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...Renan, "What is Nation?" (16)
On 6 June 1993, the Golden Venture, a freighter carrying nearly three hundred illegal Chinese immigrants, ran aground only a few miles away from downtown New York City. Aware that the vessel was taking on water, crew members ordered the passengers to swim ashore in the choppy, cold waters. Of the two hundred or so who complied, at least eight drowned before reaching the shore. The remaining passengers were rescued by Coast Guard cutters and subsequently arrested and imprisoned by the United States government. Major television networks provided live coverage of the rescue and arrest operations, and thousands of American citizens watched the Chinese immigrants splash to shore or be plucked from the water with gaffs and ropes. (1) Literally and figuratively, the Golden Venture of these hopeful emigrants was broken upon the forbidding shore of New York City, and their journey toward freedom and prosperity was interpreted to the American public through a media spectacle of abjection.
Written around the time of the Golden Venture and published in 1995, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker includes a version of the incident at the novel's crucial transition point. Native Speaker charts the rise and fall of a mayoral challenger who is racially marked as an immigrant in the turbulent New York political scene of the mid-1990s. John Kwang, a Korean American businessman and city council member, runs a permanent campaign for mayor in his attempt to become part of the political "vernacular ... a larger public figure who was willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family" (139). Kwang's challenge to the racially insular New York political establishment leads to his eventual disgrace and exile to Korea. By depicting the infiltration of Kwang's political organization and deportation of his key supporters as illegal immigrants, Lee demonstrates the powerful array of forces brought to bear against the full political enfranchisement of New Yorkers who can be constructed as both racially minoritized and foreign. However, Lee complicates this reading of Kwang by framing the story of his destruction against the anti-Bildungsroman of another Korean American, Henry Park, the narrator of the novel and corporate spy who infiltrates Kwang's campaign. The self-doubts and tensions resulting from Henry's infiltration of Kwang's political organization and concurrent attempts at rapprochement with his white American wife Lelia restate on a micro level the questions of political and social enfranchisement posed by Kwang's sabotaged campaign for mayor. The interplay of the domestic and political plotlines allows Lee to critique the dominant paradigms of racial enfranchisement in the United States and the status of "ethnic" literatures within the American publishing industry and literary canon. The book's title draws attention to Lee's self-conscious complicity in the racial marketing of his book, and the ambiguity surrounding the identity of the novel's "native speaker" (Park? Lelia? Kwang? Lee the author?) sharpens the edge of the novel's paratextual critique. Ultimately, the novel moves beyond New York and its political/publishing establishment to address the roles that immigrants have played historically in the literature and politics of the United States, a trajectory that Lee traces from the colonial era through the democratic vision of Walt Whitman and into the dystopic world of twentieth-century media culture.
The Golden Venture incident contributed to fears among the American populace of an "Asian invasion" facilitated by unscrupulous smugglers and international networks of organized criminal syndicates (P. Smith 2). The exceptionally harsh treatment meted out to the Chinese immigrants on the Golden Venture was meant to serve as a warning to aspiring immigrants around the world that they were not welcome in the United States. Most of the passengers on the Golden Venture were imprisoned for periods extending into years, and the last of the Golden Venture detainees were not released until fifty-three of them were pardoned by President Clinton in March of 1997, nearly four years after their disastrous entry into the country. The White House press secretary's comments on the occasion of the pardon give a clear summary of the reasons for their long imprisonment:
The Administration's policy of detaining smuggled aliens has deterred smuggling by organized criminal syndicates, resulting in a sharp decrease in the number of alien smuggling vessels that have reached U.S. shores. Moreover, the newly enacted immigration bill's provisions that permit the expeditious exclusion of smuggled aliens has significantly strengthened our ability to deter alien smuggling.
While the insistent repetition of "alien" is meant to distinguish the government's policy from the reception given to legal immigrants, the treatment of the Golden Venture detainees is only a more extreme version of the exclusionary attitude faced by other racially marked minorities within the national culture of the United States. Lisa Lowe describes the exclusion of Asian immigrants from full participation in modern American society as the result of a
national memory [that] haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of actual laws prohibiting Asians from citizenship and sustained by the wars in Asia, in which the Asian is always seen as an immigrant, as the "foreigner-within," even when born in the United States and the descendant of generations born here before. (5-6)
Due to the a priori construction of Asians as inescapably foreign within a domestic visual economy brokered by the mass media and popular culture, Asian Americans are not fully naturalized into American national culture. Thus, the threat of detention and expulsion aimed at "smuggled aliens" can also be used against Asian Americans who threaten in some way the economic or political dominance of citizens who are visually constructed as "native." Like all citizens of non-Anglo-European descent, Asian Americans undergo a double scrutiny when attempting to enjoy the full spectrum of rights guaranteed to Americans, regardless of race. Lee invokes this experience of containment, exclusion, and potential expulsion throughout his novel.
Lee prefigures the significance of the Golden Venture incident to the Kwang subplot by incorporating the image of a shipwreck into the narrative fulcrum of Henry and Lelia's relationship. Separated previously by their culturally disparate responses to the death of Henry's mother and the accidental smothering of their biracial son, Henry and Lelia undergo an emotional journey of reconstruction after the death of Henry's father. This journey leads eventually to Henry's reconciliation with both Leha and the ambivalent effects of the cultural heritage passed on to him through his familial relationships. Henry and Lelia's restored physical intimacy represents the turning point in the subplot of marital accommodation. Lee connects the scene of conjugal intimacy with the crisis of political visibility through a careful use of descriptive language that associates sex with the arrival of smuggled immigrants:
She wanted me to push down on her harder. I couldn't, so then she turned us around and pushed down on me, the slightest grimace stealing across her face. Her body yawed above me, buoyed and restless. I held on by her flat hips, angling her and helping her to let me in. Mixed-up memories, hunger. It was like lonesome old dogs, all wags and tongues and worn eyes. This was the woman I promised to love. This is my wife. (230)
Initially, Henry is in a traditional posture of male dominance, but Lelia demands that Henry exert more leverage--more dominance--than he is capable of in order to consummate her physical pleasure and his full penetration of her body. She therefore inverts their sexual/political roles and uses the greater (social) force afforded to white bodies to facilitate Henry's sexual penetration of her body and the consummation of her pleasure. In the moment of reversal, Lelia's body is figured as a seafaring vessel, associating her with the immigrants of the Golden Venture and also invoking the memory of Puritan immigration. Henry is pushed down into the floor as Lelia's body "yawed above." Buoys and angling (tacking) continue the maritime imagery as Henry "help[s] her to let [him] in."...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Studies in the Literary Imagination
Beyond The Silk Road: staging a Queer Asian America in Chay Yew's Porc..., March 22, 2004
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