Transpacific Attachments

de Lily Wong

"Transpacific Attachments identifies the formation of a collective sense of Chinese identity through representations of the prostitute figure in popular media circulated among the U.S., China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present day. Often portrayed as a "desired other," the Chinese prostitute figure has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. The book discusses, for instance, how early Hollywood's depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes, mobilized in part by the Page Act of 1875, reflect discourses of biological threat that justified the persecution of Chinese immigrants and the United States' expansion abroad. Distributed across the Pacific, this popular narrative which places Chinese prostitutes as stand-ins for a "diseased Chinese race" provoked the rise of a Chinese National Cinema that reframed the prostitute figure into a symbol for reform in the 1930s. The Chinese prostitute figure not only serves as the discursive surface on which Hollywood and the Chinese film industry negotiate competing ideologies, but she functions also as a medium through which affective intensities are motivated into collective action. By historicizing the ways the Chinese prostitute figure is remade through transpacific media networks--from literature to film to new media--Lily Wong shows how the figure both reflects and rallies feelings that form collective identities, such as "Chineseness," that are often overlooked under national, ethnic, linguistic-centered scopes"--