China Man Autoeroticism and the Remains of Asian America

Bibliographic Data

ID23230519
AuthorsTomo Hattori (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume31
Issue2
Pages215
Publication date1998-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNOVEL A Forum on Fiction (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0029-5132 • E-ISSN: 1945-8509
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1346199
OpenAlexW2332155593
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited10

There is a scene in Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men that attracts the attention of notable Asian American critics and no doubt startles many other readers. In the chapter entitled Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the eponymous protagonist and railroad worker Ah Goong masturbates in the open air. Ah Goong's usual job for the railroad is to dangle from a basket which is lowered over the edge of a cliff so that he can lay explosive charges into the rock face. Once he lights the dynamite, his fellow workers are supposed to lift his basket up fast enough to allow him to clear the blast. While the work is stressful and dangerous, Ah Goong manages to snatch moments of tranquillity as he dangles below the work crew and above the ground. He often urinates while in his basket, but, on one occasion, he is clutched by sexual desire and, overcome by beauty and fear, masturbates in an effort to calm himself: Suddenly he stood up tall and squirted out into space. 'I am the world,' he said. The world's vagina was big, big as the sky, big as a valley. He grew a habit: whenever he was lowered into the basket, his blood rushed to his penis and he fucked the (133). The act of fucking the world, which can be seen as an eroticized extension of planting explosives into the rock, allows Ah Goong to identify with a masculine sexuality that is not limited by his economic station as a Chinese railroad worker. One may wonder, though, whether Ah Goong is the world in a fulfilling and satisfying way, or merely himself in an act devoid of meaning and power. What are the consequences of Ah Goong wanting to fuck, and what does mean in this instance? As a spontaneous action that grows into a habit and, as narrative, into a deliberate piece of outdoor stagecraft, Ah Goong's sexual act is a moment both of physical and social coming out. While Kingston's narrative remains suggestively ambivalent about the purpose and success of Ah Goong's performance, I suggest that this scene in China Men is instructive for theorizing the dilemma of the minority subject in American culture. Ah Goong's autoerotic act may be seen both as an escape from the dominant culture's notion of proper subject formation under compulsory heterosexuality, and as a pathetic attempt to mimic the imagined pleasure of the dominant male subject. What is at stake is no less than the question of whether minority subjects can legitimate themselves effectively from their current structural and discursive status as minorities within a dominant national racial

Ancient history · Archaeology · China · Geography · Political science · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics

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