Tributaries: Volume 3

TRIBUTARIES ASIAN CANADIAN AND ASIAN MIGRATION STUDIES STUDENT JOURNAL VOL. 3

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Introduction Cover Page Table of Contents Letter from the Editors Land Acknowledgement & Tributaries Editors

1 2-3 4-5 5

Contributors

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Creative Writing Responsible Tsismis: A Code of Conduct Nan Yaar?

In the Fold Dumplings

9 - 11 12 - 13 14 - 15 17

Lingon: Harapin Re-connecting, Once Again

18 - 19 20 - 26

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Visual Art

Pagitan Untitled (loving me is worth being proud of) 兔兒神回來 Return of the Rabbit God Stay for Something Better 眼花/ngan fa Without the War

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28 - 39 40 - 41 42 - 55 56 - 57 58 - 59 60

Essays Technological Fantasy: Spatial Power in China’s Premier Special Economic Zone

62 - 67

Mad Cow, Mad Woman: Considering Meat, Militarism and Madness in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

68 - 75

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Letter from the Editors This journal’s name, Tributaries, brings to mind the paths of water migration and the idea of movement. By evoking water, Tributaries invites us to consider our relationships to topologies and geographies, our relationships to unceded land and the geographies of displacement and settlement that have shaped and continue to shape our positionality on stolen land.

As the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration (ACAM) Studies student journal, Tributaries is rooted in the multidisciplinary and undisciplined origins of ACAM and our commitment to holding space for communities marginalized by white supremacist structures, systems, and discourses. We seek to provide a platform for our communities, a space of exploration, of ideas, of joy, of dissent, of critique, of life. We invite you to think with us as we move through this shared project together, recognizing that our current issue of Tributaries builds upon the collective learning of our two previous Volumes.

Volume 3 of Tributaries asks, how might we imagine Asian/Asian Canadian diasporic futurities? This question holds particular relevance in our current moment, a time that has asked us all to reimagine our futures both individually and collectively in light of an increasing awareness of both our vulnerability and mutual responsibility towards each other.

By speculating on, in, and around Asian/ Asian Canadian diasporic futurities, this year’s journal strives to highlight the intimate relationships between the past, present, and future; how the stories we tell ourselves

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about the past shape how we imagine and construct our futures and how the stories we tell ourselves about the future re-envision our past and present selves. This framing reassesses how we engage with our pasts, locate our presents, and work toward our futures, thus providing a lens to imagine the future of both Asian/Asian Canadian studies as an academic discipline, and Asian/Asian Canadian as an identity category.

As we engage in this process of reflecting on both the past and future, we want to recognize that this journal cannot encompass all that might be said and all that is being said about this topic. Instead we hope to offer glimpses of what could be, if we allow ourselves to wade into the stream and be swept away by the speculative currents of futurity while still remaining grounded in our commitment to social justice and anti-racist solidarity.

Just as many individual tributaries come together to feed a river, we would like to recognize that this Volume has been a collective effort, bringing together our community, contributors, and editors to create something that could only be the result of collective imagination. We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to our contributors, for your words and images that moved us and challenged us to imagine what Asian futurity is and could be. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to our editorial team. Thank you for your insights, commitment, and generosity throughout this process. And finally, to the whole team at the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies

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program, thank you for your wisdom and continued support.

We hope that the speculation, art, and shared storytelling contained in this volume offer an opportunity to think together across and through difference as they bring together different currents of thought. In this season

of uncertainty, what might the revolutionary potential of Asian/Asian Canadian diasporic futurities offer us?

Editors-In-Chief Olivia Lim & Leilan Wong

Land Acknowledgement Tributaries is published on the unceded and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓ íl̓ witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. UBC is built on the unceded lands of hən̓q̓ əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

What does it mean to seek recognition and belonging on stolen land?

What responsibilities come with being uninvited guests on this land?

As we continue to create space for Asian and Asian diasporic literature, artwork, and creativity, we must also consistently acknowledge and reflect on the implications of our presence on Indigenous lands and territories as non-Indigenous people of colour/Asian diasporic settlers.

We extend solidarity and gratitude to the Indigenous peoples and communities who have stewarded this land, and seek to recognise our own roles in the settler colonial structure wherever we may find ourselves

Editors Daniel Chen Moira Henry Tiffany Lee Kailey Tam Tintin Yang

Editors-in-Chief Olivia Lim Leilan Wong

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TRIBUTARIES Contributors Kyna Baltzar

Kyna Baltazar is a 1.5 generation Filipino-Canadian immigrant who has recently completed her BA in Asian Area Studies at the University of British Columbia. She hopes that she can ignite one’s interest in learning more about the rich culture and history of the Philippines through her work.

Vanessa Chan

Vanessa Chan (陳詠珊) is a UBC graduate in English Language and Literature with a minor in ACAM. She is a second generation Chinese-Canadian settler growing and creating on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people. Although her experiences have mostly been in academia and student support, she enjoys making multimedia creations in both traditional and digital forms.

Find her at https://vanessachan.ubcarts.ca/.

Elliott Y.N. Cheung

Elliott Y.N. Cheung is an M.A. student in Cultural and Creative Industries at the Taipei National University of the Arts. He received his B.A. Hons. in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of British Columbia, specializing in Japanese literature with additional focus on transpacific cultural flows. His present research interests involve queer Sinophone homonationalism and discourses of the body. He is also expanding his artistic practice at the intersections between dance, film, and writing.

Pbebe M. Ferrer

Phebe M. Ferrer is a researcher and poet living in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Phebe recently graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of British Columbia. She is currently exploring and studying poetry as a medium of writing and expression.

Louie Leyson

Louie Leyson is a Filipino Canadian student going into her fourth of undergrad at the University of British Columbia. She explores themes of Filipino diaspora through poetry and multimedia arts.

Alger Liang

Alger Liang is a settler who breathes, lives, and learns on the territories of the Squamish, TsleilWaututh, and Musqueam peoples. Liang is a multidisciplinary artist whose works are a by-product of reflection, exploration, and resistance. His practice takes a phenomenological approach that uses the body as a tool to sense the situated world. Through this embodiment, he engages with themes such as: the queer Asian diasporic identity, performativity, memory, family, and trauma.

Beverly Ma

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Beverly grew up on the unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ peoples. She enjoys painting as a way to explore the teachings and stories of her Cantonese ancestors. Beverly recently graduated from UBC with a double major in Indigenous Studies and Geography. She continues to learn through the critical lens cultivated by this education.

VOL. 3 Contributors Hannah Pabuaya Rubia

Hannah is a Filipina settler living on the unceded and occupied territories of the Tsawwassen, Sto:lo, Kwantlen and Musqueam peoples. Hannah is completing a degree in English Language and Literature while studying playing double bass on the side.

Arrthy Thayaparan

Arrthy Thayaparan is a Tamil Canadian student who recently completed her BSc with a minor in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies and will be going on to complete her Master of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. She strives to share her platform with marginalized communities to help their voices be heard by the global community.

Shawna Turai

Shawna Turai is a first generation Tamil Canadian who is currently in her third year of studies for English and Geography. Shawna is an outspoken advocate of the Tamil experience and as a student leader has led efforts in sharing stories of Tamil history through her work.

An Xu

An Xu is a third year student majoring in English literature and minoring in Asian Candian and Asian Migration studies. She is a Chinese born, Canadian raised writer, and currently lives in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples. Throughout her academic and creative endeavors, An explores what it means to be a woman of colour who is both settler and immigrant. She’s always working towards reclaiming her heritage and feeling authentic to her hybridity.

Tintin Yang

Tintin Yang is a recent graduate from UBC with a BA in International Relations and an ACAM minor. She is a settler of Chinese descent currently on the ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓il-wətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people.

She is interested in digital cultures, our anthropocentric world, critical race theory, storytelling, and international politics.

Kihan Yoon-Henderson

Kihan is a recent UBC graduate with a major in Human Geography and a minor in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies. She is a mixed race member of the Korean diaspora, who grew up on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. As part of her studies, Kihan also attended Yonsei University in Seoul. In reflecting on the theme of this volume, she sees this paper as engaging in disruptive notions of time, particularly grappling with the desire for a peaceful futurity on the Korean peninsula in the context of ongoing personal and collective violence mired in the legacies of the Cold War.

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Creative Writing 1. Responsible Tsimis:

A Code of Conduct 2. Nan Yaar?

3. In the Fold 4. Dumplings 5. Lingon/Harapin 6. Re-connecting; Once Again

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9 - 11 12 - 13 14 - 15 17 18 - 19 20 - 26

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Responsible Tsismis: A Code of Conduct Hannah Pabuaya Rubia and Phebe M. Ferrer Tsismis • From the Spanish word chisme, integrated into Tagalog vowels and sounds.

• Both a noun and a verb, tsismis is defined as gossip. Others describe tsismis as a form of discourse that negotiates between fact and truth.1 1. We imagine tsismis evolving beyond its current form We acknowledge its past and continued usage for harm, and for its intent to spread negative rumours and damage reputations.

We want to instead reimagine tsismis as an aspect of care work, where tsismis’ ability to hold both fact and truth creates space for community conflict to be acknowl- edged, discussed, and resolved, instead of being dismissed.

2. We imagine using tsismis as a means of directly confronting the conflicts within our friendships, romantic, familial, and larger community relationships.

We realize that conflict will never be eradicated from our community because it is rooted in difference, and our aim is not to enforce homogeneity amongst our peoples2. However, conflict is sustained when we refuse to directly acknowledge natural problems that arise from the differences amongst our community. Resolving conflict would require inwardly confronting that resistance.

We want to envision the work of tsismis after it is shared. Oftentimes, the speaker uses tsismis to avoid the person they are in conflict with and to privilege their perceptions of the other’s faults or misdeeds to the listener. The lack of perspective implies that there is only one person is at fault, and that this act of shunning is a consequence of their wrongdoing3. The speaker can effectively use tsismis as an overstatement of harm committed against them, and wield the community to collectively shun the other person as punishment. While a person may be uncomfortable with their own participation in the conflict, this does not justify shunning. Feelings of hurt, frustration, and discomfort should not be conflated with 1 2 3

For example, Filipino-American writer R. Zamora Linmark.

Schulman 2019: 20 Schulman 2019: 21

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TRIBUTARIES feeling unsafe4. Shunning is punishment because it isolates the other person from their community and closes off any path for the other’s story to be heard.

We want to reimagine tsismis as this shared responsibility, ultimately toward making sure that conflict does not repeat. For true justice to occur, we must look towards our community as the place for resolution5. We envision passive aggression, those little leaks of indirect refusal, as an early sign for community intervention.

We understand that tsismis thrives on conflict precisely because it forces the speaker to be highly subjective and speak from the place of “I”, where no statement can be declared as absolute fact. In other words, the usage of tsismis symbolizes an understanding that conflict can only be resolved when different subjective truths are confronted.

3. We imagine tsismis as community accountability.

As children of the diaspora, we joke about tsismis as gendered community surveillance from our titas, lolas, mothers, and others.

We want to instead see tsismis as an aspect of community accountability, where we actively recognize and face the conflicts in our relationships, and work toward addressing them.

Tsismis is an expression of our desire for ongoing improvement among our community of families, friends, and significant others. We do not only want their improvement for our sakes but because we know it contributes to our collective improvement.

We want to reimagine tsismis not as just going behind someone’s back to gossip about the drama in their lives, but a free-flowing space where third parties can work through the conflict before confronting those involved. Tsismis becomes an expression of care.

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Schulman 2019: 58 Schulman 2019: 20

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Artist Statement We write this code of conduct as a means of confronting the discomfort we experience due to our unabashed love of tsismis. This is our attempt to negotiate the difference between enjoying chaos inherent in tsismis and gossip, versus allowing conflict to fester amongst the people we care about. We realize that in moments of interpersonal conflict, we often turn to tsismis as a way of releasing the pent-up frustration and opinions we hold.

We, therefore, write this code of conduct as a pact to ourselves and our community, to commit to using tsismis as a form of community accountability and conflict resolution. We are inspired

by Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is not Abuse, particularly where she envisions “the community surrounding a Conflict [as] the source of its resolution”1. merritt k reflects that Schulman’s vision is best practiced in small communities “whose members can’t afford to turn on one another”.

While we, ourselves, may have experienced tsismis as a form of care work, its popular usage as disparaging gossip prevents us from fully imagining what this looks like. We thus write this code of conduct as an attempt to more fully imagine tsismis as care.

We have written this code of conduct in English because we write specifically for the Filipino/a/x diaspora who may or may not speak Tagalog, and instead speak English or other Philippine languages.

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Schulman 2019: 20

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Nan Yaar?

Arrthy Thayaparan and Shawna Turai Nangal engal sontha nilam illatha makkal.

We are a people with no land of our own.

Varalaru munnetram, thoodichuh thedenallam, engalai alikkirathu.

Every historical advance, every claim that we make is denounced or swept away.

Nankal pala udankillaikuh cerntavarkal, ullakin ovvura mulailyillum paraviyirukkirom We hail from many places and have spread to every corner of the world.

Jadhi, Kalanittuvam, marrum inappatukolaikku etiraka nankal poratukirom.

We fight against caste, colonialism, and genocide.

Indru varai kuta.

Even to this very day.

Kuthu, Silambattum, Parai enpatu nam evvarum nammai velippatuttinom.

Kuthu, Silambattum, Parai were how we expressed ourselves.

Intha ollikal amaithiyaguh irunthalum nam melum celkirom.

Though these sounds get quieter the further we go.

Engal mozhi, engal mozhi, onrupatukiratu.

Our mozhi, our language unites us as one.

Nankal araciyal matrum manarityiana tataikalai etirkolkirom, Though we face barriers, political and mental, Engal makkalin tiyakankalaiyum ilappukalaiym nangal eppothum ninaival kolkirom.

We always remember the sacrifices and losses of our people.

Ithu en munnorgal mulamkha en rettattin valiyaga odukirathu, Yendah mannasuh paysaruh mozhi, Tamizh.

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Artist Statement “Nan Yaar?� is a poem that traces the journey of the Tamizh (prounounced Tha-Mil) people through colonization, genocide, and uprooting from our native lands. The poem expresses Tamizh pride, but also expresses the struggle to maintain that identity in a foreign country.

The bilingualism of the poem represents our fading ability to write and understand this ancient language. As such, we communicate in this way to connect to our past and honour our heritage—to show that we have not forgotten our origins.

Through the piece, we hope to bring awareness to the challenges of being a marginalized community and claim agency in a space that has historically undermined us. The stories of our ancestors and the struggles faced by the Tamizh people guide us as we seek to preserve our culture, reminding us of the importance to remember where we came from. By connecting to the past, we are able to construct a nuanced identity of what it means to be Tamizh in the diaspora.

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In the Fold An Xu

“Kai Ti, would you come help me make the dumplings for dinner?”

Katie’s eyes widened. She looked back toward her room where she had been looking forward to sinking back into the quiet solitude of the Tolkein book she’d been reading.

Sensing her reluctance, Laolao laughed softly, tied a red apron around Katie’s waist and pulled her into the kitchen. “Don’t worry, la. I’ll teach you how.”

Laolao showed Katie how to knead the dough the right way. Then rolled, cut, and rolled again into small round wrappings. With a flick of her wrist, she scooped up a ball of filling with her chopsticks and pleated the wrapper around it in three swift movements. “Now you try,” she said, offering Katie a wrapper.

Katie’s clumsy fingers fumbled and tried to stuff half the amount of filling Laolao had in about ten times as many movements, squeezing the dough over and under itself until flour and oil stuck to every crevice between her fingers and hardened into a scaly crust. Her hands ached from holding the shape, but the dumpling just refused to come together.

Finally she opened her fist to reveal the folds that had been squished together into one large unrecognizable clump. Katie and Laolao burst out laughing at the sight of her, frankly, abomination beside Laolao’s masterpiece on the large bamboo dumpling tray. “It looks really terrible,” Katie managed through her tears.

“I was just as bad as you when my Ma first taught me,” Laolao consoled her. “She used to say that a person’s dumplings say a lot about them and where they come from.”

Katie snorted. “That must mean that I am just a shapeless clump as a person—” “aiya nonsense,” Laolao tapped her on the arm with her chopsticks. “You just haven’t gotten the rhythm right. The dough and filling are two halves of a whole. Stop fighting it so much.”

So Katie practiced a bit more, and thankfully with a few more pointers, and for the sake of their dinner, she got steadily better. Once the pleats came together and the filling stopped escaping, the minutes melted away.

When Katie lifted her head, she was surprised to see they had already covered the entire bamboo tray. The dumplings were plump and imperfect, placed in a perfect swirl.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she admitted. “We should do this more often when you visit us.” Laolao hummed in agreement.

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At dinner time, the family folded around the round dinner table, parents and aunts and cousins congratulating Laolao and Katie on their efforts.

“Thank you!”

“Xiexie,” Laolao smiled, the wrinkles around her eyes staying long after it faded. “You might be able to tell the ones I made from Kai Ti’s, but they still taste good all the same.”

And laughter swirled around the room.

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Illustration by Tintin Yang

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jiao zi An Xu over and under we fold into pretty little parcels lips pouting, pinching, wrinkling the years gone past, mince stains fingers and alliums linger brine of soy and bite of ginger hands bleached with flour brushed off on aprons we pleat to crusty cheeks and hiccuped laughter we preserve in dough a perfect suspension

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Lingon/ Harapin (Look Behind / Look Forward) Phebe M. Ferrer

lumingon ka anak / sa tanawin / sa tubig at langit / at sa atin / alam mo ba / nakaugnay tayo / kahit / tayo’y magkalayo mom i am looking / how long should i watch / my steps behind me / how far must i / try to / see / what / am i even looking for ngunit anak / huwag kang palaging lumingon / harapin mo / ang tanawin / ang tubig at langit / tingnan mo / kung saan ka lumalakad / baka ikaw ay / madapa but mom / saan / where am i going / paano / how do i make sure / na lumalakad ako / sa tamang direksyon anak / may tiwala / ako / sa’yo mom / how long should i wait / to see you / when will it be safe again / to come home huwag mong kalimutan / anak / home / is wherever you choose it / to be

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Artist Statement In thinking about Asian Canadian futurities, I inevitably think about our past and histories.

Jose Rizal, a famous Filipino historical figure, once said, “ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa kanilang paroroonan”—those who don’t know how to look back at where they came from will never arrive at their destination. Our histories have established the roads that we now walk on to our futures and I believe it is our duty to never forget that.

However, I also fear that we will become stuck in the past, in the trauma running through our family trees and bodies, and that we will not find the strength to move forward. I fear that we will be stuck in questions of identity, unable to think about larger systemic questions like intercommunity solidarities.

In this piece, I bring my thoughts about the tension between looking back and looking forward through an imagined conversation with my mother, based on conversations we have had.

Inevitably, thoughts of home, identity, and separation due to the pandemic also join the conversation. Through this piece, I hope to convey my own personal growth from being stuck in questions of identity, to moving forward, claiming an audacity to define myself and my home as I choose.

For the format of this poem, I particularly chose to use forward slashes for several reasons.

First, I want to visually show the poem’s rhythm, especially for the Tagalog lines. Second, I want to visually separate Tagalog and English and thus show the separation of the two speakers, reflecting their differing lived experiences and the stage of life they are in. Despite this separation, I also use the slashes to present parallels between the speakers’ lines (e.g., ‘ngunit anak’, ‘but mom’) to show that while these two speakers come from different places and generations, their sentiments are the same. Toward the end of the poem, even the Tagalog and English cannot be kept separate, as the speakers use both languages to reach one another.

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Re-connecting, Once Again Elliott Y.N. Cheung COMING I have questioned for some time what it means to be ‘from’ somewhere — to know certain experiences, to practice certain traditions, to speak a certain way, to have been born or raised somewhere, some way. In the same vein, I have considered the significance of ‘foreignness’, and all of its associations.

Inside / outside, exogenous / endogenous, local / international.

Constructed borders, the nation-state, in the age of coronavirus.

Nationalities, their benefits.

Identity dictated by a passport, or two, or three.

By the info page, the resident card, the outdated picture.

Remove your hat and glasses, give your thumbprint, your address of stay.

Xenophobia. Colonialism.

Histories of state violence and buried oppression.

The blooming of a sunflower, the opening of an umbrella.

Two places, two histories, two paths.

I decided to move to Taiwan for multiple reasons, and whenever I am asked, I always struggle to find an answer. I was curious about a Sinophone society where LGBT rights are recognized. I was intrigued by the nation’s commitment to a free civic society, democracy and human rights. But above all, I was motivated by an imagination of home. // In the summer of 2018, I was one of twenty students invited to participate in an annual Global Seminar titled “The Heritage of Chinese Migration”. Four years after the Umbrella Movement, one year after my father had passed away, opening the recruitment email was the first moment of many that bade me home to discover what had been left behind.

Although my mother, bearing a deep-seated fear of the Communist Party, expressed some consternation at the fact that the program would take us to China, I insisted. I packed my bags and went to the airport, and soon found myself looking up at the display in the departure lounge, ‘CX865 to Hong Kong’ illuminated in bold white lettering.

There I remembered a journey I made as a child finally being done in reverse.

Driving out of the city, passing the skyscrapers for the last time, weeping at the airport, waving goodbye, plugging the earphones in on the armrest and hearing the unfamiliar lilt of Air Canada’s

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French-language programming pour into my ears.

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// One year after our trip, on June 9, 2019, the Water Revolution erupted. At the very moment the million-strong tide of Hongkongers’ indignance exploded onto the streets of our beloved city, I found myself on a plane leaving for the next stop on my graduation trip.

It was on that same day twenty-some years ago that my mother stepped foot on the soil on which I was to be born. Her imagination of it must have been different from what she encountered, just like my rainy window every cold January was a far cry from the verdant hills of Sea Island I passed with the car windows rolled down on our visits every warm July.

Two years after our trip, on May 21, 2020, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China unanimously agreed to pass a National Security Law in Hong Kong. The law would allow Chinese legal jurisdiction in the city over any cases related to national security, destroying Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, rule of law, and way of life, as well as prematurely ending the “One Country, Two Systems” principle under which the city had been governed since the Handover. The day of its implementation on June 30, 2020, has been cited as the true Handover of Hong Kong — the day it became ‘just another Chinese city.’ The day when all that made Hong Kong different, distinctive, unique, was neutered, stamped out, unable to be recorded, for there’d be nothing to erase in the first place.

In the days following, the offenses began pouring in with no end in sight.

The immediate disbanding of several high-profile pro-democracy associations; the political exile of key pro-democracy figures; the release of the law’s details at the moment of their signing; the inclusion of extrajudicial criminal accountability for anyone who has supported Hong Kong regardless of nationality; the first arrests for possession of a Hong Kong Independence flag, of a Taiwanese flag, of pro-independence stickers; arrests for pro-independence slogans and public art promoting protest; mass arrests of protestors holding blank pieces of paper; the installation of facial recognition cameras on Hong Kong streets; the cancellation of extradition treaties between Hong Kong and Western countries; the U.S. cancellation of Hong Kong’s trade status; the establishment of re-education camps in Shenzhen; the explosion of a third wave of coronavirus cases due to a government unwilling to close borders; the firing of pro-democracy academics from their posts; the disqualification of pro-democracy candidates from running for election; the postponement of Legislative Council elections; young protestors seized in their homes; the U.S. sanctioning of key Hong Kong and Chinese officials; the storming of Hong Kong’s remaining pro-democracy paper by over two hundred policemen.

The new purple flag denoting violation of the Security Law and subjection to arrest; now the vibrant standard of the executioners of freedom, the Hong Kong police.

I remember the time my classmates and I spent exploring the city.

Stopping for barbequed meats and bottled soy milk.

Drinking beers at the wharf and spending the night at LKF. Admiring the nightscape, like nowhere else.

Cooling off with loeng cha and giggling about ‘Cantonese salami’.

Hitting all three Eslite bookstores in one day.

Going into 7-11 just for the A/C. Dancing in the aisles at Park’N’Shop.

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TRIBUTARIES Buying Cantonese-dubbed Digimon episodes at Park’N’Shop.

Going into 7-11 just for the ice cream.

Hitting PageOne with my dad.

Warming up with walnut paste and being recognized by the aunties — “Lok-lok’s here again!”

Admiring the nightscape, like nowhere else.

Eating McDonald’s with my friends every Friday and shopping in Times Square.

Stopping for street sausages and flavoured waffles.

I imagine the life I might have lived, the possibility of which is now and forever closed. // It was two years after our trip when I found myself in Liberty Square, in Taipei, shouting the familiar slogans amongst local Taiwanese and Hongkongers — “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of Our Times!” But when the masked protestors in black, solemnly waving their flags in the crowd called out, “Hong Kong Independence! The Only Way Out!”, the organizers on the stage seemed to look the other way. It was as if everyone already held a tacit fear of the consequences that shouting such slogans would bring.

GROWING Re-connecting is the title of a film by several of my classmates about my and two friends’ journey to our ancestral lands in Guangdong. My grandparents fled to Hong Kong after World War II, before the Communist Party took control of China. The postwar demographic makeup of Hong Kong involved a significant number of these refugees, who played an integral part in the formation of Hong Kong identity. My family proudly claims to be Hong Konger, though after immigrating to Vancouver, they also call themselves ‘proudly Canadian.’

It may be diasporic fantasy which prompted my attempt to claim these historical and cultural links.

My grandmother had very little information about my grandfather’s home in the city, long abandoned and torn down in favour of rapid urban development. I was only ever taught a single phrase in their local dialect, because compared to the prestige of Hong Kong Cantonese, it seemed irrelevant or unimportant. In the film I explored this aporia, describing it as a sort of respect I was paying to my paternal relations.

One evening after class, a dear friend and I took the South Island Line to my childhood home. I remember the palpitations as I stood on the train, looking through the window at the familiar sights, the sub-tropical greenery, Ocean Park. I remember emerging onto ground level and bursting into tears at the sight of my old stomping grounds — the concrete sidewalks I would run along as a child, the orderly public spaces, the smell of the brine, the wet markets and ice cream stores, long replaced by cinemas and luxury outlets. Walking back to my old apartment building, I asked the old security guard if I could walk around in the lobby — 我以前喺度住㗎,“I used to live here” — and afterwards ended the night with homestyle fare at the neighbourhood mall I frequented as a child.

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Two years out from the trip that changed my life, sitting in my Taipei apartment a mere hour’s flight away from my parents’ home, I began reflecting on how my connections to home and heritage had developed since. Had I become more secure in who I am, my ties to the places my family and I have lived, the lands we have been hosts or guests on? Was there a place I could truly call home? Does there need to be? // I came to Taiwan in search of that home, and though I found it in some senses, I realize that no matter how many links I pull on, how much I try to reconstruct, that home does not exist, has never existed, may never come to exist. Home is a transient image that has been and is in the process of being destroyed, whether altered by the years, ravaged by the pandemic, or muzzled by draconian rule. The more places you live, instead of being able to call just one place home, the more places coalesce in the way you act and talk and behave and live. Diaspora becomes layered.

I will never be someone with a secure sense of national identity like those who have lived in one place their whole life, who will live and die for their little corner of the field. Hong Kong itself cannot claim that kind of imagined tradition, because its history is marked by layers of empire and assimilation. Hong Kong was a hybrid city, a construction cleaved out of a fishing village for capitalist purposes, a haven for those who did not care for their roots, a floating city. Any attempt by its inhabitants to claim roots and decide their own destiny, was denied by the empires that held it hostage.

So its people fled. What would have been their home became the ballast for a journey that took

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TRIBUTARIES them to their next destination. My parents were so proud to be Hongkongers and glad to become Canadian, and they expected that I would be too. Instead, I felt stretched along that vast distance, my body a thread pulled taut from both ends. To this day I relish in the fleeting moments where I feel secure in my identity. Yet at heart, I think too liberally to be Hongkonger, talk too abruptly to be Taiwanese, and look too Asian to be Canadian. The liminality of my identity rings endlessly in the chamber of my being. With every attempt to become merely one thing, I only add more frequencies to that chamber.

One day, it will be drowned out with sound, and I will become everything and nothing at all.

LIVING I have seen the way that Taiwanese people have fought so fervently for their home, which has taught me a great deal about the way I and other Hongkongers, whether diasporic or local, ought to see their home. Many advocates for Hong Kong nationalism surmise that Hong Kong is entering a period akin to that which the Taiwanese experienced under martial law: where intellectuals, leftists, and dissenters were arbitrarily seized, silenced, made to disappear, or executed. Where diaspora played an integral role in engaging with their host culture and lobbying for international support. Where, from the day democracy finally came, they worked hard to reconstruct their identity and face the inexplicable pain of the past.

I have seen Taiwanese nationalism promote itself at the expense of others, and indeed it can be argued that this is the nature of nationalism. But I have also seen many examples where this endeavour spills out of nationalism, to become dynamic and inclusive. I have gained insight on how to view myself, how to face the ellipses of my past, and how to approach the reconstruction of the place I might call home into a place that is fit to bear that moniker and where the right to do so is respected. However, I see that as more Hongkongers flee to Taiwan, and as more are inspired by the tenacity and commitment of those around them to build up their common space, they will also begin

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VOL. 3 to see Taiwan as home, that they will learn its story and its ways of life, and that this home too will grow to accommodate them.

I have come to realize that cultivating a sense of home is a constant effort. That security is conferred for some and has to be won for others. That for those others, they will never truly be safe until the hegemonic society not only sees, but understands their existence, a struggle for which they fight with everything they have. // There will be a day when the people see through the lies of the establishment that keep them subservient to benefit those in power. That day came long ago for many Hongkongers, though they are few and helpless against an authoritarian regime, and they must keep their mouths shut, or speak truth in a way that appears congruous with the lies. In learning these tactics of resistance, they join the ranks of all those oppressed by authoritarianism around the world.

Hongkongers are well-equipped. Hongkongers have taught the world many things about resisting at the blade’s edge of capitalism, and for that I cannot help but feel a sense of pride. I am proud to have inherited a Lion Rock spirit of perseverance and innovation, to have grown up with the explosive and melodic language of chuen and pok-kai and gah yau and ding lei gor fai and ngo dei zun hai ho lun zhong yi heung gong.

I hope that one day, all those who have fled Hong Kong due to political persecution will be free to return home. The protestors will take off their masks and see one another’s faces at the bottom of the pot1. The paths will converge, and we will join hands with those who are freed alongside us, those who supported our journey to freedom, at home and abroad. The histories will be remembered, and written down, and taught. We will once again be water, running forth from the mountain, never staying put, always in flux, vibrant, beautiful, and free.

I come from Hong Kong, grew up in Vancouver, and live in Taipei. I am all of these places, and yet none of them, because the places we live become a part of us. I will draw on the lessons I have learned in all of them, pay respect to those who have supported me, and work tirelessly until the day my home is free.

Then I will tell those around me about all the places I’ve lived, and how they brought me home.

July 8, 2020 All photos courtesy of the author.

1 In Cantonese, 煲底見 bo dai gin, a popular reference to the shape of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council building, which is shaped like a large pot. Near the beginning of the protests, the protestors made a promise to meet at the bottom of the building in a free Hong Kong, remove their masks, and see one another’s faces for the first time.

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Artist Statement This work is a personal exploration rooted in the experience of the “Heritage of Chinese Migration” seminar that I experienced with ACAM in the summer of 2018. During that course, several classmates, headed by Mimi Nguyen, followed my and two others’ journeys to our ancestral homes, and our process of unpacking and discovering our experiences therein. This project left a deep impression on me that still resonates today. As the members of that cohort have gone on into various different paths while ostensibly maintaining the sense of awakening that that program in-spired, and in light of recent tumultuous political changes in the Sinophone sphere and globally, I believed it was an imperative time to rediscover and, indeed, re-connect to the experiences of the past.

As such, I reached out to the classmates of that cohort to see if anyone would be interested in a collective recollection. Though I did not receive a strong response, I believe that that is also indicative of the nature of the current situation (people may be busy, may have moved on to other things, may fear political reprisal for their remarks, etc.), and that the act of calling together the group for recollection, in itself, is a sort of reflection on the ripple effects of history into the future. This, I believe, is congruous with the issue’s theme of ‘diasporic futurities’ — we are diaspora not only physically, from our ancestral homes, but temporally, from the sending point of our together-ness in the past. As the progression of the future is intricately linked with the sequential unfolding of the past, this year, its events, and this issue together mark an important turning point for me and my future direction, at which point an affirmation of the past is necessary in order to continue forward.

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Visual Art 1. Pagitan 2. Untitled (loving me is worth being proud of) 3. 兔兒神回來 Return of the Rabbit God 4. Stay for Something Better 5. 眼花/ngan fa 6. Without the War

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Pagitan Arrthy Thayaparan, Kyna Baltazar, Louie Leyson Artist Statement PAGITAN

(Adverb) /Pa-gee-tahn/

1. time or space between.

2. space between rows of seats in church aisles, etc.

Ave Maria / Gratia plena. / Maria, gratia plena. / Maria, gratia plena.

When considering the indelible mark on the Philippines left by the violence of Spanish colonialism more than five centuries ago, the term “post-colonialism” rings like a fantasy.

Filipinos understand that the Jesuits never fully disappeared from the islands—they’d left an enduring realm of ghosts in their wake.

Ave, ave Dominus / Tecum.

Through our layering of Taglish poetry over double exposure photography blending Catholic and Filipino imagery, we’ve produced a visual microcosm of the liminal “Third Space” which has emerged—both spatially and temporally—from Spanish Catholicism’s interactions with Filipino culture. The Filipino “Third Space”—or Pagitan, as we’ve decided to name it— functions as both a manifestation and taming of the realm of ghosts left by imperial violence.

Benedicta tu in mulieribus / Et benedictus.

Much of our imagery focuses on a gendered understanding of this space. Filipinos have elevated the icon of the Virgin Mary to a far higher status of holiness than the Jesuits intended. In this way, the veneration of Mary has generated its own Pagitan. What happens within a Third Space carved out in the shape of a woman?

Et benedictus fructus ventris / Ventris tuae, Jesus.

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As young womxn who are children of immigrants, or immigrants ourselves, we understand the gendered struggles of navigating Pagitan. In our poetry, we convey our personal doubts, struggles, and epiphanies within this space.

Ave Maria, Ave Maria, Ave Maria.

Though we understand the grief of the Catholic ghost as a permanent fixture to the Philippines and to its diaspora, we also examine the apparition’s form as a site of transformation and hybridity. What emerges from the interweaving of disparate spaces?

What can we cultivate in Pagitan, in the gardens between gardens?

Ave Maria, Ave Maria.

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1 I’ve been whittled down to a servant too soft, yearning too long, spine vanishing downward from me like violet lenten wax. ave. ave. Maria.

2 Which one is really me. I can never tell Am I the daughter in the portrait? Or the angel in the altar?

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3 Stuck in Pagitan 4 I tried so hard to be clean for you. Maria, Mary, I bathed in the salt of your white tears at sinunog ko.

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5 Rosary beads bleed through my mother’s fingers. Sa diyos ama namin. Awang mininithi —— 6 Mga luha na tahimik bumabagsak But smiles plastered for the memories

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7 I pray to become someone whole Dinadasal ko ay maging buo 8 Hindi pa tayo tapos

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9 The ghost of a thousand Phillippine mythologies razed by Catholic fires Unclasps my hands Slowly, turns them to pressed hyacinth 10 Leaves shading us. Hidden in the dark from darkness Ano ang katotohanan ano ang kasinungalingan

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11 Dumating na ang Araw It was too late When that day came 12 eating sinigang from a paper bowl with creased brown hands

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13 gone away & replaced with the faint rose notes of your western perfume 14 Looking out through windows daydreaming for a tahanan

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15 Wading through traumas Lodged in my bloodstream 16 Days became months And months turned into years

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17 Imagine yourself infinite - kita, inyo, mo, ninyo, ikaw, kayo 18 We thought time stopped for us Hindi pala we were wrong Time did not wait for us.

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Untitled (loving me is worth being proud of) 兔兒神回來 (Return of The Rabbit God) Alger Liang Artist Statement Liang’s recent work, 兔兒神回來 (Return of The Rabbit God), inspired by a queer 18th century Qing Dynasty folktale by scholar and poet 袁枚 (Yuan Mei), is born from navigating the queer Chinese diaspora and the toggling of two worlds. How do you negotiate yourself being in both - a cultural space that celebrates your heritage but condemns your queer identity, but also a colonial Western space that accepts your queerness but orientalises your heritage? How does being in each space inform how you move and perform within each space? Through world building and fashion photography, this work explores these intersections and claims them in full glory - it narrates a contemporary Rabbit God, an androgynous fashion deity who reimagines a new Asian diasporic futurity for bodies navigating the tension between these two spaces. Their return is a reclamation of queer identity and cultural roots. Similarly, Untitled (loving me is worth being proud of) is a propaganda style screen-print that also speaks to the present and the future by re-activating the past. Liang uses archival imagery, bold text, and colour to convey affect in memory, history, and trauma. The Chinese characters that translate to “loving me is worth being proud of” can be read as affirmation and cynicism. The work asks - “living as an Asian diasporic settler, what does it mean to be proud and how does pride shift and manifest through cultural difference?”

Model/Creative Director: Alger Liang Photographers: Tyler Bolivar Assistant Photographer: Terrell Paiva Makeup Artist: Melfinna Tjugito Wardrobe Stylist: Rina Ong Hair Stylist: Patrick Uy Calligrapher: Sheen Wong

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Untitled (loving me is worth being proud of)

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Stay for Something Better Vanessa Chan Artist Statement Earlier this year, I had an argument about the protests around the world, and especially in Hong Kong. They asked me: “If these people don’t love this place, why don’t they just leave?

Why do they care?” I didn’t have what it took to speak to this person in their language, to make them understand that the drive behind these protests and riots and actions was a desire for something better; a dream for a world where these injustices aren’t just ignored, but well and truly gone. This conversation stuck with me, and when the Black Lives Matter protests began, these thoughts came back over and over as I read post after post vilifying the protests. /// I wanted to write something for my submission this year, but this image kept coming back, and felt much more powerful. The yellow t-shirt with the BLM fist represents these two movements.

Asian Canadian futurities are not only rooted in the past, and in our diasporic communities.

We must also focus on those in our current communities, recognize our roles as settlers, and examine how we as a community uphold other systemic injustices. In line with this issue’s theme, I believe that we must remember and witness the injustices of the past and the present in order to dream of better, brighter futures.

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眼花/ngan fa Beverly Ma Artist Statement This piece is titled 眼花/ngan fa, which translates literally to “eye flower” in English, but means “blurred vision” in Cantonese. Painted in acrylic are vines of honeysuckle at different stages of bloom, intertwining with a peony plant—all of which are hiding stalks of bamboo. The messy growth and entanglement of plants creates a sense of blurriness, reflective of the complex and diverse realities we face as Diasporic Asians. The blooming honeysuckle alludes to the future that we continue to construct and envision, one which bears as much complexity as our past and which offers transformation, healing, and celebration.

In conceptualizing the possibilities of diasporic futures, I am prompted by the question of where and to whom I ground my exploration of this theme. I reflect on the stories told by my grandmother while we harvested honeysuckle flowers, and reminisce about the strong scent of red peonies as we prepared to welcome summer.

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眼花/ngan fa Acrylic on canvas, 24’’ x 30’’

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Without the War Arrthy Thayaparan Artist Statement Without the War is based on a poem I wrote that imagines the lives of my family had history run a different course. As a child who grew up learning and witnessing the atrocities of the Sri Lankan civil war through the media, it was always clear to me that my family had not freely chosen to leave their homes behind.

As such, I was always shocked to hear from other Asian friends that their parents had come to Canada of their own volition. And so, in the back of my mind, I’ve always pondered what would’ve changed had there been a choice for my parents.

The film uses footage from the archives of the Associate Press and family videos as a backdrop for the poem to show the loss that is felt by my family for what could have been our life. The poetry is punctuated by interviews with my parents. While the poem daydreams about the possibilities, the interviews break through to show the harsh reality of the situation. I let my parents expressions, emotions and stories speak for themselves, because as first hand witnesses to the conflict, they are the most reliable sources to help educate others about the war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM7jmqb8ork

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Essays 1. Technological Fantasy: Spatial Power in China’s Premier Special Economic Zone 2. Mad Cow, Mad Woman: Considering Meat, Militarism and Madness in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

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Technological Fantasy: Spatial Power in China’s Premier Special Economic Zone Tintin Yang INTRODUCTION Trajectories of national economic development under global capitalism in Asia tend to focus on narratives that depict a shift from the export of raw materials or low-value product manufacturing to high-value added goods (Zhuang & Ye 2).

Economists’ fascination with the “economic miracle” in Asia is an appraisal of the free market solution to poverty and wealth creation. China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Shenzhen was introduced in 1979 under Deng Xiaopeng’s leadership as part of the Open Door Policy (ibid.).

Often referred to as “China’s Silicon Valley”, Shenzhen’s rapid growth inspired the proliferation of other similar economic experiments throughout Asia. Principle to this story is the advent of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) to the region. Today, most inward FDI in China comes from the United States, whose investors benefit from the highly specialized factories and manufacturers (Yuan et al. 59). The technological fantasy that persists in the glistening high-tech world of Shenzhen is not only a product of techno-orientalist narratives but also one that enables the consumption of hightech goods at an ever-increasing rate of demand.

Technological fantasy refers to the expanding tech manufacturing sector and its affiliated imagined geography of the electronics factory. The fantasy is one that flattens the multifaceted forms of labour necessary for the production of such goods, and does not appreciate the discursive effects that the introduction of a SEZ has on local geographies, economics, and its transnational impacts on global

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finance and trade. To that end, SEZs serve as a discursive site of economic and political power as well as productive spaces of discursive forms of labour, and contribute to an imagined geography of modern China. Looking at the case study of the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, the discursive spatial and economic power within zones of exception indicate the different forms of social and economic labour necessary for the operation of SEZs. SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONES: THE CASE OF SHENZHEN, CHINA As part of China’s 1978 “Open Door Policy,” the initial SEZ initiatives were introduced in 1979 under international and domestic pressure for China to open itself up to the West. By adapting and learning from the West and following the failure of the Cultural Revolution, the opportunity for significant economic change was abundant and urgent (Huan 4). While the Open Door Policy included several adjustments to allow for extended cultural and economic exchange with foreign countries, an influx of foreign direct investment was encouraged by the introduction of SEZs and a favourable exchange rate (ibid. 6). Shenzhen was a particularly good fit for the economic experiment given its proximity to the coast as well as to both Macao and Hong Kong which both embraced capitalist economies (Yuan et al. 57). Furthermore, flexibility was afforded in the Pearl River Delta through its existing infrastructure as a trading port and Shenzhen’s primarily agricultural industries

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at the time, which gave the opportunity for a complete infrastructural upheaval to take place (ibid.). Though Shenzhen was an experimental run at the SEZ project, its success along with three other SEZs established at the same time inspired another wave of “opening” up China in the 1980s.

The promotion of high-tech manufacturing in Shenzhen reflects the goals outlined in the “Made in China 2025” strategic plan (Stevens 219). This strategic plan proposed that by producing and exporting a greater number of high-value added goods, the Chinese economy would theoretically diversify and stabilize (ibid.). Shenzhen, which is currently the global hub for smartphone production manufactures goods for companies like Apple and Huawei, acts as a successful and thereby prototypical SEZ. Many factories manufacture products from start to finish all under the same roof, as is the case with most electronics contract manufacturers such as Foxconn and Flexitronics (Lüthje & Butollo 222). However, these companies have not evaded controversy due to their intensive working conditions. The high-tech products made in such factories are not only exported to wealthy countries, but are also sold to the growing middle class in China and other Asian countries (ibid. 227).

Part of the story then, of the continued strength and success of the economic models in Shenzhen and many other SEZs more broadly is the growing middle class in many countries that have consistently or historically been considered “less developed.” The rise of high-tech manufacturing is unlikely to slow; paired with an expanding market, having access to the digital space becomes more of an economic necessity, marker of status, and an important interface for connection.

As the electronics industry dominates the total labour force in Shenzhen, it exemplifies the neoliberal logic of newly industrialized countries.

Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that operates and manages ten factories in the Pearl River Delta area, is a poignant example of the developing social, economic, and political impacts of China’s Open Door Policy and SEZs (ibid.). Foxconn, and many other electronics contract manufacturers have been in the spotlight for both their rapid expansion and controversy surrounding working conditions, including eighteen attempted worker suicides in 2010 (Ngai & Chan 2012). While Foxconn is currently the leading manufacturer of electronics globally, it has not been met without competition. Lüthje and Butollo note that competition and rising costs of inputs (including labour) has significantly narrowed profit margins (223). As a result, large manufacturers attempt to reduce costs and remain competitive by maintaining strong control over employees to retain contracts. Ngai and Koo argue that Foxconn’s thin profit margins result in increasingly exploitative labour practices, which allow for Foxconn to operate in a near-monopolistic fashion (414). Operating in a quasi-socialist economy while under global capitalism; SEZs as zones of exception have allowed for private companies’ practices to corroborate with government policy.

These zones and the companies benefitting from them have thus entirely shifted local and regional geographies both spatially; through the influx in migration and the bureaucratic processes that attempt to regulate and retain such movement, as well as those imagined.

MIGRATORY GEOGRAPHIES OF THE ZONE

As SEZs significantly shift the regimes of power in Shenzhen from state-controlled to inviting foreign influence, the spatial aspect of its changes include the influx of migration into the region since 1979. A significant portion of the workforce in the electronics manufacturing industry are migrant

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workers with temporary hukou status. As Ngai and Koo explain, hukou is a residence/family registry system which serves as a domestic passport of sorts. Due to heightened control on the mobility of its citizens, the hukou system allows for temporary and migrant workers to have fewer employment and housing opportunities when outside of their places of permanent residence (418). It is a system that disproportionately negatively affects those who come to urban centres from rural areas to seek better (or any) employment. These urban areas have long been seen as lands of opportunity for rural youth, particularly in SEZs, where many multinational corporations gain from the taxation benefits, less stringent labour regulations, and other business incentives (ibid. 419). In the case of high-tech manufacturing, predominantly young women migrate to fulfill this labour market niche.

This dependency on FDI to fuel the economy of Shenzhen has led to increasing inequality within the area, yet the allure of life in the city appeals to young people or is the only realistic option that youth have in supporting their dependents (Ngai & Chan 389). With this combination of rural youth seeking opportunity in urban centers and statemonitored migration policies, the SEZ encourages the exploitation of migrant workers’ labour as they do not have other economic opportunities available to them due to the hukou system as well as other reasons (lack of social connections, etc.).

Zones of exception can be read as lawless and “distinct from the legal tradition of exception that applies to a nation” (Easterling 66). The notion that these zones are exceptional often signifies that they emerged out of nowhere and moreover, dismisses those who have lived there prior to massive infrastructure and economic projects.

Du observes that the narrative that SEZs were essentially built overnight obscure the new social roles that locals needed to occupy as land was

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acquired by the state from the predominantly farming and fishing population (65). Many of these once farmers would later become landlords to migrant populations on the outskirts of Shenzhen’s urban center. Sometimes referred to as “villages in the city,” these areas are home to a majority of Shenzhen’s temporary workers and are solutions to address housing that were not addressed by initial central planners (ibid.). Many of these “villages” have unlicensed schools and hospitals as most migrant workers cannot access official social goods due to restrictions in the hukou system (ibid.). When SEZs are referred to as “lawless,” it is not only in reference to the lack of regulatory policies, but also lawless in that the state does not offer provisions for many of the workers that keep Shenzhen’s economy strong. At the time of writing, Du estimates that 200 million workers across China are transient, many living in urban villages in indefinitely liminal states of citizenry (66). Thus, the zone of exception has also established new spatial conditions of living, both as addressed through local landlords serving the migrant population as well as private companies such as dormitory-style housing options offered by electronics manufacturing companies.

Looking at urban zones of exception as a process and as emanating ideological values, the SEZ as a fantasy of exception is one that is a developmentalist rationality (Doucette & Park 396). Easterling uses the term “extrastatecraft” to define the rules that govern everyday space, where the economic and spatial infrastructure and bureaucracy in zones of exception deeply influence the physical geographies and migratory patterns of those living and working in SEZs (2014). In the case of Shenzhen SEZ, bureaucracy, capital flows, and labour rule to govern a movement and physical space. While there are notable geographical shifts produced by SEZs, the primary reason for these

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demographic fluctuations are economic ones.

DISCURSIVE LABOUR IN HIGH-TECH MANUFACTURING Young workers in high-tech manufacturing are the backbone of the electronics manufacturing industry in Shenzhen. Returning to the example of Foxconn, the company employs over one million people and in each of their factories they employ anywhere between 20,000 to 400,000 people (Ngai & Chan 394). The typical work performed on the assembly lines in these factories is repetitive and exhausting, with workers often doing only one or two physical tasks daily. Employees have themselves described their work as “robotic” while they work twelve hours a day, six days a week. Most employees, however, still need to supplement their meager base wages by working overtime (Ngai & Koo 417). Some of the labour is near-compulsory, to the extent that many young students attending vocational training are expected to complete internships through their degree/certification process at Foxconn as part of a partnership between their educational institutions and the company (ibid. 418). As the Foxconn model develops and shifts with the rising cost of inputs and costs of expansion, it has introduced a quasi-compulsory form of labour to meet its bottom line and introduced a new demographic of educated and skilled people who are working on the production floor.

Labour is also highly gendered within special economic zones. As primarily female workers are on the floor in high-tech manufacturing, young women are indispensable to the electronics manufacturing industry (Chen 73). Women are considered a “flexible” and docile workforce, typically seen as less likely to speak out against their employers. These women are often

referred to as dagongmei, which refers to a social category of young working women which emerged due to the social and economic needs of supporting China’s neoliberalization (Ngai 8).

While these tropes of female labour are often simply read as sexist, it is also due to the precarity and transience of labour for rural women. Ngai observes that many of the migrant women working in electronics manufacturing are faced with the social expectations of getting married and settling down in their mid-to-late twenties, thus they almost always act as a flexible and transitory workforce (ibid. 7). The expectation for young women to return home after a four or five year stint working in the big city is a common occurrence, where SEZs have dramatically shifted the working and social lives of women in modern China.

In the Shenzhen SEZ, it is not only large-scale manufacturing that is done. Stevens highlights the various forms of labour that have emerged from its implementation. He observes that with the advent of an entirely new culture of work that has erupted as a consequence of the electronics manufacturing industry (219). Stevens points to the development of the industrial design industry in Shenzhen where local entrepreneurs and factory-owners are able to connect, speaking to the emergence of a middle class and a knowledge-based economy (ibid.). Due to the development of the electronics industry in Shenzhen, there has also been the emergence of electronics markets, most famously the Huaqiangbei electronics market, where small-scale factories and workshops are housed and sell their component parts or entire products.

The products sold here are often derivative designs of big companies, but have also offered “hacked” versions of standardized consumer products. There is a diversity of labour within these electronics markets such as packing and shipping, branding, recycling (of old products),

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and caregiving (ibid. 221). As many workers cannot afford to purchase the goods that they help manufacture in their factories, they often turn to these smaller markets that also assemble electronics, albeit their off-brand counterparts.

POLITICAL PROJECTS IN THE ZONE The SEZ is also an emblem of the ongoing project of global neoliberalization. As China was once viewed as a socialist threat to Western capitalist countries, it is now a vital trading partner. With the United States importing over $452 billion worth of goods from China in 2019 (US Census Bureau). While not all of these imports were from the electronics industry, SEZs have indicated the trajectory of China’s export-oriented capitalist economy.

Chinese SEZ projects were not novel creations; the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) began to research the development of zones as a “prescription for developing countries” (Easterling 48). As a prescription provided by the UN, zones of exception encourage export-driven economies and trade liberalization in these areas to jumpstart economies, though they were not intended to be long-term solutions (ibid. 50). Deng Xiaopeng adhered to a grander tradition of trade liberalization which was starkly different than the previous Maoist era. In a post-Mao era, China has become integrated into global capitalism with its foreign policy now based on the assumption of economic interdependence and shifting attitudes towards international economic and financial institutions (Huan 7). The introduction of SEZs as part of the Open Door Policy clearly marked this political shift. By marking that China was “open for business,” it also increased its role in the international community as a willing participant in international finance and trade.

Locally, the SEZs are creating their own forms

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of civic activism, though it is indeterminate to what extent these efforts are successful. There are thousands of yearly petitions, strikes and boycotts for better wages and working conditions in the various factories in Shenzhen, all of which are crushed by the state (Easterling 63).

Though one may perceive China’s Open Door Policy as an introduction of liberal market forces permeating China’s economy, the party-state has become more powerful as it incorporates market discourses to legitimize itself (Ngai 190). The growth of the Chinese economy is in part due to the success of its SEZ projects, which gives the state legitimacy as its reputation of bringing general prosperity to the country is tied to its economic and foreign policies. Therefore, the SEZ is used as a rhetorical tool and site of upholding state power, though it seems paradoxical to what is expected from an area that has a purpose of promoting free market capitalism. That is to say, the SEZ is not only a policy tool employed by the state, but also becomes a tool for the state to legitimize and bolster itself.

CONCLUSION What SEZs “do” is multifaceted and its discursive employment as a political tool occurs simultaneously while young workers shift labour demographics. The technological fantasy suggests that introducing liberal reforms through the export of high-value added goods function as a cure for the ills of poverty and the shortcomings of centralized economies and urban planning. Rather, what is actually a fantasy is the notion of the zone of exception. While it is a highly productive area that is vital to the supply chain of most consumer electronic goods, the SEZ has also shifted ruralurban migration patterns. The SEZ also acts as a site of gendered labour by establishing new social categories and workforces in order to meet

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the expectations of foreign investors. The SEZ as a rhetorical and political tool for the Chinese government has also boosted China’s role on the global financial stage, marking a departure from its once isolationist policies. These spaces of exception carved out by states, whether they are in China or elsewhere, are imagined geographies of liberal development theories. Highly productive zones of exception are often not thought of as spaces of transit for young, ambitious people from rural areas, nor are they often thought of as the site of over a dozen suicides over the course of a single year. Instead, what we imagine is the glossy, high-tech factory with efficient assembly lines from a bygone Fordist era. In reality, the Shenzhen SEZ is a site of migration and discursive labour that have all come as a consequence from an economic experiment which accelerated the process of goods manufacturing and production and enables unrelenting consumption.

Works Cited Chen, Xiangming. “Magic of Myth & Migration: A Case Study of a SEZ in China.” Asia-Pacific population journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 1987, pp. 56-76.

Doucette, Jamie. & Park, B. “Urban Developmentalism in East Asia: Geopolitical Economies, Spaces of Exception, and Networks of Expertise.” Critical Sociology, vol. 44, no. 3, 2017, pp. 395-403.

Du, Juan. “Shenzhen: Urban Myth of a New Chinese City.” Journal of Architecture Education, vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, pp. 65-66.

Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space. Verso, 2016.

Huan, Guocang. “Chinas ‘Open Door’ policy: 1978-1984.” Journal of International Affairs:

China in Transition, vol. 2, no. 39, 1986. pp.

1-18.

Lüthje Boy & Butollo F. “Why the Foxconn Model Does Not Die: Production Networks and Labour Relations in the IT Industry in South China.”

Globalizations, vol. 14, no. 2, 2017, pp. 216-231.

Ngai, Pun. Made in China: women factory workers in a global workplace. Duke University Press, 2006.

Ngai, Pun & Chan J. “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: the Foxconn Experience.”

Modern China, vol. 38, no. 4, 2012, pp. 383-410.

Ngai, Pun & Koo, A. “A ‘World-Class’ (Labor) Camp/us: Foxconn and China’s New Generation of Labor Migrants.” Positions: Asia Critique, vol. 23, no. 3, 2015, pp. 411-435.

Stevens, Hallam. “The Quotidian Labour of High Tech: Innovation and Ordinary Work in Shenzhen.”

Science, Technology and Society. vol. 24, no.

2 , 2019, pp. 218-236.

U.S. Census Bureau (2020). 2019: U.S. trade in goods with China. Retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/ c5700.html#2019 Yuan, Y. et al. “China’s First Special Economic Zone: The Case of Shenzhen.” Building Engines for Growth and Competitiveness in China: Experience with Special Economic Zones and Industrial Clusters, edited by Zeng, D., The World Bank, 2010, pp. 55-86.

Zhuang, Liang & Ye, C. “Changing imbalance: Spatial production of national high-tech industrial development zones in China (1988-2018).” Land Use Policy, vol. 94, 2020, pp. 1-8.

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Mad Cow, Mad Woman: Considering Meat, Militarism and Madnesss in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian Kihan Yoon-Henderson In 2008, massive public demonstrations emerged on the streets of Seoul following the South Korean government’s decision to reverse a ban on US beef imports that had been in place since 2003 due to concerns over mad cow disease.

As South Korea had previously been the third largest importer of American beef, it was widely speculated that the newly elected conservative government had reversed the ban in the process of negotiating a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (J.E. Lee 404; K. Lee 195). As part of these negotiations, the reversal of the ban also appeared to symbolically signify the new government’s desire to restore South Korea’s relations with the US more generally, which had been tense under the previous two administrations due to their perceived “soft” attitudes towards North Korea (Shin 121). This led to public outcry that the government was prioritizing US relations over the health of its citizens, and transformed into what at the time were the largest public demonstrations in the country since the 1987 democratization movement (K. Lee 194). With these conditions in mind, meat – and the bodily and psychological harm towards South Koreans it was feared to contain – came into fleshy association with longer Cold War, imperial, and militarized dynamics on the peninsula.

In this essay I want to consider the 2008 anti-US beef import protests in South Korea as a moment of post-colonial resistance and as an entry point to exploring themes of militarism, patriarchy, meat eating, and “madness” in the literary text The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Set in contemporary

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South Korea, the story follows a woman, Yeonghye, and the domestic and societal fallout of her decision to stop eating meat after experiencing a violent dream. The first novella of this threepart work, entitled The Vegetarian and the focus of this paper, was first published in 2004 and the completed work emerged in 2007. The beef protests and the circulation of The Vegetarian thus politicized the meanings of meat in contemporary South Korea at around the same time. Together, they signal enduring histories of the Cold War in Korea and related structures of capitalism, US imperialism, patriarchy and militarism. Moreover, both the event of the protests and the novel can be read in terms of gendered and Cold War characterizations of madness and irrationality. I therefore consider the beef protests a salient place to begin my discussion of these themes within The Vegetarian.

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While the magnitude of the beef protests has been attributed by some scholars to how concerns over American beef imports came to stand in for a more general critique of the increasingly neoliberal Korean state (K. Lee 195; S.O. Lee et al. 360), it seems equally imperative to situate the moment as a continuum of the longer Cold War dynamics between the United States and Korea.1 Here, I 1

Indeed, as Choe Sang-Hun wrote in 2008 for The New York Times, integral to the beef protests was a public reaction to

past and present spectres of imperialism on the peninsula; signs plastered by protestors on the shipping containers used by the government to deter gathering in public space read messages such as, “[t]his is a new border for our country. From here starts the U.S. state of South Korea.”

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want to foreground an understanding of the Cold War in line with scholars such as Jodi Kim, by taking issue with the dominant historicization of the Cold War as temporally resolved, militarily “cold,” and ideologically rooted in Western benevolence and democratic ideals. Kim emphasizes that the Cold War as it was fought in Asia “represents a key historical transition in imperial formations” from “formal territorial colonization” to “neoimperial forms of political, economic, military, and cultural domination” (18).2 In addition, Kim articulates that the Cold War is not a past epoch: the Manichean epistemologies, gendered racial formations, and conditions of US imperial hegemony that structured the Cold War continue today, in its “protracted afterlife” (4).

Understanding the Cold War in this way, the 2008 anti-US beef protests can be considered a moment of post-colonial resistance in which meat became highly politicized as part of longer histories of antiimperial resistance in South Korea. The splitting of the peninsula into North and South at the end of the Second World War by the USSR and US, the Korean War and consequent perpetual militarization of the peninsula by both Korean and American forces, and the Cold War legacies of US economic imperialism in contemporary spaces of trade, all come to bear in the story of American meat and mad cow disease in 2008. So too, does the idea of “madness” itself: mad cow disease is feared for its fatal effects on the brain and the symptoms of psychosis and dementia it causes. But claims towards madness, in the form of irrationality, were also made against the protestors themselves: the US government claimed South Koreans were being “irrational” 2

In fact, as part of this and relevant to thinking about the 2008 protests, Kim explicitly – if only in passing – references trade agreements as one of the “nonterritorial imperial tactics” that operationalized the “neoimperial governmentality” of the United States during the Cold War (18).

and that there was no scientific basis for concern in regards to the safety of US beef products (Kang 588). Given the gendered dynamics of the movement, which notably included many women and high school aged girls (K. Lee 199; S.O. Lee et al. 363), as well as the way that Korea as a nation has historically been rendered feminized by American forces (Choi 15), this gesture towards irrationality I argue carries loaded meanings.

The idea that demonstrators were acting beyond reasonable claim was also a stance reiterated by the South Korean government and conservative Korean media outlets at the time. Protestors were portrayed as Anti-American and Pro-North ideologues, demonstrative of the way that the militarization of the divided peninsula continues to shape the potential for public dissent in South Korea and thus the endurance of the Korean War today (K. Lee 199; Shin 128).

MAD WOMAN So how then, do we make sense of the emergence of The Vegetarian during this time, a literary work which similarly oscillates around madness, meat consumption, and, as I will argue, the legacies of how the Cold War was waged in Asia? My point here is not to theorize a literal connection between Han Kang’s writing and the movement against American beef imports itself. However, it is interesting that meat, in its intersections with American imperialism and multiple notions of hysteria, carried such visceral and violent meanings at the time of The Vegetarian’s publication. I remember how during a family trip to Korea in 2005 – even before the protests of 2008 – fears about mad cow disease were palpable within Seoul. For my cousins and I, small children at the time, this feeling of potential or looming “madness” came to permeate our primary memories of Korea, the place our family is from. Where we perceived

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this threat to be coming from is hard to track down in our memories: was it only the meat? Similarly, what is it about the act of eating and preparing meat that Yeong-hye finds so deeply disturbing? Is it the meat itself which drives her “mad” – at least in the eyes of those around her – or is it something to do with what the meat represents, what dynamics of violence exist in Korea and how these conjure longer spectres of war, militarism, and gendered violence?

The meaning of madness itself in The Vegetarian warrants further and more nuanced discussion.

As mad studies scholars Tanja Aho, Liat BenMoshe and Leon J. Hilton describe in the context of the “interlinked processes of racialization and disablement” in the United States, the casting of “rational” and “irrational” “bodyminds” is mired in structures of racism, sexism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and related systems of social control such as policing, incarceration, biomedicalization and institutionalization (291). Who has been made to constitute the rational subject comes under scrutiny when these larger systems of oppression are accounted for; as they write, “critical mad studies can reveal how enduring “macropolitical” systems, structures, and historical processes articulate with the “micropolitical” dimensions of subjectivity, embodiment, and psychic experience” (295).

The structure of The Vegetarian itself can be seen to interrogate the meaning of the “rational” and “irrational” subject. As we are granted the point of view of Yeong-hye’s husband Mr. Cheong as the first person narrator, Yeong-hye – in her decision to stop eating meat – is positioned outside of the “sane” by another subjective agent from the very start, not an omniscient narrator. While Mr. Cheong establishes himself as the ideal rational subject – particularly through the novella’s opening,

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in which he describes how every decision and detail in his life has been meticulously crafted around the desire to “take the middle course in life” (Han 4) – as the reader we are aware that his is not an objective position but is inextricable from his patriarchal position in Korean society.

Thus while Mr. Cheong seems to encourage the reader to compare Yeong-hye’s “irrational” behavior to his own “rational” behavior, we are aware that his descriptions of Yeong-hye before her vegetarianism as “completely unremarkable in every way” (3) and “a completely ordinary wife” (4) and his narration of her descent into irrationality or madness from this point on, are observations inherently situated within his own understanding of the societal constructions of normalcy between husband and wife.

When Yeong-hye stops eating meat and discards all the meat products in their house, he begins to bombard her with comments about her diversion from saneness: “‘[a]re you crazy?’” (9), “‘[h] ave you lost your mind?’” (10), “‘[y]ou’re insane!

You’ve completely lost it.’” (11). At first, however, Mr. Cheong appears to convince himself that Yeong-hye’s actions do not represent genuine mental illness. He reflects, “I found it difficult to believe that she might genuinely be going soft in the head” (17) and reassures himself by thinking back that “there didn’t seem to be any strain of mental abnormality lurking in my wife’s bloodline” (18). What ultimately appears to convince him that there is something abnormal about his wife, and thus requiring intervention, is her behavior at a dinner he is invited to by his superiors at work.

The atmosphere at the table becomes tense when Yeong-hye – who is also breaking social taboo by not wearing a bra – mentions she does not eat meat.

To those at the table – made out to be exemplars of “success” in hyper capitalist mainstream Korean society – the slippery overlap of what constitutes

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the norm in terms of social routine with what constitutes the sane at a psychological level is gestured towards in jabbing comments, such as when the executive’s wife remarks “‘a balanced diet goes hand in hand with a balanced mind, don’t you think?’” (24). When Yeong-hye returns an unkind comment made by the boss’s wife about whether she isn’t hungry after hardly eating with a stare instead of “the demure, apologetic smile which was the only reasonable response” (25), Mr. Cheong seems to decide for himself that at a psychological level she is disturbed, or what we might call “mad”. He remarks: “[w]hat shadowy recesses lurked in her mind, what secrets I’d never suspected? In that moment, she was utterly unknowable” (25). From this point on he decides that an intervention is needed with his wife. That is, that she must be disciplined back to rational life, the first step towards which is to call her family, the first point of contact for such disciplining.

However, considering the ways in which madness is externally and socially constructed is not to deny Yeong-hye’s own complex and agential subjectivity and personhood. It is clear, in the italicized sections narrated in her own voice, that Yeong-hye herself is trying to make sense of changes she is undergoing, such as the lump she feels in her solar plexus and the sharp edges she feels herself developing. Here I draw inspiration from Aho, Ben-Moshe, and Hilton, who, in articulating the way that the (ir)rational subject has been constructed in conjunction with histories and structures of oppression and control, do not discount the lived experience of neurodiversity, disability or madness. Rather on the contrary, they embrace disability as a “productive force,” which “generates specific sensibilities, discourses, and affects” capable of disrupting harmful ideations of normalcy (295).3 In centering the mad subject, the 3

The scholars also foreground movements for access,

scholars also stress the pressing need to attend to “the psychic and affective costs of normalizing violence” and the “vastly uneven ways in which these costs are distributed and experienced” (300).

With an attention to this last point, from here on I want to think through the socio-historic and actualized conditions of violence in Yeong-hye’s life that can be seen as influencing her decision to stop eating meat. I interpret Han Kang’s inclusion of meat as a trope in the story as a marker of the violence experienced by Yeong-hye, as well as for the violence that more collectively permeates a continually militarized peninsula. Meat is something that necessitates butchering and ultimately, the death of an animal to consume.

Yeong-hye’s gendered position means that she has been forced as a daughter and wife to come into daily material and visceral contact with this violence. Just as meat took on expanded meanings in its articulation with longer histories of American imperialism in relation to mad cow disease and US beef imports, the violence contained within meat in The Vegetarian comes into intimate proximity with the violence in Yeong-hye’s own life, as well as with histories of militarism and war more widely.

As the reader, we are able to grasp insights into the sorts of histories – personal and collective – that can be understood to inform the violence Yeong-hye locates in preparing and eating meat. Particularly noteworthy are the allusions to patriarchal masculinity and its intersections with militarism in South Korea throughout the novella.

In this regard, in introducing Yeong-hye’s father to the reader, Mr. Cheong mentions his fatherin-law’s pride in being a Vietnam War veteran and his tendency to enter into “his monologue” care, and justice instigated by disability communities and cultures, resisting the erasure of mad subjects and related forms of institutional and incarceral violence.

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on the violence he carried out as a soldier (Han 29). As part of his brief description of his fatherin-law, it also surfaces that Yeong-hye’s father “had whipped her over the calves until she was eighteen years old” (29). This reference to Korea’s role in Vietnam alongside the casual mentioning of the gendered domestic violence perpetrated

by Yeong-hye’s father towards her is significant.

As Chungmoo Choi elaborates, both Vietnam – rendered a gendered territorial space by the Korean state – and the bodies of Korean women were positioned as sites to recuperate a “national masculinity” in postcolonial Korea, following and in the face of the emasculating experience of colonization by Japan and American imperialism.

The significance of the gendered dynamics of South Korea’s involvement in Vietnam is also noted

by Simeon Man, who emphasizes how President Park Chung-hee framed Korean involvement in the war in terms of a way to “‘demonstrate the bravery of Korean manhood to the world’” and thus as a way to overcome the colonized status of Koreans (qtd. in Man 124). In actualizing this rhetoric of the state, Man writes that Korean men who served as soldiers in Vietnam “came to understand violence as a form of currency for demonstrating their worth as citizens and as men” (124).

Han Kang reminds us of these intersections between militarism and masculinity in South Korea in The Vegetarian. In what one might call the novella’s climax, Yeong-hye’s family stages a dinner in which dish after dish of meat is pushed onto Yeong-hye, who continually refuses it. After telling her father she will not eat the meat, he becomes enraged, hits her multiple times and grinds the meat into her mouth as her brother restrains her. Yeong-hye’s decision to stop eating meat is interpreted as a form of disobedience against the will of her husband and father, for which she must be disciplined. In this scene the

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distinctions between the influences of militarism and patriarchy seem to collapse, and Korea’s violent history within the peninsula and in the “subempire,” to use Man’s term, explodes into the contemporary moment in the intimate space of Yeong-hye’s sister’s 17th story apartment. When this encounter leads to Yeong-hye slashing her wrist, even the actions of her brother-in-law to stop the bleeding conjures the omnipresence of militarism on the peninsula, as he is described as “[e]very inch the special forces graduate” by Mr. Cheong (Han 41).

Moreover, the way that curtailing the sexual agency of Korean women is entangled in these histories of militarism, colonialism and patriarchy on the peninsula is referenced when Mr. Cheong compares Yeong-hye’s reaction to him raping her to that of a comfort woman. Through this passage, we begin to understand the ways in which, as Choi writes by drawing on the work of bell hooks, Korean women have been “doubly colonized” by both colonizer and Korean men (14). As Choi further explicates, in combination with existing structures of patriarchy, reclaiming ownership over the bodies of Korean women emerged as a form of recuperative masculinity and gendered nationalism in the postcolonial era (14). Choi thus brings to light how controlling the sexuality of Korean women is historically loaded, particularly given the ways in which Korean women have been vilified within South Korea as collaborating “whores” for their role in militarized sexual encounters. This includes the history of comfort women and sex work surrounding American military bases. Yeong-hye’s refusal of sex with her husband – which she explains as due to her repulsion from the smell of meat coming from “the same place your sweat comes from” (17) – and Mr. Cheong’s routine rape of her with reference to the roles of comfort woman and Japanese soldier,

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Illustration by Kihan Yoon-Henderson

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signals the way that sex is intertwined with his own understanding of masculinity in historically specific ways. Particularly disturbing is that Mr. Cheong himself seems aware of how these histories of sexual trauma are inherited by Korean women and the violence Yeong-hye herself experiences through his actions, when he writes: “I couldn’t stand the way her expression, which made it seem as though she were a woman of bitter experience, who had suffered many hardships, niggled at my conscience” (31).

In addition to these specific references to the gendered effects of militarism, the novella can also be said to conjure the enduring violence of the Korean War itself. As Christine Hong reminds us, the Korean War is “unending,” most obvious in the way that the peninsula has been perpetually militarized by North, South and American forces.

Hong elaborates that the extended temporality of war and wartime for Koreans is inescapable, which I see as underwriting the graphic attention to violence in the novella. Here I also find it helpful to consider Crystal Mun-hye Baik’s way of thinking about the endurance of the Korean War, in which she complicates “trauma-based” and “postmemory” theoretical approaches due to how the Korean War does not only haunt as a past event, but continues to structure the present.

As Baik writes, “[t]he Korean War is not a hidden afterlife that dwells in the contemporary moment solely through psychic and emotional traces” but “remains a tinderbox with life-threatening implications” (16). In light of this, when I first read Yeong-hye’s narration of the initial dream that leads her to throw away all the meat in the house, the imagery resonated to me with the imagery of wartime massacre. Particularly, the sheer graphicness of the scene in the barn, in which Yeong-hye describes “a long bamboo stick strung with great blood-red gashes of meat,

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blood still dripping down” (Han 12), conjured the image of bodies disgorged by a weapon. Yeonghye’s own confusion as to her role in the violence is also evocative of the chaos of collective and war torn violence. In the dream, Yeong-hye runs from the bloody barn and attempts not to be seen by the picnicking families that she passes, but nonetheless she acts as a reminder that what was before – hunks of raw, bloody flesh – necessarily conditions what is experienced in the present – sizzling meat, enjoyed by picnickers. That violence does not so much as haunt but rather conditions the present in this way, can extend to the experience of Korea itself and how the brutality of the Korean War persists in the subjectivities of Koreans and engenders the very existence of South Korea in its hyper-capitalist present. More than a past event haunting the present, Yeonghye’s anticipation of latent violence throughout the novella – such as when she asks “[w]hy are my edges all sharpening – what am I going to gouge?”

(33) – speaks to the way that violence remains a potential and structuring premise on the peninsula.

MAD RESISTANCE Perhaps the brilliance of The Vegetarian is that while not in a clear and deterministic or causal way, it contains the explosive potency of what it means to have a constant state of war placed on and within the body. The graphic violence that courses throughout the book – including the violent imagery of Yeong-hye’s dreams and the gendered violence that her family members subject her to – reflects the persistence of patriarchal militarism and the perpetual threat of war on the Korean peninsula. Ultimately, The Vegetarian explores the psychic and embodied effects of this violence through Yeong-hye’s relationship to meat, while also unsettling what constitutes the norm and the “sane” in contemporary South Korea.

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However, rather than a treatise on violence alone, the text speaks to the power of continual resistance to these forces even when such resistance is deemed “irrational” and strictly punished. As a form of return, and by way of a suspended conclusion, I therefore want to focus on how both the 2008 beef protests as a post-colonial moment and Yeonghye’s refusal of meat constitute acts of resistance and critical interventions into the enduring dynamics of the Korean War and Cold War more broadly. Both moment and novella do so through critically examining expanded meanings of meat: the rejection of American beef at a collective scale, and the personal choice to reject meat on the part of Yeong-hye are powerful acts that both gesture towards the will for a more peaceful futurity on the peninsula. However, Han Kang leaves us not with a neat narrative closure of Yeong-hye as a pure symbol of peace, but rather with a dead white bird ambiguously crushed in her hand and presumed to have been bitten by her mouth. This to me is a sparingly honest ending that is accountable to the past and ongoing psychic and political conditions brought on by histories of militarized violence and the Cold War. Within this context the resistance demonstrated by Yeong-hye in The Vegetarian and at the collective scale by South Koreans in 2008 is only made more impactful and urgent to consider.

Works Cited Aho, Tanja, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Leon J. Hilton.

“Mad Futures: Affect/ Theory/ Violence.”

American Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 2, 2017, pp.

291-302.

Baik, Crystal Mun-hye. The Delicious Taste of Army Base Stew: An Introduction.

Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique, by Baik. Temple

University Press, 2019, pp. 1-32.

Choe, Sang-Hun. “An Anger in Korea Over More Than Beef.” The New York Times, June 12, 2008.

Choi, Chungmoo. “Nationalism and Construction of Gender in Korea.” Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, edited by Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, Routledge, 1998, pp. 9-31.

Han, Kang. “The Vegetarian (Part 1).” The Vegetarian, by Han. 2007. Translated by Deborah Smith, Portobello Books, 2015, pp.1-52.

Hong, Christine. “The Unending Korean War.” Positions: Asia Critique, vol. 23, no. 4, 2015, pp. 597-613.

Kang, Susan. “Irrationality and Regulation: Constructing Mad Cow Knowledge in the USSouth Korea FTA.” Globalizations, vol. 10, no. 4, 2013, pp. 587-601.

Kim, Jodi. Introduction. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War, by Kim, University of Minneota Press, 2010, pp. 1-35.

Lee, Jung-Eun. “Micro-dynamics of Protests: The Political and Cultural Conditions For AntiUS. Beef Protests in South Korea.” Sociological Perspectives, vol. 55, no. 3, 2012, pp. 399420.

Lee, Keehyeung. “Looking back at the Candlelight Protests of 2008, South Korea: Reflections on its Multiple Implications and Lessons.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2017, pp. 193-208.

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Lee, Seung-Ook, Sook-Jin Kim, and Joel Wainwright. “Mad Cow Militancy: Neoliberal Hegemony and Social Resistance in South Korea.”

Political Geography, vol. 29, 2010, pp. 359-369.

Man, Simeon. “Working the Subempire: Philippine and South Korean Military Labour in Vietnam.”

Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific, by Man, University of California Press, 2018, pp.103-134.

Shin, Wooyeol.“Conservative Journalists’ Myth Making in South Korea: Use of the Past in News Coverage of the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil.”

Asian Studies Review, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 120136.

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Tributaries draws from the multidisciplinary origins of UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration (ACAM) studies program, bringing together different platforms, mediums and genres to explore the diversity of our lived experiences, migration stories, identities, and community connections. We are committed to sharing the stories and voices of marginalized communities across the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability and beyond.