The Wily Filipino

Pinoy Academic Porn.

The list below -- "dusted with glitter, sparkles and fairy dust" -- comes from an unnamed Pinay university professor from the Northeast United States. (I suspect the title of her unnamed forthcoming book would be a perfect candidate for this list, but she didn't want to jinx it.)

A mini-list of factoids:

1. I'm not posting the other companion list (Anacleto's Structurally Queer Siblings, or A List of Drag Queen Names of Some Filipino Academics in Random Order of Fabulousness), simply because there were too many in-jokes to interest the general reader. I can't even remember who "Anacleto" was supposed to be.

But let's just say that "Martina Navratilova Manalansan" had a wonderful ring to it. (It's also the oldest in terms of provenance, I think.) "Li'l Kim Alidio" sounded great too.

2. A particularly filthy (and bad) pun on, um, a seminal Filipino American text -- let's just say it involved Carlos Bulosan and a boner -- was originally on the list, but Neferti asked everyone, "Let's not go there," so we didn't.

3. People cheated on three titles by adding new subtitles, or changing them around, in the grand tradition of Shaving Ryan's Privates. But that's absolutely fine. It was nice to discover that Displaying Filipinos actually allowed for many variations ("displaying", "splaying", "playing", and "laying"), but obviously its porn-title possibilities were completely accidental. No, really.

4. I can't categorically say I wasn't involved in this, but I was mostly a spectator in the back seat while this was all happening. The list was further refined in the hotel lobby. The chardonnay helped.

5. The order is not mine, though Dylan was upset. "How could I not be Number One??" he asked.

And this is how it all went down:

------
The Top Ten Porn-Sounding Philippine and Filipino American Studies Book Titles:

1. White Love
2. Forced Passages
3. Splaying Filipinos
4. Fantasy Production
5. American Tropics 14: Sequel to Forced Passages ("It's a compilation," Allan said, by way of explanation.)
6. Creating Masculinity: Behind the Scenes of White Love
7. Five Faces of Sexile
8. Passion and Revolution (Soft)
9. The Gangster of Love
10. The Philippine Temptation

At Random.

1. My comment boxes have died -- I suspect people (or spammers) have been posting something, but I can't read them somehow, and even some old comments aren't showing up anymore. So I've turned them off, unfortunately. Anyone wanting to leave me a message or a comment can send them to me via the Meebo widget on the upper right-hand side of the main blog index page. (I can get them even if I'm offline.)

2. Arthur Dong's Hollywood Chinese is one of the best Asian American documentaries I've ever seen, period, and one I'd assign to students in a heartbeat if it were out on DVD. It's also out on a limited theatrical release all across the world, but Bay Area audiences are lucky enough to have it for almost two weeks (April 11-23 at the Kabuki and at the Grand Lake). (Los Angeles viewers have it made though, as it's part of an entire Hollywood Chinese film series at the Egyptian from May 15-22, including a cast and crew reunion of Wayne Wang's The Joy Luck Club.)

Hollywood Chinese is a fascinating film all throughout, including jawdropping footage from Marion Wong's The Curse of Quon Gwon) -- the first Chinese American film ever made, in 1916 (!) -- plus revealing (and sometimes hilarious) interviews). (It's also worth noting that Arthur Dong walked off with a Golden Horse for Best Documentary last year -- and that two of the other winners (Ang Lee and Joan Chen) are interviewed in his documentary as well.)

3. Up next, to be posted in the next few weeks:

- possibly more movie reviews
- a handy and totally opinionated guide to the San Francisco International Film Festival, whose lineup is coming out next week
- a summer reading and watching list
- my life as the neighborhood invalid
- Pinoy academic porn

Wayne Wang, "The Princess of Nebraska" (A Review, Kind Of).

There's a scene about halfway through Wayne Wang's 2007 film The Princess of Nebraska that's the complete stylistic opposite of the ending of his 1982 masterpiece, Chan Is Missing. You'll be forgiven if it reminded you of those Christopher Doyle-filmed handheld scenes in Chungking Express, and maybe it's even done on purpose: the scene is all a blurred swath of neon and Chinese characters, at once both immediately recognizable and illegible. (The man messing with the camera is Richard Wong, the talented director of Colma: The Musical.)

In contrast, the conclusion of Chan Is Missing consists of unmoving black-and-white scenes of Chinatown, of its residents walking with their groceries and waiting for the bus, of store facades and empty sidewalks reminiscent of Atget's Paris, while "Grant Avenue" from Flower Drum Song plays semi-ironically on the soundtrack. (Most people seem to remember the preceding scene as the conclusion -- a Harry Callahan-like image of gray ocean ripples, while our accidental detective "summarizes" the case on the voiceover -- but that's not the real ending.)

These two scenes -- shot in the same location, a little over twenty-five years apart -- exemplify not only a cinematic difference. They also invoke two different Chinas, the filmic embodiments of the vast cultural and socioeconomic differences produced in that short quarter-century. As with Jia Zhangke's film The World, this conjured homeland is awash with unequally distributed capital, with twittering cellphones and designer clothes.

But the China in this particular film is both absent and perpetually present, therefore mirroring the dislocation in the film as a whole. The new China seems incomprehensible to and utterly removed from Chinatown, but the main character is constantly connected to that China electronically. Even if her messages and videos do not seem to require or elicit a response.

The Princess of Nebraska has a fragile shell of a plot: Sasha (newcomer Ling Li), a 16-year old Chinese college student, is not in Nebraska anymore (the first shot, after all, is of her red shoes), but has arrived, by way of the Oakland airport, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I won't reveal the reasons for her arrival (though any internet search will tell you, unfortunately), but it probably doesn't matter: plot is decidedly subservient to mood and image here, the background to the narrative only barely hinted at.

Sasha stands in for a new Chinese generation, born way too long after the Great Leap Forward. When asked about Tienanmen, Sasha simply answers, "I heard about it from my grandmother." Whether her answer is given out of pique, boredom, or honesty is irrelevant; the point is that she and her generation (to echo the new American turn-of-phrase Sasha learns) has "moved on".

Despite the superficial quality of her interactions with other people (and I think this is deliberate) -- her friends chattering about going to parties to meet hot men, reading other people's letters never sent, engaging in aimless theft, wandering the city streets as a dazed flâneuse -- the film masks a deeper discontent. These interactions can also be seen in contrast to Chan Is Missing, which, despite its improvised meanderings, is full of discussions about identity without them being specifically denoted as such. (I'm also reminded of two recent movies -- Lost in Translation and Cafe Lumiere -- which feature women navigating through foreign cities alone.)

Sasha's world is almost constantly mediated by the cellphone videos she takes: confessional fragments, snatched from the swirl of life around her, crammed into a small screen. The Princess of Nebraska skims across surfaces, and Wong's camera catches glimpses of Sasha obscured through dirty glass, half-hidden behind walls, or captured in smeared reflections. (There's a sound cue employed throughout the film that sounds like the whooshing of a BART train, suggesting perpetual transit.) These filmic gestures serve to heighten a sense of restless desperation on Sasha's part: a need to relate, to simply connect, to actually hook up in an existential manner -- to find anything that makes any sort of sense -- in order to save herself, a woman adrift between allegiances and continents.

Ultimately, however, the film is something of a weaker effort, as wispy as the skirt Sasha wears in her After Hours odyssey through San Francisco. It's certainly comparatively insubstantial in the context of Wang's oeuvre. This assessment, however, is unfair because Chan Is Missing is in my top ten films of all time; if we're only talking about Asian American films, then Chan Is Missing is without a doubt the greatest of them all -- an impossibly high standard in my book, to say the least. But The Princess of Nebraska is nonetheless a fascinating, beautifully filmed work.

During the Q&A portion, Ling Li joked that there was "no ending". But of course there was one. It isn't as magnificently sublime as the last four minutes of Chan Is Missing -- this one's about four minutes and a half, precisely choreographed to an achingly beautiful Antony and The Johnsons song -- but it's haunting and shiveringly enigmatic all the same. I don't want to spoil it for future viewers -- I'll just say that I think it's about infancy and the struggle to speak the inarticulable -- but who knows what the scene is really about? It's still the equivalent of those floating, bobbing, shifting waves of meaning at the end of Chan Is Missing, and with that Wayne Wang comes back full circle to Chinatown and his own cinematic ambiguities.

Ashamed Again.

Where: outside of the Clay Theater, Fillmore Street, San Francisco, at the premiere of Richard Wong's Option 3.

Who: Richard Wong, H.P. Mendoza, and one excited fanboy who's hung up on his friend over the cell phone once he saw Wong and Mendoza outside the theater (me).

Me [walks over to the two who are deep in conversation]: Hi -- I'm gonna interrupt and be a total fanboy and just wanted to say I really really loved Colma.

Both: Thanks, thanks.

Me: And I'm really looking forward to the new movie.

Both: Thanks, thanks, we hope you like it.

Me [to Mendoza]: You actually posted on my blog once.

Mendoza [glimmer of recognition]: Yeah, I was shaming you into seeing it!

Wong: Oh, I saw that. You were going to a concert.

Me: Yeah, I couldn't go to the premiere because I had a Belle and Sebastian concert that evening.

Mendoza: [bigger glimmer of recognition]: You're the Wily Filipino!

Me [big toothy grin]: Yes!

Wong: We have a Colma: The Musical singalong tomorrow, you should go.

Me: I know! I can't make it though.

Mendoza: You have a concert.

Me [ashamed]: Um. Yes. I have a concert. [slinks away]

This Weekend's Conference.

My fantastic weekend just came to a close, and tomorrow I return to my 9-to-5 "exit strategy / escape route" job. I can't say enough about the intellectual energy of the roundtables, and the superior quality of the circulated papers (which I devoured -- you have no idea how much exciting stuff is out there, and about to be published), and just the overwhelming sense of fun.

(Can I add as well that the late-night discussions -- actually, they started at dinner -- in the hotel lobby were just transgressively, hilariously filthy? Readers will see some sanitized examples shortly, but I don't think I'll be reproducing the Pinoy Academic Drag Queen Names list here, partly because mine just doesn't sound sexy enough. I expect it to be sent by email from the northeast pretty soon.)

And now for more random non-intellectual musings. I must confess that, despite my excitement (and temperatures in the teens notwithstanding), I was worried and fearful about being the lone, unaffiliated non-academic interloper presenting at the conference. I honestly didn't feel particularly worthy to be included with all these luminaries. It had already taken me about a year of difficult readjustment to get used to the idea that I was now an Ex-Professor. (Any resemblance to "ex-parrot" is deliberate.) Amazing, really, how the academic life seems to be the perfect breeding ground for ontological insecurity -- but then I really know of no other career.

These anxieties (mostly) melted away once I got there -- not necessarily because my feelings of self-worth magically increased, but because I suddenly felt like I belonged somewhere. It helped that I personally knew probably a good five-sixths of the participants (and of course met and talked with the other one-sixth later). But there was also a keen historical sense on my part -- mostly engendered by Rey Ileto's fascinating keynote address on scrapbooks -- of how these linkages and networks were forged throughout the years in classrooms, in conferences, in libraries, in hotel lobby bars, in textual exchanges. After all, these were folks whose books I had taught, or had read, looked up to, informed my own work, been on panels with, e-mailed, gotten drunk with, and so on, throughout my relatively long adventures in higher education. Half my life -- essentially, my life outside of the Philippines -- has been spent in that arena, and these were most of the people who were present, both physically and symbolically, in that journey.

There's a lot of negative talk about "the Filipino community" -- the general hollowness of the concept, the way it's used as an anti-intellectualish cudgel to beat the recalcitrant into submission (and ha! I contribute to that discussion as well), or as the amorphous, blobby mass to which Filipino American scholars and activists must pay obeisance (and not dare criticize). But the genuine intellectual acuity and emotional warmth of this particular Filipino community cannot be denied.

And as much as the word "family" can be abused in a heteronormative fashion (and honest to god, some people have to learn that the social sciences really aren't that heteronormative), I have come to see, especially in recent years, this group of intellectuals as members of my extended family. (We Filipinos are supposed to be expert practitioners of fictive kinship after all.) And yes, families can be fucked up, and sibling rivalries will always exist, but such networks can also be the basis of enduring intellectual and affective solidarities, from which more political work and critique (both of the self and others) can be done. I honestly can't think of a more generous, supportive, wonderful (and good-looking!) group of scholars anywhere as the ones I hung out with this weekend, for whom I will be forever thankful.

So -- thanks and congratulations to the organizers, August Espiritu and Martin Manalansan (who's currently Acting Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), for an amazing, unforgettable conference. (And curse you too for making me radically rethink my career trajectory! Again!)

The Power of Mimicry.

They are excellent mimics: as often as we coughed or yawned, or made any odd motion, they immediately imitated us.... They could repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they remembered such words for some time. Yet we Europeans all know how difficult it is to distinguish apart the sounds in a foreign language. Which of us, for instance, could follow an American Indian through a sentence of more than three words? All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry. I was told, almost in the same words, of the same ludicrous habit among the Caffres; the Australians, likewise, have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe the gait of any man, so that he may be recognized. How can this faculty be explained? is it a consequence of the more practised habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage state, as compared with those long civilized?

- Charles Darwin, on the natives of Tierra del Fuego, Dec. 17, 1832, The Voyage of the Beagle

We Always Forget The Ballast.

I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I somehow missed reading this book in my previous life as a Southeast Asianist scholar, but there you go. Look -- just do yourself a favor and buy this book, okay?

   A story of the Moluccas Suprapto had to hear the professor tell.

   A young prince from Tuban on Java pours water over his father's hands during a ritual washing, he drops the basin, is slapped by the old man, insulted, and then has only one wish: to get away.

   On a sandbank at the shore he draws a proa in the sand, with all the accessories a proa has: rudder, mast, sails, oars for a calm, rope, anchor stones in baskets, jugs of fresh water and food, fuel and a piece of flint, a brazier and a cooking pot, mats to sit and sleep upon, goods for barter, scales, money, and above all, arms. He thinks of everything -- he is a clever young man, he forgets nothing, except one thing! He forgets the ballast.

   Then, when the Lord Allah has answered his prayer and made his drawing into reality (and his brother and sister and his old nurse who want to come along have gone on board) the proa floats too high on the waves.

   Ballast is needed! What kind of ballast?

   There is nothing available but the earth of their country; and they carry earth aboard and throw it in the hold; then they set sail without looking back.

   They pass many islands, and at all of them they weigh the earth there against the earth they took with them -- the two never have the same weight.

   Until they come to the Moluccas, to that one island -- there the earth weighs as much as the earth of their own country, and there they stay and found a small state, and the Javanese prince from Tuban is the first Rajah.

   "Don't you ever write poetry, young friend? You could make a poem out of this, an epic, in hexameters, and what deep meaning it has!" The professor laughed his cackling laugh, he looked Suprapto in the face for a moment and then suddenly said very seriously, "You too, didn't you? You too had to hold the water basin and you too dropped it, my poor young friend, that is always the beginning --"

   For once Suprapto did not control himself. "A water basin, what do you mean?" he said shortly, almost angrily. "I've never in my life been made to hold a basin for anyone!"

   The professor shook his head, "but you have, young friend, you have. All of us, always, when we're young, have to hold something for those who are old, and we drop it and want to get away, and draw a ship in the sand to reach a new country, and we always forget the ballast -- there is no ballast but the earth of the old country -- and the new country's earth is always just as heavy as the old country's -- and for that, then, we have left and crossed the seas and might even have drowned on the way, in deep water, or grown old and in our turn let someone hold a basin up for us -- you too, you'll see, you too, Raden Mas Suprapto," the professor said slowly and clearly, "just like that other prince."

- from Maria Dermoût's The Ten Thousand Things (1955), translated by Hans Koning