Author: Stephanie

Shooter of arrows, constant opinionator. Never over it. @yiduiqie

an immigration narrative or three

On By StephanieIn movies1 Comment

I saw Elysium on the weekend. It’s not very subtle. It’s so not very subtle that I’m not even going to talk about its blatant immigration narrative, its poverty porn of brown people and brown spaces and deserts, its third world despair as represented by Matt Damon (MATT DAMON).

(My short review: Gosh, there were some interesting ideas presented! Completely wasted, totally pointless, Jodie Foster chewing on the scenery and despite it being the only believable white future I’ve ever seen it was boring and kind of offensive.)

Also I’m sick with the death cold I picked up on the flight home from Singapore, which I still haven’t shaken, so today you’re getting links on immigration and immigration narratives. You love it, I know you do.

My favourite post about Elysium is I renounce my Elysium Citizenship by J Lamb. It is a super excellent post about privilege, representation, and boring boring narratives that seek to interrogate but merely reinforce.

Blomkamp offers this antiseptic, conformist Whiteness as the celestial haven all the darker nations covet; lush green grass tickles the bare toes of towheaded human gazelles who play and laugh and smile because their lives demand no other purpose. Watch as a statuesque beauty drops her theatrical red robe to lie upon what appears to be a personal tanning bed; you learn it’s actually a miracle machine that can cure cancer in seconds. Horror paralyzes. This manicured playground for Teutonic supermodels and corporate overlords gives life everlasting to a Whiteness so privileged it never need die. Earth’s cautionary tales spend the entire film gripped by a feral desperation to emigrate to this orbital nirvana; the entire movie posits a world where no person of color wants anything less than Elysian citizenship. Ask yourself how this morality play ends.
Many good liberal folk applauded this film, and considered Elysium a warning against American xenophobia and isolationism. We have so much, why can’t we share? But the Elysium immigration metaphor characterizes the darker nations as eternally broken, and always wanting.

Anyway, but that’s the USA! Australia has a totally different immigration narrative from that.

I exist because of immigration. Don’t many of us? I exist because of illegal immigration. I exist because my grandmother escaped the Chinese mainland, swam to Hong Kong as a child, and made her way on a boat to Malaysia. I don’t know anything more about that, because here’s one of the things about asylum seeking: when your circumstances are such that a seven year old child has to swim away from the only home she’s ever known, you tend to lose your grasp on your past and your family history. My family history starts in Malaysia, where my family worked and stressed and lived, and continues here to me (I wrote a thesis on illegal flows of migration in and around China in 2005, which is hilariously not the same). I can’t imagine a world where I would deny someone the chance to run away and start again, whatever the situation they’re having to leave; let alone when they’re a refugee from persecution.

Which is why this article at the Hoopla BLOWS MY MIND: Immigrants Against Immigration.

Candidate for the Eastern Melbourne seat of Chisholm, Liberal candidate and former Vietnamese refugee, John Nguyen (below) shares my mother’s sentiments. He came by boat, yet pledges to stop the boats.
Nguyen says his family came to Australia the “right way”, because they sought asylum in Malaysia which is the first country they arrived in.
They were later processed and brought to Australia. But now, Nguyen wants the integrity of our borders upheld.
This baffled me. I wanted to know more.
So I visited ethnic hubs across western Sydney approaching shopkeepers, mums and couples dining at cafes and simply asked: “Do you think we should end immigration and stop the boats?”

BLOWS MY MIND.

And for your reference: Asylum Seekers: Where Australia Stands.

Okay good. PS I would break up with my own parents if they felt we should limit asylum seekers, given how few we accept as it is.

My Island Homicide: a book review and writing someone else’s face

On By StephanieIn books

This is mostly a book review rather than a 101 on writing someone else’s face, so we’re going book review first, issues town second.

The Book: My Island Homicide by Catherine Titasey (2013, UQP)

[Mild spoilers to follow but nothing about the crime or anything]

My Island Homicide is the first novel by Catherine Titasey, not quite a crime novel set on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, though I received it under the guise of being a crime novel. I would not describe it as a crime novel, though the crime is there and looms large: it’s more a slice of life, and it’s kind of fun.

There are not that many fiction books about the Torres Strait, and there are even fewer books that end happily (as it were); that have an Islander protagonist; that are this great slice of Torres Strait Life that I wanted to just keep on keeping on. I loved the minutiae in the book. I loved the Sissys getting more and more animals as Jack palmed them off. I loved everyone’s casual acceptance of maydh (a curse), and the mostly natural weaving in of the local Broken English, and I loved loved loved the protag’s mum coming home to Thursday Island and finding herself again.

And I wanted to love it as a book. But it reads weird. It was billed as a mystery (and it is), but it’s also a romance and it’s also a slice of life. On pg 138, almost halfway through the book, there’s suddenly a family mystery! At times it seems as if the pedestrian plodding of the story – not of the plot, but the pace of the book itself – is a reflection of life on Thursday Island, just going with the flow and letting it happen, but at other times it simply felt like uninspired pedestrian writing. I wish that the book had been able to settle into what it wanted to be, rather than hopping back and forth.

My Island Homicide talks about all sorts of issues, but only briefly. It mentions in passing the predominant local crimes (assault and theft) and their causes (alcohol, hunger). It makes a major plot point of the lack of education in the Torres Strait, and how easy it is to pretend like the white man is doing something when really he isn’t. It laughs away DV and assault, and it’s hard to tell when it’s poking fun with versus when it’s poking fun at the things that happen in island life. These are major issues in the Torres Strait and also incredibly damaging stereotypes when seen through non-TSI eyes, and I wish more had been done to flag this as not okay.

There’s a lot of unquestioned behaviour and acts which seem less than ideal. A white person describes the abuse they’re suffering from a black person as ‘racist,’ with no looking at the fact that it’s not possible (due to the equation of privilege + power = racism). There was some super dodgy stuff going on around the young gentleman who was unable to talk (sometimes it was implied he had suffered brain damage, sometimes just that he couldn’t speak and refused to sign) in terms of attitudes.

The book keeps making jokes at the expense of Gen Y, followed by some vegan hate, which didn’t endear it to me. (At one point a member of Gen Y declares they don’t know what Twister the board game is, which, I call nope). This is obviously less critical than the class and social issues in the Torres Strait, but also totally not cool!

Thea’s mother thinks Thea’s under maydh, and though Thea is unsure she goes with it, being treated for the curse and in the end she recovers with two answers: a western medicine answer, and a maydh answer. I love this resolution. Of course there’s a western medicine answer, because western medicine is always trying to quantify non-western traditional methods and outcomes. But there’s a ‘traditional’ outcome and solution too, and we’re never told which one is right in the context of the text. It just is.

It was really nice to read a book set in the Thursday Islands, and to be reading a book that was trying so hard to do justice to the Torres Strait and to this part of Australia’s population and culture. But it wasn’t a great book, and I can’t whole-heartedly recommend it to you. It was fun and easy to read, but it took me about 100 pages before I was actually into it. If I was handed another book by this author I would consider reading it, and I would certainly support what she’s doing (writing about Torres Strait Islander communities) but I wouldn’t leap to read it. Three out of five jiaozi.

If you want to read the book, let me know, there’s a possibility this copy is mine.

People as Food

Milk chocolate. Almond. Burnt honey. Olive. Dark olive. Peanut brown. Nut brown.

I made a list of the ways brown people are described in My Island Homicide. I recoiled at that last one, particularly as it was the last sentence of the novel, used to described Thea’s (the POV character) baby. Note Thea describes herself as light brown. (Her mother is milk chocolate)

Hey you know what we are not? We are not a menu. We are not food items or items for export or exploitation or fetishisation, even after you give birth to us, much like many of these items were (or still are). Coffee and cocoa in particular, with their slave labour connotations and the indigenous exploitation inherent within, makes these comparisons, even when unintentional, totally on the dodgy side.

It is not a compliment to describe brown characters in food terms.

Working with (and Reading) Someone Else’s Culture

This blog post is not a cultural appropriation primer or anything like that, because I don’t have the time nor the patience, and also because many other people have done that work, though maybe not from an Australian point of view. So maybe that’ll come another day.

My Island Homicide is very firmly a book set in the Torres Strait. It is on Thursday Island and Horn Island and a couple of tiny dotted islands in between. Titasey is white; though she is married to a Torres Strait Islander with TSI children, and has lived on Thursday Island for 20 years.

The POV character is a half-Islander, half-Caucasian woman whose family moved away from the Torres Strait and now she’s come back, wanting to live her stereotypical idyllic island lifestyle and maybe along the way she’ll learn some things. This worked for the most part as a frame for explaining things about the culture to an assumed non-Torres Strait audience. Thea learning Broken English was woven with shame (at not knowing it) and embarrassment and also naturally into the text, in a way that didn’t throw me out and that was awesome. Things were explained where explanations worked, but the text didn’t assume the reader was completely lacking in knowledge (except, inexplicably, when it explains that Billabong is a surf company).

You can tell, when you’re reading My Island Homicide, that Titasey is an outsider but has worked to not be an outsider. She presents this culture that isn’t hers as respectfully as she can, and though I wish it’d been better written I really appreciated that.

An Aside on Creating Safe Spaces

On By StephanieIn conventions4 Comments

A few weeks ago I was the door bitch for A Night of Intrigue, a goth/alt/dark event. As you can imagine, explicit consent is a must in such an area, and hard to enforce. And much as it can be difficult to convey in a SFF convention space, it can be hard to remind everyone to be respectful and to ask permission and very importantly, especially in such a space, ‘nudity is not consent’ is critical.

I took on the role of gateway consent controller for the night, if I may call it that. We had signs up at the inner doorway (after paying and getting your tags and all the rest of it), and I gave the same spiel hundreds of times. We had a red tag for ‘PLEASE DO NOT TALK TO ME IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME,’ and a green tag for ‘hey, feel free to start a convo respectfully,’ or you could choose not to tag at all. And so many people were skeptical, why do you even need that? This is silly. Some people I had to explain it wasn’t a sex thing, but the traffic light was a good comparison. Some people made fun of people who were coming to a nightclub/social event and didn’t want to meet/hang with anyone new.

But there were a dozen or so people who ran towards that red armband and put it on so fast, and so obviously, so that their red stripe would be clear. And as Ju reminded me, when my voice was hoarse and it was after 1am and I was getting tired and frustrated at people rolling their eyes at me, every person who came through that door heard my spiel. So even if they thought the system was silly, they had all had the same thing personally delivered to them as they came to through the door: that we were looking for respect, and we expected it from everyone, and that we were gonna be enforcing that.

It’s not perfect; it’s hard to prevent bottleneck, and I felt at times that I was working against my own desire not to put anybody out. It’s not a system that works for everyone, but it’s a start, and I think having it personally delivered almost one on one helped.

(ps if you are interested, the next event is September 13 and you should totally come along)

The Exotic Place as Other (and notes on cinder, by marissa meyer)

On By StephanieIn books, meta6 Comments

Futures and dystopias are frequently set in completely fabricated cities and worlds and planets, often but not always rising from the ashes of some war or climate catastrophe on Earth. There is extensive world-building and backgrounds established, and aside from the shared past of ‘Earth’ there is at times little else shared; Earth, and the issues of now translated into the text.

Frequently, though, those new dystopic futures are in New Something. New Beijing, New Singapore, New Istanbul. When they’re written in English and set in New Asian Something, I will bet you all the tea in my house that it is shorthand for an exotic distant (future) other; that the name of that place bears no actual relation to the plot or the world building other than something superficial like chopsticks, or the heat, and could have been set in New New York or New Londontown.

When you give the name of a place, you conjure connotations of that place, images and memories and ideas. When you name a place and there is nothing similar between the place you describe and the place you have named, what connotations exactly are you trying to conjure? In many cases, that image is other, and the exotic.

Exotic as Shorthand and the Place as Other

Exotic is a problematic term all on its own, particularly so when it’s applied to some culture you don’t know; in English-language Science Fiction, that’s almost always a place that isn’t a Western place. Tori Truslow wrote a great post in 2012. It’s got totally racist connotations, especially when we’re talking about beauty, particularly women; it separates us, and it others us. It’s frustrating when it’s applied to your food and your culture (as I wrote about five years ago). These are all different topics, but you see the connection: the exotic as other.

And the exotic in a text assumes an audience; but more importantly, it makes assumptions on who is not considered the audience.

In Australia, the term ‘exotic’ is used to refer to introduced species of plants and animals; primarily, English species. Roses are exotic; as are rabbits. I delight in this usage; particularly in my industry where this is the correct terminology.

The words ‘New Place’ are not required to create this artificial and lazy sense of place as other. Firefly, the Joss Whedon space western, is set 500 years in the future when the USA and China have combined to form one governing body and there’s nary an Asian city or country name in sight. There are swearwords in ear-twitching Mandarin, though, and comments about cooking bao and some kitschy East Asian set dressing. There’s no actual evidence of the alleged Chinese upper class, and despite claiming to be a fusion universe the show features no actual Asians (and indeed, described as Pan-Asian rather than the logical outcome of Pan-Chinese). It creates this great sense of place, of other, of how our dystopic future might turn out without resorting to green skies and triple moons…if you’re not sitting there, foaming at the mouth while someone appropriates your culture for its trappings and none of what it could actually contribute (say, actual Asians. And 100 kuai says terraforming was invented by an Asian scientist. Because have you met the Asian monolith?).

Dystopic future Los Angeles as represented in Blade Runner (you know what’s great about Blade Runner? Edward James Olmos) is like the perfect summing up of my point. It’s so perfect, I found some lecturer’s class notes on the internet that agree. This 2019 LA has lots of East Asian elements and non-English languages, and a whole lot of brown people, which reflected a (1980s but still relevant today!) fear of East Asian growth (Japan then, but China now) and an increase in white flight, which in Blade Runner are used as short hand for dystopia.

My disdain for The Wind-Up Girl remains strong, for many reasons, and in my original review I noted that (sorry, I’m totally quoting myself here):

there is really no point to setting the novel in Thailand. Thailand in this novel is othered just like many of the characters, and at most point it feels like any old made up exotic back drop. There’s very little about the setting that is really clearly a future Thailand, except from some mythology stuff. It could have been any old country, so why make it Thailand? Except I guess to make use of its sex trade issues WHY OH WHY. Some reviewers (okay, one commenter on one review) mentioned that it could be because Thailand is the only country that was never colonised by some white dude, which, okay, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still totally The Other.

And as Jaymee points out in her review, there is not only no justification for this geographical choice, there is also no explanation for inexplicable changes in neighbouring geography, such as the xenophobic fundamentalism of Malaysia (called Malaya in the book) which is inconsistent with a nuanced understanding of Malaysia’s history and racial politics. This oversight highlights the other issue with the exotic as the other: a necessary understanding not only of that one city, but of all its other interactions in the world.

Hilariously, I discovered this review of The Wind-Up Girl (which includes a review for River of Gods, which is a book I really want to read to see how terribly it uses India as a dystopic future setting) which completely disagrees with me, on the grounds that a good future dystopia based on an existing city should be totally different due to science and technology and in fact let me quote from this review, because this bit I agree with:

The right way is to recognize the historical fact that no country reaches the tech frontier without undergoing serious social changes. The faint echoes of samurai and cowboys in the Panasonics and Googles of today are just that – faint echoes. Writers who realize this will try to preserve some element of the spirit of the old in the form of the (imagined) new, rather than trying to cut-and-paste.

True! I will buy this theory, or some of it. However I disagree that The Wind-Up Girl has done so, primarily because I ask this: who are you to make the decision that it is sufficiently echoey? The biggest problem with this theory is that we are writing in the today. As an author not from these cities (as every author I am talking about in this blog post is), can they ever truly be trusted to make these sorts of judgements on a city? Instead, they pick and choose and turn up a city that is never quite right, precisely because it could just as easily have been set anywhere and it has brought nothing to the story other than the exotic as dystopic and different, particularly as the stories are written today, in our actual current world politics. (Thanks once again for making Thailand a stereotype of poverty and sexual slavery, Paolo! It’s not like every Western produced text that features Thailand makes the same statement!)

The Accidental Exotic is My Backyard

There is a flip side to this: the unintended Exotic. Elizabeth Knox suggests that non-USA/English in English writers may do this by accident or even consciously, where one’s normal is in fact the “audience”‘s exotic and different. This again makes assumptions about audiences, and asks what we can expect a reader to know and to understand. Famously Avatar: The Last Airbender was considered by some viewers to be entirely fantasy, including some elements taken directly from Japanese, Chinese and Korean myths and traditions. How much of this is because readers (and viewers) are used to the completely familiar, and the exotic as other?

New Beijing, Imagined (No, Seriously, Imagined) in Cinder, by Marissa Meyer (spoilers included)

Despite its capital of New Beijing, the Eastern Commonwealth is not a China. It can’t be, not with far-flung provinces such as Mumbai, an Emperor named Kaito, and kimonos as formal wear. The emperor eats with chopsticks at one point, and Cinder’s sisters are named Pearl and Peony, and family names before personal names. In the market is a sweet bun baker named Chang Sacha, which I guess could potentially be a pan-Chinese name. There is a moon calendar celebration.

Some reviews mentioned how Chinese it all sounded but it is so not Chinese sounding that I cannot even. It is not even very pan-Asian, which I wouldn’t forgive but would at least be something.

Pearl and Peony are Western stereotypes well before they’re actual Chinese names, especially in a text that’s Linh and Chang and Kaito. Their mother, Adri, makes no sense in this context as a name. Indeed their names even translated, with no naming schema, confuse rather than clarify. There is an Emperor, and with that Japanese name and the Changs and the Linhs (Vietnamese, by the way, if you’re wondering, and also usually a personal name) we’re moving solidly into pan-Asian territory.

The likelihood of China entering an alliance with Japan is as always slim to none for varied historical reasons; I would believe a China-Korea alliance before a China-Japan alliance, though the Singapore I’ll grant, especially if it were a one commonwealth two systems deal.

It’s a lot for me to say that it can’t be New Beijing because the names are broken, but it’s basically all we’re given. This New Beijing could be any North American city that I’ve seen on a tv screen (but surely even then the USA, with its history, is unlikely to accept a hereditary ruler so perhaps not even then). The chances of it being even pan Asian, let alone Chinese, are unlikely. There is nothing in Cinder that gives a sense of place, let alone a sense of a sprawling Chinese city. There is no ridiculous architecture, no noisy press, no constant flux. There is a cluster of apartments rising high into the sky, kids playing in corridors and in my head I imagined Chungking Mansion, the Hong Kong monstrosity, but that was more me than the text.

Awkwardly for me this New Beijing is in a far-flung renumbered distant future, so a defence of this book could be that Earth politics has changed so much that Emperor Kaito (Japanese) could indeed peacefully rule the Eastern Commonwealth of (unnamed) China and Singapore and Mumbai at least, living in New Beijing, and it’s all good.

But uh we live here, in the real politics of the world, and to imply that there is a Japanese ruler of a combined China and Singapore and India is there are no words, imagine me lying on the floor making choking noises as I bury my head in my arm and laugh and laugh and laugh.

The Book Smugglers in a review note that the story is set in New Beijing but really fails to capitalise on that and in addition the story goes out of its way to make Cinder first assumed European, and then Lunar (and we assume, caucasian) – what even is the point? they ask. The point is to use the city as shorthand for characterisation and move on, and this is why representation and research and every thing else is so important. We are not making a needlessly big deal! We are making an actual facts big deal.

Our dystopic future is very scientifically unlikely to be white, because of genetics, and science, and look white people are a minority already, you know? And climate change and the sun and recessive genes, and a lot of our scientific breakthroughs are coming out of Asia and Africa. Do you know how advanced Chinese alternative energy research is? And the fact that authors continue to write our dystopic future as white, or as white hero in a pretend brown world, simply proves the point that we’re used as a backdrop and there’s no actual real reflection of our dystopic future (or our current) in these texts.

(It’s funny how easy it is to misread a thing. Another review claimed that for the ‘sensitive readers’, there was nothing to worry about, unless you were offended by cyborgs. Oh sure, nothing, except the explicit medical trauma where Cinders is offered up for medical experimentation by her step mother, and then we are treated to pages and pages of her tied to a lab table, panicking, having her blood drawn by med robots, her protesting and saying she was not a volunteer, having a disembodied voice telling her too bad. Sure. Nothing to worry about for anyone.)

Imagined World Politics and Their Implications in 2013

New Beijing is in the Eastern Commonwealth, which is ruled by the hereditary ruler Emperor Kaito. An emperor of any Chinese-something alliance is unlikely, given China’s history with hereditary rulers and though the Emperor was such for nearly 2000 years, it will take much to move him back again. The Emperor lives in a palace in New Beijing, so we can assume that New Beijing is the capital of the Eastern Commonwealth. This book was published in 2012, so we can assume that New Beijing implies something about the original power of China moving into this commonwealth, particularly in light of page 28, at which point I gasped out loud: “Subjects had been carted in from provinces as far-reaching as Mumbai and Singapore.”

The provinces of Mumbai and Singapore. The author’s website implies that the ‘Eastern Commonwealth’ is basically Asia, and that there are other similar conglomerates (Africa, Europe and Australia, ruled by a Governor-General).

Speaking of Africa, one of the key components of Cinder is the deadly plague which found its first outbreak in a small village in the African Union. This is revealed to be a disease brought to Earth by refugee Lunars, who have fled to the African Union’s unpopulated areas. It’s problematic that ‘unpopulated Africa’ is the location selected for runaway Lunars (and not, say, unpopulated Europe or unpopulated North America), due to its implications of a continuing ’empty’ or backwards Africa.* It’s problematic that this feeds into the concept of dirty brown people.

In the previous section I talk about why implying the Japanese-China alliance or commonwealth or whatever is a completely ridiculous notion given our real world politics. This conglomeration of the Eastern Commonwealth which I cannot even take seriously because it then refers to the province of Singapore (as opposed to the country of Singapore, which surely is the point of a commonwealth) just continues to give rise to the idea of pan-Asianism, a particularly vexing problem when we are talking about the representation of Asian people in Western texts; that is, we are interchangeable.

My Face

I could really do without authors choosing to set stories in my exotic different cities and then choosing to make the city some random Western smush, with no real need to be set in that city and no real understanding of how my city works.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not all up on my rant horse because she’s ruining my city or my feelings or whatever. But this is definitely a personal issue as well as an intellectual one. It assumes that a non-western audience is not your audience; it assumes unfamiliarity with the setting, because it’s a short-hand; it assumes that my city is short-hand for cool and exotic. And it is lazy and unnecessary and occasionally it makes me very angry.

*a footnote! I’m trying to avoid footnotes but this one is important and definitely a foot: I hate ‘#firstworldproblems’. you know what African countries have? commutes to work that are so short you can’t listen to a whole song, the movie you pirated being only available in poor quality so looking bad on your tv screen, and really expensive socks (all items I have taken from the hashtag right at this moment).

this thing we are doing (a manifesto)

On By StephanieIn meta10 Comments

Hey so I wanted to talk about why I am so excited about this blog!

When I was 14, I picked up Sabriel, by Garth Nix. Sabriel lived on one side of the Wall but always knew she belonged to both sides and was singled out for it in both places. Despite living in a fantasy world, with her dark hair and her dark eyes and written, as she was, by an Australian author, I knew deep in my heart that she was a mixed-race Australian girl, just like me.

Science fiction and fantasy was always my safe place, as a kid; a place where my idiosyncrasies were nothing more than that, where my brown skin and my black hair weren’t out of place. I read, almost exclusively in English, and I could always find some kid with dark hair, some girl with olive skin. I knew exactly what our future held: a whole lot of mixed kids, amorphous brown kids of varying hues, just like me, and also space ships.

Instead, the science fiction future I have found myself in is a sea of scientifically improbable white faces, and I have sadly and with deep regret left most English-language fantasy behind to its its fae and its beautiful red heads and its dragons shaped all wrong. I found myself drifting away despite my wishes: disillusioned by yet another Anglo-Celtic barely veiled Arthurian dragony thing with some barbarous coloured people and a whole lot of white people (GoT, I’m looking at you); surrounded by  humans on colonising, conquesting adventures through time and space. I started reading Chinese SF instead, but as a first generation adventurer into the world while that’s an option for me that’s not an option for all brown kids in an English-language world.

In 2011 I was on a panel at Continuum called The Dark Side of Steampunk. During it I ranted and I waved my hands and I’m pretty sure I nearly ended up in fisticuffs with other panelists over the things about which they were wrong (everything, but especially race and ethnicity) and afterwards someone I had never met, someone not white, had come up to me and, shaking, told me how happy they were that I had said every word.

Earlier that year The Wind-Up Girl was the Swancon bookclub book; at the panel discussing it, the bad bits were brushed aside so time could be spent on the good bits, and I sat there, choking on my loathing.

I have felt uncomfortable in Australian fandom for a long time. I go to cons, but I feel ill at ease, and as the years have gone by I have become more and more angry that I have to negotiate these spaces, these discussions where I am invisible, where to be of colour is to be the other, where male voices are the default, where I have educate rather than debate.

So in 2013 I chaired a Continuum. It is one of the biggest things I have ever done. I invited two non-white Guests of Honour (though in the end, only one was able to come), and everybody who came on board the committee was told in explicit words exactly what I wanted to achieve. I understand that it’s a slow process, an ongoing process. This year I was so proud of the programme we put together, its focus on putting all sorts of views forward and expanding horizons and challenging assumptions and even doing the 101 work, which I don’t mind doing. The panel simply titled “Social Justice 101” overflowed out the door and certainly was too full, but it worked and it challenged the people in my SFF community and for that I am grateful. This blog is a direct outlet of that, a direct result of that panel and the success of this con.

I kept my plans secret, for a while, aside from telling my committee. But in the programme I said it outright. My welcome was:

Our theme this year is Contraindicators. Speculative fiction and pop culture often challenges assumptions and dominant story lines, but so often it is complicit in all sorts of unpleasant things. This year Contraindicators seeks to actively challenge that, to create new and surprise endings, incorporate different themes, and to poke at assumptions and stereotypes. Contraindicators is about intersections and things that start off one way and don’t finish the way you think they will. It’s about cryptids. It’s about challenging the dominant paradigm. It’s about creating a space where people feel comfortable to talk about the things that make them feel uncomfortable in fandom, about working together to change our space into Our Shared Space.

In my opening speech I was even more explicit, talking about my experiences of racism and disillusionment within fandom, and within stories. I am sick of being quiet and polite about this! I want everyone to have to think about this, to have to challenge their own assumptions and be shaken from their privilege.

Not many of us panelists were people of colour, this year; but as the programme continues in this vein (which I hope it will; certainly it has the blessing of the next chair), and we continue to work towards a space where people can feel comfortable and as people see a community where their own faces are welcome, and reflected, I hope that this will change, and I won’t have to abandon this community and this SFF world that I do, in fact, quite enjoy.

This blog is not the only space in which I’m working towards my goals, but it’s the one that’s currently foremost in my mind, and I’m super excited to be sharing this space with Liz, one of my favourite people in fandom and real life.

As Liz mentioned, an important part of this space is that it’s primarily a not-USAmerican space; we are two Australian ladies of varied backgrounds, and this space reflects that, because my science fiction future also doesn’t involve USAmerica saving the world.

ALSO this blog is not just about me being Azn. It’s also about other things. But.

Fifteen years later that same copy of Sabriel still sits on my shelf, currently wedged between Cindy Pon’s Silver Phoenix and Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover. I haven’t read it in a while, but everything I ever hoped for, and everything it ever gave me, still holds true, and I will always love it for that.

Australia’s Jaegar Program (ps, racism and history)

On By StephanieIn meta7 Comments

How awesome is it that Australia is one of the active Jaegars in Pacific Rim? Totally awesome. I’m an Australian who loves me some giant mecha, and imagine the opportunities! We are a land of opportunity and resources, we have so much of the raw produce required, we have so much experience building for example high quality cars, and a whole lot of space. We also, given the Kaiju approach the population areas via the sea, require an effective defence program. We are, after all, girt by sea.

Liz talked about some stuff, but I’d like to talk about the logistics of pilots and Jaegars in Australia.

Australia’s Jaegar Program

Historically, at least historically in the last 150 years, as a nation, we are a bit obsessed with defending from those who come across the sea, and are incredibly xenophobic and closed-minded. And I say that as an Australian from across the sea, who is here today because of an illegal boat trip. I wish we weren’t but there’s the White Australia Policy, and the Yellow Peril panic of the 90s, and the Tampa and all the things going on right as we speak. It’s Christmas Island and Indonesia and the fact that our refugee intake is so low compared to many other countries

Despite an ongoing and illogical reliance on the ANZUS Treaty, leading Liz to suggest that it’s unexpected that Australia isn’t just relying on the US Jaegars (valid point), I don’t think it’s actually a surprise that Australia still has Jaegars around, holding on to them until the end. And I don’t think it’s a surprise that there was more than one, I think Australia would have had more than that at one point. There would have been complaints about the cost (and a scandal involving outsourcing bits, and discussion of extending allowances under the 457 Visa), but Jaegars, oh we would have them.

Slayer and Striker Eureka

I mentioned this briefly in a tumblr post, but Eureka is both a great and hilarious word to use within the Jaegar name. Eureka has many connotations in Australia, but mostly it means rebellion and fighting against the man. At another level it also represents democracy and mutliculturalism and the desire for profit. The Eureka Stockade was a rebellion on the Victorian gold fields, where workers from many country rebelled against being unduly taxed by the government (through licenses), in 1854. This event led directly to the reformation of unfair laws in Australia. It also led to the Southern Cross flag being used as a symbol of protest and sometimes me wanting to punch people, but that’s only to be expected.

In this context, Striker is a puzzling choice. The Eureka Stockade is sometimes referred to as a Strike. To call it the Eureka Strike (or Eureka Striker) would almost certainly have been a problem, but does that apply to the Striker Eureka? It is hard to say, and though an odd choice, it is not completely out of the realms of possibility. Slayer is the greatest bogan naming choice I’ve ever heard, politically I doubt it would happen but I love it. I love it a lot, and again it is not out of the realms of possibility.

More likely however are things involving things like kangaroos, bushranger names (omg the Ned Kelly!), and maybe we’d end up with one named the Captain Cook or something.

The Politics of Pilots 

We are a nation of immigrants, colonialists, criminals; people running away from things; people running too things; of Indigenous Australians and those who have come in the last 250 years. Despite the words, this was never Terra Nullius, and I live here on the lands of the Kulin Nation and I pay my respects to their elders. I am descended from an illegal immigrant; I live a life of superstition and being Chinese in all the ways that hurt and all the ways that don’t hurt. My father was in the air force and I grew up a military brat, moving from city to city, my father in the bowels of a herc. I am Australian.

Here are the ways you become a pilot in Australia: you have the money to pay for private lessons; you join the Air Force and give away a certain number of years of your life. One assumes the training and skills required for a Jaegar Ranger are more arduous, but still exactly like this: you give your life to the military, or you have a lot of money.

It does not completely surprise me that the Australian rangers are stern looking white men with a dog. No matter who the Australians were, I’m glad they had a dog, that’s fantastic, though I hope they’ve considered the Quarantine issues they’re going to face bringing Max back into Australia. That’s very important, because our quarantine laws are very strict and I’m sorry for Max. Though if we’re going for stereotypes he should have been a blue heeler at least.

The face of Australia is white. Despite everything, our television is white, or representation is white. I still get excited when I see a non-white Australian face on tv, though it’s never quite perfect. When a non-white family moved onto Ramsey Street, they were brand new immigrants. Never mind our generations living here, since the goldfields. Never mind our Indigenous people. Just our white people, the face of Australia. Always in our prestigious roles.

So the white father and his white son, sun kissed and well built, that makes sense. Politically, economically, historically. Frustratingly. In the movie and in our rock star Jaegar pilots.

A friend pointed out how this image of Australia is consistent with the image of Australia often found especially in Europe and the USA. He mentioned that this is largely how White South Africans are viewed in Australia: parochial, a bit backward, hilariously racist.

But imagine how amazing it would have been if our pilots were islanders or indigenous. The Australians in Pacific Rim were not portrayed by Australians, but what if they had been played by Jay Laga’aia and Lani Tupu; or by Deborah Mailman and Aaron Pedersen as a brother-sister team (the noise I just made).

In other news, no Australian calls their Australian son Chuck. Chaz, maybe. Charlie, sure. Chuck, rarely if ever. It’s what you call your dog. At least when he yelled ‘kick its arse’ he said arse and not ass, I suppose.

Pacific Rim and the Chinese Jaegar Program (and what that means in 2013)

On By StephanieIn meta5 Comments

If you know nothing about China at all, one thing you might know is that China loves design, and function, and building Really Really Big Things Really Quickly. And then building a second one. And then a third one that’s even bigger, with extra columns and squiggly bits. And then keeping them forever until they’re held together with duct tape.

The other thing you probably know about China is that there are a lot of people.

So it shouldn’t have surprised you when, in Pacific Rim, the Chinese Crimson Typhoon, piloted by the adorable Wei triplets (played by Charles, Lance and Mark Luu), turned out to be one of the four remaining Jaegar.

[Please note that this post contains spoilers for Pacific Rim (and also vague spoilers for Iron Man 3)]

The Logistics of the Chinese Jaegar Program and China’s Role in the World of Jaegars and Kaiju

This construction work is not limited to building large things quickly. It extends to a massive scale, manufacturing product after product and having a massive impact on global movement of commodities and industrial components. Production and manufacturing in China covers a whole lot of areas relevant to Jaegars, including industrial production, electrical production, and electronics. Although in recent months there has been a slight dip in employment figures in this area, this is considered to be due to an increase in automation, which further supports the Jaegar production cause, at least in theories. Reverse engineering is also a significant element, the copying of what already exists until one cannot tell the difference. Fake Apple stores are perhaps the most well known in the West, Apple stores that are so convincing in appearance and behaviour and electronics that even the staff have no idea they are working in a fake. And in 2004, when NEC discovered there were NEC counterfeits coming out of China, investigations revealed the entire company had been copied – 50 factories across China and Taiwan, complete branding, corporate HQ, royalties, products in major stores, warranties and final products “of generally good quality”.

Deloitte tells me that in 2010, China contributed 20% of the global manufacturing total. Between 1980 and 2009, China went from 0.8% to 13.5%. A quote from Deloitte that sounds like a negative but I actually think contributes to my point: “Many Chinese products have low added value, a challenging position amid rising costs and a shrinking export market. In the current state of the global supply chain, China’s manufacturing industry mainly plays the role of “manufacturing, processing and assembly…” The report points out that China has poor logistics, marketing and sales channels. It’s not explicit, but the implication is for export, and that China still relies heavily on Japan, Europe and the USA for these and for upstream goods. Which goes perfectly, actually, with China being an essential part of Jaegar production and ultimately developing its own Jaegar program.

Chinese minerals are less plentiful than its human and natural resources, but it has been seeking to rectify it. China is one of Australia’s strongest trading partners in recent history, with hundreds of major projects and dual owned operations especially in the mining industry. Australia exports significant quantities of iron ore, coal, gold and crude petroleum to China every year, amongst everything else. This every else includes a whole lot of professionals – every Australian I met while I was living in Beijing was either an English teacher, a politician, or an engineer. The top imports from China to Australia are, tellingly for the logistics of building Jaegars, telecom equipment and computers.

China has a great desperate need to participate in the Jaegar program. I go into it a little in regards to Hong Kong a little later, but China has a huge inferiority complex in regards to its national borders. China was a whole lot of separate countries until it was unified in 221 BC by Emperor Qin, who was originally the king of Qin. He is known as the First Emperor, he built a lot of the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors are his guardians in death and he nationalised the road system. He is not really relevant overly to this post but I want to emphasise that he put a whole lot of effort and reform into combining China into one country, and nobody is letting go now. There is shame in failure is basically our cultural creed. It’s why Tibet is a huge deal, it’s why Xinjiang is a huge deal, and it’s why Hong Kong is a Really Fucking Big Deal. It’s the undercurrent to a lot of things, the concession and the Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion being a case of Those White Jerks, This Is Your Fault. It’s the undercurrent of China is the centre and the pinnacle of the world, the rest of you are all ghosts. It’s the core of the military programs and state control and every thing else, and it’s why when the Kaiju come China will grab onto what it can do and won’t ever let go.

China’s massive military and constructive complexes are often incredibly problematic, but combined with the Chinese historical love of building the biggest things ever (the Great Wall; the many fake mountains just for the hell of it, well actually for the feng shui of it but still), its giant population, its huge population in its massive coastline, its history of needing to maintain national integrity, and the fact that it’s already bringing in a lot of resources, means that China will be going for it so fucking hard.

The Illogical 暴風赤紅

It’s not that Crimson Typhoon isn’t the English translation I would have given of the Chinese Jaegar’s name (it isn’t, but it’s close enough that I’ll handwave). It’s not that it uses character combos with which I’m unfamiliar (Chinese names get esoteric, that’s totally legit). It’s a little bit that the name sounds like it was invented in English and translated into Chinese characters, rather than the other way around.

Mostly, it’s that the name is written in giant traditional characters, when it’s a Chinese craft. It’s a Chinese craft, presumably funded/governed/controlled by the Chinese government. The Chinese government has spent a lot of time and money on making sure that simplified characters are the characters that get used for everything. The likelihood of the Chinese Jaegar, something of pride and awesomeness and achievement, having its name in traditional characters, is completely laughable.

The movie itself is set in Hong Kong, where traditional characters are frequently found; and often very contemporarily used, sometimes because of habit and sometimes in an active eff you to the mainland government. However it is still a Chinese craft, and HK is part of China now, despite two systems one country, and with the potentially for active eff you at the government and the fact that Jaegar was almost certainly built on the mainland, there is no chance that thing is named 暴風赤紅 over 暴风赤红.

If you’re interested, 暴風 is really strong wind (force 11), and 赤紅 is kind of like crimson, I guess.

I wrote some more about names at Tumblr, and there’s a bit more in my next post (tomorrow, on Australia and the Jaegar Program).

The Colonialist Narrative: the Hannibal Chau Problem

Liz already mentioned in her overview post that Ron Perlman’s character, Hannibal Chau, was originally meant to be not a white dude, yet somehow, played here by Ron Perlman (a white dude). Whilst that on its own is sketchy, it is super sketchy in context. What we have here is a white man, taking on a Chinese name, running a crime syndicate based out of Hong Kong, specialising in the highly illegal bits of a rare animal, for hilarious medical purposes, because that’s what Chinese people love, you know? This is the most blatantly inappropriate colonialist narrative since Tom Cruise was in the Last Samurai, though I’m pretty sure the Wolverine movie is going to also hit this. Hong Kong, the symbol of China’s super embarrassing failure and capitulation to Western Imperialist forces (see: about 1000 words ago), brought back into China’s arms in 1997 with the end of the loan, is being slowly sucked back into being a part of China. This is for better or for worse and I am not at this juncture discussing the good and bad of it. It is a huge ongoing issue for China, and for Chinese people. China’s concessions to the West were in significant part due to the Opium War, which was a symptom of the forced trickle of opium into China that was a deliberate ploy by Western forces to open China up against its will. Hong Kong was a part of this. So now we have a white dude, taking on a Chinese name, supplying illegal products for what looks like Traditional Chinese Medicine to Chinese people through the port of Hong Kong, surrounded by nameless Chinese thugs. Good work, everybody! Super good work.

The Reflection of China in Current Movies

The increased ‘good guy’ role of China in particularly USA blockbuster movies is indicative of China’s changing role in the geopolitical situation. This is reflected often by small but not necessarily insignificant moments in movies such as Pacific Rim. I do not think it is insignificant, in a ‘right now we are in 2013’ sort of way, that one of the four remaining Jaegars is Chinese, that the movie is set in Hong Kong, that there are three super hot ethnically Chinese Jaegar Rangers wandering around in the background, that they are spoken of with admiration.

In years past China has played the role of unquestioning, unthinking bad guy in movies, aided by the USAmerican tendency towards ‘communist’ as shorthand for ‘evil, unthinking pod person’ (because socialism is a bad thing? Americans.).

This has changed recently, starting with the slow shift towards China as ally in movies, and moving towards dual cuts – Iron Man 3, for example, contained a full 4 minutes extra of Fan Bing Bing’s face and plotline in the Chinese cut. The Mandarin, the advertised baddie in Iron Man 3, had me flailing in rage months before the movie came out, and there is some speculation that the changes to the role and plot in that movie were intentional in courting mainland Chinese demographics. The Christian Bale ‘what these Chinese ladies need is a White Saviour’ movie the Flowers of War (金陵十三钗) was a movie that set about intentionally creating a favourable image of Chinese people for a Western audience, sometimes to the detriment of the Japanese characters. It is also a contentious piece of history between China and Japan, with Japan denying it was all that bad and China maintaining it was super bad. The choice to make this movie could be seen as declaring a side. Red Dawn was to originally feature Chinese villains, who in post-production were digitally replaced by North Korean soldiers (which some sources described as ‘unprecedented‘).

Not to get all ‘everything has happened before’ up in here, but changing movies in the changing geopolitical situation is not only necessary, it’s precedented:

The cinematic depiction of the Chinese has been correlated with US policy towards China, as well as the Western attitude towards the Asians. In the 1920s and the 1930s, the fears of Chinese expansion (immigration) in the United States, reinforced through the circulation of racist thoughts by some US newspapers, pulp magazines, and books, found their way to Hollywood through dozens of movies portraying Chinese as dirty, criminals and tyrants…As China turned into an ally in the 1940s, a more positive image of the Chinese was established. This shift was brief with the rise of Communist China…Hollywood went right back into attack mode.

(Hollywood’s Representations of the Sino-Tibetan Conflict: Politics, Culture and Globalization, Jenny George Daccache, Brandon Valeriano, 2012, Palgrave Macmillan)

These moves are a form of soft politics, a game at which China is incredibly adept. Soft politics forms an explicit part of China’s overall “Going Global” or “Going Out” (走出去战略) concept, and it’s not a surprise that movies is one area where they feel they can easily sway things.

In the real world, China is also a rapidly rising power. Aside from the need to capture the Chinese movie going public, is it really reasonable to posit a future where China isn’t making a significant contribution to whatever amazing world saving efforts the USA is making? In 2013, China owns just over $1.1 trillion (about 10%) of the USA’s world debt, they’re going to have to collect on that some day and it’s important to keep them on side. And when they’re providing more money, they’re gonna want their fingerprints all over everything, just to prove they’re the best again, that China will never again be bested by Western powers.

My Face

You know what I don’t have a problem with? USAmerican movies having to rethink how Chinese people are represented, beyond just stereotypes. And it’s wishful thinking, but maybe this will extend to actual consideration about how other groups are represented, too. And it’s more complicated than that, of course it is, but at least I have that, and maybe one day I won’t need to search so hard to find a representation of myself or my culture that rings at least a little bit true. (And also maybe we could see a bit more of the Luu triplets, I’m not gonna stop going on about that)

 

 

There’s so much more to say, but at 2000 words this is going to have to do.