the love wife gish jen chen fu-jen

7/30/2019 The Love Wife Gish Jen Chen Fu-Jen

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Critique, 51:394415, 2010Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00111611003631678

The Parallax Gap in Gish JensThe Love Wife: The Imaginary

Relationship between First-Worldand Third-World Women

FU-JEN CHEN

SU-LIN YU

ABSTRACT: Focusing on the relationship among three women (Blondie, Lan,and Mama Wong) in Gish Jens The Love Wife, we shall explore the imaginarybinary relationship between Blondie and Lan and the gaze of the (m)Other(Mama Wong) involved in the binary relationship. We are engaged in an arduousqueryhow does one deal with the Other woman, her otherness?that can beexplicated and linked to a larger social context: the relation between Western

and Third-World women.

Keywords: Asian American literature, feminism, psychoanalysis, race

In her latest novel, The Love Wife (2004), Gish Jen, within the borders of onefamily, not only extends the notion of America as a nation of immigrants asshe did in her earlier works, but also explores such contemporary issues as

transnational adoption, dot-coms, New Age movements, offshore outsourcing,racial hybridity, interracial marriage, and Alzheimers disease.1 Thus provoking

new ways of imagining identity, family, and nation, the novel poses manyimportant questions about contemporary life: What is the new face of America?


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of subjectivity for the sufferer of dementia, for the New Ager, and for theadoptee? In addition, in the age of increasing cross-cultural interactions, howdoes one deal with the racial/cultural Other? An urgent question of feminismasks: not merely who am I? but who is the Other woman (qtd. in Michie

65).2 Contemporary feminist writers and scholars have been obsessed withhow to manage the otherness that is represented by the Other woman. Inthe encounter with Third-World women, who have provoked much anxietyand desire for Western feminists, what is a possible social bond? Could itbe a bond created on a basis of neither idealistic nor simplified strategies,neither universality nor commonality, neither binary oppositions nor postmodernproliferated differences?

While Jen in her early novels explores the immigrant experiences of theChang family in America,3 The Love Wife, rather than offering another Chang

family saga, focuses on the multiracial Wongs, a family of mixedAmerican,European, and Chineseheritage. The New American family, as a neighborof the Wongs once referred to them (3), is comprised of a second-generationChinese American husband, a golden-haired, blue-eyed, Wisconsin-born wife,two adopted daughters of Asian origin, a biological baby, and a goat. The man ofthe household, Carnegie Wong, age thirty-nine, works at a high-tech companyand, in spite of his mothers objections, marries a stereotypical Midwesternwoman named Janie Bailey. A yoga-practicing, career woman with New EnglandWASP manners, Janie has been pejoratively nicknamed Blondie by Carnegies

mother. Prior to their marriage, Carnegie and Blondie adopt Lizzy, a foundlingof indeterminate Asian heritage, and years later travel to China to adopt anothergirl, Wendy. Finally, Janie gives birth to their half-half son, Bailey, who looksdisturbingly non-Asian. With Bailey, the happily married Blondie and Carnegiehave two adopted Chinese daughters (now aged fifteen and nine) and a biologicaltoddler. Living in a lovely old farmhouse in suburban Boston, the soup-du-jourAmerican family is dubbed by the couple on the opening page of the novel as aloving improvisation and simply something [they] made and something [they]chose (3). With two adopted daughters and one biracial biological son, however,

the racially mixed family is derided as unnatural by Carnegies mother, MamaWong. An oppressive mother, impossible mother-in-law, and shrewd immigrantbusinesswoman, Mama Wong has lived the American dream by making a fortunein Chinatown real-estate speculation. But even after her death, she is never reallygone, for she continues to chime in bluntly and dictate to the family. When MamaWong diesafter a long decline into Alzheimersthe Wongs are shocked tolearn that she has arranged through her will for a single female relative frommainland China to join the family. Age forty-six, a year older than Blondie, Lanis quite mysterious to the Wongs. They wonder, Is Lan a housekeeper, a live-in

nanny to the children? Or is she, as Blondie suspects, sent by Mama Wongto be to Carnegie the Love Wife of the novels title? Inevitably, then, Lans


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suddenly calls many issues into question. Beginning with the arrival of Lan, thenovel ends with a twist that reveals her real identity.

In the first part of this article, focusing on the relationship among threewomenBlondie, Lan, and Mama Wongwe shall explore the imaginary binary

relationship between Blondie and Lan and the gaze of the (m)Other (MamaWong) involved in the binary relationship. The polarized differences betweenBlondie and Lan are sustained on the grounds of a safe distance at which theykeep each other. The truth of the very gap between Blondie and Lan is oneof parallax: they appear different due simply to a gap in perspectives. In thepapers second part, we examine the role of Mama Wong in the context of theLacanian clinic. Mamas enigmatic desire and symptoms of Alzheimers diseaseprompt characters (and, perhaps, the reader as well) to hysteria, rendering theimaginary relationship meaningless and providing a position in relation to which

one confronts the truth of desire and reconsiders his or her existence as a subject.In the third part, we investigate the very ending of the novel, engaging in anarduous queryhow does one deal with the Other woman, her otherness?thatcan be explicated and linked to a larger social context: the relation betweenWestern and Third-World women.4 Finally, we suggest a possible social bond,one grounded on the mutual recognition of shared failure and Slavoj ieksnotion of Pauline love.

I

The Love Wife begins with the arrival of Lan from China. Portraying theencounter between Blondie and Lan, it unfolds lucid contrasts and conflictsbetween them. At the very outset, Blondie, on the morning of Lans arrival,is ruminating on her improvised household and envisaging the possibility ofintegrating Lan into her loving, flexible, and harmonious family. For Blondie,life poses apparently boundless options, and a family is united not by blood butby chance. Experiencing family as a matter of choice and an act of performance,

Blondie believes in openness and cultural exchange, especially in a time ofglobalization (6). With a manner of self-confirmation, she recalls that in highschool she had been voted Most Sympathetic to Others, that her family usedto host exchange students, and that her mother always admonished that in thisfamily, we do not generalize and in this family, we keep an open mind (6).Ironically, from the very moment of their first encounter, Lan and Blondie do nottrust each other. At the airport, Blondie immediately notices how her husbandblushes at Lans girlish smile, how naturally her two adopted daughters and Lanstand as a set of S-M-L (16), and yet she remains outside of Lans charm. At

the same time, Lan cannot disguise her unease at the sight of such an unnaturalfamilythe all-blond lineup of Blondie, Bailey, and Lizzy (she dyes her black


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hearts of the daughters but intentionally alienates Blondie, who provides herwith a living space in an unattached garage that already houses a pet goat.

From the beginning of the novel, then, Jen foregrounds a sharp contrastbetween Blondie and Lan: a white executive businesswoman and a Third-World

woman not even from a city proper (Love Wife 15); a middle-class womanprivileged to endless play of lifestyles in todays postmodern panorama anda shoe factory worker impressed by her need of nothing; one insisting onhaving a happy family, raising happy children, and acting out happiness, andthe other capable of eating bitter (49). Blondie confesses that her family hastoo much stuff and Lan is rich in spirit (50). In addition to contrastingportraits between them, Blondie and Lan often hold opposed views and interpreteach others intentions as hostile. Gardening is Blondies recreation but Lanslabor; growing up in the country is great for Blondie, but the country, for

Lan, indicates backwardness and unemployment (42); Blondies pet goat isLans farm animal or, even worse, feudal boss (139). In the eye of Lan,the apartment, provided by Blondie who considered the need for privacy, is abarn, and Blondies politeness in treating her as an honored guest is xiaoli cang daothat her [Blondies] smile hid a knife (136). Likewise, Lansresponse by refusing to eat with the family is unreasonable to Blondie, andLans meager needs for materials and food are diagnosed by Blondie as Chineseasceticism and an eating disorder (138). Lan feels treated by Blondie asa servant; Blondie, alienated by Lan as an outsider even in her own home.

Lan starts to distinguish the real from the fake throughout the novel: realChinese, real Chinese crickets, real Chinese girls, real mothers (versus adoptedmothers such as Blondie), real candies (versus date candies), a sincere expression(versus Blondies feint), a real family, a real brother, a real hope, and soon. In tandem with Lans engagement with binary distinctions, Blondie trapsherself into proving to be a chopstick, not a fork, a real mother, thoughnot a birth mother. An imaginary harmonious relationship between them istemporarily made in chapter eleven, A Happy Family. A peaceful coexistenceis provisionally reached when Blondie tries even harder to be a chopstick and

normalizes her relationship with Lan through foodstuffs (240) and when Lanrecognizes that she is desired by Carnegie, the man of the household, so thatshe feels she is finally inside the house (146).

The struggle between Lan and Blondie is actually polarized along the axesof East/West, nature/culture, and real/fake. Such a series of apparent binaryoppositions is sustained on the grounds ofa safe distance that Lan and Blondiekeep from each other. In Neighbor, Slavoj iek questions the multiculturalistsnotion of tolerance as precisely a strategy to keep the intrusive neighbor ata proper distance (3). In the novel, both Blondie and Lan carefully keep the

other at a proper distancethrough Blondies politeness and Lans servility,Blondies arrangement of the room for Lan, and Lans insistence on speaking


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speak Chinese). Thanks to the distance she creates, Blondie, enjoying the navegaze she imagines taken by the Third-World woman, sees confirmation of herhappy family life in an eastern suburban neighborhood. Blondie recalls Lansamazement at her first seeing the Wongs house:

Of course, she was amazed by our house. We ourselves were amazed byour housea lovely old farmhouse, walking distance to town, with a porch,and a large rolling lawn, and a converted barn housing cars and, thesedays, a black-and-white pygmy goat [: : : ]. The land settled in green swalesaround it, like a skirt. I had my eccentric sunflowers in back [: : : ;] by thedriveway, stood our small orchard of seven wide apple trees, planted in acircle so that their arms all but touched [: : : ]. As a group, though, theyappeared, charmingly, to be playing ring-around-the-rosy. And in the springthey formed a ceiling of blossoms. If from the front yard you made yourway up the little inclinethere were five or six stone stepsyou ascendedinto a low sky of blooma heaven. (Love Wife 1920; italics added)

Moreover, Lans wonder at the Land of the free (43), at boundless choices (46),and at the lack of slums (44), and even her love for bathrooms (40)all helpBlondie rediscover her previously rocky marriage in its freshness and pureness.To be exact, at a proper distance, Lan serves for Blondie as the Ego-Ideal,the point from which Blondie and her family are being observed, from whichBlondie looks at herself so that her marriage appears to herself, in Lacanianterms, as likable, worthy of love (iek, Sublime 105).

On the other hand, being kept at a safe distance, Lan, in reaction againsta feeling of alienation, inevitably clings to a notion of an authentic, sacredessence. Ironically, however, Lans conviction regarding her authentic existencecould be complicit in late capitalist, multiculturalist ideology.5 Lan takes theview that Chineseness is something inherent in the blood, identifies culturaldifferences as a genetic heritage, and judges acts for whether they are naturaland real. Her view of self-authentication entails enjoyment in her assuming, forher being, an untarnished origin even in the land of fakeness. Indeed, as if tobear out her own assessment, Lan is credited by Blondies children with an

ability to read peoples minds and to know a fake when she sees one (LoveWife 202).

Blondie, at first, is passionate about appearance and Lan, about the realand nothingness. Though a self-proclaiming improviser, Blondie is actuallya devotee of symbolic codes who acts out the desire of the Symbolic Otherand is concerned with the representation over the represented. Trying hard toshow the Other that she and her family are properly represented, Blondie advisesthat one should be happy and should not dwell on unpleasant things (e.g.,the traumatic journey to China to adopt Wendy; Love Wife 20809). As for

something unable to be symbolically represented such as Lizzys uncertain Asianorigins, Blondie chooses to ignore it: We did indeed decide not to mention


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what good would come of such talk? (217). Blondies pet phrasessuch ashonestly and in this family, we do [or dont]reveal her anxiety regardingperformative efficiency. Thus, reducing her life to the lifeless, Blondie excludesfrom thought any uncanny elements and denies excess or lack of representation

over the represented.Counteracting Blondies passion for the symbolic semblance, Lan turns out to

be obsessed with the represented beneath the representation, the essence of innerdifference. Focusing on reifying the realness or reducing subjects to a core ofnothingness, Lan depicts others as ones (in)authentic to the Other or representsherself as one with no desire. Whenever facing commands or criticisms fromBlondie, Lan responds with her ready words in a way that objectifies herselfand reduces herself to a nondesiring beingIf you do not like candy, there isno candy; If you like me be more careful, I will be more careful; If you

want me to say no, I say no; If you like it cooler, I will make it cooler.Lans passivity reaches its apotheosis when she is asked by the Wongs to moveto Maine after an incident with Shang, her abusive, married boyfriend. If youwant me to go, I will go, Lan says. If you like me to be happy, I will behappy (Love Wife 319)

The polarized differences between Blondie and Lan finally lead to a directconfrontation. Their first confrontation results from their opposite styles ofdiscipline: Lan quickly wins the heart of the children by feeding their naturalneeds, but Blondie eagerly nurtures in her children a sense of discipline or social

codes of No-s. On the one hand, Lan gives candy to toddler Bailey, allows athird-grader, Wendy, to do her homework with the TV on, and disregards thatLizzy, a teenager, goes out on weeknights. On the other, Blondie clearly ordersNo-s in this familyno candy to toddlers, no TV while doing homework, andno dates on weeknights (26366). Protesting her mothers codes of No-s inthe family, Lizzy rages about Blondies fakeness:

Werent we all happy until she [Blondie] walked in? And will you listento her voice? [: : : ] Can you hear how fake it is? Why dont you just yell?

[: : : ] Why do you have to talk in that fake voice?In this family, we [Blondie responds.]Then who even wants to be in this family! Because I do raise my voice!

Because I do yell! Because I am not fake like you, as everyone can totallysee! (265; italics added)

A week after her own daughter rebukes her for being fake, Blondie quits herjob.

After Blondie resigns, Blondie and Lan ironically switch roles: in the latterone-third of the novel, the one adopts the role of the other. Once a rigid follower

of symbolic codes (one who folds her towels, laundry, including underwear,caps her shampoo securely back up after each use, smiles, and talks in a manner


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Lan, Blondie renaturalizes her relationship with her children, accepting Baileysjumping without a diaper, Wendys sharing her secrets, Lizzys becoming a sisterto Blondie, and, in drama workshop, finding her natural talent (Love Wife 273),a great voice inherited from her German great-grandparents (though Lizzy

is adopted). At the same time, Lan, turning herself into a Blondie, begins tocommand with should and shouldnt. Talking to one child or another, Lansays [You] should stop [taking drugs], [You] shouldnt sleep with Russell,[You] should talk something nice, or [You] shouldnt paint on clothes (27576, 306). Lan goes to college, taking courses on the internet, global economy,and showing interest in the stock exchange. Thus, in varied ways, Lan performsand follows step-by-step the codes of the Societal Other.

While Blondie is fascinated by Zens concept of emptinessa perfect passionfor the passionless (Love Wife 311)Lan is no longer a person who is content

with plenty of noth-ing (92). Lan now desires. Dating a wealthy businessman,dressed in leather jacket or skirt, and feeling real hope for the first time inher life (299), Lan looks forward to being a cofounder of an online gamblingcompany. While Lan once served Blondie as the Ego-Ideal, the point fromwhich Blondie can appear to herself likable, Lan now models herself upon afigure of the Ideal Ego such as Blondie, a successful businesswoman as well as acofounder of an investment firm. Of the change in Lans role, Lizzy complains,Youre as bad as my parents (275) and [Youre] practically the same as Momand Dad (322). Indeed, as a reader observes, Blondie and Lan could have

easily lived each others lives and ended in the same places (Reviews for TheLove Wife).

Both Blondies passion for the Symbolic semblance and Lans passion forimaginary authenticity are problematic. Excluding any uncanny excess fromlife, Blondie insists on, in ieks words, the position of absolute self-positingsubjectivity (Neighbor138). Disallowing the excess/lack of representation overthe represented, she thus fails to recognize that there was a rift in her marriagethat already existed prior to Lans arrival. In order to save her marriage, Blondiequits her job and swings toward a re-naturalization of her roles of mother and

wife. Though her changes at first appear fruitful, Blondie is soon surprised tofind out that she is not that passionate for gardening despite always consideringherself a farm girl who couldve gardened night and day (310). Worse, shefinds out that this natural life leads her to low self-esteem (309) and she fail[s]to raise happy children (309). Indeed, Blondie fails to recognize that naturalnessis not very natural but is necessarily and performatively enacted over time. Infact, by the end of the novel, when it is Blondie, not Lan, whom the childrenconsider as their real mother (360), one understands that ethnicity no longerplays a significant part in the role of mother.

If Blondie fails, neither does Lan succeed in resymbolizing her position inthe New World. At first a nondesiring subject, Lan becomes one, like Blondie,


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failure of a small business, and prejudice against immigrants in rural Maine, Lanultimately fails. She fails because the Other fails to provide her with reassuringsignifiers for her representation; she fails because there are some identity-bearingsignifiers she, as an immigrant woman, can hardly perform or claim (i.e., white

skin and masculinity). A symbolic identity cannot be one hundred percentrepresented or performed; there is always some fundamental impossibility. ButLan fails to recognize the excess in being American found, for instance, in aracist statement made by a bully who challenges Lans husband: [T]he factthat youre a citizen doesnt make you an American (341). In fact, even beforeLan switches to her role as a performer or devotee of Symbolic representation,her naturalness has been always already tainted by some unnatural elementsher telling of exotic stories, her show of nondesiring desire, and her actingout of charm, tenderness, mysteriousness. Paradoxically, the Chineseness she

reifies is mysterious not only to Blondie but also to herself.6 In their sharedpassion either for Symbolic semblance or authentic substance and their sharedfailure of resymbolization and renaturalization, Lan and Blondie suggest theexcess of fixity and the impenetrability of the thing both to the Other and tothemselves.7

Though the contrasts between Lan and Blondie emerge from the binarypolarization along the axes of East/West, nature/culture, and real/fake, the re-lationship between them is one of parallax: there is no substantial difference,and they appear different due simply to a gap in perspective, the shift from

one to another.8 Not opposed to each other or exclusively in opposition to eachother, Blondie and Lan form a cycle, each extreme supporting and includingthe imaginary Other.9 Orienting her life toward pleasure (the suburban lifestyleof the American professional middle class), Blondie, in order to guarantee thepleasure of the happy family, ends up adhering to a painstaking discipline ofnegative codes, of No-s like the biblical thou shall nots, much in accordwith ieks critique (it requires the utmost of discipline [: : : ] to guaranteethe maximum of pleasures) of the imperative of jouissance in todays late-capitalist society.10 Yet Lans assertion of nothing needed, though appearing

different from Blondies, actually also serves to orient a life toward enjoymentbecause Lans very gesture of renouncing enjoyment, as iek describes thephenomenon, generates a surplus-enjoyment of its own (Parallax 381). Inlight of the injunction to enjoy that is immanently intertwined with the logicof sacrifice, we should not be surprised to see numerous switches in theirroles throughout the novel, since Lan and Blondie only appear oppositionalthanks to what iek calls a parallax-shift of our perspective (Parallax 381).In the novel, we cannot properly grasp one of the women without the other.Lan first serves as Ego-Ideal to substantiate Blondies image of an ideal family;

in turn, Blondie serves as Ideal Ego, an imaginary double, with which Lanidentifies on the assumption of resemblance and inasmuch as she can be like


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Indeed, the binary opposition between Blondie and Lan, in terms of theLacanian registers, is neither real nor symbolic but imaginary. In the novel thereis no symmetrical or intersubjective relation nor is there a neutral standpointfrom which to grasp the objective difference between them (as what one regards

her difference from the other is not that which the other so regards). Thedifference between a binary polarity such as Blondie and Lan is not that betweenthe One and the Other, but, in terms according to iek, that between theOne and its empty place of inscription or that between one and zero (Iraq137, 139). The true difference between them resides in the very gap in theshift of perspective. In other words, what characterizes Blondie is not thedifference between Blondie and Lan, but the difference between Blondie andthe excess/lack of the representation over the represented, the gap inherent inBlondie herself; likewise, what characterizes Lan is not the difference between

the binary opposition she imagines but the difference between herself and theimpossible thing, one impenetrable both to the Other and to Lan herself. Inshort, neither of them can be privileged as the deeper truth of the other.

In the novel, class antagonism is the very gap that precludes a direct view ofcharacters without distorting perspective, and that, instead, generates multiplereadings on the basis of multiculturalisms politics of identity. Following thelogic of recognition of binary opposition, Blondie, in several ways, offloadsantagonism into (co)existing racial/cultural differences, thereby downplayingclass divisions. First, she neglects her own privilege as an adoptive mother,

one who can afford to adopt a daughter from the Third World. Second, sheneglects to know how from the very beginning Lans willingness to accept thethird seat in the car, her complaints about living in a separated room, her refusalto eat on the table, and her reluctance to take care of the goat, are all gesturesof class servitude rather than a sign merely of cultural difference. Moreover,even as class antagonism is denied, Lans mode of resistance is further obscuredby such multicultural concerns as ethnic rights, representation, intolerance, andimmigration. But for her part, Lan, purported to have a ladder-like outlook(Love Wife 219), is very aware of social stratification. Nonetheless, when she

and her husband, Jiabao Su, run a take-out food store in Maine, they, in order tocut down their labor costs, replace local help with Chinese immigrants under theexcuse of cooking more authentic Chinese food. In alleged defense of preservingethnic color, they exploit those beneath them and at the same time disavow classantagonism. In addition, though Lans view of Blondies pet goat as a feudalboss indicates her clear consciousness of class exploitation, the Baileys beachhouse where she and her husband stay is ironically seen by themselves as devoidof class antagonism. When the town people call it unnatural that the Baileysown the only beach in town, Jiabao retorts that the beach reflects the nations

respect for the principle of private ownership (340). Thus, in the novel, theantagonism among Blondie, Lan, and others is anchored in class struggle. It is


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II

The binary relationship apparent between Blondie and Lan is in fact inherently

triangular, for it involves not only the two images of self but also the gaze ofthe (m)OtherMama Wong. Not drawn with detail, she appears mysterious toothers, even to her only son: My mother never talked about her day, or herpast, or my father, said Carnegie (Love Wife 191). In the novel Mama Wongis known as a demanding mother, mean-spirited mother-in-law, and shrewdimmigrant businesswoman. She escaped from the Mainland by swimming toHong Kong with two basketballs and rose from an impoverished immigrantto a self-made real-estate mogul. Moreover, she is perceived as odd, deviant,and all her behavior, in Blondies eyes, is inappropriate (27). Mama Wongs

inappropriate behavior and developing symptoms of Alzheimers disease hurtleagainst everyones reasonable expectations. Though the story begins after herofficial death, Mama Wong serves as the ruling spirit, shaping the trajectory ofthe story even after her death. In her will, Mama Wong stipulates that Lan,a distant cousin, be brought over to care for the children properlyThatway the children will at least speak Chinese, not like Carnegie (193). Hermachinations from beyond the grave surprisingly unravel the Wongs fragilefamily life, for they set in motion a chain of feelings and events that spinaround Mama Wongs enigmatic desire. Both her presence and absence haunt

people around her, prompting us (the reader included) to ponder what she reallywants.The role of Mama Wong, in the light of Lacanian theory, splits into two

discourses: the discourse of the pervert and the discourse of the analyst. First,perceived within the discourse of the pervert, Mama Wong can be the one whoknows the truth of desire, complies with the injunction to enjoy, identifies withthe surplus-enjoyment of the Other (or, rather, the surplus-value in Marxiststerm),11 and assumes the position that Lacan calls the object-instrument ofthe will-to-enjoyment (320). Claiming [w]here there is will, there is way

(Love Wife 27), Mama Wong is engaged in jouissance-seeking (or surplus-value-seeking) activity and, in contrast to Blondie and Lan who disavow classantagonisms, perceives class struggle all the time: She was very binary inthat way. Always looking down on someone, or else convinced someone waslooking down on her. As if all the world was a ladder to her, Carnegie saysof his mother (1415). Disappointed by her sons lack of financial drive, shereproaches him: Forget about inner truth. You know what life is about? Life isabout survive. Moreover, Mama Wong displays excessive enjoyment and hasaccess to pleasures that others are denied:

She swaggered around in her fur coat and sneakers. She wore rings big asroad reflectors. The restaurant owners in Chinatown all knew her [ : : : ]. She


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of course, the red-eye disease of others. Rumors stalked her: her businesshabits, her spending habits, her savings habits. What wasnt suspect? Peoplescrutinized her cars, her clothes, her hair, her companions. (31)

As people think that the pervert must be getting an awful lot more satisfactionin life than they are (Fink, 17980), so Mama Wong seems to gain muchsatisfaction from surplus enjoyment (surplus value). Interestingly, in the novel,Mama Wong is the only one immune to identity crisis, for perversion, rather thanbeing subversive to the predominant hegemony, is always a socially constructiveattitude (iek, Ticklish 247) and since she, a servant of the superego injunctionto enjoy, always aligns herself with the surplus enjoyment of the Other.

Mama Wongs excessive enjoyment is operative in todays racism. iekmaintains that everyday racism survives precisely at this level of being dis-

turbed by what is perceived fantasmatically as the others excessive enjoyment(Conversations 113). The racist fantasy, for iek, relies on the assumption ofthe ethnic others excessive and strange enjoyment: the alien groups deprive usof our own enjoyment and enjoy themselves in an unfamiliar way. iek argues,

What really gets on our nerves, what really bothers us about the other,is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment (the smell of his food, hisnoisy songs and dances, his strange manners, his attitude to workin theracist perspective, the other is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or anidler living on our labour. (Looking Awry 165).

Though alleged to have excessive enjoyment, Mama Wong teaches her son totake psychological shelter in ownership from encounters with racism. Whenbeing called by a skinhead chink boy, Carnegie in fact shields himself as shecounsels: with the knowledge that I had a net worth several times my tormen-tors. Eat your own heart out. Lets see your tax return (166). But, as iekperceives, in sex and jouissance there are other defenses as well, and Carnegie tohimself admits one of these: Also, though, privately, I used another knowledge:that I had a white wife, with breasts many times more beautiful than the pair be-

ing flaunted (166). In Carnegies mental defense against racial prejudice, there isan exact expression of the iekian notion of racism: I did steal your jouissance,your money, and your womanAnd I enjoy much more than you do! In effect,the best interior defense against racism is to fulfill its hidden premises.

First recognized in the discourse of the pervert, the role of Mama Wong,through the course of the story, gradually shifts toward the discourse of theanalyst as she declines in body and often in mind. An Alzheimers diseasepatient, Mama Wong suffers from the loss of time and space, memory, judgment,social boundaries, and a meaningful role to play. In the novel, Jen experiments

with a shifting narrative and a feast of voices: each major character tells his orher own story in the first person. Their voices mingle. Not only do they follow,


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an unidentified third party, as though theyre in group therapy (Seaman 1799).In an interview, Jen herself explains that the novel came to me this wayas iftold by the various Wongs at a very long family therapy session, only withoutthe therapist (A Conversation with the Author). Interestingly, it can be Mama

Wong who serves as that absent analyst in the Lacanian clinic.Insisting that the practice of language be what dominates society, Lacan, in

order to analyze the crucial factors through which language operates in humanaffairs, formulates a matrix of four discoursesthe discourses of the Master,the university, the hysteric, and the analyst. These four discourses representthe four possible types of social bonds or the four possible positions inthe intersubjective network of communication (iek, Undergrowth 2829)or four different ways for the subject to take a stance towards the failure ofthe pleasure principle (Verhaeghe 25). Though the discourse of the pervert is

not one of four discourses, this discourse is structurally identical to that of theanalyst. In both, object petit a, the split subject ( jS), knowledge (S2), and theMaster (S1) are put in positions that indicate the agent, addressee (the Other),truth, and production.12 The difference between the social bond of perversion andthat of analysis, iek explains, is grounded in the radical ambiguity in Lacanof object petit a, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary phantasmaticlure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating: for the Void behindthe lure (Iraq 142; italics added). Specifically, the difference between thesetwo discourses resides in the ambiguity of object petit a when it occupies

the position of the agent. While the agent in perverse discourse acts as theimaginary phantasmatic lure and knows perfectly the truth of desire, the agentas played by the analyst in the analytic setting knows there is no truth of desireto know (Dean 89).13

In analytic discourse, agents/analysts embody the object a and speak toanalysands, who stand in the place of the barred subject, represented in thediscourse as jS. Analysts, always enigmatic, must reduce themselves to a Voidor the residue and act as a blank screen to analysands (Fink 32). That is, theanalyst should fully assume subjective destitution in order to be the one who

breaks out of the vicious cycle of the intersubjective dialectics of desire andturns into an acephalous being of pure drive (iek, Iraq 144). The analyst, as aresult, throws into question analysands interpretations of the Others desire andprovokes them as subjects into confronting their own being, a kernel previouslyforeign and unknown to them. Prodding analysands to rethink the establishedorder of things and their entire situation, the analyst does not offer answers, butprovokes analysands to face head-on the truth of desire, to recognize and identifythe excluded part of their beingthe object petit athat has been excluded fromsymbolization.

Mama Wongs enigmatic desire and developing symptoms of Alzheimersdisease prompt other characters (and, perhaps, the reader as well) to hysteria.


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Mama Wong seems therefore entitled to the position of analyst. Until the end ofthe novel, although everyone tries to decipher the (m)Others enigmatic desirewhat does she really want in her will?we all, readers included, misread MamaWong. While, before her death, Mama Wongs bodily and mental decline evokes

in people a query about the mind and personhood, the novels primary narrativeor thematic concern is not merely Mama Wongs suffering from Alzheimersdisease; rather, it is how Mama Wong provides a position in relation to whichother characters can reconsider and reorganize their experiences as subjects. Howdo they (and we) respond to one whose mind is no longer there? What remains ofa subject, a person, when memory goes? Mama Wongs presence is unbearablenot only because, appearing incoherent in terms of self-integration, a personwith dementia threatens any clear, certain, and uncontested identity, but alsobecause, undergoing subjective destitution, one falls away like the object petit

a, the leftover of signification, and exists as a voidan excremental remainder.While people usually accept that as fetuses they once existed mindlessly,

many would prefer to connect the clinical picture of Alzheimers to that ofinfants, thereby considering the decline of Alzheimers sufferers as a regressiveprocess leading back to the status of the infant (see, for instance, Woodwardand Ridge).14 We do not accept the analogy between infants and the senile(or sufferers of dementia) because, since the latter have been subjected to thefield of the linguistic Other, the effects of language on the subject have alreadyconstituted in them as unconscious. In the case of late-stage dementia, patients

do not regress to existence as prelinguistic infants but progress toward existence,in Lacanian theory, as a post-symbolic thing, one that, though no longer capableof weaving a meaningful life-narrative, still persists within language as the rockof impossibility. That is why Mama Wong, as such a rock of impossibility (andnot as an innocent preverbal infant), persists in haunting other characters evenafter her death and why Alzheimers disease these days has become such asignificant socio-cultural phenomenon.15

While Mama Wong exists as a void, as the leftover of signification, Blondieserves a contrapuntal role. She remains engaged in symbolic semblance, is

insistent on self-transparent, self-directed identity, and is blind to the excess/lackmarking representation and to the foreign kernel within subjectivity (iek

Lenins).16 Throughout the novel, because Mama Wong exists as the void andher enigmatic desire suspends symbolic efficiency, she continually provokesBlondie into confronting her own Other-ness, the truth of her own desire. AsPaul Verhaeghe suggests regarding analysands in general, Blondie is left withtwo possibilities (4447). In one, Blondie may withdraw from the encounterwith the foreign kernel and return to confirm the position of Mama Wong asthe pervert (or the master) by answering Mama Wongs desire with the fantasy

that Lan is the wife Mama Wong would send from her grave, the wife Carnegieshould have married (Love Wife 195). Or Blondie may engage in confrontation


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Lan, like Blondie, is also overwhelmed by Mama Wongs enigmatic desire.Though the great-aunt once assured Lan, before she left for the United States,that you will be their ayi [aunt] (102), Lan still wonders: Why was I broughthere? Because Carnegies mother wanted me to come [: : : ]. But [: : : ] whatwas the real reason? Why [sic] did they want from me? (49). The answerLan first comes up with is that Mama Wong desires her authentic essenceChinesenessrather than Blondies superficial symbolic semblance, so that theWongs can be imbued with the deep special quality that makes them who theyreally are. Since [n]either the symbolic order nor the imaginary realm of fantasyprovides any ultimate guarantees (Dean 89), the role of Mama Wong, however,is to continually frustrate such imaginary and symbolic reassurance. Thus, whatappears as the most natural or most clearly represented must also be the mostquestionable. Indeed, Mama Wongs existence renders the apparent polarized

differences between Blondie and Lan meaningless and belies their symmetricalrelationship. Treating each other, in ieks terms, either as the imaginarydouble or as the purely symbolic abstract partner (Neighbor 162), Blondieand Lan invoke either the mirrorlike relationships of competition (as well asunderstanding) or the impersonal set of rules that coordinate [their] coexistencethrough tolerance and indifference (iek, Neighbor143). Oddly, perhaps, it isin Zizeks concept of the imaginary neighbor that we find the model of therelationship between Lan and Blondie. As explained in the words of Jodi Dean,

The imaginary neighbor is the one who looks like me. I respect him becauseof this similarity [: : : ]. He might be worthy of respect because he is avictim (how could I feel if this happened to me?) or a hero (overcomingcircumstance that would be the end of me) or because of the significanceof his cultural expression (this drumming is his version of Mozart!). [: : : ]The symbolic neighbor is the abstract subject of rights. Here my respect isultimately my respect for law, my sense of duty of the law. (173)

III

As the novel moves toward its resolution, the relationship between Lan andBlondie breaks off. Lan, after her husbands death in a tragic fire, moves backto the Wong family, this time into the house, not into the barn; at the sametime, Blondie, with her biological son, moves out. Blondie avers that I am nolonger playing [: : : ] Mama Wong won, thats all there is to it. I quit. End ofgame (Love Wife 355), and Lan accuses Blondie of being fakeFrom thevery first moment, I felt she was fake [: : : ]. From the very first moment shewanted me to go home [to China] (364). Moreover, Lan, albeit pregnant with

Jiabaos baby, and Carnegie find themselves in love, but their romance takes asevere blow at the very end of the novel, when a book of family history, sent by


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reveals startling secrets from Mama Wongs pastthat Lan is actually MamaWongs daughter, born in China, and that Carnegie is a child she adopted in theUnited States. The revelations, which raise the spectre of a form of incest, areso unsettling that they lead Carnegie to a heart attack and, at the novels end,

to his imagined dialogue with dead Mama Wong and to episodes of confusionand coma. The book ends with Carnegies familynow including Lan, Blondie,two adopted daughters, and a biological sontogether hoping for good newsoutside a surgery room.

Since the family book reveals the actual identities of Lan and Carnegie, wemust ask, Who is the love wife? If it is not Lan, then who is it? One answer,somewhat ironic, is that it is Blondies comforter, Gabriela. Gabriela is a mistressor love wife to Giorgio, an Italian puppeteer. Even as she encourages Blondieto fight to save her marriage to Carnegie, Gabriela is looking forward to Giorgios

divorce. A second answer is Blondie herself. That answer to the question, Whatdoes Mama Wong really want?, comes up during the imagined conversationCarnegie has with Mama while he is in a coma. While Mama Wongs desirestill remains enigmatic to all, even to Carnegie, he persistently interrogates MamaWong for the truth. The long dialogue is worth quoting in full:

Ma, [: : : ] I got the book, and it turns out Im not even your son.Only an American boy would read something and think, Oh, that must

be true. As if true is that simple! [Mama Wong says]So what is the truth? [: : : ]Tell me before I go back to my family.Your so-called family, she says, with a laugh.My family, I insist.She laughs again.Lan is your daughter.My long-lost daughter.And I?She laughs. Who you are if you are not my son?I love Blondie, you know, I say. Thats another joke. I married the love

wife.Then how can she be the love wife? Tell me.

And what about Lan? I might have married her, you know. If Blondiedivorced me.Another wrong wife! [she says]Ma. Werent you the one who sent her to me, from your grave? A second

wife? A love wife?Laughter.It seemed natural enough, I say.Natural! She exclaims. On the other hand, marry Blondie not so natural

either.What is, then?

Nothing is natural, she laughs. Nothing.

[: : : ]I am dead! I am dead! I am dead! Do you hear me? Dead! [she says]But


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ButGo, she says. The way you hang around, looks like I am the love wife.

Go! (Love Wife 37677; italics added)

Mama Wongas a Lacanian analyst who, in Carnegies eyes, is supposed toknow the Others desirerefuses to provide Carnegie (or any of the others)specific answers. This evasiveness or opacity is what makes Mama Wong sounbearable. As ieks discussion of Kantian autonomy of the subject suggests,manmeaning men and womenwants firm coordinates [: : : ] imposed onhim from the outside, through a cultural authority, through, that is, a masterin order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom andself-responsibility (Parallax 90). It is freedom, then, that is the challenge forCarnegie, the freedom to define his own limitations fully and to assume his own

enjoyment directlywithout the need of an external master (iek, Parallax90).

But challenges are also posed for Blondie and Lan. How does one deal withthe Other womanher very otherness? The challenges for Blondie and Lancan be explicated in and linked to a larger social contextthe relation betweenWestern and Third-World women.17 Between Western and Third-World womenthe story has been tense and antagonistic. Women of color/Third-World feministswere among the first to challenge woman as an undifferentiated category andquestion the concept of a universal sisterhood or womens liberation on a truly

international scale. The promotion of sisterhood is based on an essentialistnotion of womanhood beyond history, nation, race, ethnicity, and class. AudreLorde argues that there is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered bythe word Sisterhood in the white womens movement. When white feminists callfor unity, they are mis-naming a deeper and real need for homogeneity (5).Asian American feminists have been also concerned with the inextricability ofgender and ethnic identity:18 Shirley Geok-lin Lim identifies an ethnic-culturalnuancing of conventional Euro-American feminist positions on gender/powerrelations and a feminist critique of ethnic-specific identity (572); Sau-ling

Wong further maintains that Asian American literature ethnicizes gender, amode different from the usual theoretical trend of gendering ethnicity; Shu-MeiShih argues for a transpositional and transvaluational relationality in todaysglobalized world (119).

White feminists, mistaking the Other woman as the imaginary double, areengaged in that mirror like relationships of competition, mutual recognitioniek has described (Neighbor 143). For example, a white woman raped by ablack man and a black woman raped by a white man in the United States sharethe experience of rape and have much to learn from each other about its psy-

chological, sexual, familial, and legal consequences. Nonetheless, ones desireto embrace the other woman ends, ironically, by ones absorbing otherness into


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terms like woman, womanhood, and even feminist, emerging young ethnicfeminists are beginning to incorporate race, class, religion, community, or nationinto their analytic frameworks.

Again, how does one, without misrecognizing her as the imaginary double,

deal with the Other womanher otherness? Multiculturalism today rests ondiversity and tolerance: endlessly divided subgroups coexist, no one is excluded,every difference is respected, and we are all (mis)recognized. Multiculturalisttolerance is sustained only by the other devoid of otherness. The other whomone tolerates is already, in the words of iek, a reduced otherthe otheris okay in so far as this other is only a question of food, of culture, of dances(Interview with Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann). Treating the other asthe symbolic abstract other, iek says, one may indifferently recognizes herpure difference and particularity with respect to the impersonal set of rules

that coordinate our coexistence (Neighbor 143). Multiculturalism thus couldbecome, Zizek writes elsewhere, a racism with a distance (Ticklish 216), justas Blondies tolerance of and emphasis on Lans exotic differences is a way ofasserting her own superiority, and just as Western feminists, to move beyondsimple binary opposition, turn to recognize differences in Third-world womenin hope that a greater understanding of differences in the Other woman will beenriching and valuable in feminist studies.

To move beyond binary opposition, Gish Jen advocates a postmodern modeof identity, one no longer consistent or essential, but shifting and floating from

one to another contingent identification and temporary embodiment. On theoccasions of many interviews, Jen herself advocates the concept of identityin flux, and her anti-essentialist convictions are also apparent in her stories.19

Jen says that [t]heres a very Western view in which somehow you needto resolve the tension between any two things, to want things to come to akind of conclusion : : : whereas Ive been wondering where this whole idea of

fluidity comes from, and I think its because I grew up with an [Eastern] ideaof yin/yang, sweet/sour. Opposites dont find each other, but belong togetherand can intensify each other, and are simply in the nature of the world (italics

added).20 Nothing is natural, as Mama Wong intones, apparently speakingon Jens behalf (Love Wife 376). We accept Jens concept of contingency,temporality, but, as a Lacanian, not the dispersion of the subject.21 In Lacan,what the movement of symbolic deferral-substitution forever fails to attain is notIdentity but the Real of an antagonism (iek, Interrogating 211). Besides, thefluidity of identity presumes that no intracontradiction exists within an identityand interrelations among identities can be totally signified in language. Yet, thesubject, as Slavoj iek maintains, is nothing but the failure of symbolization,of its own symbolic representation, and nothing beyond this failure.22 That

is, identity (or, rather, subjectivity) is based not on a successful performancebut its failure, not on the chains meaning but its disruption; in other words,


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when it fails to be made.23 The subject can be signified in language, but it isnot purely linguistic. An identity without any intracontradiction simply servesas a type, a completely rhetoricalized form that excludes a nonmimetic accountof identification based on Lacans concept of Real.

The question is posed one more time: how does one deal with the Otherwomanher otherness? Not imagining her as a mirroring self or an abstracthuman being, one loves the other as real. To be exact, one recognizes anunfathomable abyss of radical Otherness that forever persists in her and cannotbe gentrified (iek, Neighbor 143). iek writes, the Lacanian che vuoi?is not simply an inquiry into what do you want? but more an inquiry intoWhats bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, notonly for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?(141). In fact, we all in some sense remain enigmatic and impenetrable not

for the other but also for ourselves, because we are already nontransparent toourselves and because there is an alien traumatic kernel in us that we donot master (140). This recognition of impossibility in the Other as well as inourselves helps us to remain psychologically mobile without being obliged toanswer, fulfill, repress, avoid, enforce the demand from (or on) the Other. Anew symbolic bond is formed around the mutual insistence on insurmountableimpossibility (not mirroring [dis]similarity, abstract coordination difference, orfluidity) and the mutual recognition of shared failure to account fully for who Ireally am and who the Other is. The failure is not a state of loss but is originary,

inverting the condition of impossibility/obstacle/antagonism into the very groundof coexistence.24

Only a lacking subject is capable of love (to love and to be loved). Wemay like someone for her/his (un)likeness and tolerate her/him in respect toan abstract Symbolic injunction, but we only love someone who is an abyss,whom [we] dont know, someone who is a being with an impenetrable excess(iek, Divine 12).25 While racist love conceals the failed symbolization of racialstruggle in the Real, Pauline love (agape), according to Zizek, does not introduceuniversal balance between yin/yang, between East/West, between Lan/Blondie,

or between the third women/the first women, but a kind of radical imbalancethe very gap in the order of being (iek, Divine 5). Love marks the lackin imaginary complementarity or symbolic totality. Resolving the deadlock ofnarcissistic reflection and symbolic injunction/prohibition, agape may open upthe possibility of hope, changing one from within, involving one in arduous work,and forcing one to struggle to assert ones fidelity to failure, impossibility, andthe absolutely incompatible gap. True love is not to embrace ones reflection,not to maintain a proper distance, not to be afraid to get too close (iek,

Iraq 178), and not to change her [: : : ] or look for her essence (Dean 174). To

iek, it is Christianity that offers an account of the act as Christian love, the actthat changes the coordinates of the constellation and allow[s] us to reboot in the


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work of love demands arduous work and ongoing struggle, but in the act of lovethere are no guaranteesfor Zizek, this absence of guarantees is [, however,]the very space of our freedom (Dean 203).

The Love Wife does not conclude with a happy ending, but with the begin-

ning of the arduous work of LOVE. Such seems the message in the scene, atthe very end of the novel, which Wendy observes in the waiting room upon thesurgeons telling them his news:

Well, we went into extra innings, he says. But we made it.We made it! How we cheer and cheer then, wildly, all of uscheer and

cheer, our whole family, together. Hooray! We made it! We went into extrainnings, but we made it!

Its happy, so happy, and who knows?just might stay happy. Look at usall hugging, after all, Lizzy and Bailey and Mom and Lan-lan and me, and

look now! How Lan-lan grasps Moms hand, and Mom grasps hers. Thatshappy.

But then they let go, and look away, blinking.We made it! And yet we know now, too, what we know.This World can disappear like any other.

Its amazing how dark a room can suddenly get. (379)

The Love Wife ends where the need for the long, demanding work of love begins,though with a little hope for the future and not much faith in the past. But lovenever fails. Miracles happen.

NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

KAOHSIUNG, TAIWAN

NATIONAL CHENG KUNG UNIVERSITY

TAINAN, TAIWAN

NOTES

1. Her debut novel, Typical American (1991), examines the contemporary process of becoming atypical American, questioning Americanness as a preoccupation with identity; her second novel,Mona in the Promised Land (1996), explores a new mode of subjectivity in todays postmoderncapitalist regime, an identity that is no longer situated in the in-between of binary oppositions butinvolves an incessant movement of a proliferation of differences. Asian American literary works shifttoward investigating the possibility of a fluid, decentered identity in a postmodern era, challengingthe very notion of a stable identity of sexuality, gender, and ethnicity. New tendencies can also beobserved: the lessening of cultural nationalism, the increasing feminist and deconstructivist mode,and the embrace of a postmodern subjectivity opened up to multiplicity and free play. For a detailed

discussion about the new tendencies, see Wong, Necessity, 112; Cheung 12; and Gonzalez 22542. The anti-essentialist convictions are apparent in the stories of Gish Jen. In many interviews,Jen a daughter of immigrant Chinese parents herself advocates the concept of identity in flux an


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and Interchanges); Rachel Lee,Gish Jen, in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian AmericanWriters; and Don Lee, About Gish Jen in Ploughshares.

2. This is a question asked by Jane Gallop.3. For a further discussion of cultural hybridity and racial hybridity in her earlier novels, see Fu-

jen Chens articles Performing Identity in Gish Jens Mona in the Promised Land and Postmodern

Hybridity and Performing Identity in Gish Jen and Rebecca Walker.4. We understand that that the terms First-World women and Third-World women are

problematic and insufficient to explain womens relationship in todays postmodern era, whichemphasizes multiplicity and fluidity, but as white Western feminism remains the norm against whichthe other is gauged, to move beyond the binary opposition is not to abolish the adjectival categoriessuch as Western and Third-World. Rather, we should critique the stability of each term andexplore its critical possibilities as long as they remain useful in our confrontation of racism infeminist studies. Julie Stephens observes that Western feminist no longer operates as a signof imperialism within the feminist discourse but rather indicates the anti-imperialist intentions offeminism (102); similarly, Trinh T. Minh-ha problematizes the category, Third-World women, bysaying that it is meant to be both complimentary and complementary (30).

5. iek argues that one should turn around the standard notion of ideology as providing a

firm identification to its subjects, constraining them to their social roles: what if, on a different[: : : ] level, ideology is effective precisely by constructing a space of false disidentification, offalse distance towards the actual co-ordinates of those subjects social existence? Is not this logic ofdisidentificaiton discernible from the most elementary case of I am not only an American (husband,worker, democrat, gay : : : ), but, beneath all these roles and masks, a human being, a complex uniquepersonality [: : : ] (Contingency 103).

6. iek points out that Jews are not holders of this secret jouissance not merely because theydo not know their own secretto paraphrase Hegel, the secret of the Jews is a secret for the Jewsthemselves (Interrogating 367).

7. Rather than a real thing, the thing, as the beyond-of-the-signified in Lacans term, isimpossible to imagine, impossible to put into signifiers, and impossible to reach in any way; thething is the (psycho)logical effect of the subjects accession to the Symbolic order.

8. iek elaborates his concept of parallax in detail in his latest work, The Parallax View(2006).

9. Rey Chow proposes that we should pay attention to the processes of identificationconstructionthat take place in language, psychic processes and institutions, so that the other is no longer simplyregarded as a Manichean opposite to the self, but always already a part of it (363).

10. In The Parallax View, iek maintains that a life oriented toward pleasures cannot but endup in the utmost discipline needed to guarantee the maximum of pleasures: a healthy lifestyle,from jogging to dieting and mental relaxation, respect for others (381).

11. For the homology between Lacans surplus-enjoyment and Marxists surplus-value, see iek,Fragile (2224).

12. For a detailed discussion of Lacans four discourses, see Verhaeghe 1747; for comparisonbetween the discourse of the pervert and the analyst, see Zizeks Iraq 13344 and Parallax 30305.

13. Unless indicated otherwise, it refers to Jodi Dean.14. Kathleen Woodward suggests that we can hypothesize the mirror stage of old age as the

inverse of the infant mirror stage proposed by Lacan (109), but she adds that the mirror stage of oldage is more obviously rooted in the social and economic theater of a given historical moment (111).Stanley Ridge and others also maintain that [d]ementia patients have significant characteristics incommon with infants. Pre-linguistic, sensorimotor infants are intensely sensitive to the non-verbalemotional signals of others; they are also skilled communicators, using their expressive behaviour tosignal wants, needs, fears, likes and dislikes. The same dependence on non-verbal communicationapplies in the case of late-stage dementia patients who have lost most or all of their ability to speakcoherently (153).

15. Dementia undermines the Cartesian notion of a subject as an agent of rational self-legislationand a unified being of disparate parts, mind, and body, each with its own attributes. Dementia is

one of the most frequent themes in todays literary marketplace. It is even tackled by contemporaryAsian American writers, including Cathy Song, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and others.

16 For iek the analysand herself is not self-transparent and is also struggling with a foreign


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17. For a further discussion on the imaginary relationship between Western feminists and Third-World women, see Yu.

18. For a further discussion of the development of Asian American feminism, see Grice.19. See Jens interviews with Lee, Matsukawa, Satz, and Shan.20. See Gish Jen in Asian Week.

21. Shu-mei Shih warns that there are basically two kinds of multiply situated subjects who shiftand root in different positions: those who flaunt their multiple subjectivity as a strategy of flexibilityfor maximum accumulation of money or fame and those who practice multiple subjectivity out ofethical, political, historical necessity, with all the difficulty, contradiction, and confusion it implies(119).

22. See iek, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please! 120.23. Tim Dean explicates the notion of desire in a similar vein in his Beyond Sexuality, 20005.24. For a further discussion on the political possibility of shared failure and partial enjoyment,

see McGowan 19496.25. See iek, On Divine Self-limitation and Revolutionary Love.

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Michie, Helena. Not One of the Family: The Repression of the Other Woman in Feminist Theory.Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and DianePrice Herndl. Rutgers: Rutgers UP, 1993. 5868.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Fu-jen Chen is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literature atNational Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, where he teaches ethnic American literature and Lacanianpsychoanalysis.

Su-lin Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literature at NationalCheng Kung University, Taiwan, where she teaches contemporary women writers and Third Wave

Feminism.


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