and demonized voice provides the novel's last words, overwhelming the reader with its evil . The hiding o f the narrative/authorial gaze, where it is sometimes barely distinguishable from that o f Angela 's gaze, also suggests a certain level o f a disavowed author/narrator identification with the character, Angela. I would suggest that L i m ' s ethnic demonization of Angela 's anti-ethnic subjectivity as betrayal and female hysteria involves the projection on to the 'other' (Angela) o f the sense o f betrayal and hysteria that form the ground of the author/narrator's desire for ethnic revival. In silencing his/her own voice, in refusing the reader any narrative commentary, the narrator takes away any means by which Angela 's hysteria can be contained. Instead, the narrator/author enjoys this hysteria and encourages it to spil l al l over the novel, while positioning himself/herself vaguely as the 'other' to this anti-ethnic, feminist hysteria. It is indeed as i f she was enacting or realizing through Angela, her own repressed doubts about the government's Confucianist agenda. The novel reveals that the cathecting o f state ideology o f Asian/Chinese identity splits Singapore women's desire. Torn between wanting to identify with their ethnic culture and, on the other hand, wanting to keep the freedoms from patriarchal oppression that they have secured through Westernization/modernisation, L i m resolves the split in her desire in a masochistic fantasy where she expresses her modern, feminist desire (through Angela) and then beats 'herself up for it. The narrator's anonymity also suggests the author's (repressed) knowledge that Angela 's guilt is the author's own (guilty) construction and symptomizes the author's inability to resolve her own desire 225 regarding ethnic culture, so that she needs to camouflage this undecidable point-of-view. The narrator/author thus dissociates herself from narratorial guilt and evades the responsibility o f narrative certainty by implicating Mee K i n as the disseminator o f information. We know that the narrator's access to information is limited to and identical with Angela's cognitive knowledge o f the events, o f past and present, differing only in the cultural screen through which it looks on these events. The novel is also structured as the narrative that Angela tells her confidante Mee K i n : her words to Mee K i n open and close the novel. This allows the reader to surmise that the unidentified narrator is either Angela 's confidante, Mee K i n , or that the narrator has received the story from Mee K i n . I f the narrator is Mee K i n , the novel is itself ethically stained as Mee K i n ' s betrayal of Angela 's confidence, which threatens to deconstruct the high moral perspective the novel takes toward ethnic identity. This is further aggravated by the narrator's disavowing o f that identity since, in the novel, the narrator distinguishes herself from Mee K i n . A l so , i f the narrator is Mee K i n , the novel expresses Mee K i n ' s decision to counter Angela 's viewpoint (a viewpoint that she agrees with in the inner frame of the novel). Mee K i n ' s courage to differ from Angela then derives only from the promise of anonymity, which colors this courage with betrayal. If the narrator, however, is one who has received the story from Mee K i n , then it loses ground in terms of any claim to objectivity since it is third-hand information, and, further, has twisted Mee K i n ' s viewpoint, which is sympathetic to Angela. Here too, the narrator's anonymity and lack o f acknowledgment o f his/her gender is troubling and reveals authorial/narrative deception as the base o f the novel 's 'pro-ethnic' perspective. L i m represents and explores 'As ian modernity' as a hybrid East/West culture, which contradicts the state's position o f regarding Asian modernity as a non-Western cultural formation, where state-approved Western norms o f "progress" and "rationality" are de-racialized/de-ethnicized as "modern." For instance, B G Lee, in identifying "Westernization" as the problem that Singapore was trying to solve through the proposed National Ideology, places "Westernization" outside the boundaries o f national culture and the state's concept of Asian modernization ("Westernization," ST 12 Jan. 1989). In the 226 same speech, he implicit ly separates modernity and Westernization as categories of cultural influence when he says that every non-Western developing country had to ponder "how to modernize without losing its soul." He defines a Confucianized modernity ("Confucianism . . . brought up to date") as one where Confucian ideas are reconciled with other ideas such as "democracy and the rule o f law." But Lee defines democracy, not as a Western institution, but as Singaporean, as "part o f our [Singaporean] ethos." Similarly, he says that the Confucian concept o f family ties, "where sons owe an absolute duty o f fi l ial piety and unquestioning obedience to fathers," needed to be modified with 'Singaporean' norms where "the parent-child relationship is more respectful rather than one of absolute subordination." The modernity o f the Singapore family institution apparently is held to be an indigenous, not a Western influence: "Sons and daughters are treated more equally because o f family planning," not because o f the infiltration o f Western gender attitudes. In L i m ' s imaginary, however, the 'As ian modern' is explored as the coming together o f both Eastern and Western epistemologies, where the subject tries to gaze through an epistemology and value system that is As ian and Western at once. The novel's titular metaphor "the serpent's tooth" is an important aspect o f L i m ' s endeavor to represent the 'As ian modern' but as I w i l l show, it also operates to represent the impossibility o f such an agreeable, non-contradictory cross-culturality. In the novel, the serpent's tooth refers to the theme of the 'unnatural' betrayal o f the child by the parent and more particularly to the rebellion o f the daughter against the law of the father as it is represented in Shakespeare's K i n g Lear, where Lear sees such betrayal as "sharper than a serpent's tooth." In that the serpent is also an important symbol in Chinese mythology, the serpent's tooth may be read as condensed metaphor o f an ethical meeting place o f the East and West. The use o f both Eastern and Western references is used to generate the guilt (including sexual/gender guilt) that is needed to persuade the modernized/Westernized Singaporean to invest in ethnic culture as its parental/patriarchal culture. However, the serpent's tooth as metaphor o f betrayal itself reveals the author's desire for a simultaneous East/West gaze (rather than a 227 purely Eastern gaze) and betrays this desire, splitting instead o f reconciling East and West, and revealing the union o f the two cultures to be an impossible dream. For instance, the possibility of an epistomological correspondence between East and West is raised and then negated in the scene where Angela's son Mark rehearses K i n g Lear's speech together with a Chinese poem for a bilingual oratorical competition, in order to show an East-West agreement on fi l ial piety (68-72). While the reader w i l l surely get the author's message that Angela is a mirror-image o f Lear 's unfilial daughters, Mark ' s reading of Lear's speech is more culturally problematical. In assuming Lear 's persona, Mark ' s identification with Lear's venomous onslaught against filial impiety, of parental betrayal, also makes him simultaneously Goneril and Regan since he is the Chinese subject who, in pretending to be a character in a Western canonical play, himself betrays his parent (culture). The novel has already represented Mark as a type of 'Westernized Oriental gentleman' who is antipathetic to Chinese culture: he primitivizes Chinese culture as a complex of "superstitions" in two school essays (15; 92). Mark thus cannot occupy Eastern and Western speaking positions at once. Old Mother herself tells a Chinese tale where fi l ial impiety is, as in K i n g Lear, associated with the bite o f a snake (166-7). But here the surface sameness of Chinese and Western concepts o f f i l ial piety dissolves at a deeper level into difference. In Old Mother's story, Chinese fil ial piety is represented in terms o f a son's obligation of loyalty to his mother rather than his wife. There is one gaze, however, in which Lear's speech could be used to unite Western and Eastern values of filial piety: the feminist gaze, which would point out the common slippage in both West and East between meanings o f filial piety and patriarchal control of women. Given her agenda of acceding to the state's masculine ideology, L i m cannot consider this gaze. In fact, the novel spends much o f its imaginative energy trying to control/demonize this feminist gaze, which keeps intruding into the novel in the form of women's nightmares. In another episode in the novel, Angela is unable to 'see' the decorative serpents and dragons carved on her mother-in-law's four-poster bed until it is restored, that is, turned into a Western Oriental object 228 of art. Here again the Singaporean subject's dream about uniting West and East in an As ian modernity falls apart. Angela, in fact, is directed towards appreciation o f Chinese culture only through the Western commodification o f Chinese culture as Chinoiserie. But this Western exoticized 'seeing' o f Chinese serpent and dragon motifs, however, also visually triggers the 'other' side of Western Orientalism, causing Angela to 'remember' Chinese culture in nightmares as a culture dominated by sexual abuse and female oppression. Suddenly, the snake or serpent as symbol o f an exoticized Chinese culture turns into the phallus, while its bite suggests sexual penetration of the women, both of which are Graeco-Roman meanings attributed to the snake. Sleeping on the restored bed, Angela dreams o f her husband's Grand-Uncle in China raping a maid. She dreams that she rushes into the room to rescue the woman but sees Grand-Uncle "naked from the waist downwards" while "the serpent on the [bed] post unwound itself and slid towards her bare-fanged. There was a guffaw of malicious delight from Grand-Uncle." Waking up, Angela utters Kurtz ' s primitivist, racist response to African culture in Joseph Conrad's Heart o f Darkness: "the horror—oh, the horror - -" (108). Thus Angela's negative as well as positive attitudes to Chinese culture have Western origins. Again , the narrative gaze, which resorts to the discourse of psychology in representing Angela 's fear o f Chinese culture as delusional and guilt-ridden, shows that the critique o f over-Westernization of the ethnic subject need not necessarily deliver one to the shores of ethnic identity. The narrative critical gaze is itself implicated in Western knowledge and identifies with Western culture. In another o f the novel's episodes, Angela compares Old Mother's telling of the legend of the cow unfavorably to Western versions o f the Chinese legend, where she mistakes the Western translation for the Chinese original: Why, Angela wondered with some sadness, had beautiful legends like the legend o f the cow translated into clumsy, unreasonable superstitions that made life more difficult for others? (90) But i f the narrator makes the reader aware of Angela as colonial subject, the theme of translated copy versus original also splits the narrator's story-telling and casts doubt on its authenticity, especially in 229 asserting Chinese identity in the English language. A t such points in the novel, the serpent's tooth figures the author's unconscious realization that the East and ethnic culture cannot be understood or recovered except through the Western gaze: that the 'As ian modern' may only be the Western masquerading as Eastern culture. In both these scenes, Mark ' s reading of Shakespeare and his mother's nightmares, the serpent's tooth figures a metaphorical link between crises o f ethnic identity and those o f sexual/gender subjectivity. Mark ' s reading o f the play as Chinese subject also problematises his sexual/gender subjectivity. He can't be Lear because he is the 'daughter' who betrayed the parent (culture). A s Goneril and Regan, he is marked by gender perversion since in Shakespeare's play, the two treacherous daughters are viewed as unnatural women. In the second episode, Angela 's 'discovery' of her ethnic culture gives her nightmares about Chinese patriarchal power and its abuse of women. But i f L i m fantasizes that the return to ethnic identity w i l l restore masculinity and femininity to their 'natural' places, the serpent's tooth as condensed metaphor is also a constant reminder that perversity is itself a part o f nature. For instance, O l d Mother tells a story of a "tiny, harmless-looking snake" who repaid a village ch ie f s kindness in sparing its life by promptly destroying the village's rice plants (160). "A Dream of China" (1984) by Ovidia Yu Barely two years after Singaporeans were bombarded with the government's Confucianizing project begun, Ovid ia Y u ' s short story broke with a trend where Singapore Chinese ethnic identity was explored in terms of a Chinese working-class culture. In the previous two decades, as history texts studied in schools indicate, the transformation of Singapore from a fishing village to a modern city-state was attributed to the masculine vigor o f immigrant dispossessed peasants from As ia , people o f the soil who worked hard to overturn their economic lot. But Y u ' s short story " A Dream of China," which won the 1984 Annual Asiaweek Short Story Competition, seeks instead to link Singapore's Chinese cultural origins to a high-brow, classical Chinese culture. In particular, it tries to represent Singapore culture as 230 the modernized version o f this elite Chinese culture. In Y u ' s mythology, Singapore culture is Sinicized and represented as the historical progression and transformation of Chinese culture through modernity. A s the story imagines it, Singapore culture is more truly Chinese than China's since the spirit o f Chinese culture is dead in China. The story is told in the first person. The narrator, an educated woman, wife, young mother, and daughter o f an immigrant from China, leaves Singapore to visit China in order to investigate family matters. Reading a nostalgic poem about China written by her father, she had been surprised that her father was not "content in Singapore after all these years," that he regarded it as an "ornamental pond," and "not the wide brimming river. Not home" (1159). Over the years, she had been disturbed by the guilt and shame her father felt about not having returned to his homeland, China, and helping out his family there. She says: . . . one thing lay heavily on my father's conscience. Because o f that he had decided that he would die in exile, never to return. . . . He elected to stay in Singapore. It was this decision that in later years he regarded as his supreme act o f cowardice. His younger brother returned to China to help repair the atrocities of the Japanese. He remained in S ingapore . . . . He had failed to return to China as his brother had. His younger brother had done right and he had done wrong. He was too overcome by shame to return himself later, when he was no longer needed. (1155) Then the narrator finds out that "it was not only shame for ignoring the call o f his country that had barred [her] father from China all these years" (1157). Her husband had found out in conversation with his father-in-law that her father had actually seriously considered returning to China after the war but that his younger brother had dissuaded him. The younger brother had said in a letter that his elder brother's overseas-Chinese wife, loving luxury, would cause their "lands to be disrupted and sold to support her in her luxury." The narrator's father had then felt shame that his younger brother was wiser than he in such matters. He thought his younger brother would serve family interests far better than he could, and resolved not to displace such a 231 dutiful son by returning himself. Since then he had looked upon his younger brother as a paragon of virtue and dutiful good sense. (1157) The narrator is overwhelmed by the information: " 'I didn't know he ever meant to go back to China,'" I said to my husband, surprised. 'He never told me that' " (1157). Then she discovers letters from China, from an aunt asking her father for money. This upsets the narrator because she had always thought of the relationship between her father and his brother (who had returned to China from Singapore after World War Two) as an economically equal one. "But why were they always asking for money if, after all, my uncle returned to build a new China? Don't they treat him well there then?" she asks her father (1159). Also, she smells something fishy about her uncle since it had been his wife, not him, who had written for money. I would venture that the narrator wishfully suspects here another side of the story, one that would help alleviate the guilt and shame her father feels in relation to his younger brother. (One may read this relationship in terms of the Singapore Chinese subject's sense of cultural and moral inferiority to the high parent culture.) Though her father admits that he had financially supported his family in China, the narrator turns away to tend to her child and misses his answer about why he had to do it. Since her father "was not disposed to discuss the issue again," she was "left to wonder," and leaps when an opportunity to be tour guide/interpreter on a trip to China presents itself. The narrator's visit to China is to be viewed as a hermeneutic quest for ethnic identity. Yu views the representation of Singapore's 'Asian modernity,' the reconciling of Chinese tradition with modernity as important to this venture. But I hope to show that her particular definition of this ethnicized modernity is a hysterical symptom where she seeks to escape from a repressed knowledge that immigration to Singapore and the ceding to capitalism has totally hybridized Chinese culture in Singapore with Western culture so that it can never be viewed as an authentic, 'pure' Chinese culture. She attempts to resolve this problem by imagining a Chinese "spirit," essential and primordial, but which can be transplanted, modernized, without changing that inner, crucial core that is definably Chinese (which echoes state 232 ideology, as I show in chapter 2). She finds this 'Chinese' spirit in China's landscape, its "distant mountains . . . dreamy and purple in their vagueness" and their "caves of stalactites." For the narrator, a trip down a river in China is "a journey . . . back through time into an age o f timelessness" (1161). But for Y u , this Chinese spirit is already dead in China and truly alive only in modern Singapore. Departing from her uncle in China, she says, watching the "drab old man in old worn clothes wandering from puddle to puddle o f yellow light," that "it was as though he was the spirit of China, now broken and leaving me." Then, she adds " M y father's China no longer exists except in him and in other men who try to live true to the dream of China in their hearts" (1165). But Y u ' s imagining of 'As ian modernity' also needs to be analyzed as a paranoid re-writing o f history, where she tampers with the chrono-logic o f Singapore history in reconciling her contradictory desire for ethnic culture/identity and Western culture. A s a fantasy of Singaporean Asian identity, Y u represents the 'As ian modern' through the narrator's father as the hybridization o f Chinese classical culture with (Western) capitalism. This is used to cover over, as I w i l l show, the irreconcilable antagonism between capitalism and Chinese tradition. The 'As ian modern' then functions to compromise the de-colonizing imperative with an interest in recuperating Chinese ethnic culture for the service o f that other, alien culture, capitalism. But Y u then tries to Sinicize this hybridity by representing the 'As ian modern' culture as originally Chinese rather than Western. This involves a deliberate chronological misrecognition. Y u ' s story shows the reader that capitalism is the condition o f possibility for 'As ian modernity': it funds this 'As ian modernity' that is represented in the narrator's father. But this happy consequence of capitalism (the 'afterwards' o f capitalism), where the Chinese person has the economic means and the leisure under a capitalist mode o f production to nostalgically recover his ethnic past, is mis-represented as an original Singapore Chinese subjectivity. Y u ' s fantasy o f the 'As ian modern' is also a way to escape from the problem of the guilt o f ethnic betrayal involved in the original entry into a foreign culture of capitalism. Her imaginary answers this guilt-ridden problem 233 of entry into Singapore/capitalism by mis-representing it as the same as the historical impossibility of returning to China. Y u ' s fantasy turns on a metonymic slippage where a particular character representing one genus among Singaporean Chinese-a university lecturer in science, with a background in classical Chinese education and culture~who, it is made clear, is not a typical Singaporean Chinese, is surprisingly recuperated at the story's end as the genus that universally represents all Singaporean Chinese. This man, the narrator's father, symbolizes Y u ' s concept o f the 'As ian modern.' A s a university lecturer in marine biology, he represents modern knowledge, which, however, he happily combines with Chinese culture and a Chinese subjectivity, practicing Chinese calligraphy, using Chinese poetic forms to express his innermost thoughts, and passing on a Sinicized perspective on life with his stories o f China to his daughter. A s the narrator, his daughter, describes him: He was Westernized to a certain extent and did not demand unquestioning obedience from his children. It was not in that that he remained staunchly Chinese, but in his calm, his respect for the 'face' o f the servants and his disregard for material gain. (1156) Y u attempts here to subvert Western Orientalist conceptions that Chinese culture is essentially authoritarian. Rather, she represents spiritual strength and ethical grace as the quintessential Chinese. Through this man, however, Y u figures Singapore's original Asian modern subjectivity as the cultural conjunction o f Westernization with the guilt o f ethnic betrayal. The Westernized/modern subject turns to his ethnic culture in an attempt to compensate for having betrayed his Asian motherland and as a strategy to disavow his (ethnic) lack. Guil t for not having returned to re-build China after Wor ld War Two, as wel l as the lack of masculinity that he senses in himself (in comparison to his brother), makes the narrator's father desire Chinese culture as his objet petit a, that which is a constant reminder o f his lack, his castration, but also that which can make him whole again. But let us not miss the point too that, as a phantasmatic solution, the guilt of ethnic betrayal also assures that the Singaporean Chinese person's contradictory desire, that of remaining in Singapore, can be met: viewing himself as traitor to his 234 motherland, the subject has the perfect excuse for not returning home. Guil t arising from the subject's betrayal o f his motherland is the answer o f the fantasy to an original split in desire caused by the subject's entry into the modern/Western: in his wanting to return to the motherland (traditional, ethnic culture), and in his desire to stay put in the modern (Western). The now-retired university professor's 'As ian modern' subjectivity then allows him to be in two cultural places at once. Y u eroticizes and represents an original split in desire in Singapore for Chinese culture and Western capitalism in libidinal and gendered terms as male sexual desire, where the Chinese male immigrant is torn between two women: his mother and his wife. The desire for Chinese culture is represented as an oedipalized desire as son to save a beautiful mother (China) who is in trouble, while the desire for modernity/capitalism/Western progress is depicted as his desire to meet his duties as a husband. The narrator's father and his brother, both immigrants to Singapore, yearned to go back to their mother (China), whose "pulse beat in their bodies" and whose "rich and parched so i l " they had "soaked" with "their blood" (1155). A s revolutionaries in China, "disowned by their father," who was a member of China 's ruling class, "they saw her [China] differently. Bruised and savaged but nonetheless beautiful" (1155). The narrator's father however (unlike his brother) later decides to stay in Singapore because, as his brother points out, his wife, "used to city life in Singapore," whom he had married "without their parents' consent," may "pine to return to Singapore, causing their lands to be disrupted and sold to support her in luxury" (1157). This gendered and sexualized triangulation o f Singaporean desire allows the retired university lecturer's 'As ian modernity' to be represented as a post-colonial subjectivity that is tied to a 'normalized' masculinity. In the Singaporean female sexual temptress (deracialized, one would assume, since 'race' is a male category here), capitalism/Western culture is feminized. But i f this capitalism/woman breaks up the (male) ethnic subject's devotion to his family and ancestral past, 'she' (capitalism) is also the agent that saves this (male) ethnic subject from subjective divestiture, which would have been the consequence of his yielding to his Oedipal desire for his mother. The seduction o f 235 the ethnic subject by capitalism (viewed as modernity) is history as patriarchal command, ordering that the ties to the cultural ethnic past and the family be henceforth pursued in a displaced, fetishized form rather than in the real, in a similar manner to the incest taboo. The incest taboo, as we recall, orders that the male subject displace his desire for his mother onto other women, who function as fetishized substitutes for the objet petit a of mother's voice/gaze/breasts. In the former university lecturer's brother, we have a representation of the total surrender to the ethnic cultural past as infantile regression. Whi le the brother who obeyed the call of modernity (the narrator's father) goes on to be a successful and respected member of his community, a good and caring father and husband, who carries on the family line, his brother, who rejected this call and returned to China (to mother) winds up frustrated, destitute, childless, and unable to move beyond narcissistic self-love and an abusive sexual relationship with his wife. This representation o f modernity as a 'normal ' masculinity serves to shut out the viewing o f this encounter between modernity/capitalism/Western culture and Chinese culture as a confrontation between two patriarchal orders of different races/ethnicities, where one patriarchal culture (Chinese) capitulated to the other and was thereby emasculated. It also allows the writer to repress the idea that the desire for money/capital accumulation inevitably caused a departure from and betrayal o f China/Chinese culture. A s I have suggested, the retired university lecturer's 'As ian modernity,' his combination o f high Chinese culture with 'modernity,' is the consequence of the Chinese entry to Singaporean/Western capitalism and is imbricated by capitalism/Western culture, but which is disavowed by its representation as the before, an original, purely Chinese immigrant subjectivity. The narrator is at pains to depict her father's 'As ian modernity' as the exception, not the rule of Chinese subjectivity in Singapore. He is 'different,' he is the Chinese 'original. ' For instance, unlike the more typically over-materialistic Singaporean, he places more value on spiritual qualities than on material gain and is critical o f the "shallowness of the lives his students at the university led." He complains: " A l l they did was study. If they did dream it was of job security and owning a car" (1155). 236 Even his own children from his first marriage view him as an overly-idealistic odd-ball. The narrator is his youngest and only child from a second marriage entered into late in life. Since her mother died soon after her birth, the ex-university lecturer is both mother and father to the narrator, retiring from his job to look after his daughter. The narrator thus grows up with her subjectivity and her imaginary shaped by Chinese literature: They [her elder siblings] were sorry for me, a child l iving in the company of an old man who told the same old stories over and over again. But children love repetition and I thrived on it. I began to dream dreams o f China too, I who was born countless miles from China on this island o f Singapore. The strange mountains and still waters. . . In China there were fat laughing fairies . . . There were spirits in the trees and animals. A l l this was much more interesting to me than the Western fairy stories with their brashly coloured illustrations o f Caucasians with wings. More interesting too than mundane life in Singapore . . . . (1154) But the cultural logic o f the story turns on the narrator working as a seme where two aspects o f Singapore's cultural history, quintessential high Chinese culture and capitalism are brought together. Though she identifies with her father's desire for Chinese culture, unlike her father, however, the narrator does not identify with China as home. She dis-identifies with her father's sense o f cultural and geographical displacement. Though the daughter admits that her "father's writing made [her] homesick for the China [she] had never known" and that it "stirred up feelings inside one" (1159), on a trip to China, she identifies herself with Singapore's artificially landscaped beauty rather than with China 's grand mountains and rivers: M y spirit was as alien here [in China] as I was. It inclined toward a diamond city o f trees and meaningful occupation, efficiently sparkling in the modern world. That was where I truly belonged, among skyscrapers with glass fronts and gold-encrusted orchids. (1161) Singapore, one must note here, is to be differentiated from China in its economic and visual aspects, not in its cultural, multi-ethnic pluralism (compared to China's racial singularity) nor even its South-east 237 Asian cultural influences. The narrator establishes here her own grasping, over-materialistic nature, which makes her, within the story's cultural code, just like the average Singaporean. When she finds out that her father declined to return to China in order to keep his family property over there intact, the narrator prioritizes self-interest over family obligation and concern for relatives in China, saying "I would have gone back anyway, and claimed everything that was mine by right!" (1157). The notion that her father, already well-provided for in Singapore, would be dispossessing those who were already financially disadvantaged in China is not allowed to disturb the narrator. She wishes that her father had "gone back to China and taken everything and come back to Singapore," where he would then "be rich as wel l as free"(l 158). When her uncle pleads with her in China for passage to Singapore, the narrator cannot stop her mind from wondering about the Western commodity aesthetics of the matter. Could this "drab old man in old worn clothes" fit into her "modern little flat," she wondered; she could not "imagine the man sleeping on [her] Italian-leather sofa" (1153). Since the narrator is so ' typical ly ' Singaporean in representing the two aspects o f Singapore culture, its Chinese-ness and its (Western) materialism, the particular is transformed into that which is universally applicable to Singapore when she goes on an identity quest to China to clear her father (her patriarchal legacy) from the guilt o f betraying their motherland. When she finds that it was his brother (China) who had betrayed her father, and not vice versa, it is not just her father and herself who are absolved o f guilt: Singapore itself is absolved. This betrayal of her father by China (his brother) and her father's loss o f his family inheritance through that betrayal is a trope that wishfully represents Singapore's history of modernity (capitalism) in terms of China's betrayal of its own people, forcing them to survive in alien lands, rather than as the Singaporean Chinese immigrant's betrayal o f his parent culture. It is also suggested that China's betrayal of its own is an act motivated by greed, weakness o f character and lack o f familial feeling (as exemplified in the character o f the narrator's uncle), all of which are coded as the historical degeneration of the Chinese spirit in China itself. Y u ' s fantasy then 238 depicts Singapore's capitulation to modernity (capitalism) as a justifiable response to historical circumstance (of a forced departure from China) rather than as a betrayal o f Chinese ethnic culture. Singaporean Chinese then are to be released from the original guilt o f ethnic betrayal, which obstructs their claim to Chinese identity, by counter-claiming that it was China that betrayed the overseas Nanyang-Chinese. Clearly, the betrayal of the narrator's father by his brother in China is meant to displace her father's betrayal of his motherland, but this is only imaginatively possible through a chronological reversion of history. The story's surface may claim that the narrator's uncle's betrayal of her father is the metaphoric 'cause' that releases Singaporean Chinese from guilt for entering into an alien (Western) culture of capitalism, but the subtext tells a contradictory story. Rather, Singapore's success under capitalism is the condition that enables the uncle to cheat (betray) his brother. The uncle is able to steal his elder brother's patrilineal inheritance only because the brother, now settled in Singapore, did not need this inheritance (given his economic comfort in successful Singapore); the uncle also played on his brother's guilt about his material success. A l so , the narrator's father's 'As ian modernity' is represented as the 'before' o f Singapore's entry into capitalism in that he represents the values o f an original Chinese high culture. This however involves covering over the fact that the narrator's father could not have practiced his Asian modernity, especially his "disregard for material gain" (1156), without Singapore's prior and total commitment to capitalism, which allowed him a decent l iving and the ability to afford freedom from financial anxiety and the luxuries it made possible. If he was able to indulge in writing Chinese-style traditional poems such as haiku and to live his life on a more spiritual plane, it was because all around him people were striving solely for economic success, providing work opportunities for him and for his children. Without this frenetic striving, the narrator's father could not have afforded to financially support his family in China, either. Though the characterization o f the narrator's character is important in carrying off these chronological confusions and displacements, it is also the symptomatic seme of the repressed ' real ' that 239 has leaked into the fantasy in order to disrupt it. As the retired science professor's daughter, she comes 'after' him. But in representing Singapore's excessive materialism, she stands for the original modernity (capitalism) that 'sponsored' her father's Asian/Chinese modernity. As such, the cleansing of the guilt attached to this later Asian modernity does not also erase the primary modernistic (capitalistic) guilt. With regard to this, the story displaces cultural attention from a prior moment in Singapore's history, that of the moment of migration, which is crucial to the nation's claim of its ethnic cultural loyalties, to re-focus attention on Chinese immigrants' decision to stay in Singapore. The narrator provides much historical information on the life of the two brothers: their growing up as sons of the privileged in China, the later revolution in their consciousness as they fight for democracy against the monarchy, their stay in Singapore during the Japanese Occupation, their lives as husbands and/or fathers and citizens, as well as their desire to return to re-build a new China after World War Two. But there is a narrative eclipse on that part of their history that pertains to their decision to leave China for Singapore. One moment, the narrator's father is a revolutionary soldier in China, spilling blood for his beloved motherland; the next he is a university lecturer in Singapore, with a training in the sciences, and a family. This historical moment of abandoning China for Singapore, I would like to suggest, is that which must be forgotten, that which would give the lie to the myth that the entry into capitalism did not involve an original and irreversible compromise of Chinese classical culture. The two moments of migrating from the homeland and not returning to the homeland cannot substitute for each other nor are they as discontinuous as Yu would have us believe. Perhaps the reference to "dream" in the story's title is an unconscious admittance that the notion of the 'Asian modern,' understood as a Chinese modernity that is not always-already Westernized, is a delusionary formation. As Yu's story shows, the 'Asian modern' is a second-generation Singaporean's complex phantasmatic means of escaping from post-colonial guilt regarding ethnic betrayal that is also an escape from the consequent fear and resistance against giving up capitalism/Western culture. Yu's fantasy shows her need to absolve the 'Asian modern' from the guilt of the profit motive. That she 240 represents the 'As ian modern' as involving literal capital loss (her father loses his patrilineal heritage in China to his brother) does not disprove her investment in capitalism. Rather, this eth(n)ic anxiety over capitalism may be read as a symptom of the repressed 'real, ' that the 'As ian modern' itself is constituted by the capitulation of Chinese culture to capitalism, in a fantasy where capital accumulation (the modern) does not negate ethnic identity. That Singapore's modernity is ethically validated in this story by demonizing China is in itself a sign of an ambivalence in attitude towards Chinese culture that structures this ideology of Asian modernity. Significantly, the narrator does not, on her return from China, tell her father of his brother's betrayal and thereby absolve him of his guilt. I would suggest that she omits this action for two reasons. Her father's guilt constitutes his desire for the ethnic: absolving that guilt may dissolve the desire for the ethnic since, realizing his brother's betrayal of him, it would shake his faith in the supremacy o f Chinese culture. A l so , telling her father the truth that she discovers in China may land him in another more insufferably guilty place when he realizes that, despite his financial support, he had still failed to do his brotherly duty: where the mythic, delusional guilt is displaced by real guilt. When her uncle asks to see her father, she notes that "an angry, cheated look had come back into his eyes. He obviously felt my father owed him much." The narrator then thinks to herself: N o . I would not do this to my father. I wanted to return to Singapore to tell him my uncle was wel l in China. That he was too busy (not too lazy) to write himself. M y father could then breathe easy, believe he had done a good thing and reap in his old age his reward for the good life he had lived and the children he had reared. This man must not be allowed to come and spoil everything. (1164) The narrator on the other hand, as a second-generation Singapore Chinese, needs to be absolved from her father's guilt. She needs to assure herself that her father was a "good man . . . whichever country can claim him as its own" since this would allow her to practice the culture o f capitalism, guilt free, alongside that o f a fetishized observance of Chinese culture (1165). Her father's guilt was threatening to 241 spoil her enjoyment o f Singapore's economic success, morally staining it. This explains the urgency with which the narrator sets out on her quest to China: she needs to expunge her father's guilt, not in order to liberate him but herself. A s we see, she returns from her identity quest much the same as she left it, l iving her modern lifestyle but "no less eager [than before] to listen to [her] father's stories o f the most beautiful o f beautiful lands" (1165). L iv ing East and West jointly but separately, as irreconcilable opposites, on the level of ritual and artifact, she is not much different from her Jewish-Chinese nephew despite her Chinese racial purity. Golden Dragon lives his mixed Eurasian ethnic heritage by smoking opium and wearing "a Jewish skull-cap atop his Chinese-style plait" (1156). The journey does not offer her a new subject-position. The Asian and the modern/Western cannot be dialogized except by subordinating the Asian to the modern (capitalistic) and by hysterically disavowing that compromise. Then there is the irony that Y u ' s fantasy of Chinese identity turns on the Western Christian concept of baptism, o f washing away original guilt. A t the end of the story, Y u likens her father's "dream of China" to that o f "the heaven of Christian converts," where it is "an ideal to strive for and a vision o f things to come" (1165)! The Scholar and the Dragon (1986) by Stella Kon K o n ' s novel was not the earliest o f literary texts exploring Singapore's Chinese ethnic identity. But it was the first in a series of historical novels that sought to re-imagine Singapore history as the story o f the immigration of Chinese to Singapore. Among these novels, however, it is also the only one that attempts to imagine Singaporean Chinese culture as specifically Confucian, male and classical at its roots. K o n achieves this by prioritizing one slice o f Singapore's history, the story o f a Chinese immigrant, Tan Boon Jin, a scholar o f the Chinese classics and a Reformist rebel from China, who seeks a new life in Singapore and becomes one of its "pioneers." A s a successful businessman and Chinese community leader, he plays a salient part in preserving Singapore's Confucianist and classical Chinese heritage by founding an academy of Chinese studies. Though the protagonist is a fictional character, real 242 historical characters such as Dr. L i m Boon Keng and actual historical events in an excellently researched novel lend authenticity to this novel. Tan Boon Jin is further modeled on some of the real pioneering Chinese immigrants of Singapore such as Tan Kah Kee who became highly successful businessmen and industrialists, who were responsible for starting up Chinese schools and preserving Chinese culture in Singapore. Some readers may also argue that K o n has split the real Dr. L i m Boon Keng into two characters. Though L i m is present as one o f the characters in the novel, Tan himself is a fictionalized re-creation o f his friend and mentor, L i m . L ike the real Dr . L i m Boon Keng, Tan is a 'modern' man but with strong loyalties to Chinese culture and philosophy. L i k e L i m , Tan is involved with establishing Chinese-medium schools in Singapore and emphasizing Confucianism. Tan is also involved, like L i m was, in Straits Chinese women's education. L ike his mentor, he too is a reformer (rather than a revolutionary) 1 4 and is involved in contributing to intellectual life in Singapore through the media. K o n ' s novel is clearly a positive response to state ideology about Confucianism and Singapore's Chinese identity that was prevalent in the mid-1980s. One can't but notice the similarities between the fictional Wenguang Academy that Kon ' s character Tan sets up in Singapore and the nation's Institute of East Asian Philosophy that was set up in 1983 (see chapter 2) to help develop Singapore as a center for the study o f Confucianism. K o n ' s narrative interest in Tan Boon Jin's migration is part of an ideological strategy that allows the writer to imaginatively link Singapore Chinese ethnic origins specifically to one period o f Chinese history, that o f the last days o f the Chinese empire, which were also the final days o f the dominance of Confucianist culture in China. (With the establishment of the Republic o f China in 1911 and, following that, Communist government, Confucianist ideology became increasingly marginalized in China.) This choice o f historical setting (the 1890s-1910s) and the focus on the Chinese empire and its classical culture also helps K o n overcome the alienation many o f the Singapore Chinese English-educated population felt towards Communist China and the superstition-ridden, low folk peasant culture that they 243 were familiar with. Instead, Chinese culture is essentialized here as Confucianist, and celebrated as a glorious 2,000-year-old cultural heritage. The novel also resorts to the rhetoric of nostalgia in its emotional representation of the fall of the Qing dynasty (here made synonymous with the last days of an authentic and original glorious Chinese culture) to displace this antipathy towards China. This antipathy, however, as I w i l l show, is itself registered in the novel and is part and parcel o f K o n ' s attempt to invest Confucianist culture with desire. This novel goes some way towards indicating the massive re-inventing o f Singapore's history and the realignment o f ego identifications and national desire that is required for Singaporeans to accept the newer, Asianized/Confucianist national identity propagated by the state. Kon ' s use o f the historical novel form, setting the story in the late 19th and early 20th century, covers over her ideological imperatives and elisions. The issues the author raises here—the place o f Chinese ethnic identity in the diaspora and in the national subjectivity o f post-colonial, late capitalist society; the difficulties o f reconciling Chinese identity with Western value systems; the special value assigned to Confucianism in Chinese culture)—are contemporary to the 1980s, but symptomatically K o n chooses to dramatize them by reference to the past than to the present. Important Singaporean historical moments such as those o f the founding o f the nation, which would surely have been germane to an exploration of national subjectivity and the place o f ethnic culture within it, are excluded here. The government's Asianizing/Confucianizing of national subjectivity was not easily accepted in Singapore until the later 1980s. A s we saw, Singaporean Chinese resisted the teaching o f Confucianism in schools (see chapter 2). K o n could not therefore have set the novel in the 1980s i f she was hoping to effect a resolution between traditional Chinese culture and the modern, often very Westernized subjectivities o f her readers, the English-educated Chinese Singaporeans. Neither could she have set her novel in the 1950s and 1960s, during the period of Singapore's national independence movement since the dominant ideology o f that time involved precisely the rejection of racial/ethnic chauvinisms that was being promoted in the 1980s. Setting the novel in the period o f communist China and seeking cultural 244 resemblance/affiliations between this China and Singapore would also have contradicted Singapore's founding myths o f democracy and modernization. K o n ' s historic interest in the last days of dynastic China must be seen as a 1980s, post-colonial Singaporean phantasmatic re-reading o f the history of that period, whereby one period o f the past is used as a vehicle to amputate from national memory precisely those aspects o f its cultural history that cannot be reconciled with the state's 1980s' Confucianizing agenda. The novel instead produces late 19th and 20th century history, a time when cultural connections and identification with China were still strong, as the founding moments o f the nation, thereby displacing the actual founding myths o f the nation. Singapore's anti-colonial movement is also here re-defined as the movement o f the overseas-Chinese for independence from colonial rule. The novel thinks nothing o f claiming Singapore and Malaysia as Chinese in the manner o f European colonial settlers thinking o f Aboriginal lands as their own. Seating her characters Tan and his friend Chong Beng on a hi l l in Malaysia 's Kin ta Val ley, the narrator notes that by the 1910s, "For fifty years . . . the Chinese tin miners had been working and clearing the jungle in the Kin ta Val ley . The country near Papan looked much as it does now," the narrator says, overlooking Malay claim to ancestral lands (137). Tan observes to Chong Beng: "Look at that scene," he said. "There's the river winding through the plain, and the mountains wreathed in mist. It looks like a classic Chinese painting." "So it does. Makes you think o f home, doesn't it?" "But it isn't our home. This valley isn't anybody's homeland, is it?" Boon Jin said, philosophizing sleepily. "The Malays own it, the British rule it, neither of them work or live in that valley below. It ought to belong to the men who spent their blood and sweat to tame the jungle. But they don't want it, they all want to go back to China." (139-40) "Fifteen years later," in the 1930s, K o n says that Tan's thoughts on the valley were published, "asserting the rights of the Overseas-Chinese in the lands they had opened up" (140). 245 Singaporean history, rewritten as the history of the overseas-Chinese, erases the stories o f the minorities, whose role in the novel is reduced to a passive one. The nation's multiracial character, institutionalized in the discourse o f the national independence movement, is here objectivized as merely a visual feature o f the island. The only references to Singapore's multi-cultural composition are as the 'tourist sight' that greets the protagonist when he first lands in Singapore: Boon Jin looked around as he mounted the steps [of the pier], excited to be stepping onto foreign land. . . There was a long, shadowy hall, crowded with men o f many races in exotic costumes. The strangest thing to Boon Jin was that the colors o f their faces varied so much, some dark and some very pale. Their languages hummed around him . . . . (2-3) Tan notes too that his Straits Chinese female relatives wear "batik sarongs''' and "lace kebayas" (4), that they eat "o i ly and spicy food" and that the "old ladies ate with their fingers while the younger people ate with Western instruments" (6). Not only are non-Chinese aspects of Singapore reduced to visual and culinary features, but they are also represented as the feminized non-Chinese 'other,' the same 'feminine' non-Chineseness that the female character L i m Quek Choo, who later becomes Tan's wife, has to surrender in order to support the national meanings o f Chinese identity at the novel's end (see below). K o n ' s myth o f Singapore as a modernized, Confucianist China, with its history made analogous to the biography o f the hero Tan and his relationship with his father, is similar to Y u ' s . Modernized Confucianism is fantasized here as the articulation of Confucianism with democracy and capitalism, an original Chineseness that undergoes a 'translation' through its encounter with Western/modern culture as wel l as with South-east Asian culture. Singapore culture then is paradoxically both the original as wel l as its translation, similar to the father-son relationship. Guil t however forms the libidinal center of Kon ' s fantasy about her Confucianist Chinese identity, where China's death is the condition for the recovery o f Singapore's patriarchal heritage from it. The original moment of immigration is a guilty one involving the alienation of the subject from the original Chinese culture. A s Kon ' s fantasy goes, the awareness 246 that something has been lost (through migration) and that this loss was executed by the subject itself can only be born by always desiring its recovery. The Chinese classics feature as the object-cathexis o f desire, invested with the disavowal o f the lack of the original Chinese culture. The dramatization o f guilt, so evident in Kon ' s novel, is her source of double enjoyment-that which accrues from literally and figuratively ' k i l l i n g ' off Chinese culture and celebrating that patriarchal loss as freedom, as wel l as the enjoyment that comes with displacing guilt onto a fetishized object that w i l l allow one to make only a partial recovery o f that absent patriarchal culture. The Chinese classics, so praised by the state, are the fetishized metonym of Chinese culture, permitting the Singaporean subject to substitute the Chinese part for the whole. The fall of the Qing empire to democratic revolutionaries represents the moment when Chinese culture abandons China and is transplanted to the Nanyang. A s Tan notes to L i m Chong Beng: Dr . Sun's river, his Revolution. I believe it now. The Revolution w i l l come and there's no way to stop it. They ' l l establish their republic and cut off the emperor's head and all the glories o f China's history w i l l be washed away in the flood. . . . When they've slain the Emperor and burned the temples of Confucius, perhaps w e ' l l be able to keep Chinese culture alive in the Nanyang. That's the only work I can see myself doing, for my China. (139) A s a student from late 19th-century China, who hails from thirty generations o f Confucianist scholar-gentlemen and a long familial tradition of dynastic support, Tan is an untypical Chinese immigrant to Singapore who is here fantasized as the norm. He is however the modern spirit of China, who rebels against the oppressiveness of Chinese tradition and learning and joins the popular democratic struggle against imperial rule. His rebellion against class and other cultural oppressions is represented however as the rebellion of the son against the father, as the refusing of patriarchal authority. Tan's ego-ideal is Kang Y u We i , and his reading o f this exiled Chinese Reformist's teachings mark the rejection o f patriarchal instructions: 247 Boon Jin went back to school, with stern warnings from father to stay wel l clear o f any revolutionary activities. The warnings only made it more exciting to jo in the clandestine political activity which throbbed through the whole school. They furtively passed around the writings o f Kang Y u W e i . . ."(21) Kang wants to liberalize education in China, moving it away from Confucianism and a pedagogy that privileges imitation over original thought. Tan's antipathy towards the "eight-legged essay," a classical Chinese literary form, which Tan views as curbing critical thought, identifies him as a follower o f the Chinese Reformist movement. But again this ideology is stitched to Tan's dis-identification with the patriarchal order: in one scene, his father teaches the son how to write the "eight-legged essay" and chastises the son for being stupid in his inability/unwillingness to master the form. Fol lowing the patriarchal scolding, Tan dreams that he is relentlessly pursued by the "eight-legged essay," figured in the dream as an eight-legged table. Tan's involvement in the student Reformist movement is also a rebellion against his family's upper-class position and its ideological affiliation with the monarchy. Tan's migration to Singapore is a punitive expulsion of the son rebelling against patriarchal authority. But it is also the Chinese male subject's rite of passage as he moves from a society where the patriarchal order itself was rapidly dissolving to that 'other' society that would perform the necessary constitution of masculinity that China is unable to effect at this juncture of its history. Tan's father views China 's modernizing in 1898, when reforms suggested by Kang Y u Wei were introduced by the boy-emperor, as lacking in adult male wisdom. He says: What can she [the Dowager] do to stop him? Since the Emperor came of age and started ruling for himself, he packed the O l d Ancestor off into retirement, and now this devil Kang Y u Wei is his adviser, his teacher, his corrupting influence. (13) Then, just before Tan leaves for Singapore, in November 1905, "the Chinese examination system which had lasted for two thousand years, was abolished overnight" (23) and by a woman, the Empress Dowager, who had re-captured power from the young emperor. Henceforth, government jobs would 248 depend on being in favor with the authorities rather than on good exam results. Tan's father regards this as an emasculation o f Chinese culture. He says, "After al l , she's only an ignorant woman, she never studied the classics" (23). Since Tan had fallen into disfavor with the authorities, this meant the end of all hope for a brilliant career as scholar and instigates his father's move to send him to Singapore. . . . when the government examination system was dismantled, Father really thought that it was the end o f the world that his family o f scholars had lived in for so many generations. There was no more hope that any of his sons would earn a high government position like the revered ancestor [who had been Chief Minister]. In this despairing mood, he sent Boon Jin off to try to improve his fortunes in the Nanyang. (15) But Tan's father is also disappointed in his son's involvement in Reformist activities: Father let him know that he had let the family down; he was a disgrace, he didn't have the first filial virtue. " W u zhun, wu fu!" Father said to him, "No respect for emperor, no respect for parents" (23). Tan's uncle in Singapore affirms the coming together of punishment and salvation in Tan's move to Singapore. He tells Tan, "Boon Jin, in his letter to me, your father says that you are w i ld and disobedient at home; you have displeased him and grieved your mother. . . . He has sent you to me so that you can learn something useful, and perhaps reform your way of l ife" (2). The novel represents accession to post-colonial diasporic Chinese subjectivity as a displacing, compensatory mechanism for the awareness of an original male lack, of castration. Once he is in Singapore, Tan becomes alienated from his patriarchal culture. His very language itself is strange in this alien land and suffers changes in meanings here: people laugh at his use o f classical literary language as an anachronism whereas in China it was a signifier of high culture, o f class breeding. When he replies that "the celestial winds were auspicious and benevolent" to his cousin's polite inquiry about his journey, she "giggled as though he had said something funny" (5). The first thing he noticed about his family in Singapore was the way they spoke: 249 His own family at home spoke Hokkien dialect in the way o f educated people, with many literary words and phrases. But the people in his Uncle 's household spoke like ignorant people; they used simple, rough words which only servants and peasants used at home, and other words which weren't Chinese at al l . (5) After some unpleasant teasing for his language, Tan resolves that "he must always remember to speak to his cousins, in the way he spoke to servants and peasants at home" (6). In this land, too, he observes that the enterprising and successful businessman is the signifier o f masculinity, and wealth is the path to power, unlike China, where education in the Classics and in Confucianism is the route to power (25). Tan also finds out that his Confucianist values o f righteousness and familial loyalty, which form part of Tan's phantasmatic of masculine vir i l i ty , have no place in the Nanyang. He dreams o f becoming a hero to his Singapore family by revealing to his uncle that his storekeeper, Chua, is cheating him in business: "He imagined himself finding proof of Chua's dishonesty, and bringing him to justice like a famous judge in old stories" (44). But Chua successfully outwits Tan. The protagonist then sees not only his dream of masculine heroism going up in smoke, but finds he is reviled by his uncle as a thief and cheat as wel l . His moral ineffectivity only matches his physical and psychic lack of male vir i l i ty: Tan is attacked by Chua's secret-society henchman, thrown into the Singapore River, and left for dead (49-50). Tan's symbolic death, the defeat o f his masculine identity, is metaphor o f his alienation from China and classical Chinese culture brought on by migration to a 'foreign' land, which is represented as a loss o f male identity. For Tan, Singapore is "a foreign, highly Westernized country" (27). But his male/ethnic defeat in the diaspora is represented as the necessary condition that brings him back to Chinese culture, to his patriarchal legacy. In Kon ' s Chinese fantasy, Singapore's ' real ' non-Chineseness (in the sense o f an absence of high culture), its national difference as previously imagined during the independence movement and the following two decades, is re-construed as the castration that causes the phantasmatic desire for Chinese ethnic revival, which is to be cathected as the recovery o f male identity. 250 His family thinks that Tan is dead, but rescued by the L i m family, a humble fishing family o f father L i m Chew, son Chong Beng and stepdaughter Quek Choo, Tan decides to remain 'dead' to his family since he is unable to come to terms with the dishonor he had brought to it by this inadvertent bad luck. However, as he moves further and further away from his core familial meanings, widening the chasm between him and China, Tan gets ironically closer to his Chinese culture, though his response to it now is a desiring, imaginary one. L i v i n g now with the L i m family at their rustic beachfront home, eating simple meals, working with his hands, and reading the newspaper daily (his father had looked down on the newspaper as a worthless, plebeian literary form), Tan has moved into an entirely different world, class-wise and in terms o f physical environment. It is also at this point that Tan cuts off his "queue," his long plait o f hair that symbolizes his mandarin, upper-class male power. A s he walks away, "leaving more o f his past lying with the cut hair on the floor," we get the message o f the castration from Chinese roots in the diaspora. Yet it is precisely at this moment, as i f in compensation for it, that he renews contact with Chinese poetry, responding to Singapore's very different tropical seaside at Siglap Beach in terms of the familiar visual and spiritual paradigms used in Chinese poems about moonlight and waves. He also starts to read the Classics daily before setting off on his manual work, though he finds that his response to it now is closer to his affect, filled more with desire, than it ever was before: He seemed to be listening to the voices of the great scholars o f the past, who discussed Confucius with such loving attention. The Classics were not dry to them, but their source for everything they believed in, their guide for every action. A s a schoolboy, Boon Jin had studied the Classic Books as classroom texts to be learned by rote. N o w he came to understand his Confucian tradition better than before. (68-69) Tan imagines himself now as dead to his family, and even dreams one day that he sees his name inscribed on a wooden spirit tablet on the family's ancestral altar. In the dream, his mother is unable to see or hear his presence (62-3). Yet it is during this period, when Tan is deeply aware o f his utter 251 alienation from his family, his complete difference from them, that he is imaginarily able to turn his Singaporean non-Chinese 'difference' (that of capitalism) into the Chinese 'same' (of filial piety, o f honoring one's parents). Boon Jin didn't feel easy in deciding to let his family think he was dead. But he could see a chance for a new kind o f life in front of him. He would make his fortune, and one day he would go home and surprise everyone. His parents would be overjoyed to find that he wasn't dead after al l ; he would bow to them and give them money that would solve all their problems. (54 -55) Again , this desiring move is made as an imaginary compensation for that which he has lost. A s the narrator says, Tan "day-dreamed [thus] to soothe his guilty feelings" (55). Here, guilt about capital accumulation (Westernization) is escaped by reconciling it with family honor. Tan imagines that capital accumulation w i l l literally as wel l as figuratively restore his identity and bring him within the circuit of Chinese patriarchal norms of masculinity demanded from sons. Thus does the very alien value o f capital accumulation get stitched to core Confucian and classical Chinese values. But i f Tan manages to elide that alterity between Singapore and China, his father w i l l not al low him to carry out that masquerade o f the different as same. Returning home after he has made his fortune, Tan finds his father unimpressed by his wealth. To the father, Tan's Reformism, his belief in modernization, democracy and in a constitutional monarchy, has made him a traitor to his family and to China. It would seem that the patriarch cannot accept Tan's identification o f the "Chinese soul" as merely comprising knowledge o f Chinese history and the teachings o f Confucius and the classical poets. Neither can he agree with Tan's rejection o f empire and China as central signifiers o f Chinese ethnic identity. Tan tells his father his ideas about Chinese identity in the diaspora: "Chinese identity and culture can survive even without the Chinese nation . . . In America, I've seen people who are loyal American citizens, and they keep their Chinese identity." K o n , through Tan, likens the might of Chinese culture to that o f Western culture, conveniently erasing the problem of the cross-cultural influence of Western civil ization on Chinese culture through colonial dominance and showing up the unacknowledged Western identification 252 involved in Singapore's assertion o f its Chinese-ness. "Just as the influence o f Greece and Rome has shaped Western civi l izat ion," he tells his father, "so Chinese culture can survive wherever our people go, though the Chinese empire falls" (151). The minority Singapore reader w i l l also not miss, as expressed in this revealing comparison, the desire of the Singaporean Chinese ethnic subject to emulate the West's colonization o f other cultures, which is how the West secured its current cultural supremacy. However, Tan's father couldn't accept this "separation between culture and national loyalty" (151). He scolds Tan: "What is this treasonable talk about the fall of the Empire?" Father shouted, standing up. "I w i l l hear no more. What kind of unnatural son are you? Thank heaven I have your brother to keep our family honor. Y o u are a curse to me, not a blessing, you are a disgrace to us, a shame to your ancestors!'" (151) His father also tells Tan that he had "become a barbarian in the South, bringing back [his] barbarian wife! Y o u have forgotten all the teaching you were given and turned away from your ancestors; you are a disloyal, unfilial son!" (151). A s the novel shows, Tan can only live such notions o f diasporic Chinese identity with the death o f the father/China and with his sense o f his own guilty contribution to that death. Tan's father and brother (who is a government official) die at the hands o f Dr. Sun Yat Sen's Nationalist forces when they take over the country in 1911. It is seminal that Tan himself contributed money towards this revolutionary effort. Tan's determination then that he " w i l l never go back to China," "not while it is ruled by the men who kil led my family" is thus strange i f not a deliberation prevarication and a self-delusion that constitutes his desire for ethnic culture (159). B y putting the blame on others, he escapes from his own guilty knowledge o f his contribution to the death o f China/his father. Notwithstanding his funding o f the revolution and his anti-monarchic sentiments, Tan judges that "he seemed to be the only person in Singapore who felt regret that more than two thousand years o f China's history had been swept away" (159). But he also recycles that guilt of parental betrayal to keep himself ensconced in the safe, 253 economic comfort o f Singapore. Again , the ideologeme o f guilt allows the ethnic subject to be hysterically in two places at once, in the West and in China. Going back to China (I would suggest both psychically as wel l as literally) would have jeopardized the very negation o f central aspects o f high Chinese culture on which his imaginary ethnic subjectivity turns. It is only when China/his father is ki l led off as the site o f original Chinese identity that Tan can put in its place the 'other' Nanyang Chinese culture. The death of his father and 'Ch ina ' enables Tan to imaginarily substitute the father with an academy devoted to the study o f the Chinese classics and the preservation o f Confucianist philosophy, where the latter involves, as fetish, the disavowal as wel l as implicit recognition o f the castration o f the father/high Chinese culture. This undecidability in Kon ' s attitude to China is a symptom of the split desire o f Singaporean Chinese in the 1980s towards their Chinese heritage. The enjoyment the writer obviously derives from representing China as dead, a China that's recoverable only from a distance via the fetishization o f Confucianism, may be read as the disguised sneaking into this narrative o f contemporary Singapore's dis-identification with and antipathy towards Communist China as wel l as its historical alienation from high Chinese culture. The novel starts by foregrounding the end o f the Chinese empire. Tan, watching a public celebration in Singapore in 1906, his first year in the Nanyang, is not aware that only five years away, the Nanyang Chinese would haul down the yellow dragon flag for ceremonial burning. The aristocratic Chinese Consul in his Mandarin robes, now among the honored guests at Government House, would find himself hiding in terror from blood-thirsty mobs. The Old China he represented—the world into which Boon Jin had been born—would be completely swept away. (8-9) The novel then moves with desire toward this moment in 1911. One does not sense any genuine remorse in Kon ' s description of the end o f the Old China, though there does appear to be some semblance o f nostalgia. For K o n , the event would appear to be the demise of that which had already 254 been long dead. In the epigrams to chapter 7, she quotes both Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the leader o f the Revolutionaries and Dr. L i m Boon Keng, who speaks for the Reformists. Dr . Sun's quote, "The Reformers are indulging in the futile occupation o f trying to revive the dead," is balanced against Dr. L i m ' s statement, "The man who dares to plan a revolt in China o f today is not a man but a fierce fiend, i f he realizes all the horrors his diabolical work w i l l cause" (85) but the Singapore reader w i l l ascribe prophetic meanings of communist rule in China as the "horrors" that are to come to China. In a quote from the Chinese Book o f Histories which serves as epigraph for chapter 11, we are encouraged to read the trouble in China as a sign that "the Mandate of Heaven has changed," that the spirit o f Chinese culture has migrated to Singapore (141). Detailing the celebrations in Singapore and Malaya, she says that it "showed that in the minds o f the most pragmatic, there was no more future in supporting the Imperial Government" (158). The first reports o f the fall o f Peking to revolutionaries were false, so that the celebration o f the fall o f the Chinese empire in Singapore, was at first "imaginary," K o n says in a symptomatic use o f the word: The fall o f Peking was an imaginary event, that was more powerful than the truth. The story made people dismantle the loyalties and thought habits of a lifetime; and when that period o f rejoicing ended, the Empire of China was a ghost that had no more power over the minds o f its people. (158) Perhaps Kon ' s use o f the word "imaginary" is a return of the repressed 'Rea l ' announcing the involvement o f authorial desire and the "imaginary" (as opposed to history-as-facf) and disrupting the 'truth' in this re-inscription of Singapore as the "new China" that emerges with the death of the " O l d China." K o n ' s frequent resort to dreams and her detailed tracking o f Tan's fantasies and his desire suggests that she is more than a little aware of the role o f fantasy in her own imagining o f Singapore's Chinese-ness. With in the novel, a nostalgic desire for a dying/dead China runs side by side with the desire to literally and psychically destroy that China. Due to that, Tan's monarchic, pro-Reform politics is 255 considered only slightly better than the desire of the Revolutionaries to force an end to the Chinese empire. The revolutionary figure L i m Chong Beng is represented positively, not as someone fanatical or over-idealistic. L i m visits China and witnesses the monarchy's oppression o f the poor. This fires his revolutionary zeal and lends it moral credence. While seeming to grieve the end o f the Chinese empire, the novel also thereby recognizes its oppressiveness. The virtual celebration of the demise o f China that occurs in this novel is ideologically necessary to reconcile the state's Asianizing/Confucianizing o f Singapore with Singapore's own late-capitalist and modern culture. The novel represses the thought that historical circumstances such as migration, colonialism and modernization must necessarily displace a quintessential Chinese ethnicity or at least transform it. This fantasy of an essentialized, ahistorical Chinese culture that survives spatial and temporal dislocation requires however that both Chinese and the 'other' cultures be fetishized (objectivized), and, as objects, therefore rendered incapable of coming into any dialectical confrontation with each other. Kon ' s fictional Tan, a Chinese scholar-cum-businessman and other characters such as the real L i m Boon Keng, a doctor o f Western medicine who is also a Reform movement activist anxious to preserve Chinese culture, are offered as figures that dramatize the possibility that East and West can co-exist, and did co-exist in Singapore without contradicting each other. Tan, for instance, is represented as being able to retain his belief in the imperialist ideologies contained in the Trimester Classics and Confucianism even while transforming himself into a successful businessman and an egalitarian modernist. The desire for the Western as 'other' runs side by side with the desire to retain the Chinese ' s e l f But as the text shows, this co-existence o f traditional Chinese culture with modernism/Westernization is an uneasy alliance o f the modern/Western with Confucianism, where a dialogization is only possible with the death o f essential Confucianist values such as patriarchal power and political authoritarianism exemplified in Tan's father's death and the end o f the Chinese empire, which ironically also makes that dialogization inauthentic. 256 The Singapore government's emphasis on Chinese studies in recovering a quintessential Chinese culture is hence revealed in this novel to be a fantasy in which a part of Chinese culture can be internalized in an identificatory process only on condition that the rest is dead. The Chinese classics function as the imaginary substitute for the lost father: the rem(a)inder o f the death o f the father. I f the Lacanian phallus is metaphor o f patriarchal order, the Chinese classics are its metonym. In the process, post-colonial, immigrant Singaporean Chinese subjectivity is represented as an under-developed male subjectivity. Since the ego-ideal, Tan, is only a partial image of the real father, we get a partial and ambivalent masculinity posing as the whole. A t points, the novel veers dangerously close to representing the Chinese heritage as feminine. Tan's mother and sister-in-law are the only ones who survive the Nationalist movement's destruction in China and make it safely to Singapore. I f fetishes involve the projection of masculine lack onto woman and the denial o f that lack via the vehicle o f the woman's body, then the study o f the classics is the mistaken finding o f the phallus on the body of woman, where something female (the breast/ Chinese classics) is mistaken for something male (the phallus/father). Significantly, it is Tan's wife, L i m Quek Choo, who suggests that the death of the father/China can be imaginatively deferred by the study of the Chinese classics and the setting up o f the Wenguang Chinese Academy (160). Thinking of founding this academy, "Boon Jin put aside his guilt and regrets" (161). The Chinese academy then is the symbol o f Singapore Chinese guilt concerning the betrayal o f their ethnic culture: it substitutes for the absence in the real of Chinese Confucianist culture. The paradigms o f the adventure story and historical biography are used to establish the male heroism of post-colonial Chinese subjectivity. Capitalism forms the background to this Chinese male vir i l i ty. Tan and L i m Chong Beng's move from the rural to the urban, from selling fish to processing rubber and manufacturing rubber products enters them into the circulation of international capital and modernization. It is this that finances and makes possible their political activism and sees them 257 becoming important community leaders. A s the novel's epilogue tells us, L i m Chong Beng was even a martyr to the Chinese cause, as he who died fighting the Japanese in Manchuria (162). It remains however a fragile masculinity, which finds a place for the Singapore Chinese modern woman. She can pursue her agenda o f modernization and female emancipation but not at the expense of failing to prop up the (fragile) masculine identity of her men. A s mothers and as wives, women are allegedly needed to repair male castration. L i m Quek Choo, Tan's wife, is a firm believer in the feminism of Indonesian princess Raden Adjeng Kart ini , and she has in the past criticized the Chinese Trimester Classics and classical literary language as so much phallogocentric ideology and a strategy to maintain class power (65-68). She also views herself as non-Chinese (she grew up in Java, and her racial origins are uncertain) and is educated in Western ideas. But it is this woman that K o n selects as patroness o f Confucianist studies! Female Chinese desire and identity is hence linked to the restoration o f patriarchal power, at least in making sure that its substitute works effectively. Supposedly, only strong women such as L i m Quek Choo can manage this. The feminist threat to a Confucianist revival is thereby disarmed. The subtext is that i f women aren't up to this challenge they could find themselves having to accept eunuchs or psychically traumatized men as their partners, not to mention that the foundations of social organization itself could crumble! Tan's wife, for instance, suggests the founding of a Confucianist academy to soothe her husband's mental turbulence and guilt surrounding the death o f his father. Despite having found the phallic substitute, this 'normal ' male world o f post-colonial Chinese identity has not achieved perfection. The novel ends with a dream that implicates Singapore's ethnic fantasy o f Chinese-ness in a contradictory non-adult male subjectivity, with vague references to homoeroticism. Tan, with his father dead and himself at peace because o f his decision to found an academy of Chinese studies, dreams o f himself as a boy chasing after butterflies in play with another boy. Going by his yel low dress, his playmate is the child-Emperor of China. This pastoral haven is supposedly Singapore as the 'new China ' (though K o n never explicitly calls Singapore this): it certainly 258 is the future as Tan imagines it, which is destined to be in Singapore. The two children are playing on a "green hillside, among old blackened timbers half-buried in the earth," where Singapore is represented as the regenerative spirit o f an ancient culture. They run "happy and unafraid, over grass and tiny flowers growing between the quiet ruins," playing "along the old paths o f a forgotten garden." "The light o f a clear spring morning in China shone around them" (my emphasis, 161). The epilogue ends in a manner that suggests successful ideologizing by the state. Tan's grandson, speaks of his grandfather and recalls that he had told him that "there are some eternal and unchanging truths . . . and in our new society we should still keep hold o f them" (162). But i f K o n is running away from the ' real ' of history, even Chinese classical texts point to the phantasmatic nature o f her search for cultural roots, of her pursuit of the eternal in the historical itself. In her epigraph to chapter 11, K o n quotes the Book of Histories, which suggests that even divine w i l l changes over time: " N o w Heaven is sending down calamity on the state of Chow. . . . Y o u should realize that the Mandate o f Heaven has changed"(141). Gift from the Gods (1990) by Christine Lim Su-Chen In the state's discourse o f Asian identity, we saw that modernity and traditional Asian/Chinese culture were viewed as reconcilable elements, in part by excluding notions of liberal or radical democracy which were proclaimed to be "Western" and selectively re-defining modernity. The antagonisms between them were foreclosed from the discourse. L i m ' s novel emerges from this space o f repression: it pits what may be recognized as a Western feminist discourse (which the novel disavows) against oppressively patriarchal aspects of Chinese culture. I want to argue that this does not, however, amount to a subversion of state ideology. It passes the 'censors' by using a form of this Western feminist discourse, a dialogue between a modern Chinese woman and her maternal past, but in order to dissociate from the maternal past. The novel imagines away the contradictions between 'modernity' and Chinese culture by defining 'As ian modernity' as a 'native' feminist response to Chinese ethnic experience, 259 where the two, modernity and Chinese culture are supposedly dialecticized. This Sinicized modernity is expressed in the form of a writing event: a Chinese woman attempts to define her modern subjectivity as a response to the oppressions suffered by her mother and grandmother as women under an ethnic patriarchal culture. In doing so, contemporary Chinese modernity is not allowed to be viewed as a capitulation to capitalism, as a contamination by Western culture. A Hakka cradle-song, which serves as the novel's epigram, establishes the Chinese-ness of its feminist interest so that the reader is not encouraged to interpret this 'As ian modern' writing as involving a West/East cross-cultural hybridity. The song foregrounds the writing event as a feminist response to the gender inequalities and female oppression characterizing a past Singapore Chinese immigrant culture: H o w sad it is to be a woman; Nothing is held so cheap. Boys stand strong and firm, L i k e gods fallen out of heaven. N o one is glad when a girl is born. (5) Modernity as it is complicitious with Western imperialism is shunted outside the novel, but I w i l l argue that this 'outside' shapes and fashions the novel from within, refusing it as an expression o f an ethnicized modernity. For instance, the narrator, Yent i , ensconced in her perspective o f 'modernity,' represents Singapore Chinese culture as feminine (i.e. weak, decrepit, sensual), primitive, as belonging to a different time (of the past), which is dramatically similar to Eurocentric colonial readings o f Chinese culture. This 'modern Chinese' response to traditional Chinese culture is thereby always-already Westernized. The novel's tour de force however consists o f the paradoxical manner in which it 'reconciles' feminism (the Western modern, here pretending to be 'Chinese' modern) with desire for a patriarchal Chinese tradition. It does this, I w i l l argue, by producing feminist discourse as lack, as the desire for female liberation that arises out o f the absence o f the father and the father's story. Thus, female desire in the narrative points towards yearning for the father, while masquerading as a desire to be 260 free o f the mother and of the mother's experiences of oppression. This 'modern' space gestured at by the novel is deliberately rendered ambiguously, mystified and disguised through the use o f non-realistic modes o f representation such as the dream and fantasy. In doing so, it unwittingly reveals that the state's similar vagueness about the Asian modern may have something to do, like the novel, with the fact that it insincerely mouths the cause o f feminism while carrying out an agenda of patriarchal control. A t the end o f the novel, Yent i says that she recalled her past in order to exorcise it, leaving her to be free "to sculpt a new me" (213). But this 'modern' and new space of subjectivity can be read in two ways within the novel: as liberating Yent i towards a modern, feminist subjectivity, or as releasing her from her mother's desire so that she can search for the absent father. Just as the state sacrifices female freedom for 'As ian modernization,' so too Yenti , and through her, L i m , cathect state ideology by representing modern Singapore Chinese 'feminist' subjectivity as an awareness of lack, as castration, so that the Singapore Chinese feminist cause must be to search for wholeness, and thus, for the phallus, for the symbolic order o f the ancient Chinese past. This justification of Asian modernity, of women welcoming an ancient patriarchal tradition, can only exist as secret fantasy however: it can never be spoken, at least not in English, because to do so would be to expose it as merely another moment o f female oppression, as patriarchal revivalism. It is the desire that can only be known through a false, mystifying name, as "As ian modernity." This novel lends itself to reading as a feminist text, as a novel that exposes a culture's history of female oppression. Its Chinese 'difference,' where it historically records, I would maintain with accuracy, the trials and tribulations of Chinese women working-class immigrants attempting to survive in Malaysia and Singapore in the early years of this century, also allows it to be received as a post-colonial feminist text. Being effectively bilingual, Christine L i m is also able to convincingly communicate the 'native' voice of Singapore's early 20th-century Chinese working class, illiterate women. Though the novel is written in English, the novel's narrator obviously received her oral women's history lessons from her mother and grandmother in Chinese dialect, so that this women's 261 herstory is a translation into English o f these women's experiences. Chinese idioms and proverbs pervade the novel and provide a sense o f an authentic 'Chinese' immigrant female textuality. But this textuality also often serves to represent Singapore Chinese women as hysterical, resorting to melodrama to hide their wrong-doing and guilt. For instance, when Yenti ' s mother, Yoke- l in , gives birth to Yent i , her father-in-law banishes her and her new-born daughter from his home. Chinese idiom is used to portray the full force of patriarchal oppression and contempt for women. Yent i is regarded as a "piglet," and her birth is considered "bad luck," while her mother, in giving birth to a gir l , is considered a "broomstick spirit" (the Chinese regard broomsticks, when used at auspicious moments in the home such as during the Chinese N e w Year, as sweeping good luck out o f the house): "Stop that piglet's cry!" her father-in-law yelled. "No crying under my roof! I am not dead yet! Stop the tears! Change the luck! Get that broomstick spirit out o f my house! Nothing but bad luck since she came! Out! Mother and daughter out! Y o u hear me in there! Out!" (15) But the direct voice o f patriarchal oppression is seldom heard in a novel where the woman's voice dominates. In this incident, patriarchal oppression is countered with Yoke- l in ' s foster-mother Tai K u ' s response to the birth o f the gir l . She takes in mother and daughter but only because o f public knowledge regarding her arrangement o f the marriage: "She was angry . . . that Yoke- l in had brought dishonor and loss o f face to her, and yet, she, Tai K u must not be seen to abandon her adopted daughter at a time like this. After al l everybody knew that she had made this match for Yoke - l i n . " She is not therefore naturally inclined to take in Yoke- l in and Yent i . But she w i l l not admit her guilty involvement in her adopted daughter's fate: she married Yoke- l in off for a good dowry without investigating the would-be-husband, who was a Communist insurgent being hunted down by the government. Instead, she represents her act o f providing shelter as an immensely kind act, adopting a martyr-like pose. In public, she defends her daughter while, in private, she harangues her for wrong-doing. She tells A h Sow, a neighbor and wife o f a noodle hawker: 262 " A h Sow, you tell me what wrong my daughter has done?" Tai K u began. " L i k e swallowing a dead cat, my mouth's stuffed! Y o u tell me what can a mother do? Y o u slave to bring up your daughter! Not my flesh, but never mind! Y o u make sure she's married wel l . Then what happens? She returns crying, a new-born babe in her arms! I've no more face to hide! Y o u have the heart to throw mother and baby out? I, Tai K u , am not like other mothers. I haven't! (28) When her friends suggest that she shouldn't spend so much on a " g i r l , " Tai K u , who is o f like mind, begs to differ: " N o grandchild of mine shall come into this world poor and shabby. I might be poor but I have backbone!" she says (30). But at home with Yoke- l in , she embodies patriarchal tyranny: " Y o u come home, thrown out by other people! Not a squeak from you! D i d I say a word? Ha? Answer me. I only squeeze my own heart and suffer my shame in silence. D i d I complain? N o money, did I ask you?" (36). The real patriarch o f the family, her husband Tai Shook, is, by contrast, represented as soft-spoken and kind. Ta i K u drowns out her husband's sympathy for Yoke- l in in a castrating torrent of verbal abuse: "Butcher, you keep quiet, what do you know? A poor butcher all your miserable life! Remember, she married at seventeen! I, ah, at fifteen! Who cared about me then? She at least has got me. Who did I have?" (36). But the reader knows that Tai K u has had a relatively comfortable life, barring a stint at a brothel in Malaysia . A Chinese tin-miner had married her and provided wel l for her, even procuring for her an adopted son and daughter (23-4). When he died, she married Tai Shook, a gentle-hearted butcher, who again provided wel l for her materially. Cal l ing Yoke- l in an "ingrate," for whom she'd "worked her heart out" (36), Tai K u does not mention that she had sent Yoke- l in to work at the age of 12, to wait at tables and clean dishes "from eleven in the morning to eleven at night" (32). Tai K u ' s action suggests that she had adopted Yoke- l in as a source of income for herself, pawning her jewelry to redeem Yoke - l i n from the brothel to which she had been sold by her step-father. But she proclaims her "mercy and charity" to the inhabitants o f the tenement house where she lives: "I didn't count the cost . . . When I help, I help all the way. Y o u want to accompany the Lord Buddha, accompany him all the way, I always say" (31). 263 In the tenement gossip surrounding Yoke- l in ' s return, this female Chinese textuality is again used to represent women themselves as forces of oppression, tyranny and ignorance. Among themselves, the female tenants at the tenement house agree that "Yoke- l in must have done something to sully the good name o f the Chows [her in-laws]. Why else had they asked her to leave with the baby?" (27-8). The trishaw-rider's wife "rolled her eyes knowingly. Who could say, the baby might not even be a Chow" (28). The gossip has it that Yoke- l in ' s mother-in-law herself had suggested that " i f Yoke - l in had been more submissive, her son might have stayed" (28). A h Sow herself is convinced that scandal was involved: "There was more to it than met the eye. M e n did not know and the spirits did not see, as the saying went, so who could tell what had gone wrong" (27). This novel is separated into two parts. For the most part, the novel is set in the past, beginning in Malaysia from the late 1940s and 1950s with the birth of Yenti , with some brief accounts of the earlier period. It recounts, in the third person, the history o f three generations o f Malayan Chinese women, Yent i , her mother Yoke- l in and her foster grandmother Tai K u , with Yent i as narrator. But we are brought back to the present and to Yent i ' s consciousness in brief sections o f the novel which comprise entries in Yent i ' s journal. This split in the novel between past and present, third-person and first-person narration, between translated Chinese dialect and formal English, tends to produce the impression that we have two stories here, two female points of view or subjectivities, one traditionally Chinese and one that is modern. In order to read the novel as ideological fantasy, the critical reader must overcome this split to realize that Yent i ' s modern structuring gaze pervades the novel, so that even the traditional Chinese past female subjectivity is a figment of her imagination. Yent i herself admits this: "What I am writing may be fiction mixed with fantasy, but still , fiction is fantasy made real by a few facts" (51). Yent i ' s journal entries are included in the novel, I would argue, in order to delimit non-feminist readings o f her communion with her maternal past, to disavow her anti-feminist desire for a high, patriarchal Chinese culture. In the second journal entry that interrupts the novel, Yent i says that she wants to acknowledge her ethnic roots but by breaking away from the two distinct Singaporean Chinese 264 trends in remembering the ethnic past that I have discussed, the story o f the peasants o f the soil and that o f the transplanting o f high, classical Chinese culture in Singapore. "Reverse snobbery these days," she says, "celebrates its humble pioneering origins, but the nouveau riche, like my mother in her grand mansion, dig out the successful family scholar or business tycoon to sing about" (51). Yent i then is determined to show a very different "reality," that her family had not come from "men o f vision and learning" as her mother wanted everyone to think (51). Rather Yent i wants to document the true history o f "the wave o f [Chinese] immigrants o f Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka or Hock Chia origin, the impoverished and inarticulate . . . thousands who farmed and mined the land, who worked and married and produced descendants like me, assistant curator of a museum . . . "(53). She has "chosen," she says, "to give them a voice" (53). She adds that she "is not ashamed of them anymore," but this shame is gendered in the novel. The shame-free aspect of her past is associated with her male history. Referring to the Kin ta Va l ley in Perak, Malaysia, she says: In this valley, the [Chinese] immigrants had hewn and cut, mined and fought over mining rights, tin ore and women. A few became rich and the streets of Ipoh used to bear their names. But for every Chinese name that is known, there are nameless thousands like my grandfather, Tai Shook. For them life was two bowls o f rice a day. A n d yet they have hewn a niche for themselves in the Malay Peninsula, and produced graduate grandsons and granddaughters like me. It's something to be proud of, isn't it? (50). Even her father, who left her mother destitute by running away into the Malayan jungle and joining the communists, is recuperated imaginatively as an over-idealistic but honest man. Recall ing meeting three ex-members of the Communist Party of Malaya, she says they were "hardy middle-aged men, very skillful with their hands." She sees her father in them: One of them showed us how to skin a squirrel and pull a tortoise live out o f its she l l . He chopped it up and made a delicious tortoise soup for us. Poor man, he had surrendered himself because he was starving. He seemed more like an ignorant farmer lured by false ideals for which he paid with 265 wasted years than a dangerous element out to subvert society. Sometimes I imagine that one of these had been my father and our meeting in Alor Star had been engineered by the gods. (52) But the shameful aspect of her history resides in the feminine line: Anyway, every family has its skeleton in the cupboard. I used to be ashamed that Mother was a cabaret woman turned respectable housewife, and Grandmother Tai Ku was a prostitute turned matriarch (51). At the novel's end, the last of Yenti's journal entries represents the novel as a feminist text, involving the liberation of the modern woman from a history of gender oppression: There, I've finished. I have buried my family, given each one its due, and in the process, freed myself of the ghosts which haunt the mind. This writing is an act of remembrance as well as a severance of the ties that bound me to what I was. From now on, I shall sculpt a new me! (213) Yenti is supposedly free to take on a new subjectivity. Since this is to be different from that of the Chinese women of the past, the reader must reckon that it is to be female 'modern' identity. Certainly, in her journal entries, Yenti positions herself as the modern 'other' to her mother. Unlike her mother, she went to school and does not depend financially on men. Her relationship with her husband does not involve the trickery and deceit embedded in her mother's relationship with her step-father: Ong Kim San, a millionaire's son, married Yoke-lin because he thinks her son Soo Beng is his progeny; due to her financial dependence on him, Yoke-lin had to put up with a long line of extra-marital infidelities. Since Yenti acknowledges her mother's contribution to her 'modern' life, her modernity then has been borne from traditional Asian/Chinese culture, making it an 'Asian modern' identity. The silence the novel peters into regarding the "new me" that is to be "sculpt[ed]" may perhaps be read as an implicit authorial admission of the difficulty of imagining what an Asian modern feminist subjectivity might be that wasn't already contaminated by Western notions of female emancipation. But it also, I would suggest, refers to an Asian modern female subjectivity that is 'ready' to welcome back the traditional ethnic patriarchal. 266 A feminist reading o f this novel would have to privilege Yent i ' s closing words over her opening statement. Yent i ' s journal entries begin and end the novel. While her last words deal with the 'feminist' desire to bury a past that is gendered as oppressively female, her first words speak o f desire for a paternal history: M y father ran away to jo in the Communists in the Malaysian jungles the night I was born. I don't know him. The two or three times when I tried to find out more about him, Mother pursed her lips and remained silent. That was her way of telling me that that past in her life was dead. It had been wil led out of existence. (6) The novel's narrative then is a female history, a story of the mother that is put together to substitute for the lack o f the father's story. From the start then, the reader is told that the story o f Singapore's ethnic past recalled is inauthentic in its incompleteness, in the paternal silences that it can never hope to fill because the father abandoned the daughter. The maternal story contained in the novel may be viewed as the fetish, the false substitute for the objet petit a, which is the father's story, which forms the original source o f desire for that which is missing in the female self. The desire for the paternal is hence expressed in a negative and contradictory manner: by fetishizing the mother's story, producing it as spectacle, full o f minute details, but constantly undermining the authenticity o f the story, with a 'this is not it. ' A t every point, Yent i foregrounds the fictionality o f her story, its existence as a construction of her imagination, pieced together from fragments o f the story. The questioning of the truth o f herstory is posed at every turn. As ian modernity, I would argue, is produced in this novel as the desire for the patriarchal that is . generated by the failure/lack in the narrative o f ethnic identity, represented as female. To enter or write this subjectivity, the female must unravel the story o f her maternal past, uncover its female 'shame' and burden. Discovering and thereby exorcising this sense o f an unethically oppressive culture, she can then be delivered to the shores of an Asian modern subjectivity. Yenti thus sets out to track the place she occupies within her mother's desire. This however requires the co-operation o f her mother, who refuses 267 this demand by denying Yenti access to the truth o f her desire. Yent i takes on this task o f autobiographic writing as the act o f representation that, similar to that o f the Lacanian mirror-stage, w i l l yield up a (mis) representation o f herself as a coherent whole. Just as in the mirror-stage, the child finds itself looking through the gaze of the other, which structures the self-image, (the gaze being located inside the spectacle rather than outside it), so here, too, Yenti tries to find herself through her mother's gaze. She attempts, especially, to find herself as the object o f the m/other's desire, which involves framing her mother's life-story in terms o f self-sacrifice and martyrdom, where the mother lives for the child. This narrative o f ethnic identity would have been similar to one of the two dominant narratives in Singapore where Chinese culture is figured in terms o f the pioneering, hardworking peasant immigrant from China, who rose, against all odds, from rags to riches. Yent i is wi l l ing to take on the burden o f her mother's prostitution just so long as she can find in it a motive of self-sacrifice for the daughter. This is the 'shame' o f her past that she can bear. Instead, Yenti finds herself confronting the possibility o f yet another, more unbearable shame: that her mother became a prostitute, not in order to provide for her daughter, but to ensure a comfortable life for herself. Hoping to constitute her subjectivity through her mother's gaze, Yent i is instead divested of subjectivity: her mother Yoke- l in ' s desire, she suspects, had always been directed elsewhere. Yent i traces this 'elsewhere' of Yoke- l in ' s desire with a vengeance, so that the narrative is a phantasmatic working out of maternal desire as hermeneutic puzzle. Though suspicion o f her mother's non-martyr-like and non-maternal desire is present everywhere in the novel, it is concentrated especially on Yoke- l in ' s sexual adventure at Ping Shan in Malaysia. Yoke- l in , afraid o f losing Ong, a millionaire's son whom she meets at the cabaret where she works in Singapore, approaches the temple medium at Ping Shan, to intercede with the gods for a son for her: Yoke- l in hopes that Ong w i l l marry her i f she gives him a son since the unmarried and childless Ong, himself the son o f a concubine, stands to inherit a quarter o f a mi l l ion dollars from the family when he has male offspring. This event at Ping Shan takes on a huge significance for Yent i . For her, it contains the vital clue about her mother's desire, which supposedly w i l l constitute her own selfhood, where the self emerges from its relation of desire and identification with the 'other.' Yenti reconstructs the event frankly as the answer o f her fantasy. She admits: "During my teenage years, my imagination and fantasy were fed by the bits and pieces o f conversation overheard, and so my fertile mind thinks it knows what happened between Mother and the medium of Ping Shan during her brief sojourn on that magical mountain" (124). Earlier in the novel, Yent i foregrounds the phantasmatic element of her construction o f the past (see above). In her fantasy then, and therefore in her desire, Yent i narrates the event at Ping Shan as centerpiece of her mother's betrayal of her daughter, son, and husband-to-be. It is the originating moment o f Yoke- l in ' s betrayal, where she conceives a son by having an affair with the temple medium, whom she then passes off to Ong as his progeny. Literally and figuratively, the son is a "gift from the Gods": in all likelihood, the son Soo Beng is more probably the temple medium's son than Ong's since, at the time, Ong had been busy pursuing a new love interest and had been absent from Yoke- l in ' s bed. Though Ong suspects that he is not the father, he marries her in order to claim his patrilineal inheritance. Safely ensconced in a new home, with a rich husband to take care of her material needs, Yoke- l in , when confronted with her duplicity by Yenti , tells her daughter that she did it for her: to get her a home and a good education. Yent i ' s representation of the Ping Shan event helps the reader to locate the narrator's desire. The representation of the affair between her mother and the temple medium is the only non-realistic scene in the novel. Here, Yent i ' s desire to find herself as the object o f her mother's desire gives way to or finally reveals a contradictory desire, to find a man as the object of the mother's desire. We cannot but read Yent i ' s fantasy about the 'masterly' manner in which the temple medium takes her mother sexually, sending Yoke- l in to the heights of ecstasy, as anything else but desire for masculine vir i l i ty , passion and control. She certainly appears bent on interpreting the event as something more than a cultural phenomenon where temple mediums provided an "acceptable source o f sexual pleasure and release for apparently respectable housewives" (184). 269 The novel appears to be about female gender oppression in a pre-modern Chinese culture, in response to which Yenti is trying to fashion a female Asian modern subjectivity. But we note that this effort turns on the very silence/silencing of Yoke-lin [the maternal past]. Yenti's search for the past is prompted by Yoke-lin's "pursfing] her lips and remaining] silent" (6). Yenti admits that she cannot totally re-create the past because of the language difference: to restore her mother's story, she must communicate effectively, but is prohibited by her lack of familiarity with Chinese dialect from doing so. Yenti also represents her mother as uncooperative in sharing her history, but, conversely, Yenti is relieved that her mother, Yoke-lin, will not be able to disprove her own phantasmatic re-creation of the past. She writes/imagines the very past that her mother does not want to discuss: Mother doesn't want to talk about her past, that is, her real past. What she doesn't want to remember doesn't exist. If she knew that I am writing about her roots and origins, she would be furious. Fortunately, since she cannot read English, the problem will never arise. (50) Yoke-lin is the only one who can expose the fantastic and the inaccurate in Yenti's representation of the past. But Yenti diegetically silences her mother by the very act of writing in English. In addition, both Yoke-lin and her foster-mother, Tai Ku, are only shadowy characters in the novel: they lack the complete subjectivity that Yenti is provided with. Since the novel emerges from 'Chinese' silence and from Yenti's inability to communicate in dialect with her mother, we can only conclude that this 'modern' Singapore woman's representation of the past is at least partially a Western construct. We can certainly recognize in it Western representations of Chinese culture as 'feminine.' Yenti acknowledges that her pursuit of'truth' regarding her maternal past has a Western genealogy: "Living the truth is better than living a lie. That much I've learnt from my convent education" (184). Unlike Western constructions, however, it is Singapore's post-colonial Chinese past, not the original Chinese culture itself, that is feminized. Feminist discourse is used but not to help the female subject to identify with her mother or to chart her progress from her. Rather, it provides the narrative framework with which Yenti can dis-identify with the mother, leaving the post-270 colonial female subject free to track the path of her father's desire. The novel uses a feminist form to express a content that yearns for the patriarchal. The novel, like the state discourse of Asian modernity that it implicitly supports, relies on a lack of correspondence between form and content, between its surface rhetoric and its deep content, between its connotation and its denotation. The feminist autobiographical form however combines with the emphasis on the shamefulness of Singapore's (female) ethnic past to communicate its desire for the patriarchal. 'Asian modernity' is represented in this novel as the 'other' subjectivity that is released as the post-colonial subject confronts and exorcises the shame felt towards the old ethnic culture and the oppressions that it perpetuated. Yenti claims that she has written the novel to exorcise the ghosts of shame that haunt her. Yet in the novel we see her doubling, tripling the shame, displaying it in great detail: almost as if she was getting a great deal of pleasure out of it. This motive of shame is important to the production of a feminized post-colonial Chinese culture as spectacle. The gaze of shame structures the novel's scopophilic regime, its production of truth. While the close-ups of daily life in the 1950s, with their claustrophobic female oppression, inspire desire in the reader for release into an other (ethnic) history, the 'out-of-focus' shots (such as the episode at Ping Shan) suggest that what we have gotten is only half of a story, that there may in fact be a more virile story out there that needs to be told. Lim's narrative is feminist in so far as it seeks to inscribe women's contributions to Singapore's mythologization of itself as a 'rags-to riches' story. The success story of Ong Kim San (Yoke-lin's husband) "in which the downtrodden son of the bondmaid rose to become the new master of the mansion" (210) is incomplete if it does not acknowledge the role that Yoke-lin played in this drama: it is her provision of a son for Ong that allows him to claim his paternal inheritance and thereby save the family mansion from being sold, which in turn allows him to install his mother, for so long banished to peripheral areas in the family mansion, as the new matriarch. But we must remember that it is Yoke-lin's sexual union with the temple medium, Master Loong, that sets Yoke-lin on her new path to success and power. Female delivery is fantasized here in this novel as penetration by the male. Yoke-lin's 271 sexual union with Master Loong releases her from "her hard encrusted self'(180), making her open "out like a young flower . . . molding her to receive the stream of life" (180-1), answering to that "strange confusion of fear, resistance and desire to submit to a power greater than herself." It is her fantasy about the sexual union between her mother and Master Loong that enables Yenti to finally identify with her mother and to deliver herself from her original sense of shame about her mother's past. "When I was young," Yenti says: I had judged the world like the young—from the self-righteousness of ignorance. I had kept my knowledge of Ping Shan from Mother and everyone else, clutching the piece of shame and deceit close to my heart. But now that I have tasted passion myself and felt the sting of its victory. . . What Mother did or did not do on Ping Shan no longer carries for me the same immense moral dimensions and implications it once did. (185-6) The narrator's strategy of freeing herself from the ghosts of the past precisely by opening herself to them, where "writing is an act of remembrance as well as a severance," echoes this paradoxical ideology where women's freedom can only follow from penetration by the male, where female "victory" must have the masochistic "sting." It is significant that the union of Loong and Yoke-lin is imagined by Yenti as that between the "Immortal Scholar" (one of the eight Immortals in the Chinese pantheon, who represents the "Spirit") and his bride. Master Loong himself is, either in Yenti's imagination or a fact imparted by Yoke-lin, a scholar of the Chinese classics. However, he is a metaphorically castrated scholar, one who descended from monks, but whose "passion to do the honourable thing" had finally dissipated in "steamy massage parlours, lurid bars and crowded gambling dense," leading him to bondage to a secret society, which cut off his index finger when he dared resist its control over him (162). Castrated, he is a figure of a Chinese masculine virility that has been lost in the Malayan encounter with capitalism, who represents "the lost, intense passions of men, caught in the confluence of the old and new winds of life, with little education to comprehend the contradictions both in themselves and in the world around them" (165). 272 In contrast to the female characters in the novel, Loong is the only other character aside from Yenti who is given more fully fledged characterization. We are taken into the inner recesses of Loong mind as he philosophizes about his fate. Despite his castration, Loong manages during his period with Yoke-lin to assume an identity with the Immortal Scholar as he momentarily returns to his old virile self: "For the time being, his gods were allowing him to be himself," the narrator says (177), when he impregnates Yoke-lin with the vigor she apparently needed to make something of her life. Despite her assertion that her reconstruction of the past is different from the nation's dominant imaginings of its ethnic past, Yenti's fantasy accedes to the state's emphasis on Confucianism, investing Confucianism with desire as the secret, unacknowledged male energy that was an integral part of Singapore's post-colonial vigor, but which could once again be recovered. Yenti's desire for ethnic identity is necessarily split between forgetting and remembering: as she says, the "act of remembrance" is necessary for the "severance of . . . ties" (213). Here, the novel reveals that the state's constructions of Singapore's ethnic past demands from the Singaporean Chinese that they exorcise, forget, their past understandings of Chinese ethnicity in order to shape out of these a desire for newer understandings of their Chinese-ness. Thus, the forgetting of ethnic identity is an essential aspect of its re-membering. Yenti's exorcism of Singapore's feminized, working-class Chinese culture opens out a new ethnic space where Confucianism can be desired and identified with. Singaporean post-colonial identity, as represented in Yenti's herstoriography, is constructed as an inauthentic subjectivity that has been interpellated in the absence of the father, the measure of its inauthenticity being contained in its feminine character. Seemingly paradoxically, Western culture and its racist, stereotyped renderings of Chinese culture as feminine in its degeneracy/primitivism/gender oppression are appropriated here and form the path along which the colonized subject is led to 'de-colonization,' to desire union with her (masculinized and therefore authentic) native culture. But it raises the question whether, when the path to knowledge and desire is already contaminated with the Western, the object of the quest can be authentically non-Western. Is the Chinese paternal ego-ideal gestured at by 273 the novel truly ethnic or is it merely the displaced and already colonized desire for a Western form of male subjectivity misrecognized as Chinese? Migratory displacement, colonialism and capitalism do feature implicit ly as the socio-economic structural causes for the post-colonial feminization/emasculation o f Chinese culture in the Nanyang. But by gendering this post-colonial subjectivity as female, the novel suggests that rectification o f this may be made at the level of reconstructing gender roles and attitudes rather than by opposing either capitalism or Westernization. This novel suggests that the true nature of Singapore's 'As ian modernization' agenda is anti-feminist rather than anti-Western. "The Journey" (1992) by Catherine L i m This short story (184-95) polarizes West and East and represents authentic post-colonial subjectivity as an act of achieving manhood, of being able to risk al l , including life itself, in choosing the 'mother' culture over that o f an inauthentic, foreign Western culture. The story literally represents the assertion of Chinese culture in the era o f late capitalism as a suicidal venture: the protagonist, suffering from cancer, refuses Western medical treatment in order to return home to his mother, whose Eastern/folk medicine cannot help him. This heroic return to Chinese culture however is a movement towards a Chinese culture marked by lack, a feminized culture that substitutes for the authentic, masculine culture, which is the subject's object o f desire but which is now lost and beyond knowledge. While Chinese culture was at least originally male, and its current status has a maternal, nurturing femininity, Western/capitalist culture is viewed as the demonic and seductive feminine. Richard, an immensely successful young man, who rose from the rags of an "w/w" (hick-town) existence in rural Malaysia to the riches of a business in modern, affluent Singapore, is diagnosed with cancer and finds himself torn between West and East. Should he seek hope in Western medicine and journey to see a cancer specialist in New York , or seek recovery with his mother, grandmother and aunt in his hometown. The latter's Chinese medicine may or may not work, but he reasons that they can at 274 least offer him emotional affection, support and love. His dilemma is fantasized in a dream where Richard sees himself caught between his traditionally Chinese grandmother, mother and aunt, on one side, and his Westernized wife, Mabel , on the other. In the dream, Mabel tries to stop her grandmother-in-law from feeding Richard a brew of Chinese herbal medicine. Richard is caught in "the ensuing struggle, the drink spilt all over him and stained him black." Mabel 's screams and his realization that his wife is a demonic force opposing his return to Chinese culture form the decisive moment when Richard wakes from his dream and announces that he w i l l go back to his home town to seek recovery, and not to N e w York . The dream offers a manichean vision o f the East-West conflict in post-colonial subjectivity, where Eastern culture is seen as a "bitter" but life-enhancing brew, and Western culture is the female demon working to bring a man to his death: blackness, with which Richard was stained in the dream, is a traditional Chinese signifier of death. The moment of epiphany, when the post-colonial person attains an authentic subjectivity, is hence marked here as the decision to renounce Western culture for one's ethnic culture. East and West are polarized in the story in terms of Richard's childhood past, where the female figures of grandmother, mother and aunt loom large, and his present life, where his wife dominates as a controlling force. Chinese culture is associated with the pre-urban, the non-modern, herbal medicine, superstition/the non-scientific, with poverty as wel l as with a 'cosmic ' integration with nature. Richard's grandmother 'cures' the sick by giving them herbal brews under the light of the moon, and believes that physical illnesses are caused by "evi l spirits." Grandmother, mother and aunt refuse to move in with Richard because they cannot bear the air-conditioning (the non-natural) in his home. Westernized Mabel , on the other hand, is revolted by bodily processes. Recalling his past to his wife, he tells her of a childhood incident when he had fallen into the latrine: It consisted o f a wooden hut, four feet by two feet; the wooden floor had a round hole over which a person squatted directly over a waiting receptacle, an old rusty bucket. Once . . . he had fallen through the hole, and his mother had taken a long time to clean him up, drawing up one bucket 275 after another from the wel l . He had recounted the incident once to Mabel and had immediately regretted it, for she had felt quite i l l and forbidden him to talk of such things again. (188) Whi le Eastern culture is the spiritual/emotional (identified with the maternal), Western culture is the material, objectified as a 'commodity' culture and associated with objects o f material success: the "Ar row shirt" and "Pierre Cardin tie" that Richard wears, his daughter's "piano," his son's "go-kart," and the lifestyle involving chauffeur-driven cars, picking up the wife from the hairdressers and then going for a game o f golf, etc. This Western culture also reduces the other's culture into artifact, into a commodity that can be bought and sold. Thus Western and Chinese cultures take on meanings o f class and the story's romanticized production of Chinese culture as the more authentic o f the two cultures involves also a privileging of working-class, rural ethics: Chinese culture is associated with family togetherness, and nature, and is represented as the moment before the subject is alienated from his environment through the process of commodity fetishism. Richard's journey home is not merely a reclaiming o f ethnic identity; it is the reclaiming o f his 'or iginal ' class identity. The path to Western culture, on the other hand, is one involving seduction by the better things in life, a feminine seduction of the masculine: Richard associates his wealth and its trappings with his role as husband to Mabel , providing her with the diamonds, house and lifestyle she needs for herself and her family. Mabel 's expertise at interior decor, which results in their home being featured in magazines, her ability at selling cultural artifacts, initiates Richard into Western culture. This feminization o f capitalism entails a projection onto Mabel and a disavowal of Richard's own capitalistic greed. The demonization o f Mabel ' s displaces and covers over the story o f how Richard acquired his wealth and his own desire for the Western. This feminized class seduction works until Richard faces death. Unt i l the moment he is diagnosed with cancer, Richard has less than a proper appreciation of his ethnic culture (associated with his rural past): he reduces his grandmother's knowledge o f Chinese, rural medicine to voodoo and superstition, and judges "how culturally deprived had been his environment, how starved o f the requisites o f 276 emotional and mental growth"(190). But i f Western culture is eroticized as a feminized and sexualized lure into ethnic cultural alienation and an emasculation, the return to Chinese culture is the cultural journey one makes towards the restoration of a full male subjectivity. His decision to "go home" is Richard's arrival at manhood itself, marking the point from which he moves from "abject self-pity" (191) and his wife's control to risking life itself in a reunion with more authentic kinship ties. But the Chinese culture at home too has been feminized, associated with maternal nurturing, housewifely home remedies, 'o ld wives ' tales,' storytelling, and domesticity. Richard has no accession to a masculinized ethnic identity: with his father long since dead, Richard can only wonder "whether, i f his father were alive, conditions would have been more bearable?" (189). Desire in the story then is re-directed from a maternal culture to the lost, patriarchal culture. The Sin-Kheh (1993^ by Goh Sin Tub Goh Sin Tub's semi-fictional biography o f his grandfather shows that the representation o f Singaporean Chinese cultural identity as a feminized Chinese identity, where a male Chinese subjectivity has departed, is not restricted to women writers. In this novel, the narrator's grandfather, Wee Sin Kay , arrives in Singapore from China in 1894, works as a seaman, a chinchew, meets and marries Y e o M a h Cheng, and starts a family. He is later deported from Singapore by the colonial authorities when the tongs (secret societies) frame him for possession o f counterfeit money plates. Forced to return to China, he leaves behind his wife to look after their many children and to make a l iving. Goh admits in his notes about the novel that his imaginative quest for his grandfather Goh Swee Tin (on whom the novel's hero, Wee Sin K a y is based) led him instead to his grandmother Yap M a h Cheng (on whom the novel 's character Y e o M a h Cheng is based). He says: In putting together material for this story, I came to realise that the real hero (or rather heroine) o f my own family story was my grandmother Yap M a h Cheng, who became mother and father to her 277 string o f children and struggled through those hard times in an often hostile environment to ensure for her family (and their descendants like myself) the good life. (168) Goh 's novel clarifies the use o f feminized Chinese subjectivity as a trope for a post-colonial Singaporean culture. In his novel, this feminized Chinese culture is viewed as the rem(a)inder, as what was left o f an original Chinese masculine subjectivity that was either 'banned' by colonial culture, or transformed (even deformed) by it. Yeo M a h Cheng takes over the care o f her family upon an order from the patriarch Wee, and she cathects his patriarchal wishes in her ambitions for her family. Leaving Singapore upon his banishment from the island by the colonial authorities, Wee's last words to his wife are: "Be strong, my little M a h Cheng! Remember you are now the head o f our family. Be the Empress Dowager. The Queen Victoria , as they say here!" (116). Wee's reading o f colonial Western culture (with Queen Victoria as its role model) as being the same as Chinese feminist culture (figured by the Empress Dowager) covers over important differences between the two female rulers. The Empress Dowager was never a ruler in her own right, unlike Queen Victor ia : concubine o f a preceding emperor, she was a (female) usurper who had the emperor Guang X u imprisoned in the palace following the Reform of 1898 and ruled in his place as Regent. L i k e the Empress Dowager, then, M a h Cheng rules in the patriarch's name: She had this single-minded ambition: her sons must complete their schooling in the first-class Gan Eng Seng English school to which their father had thoughtfully sent them and all expenses their education called for must be met. (118) M a h Cheng works hard to see her children into the future by becoming a seamstress, being mother and father all rolled into one. But her sons' eventual success in Singapore is finally attributed to the patriarch's vision: "S in K a y had the foresight to send his boys to an English school instead of the Chinese school nearby in Telok Ayer Street, and so they were going to do w e l l " (112). She also agrees with her husband that 278 the girls [their daughters] were no problem. They did not need schooling and they could be married off easily once fifteen or sixteen. The market was good, there being a shortage o f females in the colony. (113-14) In so many other ways, too, M a h Cheng (Singapore) is a woman who molds herself and her family by identifying with an absent patriarchal gaze, therefore rendering it present. She frightens off gangsters who come to loot her house in her husband's absence by becoming the image of her husband as the kungfu fighter, and exhorting her sons too to take up the legacy of their patriarchal heritage: She remembered Sin K a y ' s last words to her. She was now Empress Dowager, she was Queen Victor ia . She called her three boys together and told them what to do. "Remember! Y o u are the Sin-kheh's sons, afraid of no-one!" So when her door was suddenly flung open to them, the samsengs [street fighters] saw before them an awesome and totally unexpected sight: one strangely fierce woman . . . a businesslike parang [huge knife] firmly clutched in one hand ready to swing into action, and in the background three bulging-eyed boys, the smallest boy upfront unarmed but rigid in a kungfu posture, the biggest behind him holding a meat chopper, the last boy at the back wielding a firewood axe. (118) M a h Cheng's strength then as woman and mother is a masculinized femininity, a female identity fashioning itself under male identity and male values, keeping patriarchal culture alive in its absence, preparing for the day when it w i l l return to bestow its approval. When Wee leaves, he promises that "someday, somehow," he would "find a way and come back secretly. Yes , some happier day . . . Y o u w i l l hear a knock on the door, you w i l l open it, and there I w i l l be!" (115-6) That "happier day" turns out to be the occasion of the birth o f his first grandson, the day when his wife secures for him his patrilineal heritage. 279 The feminization o f Chinese culture is a gendered metaphor for the changes wrought to the original ethnic culture by its cross-cultural encounter with colonial, Western culture and marks this culture's transformation by the historical, geographical, economic and geo-cultural circumstances o f immigration. The sin-kheh ("new guest") were Chinese immigrants who came to Singapore looking for work (mostly as manual laborers but also in the tin mines). In the popular Singapore imagination and in this novel, they are a symbol of Singapore's representation o f itself as a nation of dispossessed who rose to success through their working-class values such as hard work, endurance, thrift, and strong familial bonds. According to this novel, the sin-kheh arrived in Singapore, like Wee Sin Kay , full o f an Asian/Chinese masculine viri l i ty. One o f the first things Wee does upon landing in Singapore is to prove this Chinese masculine vir i l i ty. Encountering some secret society thugs who make fun o f him, he rolls up his sleeves and decimates them with his kungfu moves. This male viri le subjectivity however is 'othered' by its self-control and its respect for a "no-nonsense countryfolk values . . . a peasant moral streak" from the Chinese hyper-masculinity o f secret-society fighters (29). Wee therefore declines recruitment into the top ranks o f the tongs. Wee's 'Chinese ' masculinity is different from that o f Black Dog's , the head o f the 18 tong. It involves balancing passion with loyalty to his traditional moral code. The "conflicting pull o f passion and loyalty" (28) and its resolution is eroticized when Wee has to choose between having a passionate affair with the femme fatale, Jade, or marrying M a h Cheng, who was "every bit the shy Chinese female" (18). In deciding to marry M a h Cheng, with whom he fell in love at first sight, Wee balances passion with loyalty to his ethnic values. His countryfolk values, we are told, "reined him back from galloping on too far with his simultaneous romantic pursuits." These also steer him away from crime and material greed, stopping him from "following that call to a get-rich-quick career with the tong that was now practically his for the a s k i n g . . . " (29). Black Dog's Chinese masculinity is, by contrast, pathologized. His excessive dependence on and enjoyment of violence and bullying is linked to a pathological sexuality: it is suggested that he is both incestuous and homosexual, apparently a case of Chinese masculinity turning in 280 narcissistically on itself. He has sex with his sister, Jade, but it is obvious that this incestuous act is not only motivated by his desire for his sister, but also for Wee. Brother and sister fornicate while making plans to get rid o f Wee, who has jilted Jade and who refuses to jo in Black Dog's tong : In the lul l [of their sexual activity], they started talking about what had brought them together. Sin K a y . A n d that got them up once more. (107) The banishment of Wee from Singapore (his sentence for being in possession of counterfeit money plates) works as a metaphor in the novel to signify the lack of a place in colonial Singapore for an original masculine Chinese culture. Wee's banishment from Singapore (the banishment of this culture) results from the conflict between his Chinese values and the values o f colonial Singapore. He is, firstly, emasculated by Singapore's business culture, this emasculation and his heroic resistance to it leading to his entrapment by the 18 long and by Jade. Then, colonial law criminalizes Wee's Chinese male heroism: it is Wee's patriarchal desire to protect his family from harm as wel l as his sense o f justice that delivers him into the hands of the secret society and eventually to the colonial police: he has j i l ted Jade and betrayed a member of the 18 tong to the police, and hence feels that he must pay for this in some manner. But it is Wee's surrender to female desire that begins the chain of events that leads to his banishment from Singapore: he witnessed the murder o f his wife's best friend by the 18 tong, and it is his wife's demand that he avenge this murder that leads him to betray the 18 tong to the colonial police. Singapore's capitalism is represented in this novel as emasculating, as one of the forces that displaces the original male Chinese culture on the island. But this Chinese culture survives second-hand through M a h Cheng. Wee's character is the prototype o f the mythological masculine Chinese adventurousness and enterprising spirit that is today associated with Singapore's bold entry into the modern era: Sin K a y was at heart a good man . . . but from young he had always had that streak o f restlessness, he had always been the adventurer, readily seduced by the new and unusual, game to take on risks for the prospect o f thrills and quick rewards, unhappy under the restraint of routine (16). 281 It is not surprising that Wee gives up a desk-bound job as clerk in his younger brother's business to become a seaman, holding up his future brother-in-law Captain Yeo Leng, "the foghorn-voiced captain with dancing eyes, jaunty beard and endless escapades in exotic places," as his "swashbuckling" hero or ego-ideal (15-16). Wee is different from the Straits Chinese businessman: he is virile whereas, as Wee's brother notes, the "Peranakan descendants of Chinese seemed to have become . . . emasculated from entrepreneurship" (15). But when his brother-in-law suffers from a stroke, a sense of family responsibility forces Wee to manage his opium business. This splits Wee's desire: though he enjoys the get-rich-quick aspect o f business, his "peasant moral streak" means that he must temper that enjoyment with guilt (94). So it is almost with relief that Wee succumbs to his fate o f banishment from Singapore: "He yearned to return to the sea, to the old good life, the clean air of the waves. A w a y from people. A w a y from all this concrete jungle, this choking atmosphere" (100). The novel represents Singapore's cultural history then as that of the entry into Singapore o f an enterprising, "swashbuckling" sin-kheh peasant masculine Chinese culture, whose encounter with colonialism and capitalism resulted in one o f three fates. Either it forces this culture to depart, as with Wee, but not before leaving behind a positive feminized version of this culture; or it becomes hyper-masculinized and narcissistic, as with Black Dog and the secret societies, feeding on its most violent aspects, where Chinese heroic masculinity degenerates into gangsterism; or, it becomes emasculated through business and colonial subjugation, as supposedly with the Straits Chinese. The author prioritizes the first as the dominant narrative o f Singapore Chinese cultural heritage in that it is Wee's descendants who form the modern, progressive cultural energy o f present-day Singapore. About 70 years after Wee's departure from Singapore, his grandson (his eldest son's child) demolishes his mother's old neighborhood and home, building on its spot "a 52-storey skyscraper on the same spot for a giant bank named after the overseas Chinese" (142). Another grandson has becomes one o f Singapore's foremost writers, Goh Sin Tub, the autobiographical frame o f this novel bringing the author into the circuit of the novel's meanings. The implicit meanings o f this feminization o f this original Chinese male culture, o f 282 the difference between the former and the latter, would seem to be allegorized in Wee's children, who inherited his values and qualities but who were brought up by their mother. His eldest son Song's English-education and his success as a bank officer marks him out as different from his father, where Singapore has feminized an original male Chinese culture through its encounter with English culture and with commerce. On the other hand, the heritage of the masculine Chinese culture has toughened the female aspects o f Chinese culture: before marriage, M a h Cheng was a typical Chinese village girl in her innocence and gentleness, but when cornered by circumstances to look after her family, she becomes tough, enduring, and ambitious. Wee's cultural legacy to his daughter may be read as a masculinization of female culture: she is "one tough cookie," "who could fight and hold her own against any boy in the neighbourhood," who grows up to be "strong-willed, a person who knew what she wanted and was prepared to struggle for it" (85). The soothsayers' mix ups (they predict a son when it is a daughter, and a daughter who turns out to be a son) are prophetic of their insight into Singapore cultural identity as that involving gender inversions: where male Chinese values are feminized (Wee's third son backs out of a fight), and Chinese female values are masculinized: even as a child, Wee's daughter is a strong 'mother,' "playing hopscotch with other girls . . . with one little brother or sister strapped to her back" (121). Goh 's narrative taps into a founding myth of Singapore as a nation which rose from rags to riches on the sweat, hard work, imaginative enterprise and the sheer instinct for survival o f dispossessed, rugged and poor immigrants. Though this myth had existed in the earlier decades of the nation and validated Singapore as a meritocratic society where even the poorest of the poor could rise to success, its ' A s i a n ' racial/ethnic cultural meanings were stressed and further developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Singapore's history books, written by government writers for school-use, such as the C D I S ' history textbook History o f Modern Singapore (first published in 1984, during the government's Asianizing project), celebrate the successful business and industrialist immigrant-pioneers as the true representatives o f Singapore's national history. During this period, the literary genre of pioneer biographies provided a paradigm for l inking Singapore's success to its 'As i an ' values. Goh's novel is contemporaneous with the publication 283 of an entire collection of biographies and autobiographies o f the poor Chinese immigrants who became the nation's first tycoons. Eating S a l t - A n Autobiography by Ho R i h H w a (1991), The Tiger K i n g : The Li fe and Times of A w Boon Haw by Sam K i n g (1992) as well as biographies o f Singapore Chinese businessmen-philanthropists Tan K a h Kee, Whampoa Hoo A h Kay , banker Lee Chee Seng, hotelier L ien Y i n g Chow and an autobiography of K w e k Hong Png, the patriarch of Singapore's Hong Leong conglomerate, were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1994, the semi-governmental Singapore Broadcasting Corporation also produced a series o f television programs on Singapore's successful immigrant pioneers. B y equating the nation's economic roots with its ethnic roots and ethnic values, this myth claims to be 'As ian . ' A s many of these biographies show, however, it is a West-East cross-cultural myth, where Chinese/Asian values are made to reconcile with the values o f Western capitalism. For instance, the "Publisher's Note" frames Eating Salt, the autobiography o f H o R i h Hwa, as the story o f "an Asian entrepreneur who has pioneered technology, seized opportunities to build a fortune during the post-war years . . . . A l l this, while holding true to the traditional Chinese tenets o f behavior." In this frame, the capitalist enterprise is linked to Chinese male traditional virtues o f endurance and notions o f purposeful l iving. In Goh 's novel, the pioneer myth is further nationalized, democratized and Sinicized so as to allow even the average Chinese Singaporean to see himself/herself in its mirror. Here, the immigrant doesn't need to be a tycoon in order to be considered a pioneer. The sin-kheh are elevated to pioneer status as a class solely on account of their being the forefathers o f the present Singapore Chinese. Their achievements may have been modest in their own lifetime, but Singapore's successes spanning the 20th-century are attributed to them, especially to their Asian ethics of hard work and moral rigor. Except for the absence o f the pot of gold at the end, the sin-kheh are rendered as replicas o f the pioneer immigrant in their work ethic, their ability to endure, their imagination and their daring. The anonymous and ordinary immigrant's story borrows from the heroic elements o f the pioneer's narrative to make the ordinary, extraordinary. The novel's jacket says: "Into old Singapore one hundred years ago sailed an 284 immigrant from A m o y to seek his fortune, determined to fight for his independence. Wee Sin K a y is . . . . The Sin-Kheh." Wee's first name Sin-Kay, a homonym of sin-kheh makes this not just an imaginative biography o f a pioneer immigrant but a generic biography representing an original national culture. This democratization o f the pioneer narrative, where it is transformed from being a metonym of the nation's story (about one class of capital owners) to being its metaphor, however, also changes the narrative's gender regime. Where other pioneer narratives emphasized the Chinese immigrant's patriarchal 'As ian masculinity' as the source of Singapore's cultural/spiritual strength, Goh 's more democratic version, given as it is to casting its net over people's failures as wel l as their successes and over women's stories, recognizes the transformation of the original ethnic culture in its encounter with historical and foreign cultural forces, though he genders this transformation as feminine. For Goh, the search for ethnic identity is the search for one's grandfather, and marks the yearning o f the Singaporean subject for an absent, departed patriarchal culture), for the absent male origins o f Singaporean Chinese (feminized and hence derivative) cultural identity, which is ironically the story he cannot write. The Bondmaid (1995) by Catherine Lim In this novel, L i m reverses the gender regime she had employed previously. N o longer is Singapore's immigrant Chinese culture represented as an effeminization of an original virile culture, that involves female betrayal. Neither is this female betrayal allowed to become a metaphor for the ethnic subject's supposed seduction by capitalist/Western culture, as it was in her short story "Journey." In this novel, set in the earlier half o f this century, Singapore's Chinese immigrant culture is represented as the degeneration in Singapore o f an original patriarchal ethnic culture in its encounter with another patriarchal (Western) culture of capitalism. Chinese patriarchal power in the House o f W u , a powerful and wealthy Chinese family in Singapore, is hence doubled by money, worsening women's lot since class and gender oppression now intersect. Singapore's early immigrant Chinese culture is represented most unsympathetically as merely involving the abuse o f women: aging patriarchs rape young female 285 servants; Buddhist monks prey on unsuspecting women; young girls are sold as bondmaids to rich households, etc. But the feminist insurrection o f Han, a lowly bondmaid who refuses the command of the dominant order, tears apart this structure of patriarchal power: at the novel's end, her lover descends into a life-long depression, while her oppressors are forced to leave Singapore and return to China in order to escape from her curse. Han's feminist spirit may be viewed as the 'modernity' that destroys this early immigrant culture. In that she derives her revolutionary strength from praying to an ancient Chinese goddess, the "Goddess without Eyes and Ears" (with whom she is later identified in popular gossip), bypassing the 'patriarchal' "Sky God , " the reader is encouraged to read Han as the figure o f the 'As ian modern.' But this 'As ian modern' is itself a cross-cultural East-West subjectivity that ambivalently hide its Western genealogy only to expose it at other moments in the novel. For instance, this ethnicized modern set o f values is embodied in a few men in the novel, Han's lover W u and his father, who are differentiated from the rest of the men in the W u household: they do not view women as sexual objects and do not abuse their patriarchal privileges. But they are both also the only men in the household who are Western-educated. Though Han's modernity is represented as ethnic in its relation to a subsidiary Chinese religion and mythology, the narrator also foregrounds Han's subjectivity as one that is imagined, a fictional creation o f the narrator, who is not only modern but writes in English. On one level, Han's feminist revolt against Singapore Chinese patriarchal exploitation has no recourse to the Western modern discourse o f feminism: she is uneducated and, as a bondmaid, is shut out from direct contact with colonial culture. But her story is framed as a fictional speculation by the narrator from tiny fragments of a story surfacing from the past. We are told in the "Prologue" that the biography o f the bondmaid takes off from a real event when, in 1992, Singapore newspapers had covered a story concerning an old man. The caretaker of a dilapidated shrine along K i o San Thong Road, he was refusing to clear out from the shrine, which was targeted for a $300 mil l ion industrial development complex, turning down compensation o f several mil l ion dollars. The narrator implicit ly acknowledges the participation o f her own phantasmatic in imaginatively 'retrieving' Han's history: the narrator says the history is an imaginative reconstruction of an incoherent "story" floated about by the incident and "never properly pieced together, o f a young woman who had died there under the most tragic circumstances, sometime in the middle 1950s," who was "later seen in the vicinity by many people . . . [who] erected a shrine to her and, for some reason, called her 'Goddess without Eyes and Ears. ' The old caretaker was said to be connected with her in some way—a brother? a friend? a lover?" Hence Han's history is the narrator's projection into the past o f present (modern feminist) desire. But the 'As ian modern' is also cross-cultural in that the representation of Han's feminism is implicated in unacknowledged, intertextual references to Western women's writings. In her collection of short stories published just immediately before this novel, The Women's Book o f Superlatives. L i m admits to a fascination with and familiarity with Charlotte Bronte's feminism. I w i l l show that Han's feminism is developed according to the terms of a cultural revolution, like the one delineated in E m i l y Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights. The novel is subversive. L i m here represents the desire for Chinese culture as the desire for a feminist insurgency, for the restoration o f a pre-patriarchal Chinese culture. It implici t ly refuses the state's equation o f Chinese culture with Confucianism. Published at a time when the government's Asianiz ing agenda was still commanding public attention, the negative representation o f Singapore's early Chinese immigrant culture as a decadent collaboration between East and West patriarchal power does appear to suggest that the state's ideology of the "Asian modern" may be history repeating itself, where Chinese/Asian ethnic tradition is called upon to reinforce the patriarchal oppressiveness of capitalism/modernity/Western culture. L i m appears to have turned around in her previous anti-feminist attitudes. Women's Book, published in 1993, a collection of international short stories based on real-life events, critiques patriarchal oppression around the globe. But L i m ' s subversion o f state ideology in Bondmaid also comes after her unpleasant confrontation with the power of the state in 1994/5. L i m had been represented by the prime minister as politically dangerous, a perception that her later public apology to the Prime Minister did 287 nothing to mitigate. L i m ' s column stopped appearing in the newspaper, and, the next year, the wr i te r -who had previously been published by Singapore's leading publishers of local literature, Times Books International—self-financed the publication of Bondmaid . 1 5 L i m ' s novel is not openly hostile to government ideology. It uses many tactics to disguise its subversion. A s I have said, it does not acknowledge its Western intertextualities: this from a writer who had, just two years ago, openly identified with Charlotte Bronte's sense of female oppression in Women's Book (Prologue 4-12). In Women's Book . L i m demystifies men's glorification of women as a fantasy that allows men to escape from guilt concerning their oppression o f women. She says: " Y o u [men] sing paeans to us; you put us on pedestals, in the shining clouds o f myths and legends as your goddesses, warrior queens, glorious martyrs, virgin brides. They have nothing to do with the reality. Perhaps they are to compensate for the reality." (12) Yet , in Bondmaid, she adopts this very same male phantasmatic strategy by representing Han as a Chinese goddess. Though the 'As ian modern' is encoded in the novel's "Prologue" as a contemporary feminist subjectivity (that belonging to the narrator), the author/narrator is also at pains to suggest that this As ian modern subjectivity is now dead. The containment of Han's feminist revolution within the past is effected in the prologue itself when the reader is told that "the bulldozers moved in. Today a huge petrochemical complex stands where once the strange goddess with eyes and ears dispensed miracles." But L i m also prevents Han's feminism from escaping into the present by ki l l ing off her character: though Han brings a degenerating Chinese patriarchal culture to its knees, she herself dies in the process. Neither is her son allowed to survive. W u himself is quite mad and so cannot keep her story alive. A d d to this, the literary techniques o f mystification that L i m uses where feminist desire is expressed in dreams (see below). I would suggest that Bondmaid's ambivalence about feminism and the desire for Western culture is a cultural symptom. It testifies that the dominant ideology of Asian/Chinese national identity has driven contemporary Singapore women's desire for female emancipation and Western culture 'underground.' The novel suggests especially that the representation o f contemporary feminist 288 desire must be displaced into Singapore's past and dealt with as a 'dead' subject i f it is to get past the 'censors' o f the currently dominant ideology of Asian/Chinese identity that Singaporeans have invested in. The text shows that Singapore women need to hide and deny a very real part o f their cultural experience (their Western education, and Singapore's history itself o f colonization and capitalism which transformed gender roles/attitudes) in order to demand a fair hearing in Singapore society. Meanwhile, the subterfuge compromises the feminist cause itself. A l s o , L i m ' s fairly convincing representation of the Western as Asian in this novel, where Han's ' A s i a n ' feminism is really a re-staging of Heathcliffe's revolution against Western aristocratic culture in E m i l y Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights, also casts doubt on the ethnic purity o f the government's own notions of the 'As ian modern.' In Bronte's novel, capitalism is expressed as a hystericized desire for upper-class privileges and culture arising among the poor and dispossessed. Heathcliffe, as an orphan o f unknown origins, does not go through the child's normal pre-Oedipal and Oedipal processes of desire and identification with his parents. A s a heterosexual male subject in the making, he is not commanded by the law of the father to identify with the father and to substitute his desire for his mother with another love-object. Subjectivity is usually constituted through separation from the mother or primary care-giver, as a response to this lack or loss. This separation, necessary for subject-formation, is executed by the intercession o f the Symbolic Order. In Heathcliffe's case, the Symbolic Order attributes lack to him: instead o f interpellating him as a subject in terms o f his difference from the mother, it interpellates him as a non-subject. This lack of being itself propels Heathcliffe into his relationship with Catherine. He derives his selfhood from identification with her: he is her, and she is him. He sees himself through her gaze, and identifies with her desire, the classic scenario of hysteria in Lacanian psychoanalysis (see chapter 1). The hysterical subject is also the revolutionary subject, who rejects the Symbolic Order. Heathcliffe imagines himself as equal to and the same as Catherine, despite her class, gender (perhaps even racial) difference. When the Symbolic Order intercedes again, to interpellate Heathcliffe as different from Catherine, Heathcliffe must necessarily refuse this interpellation: to do otherwise would mean sinking into non-being again. Instead, Heathcliffe identifies with Catherine's desire: i f she wants a rich and propertied lover, then he must beget himself that wealth and property and become the object o f her desire. Wi th the entry o f the Lintons into Catherine's life, Heathcliffe can no longer locate himself as a subject through Catherine's gaze, the gaze o f the 'Other.' His desire for selfhood is now eroticized: his goal o f identity must henceforth be pursued in terms o f obtaining Catherine as lover. Since Catherine's own desires are for power and wealth, these attain erotic value for Heathcliffe. Capitalism then is represented in the novel as that cultural moment when the desire for selfhood is eroticized as the pursuit o f wealth and power. A t this moment, too, the subject is sexualized and the quest o f wealth and power is also the quest for male identity. Capitalism is also represented as originating in the subject's hysterical refusal to occupy the subject position constructed for it by the desire of the B i g Other, of gentry culture. Heathcliffe refuses to see himself through the eyes of the Lintons, as poor and inferior in culture, and hence as not deserving their respect or consideration. The tragic relationship between the child Han and the young master W u is similar to that between Heathcliffe and Catherine. Just like Bronte's famous lovers, Han and W u are orphans. Both o f W u ' s parents are dead: his mother died soon after his birth, and his father committed suicide shortly after. Han's mother sold off her youngest daughter as a bondmaid to the House o f W u . A s with Heathcliffe's identification with Catherine, Han's love for W u is a displacement o f her love for her mother and Older Brother. Han reaches out to W u in utter destitution, when, after being abandoned in the W u household by her mother, a temple medium 'exorcises' her demons by burning her body with lit joss-sticks. Her memory o f the meeting with W u is dense with the association o f primary affect: Somewhere in the child Han's mind was a dim memory o f herself lying sick on a wet mattress, in a room filled with angry adult faces rising from joss-fumes. The faces became open screaming mouths, attacking hands, kicking feet. Somebody held her down and somebody else forced a drink down her throat which came out again in a raging torrent, carrying out everything with it, so that 290 she felt completely empty, like an egg sucked out of its insides. She remembered an excruciating hunger, and then everybody stopped shouting and turned to look at the young master W u who had come into the room. He went straight to her and gave her something sweet and warm to ea t . . . . The child never spoke about the memory to anybody. There was the other memory o f a loved older brother who had carried her about on his shoulders and on his hips, making her laugh out loud in joy. Some vestige o f the old adulation remaining in her small faithful breast, she resuscitated it and re-directed it towards the young master, nursing it to feverish flowering. . . . (72) Wu ' s and Han's childhood friendship is reminiscent o f Catherine's and Heathcliffe's in that "the children's fascination with each other was exclusive" and crosses class boundaries, W u showing "no interest in the stream of little visitors, as impeccably dressed as himself," and Han having "no interest in the village children who sometimes came up with their mothers to help in the housework" (71-2). The "awareness o f adult reproof had been the only moderating influence on their intense inseparability. A s soon as he awoke, the boy asked to be taken down to play with her; as soon as she finished the small chores she had been assigned, she darted out of the servant's part of the mansion and went in search o f the boy," meeting " in a paroxysm of pure j oy" (70). Their "childhood's engaging pr imit ivism" involves the revolutionary rejection o f dominant cultural codes: master and servant, princeling and beggar: childhood's insouciance sent the walls tumbling . . . Wal ls upon walls: the boy broke through the bounds of a lonely swaddled childhood in a house of protective females, the girl through the barricades of a hundred raised voices and hands to remind her of who she was and to keep her in her place. (71) But just as Heathcliffe's dream childhood comes to an end, so does Han's, and her amalgam of desire for and identification with W u is now eroticized and W u must necessarily become her sexual love-object. L i k e Heathcliffe, Han too sees herself looking in from the outside as her playmate meets with other children his own class, and with L i - L i , from the House o f Chang, who is to be his future wife. Han is 291 unable to catch Wu ' s gaze nor to find herself in his gaze as he remains fascinated by posh toys, by the trappings o f wealth: The child knew there was a window looking into the room from the outside. She ran outside, dragged two flower pots, to a spot below the window ledge, put one on top o f the other and mounted them to have a peep inside. Watched by the bondmaids, the three children in the room were on the floor, playing with trains whose magnificent tracks stretched the whole length of the room . . . . Handsome toys, lavish food on the table—Han had never seen such a spread; lavish adulation from the bondmaids—the bondmaid Pin was fanning Miss L i - L i with a paper fan and the bondmaid Lan was now and again wiping off the perspiration on young Master Wu ' s forehead with a small white towel . . . . Mis s L i - L i , clad in her finest, another shade of pink, was smiling and pointing excitedly to the moving trains . . . . She [Han] tried to catch the boy Wu ' s eyes, waving a large cigarette-box . . . . Cigarette-box stood no chance against train; the boy's eyes were glued on the toy and never lifted. (107-10) When W u finally looks out at her, her heart beating wi ld ly , she waved at him. He merely stared, as i f unable to fit her presence into the present scheme o f enjoyment. Frantically, she pulled out the cigarette-box, mouthing something to suggest the wondrousness o f its contents. But he had already turned his back on her and gone back to his friends. The child Han turned pale. It had never happened before, and happening for the first time, it convulsed her with shock. The dull pain flared into a bright flame o f anger. For the first time, other sensations—jealousy, a sense o f betrayal, a screaming sense o f loss—combined with longing to form a single surge o f furious energy that pitched the child forward and caused her to beat at the window, shouting and crying. She banged with both fists, screaming to be allowed in. (110) 292 Since male identity is linked to wealth, Heathcliffe is able to use capital accumulation to overcome his class ' lack. ' Han does not have this recourse since money w i l l not provide the gentility, the upper-class breeding that forms women's erotic appeal: as Miss L i - L i warns Han, "you mustn't forget you're a bondmaid, a mere servant gir l . How can you have such audacity? The young master o f the House of Wu w i l l never stoop so low as to look at a bondmaid" (208). But her childhood relationship o f equality with W u enables Han's hysterical refusal of the desire o f the big Other o f patriarchal Chinese culture. Han's response to M i s s L i - L i ' s statement, " I f that is so, then you have nothing to worry about," is similar to the answer Elizabeth Bennet gives to Lady Catherine in Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice. Lady Catherine claims that Darcy is promised to her daughter, and wants to know i f her nephew had proposed to Bennet. Bennet answers thus: "Only this: that i f he is so, you can have no reason to suppose he w i l l make an offer to me" (273). Han exploits loopholes in the Chinese discourse o f female desirability to carry out her feminist rebellion: for instance, she plays the role of "loving woman" and bears W u a son. But this cannot cover over the fact that her rebellion originates in a foreign, non-Chinese cultural space. Without that Brontean strategy o f a particular type o f idyll ic inter-class and inter-gender childhood relationship that allows the formation o f a revolutionary consciousness, Han could not have come to her awareness o f the female and class oppressions involved in her ethnic culture, nor o f her right to human dignity. A t the very most, like Chu, who had to serve the patriarch sexually from age 15 (including enforced participation in sexual orgies), Han could only have responded with hatred and revenge. Chu's elder sister died at 20 from sexual abuse from the same man. Chu avenges herself and her sister much later in life and only when the opportunity finally presents itself: she deceives her rapist, now old and helpless, into eating fecal matter and insects' droppings which she places in his food. But the thought of protesting against the rape when it occurred had never occurred to Chu. Bound as they are materially and ideologically into their cultural situation, the other bondmaids in the W u household are incapable o f thinking of their human rights, which would have enabled them to cry rape. Han's subjectivity is 'different': she openly rebels against 293 and foils sexual abuse by the men in the W u household and the visiting Buddhist monk. Han's feminist notions are ethnicized through her devotion to the Chinese "Goddess with Eyes and Ears." Finding an old, abandoned shrine of a goddess near the W u home, Han creates her own feminist mythology through fantasy. She thinks o f this goddess as a feminist rebel, who plots to castrate her abuser, the Chinese patriarchal Sky God. Han projects her desired female power onto the goddess. But she creates this Chinese feminist mythology only after her very unusual childhood experience o f gender and class equality. B y contrast, Han's mother, who is just as aware as Han of female oppression and resents her pitiful life as abused wife and poor peasant, goes so far as to spit on the ashes o f the Sky God , whom she calls the "god with no eyes or ears." Unl ike Han, though, she never realizes the gender bias o f the Sky God religion itself. Han's 'difference,' perceived by everyone around her as demonic (she is often said to be possessed by demons), is an admission of Han's non-Chineseness: her sense o f women's rights and demand o f equity is alien to her cultural environment, so that only the supernatural (demonic) can account for it. A s in Wuthering Heights, the romantic and realistic modes are used together in Bondmaid. In Bronte's novel, the romantic mode of representation (where Catherine's ghost appears to Lockwood and to Heathcliffe after her death, the reunion of the two lovers in life-after-death, and the use o f dreams) enables the writer to represent the unconscious as well as desires not approved by dominant ideology. The romantic mode allows the unacceptable, the unthinkable, that which is repressed in the present cultural order to take form, and in a disguised manner. In Bondmaid. Han is unable to verbalize her desire even in her communication with the Sky-God, her desire for W u being unthinkable within her cultural orbit. Ask ing the god to grant her what her heart desires, "she left unspecified the desire [for union with Wu] , in the belief that even an all-knowing deity could be tricked into answering an audacious request i f the audacity lay hidden under a generality" (my emphasis, 124). Han's erotic dreams and her fantasies about her union with W u after death as ghost-lovers allow her to represent and to know the depths o f her tabooed desires in a culturally acceptable manner: stories o f ghost-lovers, 294 whose forbidden love is fulfilled after death, form the cultural idiom of Han's environment. In dream, too, cultural subversion and non-approved desires can take refuge in hermeneutic ambiguity. For instance, Han's dream about the Sky-God's violent rape of the goddess may be read as signifier of her sexual fear o f the men in the W u household. Or it could be read as L im/Han ' s damning representation o f Chinese culture, even its religion, as violently, unbearably patriarchal, oppressive o f women's bodies and their desire. The dream in which the goddess castrates Sky-God, and then invites the bondmaids, including Han, to castrate the men renders real, v ia representation, the desire o f Chinese women to avenge their oppressors, and to discover the sources of their own power. But the romantic mode also answers perfectly to L i m ' s need to disguise the foreign/modern/Western as the ethnic/Chinese, where modern or Western ideology o f women's rights and democracy is sneaked into an ethnic cultural idiom: where, for instance, feminist rebellion can be mythologized as the re-discovery of an ancient and long-forgotten Chinese religion involving the worship o f a goddess. Literary realism, which emphasises developed dialogue and characterization, would most l ikely have revealed the Western intertextualities of this novel's feminist and modern ideology. The novel ends with Han destroying the patriarchal order of Chinese culture but herself dying in the process. She gives birth to a son and manages finally to win W u over: while she is dying, he manages at last to speak the "love and longing that had stayed in shadows all those years" when he had been too overwhelmed by his culture's class ideology (378). If Han had survived the birth o f her son, W u would have probably publicly acknowledged her as his secondary wife. Even Han's brother comes to realize his wrong-doing in procuring women for a brothel. He undergoes "a period of self-chastisement in a temple" and finally settles in a foreign country ("Epilogue"). A t any rate, Han's feminist insurrection makes it impossible for Chinese patriarchal culture to survive. Both her son and Wu ' s daughter by L i - L i die, their deaths attributed to Han's death-bed curse on the W u and Chang ( L i - L i ' s ) families. L i - L i herself approaches insanity with her grief over her daughter's death, while W u becomes "reclusive, keeping to himself and behaving like a madman" ("Epilogue"). In the end, tormented by Han's curse, 295 the W u and Chang families leave Singapore to return to China as "curses do not travel over water" ("Epilogue"). Only W u remains, who, by taking care of the goddess' shrine, is now to be identified with Han. Wi th her progeny dead, and both W u and her shrine displaced by a new petrochemical complex, Han's feminist revolution is contained within the past. 296 Notes 1 M y references are to a selected edition of Yeo ' s anthology published in 1989 with the same title. This edition features stories from Yeo ' s earlier anthology which had been selected for study by the Cambridge Examination Syndicate for the O-level examinations. Twenty-Two Malaysian Stories. Qtd. in Y e o 126-7. 3 Y e o says that the two-volume anthology Singapore Short Stories , published in 1978, were taught and read in schools soon after publication ("Introduction" ix). 4 Given that there are three L ims mentioned in this chapter (Christine L i m , Catherine L i m and Shirley L i m ) , I w i l l refer to them by their full names in order to avoid ambiguity except where reference is obvious. 5 Straits Times has officially stated its identification with the government on a few occasions. In an article, "The Press in Singapore—the Misconceptions and the Reality," an editor with the newspaper, Fel ix Soh, defends the newspaper against public criticism o f its pro-government stance, which he notes "undermines the newspaper's credibility." He counters: "But the reality is that Straits Times—as well as other S P H [Singapore Press Holdings] publications—is pro-Singapore. The fact is that being pro-Singapore and pro-government coincide on many issues and occasions" (ST 3 June 1993: 27). 6 K o h Tai A n n points to a contradiction in the state's cultural policies, towards wanting to develop a national, integrated culture that surmounts ethnic differences, but also encouraging the cultural differences among the races by promoting traditional art forms ("Culture" 712). I hope I have shown in chapter 2 that this is not really contradictory, that an "As ian" national culture is being promoted as that which the various ethnic communities share in common. Between the 1970s and 1980s, the terms o f a "national, integrated culture" have changed quite drastically, so that it still forms a government ideal but not in the previous manner of a cultural hybridity. Also , this 'contradictory' cultural policy is 297 strategically related to a "divide-and-rule" agenda, where national solidarity, as something existing among the people, is to be displaced by solidarity between each separate ethnic group and the state. 7 Playwright Tan Tarn How ' s "Diary of Censorship" o f his play The Lady o f Soul gives an account o f transactions between the state's censorship authority, Public Entertainment and Licensing Uni t (Pelu), and the producers of theatre. It reveals the tight boundaries culture producers work within when making social-political commentary. Tan notes that Pelu's objections to his play included the critical references to Singapore as a nation without soul, the representation of government committtees as ineffective, and the unfavourable portrayal of ministers and c iv i l servants (75). g The Minister o f Arts and Information, B G George Yeo , elaborated on the roles o f writers and the state. Attacking journalists for their criticism o f political leaders, he said: "Debate, yes, but do not take on those in authority as 'equals' " ("Debate, yes," ST 20 Feb. 1995: 19). Another incident that took place a year earlier, between January and February 1994, also indicates the government's view that the arts are/should be non-political. In a joint statement made by the ministries o f home affairs and the arts against a production o f performance art, the government said that such new art forms "pose greater risks to public order, security and decency." Such art and dramatic forms, it said, "may be exploited to agitate the audience on volatile social issues, or to propagate the beliefs and messages o f deviant social or religious groups, or as a means o f subversion" ("Sequence," S I 8 Feb. 1994: 18). 1 0 In the incident quoted in the previous note, for instance, Straits Times made an issue o f two Singapore dramatists attending a left-wing drama workshops at the Brecht Forum held in N e w York . The report o f the government's response to the performance art was accompanied by an account o f how reporter Fe l ix Soh chased and confirmed the story of A l v i n Tan and Haresh Sharma's attendance at this Marxist event. Soh interviewed a spokesman for the Brecht Forum, whose remarks about the political nature o f drama were faithfully reported as i f it were 'news' (which indeed it probably was for Straits 298 Times). She is reported to have said: "There is a political function to what we are doing. We are using art to work for social change" ("Sequence," ST 8 Feb. 1994: 18). 1 1 I was placed in a similar dilemma in 1995 when editing the books column of Eight Days, a weekly cultural/entertainment magazine published by the former Singapore Broadcasting Corporation. In the event, I used socially and politically inflected literary criticism only on non-Singaporean literary texts. Earlier, in 1991, when reviewing local art for the same magazine, I had tried a "Cultural Studies" type o f approach but only to celebrate rather than critique aspects of local cultural representation. 12 "Notes on the Mobil izat ion of Women into the Economy and Politics o f Singapore," Occasional Paper no. 23 (Singapore: Dept. of Political Science, National U of Singapore, 1975) qtd. in Puroshotam, "Women" 326. 13 Prime Minister 's Address to the National Trades Union Congress to mark 1975 as the International Women's Year, qtd. in Puroshotam, "Women" 327. 1 4 A s Kon ' s novel shows, in the early 1900s until the fall of the Qing empire in 1911, China 's and its overseas-Chinese political activists were split between those wanting to 'modernize' the monarchy and establish a democratic system within the framework of a constitutional monarchy (the reformists) and those who wanted its overthrow (the revolutionaries). 1 5 K o h Buck Song reports on the difficulties L i m faced in finding a publisher for Bondmaid but does not mention her relationship with the government as a possible factor for publishers' sudden lack o f interest in the writer's work ("Over-Cautious Publishers," ST 15 Jan. 1996: 4). 299 Chapter 5 The Cut at the Center: Male Identity in Crisis in Singaporean Drama In the last chapter, I dealt with novels and short fiction written in the 1980s and 1990 which attempt to offer new myths of origin of the nation that are in keeping with the current state-authorized nationalism. I showed how these novels and short fiction hegemonize this discourse of identity by Sinicizing Singapore history, demonizing certain ideologies such as feminism and individual rights, and recirculating readers' desire from a post-colonial East-West cultural hybridity represented as female (impure, weak, hysterical, lacking), channeling it instead towards a Chinese culture represented as male (strong, pure, promising the return of an ethnic cultural power conceived as the restoration of a male, de-colonized identity). Deep affect was invested in the discourse of the revival of ethnic culture by figuring Singapore cultural identity in terms of the search for an abandoned or lost father. But given that the new discourse of national identity involved a denial and backtracking on an older discourse of an East-West culture, desire became conflicted. In many of these texts, this conflict is addressed by taking on a subject-position of guilt and/or shame from which this 'strange,' 'archaic,' unfamiliar ethnic culture could be both desired and distanced through fetishization. In this chapter, I will turn towards Singapore English-language theater, a form that began to attract a popular following in the 1980s. This was the era in which the ruling party promoted the development of cultural activities in line with a vision of Singapore as an international center of the arts. As Koh Tai Ann notes, "in the 1980s there has been a tremendous upsurge of interest in local drama in the three main language streams of English, Chinese and Malay" which reversed a long-time trend where drama in English especially was a mainly middle-class activity depending on the enthusiasms of "would-be Thespians" ("Culture" 727). This was also the period of the emergence, for the first time, of professional 300 drama companies. M u c h o f the interest in local drama in English was sustained by Theatreworks, which ensured a steady stream of plays and whipped up enthusiasm among theater-goers and drama workers for locally written plays in an industry previously dominated by the production o f colonial and European plays. Wi th corporate sponsorship, more generous public funding o f the arts and the expansion o f the middle class in the late 1980s and 1990s, local drama in English provided a source o f entertainment, especially to young urban professionals and university and pre-university students. Even though more drama companies began to form, Theatreworks continued to maintain its leading position so that its role in territorializing desire and suggesting national identifications cannot be ignored in the construction of a hegemonic discourse o f culture. Four of the five plays discussed in this chapter were produced by this company. Wi th press and television writers and producers as its founding-members, Theatreworks inevitably drew participation from personnel in the mass media who, daily in their work, had to confront and cope with the government's discourse of national identity. This influence pervaded their writing for the local theater and, in the 1990s, a body of plays was written and produced that directly or indirectly approached issues o f national identity and responded to the government's stance. I w i l l discuss five of these: Private Parts by Michael Chiang; Lest the Demons Get to M e by Russell Heng Hiang Khng ; The Lady o f Soul and the Ultimate ' S ' Machine, and Undercover by Tan Tarn How; and Descendants o f the Eunuch Admira l by K u o Pao K u n . Three o f these four playwrights have been or still are associated with the mass media. Chiang worked for Straits Times and is now chief editor o f Eight Days, a weekly entertainment/cultural magazine associated with Singapore's now-privatized broadcasting stations. Tan is a leading journalist with Straits Times and covers political issues. Heng was with Straits Times but is now associated with Singapore's Institute o f South-east Asian Studies and is also a commentator on the local political scene. In trying to track the path by which Singapore's current discourse of national identity has been hegemonized, I choose to discuss these plays over and above others such as Eleanor Wong's Mergers 301 and Accusations. K u o Pao Kun ' s The Coffin is Too B i g for the Hole and N o Parking on Odd Days, and Chng Suan Tze 's Good Asian Values which also approach issues o f national culture. These last-mentioned plays subvert state ideology whereas I am interested in studying the cultural work of those who are daily exposed to state ideology in their occupation and who are 'professional' representers of the nation as journalists. The work of Chiang, Tan and Heng commands interest in that these writers work or were working for institutions that have been associated with producing pro-government hegemonic discourses. A l s o , plays written by writers from the mass media receive greater public attention in the press and thus wield greater cultural influence. In the process, however, o f studying these particular writers, I have found that the conflict between the new and previous nationalisms appears to have plunged an important, culturally influential section of the ruling class, rising young male urban intellectuals (including the nation's top journalists) into a cultural neurosis concerning their male identity. In their works, the primary signifier o f meaning, the penis/phallus, is placed under scrutiny and found to be wanting. I f neurosis is to be defined as the stalling in meaning, as Fink does (see chapter 1), the failure even o f Singapore's experts in the manufacture of meaning has important implications for the nation's potential for cultural regeneration. K u o Pao K u n is not a journalist but some consider him to be the nation's most important playwright. His play Descendants w i l l thus be discussed, especially since it confronts head-on the government's construction o f national identity. It is also similar to the other plays in documenting a crisis in masculinity as one o f the effects on national subjectivity o f the state's Asianization/Sinicization project. K u o however probes this crisis more daringly and relentlessly than the others do, making the play one of the most salient works in Singapore drama. Kuo also offers a significant but different perspective on the Sinicization o f Singaporean national identity. He belongs to an older generation of playwrights, and, unlike the other writers, is a bilingual practitioner of theater. He is also a full-time dramatist and is free o f the type o f institutional pressures the others face, though, no doubt, he works under other tensions. He is the most 'Chinese' among these playwrights, i f it is possible to quantify ethnicity, having been 302 born and resident in China t i l l 1949 before migrating to pre-Independence Singapore. A pioneer of Chinese theater in Singapore, he is said to have "become a part o f the Singapore version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" in the 1960s and 1970s, when he worked with the Singapore Amateur Players (Jit 14). It is ironic then that among this group of playwrights, his work is the most skeptical about the state's essentialist construction o f Chinese culture as Confucianist, as is evident in Descendants, and that it should be K u o who champions a multiracial/multiethnic Asian cultural identity. But to classify him under Singapore Mandarin Theater is only to tell half the story. Kuo also has much experience with English-language theater, and studied with Australia's National Institute o f Drama Arts in the 1960s, at a time when Australian theater was beginning to be self-reflexive about national identity. After release from political detention in 1980 (he was detained in 1976 during a Singapore government anti-leftist purge), he worked with both Mandarin and English Singapore theater and pioneered experiments in multilingual theater (Jit 7-28). 1 I w i l l discuss these plays as written texts, ignoring their production history and their critical reception. Wi th the exception o f Kuo ' s text, the plays dealt with here have been published. A s such, these plays have an on-going symbolic currency in Singapore in the print media. 2 In trying to construct a coherent narrative o f the effects and patterns o f subjectification wrought by the state's discourse o f national identity, I w i l l no doubt fall prey to the limitations o f a totalized reading. The gain is that Singapore's cultural efforts w i l l be contextualized in a manner not attempted before, where it w i l l be read through local time and place; it w i l l also throw light on the ideological and psychic shifts, o f which some may be traumatic, demanded by the state's discourse o f Asian identity. In trying to bring together plays that have a claim to exist as discrete consciousnesses, some violence w i l l be incurred in emphasizing the similarities rather than the differences between the plays and in silencing other plays that do not fit into these patterns. A s far as possible, I have attempted to minimize the former by letting each play speak its difference so that the totalized reading is that of an articulation o f the relations between the plays. Culture after all undeniably achieves its effectiveness out o f the 303 accumulation o f and tensions between individual consciousnesses. I write with the conviction that I am not making a body out o f these plays but rather am tracing the outlines o f an ideological body that has gone forth before me, doing its work surreptitiously and invisibly. In doing so, I hope to make this 'body' visible. The plays considered here reveal that the state's attempt to change Singaporeans' perceptions o f their national identity has led to a cultural crisis that is causing trouble with the society's "dominant fiction" (Silverman, Male 35-48). A society's dominant fiction consists of its family ideology, which, Silverman says, includes core elements o f the Symbolic Order (the laws o f language and o f kinship structures). On its periphery are secondary ideologies relating to mode o f production such as ideologies o f race, gender and class. But the latter exist in a metaphoric relation to the binaristic terms of sexual difference that rule family ideology, which, through the Oedipus Complex, organize and delimit our desires and identifications. A s Silverman says, a contradiction haunts family ideology: the law of language dictates universal castration, where the self can come into being only through its loss or alienation (the lost ' s e l f being banished into the unconscious); but the law of kinship structure equates the father with the law and exempts him from castration. This contradiction is resolved by the imaginary by equating the phallus with the penis and the actual with the symbolic father in a central misrecognition. This fiction, which involves a denial o f castration, calls on the male subject to see himself only in terms o f images o f unimpaired masculinity and the female to desire the male subject (42). The penis serves as a 'screen' denying castration and lack of being. Connecting the secondary with the primary ideologies o f the family, Silverman says that the fragility o f this penis-phallus equation requires support from the former. Thus, changes in secondary ideologies can precipitate crises in the primary ideologies and vice-versa. I w i l l show that the plays under study indicate that changes in the master narrative, in the ideology o f race and ethnicity in Singapore, have led to crises in the primary ideology concerning male identity. The equations of phallus with penis and the actual with the symbolic father are currently very tenuous in 304 Singapore. The latter is especially shaky in a situation where state authoritarianism and interference even in familial values erodes the power of the 'actual' father. Silverman calls a situation involving threat to the belief in the dominant fiction, where society confronts the spectacle of male lack, a "historical trauma." She describes this trauma as a historical, social or natural event that brings a large group o f men into intimate relation with lack so that they are unable to sustain the phallus-penis equation (55). Traumatic neuroses, she says, are "those which are produced in response to an external event which reactivates an earlier trauma" (60). Fol lowing Freud, Silverman associates such neuroses with the death drive, which is always there in the subject and which opposes, to various and compromised degrees o f success, the ego's drive for mastery, with the drive to self-disintegration. The death drive is a threat to the ego's "psychical cohesion and binding" (60), striving to undo the latter's binding with its own "radical unbinding" (58). Such a threat is quickly followed by a process o f "cultural binding," which can involve "the gradual reaffirmation and reconstitution o f the dominant fiction" (64). But the cultural effort also repetitively stages the threats to normative masculinity and the spectacle o f male lack, which Silverman views as symptom of the death drive. Discussing Hol lywood films of the 1940s in terms of the erosion o f faith in male power caused by the world war, she documents two possible ensuing fantasies: either the male subject could accept his lack and eroticize masochism, or he could re-establish the dominant fiction and shore up the ruins o f masculinity by blaming women for its downfall (120-21). She also suggests another alternative: that new male subjectivities could be constructed that take in female desire and identification. Silverman sees revolutionary potential in the construction o f a revisionary masculinity that includes the psychic and physical marks of femininity (372). But Silverman theorizes "libidinal politics"~the politics o f desire and identification arising from the profound association o f secondary ideologies and their distribution of power with ideologies o f sexuality and gender- in a largely mono-cultural, Western context (1-3), except for some discussion o f the intersection o f male sexuality and gender with racial 'otherness' in her study o f T. E . Lawrence's 305 writings (299-338). M y reading o f recent Singapore plays does indicate the presence o f a historical trauma, a neurotic situation involving confrontation with the spectacle of male lack. But it appears to be generated by the historical event of the new Asianizing project, where the state's demand that the nation re-arrange its identifications and desires appears to have re-activated the foundational trauma of male lack that the male ego seeks to escape through myths of male power. I w i l l show that this is a trauma concerning West and East cross-culturality that appears to have injured Singaporeans' central fictions o f male identity. It also involves a rupture in cultural ' t ime' as previous identifications, fantasies and desires now become forbidden. The account of cultural binding is then l ikely to be different and more complex than in Silverman's narrative. In the plays studied here, the male subject has sundered the penis-phallus and actual father-symbolic father equations in order to exclusively identify the site o f power/masculinity with the state. He has been taught to desire this as a de-colonizing venture, as the assertion o f post-colonial difference, as the reclaiming o f a symbolic father who has been denied by the West. Some of the power that the male subject has lost to the state is imaginarily reclaimed from women and from Western culture, which is feminized. The Singapore woman, who has gained some economic and cultural power in capitalist 'modernity,' must now evacuate that space as power gets redistributed from a binaristic division o f male and female to a triple hierarchy of state, male subject with little power, and female subject with even less power. In this sense, the surrender o f male power of self-determination and the power to represent oneself to the state is accompanied by a regression towards reactionary masculinities in relations with women. It is now a commonplace of feminist psychological theory that the category of femininity is the site at which the male subject deposits and denies his lack. In these plays, however, the category of femininity is expanded to include the Western culture that must be disavowed. The disinvestment o f aspects of 'Western' culture which had been previously cathected by the Singaporean as part o f his East-West hybrid but masculine national culture is accomplished by feminizing Western values, by representing them as hysterical, excessive, perverse or delusional, thereby 306 disavowing and displacing onto the female 'other,' the lack that the Singaporean male subject feels at this amputation of parts o f a previous self. Not al l o f the male power that has been lost can be recovered imaginarily in this manner. A s Silverman says, quoting Zizek, it is through fantasy that we learn how to desire (6). The fantasy stages the mise-en-scene of desire by drawing on images on which the self is constituted (5). Hence, in the Singaporean fantasy, as seen in these plays, the new scene o f desire (for Asian/Chinese identity) can only be staged in terms o f older cultural identifications, by rejecting, inverting or incorporating them (as, for instance, by 'passing' the Western 'other' as the Asian/Chinese self). A s these plays show, the substitution in the object which is to be desired (which has changed from cultural hybridity to ethnic cultural purity) demands the generation of new identifications from old, and the re-routing o f desire. The phantasmatic, Silverman says, is not so much about the object which the subject aims at but is more concerned with working out a sequence in which the subject has a part to play (6). Through the phantasmatic then, a desiring subject-position is worked out. In plays such as Heng's Lest the Demons. Singaporean male subjects identify with the desire o f the Symbolic Order (the dominant discourse) only by assuming disempowering subject-positions as tragic victims of an inconsistent Symbolic Order, as castrated men (such as post-operation male transsexuals) and/or by demonizing, pathologizing and/or feminizing the Western 'other' (or its representatives). In some of these plays, certainly, masochism is eroticized. But perhaps the most significant psychic effect produced on the colonized 'object' by neo-colonial epistemologies such as those of neo-Orientalism could be the split executed in the 'other's desire, so that the colonized 'object' becomes a cipher, a masquerade, of subjectivity. A l l these plays show that the desire to be ' A s i a n ' or 'Chinese, ' to yield the individual's power over to the state in accordance with a particular perception/interpretation o f ethnic culture, is not unambivalent. Given the history o f the situation, the Singaporean (male) subject is deeply conflicted: he desires to be both 'As ian ' / 'Chinese ' (communitarian) and 'Western' (individualistic, democratic). This is ideologically and phantasmatically 307 resolved by the male subject imagining himself in Western scenarios for which he has himself already provided the ' tools ' for Western defeat. For instance, Singapore writers resolve their desire for resistance against state authoritarianism, which they have cathected as a 'Western' liberal-democratic norm of masculinity, by repeatedly staging this resistance only to defeat or interrogate it. A s such, masculinity is assured by a masquerade of resistance which substitutes for real resistance. In the same manner, these plays draw on the post-modern discourse of identity, deconstructing notions o f cultural authenticity, eroticizing identity as masquerade only in order to then create a space o f desire for ethnicity as masquerade. It has been noted, sometimes with disdain and worry in official quarters, that gay writers appear to dominate the local English drama scene and that they exploit marginalized sexualities on stage. The first is not true, but homosexuality, transvestitism, transsexuality and bisexuality do appear frequently in these plays. This however is not related to writers' homosexuality. Rather, marginalized sexualities are used by both gay and heterosexual writers as condensed metaphors that signify a crisis in male myths o f identity and power, that I w i l l argue has been generated by the state. In these plays, marginalized male sexualities signify cross-culturality, the crossing o f genders, in/authenticity, seeming versus being, and are important vehicles in the imagining of new identifications and desires, allowing the subject to move beyond the polarizations o f West/East and male/female. In at least two o f these plays, Chiang's Private Parts and Heng's Lest the Demons, transvestitism/transsexuality's gender crossings are used to construct alternative male subjectivities where the 'female' is appropriated into the male. The state as symbolic "father" is felt to have castrated the actual father, who is thus powerless to effectuate a proper oedipalization of his son/s. The consequent crisis in male heterosexual identity forces the male to take up more feminized subject-positions that are figured as being similar to those o f male transvestitism and transsexuality. The Singaporean male subject experiencing hysteria, lack and doubt about his masculinity identifies with the male transvestite/transsexual. But in both plays, transvestitism/transsexuality as figures also signify the 308 intersection o f cultural with gender crossings, where to be a Chinese/Asian subject desiring Western culture is equated with being a man desiring to be a woman. Strategically, then the feminization and pathologization o f Western culture is accomplished via the figure of the transvestite/transsexual and also, as in Tan Tarn How ' s play, through the male homosexual. But, as in Heng's play, the transvestite/transsexual can also simultaneously figure the loss o f faith in the (male) power o f Chinese culture, where the latter too is feminized. In Heng's play, the surgical cut that the male transsexual receives is the cut of modernity which postpones the attainment of Chinese patriarchal identity indefinitely, so that the latter can only be experienced as masquerade, as an honoring of a past identity. But the pre-operative transsexual undergoing male-to-female sex-change surgery is also the perfect vehicle to represent the rupture of a hybridicized Singaporean culture into cultural essentialism, where the cultural purity experienced is artificially assumed by an already mutilated subject, desiring and identifying from a subject-position marked by lack (the loss of the phallus in castration) and inauthenticity. For Chiang, Singaporean hybrid East-West culture, represented as male transvestitism, is to be despised as inauthentic (where the master-signifier no longer guarantees meaning). His play tries to argue for cultural authenticity (imagined in terms of gender 'authenticity'), for a retreat from the post-modern discourse of gendered/sexed identity as construction. But, as his play all too symptomatically indicates, cultural 'authenticity' must be preceded by a ' f ix ing ' o f the body o f Singapore culture, represented as sex-change surgery: either the male subject must accept his loss o f male power and match the symbolic castration with an actual castration (and become a woman) or he must add on a fake penis through reconstructive surgery and 'identify' with a male ego-ideal, whom he knows he can never be. Diana Fuss warns, in Identification Papers, against assuming that a conscious imitation o f a role implies an unconscious identification with that role (148). Here she differentiates between genuine (unconscious) identifications and those that only appear to be identifications: she calls the former "identification" and the latter "impersonation." But in assuming that "impersonation" involves a subversive mimicry, she does not make space for another sort o f "impersonation," where impersonation 309 substitutes for the inability to effect an identification. In Chiang's play, the central character is caught between an impersonation of and an identification with maleness. I f one uses Fuss' differentiation o f masquerade and mimicry, where masquerade involves the "non-ironic imitation o f a role" and mimicry, the "parodic hyperbolization o f that role" (146), and if, in accordance with this, identifications involve masquerade rather than mimicry, then Chiang's character as the figure o f cultural 'authenticity,' must mime the masquerade of masculinity, always aware that, given his castration, he can only adopt an ironic though desiring stance toward it. The Freudian/Lacanian master narrative o f the formation o f subjectivity (gendered as male) against the alterity o f the female gets challenged here in a society brought face to face with male lack. When the (male) subject must either accept lack/castration and/or disavow it by identifying with and desiring his lack o f lack through the state, the 'other' against whom he defines himself is also male. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's concept o f the homosocial continuum, where male homoeroticism is triangulated by the female, is interrupted here as male identity is worked out in encounter with other male subjectivities. I f heterosexual male identity is the sublimation of forbidden male homosexual object desires, in these plays, masculinity is both the object o f desire and the object of identification. Where the female symbolically represented the phallus to the male, assuring him of his lack o f lack, now other men provide the mirror to the affirmation o f masculinity. I f the dominant discourse o f gender works to sustain heterosexual desires and identifications, where within heterosexuality would women be positioned when this dominant gender discourse incorporates into its definitions of masculinity, marginalized, non-heterosexual male subject positions which include feminization? M y guess would be that women would be made to retreat even further into 'femininity, ' into further weakness, passivity, into ever more reactionary femininities. A s these plays indicate, the construction o f these new male subject-positions (which include the consciousness of lack) depend on the ostracism of modern and post-modern feminisms. Silverman's thesis in Male Subjectivity at the Margins, that adopting positions o f identification and desire in accordance with so-called 'perverse' or 'deviant' sexualities are sometimes 310 tantamount to a subversive gesture, that saying "yes" to marginalized sexualities can involve a saying "no" to power, cannot be upheld in this particular instance (1-2). One cannot argue with her claim that in conditions o f historical trauma, there is a resultant 'feminization' of traditional masculinity, which one easily detects in cultural texts (where men adopt female subject positions). But this does not necessarily mean that sexual differences are being broken down and that power is now being assigned in a more equal manner. In Singapore drama, a crisis in traditional masculinities is dealt with by feminizing male identity, but this has led to the male/female binary being constructed in new ways rather than effectively deconstructed. The newer, proposed masculine identities now take on, in something that amounts to appropriation, some traditionally female subject positions, such as that o f the 'female' hysteric and the recognition of castration as the male 'other' to the symbolic order. But, just as significantly, they also reassign meanings of inauthenticity to female identity, where the crisis in male power is projected onto women-where women are viewed as impotent phallic mother or as abject. That women in these texts are women who think, falsely, that they are men suggests that the newer, proposed masculine identities leave women even more in the lurch—where they are now not only not the 'other' to men, but are castrated men, eunuchs, assigned to a space of pure representation as specters o f men. A s Marjorie Garber suggests in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, transvestitism and transsexuality are often used in cultural texts to figure gender liminality, an in-between cultural space in gender identifications, but this can also add up to a re-affirmation o f phallic power rather than a deconstruction of it. She cites the case of the Harvard Hasty Pudding Theatricals that externalized and acted out crises and conflicts that arose from the construction o f a certain kind o f male identity set up by an intellectual and social elite. Far from deconstructing gender and sexual identities, this transvestite theater expressed misogyny and homophobia. Male-to-female cross-dressing, she says, is a "fetishistic scenario" in which the imagined maternal phallus o f the phallic mother is replaced by clothes and false breasts. The cross-dresser as fetishist thus does not need woman: he only requires the fetish (60-65). 311 Garber's work is crucial in reading transsexuality and transvestitism as vehicle rather than tenor, where these often indicate a crisis elsewhere than in gender. "Category crises," she says, "can and do mark displacements from the axes o f class and race onto the axis of gender." Transvestitism and transsexuality in cultural representation have often appeared, then, as cultural effects o f permeable borders that signal toward an irresolvable conflict or epistemological problem that invalidates binarity and "displaces this discomfort onto a figure that incarnates the margin" (17). Two o f the four writers studied here are non-heterosexual. But since the works do not as such thematize homosexuality, transvestitism/transsexuality, or bisexuality but use marginalized sexualities as vehicles to talk of cross-cultural issues o f identity and desire, I am reading them as non-queer texts. A t any rate, since Singapore audiences are generally unaware of the playwrights' sexualities, and these in no way frame their texts, the plays are dominantly received as 'straight' ideology and 'pass' as such. I w i l l argue that the state's recent championing o f authoritarian political culture as 'As i an , ' pitting it against Western values o f liberalism and democracy as wel l as the consequent re-alignment o f relationships o f power between the state and (male) citizen would seem to have triggered a breakdown in male myths of power in the Singapore man. A s such, the frequent appearance of marginalized male sexualities and gender trouble, to use Butler's apt phrase, is a response to a cultural conflict and has little to do with the sexuality o f Singapore's writers. In addition to falling within Silverman's category of "historical trauma," the plays discussed here also fall into F ink ' s definition of neurosis. Fink says neurosis can be presumed to have occurred when the interpellation o f the subject does not involve subjectivation. In successful subjectivation, the subject identifies its desire with the desire of the Other. In neurosis, such subjectivation is not possible and the Other's desire is experienced as demand (72-6). Neurosis occurs, he says, when the master-signifier o f the Other's demand cannot be dialecticized, that is, brought into relation with other signifiers. For instance, in subjectivation, we often de-sexualize and repress/control libidinal energy by substituting/sublimating it with non-sexual objects such as intellectual activity. In neurosis, the 312 repression is refused, sometimes due to external circumstances that awaken repressed memories. The fantasy cannot, in neurosis, enable the subject to make the substitutions in objet petit a that enable escape from repressed desire. In patriarchal societies, the male subject represses its lack o f power brought about by castration by the signifier (the Symbolic Order) by denying it in a process where the penis serves as signifier o f the phallus, as an illusion of the power that the male subject truly lacks. A l s o , the Symbolic Father is equated with the actual father and castration is 'forgotten' through the incest taboo where the son is promised the paternal legacy of the Symbolic Order i f he w i l l only denounce his mother and identify with his father (Silverman, Male 40). In neurosis, the male 'subject' cannot perform these illusions: the penis only reminds him of his lack o f power. The superego (the repressed memory o f the Symbolic/actual father's real power, which unconsciously determines and limits his identifications and desires), has emerged from retirement in the unconscious, so that the male subject cannot phantasmatically misrecognize its obedience of the Other's injunctions as signifier of its own desire and power. In these plays, the attempt to reconcile 'Western' and 'Eastern' standards o f male identity bring the subject into encounter with the specter o f male lack, which either neurotically halts the process o f meaning, or is escaped by colonization o f women's constituency and the adoption o f reversionary sexual/gender politics. Transvestitism is repeatedly figured in these plays as a forbidden Utopia o f cultural hybridity (where West and East enter into equivalence with sexual difference) and a reminder of a happier, past, but it is also the vehicle that allows a 'post-modern' deconstruction o f truth, power, and sexual/gender/racial/cultural authenticity. In Heng's play, the post-modern disavowal of meaning is utilized to argue for an identification with the government's desire on the level o f subversive mimicry. However, the surgical cut o f a sex operation (castration in the male-to-female changeover) is the Real that reminds the reader of the subject's de-masculinization, of the impossibility o f subversive mimicry. In Chiang's play, castration is figured as the only means to recover male power, except that the ensuing power can only be imaginary since the male body has already been fragmented. These plays generally 313 indicate an inability to come to terms with reality, their flight from reality further symptomatized by their reliance on non-realistic genres of drama. Cultural conflicts can only be resolved here through stereotyped character representations or by the intervention of dream sequences that permit the plays to elide intellectual inconsistencies and fragmented subjectivities. The post-modern deconstruction of meaning here is not a means to create new identity spaces, new meanings. Rather, it is the route by which the male Singaporean subject avoids meaning, escaping from the trauma that, perhaps, the signifier does mean something, a responsibility to history and to one's desire. The 'post-modern' is used here, as I see it, to abdicate from post-colonial identity/responsibility, to enable the subject to ideologically 'sit on the fence.' Split in its desire for and hence ambivalent towards both Western culture and Asian/Chinese identity, post-modern discourse provides a cultural logic where the subject can freely express and enjoy forbidden desires o f resistance, freedom and self-assertion o f one's desires (which are tied to male identity) but also then deny these meanings as excessive, as fiction. When meaning is conceived as excess, we have the moment o f neurosis itself, with 'post-modernity' appearing as the language o f disavowal of neurosis. Camp, which is in some respects similar to post-modern textuality's tendency to simultaneously gesture at opposite sets of meaning, also features in these plays as symptom of the subject's inability to locate itself in a coherent geo-cultural place. Since the state's new nationalism disrupts a previous national culture and identity, camp allows the writer to use humor, parody and hyperbole to cover up and distract attention from the troubling incongruency, the mismatch, between current and previous ideologies and value-systems. Private Parts (1992) by Michael Chiang The main plot revolves around a television broadcaster, Warren, who faces male anxiety, a psychological lack that matches his physical lack when an accident sexually wounds him. He checks into a sex-change clinic for reconstructive surgery, where he meets transsexuals scheduled for sex-314 change surgery. It is apparently a place where Warren receives a re-education about gender identity. The loss o f his penis, the signifier of male power, apparently, enables Warren to once again become a 'real man, ' to regain the signified. Chiang recuperates reactionary notions o f male identity as a corrective for a national culture that he perceives as emasculated and threatening to male subjectivity. Here, transvestitism and transsexuality are used as vehicles to critique gender blurring and re-establish old gender boundaries thought to be in danger of disappearing under the onslaught o f modernity, corporatization, global capitalism and Westernization. Ideologically conservative, the play exploits camp's potential for humor and its subversion of race, gender and class boundaries but also denigrates its set o f values. But the use of camp is also symptomatic o f a split in the playwright's attitudes and desires concerning the observation o f gender and race boundaries. There is enjoyment here o f camp's transgressive crossings. But camp is also the means by which the playwright self-consciously covers over the conservatism of his attitudes, which indicates authorial guilt and hence an ethical uncertainty towards his agenda. Chiang's desire for the old (tradition) clashes with the new (modernity) so that the former cannot be retrieved without a sense o f its inappropriateness, its 'oddity. ' Camp fantasy also provides the vehicle for Chiang to deny the unrealistic nature o f his answer to the problem of a crisis in national subjectivity in that a return to traditional gender norms is impossible, given Singapore's historico-cultural situation. A s pre-1980s ideology o f an East/West hybridity confronts the new ' A s i a n ' essentialisms, desire is deadlocked and must necessarily be ironized. A drag performance opens the play. The Dreamgirls are three men playing at being the Supremes, a popular 1960s' American Motown female singing trio. M i m i n g the Supremes' hit-song "Baby Love" and vamping to the hilt in their elaborate hairdos, sequined evening gowns and long gloves, the performers also begin to strip, and end the song in their underwear. It is soon apparent that the point of this transvestite performance is not to celebrate gender as performance, as construction, but rather to point to the gap between signifier and signified, where the penis/phallus is the master-signifier that signifies nothing. A s gender masquerade gives way to strip-tease, the redundancy of the phallus/penis is 315 foregrounded. The appearance of the phallus, revealed in the end, though veiled by the underwear (there is still room for doubt!) fails to signify masculinity since this has already been placed under suspicion by three men who have forsaken their masculinity in order to "dream" that they are "gir ls" (hence, their name). This drag performance does not belong to the heterosexual tradition where the difference between the performer's sex and the gender role s/he mimes is part of the act: that is, the performer mimics (parodically, without identifying with) the 'other' sex. A s transvestite performance, the Dreamgirls ' act belongs to the tradition o f male actors playing female roles: the difference between performers' sex and the gender role assumed is hidden. I f we return to Fuss' differentiation between mimicry and masquerade, the Dreamgirls ' performance involves masquerade, where there is identification with the 'other,' rather than mimicry (Identification 146-8). A strip-tease act is thus required to disclose the performer's sex, but this is a 'straight' intervention in a transvestite scene of desire, re-reading permeable gender boundaries as the 'perverse' split between body/nature (sex) and mind/culture (gender). Although a black music group is impersonated, the performance does not involve cross-cultural desire and identification of the Singapore subject with African-American culture but rather with 'white ' culture, with an American-Brit ish subculture of gay camp and drag performance. In her article " ' Y o u Don ' t Have to Say Y o u Love M e ' : The Camp Masquerade of Dusty Springfield," Patricia Juliana Smith says that in the 1960s, Bri t ish lesbian singer Springfield's camp masquerade o f American Motown female groups, including the Supremes, transformed a "nice, white g i r l " into a black woman and femme gay man (186). Springfield combined their high beehive hairstyles, heavy mascara and false eyelashes with the jeans and men's shirt that made her a model for British drag queens (187). During this period, black women and their music symbolized sexual freedom and power to middle-class white audiences, Smith says (190). Chiang uses the exaggerated emotion, excessive sentimentality and melodrama o f the music of the Supremes, which was appropriated by Springfield for camp parody, as I w i l l show, contradictorily, to mock transvestites and their supposed self-delusions concerning gender-crossing. But 316 these qualities are also held up as the 'essentially' feminine in the playwright's representation of 'normal' gender identities. In the next scene, it becomes evident that the failure of the master-signifier to signify, as well as the splitting of dream from reality, the image from the real, form from content and shadow from substance, is to be read as a national affliction. A live television debate is being held over the government's decision to develop a new tourist attraction, a theme park featuring international transvestite entertainment, to be called Bugis World. As Act I, scene i shows, Singaporean national culture revolves around representation, where acting is the only reality, where images have no original in this nation of ciphers (much like the Dreamgirls staging a version of female identity that was already packaged as image by the Supremes). In fact, a member of the Dreamgirls is one of the participants in the debate. The other participants are Warren, the host of the debate; Mrs. Betsy Tan, who supposedly represents Singapore's privileged class of "graduate mothers" and the "National Morals Council," of which she is a founding member; and Cyril Collins, spokesman for the tourist board which is in charge of the development of Bugis World. None of the characters are individuals: their very identity, their voice is not to be distinguished from the roles they represent and have chosen to play. Through the characters, the debate puts together a pastiche of often heard banal lines about national values from the government and media. The artificiality of life in Singapore is communicated in this scene where identity becomes merely a matter of occupying ready-made roles/subject positions, where style rather than substance dominates public discussion of important issues. For instance, it appears at first that Mrs. Tan has a substantial viewpoint: she opposes Bugis World and views it as Singaporeans' fashioning of their identity as Asian exotica in accordance with the desires of more powerful nations such as Japan and the US. But this legitimate viewpoint rapidly degenerates to reveal that Mrs. Tan is merely acting: her lines are too pat, and echo the state's discourse of Asian values. Given her tone of moral and intellectual superiority, it would seem that she has identified with the role assigned to her as a "graduate mother" and representative of the National Morals Council, and only too willingly repeats the ideology of her most 317 trusted patron, the ruling party. Even after Warren has sufficiently introduced her, she insists on advertising her qualifications and underlining her agreement with government ideology regarding family values and the role o f the mother in re-producing a particular morality in society: " I f I may tell you a little bit about myself. (Pauses to make an impression.) I am 36,1 have an Arts degree from N U S [National University of Singapore], and I worked for about seven to eight years doing personnel work in a multi-national corporation before I decided to give up my career for my family. . . . A s a mother, I have to worry about my children and what kind o f influence they are subjected to everyday." (233) Col l ins ' comment that Bugis Wor ld (and hence Singapore, which it resembles) is " l ike Disney World for grown-ups" is ironically acute, reflecting Singapore as fantasy-land (a copy of a copy o f the US) , a land of entertainment and make-believe. When Coll ins as c iv i l servant adds that "adult Singaporeans are mature enough" for this fantasy-land, it is even more pithy commentary on the government's desire for its people: that as adults, Singaporeans should play at being children (234). The play's protagonist, Warren, a television talk-show host who is a former actor in Chinese-language television drama, appears to be someone who packages and represents Singapore as image for television consumption, who controls the parameters of public discussion, and who regulates what is said and not said. Warren's control over the show is metaphor for governmental and corporate regulation o f identity and thought in Singapore. Through Diana the Dreamgirl as drag queen chosen to "represent [her] country" at the opening o f Bugis World , the lack of substance in Singapore national culture and its overwhelming concern with image and representation is linked to a sense of alienation, o f a cultural disorientation that involves gender trouble. Diana claims to be "more of a woman" than Mrs . Tan. Though she cannot bear children unlike Mrs . Tan and thus lacks female 'nature,' she considers that she is more feminine and sensual: where she treats culture/appearance as the 'real ' instead of'nature. ' But she conveniently switches over to her male voice when Coll ins makes an unwanted pass at her. 318 This confusion of appearance with reality is interpreted as a crisis in masculinity, where gender confusion is analyzed as being part of the problem. None of the characters act their sex. Coll ins mistakes Diana for a woman and himself gets terrified too easily: we are told that he "backs off immediately" when Diana rebuffs him (232). Warren appears to be the man of the hour but cannot control the conflict that erupts between Diana and Mrs . Tan. Then he is scolded by Sam[antha] Wong, who apparently is the 'real ' man behind the show. Mrs . Tan is phallic mother. This is confirmed in Ac t I, scene i i i where a Malay man places a call to the broadcasting station to protest the featuring of transvestites on a television forum. The man, standing for conventional, heterosexual and binaristic norms o f gender, is displeased by what he views as an affront to masculine culture: "What bloody nonsense, is this?" he asks, " M e n wearing women's clothing, putting on the makeup. It's very shameful." The caller is typically immediately concerned about image, that the incident may misrepresent the nation: " I f I am a visitor to Singapore and I put on the T V , I w i l l think the country is all made up of such people. What kind o f impression are you trying to give outsiders. How can you all like that?" (241) A s this scene proceeds, it becomes clear that the caller's anxiety over gender liminality is at least partly caused by doubt over his own male power, an insecurity that arises from cultural disorientation, from being overwhelmed by modern life, especially by an elitist corporate culture that offers no space to those marginalized by class and language. Obviously a working-class man with little education in the nation's language of power, English, he feels his control ebb. Though a citizen rightfully concerned about the nation's values and its representation, he is unable to keep up with the urbane 'corporate' language o f the television station's duty officer, who attends to his cal l . The duty officer wants to know his name so that she could "get the executive producer concerned to assess [the caller's] views and maybe table it for our next editorial policy meeting." But the man interprets this as corporate intimidation, responding: 319 "What, what, eh? Y o u don't come and aksi borak [show off] with me, okay? What executive policy, policy. Y o u think you slang-slang a bit, I scared, is it? Bloody fool!" Slams the phone down. (242) Even the request for his name terrifies the caller into thinking it is a trick meant to trap him in some manner, a response that many Singaporeans w i l l recognize as stemming from a fear that B i g Brother is always watching. The loss o f the people's power to represent themselves as wel l as their disorientation in late-capitalist culture is here gendered in the sub-plot as a lack in masculine identity. But this theme is also developed in the main plot, in the situation of the play's protagonist. Warren, as the host o f an important T V show "Today in Singapore," conducted in English, the country's dominant language o f business and national culture, appears on-screen to be in control o f representation, but this is a false image belying a real (male) impotence. The power to represent is actually in the hands o f Sam(antha) Wong, Warren's female boss and the show's editor, who tells Warren what to represent and how to represent. Agitated over Warren's loss of control over his guests, especially at his inability to control and appropriately frame Mrs . Tan's discourse, she hauls Warren off during the interval to upbraid him for his loose control over his pen(is): " Y o u are wasting precious time on my show! The issue today is the opening o f Bugis World , not the world according to Mrs . Betsy Tan. . . . This is prime-time T V . We hired you to host a current affairs show, not entertain morally constipated housewives." (231) She then proceeds to represent "real life" for him. It certainly doesn't include the viewpoints o f women confined to domestic spaces: "This is not one of your T V soap operas, Warren. This is real life. Get a grip on the subject." The problem with modernity, as Chiang sees it, is the lapse of traditional gender norms that leads to the emasculation o f men, with social formations no longer guaranteeing power to the male. Nature (gender authenticity), it would seem, is betrayed and the bottom has dropped out o f culture as women are 320 scandalously permitted to ascend to pinnacles o f power. Accordingly, Sam(antha) Wong is depicted as a usurper o f (male) power: in her "power dressing" consisting of men's clothes (pants and jacket) and her identification with traditionally male values such as discipline, control and authority, she too is a cross-dresser, the inverse o f Diana the Dreamgirl, the woman pretending to be a man. In fact, things have gone so awry in the modern world that it is supposedly only women today who can supply the models o f masculinity: Sam(antha) urges Warren to "act more like a man. A man in charge . . . a hot-blooded male," and suggests that he be "l ike Oprah Winfrey, or, or Barbara Walters!"(238). The subtext is that i f Winfrey and Walters are "professional broadcasters who just happen to be women," then, within modernity, representation, the making of meaning, is in the hands o f women (who are pretending to be men), which can hardly result in anything other than producing ciphers out o f ciphers. Chiang thereby suggests that the tendency in Singapore national life to emphasize image over substance, to substitute rhetoric for thought, and to negate the desiring self for the social self (as in the self being taken over by corporatization) has its roots in the erosion of traditional norms of gender identity—where gender, set adrift from its moorings in 'nature,' has become mere masquerade. Sam(antha), it would seem, has wrongfully appropriated male power in that she has shattered the integrity o f the phallus as an iconic signifier, where the signified, power, is to be equated with that which signifies it, the penis. Alienating the signified from the signifier, the mind from the body, she devalues the master signifier by 'mistaking' it for a trope, as a signifier signifying something other than itself (of a gender-neutral power). Sam(antha) literally lacks the master signifier but her admittance to her superior in jest in A c t III, scene i i i that she doesn't "have any [balls] for him [Warren] to carry" is ironic because figuratively speaking, she does have the balls (power) that Warren covets (279). Despite the absence o f the signifier, she nevertheless signifies masculinity and male desire. I f the signifier no longer signifies, then perhaps its absence (castration) w i l l instantiate its meanings as desire attempts to substitute the signified for the missing phallus-signifier . So argues Chiang and castrates Warren. Warren is on a golf course when a Japanese man accidentally wounds his sexual organ 321 so that surgery is required. Fitted with an artificial and sexually non-functional penis, Warren's body now catches up with his mind, bringing him to self-awareness of his cultural/social/psychological impotence. But the fake penis or male lack spurs him on to become the 'man' he never could have been earlier. A s his male-to-female transsexual friend, Mirabella, notes, he is a more effective broadcaster after his sexual wounding: She judges him "much better than when I first saw you. Your style has changed. . . . It's like you're not so, not so, wide-eyed" (275). Warren concedes that he is "not such a greenhorn anymore," explaining that "It's not so frightening anymore. After what I went through, very few things faze me these days." In Chiang's fantasy, castration enables Warren to seize true representational power: he is promoted to editor and is now in control o f the show, having taken over from Sam(antha). But more than that, he is now aiming at cultural integrity, at restoring substance to the representational image so that it is no longer a cipher signifying nothing but accurately represents the life-experiences o f Singaporeans: he decides to devote one show to the gender problems o f a marginalized section o f society, transsexuals, an uncomfortable topic that many Singaporeans prefer to sweep under the carpet. Further, he tells the group of transsexuals invited on his show : "Be yourself. Be honest. A n d speak from the heart. Don' t be afraid" (283). After this, the play degenerates into mere wish-fulfillment and reveals the impossible nature o f Chiang's phantasmatic cultural solution for Singapore. Warren's new-found sense o f male identity has revolutionary potential. But this potential is suppressed as Warren's desire for social change (he wants, for instance, to change Singaporeans' attitudes towards transsexuals) is represented as being in tandem with the values o f the hegemonic order. Despite knowledge of his sexual impotence, the Singapore women's media supposedly hails Warren as the nation's "sexiest bachelor" and there are even rumors that "they," the ruling People's Act ion Party, are offering him a political position. Both o f these scenarios are highly improbable within Singaporean culture: even i f Singapore women had sufficient ironic humor to vote an impotent man as a sexy bachelor, it is highly unlikely that the ruling party, known for its conservative recruiting criteria, would approach a man who was publicly revealed on 322 national T V as sexually impotent, who is physically incapable of being a family man (the ideal citizen) and who has been associated with transsexuals, to jo in its ranks. Here, camp humor is a means o f escaping from the knowledge of the impossibility o f such an easy restoration o f male power: laughter provides the distraction to reflective thought, while the unconscious awareness o f the impossible fulfillment o f desire for a coherent male identity is disavowed by displacing it into an ' impossible ' hyperbolic rhetoric of camp. Inadvertently, the play's 'unconscious' shows that identification with the power o f the ruling class contradicts ideals o f masculine identity (and self-hood itself). Chiang tries to diagnose Singaporean cultural anomie as due to a 'private' failing o f its citizens in realizing their selfhood, but the play consistently comes up against 'public ' institutions/culture as that which hinder the achievement of subjectivity. Despite Warren's sincere, 'manly ' intentions to represent the plight o f the transsexual on his T V show truthfully, to take up the power o f representation, Warren has to steer the debate away from complaints regarding the state's inconsistent attitude towards surgical sex-change (the Defense Minis try recognizes the sexual change but the Registry of Marriages does not) and direct it toward 'safer,' supposedly less political matters such as the discussion of love and romance. Again , though he is obviously attracted to the male-to-female transsexual Mirabella, Warren is unable to commit himself to her/him. When Mirabel la asks him i f he could have loved her despite her transsexuality, Warren answers vaguely, " W h y is it so important to you? What difference can it make now?" (295). One is not sure i f Warren is referring to his or Mirabella 's surgery, to his sexual impotence or to Mirabella 's revelation o f this on television as cause of the impossibility o f their relationship. Certainly, Warren's romantic involvement with a publicly self-confessed transsexual would destroy his career as national broadcaster and end all access to (male) power. Mirabella 's attraction to Warren is one of the means the play uses to eroticize masochism and the realization of one's powerlessness. But it would also appear that Chiang introduced such a problematic situation as a love-relationship between Warren and the transsexual Mirabel la only in order to deny its 323 possibility, to represent its 'otherness' to the 'normal ' heterosexual relationship. But since his 'other' modern attitude towards transsexuals forbids him from verbalizing such a reactionary ideology, the reasons for Warren's rejection of Mirabella must remain vague. Chiang hence represents the question of Singaporean men's inability to accept transsexuals as a lack in male confidence, but yet he is unwill ing to allow Warren to marry Mirabella, indicating his own ambivalence towards such relationships. On the second "Today in Singapore" shows featured in the play, Warren asks Lavinia , who is married to an Englishman, i f "Westerners are more open-minded about transsexuals." Lavin ia replies: "Oh , definitely! Even i f Asian men are understanding and supportive, very few w i l l marry a sex-change person. A l l my girlfriends in Hongkong who have [sic] Chinese boyfriends before their operation always end up marrying Westerners. I think Chinese men are always very frightened what other people w i l l say about them." Mirabel la adds: "In Singapore, it's the same. I tell you, these local men only know how to make jokes about us. But deep down, I think they are scared. I think that men find it hard to accept us because they don't know where they stand with us. They can't decide i f we are men who enjoy acting like women, or i f we are really women." (286) The play then is ideologically split regarding attitudes towards transsexuals. More than half the play takes place around transsexuals. Six scenes are centered around the group o f transsexuals who meet at the sex-surgery clinic, "Falcon Crest" in Batam, while Act I V , scene i features a T V forum on transsexuality with these very same transsexuals, Mirabella and Lavinia (both male-to-female transsexuals) and Edward (female-to-male transsexual) as participants. The prologue and Ac t I V , scene i i comprise transvestite performances. The play however is only marginally about transsexuality. Rather, transsexuality appears to be the vehicle Chiang uses to thematize and recover traditional binaristic norms of gender identity as important aspects of cultural life. B y featuring issues o f gender identity faced by transsexuals, the play deconstructs gender as sexed identity, as nature, only to reinforce 324 gender as cultural 'norm. ' A s the transsexuals plead for recognition o f their 'normality' on the T V forum, they underline standards of gender as central to the formation o f identity, and normalize the traditional binarisitic code o f gender. Mirabel la for instance recounts that before her sex-change operation, she was "always feeling insecure . . . like [she] didn't quite fit in . " So she spent "a l l her time and energy saving up enough for an operation which [she] believed would make [her] normal." She says, "I wanted to be like everyone else . . . But now I am here, the last thing I want to be is a normal, average woman. I am terrified of becoming an average woman" (289-90). Far from eschewing conventional notions o f female identity, her aspiration, it would seem, is to be ultra-feminine: I want more than the average woman. More love, more attention. I want to be noticed, I want to be valued. I want so much to be respected. A n d that's when I realise [sic] that things are going to be much harder after the sex-change. It's no longer about daring to dress up in women's clothes and facing the world. It's about actually being a woman. A n d that's something that goes beyond wearing a bra, beyond putting on make-up. (290) The transsexuals equate gender with identity itself, with a form of "being," and raise the question of gender in/authenticity and its impact on self-realization. According to Mirabella, gender is more than a matter o f style, an exterior language of the body. Her reference to it is vague and rendered in negative terms, as something that "goes beyond wearing a bra, beyond putting on make-up." But the critical reader can not only supply the elided content but also speculate about the reasons for Mirabel la 's coyness in expression. Gender is here suggested to be a system of values, a code o f behaviour and a prescribed set o f emotions and attitudes, but it cannot be completely verbalized without making transparent the inadequacy o f this definition of gender, its evasion of questions concerning the historical and cultural specificity/relativity o f norms o f gender and the constitutive links between structures o f power and gender construction. Chiang recognizes that in a modern, even postmodern society where traditional attitudes to gender identity are being dismantled on nearly all fronts, in the home as well as at the office, that public attitude 325 to transsexuality remains one o f the last cultural sites within late capitalism where a residue o f pre-modern ideologies o f gender may be found and tapped. Accordingly, he exploits this as a means to reinstate traditional notions o f gendered identity. Conventional regard of transsexuality as a form of inauthentic being (where sexed identity does not conform to gender identity) relies on the belief that gender is nature, that it is grounded in the body and is not merely a cultural construct; that inappropriate gender expression is a betrayal o f nature and a signifier o f a lack in being. The play uses the modern discursive form of a plea for transsexuals' rights as a vehicle to remind audiences of the cultural code by which they represent transsexuals as the 'other' to society and to prosecute society for having become its own 'other.' The play pathologizes post-modern notions o f gender identity by equating these with the gender dilemmas experienced by transsexuals/transvestites, whose 'perversity' is both ambivalently enjoyed and derided in the play. This backhanded use of transvestitism/transsexuality to argue against gender confusion is in tandem with the play's deeply ambivalent attitude towards transsexuality/transvestitism. On the one hand, as during the T V forum show in Ac t I V , scene i , the play appears to be sympathetic to transsexuals. But, on the other, transsexuality and gender confusion are explored as a spectacle of the 'unnatural.' The transvestite act that opens the play depicts the monstrosity of gender masquerade: the "women" suddenly displaying their maleness brings to mind the petrifying potential o f the phallic mother as wel l as the sexual threat posed by the wo l f dressed as grandmother in Red Riding Hood. Diana the Dreamgirl 's claim that she is "more of a woman" than Mrs . Tan is ridiculed by that which Mrs . Tan stands for, motherhood. But conversely, Mrs . Tan herself appears to be gender-trespassing, given her identification with the state's patriarchal authoritarianism. Transsexuality/transvestitism as monstrous perversity returns as Diana scares C y r i l Coll ins off by suddenly switching from female to male voice. The scenes of the transsexual community at the sex-change clinic "Falcon Crest" emphasize this community's 'difference': Warren is startled by the earthiness o f their scatological humor and their excessive sexuality. The transvestite miming in Ac t IV , scene i i of another hit-song by The Supremes, "Where 326 D i d Our Love G o , " undermines the earnestness of Mirabella 's love for Warren, openly declared on live national T V , reducing it to a parody of love. Transsexuals undergo a crisis in identity because their sex and gender identifications do not correspond. In a bid to resolve this 'problem,' they tend to make gender the supreme locus o f subjectivity and are more reflexive about gender than many sections of society. This does not mean that they necessarily gravitate toward reactionary and antiquated gender norms. However, some o f them do and Chiang features this type o f transsexual as the standard and uses their ruminations about gender identity to validate an essentialist concept of gender based on outdated, pre-modern notions o f male and female identity: where masculinity is equated with control, strength, discipline and the possession o f power, while female identity is associated with qualities such as sympathy, a need for domination. In addition, women are supposedly objects rather than subjects o f love: the playwright does not feel that his character Warren owes Mirabel la any explanation about why he feels their love to be impossible. Though Mirabel la was a pre-operative male transsexual, she has the 'feminine' qualities o f compassion and humor that attract Warren. In addition, s/he provides him with moral support at a difficult time, a quality that Warren's girlfriend Rosalind lacks, who leaves him when she finds out about his sexual impotence. Camp allows Chiang to verbalize an outdated female saccharine view o f romance. Mirabel la delivers a lesson on true love to Warren: "Hey, take one step at a time, okay? I f it's meant to be, it's meant to be. (She smiles) Warren, i f she really loves you, your little handicap won't be very important. (Takes his hands and holds them over his heart) Here. Here is where it matters. This is the organ you should worry about. (268) Andrew Ross ' account of Western heterosexual and homosexual camp as a cultural phenomenon can be useful in approaching Chiang's use of camp ("Uses of Camp" 54 -77). Ross suggests that camp is a response to disempowerment by marginalized groups but that its subversion can contain elements o f the reactionary. Looking at both straight and gay camp, Ross says that such groups "lack inherited cultural 327 capital, and thus the accredited power to fully legitimize dominant tastes" and so parody their lack in a self-mocking abdication of claims to power (64). Thus American heavy metal groups critique middle-class masculinity, but displace it with a reactionary working-class sexism (74). Camp, he says, also has a necrophilic economy that resurrects deceased art forms to oppose bourgeois culture (68). Chiang's camp rendition o f Singapore Chinese culture as a hybrid mix of working-class ethnic culture, English and the bawdy humor o f the sexually marginalized subverts the state's elitist ideology o f Singapore's Confucianist Asian identity but not to the extent o f interrogating its emphasis on family values and strict heterosexual, phallogocentric gender codes. A 'dead' local culture o f transvestitism that had been destroyed in the 1980s with the redevelopment o f Singapore's famous Bugis Street is explored nostalgically here but as metaphor o f an energetic and unpretentious, now lost cultural hybridity. While it contrasts with the manners of bourgeois culture, it also gestures with desire at suburban values. Mirabel la 's and Lavinia 's gender crossings coincide with their linguistic crossing o f Chinese with English idiom. When Lavinia asks Mirabel la i f she should wear make-up during her surgery, Mirabel la replies: "Darl ing. During the operation, you are going to be unconscious, with one leg pointing to Singapore and the other leg pointing to Penang. Who w i l l have time to look at your face?" (243) But following their operation (the loss of hybridity), they settle into their fixed roles as women. Camp permits Chiang to re-introduce (while ironizing) vanishing Western suburban values such as those embodied in The Supremes' repertoire. Perhaps we are meant to laugh at the first scene between Warren and his girlfriend Rosalind in A c t I, scene i i i . Warren comes to call on her, tired after the show and depressed over his female boss' i l l treatment of him. Rosalind is in her apartment, "dressed in a silk nightdress and seated on the sofa and reading a magazine," while "classical music is playing." She apologizes for looking "such a mess" whereupon "he wraps his arms around her and kisses her." He says, "I really needed to see you," to which she responds: "Oh , my poor honey boy! (Pats him on the head and kisses him on the nose). Just sit here and relax a bit while. I microwave the nasi briyani" (239). 328 But when Warren rejects Mirabella, it is at least partly because they can never hope to enjoy such a 'normal ' conjugal relationship as this. Lest the Demons Get to Me (1993) by Russell Heng Hiang Khng Heng's play tries to deal with the contradictions that the currently dominant Singapore ' A s i a n ' values pose to 'Western' norms of masculine identity, which had been invested during the earlier period. This inter-cultural conflict appears to have caused some male anxiety (which this and other plays document). The inability to be open and above-board about one's desires, and the consequence o f this dishonesty in l iving one's life against one's desire are contradictions that interpellate Singaporean men as lacking in courage and self-determination. The state's exhortation to Singaporeans to assume their Asian/Chinese/ethnic identities opens up more cultural spaces for male doubt. It splits the trajectory of male identifications, placing Singapore men in a quandary as to whether they should internalize 'Western' or ' A s i a n ' norms of masculine identity. This endlessly defers the attainment o f an integrated self-hood that is an essential myth o f male power. In addition, 'Asian ' / 'Chinese ' norms o f male identity, viewed as "traditional" and racially authentic, conflict with modern (and post-modern) norms of male identity (that deconstruct racial and gender authenticity), threatening Singapore men's sense o f their cultural appropriateness, o f their historic timeliness. These East versus West cultural contradictions also raise the question o f authenticity in being (yet another value related to masculinity). This has thrown up the problem of seeming versus being. There is also concern about the location of cultural/ethnic/gender authenticity: is it in the body or in the mind? International perception of Singapore as politically authoritarian, and the state's l inking o f this authoritarianism to Asian/Chinese identity have also demanded that resistance to the state and the ethical appropriateness o f asserting one's individual rights be theorized, especially since male subjects' submission to political authoritarianism contradicts traditional, Western norms o f masculinity and male power. The transvestite/transsexual is, on the one hand, the perfect figure for the culturally-conflicted 329 Singaporean facing a crisis in male identity: he is the in-between person searching for wholeness and purity o f being. The male transvestite/transsexual is also the figure par excellence o f resistance, o f the hysteric who refuses the desire o f the Other (the Symbolic/dominant Order). S/he is also poised to provide a critique of conventional masculinity from the 'outside' without entirely stepping out of the masculine arena altogether. Transvestitism/transsexuality thus is the condensed metaphor o f al l the above-named sources of male anxiety as well as the metaphor of resistance and the vehicle for exploring cultural hybridity, while cutting women out o f the equation. The use o f transvestitism as metaphor then must be read as a strategy o f generating an alternative masculinity without having to resort to a feminist critique o f traditional norms o f masculinity. The latter poses the danger o f deconstructing masculinity altogether as a power structure overdetermined by racial, gender and (hetero)sexual oppression. This reading of transvestitism in the play must turn however on proving that the male transvestite/transsexual occupies, within the text, a masculine subject position and economy of identifications and desire, even i f untraditional, rather than a female position. The protagonist o f the two-act play, K C , begins as a male transvestite/pre-operative transsexual who, by the second act, becomes a "real woman" (34) by surgical transformation. It is evident from the beginning of the play that K C takes up a position as the 'other' to the Singaporean male that does not quite involve a crossing over to the female side o f the gender divide. K C views himself as "honest" in contrast to the typical hypocritical Singaporean male and, in this, the text's attempt to resolve contradictory norms o f masculinity is inscribed on K C . The protagonist's 'other' is his lover, Chuck/Chak, a seemingly bisexual Singapore man who leads a secret double life. Chuck is married but seeks out male transvestite prostitutes such as K C . That he is suspected to be one o f Singapore's ruling elite, possibly a " c i v i l servant," "one of Singapore's four Rhodes scholars," or a doctor, lawyer or professional (32), allows the audience to read him as signifier of a dominant 'national' masculinity that the writer is placing under suspicion , so that the liminal (the bisexual) here represents a mainstream sexuality and masculinity. 330 The play never reveals Chuck's professional identity but the audience could also read him as an agent with Singapore's Internal Security Department: he is "built like a rugby player," suspected to be a c iv i l servant and scholar except he carries a pager, and appears unusually adept with security matters (he uses only public phones and typed letters to communicate with K C , changes his typewriter when K C points out that its "Capital C ' s are chipped in the middle," parks several blocks away when visiting K C , screens his conversations with K C and is well-informed about international politics). Even after surgery turns him physically into a woman, K C is represented in the play as a male on the fringes o f masculinity rather than outside it. In the beginning o f the play, he identifies with the space between male and female, as a male transvestite rather than as a woman. He loved working Bugis Street (now defunct, but once Singapore's haven for transvestite/transsexual prostitutes) as a transvestite prostitute because "We just had to be ourselves to be happy. A n d Bugis Street is where we can be our campy best and people leave you alone because it is expected of you" (34). He recalls too that as a youth, he used to stand in front of a mirror and "do what had always come naturally to me: play at being a woman" (my emphasis, 38). His sex-change is necessitated by the economics o f the sex trade and the practical realities o f l iving within heterosexual structures o f power rather than a desire to be a woman: "The most agonising part [about the sex-change] is being sure yourself that you want this final irreversible crossover from one sex to another," he muses (34). He makes the final decision on the advice o f a "sister," another male transvestite, who says the sex-change w i l l give him more options, such as allowing him to marry or at least be provided for as someone's mistress, and to give up the insecure sex-trade (which gets more insecure as one turns 40). K C ' s identification with 'female' subjectivity is restricted by the play to costume, to his penchant for women's clothing, and to his identification with a fictional character from Chinese opera, Madame Chin , whose theme song "The Final Night o f Madame C h i n " he sings throughout the play. Chuck offers a reading of Madame Chin ' s 'female' subjectivity as belonging to that of "sentimentality," as the awareness "about everything being so mutable" (44), but this is a male interpretation o f female subjectivity. K C ' s identification with "Madame C h i n " is thus a male 331 fantasy about female identity which the play uses, as I w i l l show, to construct an alternative mode of (male) selfhood that w i l l deliver Singapore men from crises in hegemonic masculinities. In the play, K C is not so much the female figure that resists dominant male constructions o f identity as the male hysteric who refuses to answer to the desire of the B i g (Br)Other (the Symbolic Order) in constituting himself as male. In being the apparent opposite of Chuck, whose male lack in a heterosexual hegemonic masculinity has been exposed, K C is the 'real ' man: he thinks o f himself as honest, as courageous in his sexual frankness, and he is the agent able to turn powerful men into figures of impotence. For instance, as K C ' s family repeatedly points out, his father's masculinity depends on the affirmation o f his son's masculinity. A s K C says, "God, all these years, my family never lets me forget that what I am [a male transvestite prostitute and transsexual] can k i l l my father i f he finds out" (35). Not surprisingly, given the play's semiotics, K C ' s father dies when K C undergoes his sex-change operation. K C as transsexual is also in the position to deny his father his masculinity (his patriarchal identity) by refusing to perform the funeral rites for his father as his only son. In addition, K C succeeds in reducing Chuck to a position of powerlessness: at the beginning o f the play, Chuck has the upper hand over K C with his superior knowledge, but gradually K C exposes Chuck as society's vict im, who lives in fear o f people finding out his secret. Through Chuck, Heng deconstructs the national, dominant heterosexual masculinity as a mere semblance of male power. Though Chuck may have the accouterments of power, he is not in charge of his own desire, having to sneak around to meet with K C . This masculinity is further subverted through the figure of K C , where the norms o f the national code itself, especially its insistence on honesty and courage, are exposed as originally excessive, so that the 'real man' can only be a male transvestite/transsexual. The play then proceeds to bring the audience to its awakening to an alternative masculinity: that 'true' masculinity resides in men's recognition of their lack, their impotence, and their awareness o f the contradictory nature o f their desire, which sometimes answers to the desire o f the big 'Other' and sometimes does not. According to the play's ideology, real 'manliness' as that required for 332 survival in the modern world sometimes involves dissembling, dishonesty, and a lack in courage. The play suggests this by first representing K C as the marginalized 'other' to Chuck as national male figure, and then revealing K C ' s 'otherness' to be the same: K C ' s self-declared honesty has its own limitations, making him similar to Chuck. K C ' s verbal gesture that "People like us [male transvestites/transsexuals] who parade on Bugis Street for all to see are some of the very few honest people there are" is ironized by his physical gesture as mentioned in the stage instructions: " (At this point, takes off bra and removes tissue padding)." Self-ironically, K C then adds " W e l l , perhaps not that honest," as i f any underscoring of the message were necessary (32). Later on in Ac t I, scene i i , K C reveals that, once a month, possibly over several years, he has been visiting his family, masquerading as a straight man so as to protect his father from knowledge o f his secret life as a transvestite prostitute. Pretending to have come from Bangkok where he supposedly works at a Thai branch office o f his company, he even supplies Thai fruits in season, bought at Singapore markets, flaunts a Bangkok Airport tag on his suitcase and puts up with his father's exhortations to avoid the charms o f Thai women! This grand subterfuge makes him no different from Chuck, whom he puts down for his lack of courage and honesty in leading a double life. In the second act, when Chuck upbraids him for not daring to reveal his transsexuality to an American pen-pal, Jeff Slater, who has proposed to K C , believing him to be a woman, K C comes more and more to resemble Chuck. Chuck 's comment to K C shows up traditional (Western) male virtues such as honesty and courage as phantasmatic, involving a mere "strike[ing of] a posture" (50): . . . deep down you know that you are no more honest than any one o f us. Y o u sneer at us for our lack o f courage . . . we lead lives o f secrecy because we fear the consequences o f others knowing about our secret. But you should not sneer at us and now you understand why; because, at last you also know what it is like to count the cost of somebody knowing your secret. (51) In the final conversation between K C and Chuck, the playwright rehearses exceptions to honesty. Among them, the fourth "exception to honesty" is that the truth is "not always apparent," while the fifth exception is that "it is sometimes beyond our means to know enough about something to be honest about 333 it" (52). Though K C ironizes these exceptions by being less than serious about them, the play's dismantling o f K C ' s own claim to honesty and its exposure o f honesty as an inadequate means of coping with the realities o f life, leads the audience to accept this 'post-modern' attitude toward honesty and truth. Nevertheless, as in Chiang's play, the ironizing reveals the playwright's ambivalence towards his ideology. The economy of desire and identification in the play works towards eroticizing and validating an alternative masculinity: one that comes to terms with lack, which recognizes that even the strongest man is a vict im o f the B i g (Br)'Other' (the Symbolic Order). A t the beginning of the play, K C as the character the audience identifies with and in whom desire is invested, provides a subject position for the audience to occupy, a site from which the playwright as the hidden "speaking subject o f the discourse," the producer o f meaning, directs the audience's identifications and its desire. Through K C , the playwright gets the audience to recast itself by identifying with K C ' s many areas o f lack: his lack in masculinity/gender coherence, his difference/lack in economic ability, class identity (he comes from a middle-class family but is now a prostitute and he went to the prestigious London School o f Economics only to drop out after three years), his lack o f cultural purity (he speaks reflexively in English, and sings in Chinese, but he cannot communicate with his mother in her dialect). The audience as the "spoken subject o f the discourse," the projected viewers, in this case, English-educated and Westernized Chinese Singaporeans, identify with his lack of power: he cannot be himself, having always to resort to disguise and masquerade; his desires (for sexual satisfaction, familial and social acceptance) always run foul o f the demands of the dominant ideology and hence cannot be answered. The audience also identifies with K C ' s desires: those named above, as well as his desire for an open, honest society that does not curb individual desire. The audience identifies with K C ' s insistence on openness and honesty and invests it with desire because in it the audience sees a possible means of overthrowing the center and the position of lack/marginalization it has identified with. A t various points in the play, the audience identifies with K C as the figure o f resistance who w i l l deliver them from their domination. The audience also views 334 Chuck with the ambivalent mix of desire and contempt that K C has for his lover. Identifying with and desiring like K C , the audience is set up to desire Chuck's position o f power in society. Chuck has money, class and knowledge, the rudiments o f power. A s a possible agent with Singapore's Internal Security Department, he is a figure at the center of the nation's authority, power and surveillance. Chuck hence has everything that K C (and the audience by identifying with K C ) lacks but desires in a man. Chuck suffers lack in only one respect: he is unable/unwilling to be open and honest about his bisexuality. Although we have contempt for his seeming cowardice, Chuck is set up as a figure o f mystery in the play: the one towards whom desire and curiousity are directed. Increasingly, however, as the play proceeds, the audience moves from identifying with K C and desiring what he desires to identifying with Chuck and desiring either to be or have him. In this manner, the play carries out several o f its ideological projects. One o f these is to theorize resistance away. The play starts by investing the audience with desire for resistance, but works towards invalidating that resistance. K C as the initial "spoken subject o f the discourse " champions resistance against the heterosexual hegemonic order and insists on his desire but when he is himself unable to live up to his own tenets regarding honesty and courage, the audience starts to dis-identify with him. This dis-identification is sealed in A c t II, scene i i when K C confronts his mother and sister. Initially, the audience identifies and sympathizes with K C ' s belief that it was his parents who caused his gender and sexuality problems and it perceives the consequent lack of family acceptance as a grave injustice done to K C . But in this scene, K C ' s mother and sister point out that K C cannot blame everything (his dropping out o f university and his prostitution) on his family, so that K C loses his status as hero o f resistance and as the audience's male ego-ideal. When Chuck points out the similarity between K C and himself, in that both lack the courage to be open and honest about their sexuality, and that K C ' s policy of openness is not even a viable option in modern society with its heterosexual bias, the audience shifts identification to Chuck. The lack that K C saw in Chuck, he now sees reflected in himself, and K C moves from a desiring position towards Chuck to that 335 of identification. This switch is completed by the time he takes Chuck's advice to attend his father's funeral. Throughout much o f the play, K C appears to be the "speaking subject o f the discourse," the producer o f meaning: initially, he controls the audience's gaze and his castrating gaze inspires lack in the audience. He narrativises, reads and judges Chuck as dishonest and cowardly, and his father as the impotent patriarch (who is unable to stop his only son from becoming a woman). But at the end o f the play, the "speaking subject" talks through Chuck, retrospectively ironizing its earlier masquerade as K C . This changeover is crucial for the play's ideological project in debunking resistance and maintaining the status quo: by first arousing desire in the audience for resistance and then revealing its lack (its impracticality), the audience is convinced both intellectually and emotionally of the futility o f resistance, and its desire is instead transferred to the now perceived need to compromise on one's desire and to negotiate with the hegemonic order, as Chuck does. Both the object of desire and the subject/s of identification in this play are male. The alternative masculinity that Chuck stands for has been elaborated and eroticized through K C ' s desire for him. I f we read him as a government spy, or even merely as a c iv i l servant or a professional, Chuck is a figure who undercuts the national hegemonic heterosexual masculinity of the establishment and shows its linkages to values such as honesty, courage, familial (patriarchal) control, sexual 'normality' and (authoritarian) power to be merely an appearance, a masquerade. K C as Chuck 's seeming opposite is the figure o f resistance to national masculinity, who is eventually and surprisingly recuperated by the play as Chuck 's double in order to vindicate Chuck's offer of an alternative masculinity for Singaporean men, which excludes the need for resistance against the hegemonic order. Heng's offering o f an alternative masculinity turns on a particular theory o f desire and resistance that the play dramatizes. A s both K C ' s and Chuck's experiences show, desire is often conflicted, located at contradictory and multiple sites, hence problematizing resistance (an insistence on one's desire, against the desire o f the big Other). For instance, K C is aware of his father's impotence as patriarch and desires 336 to throw away his patrilineal heritage (he wants to be his father's daughter, not his son) as well as to insist on his identity as a "real woman" but he also loves his father and wants to honor his memory. Now a post-operative female, this places him in a dilemma over whether he should attend his father's funeral dressed as a woman and thus demand public recognition of his female identity, or appear dressed (disguised) as a man in order to perform the son's last rites for the father. Similarly, Chuck as a bisexual, desires a regular family life (hence his marriage) but also desires a same-sex relationship, necessitating subterfuge and duplicity if he is to have both his desires met under the hegemonic order. Masquerade is also essential for Chuck (as a bisexual) if he is to attain his other desires such as professional fulfillment, economic success and power: revelation of his sexuality would jeopardize his chances in a heterosexual male-dominated culture. Chuck's 'alternative masculinity' shows that male power can coexist in the same subject with male impotence, that masquerade and deception are not indices of male lack (of cowardice) but rather are means for survival. The play also invalidates resistance against the hegemonic order as unnecessary, 'excessive,' with KC's male hysteria being the signifier of (Western) resistance as 'over-the-top,' excessive, campy. Why bother to resist, the play asks, when one's desires and identifications are conflicted, being both in tandem with the Symbolic Order and against it too. It suggests instead negotiation with the Symbolic Order and masquerade, both negotiation and masquerade now being recuperated as masculine values since they are the means to power. If fantasy is the screen against the threat to the subject posed by the desire of the big Other (Zizek, "Chez Vuoi?" 118), this play fantasizes that the desire of the big Other is itself conflicted, lacking coherence, thereby permitting conflicted identifications and desires to occur in the formation of subjectivity. Though this may make us all victims of the big Other, this theoretical fantasy of the contradictory desires of the big Other also allows the subject space for maneuver. This 'theory' of the big Other (of Chinese culture, in this case) is illustrated in the play's 'explanation' of KC's transsexuality. KC's parents apparently attached excessive value to having a son, which led to guilt over their good fortune when KC was born. Thus when KC fell ill, they immediately consulted a Chinese 337 fortune-teller rather than a doctor in order to interpret the desire of the gods. Their guilt led to their easy acceptance of the fortune-teller's reading of the desire of the gods because the fortune-teller was only reading their own desire back to them: he told them that KC's parents had cheated destiny by having a son and that the "demons" would be out to get him. His advice: that the parents dress their son as a female in order to deceive the "demons," especially on festival days. The "demons," of course, are only an outward projection of the parents' own internal fears and guilt. In running away from these "demons," they, however, run straight into their arms. Dressing up their son as a daughter, they 'cross-dress' their fears as their desire, leading KC to mistakenly identify with his parents' fears (the flip side of their desire) rather than with their desire. KC, delivered from culpability for his identifications and desires (he is a victim of contradictions in the desire of the big Other), is then ethically free to resort to masquerade and appearances in order to attain the objects of his desire. KC's gender cross-dressing is also a cultural cross-dressing: his problems of ethnic identification are interpreted as problems of gender identification in that the former have given rise to a crisis in masculine identity. His transsexuality is represented in the play as originating from the excessive value and desire attached to males in Chinese culture. His identification with women is tantamount to a rejection of the desire of the Chinese patriarchy (he refuses to take up the mantle as his father's son). KC's language of resistance as transsexual is set up as the Western language of liberalism confronting the language of a 'Chinese' 'communitarianism': he prioritizes his individual rights over those of social obligations, telling his sister, "If the old folks cannot accept me as I am then they have no business demanding that I have a duty to them!" (49). KC's dilemma of self-interest (Western) versus family interest and the demands of filial piety (Chinese) is metaphor for the dilemma of the nation in having to choose between its Western colonial heritage of democracy and liberalism and its supposed Eastern 'ethnic' heritage of authoritarianism and communitarianism, where 'ethnic' heritage is conceptualized as one's patriarchal (blood) heritage. As the play reveals, not only do Singapore's multiple cultural heritages threaten the formation of a coherent (male) subjectivity (where masculinity implies integrity, the possession of an 338 unfragmented self-hood), but the state's insistence on prioritizing the nation's Asian/Chinese cultural heritage also poses problems to male identity: firstly, it subordinates its male subjects' desires with its insistence and dominates their w i l l ; then it wants them to identify with a culture that they have already been taught to view, through the spectacles o f modernity (or colonial knowledge), as impotent and primitive. K C ' s father, the signifier of Chinese patriarchal power, is shown to lack power and, as head of the family, he has no familial control (he is unable to make his son take up his patriarchal legacy, even watching speechless as his adolescent son wears his mother's bra and cavorts in front o f the mirror). K C recalls that when he used to mime the heroines in Chinese opera, going against his father's objections, "there was nothing he [the father] could do about it" (37). K C ' s desire too runs the route o f Western masculinity: " K C wants a man . . . who writes good English, even i f it is American Engl ish" (35). In the play, modernity is represented as that (surgical) cut that annihilates Chinese patriarchal culture's claims to power/masculinity. K C ' s transsexuality does not threaten his father's male identity as completely as does his sex-change operation. In fact, his father dies almost immediately after his son's operation so that K C ' s figurative claim that "what I am can k i l l my Father i f he finds out" (35) becomes literal truth and suggests that the father's male identity was a fragile one, dependent on his fathering male progeny: where masculinity is a meaning conferred retrospectively through its reproduction, the original that exists only through its copies. Chinese norms of gender identity and the roles assigned to the sexes in family ideology are rendered meaningless and impotent however when modern science and technology can so easily reverse nature's handiwork: even i f K C finally decides to perform the last rites for his father as his only son, the gesture o f fi l ial piety would be mocked by modernity. Modernity kil ls aspirations to Chinese ethnic identity because, the play suggests, traditional Chinese culture turns on sex/gender norms that modernity has already deconstructed. It can only be kept alive as dead tradition, as form without content, as empty ritual, as pretense or masquerade, the substitute-rem(a)inder o f the original lack. 339 Heng rejects readings of Chinese culture as traditional, as belonging to the past and as pre-colonial. Instead, he redefines Chinese male identity as post-colonial and modern, aware and accepting o f its lack, its colonization/ castration, but as nevertheless alert to the attaining of power. Here, being 'Chinese' involves masquerading, being Chinese but pretending to be white or vice versa i f and when necessary, a cross-cultural passing that is supposedly as easy as passing off one's name: Chuck 's Chinese name, "Chak," passes as the Americanized "Chuck," while " K i m Choon" is shortened to the gender/ethnic neutral name o f " K i m " or " K C . " In contrast to the new post-colonial Chinese male identity, Western masculinity, its 'other,' is represented as ignorant o f its inadequacies, as being delusionary, involving a false recognition o f sexual/cultural power. This, despite the Western male's appearance o f rippling muscles and greater body mass as compared to the Chinese man's smaller physique: K C for instance intends to dupe Slatter, the American hamburger cook with that "firm Caucasian angular jawline and the greenish hint o f unshaven stubble" (42) and rugged good looks into marrying a man, while the latter foolishly prides himself on having nabbed a nice, docile Oriental wife! The play's offering of the solution o f masquerade to conflicts in identification and desire is made against that o f resistance, o f fighting for cultural change: it deconstructs the discourse o f identity politics by rendering identity itself as conflicted. It also rejects another possible solution to Singaporeans' problem of West/East conflicts posed by their cultural pluralism: that of inhabiting a third, in-between, space between the two cultural poles, a cultural hybridity where one is neither Eastern nor Western but both at once and neither. This possible option is suggested at the opening of the play and then shut off forever through the metaphor o f the historic closing of Bugis Street, Singapore's 'red-light' district for transvestite/transsexual entertainment, where K C works his sex trade. This hybrid model o f cultural/gender identity is the return of that which is repressed by the state's dominant discourse o f national identity, which turns on ethnic essentialisms concerning East and West. It is ideologically necessary for Heng to foreclose this option of an in-between space (to wish it away) in order to validate his solution o f masquerade and negotiation with the hegemonic order (where one alternates 340 schizophrenically between fixed identities as Asian/Western, male/female, gay/straight): hybridity eschews polarity, mocks boundaries and calls for a new epistemology: it screams for resistance against the hegemonic order, which does not answer to Heng's desire. But, as the play indicates, this inhabiting of an in-between cultural/gender space must necessarily precede Heng's solution: it is the condition making the latter possible of attainment. One cannot be Western-educated and play at being Asian/Chinese when the occasion calls for it, or be homosexual in one's private life and appear to be heterosexual in public, or be a woman sometimes and a man at other times (as KC tries to be) unless one's identifications and desires have run through the spectrum of all poles of identity: that one has already been subjectivated as culturally and sexually hybrid in the first place. Hence, Heng's imaginary resolution of Singaporean identity problems insists that this in-between space must both appear (figured by KC's transsexuality) and then disappear (when Bugis Street is closed, economically necessitating KC's sex change). KC's experience of transsexuality is the Utopian fantasy of cultural hybridity that is remembered with nostalgic desire, and then banished from memory. He thinks of his days as a transvestite prostitute on Bugis Street as his happiest. As a transvestite, KC could be "campy," be a man playing (parodying, caricaturing) at being a woman, so that he is neither all-woman or all-man, but both and neither: the authenticity of his identity defined by this gender/sex inauthenticity. The Singapore government's recent attempts to push forth an Asian/Chinese identity, its reneging on a previous discourse of East-West cultural hybridity promoted in the 1960s and 1970s, is metaphorically displaced in the play as that of the closing of Bugis Street in the 1980s (a reference to a real event) which ends KC's transsexual gender/sex hybridity. KC is forced to eschew hybridity just as Singaporeans were forced to decide in the 1980s and 1990s whether they were Asian/Chinese or Western. Symptomatically, the end of transsexual ity/hybridity is greeted in the play with resignation, and desire for a Utopian cultural/gender hybridity is offered only as nostalgia, as desire for that which is lost forever, which covers over the possibility of resistance. The play opens with KC mourning the loss of Bugis Street: "Well, we have come to the final night; the final night of Bugis Street! God, what a party 341 it was! Y o u should have seen the people who turned up and the things we did." K C ' s 'sister,' fellow-transsexual Ani ta Sarawak tells him: " K C , we are going to make the most of this night and after that, we w i l l not talk about it any more. There's no point looking back for we are never going to get another place like this street again, ever! Not in Singapore. Not in the whole world!" (29-30) Wi th surgery, K C is cut off from hybridity and w i l l henceforth have to choose between the two gender poles of male/female (so that surgery is a condensed metaphor in the play, signifying the cut o f modernity as mentioned earlier but also referring to the state as castrator since the closing o f Bugis Street was a government action). Wittingly or unwittingly, the play shows that lack o f cultural/ethnic/gender purity is not a threat to coherent identity nor would it generate anxiety over male identity: it only becomes a problem when the option of a hybridized identity is foreclosed. K C faces identity dilemmas only after his sex-change: as a transsexual, he would not have had a problem performing funeral rites for his father as his only son; but now that he is a "real woman," he becomes inauthentic both as daughter and as son. The play's ending is symptom of the untenability o f Heng's solution o f masquerade and compromise: although the audience knows that K C must turn up at his father's funeral dressed as a man, in keeping with the advice Chuck gives him as the "speaking subject o f the discourse," the play cannot show the sex-changed K C in male dress because, with his new woman's body, he can no longer convincingly pass as a man. Hence, the play ends with K C in the process o f deciding. The movement o f the play from parodic comedy to absurd theater and its rejection o f dramatic realism are also symptoms of the limits of Heng's ideological solution of negotiating with the hegemonic order. Fixed categories of identity (gender/race/ethnicity/sexuality/nationality) are mocked and this subversion enjoyed in the comedic first section of the play. K C ' s Malay male transsexual friend "Ani t a Sarawak" (named after Singapore's most successful female singer/performer, who is Malay) sings in Chinese but doesn't know the meaning of the lyrics. K C considers Ani ta his "sister"; K C himself spouts Western liberal philosophy and punctuates it with renditions o f a song from the 342 Chinese opera. K C , playing up his woman's identity, switches from talking like a prostitute to thinking like a schoolgirl in love, and desiring like a yuppie woman who wants a man with "wide-ranging interests . . . Books, the theater, music, both pop and classical, and politics" (31), all the while undressing to show that s/he is not a woman. Finally, visiting his family, K C confounds geographical/national boundaries by pretending he has come from Thailand. In K C ' s transsexuality, gender cross-dressing intersects with cultural and class cross-dressing, and hybridity o f all forms: aside from the class and cultural crossings already mentioned, he is the Chinese, cross-dressed opera singer waiting to marry a straight American man; he is the Third Wor ld urban proletariat (as prostitute) with dreams o f becoming a First World suburban housewife. But in Ac t II, the comedic and revolutionary aspect o f this post-modern approach to identity is reinterpreted as the tragedy always-already inherent in post-modern identity. This sense o f the tragic condition o f human beings inevitably doomed to alienation by the Symbolic Order, an epistemology institutionalized by the theater o f the absurd, allows Heng to invalidate resistance as futile. It also helps him to push forward his suggestion of negotiation with society's codes: at least then we can attain satisfaction o f some o f our desires and compromise without the hindrance o f subscribing to ' idealistic ' notions such as truth to self, freedom, etc. What is hidden in this move from comedy to tragedy is the playwright's role as manipulator of meaning, where the tragic sense is evoked only because we are now in an arena other than that of post-modernity. The sex-change, via which K C moves from a l iminal space o f identity to that o f fixed boundaries, is the dramatic ploy that Heng absolutely requires in order to turn K C from an empowered figure of resistance to life's tragic vict im, to carry off his ideological project o f discrediting and hystericizing resistance against the hegemonic order. The play is also structured as a monologue with K C the only figure on stage, addressing the audience with meditations on his life. The other characters are restricted to representation as disembodied voices that K C calls up as he remembers past and recent events. B y staying away from representational realism, the playwright, in theorizing resistance, elides the problem of society's responsibilities to the individual. 343 For instance, K C is able to represent his monthly visits to his family in the comic mode via narrative recollection and thereby maintain his position of power as resistance figure in the first act. But the actual staging o f this scene would have revealed instead the site o f powerlessness from which K C speaks his resistance, and the cruelty of society's demands where these force him to take up a subjectivity that he cannot identify with. It is only by withholding dramatic realism that the play can represent K C ' s resistance as excessive, as hysterical. We are also never shown K C working as a transvestite prostitute on Bugis Street. This would have revealed the depth o f his marginalization by society and evoked audience pity for him. K C ' s difference would have also hindered a largely-heterosexual audience's identification with him, which the play depends on for its ideologization. K C ' s appearance as center figure on stage belies his true position in society as a marginalized subject who lacks power and voice. Identifications, says Fuss, involve colonization/appropriation of the 'other's difference, where the 'other's subjectivity is reduced to being the same as that o f the self (Identification 1-14). B y making it such that K C appears to be 'everyman' (he has boyfriend/girlfriend problems like the rest o f us, differences o f opinion with his family; he cannot always identify with society's desires, yet yearns for social/familial acceptance), by forgetting that s/he is the 'other,' the Singapore audience can identify themselves with him/her as a tragic vict im o f society, and cover over their culpability as social agents in reproducing and supporting the structures of power that marginalize this 'other,' as wel l as their social responsibility to change/resist the existing order. The 'over-Westernized' Singaporean who has cathected Western norms and is unable to identify with the state's privileging o f ' A s i a n ' values cannot be likened to a transvestite/transsexual whose gender identity does not match society's sex-ing o f his body unless one views the state's discourse as a body that one must inhabit. The play also equates Chuck 's dishonesty with K C ' s . But K C ' s dilemmas about truth-telling are caused by the temporal split in his/her sexed/gendered subjectivity: she cannot confess to Slatter that she was a man because she is no longer one. Moreover, K C had to dissemble to his father because the latter's life was in the balance. 344 Chuck on the other hand has no such valid excuses in pretending to a straight sexuality that he does not possess. The tranvestite/transsexual is used in this play to convey the repressed (of liberalism) returning under cover o f a non-censorable term. Transvestite/transsexual gender-crossing and subversion o f fixed gender categories are strategies by which the Singaporean tries to imagine alternative subject positions and value systems while bypassing or at least camouflaging the Western discourse o f liberalism. Within the current political situation, cultural texts that openly spout liberal ethics are liable to be read by Singaporean audiences as wel l as by the state as a capitulation to Western imperialism, as a betrayal of one's racial/ethnic identity. The transvestite protagonist, K C , gets away with speaking the tenets o f liberalism (asserting one's individual rights against social and familial norms, being true to one's principles, etc.) because he is seen to arrive at his liberalism v ia his marginalized sexuality rather than through a fascination with Western culture. Thus, his championing o f his individuality and his prioritizing o f the interests o f the self over those o f society are received with sympathy as being akin to that o f a visually-challenged or movement-challenged person pleading for a new social space for himself. In this manner, too, a deep rebellion against society's central values can be covered over to appear non-threatening to society, to be viewed as something that only affects the margins o f the nation. Transsexuality provides the Singaporean with a language of escape from repressed desires such as that for Western culture and post-modern hybridity as well as from repressed cultural knowledge. K C as transsexual is allowed to inhabit a transgressive cultural space from where his/her critique o f Chinese culture is able to get past the censorship authorities o f the symbolic order by masquerading as a contingent and exceptional response. K C ' s indeterminate gender identity mocks and exposes the inability o f Chinese family culture to function as anything more than empty form in its encounter with 'modernity. ' Though she is a post-operative woman, K C is importuned by his mother to return home dressed as a man in order to perform the funeral rites for his father as the latter's only son. K C ' s 345 insistence that he is no longer his father's son but is now his sixth and youngest daughter does not matter: social custom must be observed, regardless o f the lack o f real content inside the form. Within the play's semiotics, the male transvestite/transsexual as the 'other' represents the demon (of Western values) in Singaporean subjectivity that needs to be exorcised, that is, recalled and then banished, which testifies to Singaporean ambivalence towards liberalism and democratic culture, to a split in their desire. Not accidentally, in Heng's play, the male transsexual protagonist is one who has literally identified with the desire of the "demons" in wanting to be a woman despite his possession of a male body. K C ' s transsexuality involves the return of repressed demons, those which his parents sought escape from. The play itself signals the intellectual incoherence in Heng's solution o f masquerade as the key to coping with the desire o f the Other since he merely repeats K C ' s parents' ill-fated decision concerning gender impersonation as a means of escaping from their guilt/fears. If the attempt by K C ' s parents to deceive the demons led them instead to fulfill the demons' desires (that they shouldn't have a son), then the Singaporean, in pretending to obey the Symbolic Order/dominant culture/state ideology, w i l l , in all likelihood, answer to the desire of the very demons (oppressive structures o f power) that he means to avoid, as wel l as reproduce the latter's power. The 'explanation' for K C ' s transsexuality is the unconscious element that disrupts Heng's intellectualized fantasy o f masquerade, an unsuccessfully repressed desire for resistance that spoils the fun and points towards a future o f conflicted identifications and desires, a neurotic stalling in meaning such as we see in K C ' s inability to decide the sex/gender he w i l l assume at his father's funeral. The play ends with these stage directions: (Music from "Final Night" begins and gradually gets louder. KC collects men's clothes from the wardrobe and changes in front of a standing mirror. Then she changes into the black dress. Still unhappy, she changes into men's clothes again. Lights fade out as she is changing, leaving the audience guessing as to her final decision.) (53) 346 The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate 'S' Machine (1991) and Undercover (1993) by Tan Tarn How For playwright Tan Tarn How, as with Michael Chiang, the shortcomings of Singapore's national, especially political, culture are explained, critiqued and consequently mediated by the culture o f masculinity. Both o f Tan's plays, Lady o f Soul, written in 1991, 4 and Undercover, first dramatized as a reading in 1993, treat themes associated with the nation's political culture such as the lack o f freedom in expression and political authoritarianism as issues that concern masculine identity. The women in these plays are largely represented as men's minions, as their helpmates who have internalized male values, or as the 'other' to the (male) nation, onto whom the negative, disorderly parts of the national male psyche are displaced. In Lady o f Soul, woman is metaphor o f the nation's desire for an alternative culture but, as the metaphorized object o f (male) desire, she is feared for her potential to produce cultural chaos and degeneration. A s Deniz Kandayoti and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have already articulated for us, this is a masculinization o f the nation where women are treated as a different trajectory o f the nation, which marginalizes women's desires and their needs on national agendas. But I hope to show with my discussion o f these two plays that the masculinization o f the nation is also an ideological strategy that serves to shut off the nation and its cultural problems from radical critique. It is, in this sense, a crucial aspect o f the endeavor of the public imagination to bring public desire into correspondence with totalitarianism or at the very least to delimit and problematize opposition to statism. Lady o f Soul is a satire about a nation that is looking for "soul." Though written as a surrealistic drama featuring dream sequences, musical acts in the vaudeville tradition and improbable events set in an unnamed country, the play has many local references. The central event of the play, where a group of c iv i l servants and a cabinet minister put together a program of action and policies that w i l l transform the nation into a vibrant society, one with "soul," takes off from a real event. In 1984, the ruling People's Act ion Party issued its election manifesto "Agenda for Act ion: Singapore, Ci ty of Excellence—A Vis ion o f Singapore by 1999," where Singapore was to be developed as "a society" that was "culturally vibrant." In a speech to the A lumni International, Goh Chok Tong, then First Deputy Prime Minister 347 and Minister for Defence, said that once a society's "basic needs" were "secure," as Singapore's were, it would want "similar progress in the social and cultural fields" as in the economic domain. Singapore was to be produced as a "cultivated society," by which Goh meant a society o f well-read, well-informed citizens, a refined and gracious people, a thoughtful people, a society o f sparkling ideas, a place where art, literature and music flourish. It is not a materialistic, consumerist society where wealth is flaunted and money spent thoughtlessly, in short a parvenu society. 5 In March 1985, an Economic Committee was appointed to identify new directions for Singapore's future growth. A Sub-Committee on Services published in 1986 its recommendations for the development o f a "vibrant cultural and entertainment services industry." A Task Force on Cultural and Entertainment Services was then appointed that same year to implement these recommendations. Though the government expressed concern about what would happen i f the arts developed in an unfettered manner, by 1991, f i lm censorship was liberalized with a f i lm classification system. A Censorship Review Committee was also set up to review censorship criteria imposed on plays and recommended, in 1992, greater artistic freedom for artists and self-regulation for established theater groups. Lady o f Soul was one o f the first plays to be passed uncensored under the new guidelines, 6 but, in an earlier submission, the licensing authority had recommended changes to the play. In his earlier letter o f appeal addressed to the Public Entertainment and Licensing Unit , Tan situates his play within the government's project in developing the arts, and echoes its discourse o f cultural promotion: . . . the whole theme o f the play—that o f a nation searching for soul—is a serious and immediate concern for Singapore. After all the Government itself has declared that it wants to make the nation vibrant and cultured, that it wants Singapore to have a soul that it hitherto lacks . . . It has voiced its worries about what may happen i f this happens in an unfettered way; the play gives the chance for the minister to reiterate these worries. The audience is therefore not given a one-sided perspective of the debate. . . . I think that Singapore's quest for a soul is one that other newly 348 industrializing countries are concerned about: What comes after prosperity? H o w do we repeat •7 culturally what we have succeeded in economically? The play rehearses the issues connected with state promotion o f the arts and with censorship, the liberalization o f the arts and freedom of expression. It also critiques local political culture, featuring characters such as a "Minis ter" and a "Minister o f State" (junior minister) leaving no doubt about the geographical location o f this unnamed nation. A s printed text, Lady o f Soul extends beyond the boundaries o f the play's script. The play was published as a text in 1993 together with " A Diary of Censorship" (in which Tan documents and comments on the play's trials and tribulations with the censorship authorities). It also includes Tan's "Letter o f Appeal sent to the Public Entertainment and Licensing Uni t " in 31 October 1992, where he requested that the play, which had to be revised in accordance with existing guidelines, be reviewed under the new, more liberal guidelines set out by the Censorship Review Committee, which had been published earlier that month. Sirius Books ' publication of the play also features a local news report of the play's censorship history, which called Lady o f Soul "a landmark play . . . heralding a new phase in theater" in view of its being a political satire that was passed under the new guidelines (83-5). The play proper, which has six scenes excluding the prologue, starts by establishing, in the first scene, women's subordinate position in Singapore's hierarchy of political power. Derek is a top c iv i l servant, possibly a Permanent Secretary, who is about to make a presentation of the findings o f the "Committee For the Creation o f a Vibrant Society" to the Minister of Culture and the Minister o f State. Advis ing Chris and Les, his two female assistants, not to be nervous, he sets the women up as his minions and prepares the audience to make the equation between the masculine gender and political power. This point is underlined in the following discussion between Derek and Paul, the Minister o f State (Singapore's title for junior ministers), where political power is specifically framed within the coordinates of the 'o ld boys' network.' Paul and Derek, it turns out, were not only fellow-students in a graduate program in Public Administration at London University but had been lovers too. Paul has just 349 returned from a trip to England, and in a typical scene of male bonding, they recall former Bri t ish (male) lecturers o f theirs, quote the tenets o f colonial public administration, and laugh about their former university exploits in London. Paul's wife merits a mention in their conversation i f only to reinforce the masculinity of political culture: Elizabeth was apparently, according to Paul, a bit bewildered by the fuss I was making about it [visiting old haunts in London in a 'pilgrimage'] , but she dutifully followed behind. I supposed [sic] it got better for her when we moved on to the Lake District on the business part o f the trip. ( 8) Elizabeth then is cast out of this masculine culture of public administration. A s a woman, no doubt, she understands the Romantic poetry o f Wordsworth and Coleridge and the Lake District better than the "bewilder[ing]" ' real ' world o f politics. The first scene continues with a discussion by the three men—Derek, Paul and the Minister—of the proceedings and findings o f the "Committee for the Creation o f a Vibrant Society," where government business is represented as a masculine responsibility. This would have been no less evident when the play was staged in 1993 with a woman cast in the Minister 's role. A s the playwright notes in his diary of censorship, "the Minister was written as a male part" (63). Earlier, worried about getting the play passed by the censorship authorities, the playwright had suggested, in a meeting with the director o f Theatreworks, the theater company that was to stage the play, "that maybe we could change the Minister to a woman, and not only for censorship reasons" ( "Diary" 62). This cryptic comment may be explained by reference to the play and the role of the Minister within it. Despite the playwright's disclaimer that the play says that "ministers and c iv i l servants in Singapore are like the characters it portrays," the satirical appeal o f Lady o f Soul depends on the local audience's recognition o f the rhetoric and discourse o f evasion, caution and double-speak used by Singapore's political leaders and top c iv i l servants in public statements made about progress on new policies. Since Singapore's ministers and ministers o f state are predominantly male, this type of discourse, even i f voiced by a woman cast as minister, would have been read by a local audience as a male discourse spoken by a female minister who 350 has internalized a male political and c iv i l service culture. The minister also defines her position as that o f upholding male authority: " W e l l , I want this [the project] to be handled with the utmost care and discretion. Y o u know how the Prime Minister is, he's a man of care and discretion" (19). Adding, "I w i l l be depending on you, Derek," she represents herself as a conduit, someone who w i l l deliver one man's ideas to another man. A t this point, the play is a local rendition o f the British T V comedy series Yes . Minister, which satirizes Brit ish c iv i l service culture's conservatism, its resistance to social change and progressive ideas. In a direct reference to the Brit ish series, Derek repeats the show's signature line, "Yes , Minister ," several times in order to underline the c iv i l service's prioritizing of authority and hierarchy over serious commitment to social improvement. B y referring repeatedly to the British T V series and emphasizing Derek's and Paul 's Brit ish education, the play suggests that the Singapore c iv i l service's wariness towards social change and liberalism is the legacy of an outdated British colonial culture o f public administration, fashioned when the Empire was already in decline. This colonial culture is personified by Paul 's and Derek's Brit ish "rickety old professor," "old Kowalsk i , " and exemplified in the principles of public administration he taught them: where "Rule One" dictates that" 'Committees Spontaneously Reproduce Themselves Asexual ly ' " and "Rule T w o " that " A good public servant encourages the realisation o f Rule One" (13). A s Derek becomes a figure of resistance who w i l l fight for change and an effective c iv i l service, the playwright ventures that a new kind o f masculine culture is required to turn Singapore into a vibrant nation. Derek's desire to "change society" (19) is associated with a post-colonial machismo, a masculine responsibility to be true to one's ideals despite social and political opposition, accompanied by strong national fervor. We are told that Derek had a "devil-may-care attitude" in his student-days, which is suggested by an anti-colonial quarrel he has with a Brit ish professor. Recall ing the incident, Paul says to Derek: 351 "I thought you would get kicked out when you told him off in the senior common room. 'What do you mean, you pompous old fool? If you are not acquainted with my country, you are hardly in the position to pass judgement on it.' I could hear the sound of everyone breathing after you said that." (20) Derek's masculine qualities extend beyond anti-colonial courage. He is a man o f action, with a revolutionary streak in him, always open to new ideas and experiences. Derek is thus established as an unusual Singaporean, unlike Paul. A s a student, for instance, he "wanted to spend half a year driving across Amer ica ," an idea that Paul, in a typically Singaporean manner, considered "crazy" (41). (Paul's response is a side-swipe against an often-made observation that Singaporeans tend to measure everything in terms o f opportunity costs, and familial or career responsibilities.) When Derek loses his premier c iv i l service job for pushing the idea o f freedom of expression and is reassigned to a television station , Paul fears that he "might create a revolution in the television station" (52). Derek champions liberalization of the arts and resists the state's over-cautiousness, and, in doing so, we are told that he has become "a different man" (52), where ' l iberalism' is linked to a type of masculinity. Paul, by contrast, is the typical c iv i l servant with a masculinity marked by lack: he is short on ideals and the strength to be honest and steadfast to his principles. Polit ically, Paul is a chameleon, changing his beliefs as and when necessary to advance his career; he has also developed "the habit o f saying things which are exactly the opposite of what" he means (53). His self-declared motto in life is to be "l ike a bamboo stem. Bend with the wind." Since the world won't change, "not without us breaking our necks," he does not believe that it is a man's responsibility to effect social improvement: far better to "[ride] the wave, not [drown] in it" (42). In the end, however, the play does not underwrite Derek's more subversive, heroic masculinity. Derek is allowed his moment in the fifth scene when he explains and justifies his set o f values in terms that the audience is obviously meant to identify with. He speaks up for the moral necessity o f sticking by one's principles instead o f compromising on them for the sake of material gain, career improvement and security. Otherwise one would be " l iv ing a l ie ," he declares. The "adjustment" of one's "attitudes in 352 order to hold on to the job" holds a high social and moral cost, he adds, far outweighing the "benefits of the job" (51). He is the play's hero when he risks his career as wel l as the social status, material security and political power that the job has offered him to stand up to his belief in freedom of expression. But it is a short-lived heroism. Almost immediately the play works to discredit this masculinity. When Paul leaves him to complete his packing ( he has just been transferred out o f his department), Derek has a dream that suggests that his promotion o f free cultural expression had some materialistic motivation, so that his ambitions are rendered as not different from the Minister 's or Paul 's. In the dream, Derek translates the ideal o f freedom in the arts into business terms: that it would promote local trade in pornography, sex as wel l as the arts and generate income in terms o f international sales o f the newly-invented "Ultimate 'S'[ex] Machine," in which he would have a share. In the play's final scene, where the government makes a music-and-dance presentation of its severely compromised program for cultural vibrancy, it is suggested that Derek has recanted on his vision. Together with the others, he raps out the findings o f the "Committee for the Creation o f a Vibrant Nation": "We 've tried the free road/And we don't like what we see/This is the path to hell/This is the street to ruin/So let's be safe than sorry" (60). The play hence raises and then resolves the problem of male anxiety surrounding the failure to resist state authoritarianism by suggesting that male desire is in itself many-faceted, often ridden by contradictions and capable o f generating chaos, so that, the ideological message goes, caution and control o f its expression is justified. The objectification o f women as "soul" in this play is a central ideological strategy of the play where the male desire for a nation with "soul" or cultural vibrancy is sexualized, linked to heterosexual male libido. Just as woman is the object of male sexual desire, so too is she made the object of male desire for cultural vibrancy, so that she is the glue that knits together sexual desire and cultural vibrancy. As object of the other's desire, woman is the mirror that reflects the darkest aspects o f male desire, which have been projected onto her. Hence, among the proposals for national cultural enrichment which the Committee receives from the public, it is a female brothel keeper who equates cultural vibrancy with the ultimate male fantasy o f unlimited sex, "soul" with orgasm, and 353 commodifies the whole by promoting her invention, a sex machine, an electronic latex doll capable of g providing sexual services. In the vaudeville section in the first scene, when Derek, Les and Chris present the initial findings o f the Committee to the two ministers in a music-and-dance routine, the two women figure as "soul" and, playing the role o f sexual temptress, sell soul's benefits in a rhetoric o f carnal temptation: "Soul 's extremely, utterly nice/ Taken straight or with a little vice. . . . /It makes the blood pump, the heart jump, the pulse pidipidapitdapididump" sings Les, while Chris adds, "Soul 's super on Sundays, divine on Saturdays and nifty every other day. . . . /Soul 's educational, inspirational, sensori-sensational,/It's lovable, unforgettable, and absolutely laudable . . ." (16). A t the end o f the play, the government's 'safe' approach to cultural expression (no sex, religion or politics in the arts) is critiqued as neglecting human desire. But predictably this desire is sexualized and associated with female licentiousness. In the music-and-dance routine that ends the play and iterates the government's stance on cultural liberalization, Chris is slowly stripped by the other actors. " N o w nearly naked," Chris provides the play's last words as she explodes in lust, uttering " A H , M E N ! " ( 6 0 ) . The audience hence leaves provocatively reminded that freedom of expression can be as anarchic as a woman on heat. Strangely, Lady o f Soul, which the playwright calls a "satire" ("Diary" 66), and which he hopes w i l l "provide a stimulus" for "rapid liberalization" ("Letter of Appeal" 81-2), takes an even more reactionary stance against free expression than the Singapore government does. The latter has moved towards liberalized censorship regarding the representation o f sex and does not reductively equate freedom in cultural representation with liberalized sexual representation.9 In 1991, when the government introduced the film classification system, censorship o f sex on screen became a dead issue. Contemporary national discussion about censorship sometimes focuses on freedom in the expression of political ideas while the issue o f a free press surfaces from time to time. Tan has effectively set the debate years back by refusing to differentiate freedom in political expression from the freedom to produce pornography. Recognition o f female subjectivity and female desire would have interrupted the play's negative representation o f freedom of expression and cultural vibrancy as potentially dangerous to society and 354 disruptive o f social order. The play divides freedom of expression into four separate issues: the right to freedom in sexual expression, the right to express fascist political ideas, the right to represent fundamentalist ethnic viewpoints, as wel l as the right for limitless expression in the arts. The first three rights are used to represent the nightmarish aspects o f the issue of freedom of expression. But the constituency of women's rights would check such dangers: it would certainly act to stifle pornographic representation by opposing the representation o f women as mere objects o f male sexuality as wel l as possibly re-territorialize sexual desire in terms that include maternal feeling and child-care. Feminist ideology would also oppose right-wing politics and ethnic fundamentalisms by exposing them as machineries o f gender-oppression. The inclusion o f female desire and subjectivity in this play would have structurally split the representation o f free expression and cultural vibrancy along different axes than those that Tan chooses. There would be two axes, male versus female, current state o f knowledge versus new ways o f knowing. These would have disrupted the binaristic terms that currently frame the discourse o f free expression in Singapore as that of good-versus-bad. The inclusion o f female subjectivity/desire may also have dictated that free cultural expression be viewed more positively as promising the new, rather than as the mere return of old demons. Women, then, are the repressed, whose foreclosure is necessary for the text to spin its reactionary ideology. The state's re-posing o f the problem of social resistance in terms o f West(ern liberalism) versus East(ern tradition) can be seen here as having generated a crisis in male identity in this culturally-hybrid post-colonial nation. A s this play attests, at least some Singapore men feel trapped in the contradictory demands made on them by two, very different masculine cultures: by identifying with Western, liberal norms (which make acting on one's principles the cutting-edge o f masculinity), they must reject 'Asian ' / 'Confucianist ' norms as these are defined by the state (where male responsibility is linked to the maintenance o f social order and the propping up o f patriarchal authority), and vice-versa. Though clearly the crisis in male identity is caused by the 'East ' / 'West ' contradiction, the play attempts to disavow this cause, to escape from this irreconcilable difference at the core of state ideology. 355 It is an aporia, perhaps, that anyone who has internalized the government's exhortation to be both "modern" and "traditionally As i an" cannot bear to contemplate. Derek's homosexuality is a 'queer' feature in the play that needs decoding. Neither homosexuality nor the marginalization o f the homosexual is thematized in the play. His male subjectivity is not set up as a non-heterosexual one; rather, it can easily be categorized as that of Western liberal male culture, though there is a hint o f an equation being made here between liberal idealism and homosexuality (see below). I would like to suggest that Derek's homosexuality is a strategy whereby the playwright can avoid the East versus West conflict in norms o f male identity. Since Derek is gay, he is also single and does not have a family to support. Hence, he can afford to stand by his principles even at the risk o f losing his job and status in society. A heterosexual married family man in his position would have been conflicted by the demands made on him by such Western liberal norms of masculinity and those o f ' A s i a n ' culture, which would require that he observe his patriarchal duty in financially providing for the family as well as guard the family 'name' against dishonor. A s a straight man, Derek's adherence to Western liberal norms o f male identity would have demanded a re-assessment of his roles as Asian/Chinese father, husband and son. Instead, the conflict between East and West is displaced into the conflict between Western liberal male culture and Western conservative, even puritanical norms o f masculinity. For instance, Derek's ' l iberal ' sexuality is opposed to the minister's repressed sexuality. Discussing his 'study' trip to Disneyland, the minister tells Paul it was "Oh , extremely educational. Especially the Space Mountain. (Squeezing his knees together.) Such an enlightening experience. M y wife went on it three times." (9) When Derek insists on speedy industrialization o f the arts, the minister tells him off in a prissy, school-marmish manner: "Derek, I am very disappointed in you. I have been very surprised, no shocked, by the things that I have been seeing in the office recently. Violence and dare I say sex. I have been seeing women around here 356 — not only that, women in loose attire and lewd poses. A n d add to that a few strange airy, fairy men. This is a government office, you must never forget." (45) B y contrast, Derek's liberalism, his need for "freedom," is associated with his homosexuality. He tells Paul that he feels his "hands are so tied up" in the c iv i l service. Complaining that "there seems to be so little room to maneuver," he yearns for "the freedom" of their student-days in London, and recalls this in terms o f "those cold, but also warm walks in the night" with his lover, Paul, and with the freedom of not having to hide his gay sexuality. "We could do anything we wanted then," he recalls. "Walk into any darn club, and not give a damn about who's looking at us" (20). Desire is split in the play: the playwright calls up a heroic ideal o f masculinity (Derek) only to discredit him later. The play also severely critiques the Minister and Paul as wimps but, at the end, these are the men who stand between society and chaos. Inadvertently and perhaps unconsciously, the form of the play signals to a compromised resolution of East-cum-West masculinity, an intellectual position that also answers to fears o f government reprisal: the satirist as male hero who voraciously attacks the state in biting comedy but who cautiously refrains from offering any alternatives to the status quo. Certainly, Tan's "Diary" reveals that fear of government reprisals dogs the playwright. During a public reading o f the play, he fears a middle-aged man [who] came in, sat grimly through a third o f it, and left . . . could be ISD [Internal Security Department]. I was prepared not to be afraid, but could not help feeling a knot o f fear for a while during the interval. (64) When Theatreworks decides that it would push for the play to be vetted without cuts by the censorship authorities, Tan wonders "how that w i l l affect Theatreworks as a company—would they be blacklisted or something?" (68). Tan's re-framing o f political resistance within the parameters o f male identity is an imaginative venture whereby that which is repressed by the state (the questioning of its authority) returns but in a manner in which it is made acceptable to the 'censorship' authorities (here, literalized). It not only 357 closes off the potential o f women's struggle for real political intervention, it effectively shuts out the investment o f desire in resistance and its potential for social change. Rather, resistance is reductively represented within the paradigm of two men fighting for power and vindicating their masculinity in a tussle where the resistance figure can be easily perceived and discredited as the inverted mirror image of the figure o f authority. A t play's end, Derek is the same as Paul and the minister. We are given to understand that Derek's proposal for cultural liberalization was only a bid to gain power, to ascend the social ladder. Once or twice, he does reveal his ambition, quizzing Paul as to whether he felt that his marriage o f convenience to Elizabeth had boosted his career. It is precisely this conception o f resistance as the flip side o f power/authoritarianism that Tan thematizes in his next play, Undercover. During the climax o f the play, Qiang, an anti-government community worker, captured by an imaginary government's secret police, tells the story o f his entry into subversive work: "Once I met a man who made this country what it is. . . . Yes , him. Face to face at a function." Asked by one of his interrogators i f it was scary, he replies: "It was hairy. We talked less than a minute, actually. The strange thing is I found it so hard to look into his eyes. But eventually I forced myself to—it was an electric moment. What I saw behind those eyes was absolute power. They said: T w i l l crush anyone who gets in my way. ' Do you know the meaning o f fear, of terror? I felt I understood its meaning then. I have carried that feeling with me ever since. When I think about the Center [for social work which Qiang started], about why I dare to call into question his way of doing things, I think I must be the bravest or the most foolhardy person in the world. Why do I need to confront my fear this way? W h y do I need to prove to myself that even though I am afraid I w i l l do the right thing even i f it crushes me? W h y do I need to exorcise this demon by invoking it? The reason is very simple: It proves that I am a man." (170-1) I f subversive work makes Qiang "a man," it does not however make him a better man than the head of this imaginary gestapo, but rather his double. L ike the Head, Qiang is sexist and uses women for his 358 own ends. He is also just as manipulative as the Head, giving children an alternative education, not out o f the strength o f his radical political beliefs but because he is " a fucking troublemaker . . . I just want to stir up things. I can't leave them alone"(136). When Qiang and the Head meet for the first time, the stage instructions direct that they "look at one another, sizing one another up. There is a feeling o f equality, o f sameness about them. For a moment, it looks like they could possibly even switch positions" (158). Tan is like Qiang and Undercover could be read as self-critique o f the playwright's own assumed position as male hero. L ike Qiang, he needs to "exorcise this demon by invoking it," to destroy something by repeating it, the modus operandi o f satire itself. A s satirist in this play (and in Lady of Soul). Tan critiques the government's authoritarianism by repeatedly representing it. The arrest o f subversives by the secret police is represented three times in Undercover, twice in rehearsals o f the play-within-a-play that Qiang writes, produces and directs and then in the closing scene o f the play, where its fictional status is deliberately rendered ambiguously. The play also devotes two scenes to the interrogation of a subversive. Though Tan sets the play in what he claims to be an "imaginary country" (107), he consistently taunts the authority of the Singapore government by making recognizable references to its activities and institutions. The local audience would have had no trouble recognizing the references to Singapore's Internal Security Department and its detention-without-trial o f political prisoners, given that international critique has turned these two institutions into the primary signifiers of Singapore's state authoritarianism. This is combined with other local markers of Singaporean identity. The interrogation o f Qiang as subversive social worker who was also a dramatist, calls up the Singapore government's 1987 arrest of a group of Christian social workers attached to a Catholic church who were denounced as Marxist conspirators against the state, two of whom belonged to an English-drama group (Koh Tai A n n , "Culture" 727). Finally, and most importantly, Tan (through Qiang) "invokes" the one who is viewed as the supreme figure of authority in Singapore, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Y e w . Qiang's nemesis, "the man who made the country what it is" may be recognized as Lee Kuan Y e w , who was 359 Singapore's Prime Minister through three decades following self-rule, and who is often discursively identified with the nation's success. Both internationally and nationally, Lee Kuan Y e w has often been referred to as "the man who made Singapore what it is." A s i f to dispel al l doubt, Qiang's comment, "It was hairy" is a double-entendre that not only describes Qiang's first meeting with the leader but also identifies him: "Harry" was the name Lee Kuan Y e w used in his Cambridge student-days. In his diary o f censorship o f Lady o f Soul. Tan too appears, like Qiang, to be nothing but a "fucking troublemaker" (Undercover 136) " invoking" the authority that he fears. Tan admits in his diary of censorship, "I have half a mind to do a piece that is so gross—sexually, politically, morally—that everyone who has any qualms at all would be offended. That would be the acid test o f their word that nothing would be censored. Would that be irresponsible—testing for the sake o f it?" (65-6). He adds, "In fact, I am hoping with some perverse delight that they w i l l cut it [Paul and Derek's homosexual relationship in Lady of Soul] and show my fears to be true about the kind of people they are" ("Diary," 66). The masculine position of resistance that Tan has set up then is, by Tan's own admission, a psychotic and disempowering reaction to fear that only repeats the fear and has the further effect o f re-centering the authority that it feigns to dismantle. A s the Deputy head of this fictional gestapo says of Qiang's confession: it is "incontrovertible evidence that he has a psychotic grudge against our great leader, to the extent t h a t . . . he became obsessed by it" (171). The authority's power is entrenched deeper, and audiences o f satirical plays such as Undercover leave the theater more afraid o f the state's power than before, convinced that resistance is nothing more than a hysterical reaction to (male) impotence. Tan however does not go so far as to recognize his own complicitious participation in state authoritarianism in his role as satirist-playwright. He reflects in his diary o f censorship that Lady o f Soul is caught in a paradox: i f they [the censorship authorities] let it through without any censorship at a l l , then the premise of the play [that there is little freedom of expression in Singapore] would be wrong, so making 360 reasons for staging it less compelling: i f they don't [let it through], then the premise would be proven, which makes it even more important to have it staged uncensored. ( 64) This "paradox" is re-stated in Undercover when Qiang, who is producing a play about the state's crackdown on dissent, notes that there is "an inherent paradox in the premise of the play." He argues that "the play is saying that they [the government] don't tolerate dissent," and that "the play" is itself "an example of dissent." A s such, i f the government passes the play for production, "that would demonstrate that they are not intolerant of the dissent," thereby disproving the play's premise. On the other hand, the play's premise could only be proved i f the play is not passed, that is by its very non-existence. In stating the paradox thus, Tan symptomatically does not consider that the censorship authorities could have passed the two plays simply because they were wi ly enough to differentiate the semblance o f dissent from dissent itself and/or that the plays problematize dissent. A s I have argued, Tan's two plays are ambivalent about dissent. They also rely on the ability o f satire as a genre to offer writers a vehicle through which they can express a form of dissent but not necessarily with the political 'inconvenience' of real subversive content. The Brit ish satiric comedy series Yes. Minister, for instance, exposes the scandalous bases on which many public policy decisions are made, but it also reduces these to the level o f humor, as a comedy about Brit ish 'manners.' Tan also does not factor in the split in his own desire in formulating the paradox, o f his own compromised desire for resistance. While Tan may have wanted the authorities to legitimize his critique by censoring his play, he also wished just as much to have his play staged. A s he notes in "Diary ," the passing o f Lady o f Soul does not indicate an unambiguous liberalization in the state's attitude. He thinks that Lady o f Soul was "cleared because it is an absurdist satire and that the government was comfortable with that," and is doubtful that "a naturalistic play of a similar theme" would have passed through the censors (74). Knowing this, then, one must raise the question as to whether Tan's choice o f 361 the non-realistic mode o f representation was deliberately chosen to make the play (and his critique) more agreeable to the authorities. Certainly, the play's rejection of realism is a strategy that allows it to shut out feminist subjectivity and desire from the formulation o f ideology and from representation o f the nation. For instance, Tan's guilty projection o f male lust onto a female brothel-keeper, Madame, who, we are told, should be thought of as " a sexy philosophy dropout with marketing savvy and charisma" (25) relies on the improbable. There aren't enough philosophy dropouts in the nation to warrant Madame being represented as a type. A t any rate, such a woman in Singapore would make more money selling real estate than sex. In the meritocratic, highly select Singapore C i v i l Service, too, women such as Les and Chris, who are assistants to a permanent secretary or a division head (as Derek must be), would themselves be extremely capable women, either government scholars, or, at the very least, top graduates from leading universities, fighting the tide o f gender-oppression, not colluding with it as Tan wishfully represents them. Satire and non-realistic representation often work in tandem to expose the ridiculous, the 'abnormal' in seemingly 'normal, ' real-life events. But they can also, simultaneously and conversely, normalize the ridiculous. George Orwel l ' s satirical novel Animal Farm ridicules the contradictions between Marxist theory and practice at a specific historical moment in the Soviet Union 's adoption o f socialism, but it also normalizes these contradictions as an ahistoric condition intrinsic to socialism itself. In a Freudian slip o f the tongue, Tan describes satire in Lady o f Soul as "making the ridiculous normal" ("Letter of Appeal ," 80). I f Lady of Soul ridicules the government's go-slow tactics in terms o f an ineffectual masculinity, it also normalizes this masculinity by juxtaposing it against Derek's errant and uncontrollable masculinity, which, the play suggests, could be harmful in different ways. Derek's liberal masculine culture could be socially chaotic as is suggested in Derek's dream of building an "art house inside [a] tart house" (55). It could be potentially fascist, since Derek liberally approves Alban ' s dream, expressed in the rhetoric o f Maoist China's Cultural Revolution, that the arts should be "the music that the nation marches to," the "hundred flowers that w i l l bloom," all "dandelions," "field upon swaying 362 field o f Identical, nodding and agreeing dandelions" (35). It could also be sexually perverse since Derek also promotes Madame's suggestion of making an ultimate sex machine available to everyone. There is another way to dissolve the paradox that Tan poses about the censorship o f plays that represent dissent. A s a Singaporean writer who is himself so enmeshed in the dominant ideology and forced to work within its limitations, Tan's plays show that the censorship authority's passing o f a play that critiques state authoritarianism does not necessarily falsify the play's premise. It can also prove the play's premise in that the 'censorship' is self-executed: the 'cut' is already inside the play. Descendants of the E u n u c h A d m i r a l (1995) by K u o Pao K u n Among the plays studied here, Kuo ' s play offers the most direct attempt at subverting government ideology about Singapore's Asian identity. Given his bilingualism, he, more than other Singapore playwrights, is able to address the identificatory problems of a people caught between Western and Eastern cultures and histories, and to offer cross-cultural and alternative myths o f origin. Descendants was written originally in Eng l i sh . 1 0 The play features a group o f amateur drama workers, among them a teacher and a lawyer, who are in the middle o f a drama workshop that represents the life of Admi ra l Zheng He, a 15th-century eunuch who was in the Chinese M i n g Imperial Service. Working in a non-naturalistic medium, K u o draws on the eunuch admiral's life and psyche in order to map out a subject position for Singaporeans in terms of their relation to state power. Kuo ' s play rebels against state ideology by cheekily re-writing the story of Singapore's Chinese heritage, locating it, not in the government-extolled imperialist Confucianist culture but in a subaltern Chinese history, where he represents the culture and psychic identity o f the victims of Chinese imperial culture. Whi le this is a vehicle through which K u o unmasks and attempts to contain neuroses o f male identity in Singapore culture, the play also deconstructs Chinese/Asian cultural essentialisms. It underlines the phantasmatic dimension of contemporary representations o f traditional cultures, where the object of representation is implicated in and shaped by the desires of the representing subject, desires which may even have arisen 363 from the representing subject's immersion in alien, non-Chinese or non-Asian dominant ideologies. A s this play shows, even essentialist notions of Chinese/Asian 'identity' can be cross-cultural, involving a culturally transvestite masquerade, where Western ideas are displayed in Chinese/Asian dress and idiom. The play suggests that current constructions of Chinese/Asian culture may be, at least to some extent, an Eastern stylization of Western ideas. Descendants tries to construct a modern Chinese subjectivity by re-reading the Chinese past from the perspective o f the present time and its modes/paradigms of perception. But, given the state's injunction against identifying with "Western values," repressed Western values/knowledges return under cover of the Eastern so that any imaginary construction of a modernized Chinese subjectivity is bound to be structurally similar to that which Singaporean Chinese derogatorily refer to as the inauthentic Chinese culture o f the "banana" people: those whose yellow exterior covers up, belies a white interior, so that Chinese/Asian modernity can only ever be Western culture masquerading as Eastern, a tra(ns)vestic performance. A s acts o f gender impersonation indicate, masquerade involves an interpretation and objectivization of the 'other' from within the positionality o f the self, the subject o f masquerade. Female impersonation, for instance, is often a 'reading' of female identity from the viewpoint o f male subjectivity and is thus cross-gendered not only in terms o f the structural split between body and style, nature and culture. In Descendants, the representation of Chinese/Asian culture centers around Western 'psychological ' modes of perception so that the subject or body performing the masquerade is Western, and Chinese culture is that which is being masqueraded. It is possible to read in this play the concept o f the 'Chinese/Asian modern' as fantasy's defensive reaction formation against the return of the repressed. In Horowitz ' rehearsal o f Freudian theory, adult maturation, in its movement away from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, involves the sublimation and/or repression of certain drives that are not conducive to l iving within a specific social formation. In sublimation, the conflict between the ego and the id concerning a specific drive is resolved by a defense mechanism whereby the ego displaces the drive's sexualized or aggressivized original 364 object with a desexualized or sublime object or aim. The drive then acquires a derivative or altered motive. A t this stage however, the energy o f the drive has not been neutralized so that there is not a complete desexualization or de-aggressivization. The ego still needs to counter-cathect (disinvest desire from) the original motive in order to repress it. Eventually, however, in successful repressions, the derivative motive completely or almost completely neutralizes the original drive so that counter-cathexis o f the original motive is no longer required. In most normally successful repressions, regression to the original motive occurs only in dreams. External circumstances, however, causing stress and frustration or a weakening o f the ego, can allow a strong repressed instinct to re-assert itself and cause the resexualization or desublimation of the sublimated drive. This return of the repressed characterizes a neurosis or psychosis, a return to the pleasure principle. Here, the derivative (altered) motive regresses to its defensive stage, and that which has been repressed attempts to frustrate the derivative motive's workings as a defense mechanism (Horowitz 31-37). In neurosis, this is done through means o f hysterical symptoms while in psychosis, there are hallucinations and a complete nervous breakdown. In desublimation, Horowitz says, there is "interference by primary process forms o f cognition with the workings o f the secondary process" so that neutralization o f the drive gives way to displacement, resulting either in neurosis or psychosis where "the symbol [the substituted derivative motive] is merely equated with the symbolized [the original motive]." In neurosis, he adds, the "normal functioning of the ego is interfered with, the autonomy of the ego from the id is reduced, and, in energy terms, neutralization is reversed: the ego-activity is recathected with non-neutralized energy" (Horowitz 37). Hysteria is associated with neurosis, not psychosis. If one may give an example of neurotic versus pyschotic returns o f the repressed, imagine the case of a writer who copes with fears o f failure by pushing at a career in journalism. One day, he gets the top job he has always fantasized about, but with it return his insecurities about his abilities. In neurosis, the repressed expresses itself in a hysterical symptom, such as a psychosomatic blindness, so that the subject can no longer substitute success at work for his fears o f failure. The writer is not conscious of his fears because the repressed has hidden itself 365 within the subject's code o f values, sneaking past the censorship authorities as Zizek would say: the writer thinks that he is unable to work because o f a physical affliction, not because he has been taken over by his fears. In psychosis, the writer would have experienced hallucinations, returns o f repressed primary memories that he associates with failure, or be gripped by fear every time he take up his pen: thus, the fear o f failure exerts its presence in the consciousness and refuses substitutions. Hysteria is broadly defined as the subject's refusal of the desire o f the big Other, the Symbolic Order, including, in this refusal, the rejection of the identifications commanded/demanded by it. Generated by the failure of repression, where the unsuccessfully repressed breaks through the barriers of ego defense mechanisms and stages itself in consciousness, the hysterical symptom foils the object-substitutions which may have in the past made it possible for the original sexual or aggressive drive to be sublimated or neutralized. In doing this, hysteria subverts dominant ideology and acts out a desire that is the 'other' to the desire o f hegemonic culture. But it does this by exploring loopholes within this ideology so that it appears to be still within this domain. Lif t ing an unsuccessful repression in psychoanalytic therapy, says Horowitz, involves integrating the repressed impulse into the ego, and neutralizing its energy. This makes the repression successful, in which case the impulse is permitted various forms o f sexual and/or non-sexual ego-syntonic expression. The impulse concerned is abolished, preserved and transformed (40). In K u o ' s play, the repressed that returns is fear of the loss o f self-determination and o f the power o f self-representation. Since both of these are linked in patriarchal cultures with male identity, the play represents the loss o f the power o f self-determination/self-representation as a trauma of castration, the cutting o f male identity. Unable (because o f state injunction) or unwill ing (due to interiorization of dominant ideology) to locate his rebellion against state authoritarianism within recognizable Western discourses such as those of human rights, self-representation and democratic political representation, K u o seeks hysterically to express his (Western-influenced) repressed desires by ascribing a Chinese genealogy to them, to render these desires as always-already Chinese. Thus K u o rejects the state's 366 command to invest in 'Confucianist' norms but meets its insistence on Singapore's Asian Oriental identity by Sinicizing/Asianizing 'Western' desire. It is easy to read the excessive amount o f textual/representational energy expended on castration in the play as a hysterical symptom staging/expressing a neurosis and non-neutralized sexual energy on the body o f the text. Kuo ' s play is structurally divided by suggestions made in turn by each drama worker as to the various ways in which Zheng He's life and subjectivity may be dramatically represented. (Note the play's direct thematic interest in the activity of representation, and the link between this and the portrayal o f a male subjectivity.) In their representational endeavors, they exhibit an obsession with Zheng He 's castration and the whereabouts of his "cut-and-dried penis." While Patrick is concerned with representing the "Treasure" chamber in the Imperial Palace, which contains the severed penises of those in the eunuch service, Uncle Tay wonders where this severed penis was kept while Zheng He was on his travels. Boyd stages the castration o f Zheng He, representing it as a voluntary decision made by Zheng He to enter the eunuch service in search o f wealth and fame; he also depicts Zheng He ' s father as the one who performs the castration (8-9). Samy contributes to the representation by dramatizing a dream where, identifying with Zheng He as famous voyager (as the 'other' Columbus), he experiences fear o f castration. The play also elaborately details at least three different ways o f castrating a man, as in: " Y o u take a piece of string, tie it at the base o f the testicles when the boy is still young and small. Tie it tight enough but short of causing pain to him. A s the boy grows bigger and bigger, the tightness of the string remains. Gradually, in time, the base of the testicles w i l l break of f . . . Y o u start them early enough and they won't feel the pain. They may not have even got [sic] a trauma. Because in this way the most characteristic part of the organs is still there. A n d it still works fine. Some say even better. Most important o f al l , they [sic] are safer." (23) The presence o f the repressed male lack exerts itself throughout the play in the form of a cloth portrait o f Zheng He, a permanent backdrop. This portrait is split from the waist down. The play's 367 second scene opens with the drama workers swinging a bamboo pole in front of the portrait; as the pole hits the floor, they let out a painful cry to simulate penile injury. A netball post with two balls suspended from it, an obvious phallic symbol, forms part of the permanent set of the play (2). The specific manner in which the repressed returns in this play, in hysterical symptoms that are literally visited on the 'body' of an old Chinese legend and a story of Ming/Chinese masculinity, reveals something about the etiology of the contemporary socio-cultural crisis of male identity that has manifested itself in much recent Singapore theater. In Descendants, the neurosis of castration anxiety attacks symbols of a 'traditional' 'Chinese' culture where masculine identity (phallic power) is associated with socio-economic-political success: as it is with Admiral Zheng He as well as with that other icon of Chinese masculinity, Confucius. Doing so, it indicates that the dominant ideology—which promotes discipline, submission to authority, hard work, brilliance in bureaucratic skills and the imagination required to expand the frontiers of knowledge and national power as the 'Chinese'/ 'Asian' route to male identity—is not sufficient as a derivative motive to defend against and neutralize that 'other' objectal desire for male selfhood that is associated with political and cultural self-determination (which has a Western genealogy in its links with the culture of democracy). The play as hysterical symptom subverts the ego's equation of socio-economic-political success with phallic power by repeatedly marking the former with the absence of phallic power. It also refuses the ego's symbolization of socio-economic-political success and submission to authority as a 'Chinese'/'Asian' masculinity by re-presenting the 'Chinese'/ 'Asian' as male lack, as the splitting, cutting up, disintegration of the male body. Kuo explores and represents the Singaporean subjectivity of the drama workers as a psychic and socio-politico-cultural legacy handed down by a Chinese ancestor, the eunuch admiral Zheng He, and the Ming imperial service. The play constantly makes equations between past and present subjectivity. As these workers point out, the eunuch admiral's success as explorer-bureaucrat-imperial official depended on his castration: by entering the Imperial eunuch service, Zheng He received the "licence to enter the 368 imperial palace, to hold privileged positions in the imperial household, to scale higher positions, to attain wealth and status" (9). Though his initial duties consisted o f attending to the quotidian needs o f the emperor and the nobility such as "eating, drinking, dressing, cleaning, pissing, shitting and copulating," he "graduated himself to more significant affairs such as writing, building, worshipping, warring and sailing ships hundreds o f thousands of miles into the ocean, leading great armadas . . . representing a great empire" (10). The play then uses Zheng He 's story o f success to parody the discourse o f nation-building, which includes the ethics of hard work and restraint o f individual desire, which Singapore politicians use to justify oppressive policies. The play identifies Singaporeans' submission to authority with Zheng He ' s fate, where the fame and public power he attains fails to substitute for and erase an original loss o f personal power/liberty. A t one point, the "Figure" representing authority, ironically chastises the players: "Yes! Yes! Discipline, pressure, confrontation, even suppression. These are indeed necessary conditions to nurture worthy men and women . . . When given your liberal freedom, you guys while away your youthful days, your family wealth and the nation's resources . . . N o w , after we have given you some tough treatment, hard discipline and sometimes seemingly unreasonable and oppressive measures, you overcome! Y o u transcend! A n d now you're on your way to becoming really worthy citizens." (10) Earlier, Patrick, one of the drama workers, discusses a special chamber in the M i n g Imperial Palace where eunuchs' penises, cut and dried, are preserved in boxes and hung from the ceiling in a network according to their status in the Imperial Service. This "network" is dramatized by players positioning themselves at various levels on ropes hanging from the ceiling. A s Patrick then points out, this "network" looks "l ike the organisational chart o f [his] company," while A l a n adds that his c i v i l service "department can also look like this" (5). A joke is made that Singapore is a veritable "Treasure Island," full o f "bao beis" the cut-and-dried penises of eunuchs preserved in boxes (6). 369 The play leaves no doubt that it is the irreconcilable conflict between East and West viewed as despotism versus democracy, the Asiatic mode o f production versus capitalism, that has caused a blockage in the Singaporean male ego's drive neutralization. Western knowledge makes it impossible for the players to take 'Chinese ' / 'Asian ' norms of 'masculinity' seriously, to substitute the latter for the former. A s Alan , Ke lv in , M r . Chng and Sally comment, Zheng He 's heroic stature as pioneer explorer has been over-estimated in relation to Columbus' achievements. A s Alan says of the M i n g explorations: Stupid expeditions al l these. Never got anything back. Always give give give. Y o u know how many bundles o f silk and how many kilos o f gold these guys gave away. . . . Every time, seven times, and they never learned! Stupid emperor, stupid eunuchs! Want to act big shot, big kingdom, big people, big land! (12) M r . Chng observes that "you really have to give it to the Europeans. I mean, Columbus was not to see the Atlantic Ocean until almost a century later, and they immediately colonised Amer ica !" Sally adds: "Bad luck we didn't learn from the West earlier, or else we could have won the entire market o f the East, and Japan would never get chance! Don' t know what the grand eunuch was thinking all the time. Si l ly feudal eunuchs, probably only thinking about the glory and prestige o f the Middle Kingdom." (12) Again , only Western knowledge can provide the players with access to a Chinese/Asian modern subjectivity. K u o tries to Sinicize the (male) desire for self-determination and self-representation by attributing such desires to Zheng He. But the play's representation of Zheng He 's subjectivity draws deeply on the language o f Western narratives of human alienation and on the Western discourse o f psychology. The play begins with seven actors taking turns in representing the role o f "the Figure" which, the play's instructions inform us, "is, in a sense, also their common consciousness" (1). Assuming a Singaporean "common consciousness," the actors speak o f a world of "dreams" which allows them to take flight from their real world, "a place o f insanity" (which the play covertly locates as 370 Singapore). Dreams also provide the means to see their 'real world ' in a new perspective, a perspective that re-presents their success as bondage, oppression, and a loss of manhood. They speculate that, in this, they must be carrying on the legacy passed on to them by Admira l Zheng He. The association of "dreaming" with "freedom" that the first player makes echoes that o f Freudian discourse where the unconscious is the site o f that which is beyond repression, knowledge of which promises freedom to the subject (1). The third figure represents the "dreamworld" as that of the "unknown" and the "nightly unknown" (1), again taking up psychoanalytical representations of the unconscious as the s e l f s Other, as that which marks the se l f s alienation from itself, a site that is mysterious, dark, unknown and unknowable except through its symptoms. When figure 6 says that "Only in these dreams, being alone, was I able to look at myself, inside myself and through myself," he too draws on the discourse o f psychoanalytical therapy which uses dreams to decode long-buried and repressed, disavowed feelings. The song and dance chorus that closes the play gives voice to Zheng He's longings and subjectivity, which are offered as a desiring subject position for Singaporeans to identify with. Described as being "nameless," "sexless," "rootless," "homeless" whose "wandering is [his] roots," whose "departing is [his] being," Zheng He is made out to be a Chinese Ulysses whose sea voyages are voyages o f (self) discovery, o f the discovery of human alienation. "The removal o f [Zheng He's] manhood" and thus of Singaporeans' loss o f liberty/power is mourned and condemned in this play. But this raises several questions that haunt the play. One wonders whether the lost male identity is Chinese or Western, medieval or modern? Are these different or the same? Can K u o or modern-day Singaporeans have access to Zheng He 's 15th-century masculine identifications and dis-identifications? What is added in the process to historical truth or subtracted from it? The play's representation o f Zheng He's male subjectivity as lack is made by a representing subject who is himself located within Western liberal norms of masculinity, where lack o f self-determination, individual autonomy and the power of self-representation are signifiers o f a loss o f masculine self-hood. I f the claims in some quarters are correct, that Chinese/Asian traditions emphasize social responsibility over 371 individual 's rights, then one could argue that traditional Chinese/Asian male identity is the 'other' to contemporary (Western) modern masculinity, and that Zheng He's saying "yes" to authority and attaining success and fame is precisely the Chinese/Asian scene of male identity. But the play does not consider this for a moment. The subjectivity o f the eunuch admiral as represented by the play then is a white male subjectivity masquerading as a modern Chinese/Asian male subjectivity. N o doubt, an East-West cultural hybridity would have averted the formation o f a neurosis by providing desire with ways of negotiating contradictory values. A s Lacanian psychoanalysis argues, the phallus (masculine culture) is the substitute that tries to cover up an underlying male lack, the absence o f power. It is the vei l o f power, behind which there is nothing. The Singaporean male ego sublimated and neutralized the threat o f castration/powerlessness with both Western and Eastern norms o f masculinity. 'Western' norms o f self-determination and their association with male identity were cathected as part of colonial culture but these were also reinforced in the struggle for independence. In the cross-cultural encounter, these norms were hybridized with Asian norms of male identity. However, since the 1980s, the state has demanded that these Western values be rejected as contradictory to Singaporeans' ethnic/racial heritage, where, indeed, the cathecting o f such values is viewed as disloyalty towards one's ethnic/racial culture. Since the values targeted for suppression had already been strongly invested and could not be easily erased, state emphasis on 'Asian ' / 'Chinese ' values would seem to have provided the circumstance that causes the return of the repressed (the awareness of male lack) and a concomitant neurosis. A s Horowitz says, repressions are successful to the extent that the ego is able to ideologically condemn the instinct that is to be repressed rather than merely taking flight from it (38-9). But secondary processes o f sublimation/repression operate on the 'reality' principle and such ego defense mechanisms as masculine culture are designed to help the subject cope with the realities o f social l iving. Given Singapore's real economic-cultural context, such a condemnation of Western values required for a successful repression cannot be expected without also involving a dismantling of currently dominant economic and political cultures. Displacing these Western values with a conflicting authoritarianism 372 dressed up as 'Chinese' / ' A s i a n ' tradition cannot fix the repression because the substitute object of desire (a past Chinese/Asian culture) that has been offered to the people cannot be easily cathected given its alienness to daily cultural life. A s such, it would seem that the injunction to reject Western values has caused the fragile vei l of male power to be lifted, revealing the emptiness behind it. Descendants attempts to extricate the Singaporean male ego from its awareness o f male lack by re-locating the banished (Western) desire for self-determination and self-representation within the world of ' A s i a n ' or 'Chinese' desire, so that the repressed impulse can find an alternative racialized/ethnicized expression. The repressed desire for self-determination/self-representation is re-circulated through Chinese/Asian history, and located in the moment where Admira l Zheng He supposedly encounters, on his travels, a South-east Asian social formation where citizens ruled themselves. This "negara rajaraja" (a country of many rulers) had supposedly been an outcome o f benevolent despotism, where a kindly king ruled his country " in such a wise manner that oppression and injustice disappeared. A n d when that happened, he also disappeared." Having forbidden anyone to succeed him, the country had become noted as a country without rulers, or where "al l the people became their own rulers" (26)." The play structurally stages this 'As i an ' form of democracy by featuring each scene as that where the activity o f (political, cultural) representation is polarized into two subject positions, that o f the authority figure (the "Figure") versus the subject performing the representation. In each scene, the "Figure," "theatrically dressed, larger than life but without a face" (1) listens to, evaluates and adjudicates drama workers' ideas on how to represent Zheng He's life. The role of this authority figure and the subject performing the representation is however interchangeable and drama workers take turns to play the "Figure." In the third scene, Boyd even momentarily doffs the robes of the "Figure" to make a contribution as subject performing the representation. Towards the end of the play, the last actor to play the "Figure" promises to let them know the following day "how the show w i l l be edited and presented." "Rest assured," he says, that "al l [their] creative contributions w i l l be greatly valued" (27). The drama workshop is offered in fact as a politico-cultural model of an Asian democracy, where decisions 373 concerning representation w i l l be made, presumably, according to the needs and aspirations o f the community. But the model of representation here is not that o f democracy, where representational authority is both given and taken away by the subject o f representation in the election process. In an ideal democratic situation, representational authority involves a relation between government and citizen. Rather, the play uses a model of representation that appears to be borrowed from a pre-democratic, despotic political culture. Here, authority is not a relation but a body, that o f the "Figure," different and "larger" than the subject o f representation. The decision to ignore the w i l l of the people or to take heed o f this w i l l rests entirely within this "body" of authority. A s Patrick points out, the w i l l of authority, answerable only to itself, can be arbitrary and enigmatic. When the "Figure" commands everyone to decide for themselves in an unexpected granting o f freedom, it is greeted with suspicion, and Patrick asks it a pertinent question, "What i f you get angry afterwards, how?" (20). The play shows awareness o f the nature o f authority in a despotic state. Despite this, it points to faith in and hope for a benevolent despotism as the way to integrate the repressed impulse for self-determination within an 'Asian ' / 'Chinese ' system of values. A s an ideological defense mechanism aimed at resolving a cultural neurosis/blockage, however, it involves a "flight" from the repressed (Western) impulse rather than a condemnation of the instinct or even a confrontation with it, a form of sublimation that is not l ikely to succeed. The placing of passive hope in a future benevolent despotism is similar to the primary process's means of dealing with drives: that o f wish-fulfillment by hallucinating the object o f desire. The play even signals its own consciousness of this through a remark that one of the characters makes: "happiness is better when they [sic] are actually enjoyed; happiness are [sic] pains when you can only desire them [sic]" (14). The play's solution is modeled then on the "pleasure" principle o f the primary process rather than on the "reality" principle of the secondary process. Descendants' dependence on the non-naturalistic mode of representation, its narrative organization by idea rather than chronology, its dependence on a fictional, 374 highly speculative history and on highly stylized arts such as song, dance and symbolic theater are themselves symptoms of this need to take flight from a pluralistic and diverse reality, to reduce its complexity. In this it shows that any response to state ideology must repeat the latter's reduction of life's complexities to a few simple abstract principles, and re-iterate its temporal confusions. The ideological solution extolling the Singaporean subject to hope for benevolent despotism and to identify with a traditional 'Asian' political culture of benevolent despotism involves asking the subject to blind himself to the realities and seductions of living and working within institutions of democracy, capitalism and global culture. This 'solution' could lead to two different fates for the Singaporean (male) subject: as a sure invitation begging the repressed to return yet again, or it could be the first step delivering him through regression and a split subjectivity to the rubbish heap of history. In addition, the play's imaginary resolution of ideological conflict between 'West' and 'East' is made possible only by the silencing of such idea-complexes as female difference and minority difference. There are two women among the drama workers, Sally and Maggie, but they are not allowed female 'difference.' Quite weirdly, the two women identify with the male castration anxiety experienced by the other players. At one point, Sally, who is probably a teacher in a girls' school, comments that the Imperial network of castration is similar to the organizational network of her school, and needs to be reminded that girls don't have penises (5). Instead of then dissociating herself as the 'other' to the subjectivity experienced by the male players, she merely joins the men in laughter and carries on with her male identifications. Maggie's is a token female role and could be played by a male actor without requiring any change in the script. Samy, the only Indian in the play, also ignores his marginalized, hence different, subject-position from his Chinese counterparts by identifying with the eunuch Admiral Zheng He. This erases the difference between Indian and Chinese cultural heritages. Minority 'difference,' it would seem, doesn't permeate beyond one's darker skin. As such, Samy's contribution to the representation of Zheng He differs from those of the others only in that it is "dark." He dreams "a 375 darkly dream," and, at the end o f his representation, the character playing the "Figure" evaluates it only as the "dark dreams [sic] they are" (13-14). The play deconstructs the dominant categories o f East and West only to reconstruct them differently. B y covering over female and minority differences, it forbids the complete deconstruction o f the two categories which, ironically, would have provided an ideological mechanism to dissolve the cross-cultural neurotic blockage dramatized in the play. I f either Sally or Maggie had asserted their female difference in identifications and desires, the conflict between East and West, male power versus male lack would have been re-semiotized as a conflict of feminism against the patriarchy, demanding that male identifications and desires be themselves re-imagined outside the current norms o f both West and East. I f Samy had asserted his Singapore Indian male difference, the conflict between Western and Eastern norms o f male identity would have doubled and split endlessly to take in the existence o f multiple (not merely two) male cultures, which are additionally overdetermined by the various intersections o f gender with race, ethnicity, class and sexuality. Again , this would have dissolved the neurotic fixating on two contradictory norms o f male identity. Conclusion The battle between democratic representation and state authoritarianism is framed in Singapore political discourse as the battle of West versus East to cover over the fact that it is a conflict between modern (democratic) values versus the traditional (pre-democratic). The racialization o f the battle gives political cachet to the state's position and depends on affect whereas representation o f it as the modern versus the traditional would delegitimize the state's ideology as archaic. A s i f to cement this covering over, the state often speaks of an 'As ian modernity,' disavowing its rejection of "modernity" but in the process also re-contextualizing and controlling its (democratic) meanings. The unwanted meanings o f modernity, such as ' individualism' and 'press freedom,' are placed in the opposite camp of a demonized Western culture. This ideological maneuver allows repression to occur in two directions. It forbids 376 those meanings of modernity that have been placed in the 'Western' camp. But, also, the move denies ideological space to other meanings o f modern culture such as radical democracy, post-colonial identity, minority identity, and feminisms that cannot be fitted into the West versus East polarization, those meanings o f modern culture that would deconstruct the categories of West and East, dismantle their polarization, and oppose both. These form the outside o f the debate surrounding the dominant ideology in Singapore. They are the unspeakable in dominant ideology, which may only be voiced in the cultural spaces allocated to the l iminal areas of the nation, always already marginalized, to appear in academic journals or in fringe literature/theater, with their discourses classified as "gay," "non-Eastern," "over-Westernized," "non-Singaporean" and/or "anti-Singaporean," "feminist," "Marxis t ," "anarchist" or "ethnically chauvinist." The necessary silencing o f the claims of radical democracy in the plays discussed in this chapter are symptoms o f the deep meanings and repressions of the dominant ideology. They reveal that the ideological battle lines may be drawn up in dominant discourse as that between West and East but that the real fight is taking place on and over the terrain of modernity (by which I mean the various cultural claims posed by capitalism and democracy, and post-modern, post-colonial and post-Marxist epistemologies). These plays provide evidence of a national crisis in male identity which may perhaps explain Singaporeans' lack of resistance towards state authoritarianism. We saw for instance that Singaporeans publicly defended an oppressive regime against American accusations o f brutal state control in the Fay caning incident. More recently, in the January 1997 elections, the ruling party not only won but increased its share o f the votes. A s my analysis o f the Fay incident shows, Singaporean men's felt male lack is disavowed by identifying (male) personal power with the authority o f the state. The unquestioning acceptance by many Singaporeans of their state-constructed Chinese/Asian identity could wel l be a defensive reaction-formation that allows them to escape from anxieties concerning male identity. But it is also a cultural response that demands that the power o f the Chinese male citizen that 377 has been appropriated by the state be in turn made up by stealing power from the minority and women's constituencies. 378 Notes 1 More recently in 1994, the drama company which Kuo co-founded, Neccesary Stage, was involved in an incident with the government. The company's forum theatre program was thrust into the limelight when two visual artists doing performance art obtained the attention o f the Minis try o f Home Affairs and the Minis t ry o f Information and the Arts. The government's objection to such "pol i t ical" art led to the National Arts Counci l withdrawing financial support to stage forum theatre and performance art. In addition, Straits Times made an issue of two Necessary Stage members attending a Marxist-oriented drama workshop in N e w York . See "Sequence," ST 8 Feb. 1994: 18. Production history and critical reception are important in studying the role these texts play in hegemonizing the new nationalism. Given that all o f these plays are ambivalent in their attitudes towards both Western culture and state ideology and contain scenes that variously resist and invest state authority, the staging of these plays, especially of such 'ambivalent' scenes, is an important factor in decoding their messages. The production history o f these plays would also throw more light on the gender regime involved in the exploration o f transvestitism, transsexuality and homosexuality as metaphors o f national culture. For instance, I argue that, going by the text, the transsexual figure in Heng's play represents an alternative male rather than female subject-position. In the first stagings of this play, male actors were used to represent the transsexual, which confirms my reading (Lest the Demons 28). But a female actor in this role could alter some of the central meanings o f the play. However, I have only caught Tan's play Undercover on stage due to my absence from Singapore, so that I am unable to deal with production history. The theatre scene is also relatively small in Singapore, and, at the moment, concentrates on developing new works and writers rather than in preserving a 'tradition.' Re-staging o f Singapore plays are rare, except with very popular works such as those by Chiang. In such a context, it appears to me more fruitful to examine trends in drama to uncover a 'hegemonic' effect 379 and patterns in responses to state ideology than to focus on a few plays and their production/critical histories. 3 Silverman distinguishes between three enunciative levels in the cinema text (Subject 196-98). She describes the "spoken subject" o f the fi lm as the projected viewer, who is located at the site o f the consumption of meaning whereas the "speaking subject" of the fdm is the (often hidden) producer o f meaning, who controls the gaze. A s I understand it, the "spoken subject" o f the fi lm refers to the type o f consumer who would identify with the f i lm's ideology. But the f i lm's signifiers are activated, Silverman says, when the "spoken subject" agrees to identify with the "subject o f the speech," the fictional character who is the discursive representative of the "speaking subject." The "speaking subject" often works through the fictional character, so that the latter is seen by the audience as controlling the gaze, as being the producer o f meaning. 4 Lady o f Soul was written at a Theatre Works Writers Laboratory in 1991 and first presented to the public as a reading in January 1992. It was first staged in January 1993 (Pandian, "Censors," ST 2 Dec. 1992). 5 Qtd. in K o h Tai A n n , "Culture" 713-4. Information about the government's proposed development of the arts and its "Agenda for Ac t ion" was also taken from Koh ' s article (713-5). 6 See Pandian. Tan, "Letter o f Appeal Sent to the Public Entertainment and Licensing Uni t , " Annex 1, Lady o f Soul 78-9. g Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan note that the mama-san in Lady o f Soul services a "male fantasy" ("Being Obsessed" 113). They place Tan's play within a trend in Singapore writing where "the attention o f a cultural text that would present itself as social and political critique is split and undermined by its own obsession with sexual display." This overwhelming attention placed on the sexual, they suggest, could be "a form of political censorship, an indication o f either the unwillingness or inability (or both) o f writers to advance a serious critique of their society" (112). Acknowledging that the sexual can 380 be the political, they argue that in Singapore texts, however, the "equation of sex with polit ics" often serves as the "al ibi for the absence of the polit ical," where "adolescent jokes and juvenile protests" are not "the sexual as the poli t ical" but the "sexual in place of the poli t ical" (114). This is certainly true o f Lady o f Soul but I would add that the relationship between the sexual and the political is not only one of displacement but that the two are more closely ideologically connected in Singapore than is often supposed. The Censorship Review Committee's recommendations, which were published in 1992, do not fixate on the representation of sex but do approach issues of political censorship. Tan himself quotes some o f these recommendations in his letter of appeal to the licensing authority: the committee notes that the "artistic and literary merits o f a production should be taken into acount as redeeming factors" and recognizes that "by its nature, art must be understood, at times, to challenge orthodoxy and provide a stimulus for social change and evolution" (76-81). 101 am working with the fourth draft manuscript of the play, which is dated A p r i l 1995. 1 1 K u o is the only one o f the playwrights dealt with here who tries to offer an alternative Asian masculinity that is South-east Asian rather than Chinese. In scene 14, it is suggested that Zheng He is M u s l i m and belongs to the marginalized areas of the Chinese empire: when his armada is caught in a storm, the eunuch admiral cries out, "Insya Al l ah , save us . . . remembering how he and his family and relatives prayed in his childhood days" (25). Zheng He is also familiar with "Sang N i l a Utama the Prince o f Temasek," and follows his historic example during the storm by throwing possessions into the sea. A s admiral of the M i n g fleet, he has also travelled widely in the South-east Asian region. M y knowledge of South-east Asian myths and history leaves much to be desired, but it would appear that the "negara rajaraja" (which is a Malay term) that Zheng He discusses is a fictional hybridization o f a 15-th century Malay kingdom and a society in Sri Lanka, which is often described, as Zheng He does, as "the jewel o f the wor ld" and "the Buddha's tear." 381 12 Sylvia Walby 's work is an instance o f such a deconstructive feminism. In her article "Woman and Nat ion," she argues within the context of Western democracies, but her contention that the modern nation-state has been transforming the nature of patriarchy from private to public allows the focus on female oppression to penetrate the barriers of national authoritarianism that disguise themselves as racial cultural 'difference' (235-54). 382 Conclusion I have tried in this dissertation to make sense of the large cultural changes that have swept Singapore over the last 15 years in its effort to 'Asianize, ' and to understand, in particular, the baffling possibility that a new ethnicized national identity can be constructed practically overnight to take hold o f a people's imagination and alter their most central and long-held cultural identifications. Working as a journalist, I was fortunate to be immersed for some years in the clearing-house of information and thoroughfare o f national culture that a newspaper office often is. Though Singapore is not noted as one o f the world 's centers o f press freedom, this does not mean that journalistic news gathering is limited: merely, that what is uncovered often cannot be published. A s such, I collected much 'unofficial ' information both about public responses and government attitudes that have guided my academic work here in more ways than I can document. A l l that was left was for me to develop my impressions under the light o f current literary theories. Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, inflected with Marxist cultural critique, has allowed me to tackle the sense I had then that something weird was happening in the country with the introduction o f the new nationalism, something quite psychologically twisted, culturally unproductive, even regressive. About 10 years ago, reading contemporary Singapore literature, I vowed that one day I would read the 'repressed' in local texts, move beyond their silences, their gaps, and their elisions, o f which I had felt there were many. Hence, my instant 'bonding' with Zizek 's critical method. Perhaps because Singapore, unlike many post-colonial societies, found a quick way to displace post-colonial cultural anxiety through economic success, the cultural became subordinated and made functional to the economic. In that the nation's rapid rise to economic stardom involved colonial mimicry and the courting o f Western capital, national desire is closely bound with the West, though with the U S rather than Britain, the former colonial master. This has made Singapore highly susceptible to Western ideological manipulation. A s I have shown, its political leaders have been only too wi l l ing to culturally re-fashion themselves and their country according to a Western say-so. When a culturally 383 insecure nation realizes that its own 'master' looks at it with desire and envy (and the homoerotic implications are not accidental here), it styles itself, in Confucian robes, with Chinese brush at hand, to be the object o f the other's fantasy in a manner that differs little from Singapore's "sarong party girls," career women by day who, with their tanned skin, long si lky hair and tiny hips wrapped with locally-crafted fabric, turn into would-be South Seas Gauguin models by night, fitting themselves into the Oriental fantasy scenarios o f Caucasian men. When such Oriental fantasies can be used to entice the 'other' master, China, then these become multiply seductive. The confidence that comes with wealth does not appear to have eroded Singaporeans' 'colonial mentality': it has only doubled it. On 29 A p r i l 1995, for instance, at the opening o f an exhibition in Singapore, culture minister Brigadier-General George Y e o said, with apparently no sense o f irony: " I f we [Singaporeans] are no longer different from Americans, we w i l l cease to be of use to Americans. Equally, i f we are no different from the Chinese in China, we become o f no use to them." " E x i l e , " says Edward Said, "far from being the fate o f nearly forgotten unfortunates who are dispossessed and expatriated, becomes something closer to a norm, an experience o f crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance o f the classic canonic enclosures, however much its loss and sadness should be acknowledged and registered" (Culture 317). I am not in exile but my current cultural in-between location, being abroad in the West but writing about "home" in the East, has in many ways allowed me to transcend cultural blindness experienced by resident Singaporeans. L i v i n g in Singapore, the nation can often be experienced claustrophobically as a walled city, its borders as rigid, impermeable, tirelessly constructed and daily policed by the government. The government then becomes the 'enemy' on whom one focuses. But crossing the border, these walls come into view as fragile, permeable fantasies spun out o f fear, anxiety, and desire. A s government authority degenerates to pose, the national border shows up its inter-nationality as a dualistic containment strategy: as not only that which keeps Singaporeans inside, but also that which keeps them outside the Western center o f power. Residing in the West, one becomes only too aware that non-Western nationalisms involve a complex trafficking o f 384 desire between metropolis and periphery and, paradoxically, mark the non-Western nation's alienation from itself. The moment that I suspected a conjunction in desire between the West/US and Singapore, ironically, my project o f de-colonization appeared to demand that I work within the gaps of 'post-colonial theory.' In opposing essentialistic constructions o f racial/ethnic difference, I rubbed up against post-colonial theory's emphasis on non-Western cultural difference. Since state cultural oppression was itself clothed in post-colonial rhetoric, 'post-colonial theory' seemed to be part of the problem rather than its answer. Then too, post-colonial literary criticism prioritizes post-colonial texts that resist colonial power/culture and considers de-colonization in terms o f a recovery from a past colonization~so that a romanticized accent on de-colonizing displaces scrutiny of the very real violence o f on-going contemporary imperialism. M y contextualization o f Singapore literature with national politics, I found, opened me to meanings that I could not have located through 'post-colonial' reading practices. For instance, the texts studied in chapter 4, with their emphasis on 'Chinese' identity and use o f feminist literary forms, can be quite easily mistranslated through post-colonial critique as anti-colonial and/or feminist. What Chow says about Third Wor ld cultural products offered to First Wor ld audiences in Primitive Passions: Visual i ty. Sexuality. Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, applies also to the manner in which such texts/products are received within a 'Western' discipline of post-colonial criticism. There's a certain extent of "commodity fetishism" of the Third World text involved in post-colonial readings o f non-Western national difference, where the 'third world ' is "enlisted" in "the manufacture o f a reflection, an alterity that gives (back) to the 'first wor ld ' a sense o f ' i ts ' freedom and democracy" while al lowing the 'third wor ld ' product to be viewed against the authoritarian policies o f ' th i rd wor ld ' governments. Apply ing Chow's reading of Jean Baudrillard, it would seem that in post-colonial criticism, the non-Western text takes on the figurative "labor" of signification while being emptied o f its actual substance o f labor, which is often accomplished by neglecting, through the practice of interpretation, the economic and political tensions, both domestic and international, that generated the text (59-60). Chow poses this immensely pertinent question that ruptures the "currently hegemonic reading o f 'third wor ld ' cultures . . . that insists on their oppositional alterity to the West": One question that the inscription o f "third wor ld" cultures in opposition does not seem to be able to deal with is what else there is in such cultures besides the struggle against the West. What i f the primary interest o f a "third wor ld" culture is not that o f resistance against Western domination? (56). Though Singapore and China are worlds apart in their cultural histories, American neo-Orientalism has apparently succeeded so wel l in its racialist ideologizing that I find many similarities between Chow's account o f post-Cultural Revolution sinocentrism in China and recent Singaporean cultural activity. Chow, for instance, relates the reinvention o f Chinese tradition in China to the phantasmatic staking o f a claim to an "original" modernism, where Chinese tradition comes together with "modernity." But this idea that "China can have part o f the West — technology — without changing its social structure" is a "fantasy" (73). A s Chow says: . . . the notion that "China" is first and original is already a response to the exchange with the West, a claim that is made after the onslaught o f the West has become i r revers ib le . . . . the insistence on an original "Chinese" culture is an insistence on a kind o f value that is outside alienation, outside the process o f value making. The wish to return a culture to an original (native) value is thus the wish to remove that culture from the process in which it appears "original" in the first place. (64) This disjuncture between economic reality and ethnic desire, where Chow suggests that self-repression itself has become aestheticized (51), demands that questions be asked concerning the "reconstruction of origins, the truncating o f libidinal economies, and the imaginary reinvestments that make up the 'labor' moving within a 'third wor ld ' culture as wel l as between the 'first' and ' third ' worlds" (65 ). In this manner, we can uncover "national culture as a kind o f economic text—a kind o f value wri t ing" (63). Chow notes, as I have in chapters 4 and 5, that the 'new' identity is expressed through the 'o ld , ' that 386 consciousness is "inter[media]ry," that it struggles between voices and crosses between sign systems (117). Just as a Chinese filmmaker returns the Oriental gaze in all its cruelty back to the West by repeating it (166-67), so too, but less subversively, the Singapore playwright cross-dresses as Chinese, Western, liberal norms o f masculinity invested during an earlier period. The "primitive passions" that Chow sees in Chinese films made for Western consumption may copy Orientalist representations o f Chinese culture's datedness and alterity, but as "coeval, co-temporal" representational structures o f myths o f "retrospection and forwardness, nostalgia and idealism," that construct a new aboriginal ly , they involve a "crisis-laden, ambivalent time" where the nation sees itself anew as an 'other' (43). In recent Singapore 'historical ' fiction too, one observes a similar Oriental primitivist 'othering' o f the self, an exoticization o f the backward, of a "noble savagery . . . as yet uncorrupted by modernity" (74) that is inscribed within an identity crisis but which is, as Chow emphasizes, caught in a "cross-cultural interpretative politics" (142). Chow too sees in the "unconscious that is lurking beneath Han sinocentrism," an ethnic 'emancipation' that is complicitious with patriarchal culture, which I have observed in Singapore drama and fiction (43-44). But it is Chow's analysis o f the cultural narcissism she detects in contemporary Chinese films that strikes an alarming chord with Singapore cultural production, especially with the drama considered in this study. Chow links the (heterosexual) masculinist narcissism in Chinese films ~ where men watch other men, and where for the male cultural producer, the object o f desire is another man rather than a woman — to the failure of dominant national culture. Since these culture producers are dissatisfied with national culture, women, who signify for them the reproduction/transmission o f that culture through the marriage and familial institutions, are hence evaded. Desire is instead directed narcissistically towards other men, in search of that which has been denied in themselves. The narcissism then is a flight from reality necessitated, Chow says, by the "censorial institution o f conscience," and it is not oppositional to the West. We have to rethink narcissism, Chow says, not in terms o f "independence" but as the "outward symptoms o f a process of cultural devastation, which leaves the self recoiling inwards, seeking 387 its connection from itself rather than with external reality" (135). Chow adds that narcissistic desire and identification in these films are often directed at male figures o f powerlessness, who are the "safest for the realization o f otherwise unenactable fantasies" (137-8). The narcissistic gaze o f the culture producer, which he projects onto his protagonist, results from the latter's sense o f marginalization, o f exclusion from the nation, which is coped with by identifying with powerless figures. " A certain emotional stability," Chow notes, "arises from observing the powerless as spectacle." But a sense o f empowerment is also gained in the process, accruing from "the illusion of a 'solidarity' with the powerless," which in turn forms a "unified community" o f sympathy which is other than that o f a hegemonic national collectivity (135-36). A s I have noted, Singapore playwrights do become overly concerned with watching other men and desiring them and this is linked to anxiety about male selfhood and with a need to identify with the powerless (such as transvestites and transsexuals), the non-national. M y own reading of the male culture inscribed in recent Singapore plays compels me to agree with Chow's plea that "this masculinity is the sign o f a vast transindividual oppression whose undoing must become the collective undertaking for all those who have a claim to modern Chinese culture" (141). I read Chow's Primitive Passions after much o f my work had been done so that the similarities in her critique of Chinese cinema and my study o f Singapore literature and the discourse o f Asian/Confucianist identity do suggest that psychoanalytical-Marxist theory holds promise in unfolding a new collectivity of representational structures of post-colonial fantasy, that w i l l allow us to better understand the cross-cultural relations and deadlocks in non-Western desire in the era of global capitalism. Chow's concept o f an intersemiotic translation—of the "translating from one sign system to another," and not only from one language to another or the verbal to the visual but the transporting o f narrative paradigms from one culture to another—could also be productive in problematizing the notion o f originality in post-colonial culture and allow us to see instead the way the non-Western unconscious is caught up in Western desire. In this manner, we can penetrate the racial dissembling of the post-colonial class struggle (that Etienne Balibar and Wallerstein warned us about) and see, as Chow says, both "East and W e s t . . . as ful l , 388 materialist and most l ikely equally corrupt, equally decadent participants in contemporary world culture" (192-95). Though my work deals with the instrumentalist, authoritarian function that nationalisms can be made to serve, I continue to believe in the usefulness of nationalisms for post-colonial societies. Just as the private subject can find empowering ' i l lusions' for itself despite the alienation involved in entry into the Symbolic Order, so too national subjectivity, I believe, is capable o f dreaming up fictions, and not merely regressively native ones, but those that promote multi-cultural and extra-national, regional identifications, to help in de-colonization. Paranoiac, hysterical nationalisms can be avoided by knowledge o f society's desires, by an active critical tradition. But, also, to be culturally regenerative, national culture must be a constantly negotiated democratic formation that is in the hands o f c iv i l society rather than with the state. Jurgen Habermas notes that the 'nation' concept has helped to reinforce constitutional abstract notions o f citizenship and social solidarity beyond race and class, though, undoubtedly there is a tension between an egalitarian universalism of a legally constituted community and the particularism of ethnic identifications. A s he suggests, constitutional principles o f human rights and democracy should prevail over the idea o f the nation as a pre-political ethnic collective (281-94). Marxists have traditionally opposed national loyalties as intervening in the class struggle, but as Gopal Balakrishnan notes, the proletariat emerged as a political force in modern history only as a national class, so that far from being mutually exclusive bases o f collective organization, nation and class can be complementary (200). 389 Works Cited or Consulted Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1990. Ahmad, Aijax. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory.' " Social Text 17: 3-25. Alatas, Syed Farid. "Some Problems of Indigenization." Dept. of Sociology. Working Paper 114. Singapore: National U of Singapore, n.d. Amin, Samir. "Imperialism and Culturalism Complement Each Other." Monthly Review 48.2 (1996): 1-11. Ang, Ien, and Jon Stratton. "The Singapore Way of Multiculturalism: Western Concepts/Asian Cultures." Sojourn 10.1 (1995): 65-89. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold: Rethinking the Western Tradition. Ed. Samuel Lipman. New Haven: Yale, 1994. 3-141. Babuscio, Jack. "Camp and the Gay Sensibility." Bergman, Camp Grounds 19-38. Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed. Mapping the Nation. London: Verso, 1996. —. "The National Imagination." Balakrishnan 198-213. Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race. Nation. Class: Ambiguous Identities. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1991. Ban, Kah Choon, et al., eds. Imagining Singapore. Singapore: Times Academic-Federal, 1992. Baratham, Gopal. The Caning of Michael Fay: The Inside Story by a Singaporean. Singapore: KRP, 1994. Berger, Maurice, et al., eds. Constructing Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 1995. Bergman, David, ed. Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality. Amherst: U of Massachusets P, 1993. Bhabha, Homi K. "Are You a Man or a Mouse?" Berger 57-65. —. "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation." Bhabha, Location 139-70. —. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. —. "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." Bhabha, Location 85-92. —. "A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States." Donald, Thresholds 89-103. Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart. Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994. 390 Bennett, Bruce, and Dennis Haskell , eds. Myths. Heroes and Anti-Heroes: Essays on the Literature and Culture o f the Asia-Pacific Region. Nedlands, W . A . : University of Western Australia, 1992. — . A Sense o f Exi le : Essays in the Literature of the Asia-Pacific Region. Nedlands, W . A . : University o f Western Australia, 1988. Brewster, Anne. "The Discourse of Nationalism and Multiculturalism in Singapore and Malays ia in the '50s and '60s." Span 24 Apr . 1987: 136-50. Brown, David . "The Corporatist Management o f Ethnicity in Contemporary Singapore. Rodan 16-33. Burgoyne, Robert. "National Identity, Gender Identity and the Rescue Fantasy." Screen 35.3 (1994): 211-34. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". N e w York , London: Routiedge, 1993. — . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routiedge, 1990. "Catherine L i m : I 'm Not Interested in Polit ics." Straits Times 6 Dec. 1994: 2. Chan, Adrian. "Confucianism and Development in East A s i a . " Journal o f Contemporary A s i a 26.1 (1996): 28-45. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N . J . : Princeton U P , 1993. Chen, Xiaomei . "Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse." Crit ical Inquiry 18 (1992): 686-712. Chiang, Michael . Beauty World . Chiang. Collection 92-160. — . Private Parts. Chiang. Collection 222-95. — . Private Parts and Other Play Things: A Collection o f Popular Singapore Comedies by Michae l Chiang. Singapore: Landmark, 1994. Chng, Suan Tze. Good Asian Values: A Monologue. Theatreworks. Fat Virgins 326-33. Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuali ty. Sexuality. Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. E d . John Belton. F i l m and Culture Series. N e w York : Columbia U P , 1995. — . Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics o f Reading between East and West. Minnesota: U o f Minnesota P, 1991. Chua, Beng Huat. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London: Routiedge, 1995. — . Culture. Mult iracial ism and National Identity in Singapore. Dept. of Sociology. Working Paper 125. Singapore: National University of Singapore, 1995. — . "For a Communitarian Democracy in Singapore." D a Cunha 27-34. 391 Chua, Beng Huat and Eddie C . Y . Kuo . The Making of a N e w Nation: Cultural Construction and National Identity in Singapore. Dept. O f Sociology. Working Paper 104. Singapore: National University o f Singapore, 1991. Clammer, John. "Deconstructing Values: The Establishment o f a National Ideology and Its Implications for Singapore's Polit ical Future." Rodan 34-51. "The Confucius Confusion." Economist 24 Feb. 1996: 40. D a Cunha, Derek, ed. Debating Singapore: Reflective Essays. Singapore: Institute o f Southeast Asian Studies, 1994. "Debate Yes , But Do Not Take On Those in Authority as 'Equals. ' " Straits Times 20 Feb. 1995: 19. Deleuze, Gil les , and Fel ix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane. V o l . 1. N e w York: V i k i n g , 1977. 2 vols. Derrida, Jacques. "Cogito and the History o f Madness." Writ ing and Difference. Trans. A l a n Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. 31-63. De Souza, Dudley, and Arthur Yap . "English Fict ion." Thumboo 765-70. Di r l ik , Ar i f . "Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention o f Confucianism." Boundary 2 22.3 (1995): 229-73. — . "The Postcolonial Aura: Third Wor ld Crit icism in the Age of Global Capitalism." Crit ical Inquiry 20 (1994): 328-56. Dittmer, L o w e l l , and Samuel S. K i m , eds. China's Quest for National Identity. Ithaca: Cornell U P , 1993. Donald, James. "On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies." Donald 1-10. — , ed. Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds. London: M a c M i l l a n , 1991. Dowl ing , W i l l i a m C . Jameson. Althusser. Marx: A n Introduction to "The Political Unconscious." Ithaca: Cornell U P , 1984. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin. White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markman. N e w York : Grove, 1967. — . The Wretched o f the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. N e w York : Grove, 1963. Ferris, Lesley, ed. Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing. London: Routledge, 1993. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton U P , 1995. Fink, Bruce, Richard Feldstein, and Maire Jaanus, eds. Reading Seminar X I : Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis. Albany: S U N Y Press, 1995. Fiske, John. Media Matters: Race and Gender in U S Politics. Minnesota: U o f Minnesota P, 1996. 392 — . Power Plays. Power Works. London: Verso, 1993. Fiske, John, and John Hartley. Reading Television. London: Methuen, 1978. Foucault, M i c h e l . The Archaeology of Knowledge and "The Discourse on Language." Trans. A . M . Sheridan Smith. N e w York : Pantheon, 1972. — . History o f Sexuality: A n Introduction. V o l . 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. N e w York : Vintage, 1990. 3 vols. — . Madness and Civi l izat ion: A History of Insanity in the Age o f Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. N e w York : Random, 1965. — . Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972-1977. Trans. Co l in Gordon, et al. E d . C o l i n Gordon. N e w York : Pantheon, 1980. Foucault, M i c h e l , and Gil les Deleuze. "Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between M i c h e l Foucault and Gil les Deleuze." Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism 271-313. Fowler, Roger. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routiedge, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard vol . 18. — . "The Ego and the Id." Freud. Essentials 439-78. — . The Essentials o f Psycho-Analysis. E d . Clifford Yorke. Trans. James Strachey. The International Psycho-Analytical Library 116. London: Hogarth, 1986. — . "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." Freud, Essentials 197-217. — . The Interpretation o f Dreams. Standard vol . 4. — . "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analyis—Lecture 23: The Paths to the Formation o f Symptoms." Freud, Essentials 539-55. — . "Repression." Freud, Essentials 523-33. — . The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1955. 24 vols. Frosh, Stephen. Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis. London, N e w York : Routiedge, 1994. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. N e w York : Routiedge, 1995. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. N e w York : Routiedge, 1992. Goh, Sin Tub. The Sin-Kheh. Singapore: Times, 1993. Goldberg, Dav id Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics o f Meaning. Oxford: Blackwel l , 1993. 393 Gordon, Jan. "The 'Second Tongue' Myth : English Poetry in Polylingual Singapore." A r i e l 15.2 (1984): 41-65. Grossberg, Lawrence, et al., eds. Cultural Studies. New York : Routledge, 1992. Habermas, Jiirgen. "The European Nation-State: Its Achievements and Its Limits . On the Past and Future o f Sovereignty and Citizenship." Balakrishnan, Mapping 281-94. Heng, Geraldine, and Janadas Devan. "Being Obsessed with Things Sexual in the Arts ." D a Cunha 110-15. Heng, Russell Hiang Khng . Lest the Demons Get to M e . Theatreworks, Fat Virgins 28-53. H i l l , Michae l and Lian K w e n Fee. The Politics o f Nation Bui lding and Citizenship in Singapore. Politics in A s i a Series. E d . Michael Leifer. London: Routledge, 1995. Ho , M i n F o n g . "Tanjong Rhu." Lee 150-71. Ho, R i h Hwa . Eating Salt: A n Autobiography. Singapore: Times, 1991. Horowitz, Gad. Repression — Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud. Reich, and Marcuse. Toronto, Buffalo: U o f Toronto P, 1977. Huntington, Samuel P. "The Clash o f Civil izat ions." Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 22-49. Ingram, David and Julia Simon-Ingram, eds. Crit ical Theory: The Essential Readings. Paragon Issues in Philosophy Series. N e w York : Paragon, 1992. Ivy, Mar i l yn . Discourses o f the Vanishing: Modernity. Phantasm. Japan. Chicago: U o f Chicago P, 1995. Jameson, Fredric. The Polit ical Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act . N e w York : Cornell U P , 1981. — . "Third Wor ld Literature in the Era o f Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. JanMohamed, Abdu l R. "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function o f Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature." Crit ical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 59-87. Jeyaretnam, Phil ip. Abraham's Promise. Singapore: Times, 1995. Jit, Krishen. " K u o Pao Kun- the M a n o f the Future in Singapore Theatre." K u o Pao K u n , Coffin and Other Plays 7-28. Kandiyoti , Deniz. "Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation." Wil l iams 376-91. K i n g , Sam. The Life and Times of A w Boon Haw. Singapore: Times, 1992. Ki rkham, Pat, and Janet Thumin, eds. Y o u Tarzan: Masculinity. Movies and M e n . London: Lawrence, 1993. 394 K o h , Buck Song. "Over-Cautious Publishers." Straits Times 15 Jan. 1996: 4. K o h , Tai A n n . "Culture and the Arts ." Sandhu 710-48. K o n , Stella. The Scholar and the Dragon. Singapore: Federal, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Ar t and Literature. Trans. Thomas Gora, A l i c e Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Ed . Leon S. Roudiez. N e w York : Columbia U P , 1980. K u o , Eddie C . Y . Confucianism as Political Discourse in Singapore: The Case o f an Incomplete Revitalization Movement. Dept. O f Sociology, Working Paper 113. Singapore: National University o f Singapore, 1992. Kuo , Pao K u n . The Coffin is Too B i g for the Hole. Kuo Pao K u n , Coffin and Other Plays 29-46. — . The Coffin Is Too B i g for the Hole . . . and Other Plays. Singapore: Times, 1990. — . Descendants o f the Eunuch Admira l . Fourth Draft, A p r i l 1995, ts. Theatreworks, Singapore. — . N o Parking on Odd Days. Kuo , Coffin 47-70. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. A lan Sheridan. N e w York : Norton, 1977. — . The Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis. Trans. A lan Sheridan. E d . Jacques-Alain Mi l l e r . N e w York : Norton, 1978. — . The Language o f the Self: The Function o f Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. N e w York : D e l l , 1968. — . "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.' " Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 39-72. Lam, Dana. Bernard's Story: A One-Act Play. Theatreworks, Fat Virgins 12-25. Latif, Asad. The Flogging of Singapore: The Michael Fay Affair. Singapore: Times, 1994. Lee, Helen, ed. Tapestry: A Collection o f Short Stories. Writ ing in A s i a Series. Singapore: Heinemann As ia , 1992. L i m , Catherine. The Bondmaid. Singapore: L i m , 1995. — . "The Jade Pendant." Yeo . Singapore Short Stories 46-53. — . "The Journey." Lee. Tapestry 184-95. — . Little Ironies. Writ ing in A s i a Series. Singapore: Heinemann As ia , 1978. — . "One Government, Two Styles." Editorial. Straits Times 20 Nov . 1994, Sunday ed.: 12. 395 —. Or Else, the Lightning God and Other Stories. Writing in Asia Series. Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1982. —. "Prologue: Images." Lim. Women's Book 4-13. —. The Serpent's Tooth. Singapore: Times, 1982. —. The Women's Book of Superlatives. Singapore: Times, 1993. Lim, Geok-Lin Shirley. Against the Grain: Writing South-east Asia in English-Focus on Asian English-Language Literatures. Skoob Pacifica Series. London: Skoob, 1994. —. "The English-language Writer in Singapore: 1940s - 1980s." Lim. Against the Grain . —. "The National Canon and the English-language Women Writers from Malaysian and Singapore, 1949-1969." Lim. Against the Grain 158-202. —. Nationalism and Literature: English-language Writing from the Philippines and Singapore. Quezon City: New Day, 1993. —. "Rethinking Literary Theory for a Postcolonial World: First World Theory, Third World English-language Literature." Lim. Nationalism 1-9. —. "Voices from the Hinterland: Plurality and Identity in the National Literatures in English from Malaysia and Singapore." World Literature Written in English 28.1 (1988): 143-53. Lim, Suchen Christine. Fistful of Colours. Singapore: EPB, 1993. —. Gift from the Gods. Singapore: Brash, 1990. Lodge, George C. "Introduction: Ideology and Country Analysis." Lodge and Vogel 1-28. —. "The United States: The Costs of Ambivalence." Lodge and Vogel 103-40. Lodge, George C , and Ezra F. Vogel, eds. Ideology and National Competitiveness: An Analysis of Nine Countries. Boston: Harvard Business School, 1987. Lu, Tonglin, ed. Gender and Sexuality in 20th-century Chinese Literature and Society. Feminist Criticism and Theory Series. New York: State U of New York P, 1993. Mani, Lata. "Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning." Grossberg, Cultural Studies 392-404. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race. Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. London: Routledge, 1995. Metress, Christopher. "Living Degree Zero: Masculinity and the Threat of Desire in the Roman Noir." Murphy 154-84. Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose. Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne. New York: Norton, 1982. 396 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Wil l iams 196-220. Mouffe, Chantal. "Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a N e w Concept o f Democracy." Nelson, Marx ism 89-104. Mudimbe, V . Y . , ed. Nations. Identities. Cultures. Spec, issue o f South Atlantic Quarterly 94.4 (1995). Mul le r , John P. Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Development Semiotics in Freud. Pierce and Lacan. N e w York : Routiedge, 1996. Mulvey , Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1996. Murphy, Peter F. , ed. Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures. Crossing Sexualities. N e w York : N e w York U P , 1994. Nalpon, Gregory. "The Rose and the Silver K e y . " Yeo . Singapore Short Stories 59-65. Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation o f Culture. Basingstoke: Macmil lan Education, 1988. "New Fashion for O l d Wisdom: Confucianism." Economist 21 Jan. 1995: 38. " ' O f Late, the Voice Has Become Sterner, the Stand Harsher': What Catherine L i m Said." Straits Times 4 Dec. 1994: 4 Pandian, Hannah. "Censors Pass Political Play." Straits Times 2 Dec. 1992. Tan, Lady 83-8 5. Phelan, Peggy. "Crisscrossing Cultures." Ferris 155-70. Pile, Steve, and Nige l Thrift, eds. Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. London: Routiedge, 1995. " P M : N o Erosion o f M y Authority A l lowed . " Straits Times 5 Dec. 1994: n. pag. Purushotam, Nirmala . Disciplining Differences: "Race in Singapore." Dept. O f Sociology. Working Paper 126. Singapore: National University of Singapore, 1995. — . "Women and Knowledge/Power: Notes on the Singaporean Di lemma." Ban 320-61. Quah, Jon S. T., ed. In Search o f Singapore's National Values. Singapore: Times Academic, 1990. Ringrose, Marjorie, and Adam J. Lerner, eds. Reimagining the Nation. London: Open U P , 1993. Rodan, Garry, ed. Singapore Changes Guard: Social. Polit ical and Economic Directions in the 1990s. Studies on Contemporary A s i a Series. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1993. Ross, Andrew. "Uses o f Camp." Bergman 54-77. Said, Edward W . Culture and Imperialism. N e w York : Knopf; Toronto: Random, 1993. 397 Sandhu, Kernial Singh, and Paul Wheatley, eds. Management of Success: The Mould ing o f Modern Singapore. Singapore: Institute o f Southeast Asian Studies, 1989. Seah, Chee Meow, ed. Asian Values and Modernization. Singapore: Singapore U P , 1977. Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men : English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. N e w York : Columbia U P , 1985. "Sense o f Identity V i t a l for Singaporeans: B G Y e o . " Straits Times 30 Apr . 1995: 24. Shelley, Rex. Island in the Centre. Singapore: Times, 1995. — . People o f the Pear Tree. Singapore: Times, 1993. — . The Shrimp People. Singapore: Times, 1991. Shohat, E l l a , and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media . London: Routiedge, 1994. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. N e w York : Routiedge, 1992. — . The Subject o f Semiotics. N e w York: Oxford U P, 1983. Smith, Patricia Juliana. " ' Y o u Don ' t Have to Say Y o u Love M e ' : The Camp Masquerades o f Dusty Springfield." Bergman 185-205. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. De-Colonising the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Soh, Fe l ix . "The Press in Singapore: The Misconceptions and the Reality." Editorial. Straits Times 3 June 1993:27. — . "The Sequence o f Events." Straits Times 8 Feb. 1994: 18. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Wil l iams 66-111. Suryadinata, Leo. "National Ideology and Nation-Building in Mult i -Ethnic States: Lessons from Other Countries." Quah 24-44. Tan, Tarn How. "Diary of Censorship." Tan, Lady 61-74. — . "Letter of Appeal Sent to the Public Entertainment and Licensing Uni t . " Tan, Lady 75-82. — . The Lady o f Soul and Her Ultimate ' S ' Machine. Singapore: Sirius, 1993. — . S ix o f the Best. Third Draft, 1996, ts. Theatreworks, Singapore. — . Undercover. Theatreworks. Dir ty Laundry 105-76. 398 Tharu, Susie, and K . Lalita. "Literature o f the Reform and Nationalist Movements." Women Writ ing in India: 600 B . C . to the Early Twentieth Century. N e w York : Feminist, 1991: 145-86. V o l . 1 of Women Writ ing in India: 600 B . C . to the Present. Two vols. Theatreworks. Dir ty Laundry. Mergers and Undercover: Plays from Theatreworks' Writers' Lab. Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, 1995. — . Fat Virgins . Fast Cars and Asian Values: Plays from Theatreworks' Writers' Lab. Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, 1993. "Those with Agenda Have Entered Polit ical Arena." Straits Times 24 Jan. 1995: 1. Thumboo, Edwin , gen. ed. The Fiction o f Singapore. Singapore: Unipress, 1990. Trend, David , ed. Radical Democracy: Identity. Citizenship and the State. London: Routledge, 1996. Turnbull, C . M . A History o f Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford U P , 1987. Tu , W e i - M i n g , ed. Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Mora l Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons. Cambridge, M A : Harvard U P , 1996. V a n Djik , Teun A . , ed. Handbook of Discourse Analysis. V o l . 4 . London: Academic, 1985. 4 vols. V a s i l , Raj. Asianising Singapore: The P A P ' s Management o f Ethnicity. Singapore: Heinemann As ia , 1995. — . Governing Singapore. Singapore: Mandarin-Octopus, 1992. — . "Trade Unions." Sandhu 144-70. Viswanathan, Gauri . Masks o f Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. N e w York : Columbia U P , 1989. Voge l , Ezra F. The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East As ia . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P , 1991. — . Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P , 1979. — . " A Litt le Dragon Tamed." Sandhu 1049-66. Walby, Sylvia . "Woman and Nation." Balakrishnan. Mapping 235-54. Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The Insurmountable Contradictions of Liberalism: Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples in the Geoculture of the Modern World-System." Mudimbe 1161-78. Weber, M a x . The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: A l l en , 1976. — . The Rel igion o f China: Confucianism and Taoism. N e w York: Macmil lan , 1964. Wee, C . J. W . - L . "The Clash o f Civilizations? Or an Emerging 'East Asian Moderni ty? ' " Sojourn 11.2 (1996): 211-30. 399 —. "Staging the New Asia: Singapore's Dick Lee, Pop Music and a Counter-Modernity." Public Culture 8 (1996): 489-510. Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Wright, Elizabeth, ed. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Wong, Eleanor. Mergers and Accusations. Theatreworks. Dirty Laundry 1-74. Yap, Arthur. "The Story of a Mask." Yeo. Singapore Short Stories 37-41. Yeo, Robert. "Introduction." Yeo. Singapore Short Stories 122-31. —, ed. Singapore Short Stories. 2 vols. 1978. Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1989. 1 vol. Yong, Mun Cheong, ed. Asian Traditions and Modernization: Perspectives from Singapore. Singapore: Times Academic, 1992. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory. Culture and Race. London: Routiedge, 1995. —. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routiedge, 1990. Yu, Ovidia. "A Dream of China." Thumboo 1153-65. Zizek, Slavoj. "Che Vuoi?" Zizek, Sublime 87-130. —, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan: (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) London: Verso, 1992. —. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991. —. "From Symptom to Sinthome." Zizek. Sublime 55-84. —. "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?" Zizek, Sublime 11-54. —. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. —, ed. Mapping Ideology. Mapping Series. London: Verso, 1994. —. "Not Only as Substance But Also as Subject." Zizek. Sublime 201-32. —. "Spectre of Ideology." Zizek. Mapping 1-33. —. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, New York: Verso, 1989. 400 "Which Subject o f the Real?" Zizek, Sublime 153-200. Newspaper Articles on "National Ideology" From National University of Singapore library's newspaper archive. "Asian Values 'Must Be Part of Home Li fe . ' " Straits Times 25 Nov . 1988: 30. Basrun, Abdu l Rahman bin. Letter. "It Must Identify and Bind Singaporeans." Straits Times 3 Dec. 1989: 30. "Be Mindfu l of Minor i ty Views: M P . " Straits Times 2 Nov . 1988: 19. " B G Lee: N o Intention to Stifle Individual." Straits Times 18 Jan. 1989: n. pag. " B G Lee to Head Committee on National Ideology." Straits Times 6 Nov . 1988: 1. " B G Y e o Says Values Might Not Move in Desired Direction i f Left Alone ." Straits Times 20 June 1989: 16. " B G Y e o Warns Against Cultural Chauvinism." Straits Times 18 Dec. 1988: 1. " C a l l to Give Proposed Core Values a Special Name." Straits Times 27 Mar . 1989: 14. "Chinese Clans Set a Task in Ideology Search." Straits Times 16 Jan. 1989: n. pag. "Choosing the Basic Philosophy." Editorial. Straits Times 1 Mar . 1990: 26. "Clans to Present Views on Ideology Soon." Straits Times 28 Jan. 1989: n. pag. "Confucianism and National Ideology Topic of Dialogue." Straits Times 24 June 1989: 16. "Confucianism Not Chinese-Ism: Dr . O w . " Straits Times 21 Jan. 1989: 19. "Confucianist Scholar Takes Chiam to Task." Straits Times 24 Jan. 1989: 18. "Core Values 'Reflect Mus l im Teaching.' " Straits Times 30 Jan. 1989: 15. Daniel , Patrick. "The Death K n e l l for Singapore as a Melt ing Pot." Editorial . Straits Times 18 Jan. 1989: n. pag. — . " A National Ideology Is Not Ideology I f It Is for Survival ." Editorial. Straits Times 25 Dec. 1988: 20. — . "Two Fine Minds : H o w W e l l They Help to Clear the Fog over Ideology." Editorial . Straits Times 20 Jan. 1989: 14. "Debate Focuses on National Ideology." Straits Times 17 Jan. 1989: n. pag. "Del iver the Goods but W i n Over Hearts as W e l l : Dr. Hong H a i . " Straits Times 17 Jan. 1989: 12. 401 "Don ' t Rush into It: Abdullah." Straits Times 17 Jan. 1989: 12. "Envoy Explains Why Singapore Is Studying Rukunegara." Straits Times 24 Mar . 1989: 14. "Evo lv ing a National Identity in a Changing World Environment." Straits Times 20 June 1989: 24-25. "Extracting Best o f Self and Society W i l l Benefit Singapore, Says K a n Seng." Straits Times 8 July 1990: n. pag. "Fears that Search for Shared Values M a y Divide Races." Straits Times 22 June 1989: 22. "Focus N o w on Core Values, Mattar Urges Musl ims." Straits Times 22 Jan. 1989: 1. "Formulate Ideology with Care." Business Times 2 Nov . 1988: 20. "Four Guiding Principles Outlined." Straits Times 29 Dec. 1988: 1. "From Here to Ideology." Editorial. Straits Times 31 July 1989: 20. "Government Won ' t Make Core Values Law: B G Yeo . " Straits Times 26 July 1989: 1. "Green Paper on National Ideology M a y Be Out Next Year ." Straits Times 20 June 1989: 1. "Green Paper, Public Views to be Sought on National Ideology." Straits Times 21 Jan. 1989: 1. "Goh: Singapore Needs a National Ideology." Business Times 29 Oct. 1988: 20. Heng, Russell. "Heart of Singapore Inc." Editorial. Straits Times 28 M a y 1989: 2. "Ideology ' L i k e a Coat of Armour for Aircraft." Straits Times 19 Jan. 1989: 2. "Important Values to Be Expanded On . " Straits Times 12 Nov . 1988: 40. "Indian Musl ims to Discuss National Ideology." Straits Times 29 Jan. 1989: 17. "It's the Future We Are Pondering, Says B G Lee." Business Times 12 Jan. 1989: n. pag. " J C Students Agree on the Need for Shared Values." Straits Times 1 Jun. 1989: 23. "Keep Rel igion out o f Politics, Says B G Lee." Straits Times 12 Jan. 1989: n. pag. Khaw, W e i Kang. " A Well-Balanced Cultural Identity Needs Time to Forge." Editorial . Straits Times 14 Nov . 1988: 22. "Let ' s Discuss, Decide K e y Points: B G Lee." Straits Times 31 Oct. 1988: 1. "Lessons in Asian Values 'To Begin in Primary Schools.' " Straits Times 21 Nov . 1988: 40. "Malay Forum on Proposed National Ideology." Straits Times 18 Dec. 1988: n. pag. "Malay Groups Gear U p to Present Views to Govt." Straits Times 13 Jan. 1989: n. pag. 402 "Malays to Ho ld Forum on National Ideology." Straits Times 8 Dec. 1988: 25. "Mel t ing Pot Not for Singapore." Straits Times 18 Jan. 1989: n. pag. "Minister Takes the Debate on the National Ideology to a N e w Phase." Straits Times 12 Jan. 1989: 1. " M u s l i m Groups Say ' Y e s ' to Proposed Core Values." Straits Times 27 Mar . 1989: 36. " M u s l i m Groups to Hold National Ideology Forum." Straits Times 19 Feb. 1989: 13. "Mus l ims Accept Four Core Values." Straits Times 19 July 1989: n. pag. "Mus l ims Urged to Give Their Views . " Straits Times 14 Nov . 1988: 1. Mutal ib, Hussin. Letter. "It Must Be Common, Broad and Universal ." Straits Times 11 N o v . 1988: 30. "National Ideology A i m e d at 'Shifting the Balance a Li t t le ' Towards Society's Rights." Straits Times 18 Jan. 1989: 1. " A National Ideology: Government's New Goal . " Straits Times 29 Oct. 1988: 1. "National Ideology Paper W i l l Not Be Tabled This Year." Business Times 31 Mar . 1989: 22. "National Ideology Takes Centrestage." Business Times 17 Jan. 1989: n. pag. "National Ideology to be Defined." Business Times 6 Jan. 1989: 3. "National Ideology Was Mooted by Chok Tong." Straits Times 10 Mar . 1989: 16. "Need to A v o i d Politicisation o f Welfare, Students Told . " Straits Times 20 June 1989: 16. " N e w Book Addresses Quest for National Values." Straits Times 3 Sept. 1990: n. pag. "Nine M u s l i m Bodies Present Views on Ideology." Business Times 19 July 1989: 20. " N o Need to Fear Subjugation, Boon Heng Tells Malay M P s . " Straits Times 18 Jan. 1989: n. pag. "Not Chauvinism to Learn Values Through Mother Tongue: Teng Cheong." Straits Times 20 Jan. 1989: 14. "Paper's Position Not Incompatible with Nation's Goals: The Editor 's Reply." Straits Times 11 Mar . 1990:2. "Parliamentary Panel to Identify Core Values." Straits Times 4 Dec. 1988: 1. " P M Goh on Values that Must Not Clash." Straits Times 20 Dec. 1990: 1. "Produce Ads Consistent with National Values, Urges M a h . " Straits Times 29 Nov . 1988: 12. "Public V i e w Sought on the Teaching of Core Asian Values." Straits Times 17 Nov . 1988: 2 403 "Pupils Pick Values for National Ideology." Straits Times 19 Nov . 1988: 18. "Raja Wants Revival of 'Singaporean Singapore.' " Straits Times 11 Mar . 1990: 2. "Reassure Young that They W i l l Be Involved, Davinder Singh Urges." Straits Times 19 Jan. 1989: 14. " S A F [Singapore Armed Forces] M a y Contribute to State Ideology: B G Y e o . " Straits Times 25 July 1989: 2. "Seek Views from the Reticent and Non-English Speaking, Govt. Urged." Straits Times 19 Jan. 1989: 18. "Share Your Views on Proposed National ideology, Malays Urged." Straits Times 4 Dec. 1988: 24. "Singapore Can Learn from Ishikawa: Chok Tong." Straits Times 18 June 1989: 2. "Singapore Cannot Be Mel t ing Pot o f Cultures." Business Times 18 Jan. 1989: 1. "Singapore 'Must Resolve Three Contradictions.' " Straits Times 20 June 1989: 1. "Society Before Self — Many Disturbed by This: Chay." Straits Times 20 Jan. 1989: 18. "Striking One's Own Balance." Editorial. Straits Times 21 Jan. 1989:28. "Taman Bacaan [Malay Youth Library Assn.] Submits Views on National Ideology." Straits Times 11 Jan. 1990: n. pag. " 'Tap Traditional Values But Only Relevant Ones.' " Straits Times 22 June 1989: 22. "Time Needed to Formulate National Ideology: B G Lee." Business Times 31 Oct. 1988: 22. "Tolerance the K e y : Minister B G Lee on National Ideology." Straits Times 29 Dec. 1988: 1. " U S and Switzerland Seen as Examples for Singapore." Straits Times 20 June 1989: 16. " 'Use English to Teach Core Values to Pupils. ' " Straits Times 14 Dec. 1988: n. pag. " 'Values Should Be Universal in Nature.' " Straits Times 18 Nov . 1988: 27. "Views on Ideology Needed from A l l Quarters." Business Times 14 Nov . 1988: 22. " ' W e Must Not Deny Our Past.' " Straits Times 20 June 1989: 16. " 'Westernisation: The Problem Singapore Is Trying to Solve. ' " Straits Times 12 Jan. 1989: 20. "Western Values the Way to the Future, Says Chiam." Straits Times 18 Jan. 1989: n. pag. "White Paper ' M a y Not Help to Forge Common Identity.' " Straits Times 12 June 1990: 16. "White Paper on Shared Values Out Next Month ." Business Times 20 Dec. 1990: 2. 404 " W h y a National Ideology N o w , Ask Undergrads." Straits Times 20 Dec. 1988: 18. Newspaper Articles on Caning Incident From National University of Singapore library's newspaper archive. "Absurd to Say Fay Was Singled Out." Straits Times 21 Apr . 1994: 3. " A l l We A s k Is Respect for Our Right to Enforce Law and Order: Jaya." Business Times 5 M a y 1994: 2. "Almost A l l Polled Say Singapore Is a Safe Place to L ive In." Straits Times 29 M a y 1994: 1. "American B o y ' s Acts 'Were Just Schoolboy Pranks.' " Straits Times 3 Mar . 1994: 25. "Americans Back Caning Order in Calls and Letters to Singapore Embassy." Straits Times 3 Apr . 1994: 3. "Americans Told Tales o f Public Canings in Singapore." Straits Times 1 M a y 1994: 18. Armitage, Richard L . "Promote Common Values and Respect Differences." Editorial . Straits Times 10 M a y 1994: 26. Baratham, Gopal . Letter. "Are Things More Precious than Human Flesh?" Straits Times 8 Apr . 1994: n. pag. "Britons Want Criminals Caned." Straits Times 22 Apr . 1994: 1. "Bush Says He Opposes Caning, But Is Silent over Intervention." Business Times 17 Apr . 1994: 2. "Caning Defended on C N N . " Straits Times 28 Mar . 1994: 22. "Caning o f Fay an Issue o f Criminology, Not Human Rights." Business Times 15 Apr . 1994: 18. "Caning Sentence on Fay to Stay, But Teenager W i l l Get Four Strokes, Not S ix ." Straits Times 5 M a y 1994: 1. "Caning Turned Deftly into Issue of Freedom and Basic Rights." Straits Times 12 Apr . 1994: 8. "Ch ie f Justice: Judge D i d Right in Ordering Jail, Cane for Fay." Straits Times 9 Apr . 1994: n. pag. Chua, Huck Cheng. "Fay Saga: Economic Aggression after Losing the Argument." Editorial . Straits Times 16 Apr . 1994: 33. "Clash with U S over Legal System 'Inevitable.' " Straits Times 10 M a y 1994: 3 "Clinton: Mistake to Cane Fay." Business Times 15 Apr . 1994: 1. "Cl inton Says Caning o f Vandal Is Extreme, Singapore Government Disagrees." Business Times 9 Mar . 1994: 2. 405 "Clinton to Look into Singapore Caning Order on Youth ." Straits Times 6 Mar . 1994: 6. "Cl inton Urges Singapore to Reconsider." Straits Times 9 Mar . 1994: n. pag. "Crime and Punishment in Singapore: Not Sparing the Rod . " Straits Times 29 M a y 1994: 1. " D i d Fay Deserve Two Strokes Less?" Straits Times 6 M a y 1994: 22. "Fay Caned; State Dept. Summons Singapore Envoy." Straits Times 6 M a y 1994: 1. "Fay Case: A p p l y L a w Equally to A l l , Says Bush." Straits Times 16 Apr . 1994: 1. "Fay Case: Note the Disquiet." Editorial. Straits Times 6 M a y 1994: n. pag. "Fay Case: P M Not Surprised by Singaporeans' Robust Attitude." Straits Times 8 M a y 1994: 1. "Fay Loses Appeal ." Straits Times 1 Apr . 1994: 1. "Fay 's Caning: Clinton Makes Plea to Singapore." Straits Times 10 Apr . 1994: 2. "Fay 's Caning 'Not a Human Rights Issue.' " Straits Times 15 Apr . 1994: 3. "Fay 's Case: U S Says It W i l l Keep U p the Pressure." Straits Times 11 Mar . 1994: 31. "Fay 'Seems Okay, ' Says Mother after Prison Vi s i t . " Straits Times 18 M a y 1994: 28. "Fay to Fi le Appeal for Clemency by A p r i l 20." Straits Times 8 Apr . 1994: 31. "Fay Wasn't Forced to Confess His Crimes: Govt." Straits Times 22 Apr . 1994: 3. "Fay W i l l Be Caned But Strokes Reduced to Four as Gesture." Business Times 5 M a y 1994: 2. Fernandez, Warren. "Western Media ' s Lashing o f Singapore over Fay Strains Its Credibi l i ty ." Editorial . Straits Times 8 M a y 1994: 2. George, Cherian. "Both Sides N o w . . . On C N N . " Editorial. Straits Times 3 Apr . 1994: 10. "Govt. Denies Double Standards." Straits Times 24 Apr . 1994: 21. "Government Statement on Fay's Plea for Clemency." Straits Times 5 M a y 1994: 26. " G u l f Newspapers Give Prominent Coverage to Caning Sentence." Straits Times 12 Apr . 1994: 9. Han, Fook Kwang. "Cane Fay? It Depends on H o w M u c h Y o u Value L a w and Order." Editorial . Straits Times 9 Apr . 1994: 31. — . "Government Has Moved from Certainty to Being Open to Negotiation." Editorial . Straits Times 7 M a y 1994: 33. — . " W h y Singaporeans Are So Tough on Crime and Punishment." Editorial. Straits Times 11 June 1994:33. 406 " H o w a Prisoner Is Caned." Straits Times 1 M a y 1994: 18. " K a n Seng Defends Cane as Penalty." Straits Times 24 Apr . 1994: 1 Khoo , T. S. Letter. "Time for Fay to Take His Punishment L ike a M a n . " Straits Times 8 Apr . 1994: n.pag. K o c h , E d . "Br ing Back Caning in U S . " Global Viewpoint. Rpt. in Straits Times 21. Apr . 1994: 26. K o h , Buck Song. "When to Be Tough, When to Give 2nd Chance." Editorial. Straits Times 17 Mar . 1994: 5. Krauthammer, Charles. "Sense in Singapore's Approach to Punishment." Washington Post. Rpt. in Straits Times 12 Apr . 1994: 26. Latif, Asad. "Isn't the Fay Case Just about Michael Fay?" Editorial. Straits Times 23 Apr . 1994: 31. — . "It's A l l Invectives and Not Co ld Logic . Editorial. Straits Times 8 Apr . 1994:35. "Lesson on Crime from Singapore." Straits Times 18 Mar . 1994: 33. "Let the Commentary Fit the Crime." Editorial. Business Times 8 Apr . 1994: 14. "Malaysian Tabloid Seeks Readers' Views on Vandalism." Straits Times 11 Apr . 1994:14. "Many Americans Back Caning despite T V Coverage." Straits Times 12 Apr . 1994: 8. "Many Americans Support Caning: Survey." Straits Times 16 Mar . 1994: 4. "Michae l Fay Caned, Clinton Weighing Response." Business Times 6 M a y 1994: 2. "Michae l Fay Case: Let 's Move On, Says Gore." Straits Times 7 M a y 1994: 1. "Nathan Takes Philosophical Attitude." Straits Times 7 M a y 1994: 25. N g , Chong Jin. Letter. "Poli t ical Arm-Twist ing and Loud Gestures: Do Americans Never Learn." Straits Times 8 Apr . 1994: n. pag. "Not Clear i f Fay Was Forced to Confess: U S Says." Straits Times 21 Apr . 1994: 3. "Not Sparing the Rod: Crime and Punishment in Singapore." Straits Times 29 M a y 1994: 1. "Our Way o f Keeping Streets Safe." Straits Times 21 Apr . 1994: 3. "Overwhelming Support for Caning Sentence." Straits Times 23 Apr . 1994: 4. Parsons, Peter A . Letter. "Singapore's Justice System a Mode l for U S . " Straits Times 8 Apr . 1994: n. pag. "Pol i t ical ly Untenable to Grant Clemency to Fay: B G Y e o . " Straits Times 27 Apr . 1994: 3. 407 "Prison Doctor Says Fay Is In Good Condition." Straits Times 7 M a y 1994: 25. "Prisons Department Sets the Facts Straight on Caning." Straits Times 1 M a y 1994: 18. "Punishing Offenders: Perhaps U S Can Learn from Singapore." Straits Times 5 Apr . 1994: 29. " Q C Admitted to Represent Michael Fay in Teenager's Vandal Appeal ." Straits Times 26 Mar . 1994: 2. "Reactions to Caning Reduction for Michael Fay." Letters. Straits Times 6 M a y 1994: 36. "Reactions to Sentencing of American Teenager for Vandalism." Straits Times 4 Mar . 1994: 30. "Record 312 Letters Received, Most in Favour o f Sentence." Straits Times 29 Apr . 1994: 25. " 'Regrettable' i f Case Affected U S Ties." Straits Times 7 M a y 1994: n. pag. "Several U S Firms Ignore Calls to Pressure Singapore Govt." Straits Times 17 Apr . 1994: 9. "Shouldn't Other Countries Let Singapore Enforce Its Own Laws?" Straits Times 5 M a y 1994: 26. "Singaporeans Generally Safe, But Not Taking A n y Chances." Straits Times 2 M a y 1994: 16. "Singaporeans Support the Cane: B G Y e o . " Straits Times 7 M a y 1994: 25. "Singapore Hopes Caning of Fay W i l l Not Strain Ties with U S . " Straits Times 8 M a y 1994: 2. "Singapore Should Not Have Bowed to U S Pressure on Fay, says W[orkers'] P[arty]'s L o w . " Straits Times 8 M a y 1994: 26. "Singapore's Right to Enforce Laws 'Must Be Respected.' " Straits Times 5 M a y 1994:1. "Singapore Under Attack in Larry K i n g Show." Straits Times 1 M a y 1994:18. "Singapore-US Ties Sti l l 'Ve ry Good ' despite Fay Case: Lord . " Straits Times 10 M a y 1994: 3. "Spare the Rod, M r . Clinton?" Editorial. Straits Times 10 Mar . 1994: 26. "Teenage Vandal Gets 6 Strokes, 4 Months ' Jail and Fine." Business Times 4 Mar . 1994: 2. "Ties with Singapore 'Won ' t Be Hi t by Sentence on Teen.' " Straits Times 7 Mar . 1994: 20. "Trade with Singapore W i l l Not Be Hit , says Washington." Straits Times 12 Apr . 1994: 9. "Two-Stroke Reduction as Far as Govt. Can Go: B G Y e o . " Straits Times 5 M a y 1994: 19. " U S Chamber 'Shaken by Decision to Cane Boy . ' " Straits Times 5 Mar . 1994: 25. " U S Lawyer Impressed with Jaya's Defence." Business Times 5 M a y 1994: 2. " ' U S Reaction to Fay Case Shows It Dares Not Punish Criminals. ' " Straits Times 13 Apr . 1994: 3. 408 "US Senators Ask President Ong to Grant Clemency to Fay." Straits Times 2 Apr. 1994: 3. "US, Singapore Differ in Attitudes to Law and Order." Straits Times 16 Apr. 1994: 32. "US Will Revise Fact Sheet for Americans Here." Straits Times 7 May 1994: 25. "US to Keep Pressing Singapore on Teenager's Sentence." Business Times 11 Mar. 1994: 16. "What Political Price Will Government Pay?" Straits Times 7 May 1994: 32. "What US Columnists Say about Fay's Caning." Straits Times 8 Apr. 1994: 35. "Why President Ong Must Turn Down Clemency Plea." Straits Times 8 Apr. 1994: 36. "Why Valium Is Being Given: Prisons Department." Straits Times 1 May 1994: 18. "Winston Lord: Ties with Singapore Very Good despite Fay Caning." Business Times 10 May 1994: 2.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.
Graduate
Orientalizing Singapore: psychoanalyzing the discourse of `non-Western modernity
Text