Han Ong's essay

Taken from his Facebook page
PART ONE

The most distressing thing about the whole Nightingale Affair @ La Jolla Playhouse is that, for the moment, the conversation and our consciousness are shrinking instead of expanding.

The ambition for all of us colored people remains the same: a wider repertoire of roles, better (and more) lines, a place closer to the center than to the margins (although, if the roles at the margins are interesting enough, why not?), and a performer's right to be wholly unexpected -- that gap between what an audience is cued to expect from an actor's physiognomy and what an actor chooses to deliver or to withhold, which is one definition of charisma.

But for the moment, the Nightingale Affair has brought us down to this down-sized fight: Asians fighting for the right to enact ... themselves. Never mind the semantic twaddle from the Nightingale's creators Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik and its director Moises Kaufmann about East-West, Hans Christian Andersen, chinoiserie, and that the Chinese in "The Nightingale" are not really the Chinese. (About that, more below.)

That's right: Asians fighting to be able to play themselves on stage.

You'd think this was some kind of cockamamie scenario cooked up in Civil Rights Discourse class to stack the odds in favor of the colored people. Surely such an absurd scheme could never have been allowed to happen in real life? Asians not allowed to play themselves? This is the point, were this fiction, where you, the audience member, would go: That didn't happen!

But it did. And here we are.

* *
Hans Christian Andersen was a creature of his time, the nineteenth century.

Chinoiserie not only covers lanterns, snuff boxes, fans, calligraphy, silk, but also includes actual representations of Chinese figures painted and/or carved on screens and vases; figures enacting scenes in aristocratic circles, scenes of romantic love, scenes of scholarship. When Hans Christian Andersen mused on the chinoiserie phenomenon that had swept up Scandinavia in the nineteenth century, he was also musing on the plenitude and the mystery of these Chinese figures. Inspired by them. They lived and danced among the objects he surveyed, took stock of, filed away for later use.

Think of Mike Leigh's "Topsy Turvy" and its version of the genesis of "The Mikado": Gilbert inspired not just by the samurai sword and the kimono, but by the people holding the former and inhabiting the latter. (If you're going to go on at me about the problems presented by "The Mikado," let me say that Gilbert and Sullivan were, as was Andersen in his, creatures of their time.)

People.

Inspired by people.

Not simply taking up an aesthetic which is no more than an aggregate of design features, cold and disembodied.

Let us call forth, at this moment, the spirit of the great fashion maven Diana Vreeland, herself a fan of chinoiseire, to rise from the grave and give a collective bitch-slap to Sater, Sheik and Kaufmann for their disingenuous un-embodying of the term and of the fashion movement known as chinoiserie.

Andersen's art may be ersatz and bejeweled, filigreed to within an inch of its life, but when he writes of a Chinese emperor, that is because he was so moved and so mystified by the figures he saw on the screens and vases that he wanted the emperor of China to be part of his world.

That the emperor of China in his story "The Nightingale" could be read as a veiled version of the king of Denmark (or any unwise ruler) is a wonderful feature of the genre in which Andersen was a blazing pioneer, the fairy tale: you say many things with one thing.

But that one thing -- that original point -- in "The Nightingale" is, as he wrote: "In China, you know, the emperor is Chinese ..."

***

By the time somebody thinks nothing of striking down the possibility of an Asian actor in a central role, a heroic role, it has already become a habit with him or with her. And that habit is a habit of not-seeing.

PART TWO The Nightingale Affair

By the time somebody thinks nothing of striking down the possibility of an Asian actor in a central role, a heroic role, it has already become a habit with him or with her. And that habit is a habit of not-seeing.

**
Let's say you're a colored person. You are inclined to go to the movies or to the theater. When the lights go down, your whole world shrinks to the few square feet in front of you, your attention on high alert. You're looking to be entertained, moved; or as an aspiring creator yourself, you are looking to take instruction from the movie or play before you. The use of the word "instruction" is no accident. Spectatorship at movies and plays is really like going to school or like going to church. All your senses massed for engagement, absorption.

You go to movies and plays, too, because you're on the market for a heroic proxy. Somebody up on screen or the stage who allows you to engage in the necessary fantasy of a grander life. Or a more witty life. Or a more poetic life. Before you return to your own life, which, like most lives, is just ... life-sized.

Colored people going to movies and plays and on the market for heroic proxies (and who doesn't that cover?) have long learned to transfer their hopes and identifications to the white heroes presented before them. Because given the paucity of colored faces in movies and plays in general (much less colored faces in heroic roles), who else are you going to transfer those hopes and identifications to?

This business of heroic transference is like child's play used to fulfill a very adult need: to be grander; always, more amplitude. Not shrunken, not limited -- please, not that.

So for two hours, you say: I am Tom Cruise. I am Bruce Willis. I am Sandra Bullock. I am Hamlet. I am the Duchess of Malfi. I am Algernon -- or wait, am I more Lady Bracknell?

White is the universal solvent.

Into a white face goes so many hopes and identifications. In white is black, brown, yellow, red.

You have learned that without knowing that you were learning that.

Decades, a lifetime of movie-going and play-going.

In white is the whole world itself: venal and kind, calculating and compassionate, galvanic and moribund, word-drunk and tongue-tied; in white is ingenue, lover, fighter, villain, protector, monarch.

****
The reverse has rarely been true.

An Asian man walks on stage and suddenly the machinery of heroic transference is stopped.

Yellow in America, it turns out, is no solvent of any kind.

Wait, I know the guy with the Asian face is being called Hamlet by everybody on stage. And I know "To be or not to be" and, yes, the Asian guy gets to deliver that, so I guess he really is supposed to be Hamlet, but ... But? But what?

But the last time I encountered an Asian man in fiction was in Literary Anthropology class when we were assigned John Okada's "No-No Boy" -- about Japanese-American draft resisters in World War Two -- and well, you know, I understand what an Asian man means in "No-No Boy". He means a thwarted life. He means "What I Must Not Do to Other Asians: I Must Not Discriminate."

I know what Bigger Thomas means in "Native Son": I Must Not Discriminate.

I know what Celie means in "The Color Purple": I Must Not Be Cruel.

I know what Gwendolyn Brooks means in "We Be Cool": I Must Not Drop Out of School.

I know what Not To Do with them, but I, I ... I can't say that I know What To Do with them.

An Asian man walks on stage. But before he can get there, he has had to pass through a few doors: the casting room door, the door of the director's imagination. And the door of his own self-doubt: Can I really memorize all of "To be or not to be?" Can I do it justice?

There is a last door, still. Through which not only must he pass but through which he must take the audience with him. The last time the general public -- the very people looking at him delivering "To be or not to be" -- encountered him, he was a case study in a book, a story about Japanese interment camps, Chinese railroad workers, the Hmong integration in Minneapolis, so the public has been fully prepared to acknowledge the aspects of Hamlet that align with this case study, this story (thwarted life, suffering, oppression), but suddenly now, you want general-public-me to make the leap and grant him a status of more amplitude? The status of a hero, who influences, who directs, who is in control? But I have been in the market for heroic proxies all my life, and this is not who I have learned to transfer my hopes and identifications to. The leap from Asian case study to Asian heroic transference is Olympian. It's too much, the general public says.

An Asian man walks on stage. And there is still that last door. Through which he labors to move the audience along with him. The door is marked "Civics Lesson" and the room into which he wants to move as well as to take the audience? Well, the room has no name. In it is a bunch of contradictory stuff: venality and kindness, calculation and compassion, galvanization and moribundity, the love of words and the inability to speak. It's a wide room, but how can you really tell, most of it being in shadow.

Well, for now, let's just call that room "Amplitude".

Not To Be, not to be, not to be: yes, we know what the Asian man is not to be. Not to be discriminated against.

But what is he To Be?

That is the question.

*****
Many years later. You write a musical. It's called "The Nightingale". Based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale. It's not finished yet, different drafts and versions abound, each getting its own try-out in the form of a workshop. You put a lot of work into it. You want it to succeed.

"The Nightingale" being set in China and involving Chinese characters, there is of course one workshop where all the roles are played by Asians. Duh.

But you didn't like that version.

Something about it struck you as ...

Well, it felt small.

Small when it should be grand. "The Nightingale" is a myth (well, more accurately a fairy tale, but who's going to parse the difference?) and being a myth, it should be ... mythic.

Grandeur. That's it. That's the word you're looking for.

Grandeur and universality, a mirror into which so many different people can see themselves, unalienated, because a myth has to have universal application, universal endorsement, universal, um, you want help, you're running out of words ...

But in the workshop, one Asian face walked on stage, followed by another, and then yet another, a whole chorus of them, and suddenly ...

Well, it just kept getting smaller and smaller.

It was literal. That's it. Literal. And not mythic.

Literal when it should be mythic.

Literal because well -- you'll just say it and risk a chorus of disapproval -- an Asian walks on stage and he can only be himself. He does not bring the world with him. Ingenue, lover, fighter, villain, protector, monarch -- nuh-uh, none of these. He reads small. And that smallness will transfer to your work. And a small work is an unendorsed work. You have ambitions. You want endorsement. Of course you do.

An Asian walks on stage and he reads small. Case-study-sized. Life-sized. Literal. Only himself, and no other discernible qualities that would make the surrender of heroic transference by an audience easy and pleasurable.

Civic lessons, yes. Well, if this were a musical about civics lessons ...

In the audience, you among them, watching the Asians making "The Nightingale" smaller and smaller, you thought of each act of heroic transference that couldn't occur marked by a dollar sign. You're smart. And pragmatic. Such a thought would be no stranger to someone smart and pragmatic.

Think of the negative hole that puts you and your work in.

Nuh-uh. Let's do another workshop. The monarch in China is white. White is the universal solvent. Into him so many other colors will fold. In white is yellow, black, brown, red. The size of the world. Grandeur. That's the word. Grandeur. And mythic. Grandeur and mythic. You will repeat the words in tandem or singly over and over. A mantra.

Bu in white is yet another color. In white is green. But this is something you will never say.

 

 


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