asianamlitfans | Nov. 23rd, 2008

A Review of Justin Chin’s Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms

This week I wanted to read something a little bit outside of the genres that I’ve been immersed in, which have obviously been fiction and poetry. Then, I thought, what better book than one focusing on performance and Justin Chin’s collected performance pieces came to the top of the pile. Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms is a collection of Justin’s performance pieces, translated in a way into written form, that have been performed over the last decade or so. He is a prolific writer, having published various poetry and mixed-genre collections, including Bite Hard, Harmless Medicine, The Burden of Ashes, Mongrel, and Gutted. Attack was published in 2005 by Suspect Thoughts Press.

As the title of the performance collection indicates and implies, Attack is a ferocious collection that doesn’t back down. It is in-your-face, unrelenting, very humorous and very frank in its racial politic, its queer politic, and how those axes generally intertwine as a larger grounding rubric. Of course, Attack isn’t limited to those frames, but given Chin’s larger arc as a queer Asian American artist, he has been very invested in providing a counter-representational terrain relating the raced-queered experience. Each collected performance is actually prefaced and introduced by Chin himself. If there is one limitation to the collection, it might actually be these opening areas where he actually provides some critiques of his own work. In some ways, I didn’t want to read how Chin was reading his own work and the motivation behind it because I wanted to get a sense of it myself before my mind was “colonized” by the critical approach. However, this is the tiniest of a limitation and especially since performance can be difficult to approach, I think it does serve a productive purpose.

It is difficult to do complete justice to this collection as it is a very multi-media work, with photographs from the playbills of the performances, recreations of the very slides that would have appeared alongside Chin, and various drawings and sketches. I will focus on a couple of the performances within the collection, especially the ones I find particularly intriguing. The first, “Go, or the Approximate Infinite Universe of Mrs. Robert Lomax” performed between 1994-1995 images what might have happened long after The World of Suzie Wong’s narrative ended. In Chin’s version of the post-script, Robert Lomax and Suzie Wong aren’t living so happily ever after; indeed, Chin’s performance pushes forth decades into the future and Robert Lomax is traveling to Bangkok on “business” trips where he engages in sex tourism with local Thai men. Of course, the irony is that Robert Lomax has moved on from one prostitute, Suzie Wong, to another and he is presented as the ultimate pathological sex tourist, telling whatever lies in order to gain what he wants most: sex as he fantasizes it. The politic that is developed here relates more largely to the ways in which Asian women and queer Asian men might be aligned as sexual objects, albeit with different contextual nuances. The conclusion of the performance sees Suzie Wong a disaffected, cast off character, while the local Thai man who is smitten with Robert Lomax imagines a future ripe with love and possibility, the very future that we remember Suzie Wong imagines at the conclusion of her film. The replaceability of the Asian body, regardless of gender, serves to dramatize the complicated terrain of power that emerges in transnational scope.

In “And Judas Boogied Until His Slippers Wept” performed between 1993 and 1996, investigated the politics of queer Asian American sexuality and how the queer Asian American male becomes situated through very limited erotic lenses. In one tragicomic sequence (if there is a kind of performative mode that Chin excels, it is in invoking both tragedy and comedy at the same time), Chin takes the stage as a porn star who breaks barriers by becoming the top: “In my last film, Hard Dragon, I got to fuck six white boys because I’m the star now. I even get creative input on the shoots and the scene. Like this one scene where I meet Larion Lasley at the doctor’s office, I’m supposed to play the janitor while he plays the patients. But I tell the director, ‘I want to be a doctor!’ And so I played the doctor. I don’t want to perpetuate stereotypes that Asians are coolies and low-class workers” (61). Of course, there is something to be said about the way this “character” is working to alter the different porn trajectories that an Asian American male actor might have, but at the same time, the so-called creative input he is given is cast in a very limited manner that nevertheless still ultimately renders him through potential stereotypes. Oh the one hand, he understands the one pole that renders Asians as “coolies and low-class workers,” but on the other there exists the model minority stereotype. In this respect, this figure seems to bumble through his “work” believing as if he is making major differences, but his resistance and his challenges to the ways in which he is supposed to be imagined still seem somewhat futile. And we recall finally that the title isn’t changed: he is still after all, The Hard Dragon.

One of my favorites of the collection is “Holy Spook” because it begins with a lengthy reference to Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club. Chin makes great pains at the beginning to argue that he is not making fun of Tan and indeed believes she broke down many barriers for Asian American artists, but nevertheless the reference does seem to critique the kind of seamless East/West binaries that operate within her debut novel.

Chin is extremely aware of Asian American identity politics, its pitfalls and its challenges and such knowledge makes the collection actually quite teachable and I do hope that individuals might approach the work with an academic eye. While Chin is one of the most prolific of queer Asian American writers and artists, very few lengthy studies have interrogated his work.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.suspectthoughts.com/pressattack.php