Notes

1. Ironically, the merger of Daimler-Benz with Chrysler has not been profitable. After ten years it pushed “healthy Daimler-Benz into a severe crisis” while making former CEO Jürgen Schrempp of Daimler-Benz into a rich man. Spiegel Online International, “Merkel Takes On Fat Cats.”

2. Mississauga is a city of 400,000 people about thirty-five to forty kilometers west of Toronto.

3. In Canada, the live-in caregiver program allows women from countries such as the Philippines to work as live-in domestics. After two years, they can apply to be permanent residents of Canada. See Citizenship and Immigration Canada, “Working Temporarily in Canada.”

4. Statistics vary because of documented and undocumented migrant workers. There are an estimated eight to eleven million overseas Filipinos, and 70 percent of those are women. Among the women, a large majority work as domestic workers. See Wikipedia, “Overseas Filipino,” and Citizenshift, “Feminization of Migration.”

5. Inter-Mares, a recruitment agency in Singapore, advertises, “We recruit Filipino nannies, Indonesian housekeepers and caregivers, Sri Lankan cooks and other nationalities while they are still in Singapore. . . . And when they have gained enough experience we send them to work for Canadian families” (Inter-Mares Management Services, “Inter-Mares Maid Agency”).

6. Maria DiCenzo (“Editorial”) has noted the same kind of mobility, and later tensions, in the Italian Canadian community, a group that immigrated to Toronto earlier, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s.

7. Shaw argued, “It is no accident that globalization became a dominant theme in the 1990s after the Cold War ended. Although the term globalization, first used in the 1960s, has been in common use since the 1970s and became increasingly connected to the understanding of market liberalization in the 1980s, it is in the 1990s that it has dominated social-scientific and to a considerable extent political debate.”

8. Miyoshi notes that a “truly transnational corporation [ . . . ] might no longer be tied to its nation of origin, but is adrift and mobile, ready to settle anywhere and exploit any state including its own, as long as the affiliation serves its own interest” (736).

9. Sau-ling Wong is echoing Janis Stout, who wrote that American literature has, from its beginnings, been a “literature of movement, of motion, its great icons the track through the forest and the superhighway” (The Journey Narrative in American Literature, 3).

10. Angel Island was an immigration station open from 1910 through 1940. It was designed to control the flow of Chinese into the country. Gary Okihiro says, “The migrants were carefully screened by U.S. Immigration officials and held for days, weeks, or months to determine their fitness for America” (“When and Where I Enter,” 4).

11. Historian Henry Yu notes, “Canada had experienced a history of Asian migration strikingly parallel to the United States,” but “that parallel can mislead us into thinking that the experience of ‘Asian Canadians’ is simply a variation of that of ‘Asian Americans’” (Pacific Canada, xi). His introduction, “Towards a Pacific History of the Americas,” to a special issue of Amerasia Journal outlines some of these similarities and differences.

12. Mexico falls under “North American,” but because it is not a country that customarily receives immigrants, it does not have a substantial “Asian Mexican” community to date.

13. Lily Cho argues that diaspora “emerges from deeply subjective processes of racial memory, of grieving for losses which cannot always be articulated and longings which hang at the edge of possibility” (“The Turn to Diaspora,” 15).

14. David Roediger has pointed out that in the process of becoming Americans, groups such as the Irish, Poles, Greeks, and Italians also acquired the status of white Americans (333). Myrna Kostash has also noted that “in 1908, Ukrainians were not white. Two generations later we are. How can this be?” (as quoted by Gunew, Haunted Nations, 26).

15. See my discussion of the implication of this classification in The Politics of the Visible, 5–11.

16. For a comparison of Asian Canadians and African Canadians as visible minorities, see Ty, “Complicating Racial Binaries.” For a discussion of similarities between Asian Australians and Asian Canadians, see chapters 1 and 2 of Tseen-Ling Khoo’s Banana Bending.

17. Parreñas notes, “The instabilities imposed by the political economy of globalization on Filipino households force a great number of families to send an able-bodied member outside of the country. According to one report, ‘between 22 to 35 millions—34 to 54 percent of the total population—are directly dependent on remittance from migrant workers’” (18).

18. Historians K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan document the efforts of early Chinese immigrants to seek treatment equal to that received by other groups in America on the basis of class similarities. See chapter 1 of Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era.

19. According to James Warren, by 1894 an average of about nine hundred Chinese women were entering the city’s brothels per year (“Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 74).

1. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note, “Neocolonial domination is enforced through deteriorating terms of trade and the ‘austerity programs’ by which the World Bank and the IMF, often with the self-serving complicity of Third World elites, impose rules that First World countries would themselves never tolerate” (“From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary,” 147).

2. Another novel that deals with these problems is Bino Realuyo’s The Umbrella Country, which I studied in The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Unlike Roley and Ong’s works, Realuyo’s is set in the Philippines. See chapter 9 of my book.

3. For a study of the way Filipino Americans are regarded as both “foreign and domestic,” see Sarita See, Introduction to The Decolonized Eye.

4. In his study of Filipino American youth gangs, Bangele Alsaybar notes that “urban type” Filipino American gangs, like the Santanas, “grew out of the inner city; its homeboys lived initially in predominantly Latino neighborhoods, thus getting exposed to Latino culture. It is not surprising, therefore, that Sanatans has borrowed heavily from the Latino Cholo tradition” (“Deconstructing Deviance,” 126).

5. My comparison of Asian and Chicano bodies is based on cultural perceptions of them. In Racial Castration David Eng analyzes the ways in which the “Asian American male is both materially and psychically feminized within the context of a larger U.S. cultural imaginary” (1). Hurtado, Gurin, and Peng note that first-generation Mexican immigrants “have to deal with stereotypes of the majority culture about them as manual labourers and about menial labor as ‘Mexican work’” (“Social Identities,” 264).

6. For a different reading of the novel that looks at impersonation, environmental blending, and the cultural geography of feng shui, see Hsuan Hsu, “Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui in Han Ong’s Fixer Chao.”

7. Preciosa’s fascination with the films of this period is similar to that of the Filipino American protagonist in Bienvenido Santos’s The Man Who (Thought He) Looked like Robert Taylor. See my article that deals with the negative effects of Hollywood on the Filipino subject (“A Filipino Prufrock in an Alien Land”).

1. The kisaeng tradition of elite and educated prostitutes disappeared slowly during the colonial period, 1910–45, in Korea. With the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1905, a more Westernized and commercialized form of sexual work emerged (Lie, “The Transformation of Sexual Work in 20th-Century Korea,” 312–13). This twentieth-century form of sexual work resembles the examples of prostitution Bell studies in her book. In colonial Singapore, prostitution had an ambiguous legal position, based “in part on the meaning given to sexuality in Victorian society” (Warren, “Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 5).

2. In Canada, Remembrance Day occurs on November 11, and commemorates the sacrifice of veterans and civilians who died in World War I, World War II, and other wars. A red poppy is used as an emblem because poppies bloomed in many of the battlefields of Flanders in WWI.

3. Warren writes, “For an ah ku or karayuki-san to survive the first 5 years of prostitution was to do well. To last beyond 30 was to hit a streak of luck. To grow old in brothel prostitution and exit from it in Singapore was to cheat the system—like a gambler, who, once in a lifetime, breaks the bank” (“Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 358).

4. Warren notes that “euphemistic kinship terms were used to mask the intimidating, exploitative nature of the relations between the ah ku and kwai po whose property they were,” 55. The prostitutes were referred to as “daughters” and the kwai po called “mother” (“Ah Ku” and “Karayuki-san,” 55).

1. Mother Tongue premiered at The Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver in 1995 and was presented by Factory Theatre and Cahoots Theatre Projects in Toronto in May 2001.

2. On the issue of translation, Balibar says, “Not only should we therefore consider it a vital objective to preserve and improve our educational capacities to teach the skills necessary for translating between multiple languages as a ‘daily’ practice, but also we should conceive it as a basic instrument to create the transnational public space in a democratic sense, where ideas and projects can be debated by the citizens themselves across the linguistic and administrative borders” (5–6).

3. According to the prefatory materials, Rice Boy had its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in October 2000, directed by Liz Diamond. Rice Boy’s west coast premiere was at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California, in April 2001, directed by Chay Yew. Rice Boy had its Canadian premiere at the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto, Ontario, in March 2003, directed by Micheline Chevrier.

4. The fish seller shows his love for the servant girl by continuing to leave her a fish every time he calls on the family, 16.

1. Miss Orient(ed) was first produced through the Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop (now called Carlos Bulosan Theatre). According to the program notes of December 2001, the Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop was founded in 1982 as a cultural wing of the North America–wide Coalition against the Marcos Dictatorship. It had produced about nine plays between 1984 and 1997, and also presented skits on issues affecting Filipino Canadians in Toronto. The Carlos Bulosan Theatre’s mandate is to “reflect on social issues affecting the Filipino and broader community. CBT also seeks to encourage and develop writers, performers, and other artists within the community” (Miss Orient(ed) program notes, 2003). I want to thank Nadine Villasin for allowing me to read the unpublished script of Miss Orient(ed).

2. For instance, the young characters in Bino Realuyo’s The Umbrella Country simulate the Miss Universe beauty pageant in their games the year when the pageant was held in Manila (chapter 2). This was such a big event in the city that “the streets were cleared of beggars, [ . . . ] walls were built to hide the slum areas [ . . . ], men and women were hired to clean the streets in red-and-white uniforms and to flash welcoming smiles” (38).

3. Fire, Mehta’s third feature film, based on an original screenplay, was written, directed, and produced by Mehta. Fire opened the Perspective Canada Program at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival, where it tied with Fly Away Home for the Air Canada Peoples Choice Award. It was one of twenty-nine films selected from more than fourteen hundred entries, worldwide, for the prestigious New York Film Festival. At the Vancouver International Film Festival, Fire won the Federal Express Award for Best Canadian Film as chosen by the audience. At the Chicago International Film Festival, it won two Silver Hugo Awards for best direction and best actress. In Mannheim Fire won the Jury Award, and in Paris it was voted Favorite Foreign Film. Earth, based on Bapsi Sidhwa’s critically acclaimed novel, Cracking India, is the second film in Mehta’s trilogy of the elements, Fire, Earth, and Water. Earth was shot in New Delhi in January 1998. It had its world premiere as a special presentation at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, where it was received with a standing ovation and critical acclaim. Earth won the Prix Premiere du Public at the Festival du film asiatique de Deauville in France in March 1999 and the Critics’ Award at the Schermi d’Amore International Film Festival in Italy in April of the same year. See http://www.directorsnet.com/mehta/.

4. Australian camera assistant Jasmine Yuen-Carrucan recounts that when Water was supposed to begin filming in India, they “were greeted with the news that 2,000 protesters had stormed the ghats, destroying the main film set, burning and throwing it into the holy river. Protesters burnt effigies of Deepa Mehta, and threats to her life began.”

5. Mishra says, “The massive size of Indian cinema is obvious from the statistics: eight hundred films a year shown in more than thirteen thousand predominantly urban cinemas, viewed by an average of 11 million people each day, and exported to about a hundred countries” Bollywood Cinema, 1.

6. For example, in My Big Fat Greek Wedding Toronto was made to look like Chicago; in Exit Wounds it was made to look like Los Angeles. Particularly in the 1990s, the low Canadian dollar made cities such as Toronto and Vancouver attractive to the American film industry.

7. Egoyan’s film Exotica, about a father’s relationship with a young girl who works as a stripper, was set in a nightclub of the same name. For a study of the way it reflects English Canadian cinematic traditions, see my essay “Spectacular Pleasures.”

8. This reference to Toronto’s baseball team is a dubious one because the team has an uneven record, as most Jays fans know.

9. For example, the highly successful Hindi film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), directed by Karan Johar, is set partly in England (though filmed in Scotland), with dialogue in Hindi and English. One reviewer of the film notes that Farha Khan’s choreography is great, though sometimes lifted directly from Grease (Minhas.net, “Review of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai”).

10. Actress Lisa Ray, who plays Sunita, happens to be biracial. Her father is Indian, and her mother is Polish. See Viswanathan, “The Belle of Bombay,” 34.

1. Many scholars have written on these novels. For example, see Rachel Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature, chapter 1; David Li, Imagining the Nation, chapter 2; and Sau-ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, chapter 1.

2. In her paper “Carrying the Past into the Future,” Miriam Raethel presents an excellent study of the way Lai writes a story for diasporized subjects like herself, and of the repetition of scenes between the two time frames.

3. Much has been written about the ways in which Asian writers exoticize themselves in the process of writing difference. For example, see Sau-ling Wong’s critique of representations of Chinatown, “Ethnic Subject, Ethic Sign, and the Difficulty of Rehabilitative Representation.”

4. Pilar Cuder-Dominguez notes that “Lai in particular seems to be influenced by Haraway’s thought, specifically in the wealth of science fiction inter-texts that surface throughout her novel, as well as in the way she has pushed forward the Frankenstein myth through the creation of a complex, innovative, Frankenstein creature in the clone Evie” (“The Politics of Gender and Genre in Asian Canadian Women’s Speculative Fiction,” 117).

5. In Greek mythology, Pallas and the river goddess, Styx, had four children, one of whom was Nike, the god of victory.

6. For Robyn Morris, the Sonias bring up the fear of racial otherness: “The identity paradox of the Sonias, Frankenstein’s creature and the Replicants is such that though they are created by humans, their near white, but not ordinary white, visage indicates a transgression of strict social boundaries designed to maintain hierarchical divisions [ . . . ]. The figure of human-like doubles such as the Sonias is feared because of its unrecognisability; they have been made in the image of whiteness” (“What Does It Mean to Be Human?” 86).

7. For example, Karen Luscombe writes, “For Lai, feminist revolt comes out of sardonic scatological aggression. And the stench is overwhelming” (“Review of Salt Fish Girl”).

8. Gita Rajan prefers the term “mystical realism” to magic realism. She says, “Other magic realists work with large canvases and bold brush strokes; they theatricalize the mundane by calling upon external powers, even supra-natural forces, to seal gaps in the lived reality of their characters. Divakaruni, on the other hand, alters the genre such that her novel resembles an Indian miniature painting with fine, vivid, compact, and detailed brush strokes. She operates by drawing upon internal powers to gesture towards a deliberate mysticism, albeit a personalized, Orientalized mysticism,” (“Chitra Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices,” 216).

9. In The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives I discuss the psychosocial effects of racial otherness on Asian North Americans. I look at the ways in which Asian bodies become always marked or visible, creating, paradoxically, subjects that are invisible and silent. See the introduction to that book, especially pp. 23–29.

1. In addition to works by Asian North American writers, I am thinking of novels such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, and Toni Morrison’s early novels, including The Bluest Eye and Sula.

2. Attebery note that until the 1960s “gender was one of the elements most often transcribed unthinkingly into SF’s hypothetical worlds. Even if an author was interested in revising the gender code, the conservatism of a primarily male audience—and the editors, publishers, and distributors who were trying to outguess that audience—kept gender exploration to a minimum” (Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, 5).

3. I am using literalization in the way that Margaret Homans does in her study of nineteenth-century women’s writing. Using Lacan and Chodorow’s insights, Homans argues that, unlike a son, a daughter does not have to give up the presymbolic communication that she had with her mother, and this retention has “profound implications for the differential valuations of literal and figurative, and for women writers’ relations to them,” (Bearing the Word, 13).

4. Traise Yamamoto has pointed out that Japanese American women are conflated with Japanese women and has argued that the “Western imagination has consistently infantilized and feminized Japan, constructing the Japanese woman as a metonym for Japanese national, racial, and cultural identity” (Masking Selves, Making Subjects, 5).

5. Oliver used data from the University of Texas Medical Center and the National Mental Health Association reports. See The Colonization of Psychic Space, p. 104.

6. For a more expansive discussion of Lacan’s notion of the screen and Asian North American subjectivity, see the introduction to my book The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives, 10–11.