Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 77

Film and Asian American Literature

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but also transfigure ethnicity, for the point is never to return to the original but to
tell it with a difference. The “two-toned language”^ concretely objectifies a large
group of Asian American writers’ attempt to negotiate a ground on which they can
find their own identity (170). In the case of The Woman Warrior, because of Asian
American female writers’ distrust of their inherited “language,” it is conceivable
that Kingston’s combining of the legendary female character. Fa Mulan, and the
historical male figure, Yue Fei (a general who lived in the Song Dynasty, 420-479)
serves two purposes: it is intended to destroy both the traditional Chinese gender
line which was ignominious in placing women at the bottom of the social totem
pole, and the line that separates imagination and reality. Besides, as Chinese Ameri
can scholar Amy Ling in Between Worlds suggests the transposition of the carving
on the back from the life of Yue Fei is appropriate to the story of Fa Mulan, for it
effectively symbolizes the physical tortures that Chinese women have endured
(160). Rather than to rewrite the heroine. Fa Mulan, to the above- referenced
specs as Chin charges, Kingston’s is an effort to reclaim Chinese American women’s
sense of history and identity by creatively using Chinese lore and legends.
The movie version of The Joy Luck Club, nevertheless, goes beyond the
issue of border crossing, creativity, and eclecticism. In Orientalism, Edward Said
suggests that the European invention of the Orient plays a key role in the develop
ment of Orientalism: the Orient is “the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and
oldest colonies, the sources of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contes
tant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other”; the Orient
“has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personal
ity, experience” (1-2). Orientalism, therefore, is “more particularly valuable as a
sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse
about the Orient” (6); it draws attention to “the debased position of the Orient or
Oriental as an object of study” (96); and to emphasize the Orient as a contrasting
image to the Occident, Orientalism keeps in tact “the separateness of the Orient,
its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability,
its supine malleability” (206).
Hollywood has consistently been painting the Orient as a contrasting image
to the West. What is alarming, though, is that this trend seems to be corroborated
and reinforced in movie scripts by both Asian American as well as non-Asian
writers. In comparison to the book, for instance, the portrayal of women’s struggle
in China and in the United States in the movie version of The Joy Luck Club is
unbalanced. In the book. Juxtaposition plays a key role in exposing the cruelty and
injustice of sexism no matter where it is practiced. Ying-ying St. Clair, An-mei
Hsu, and Lindo Jong’s failed marriages in China correspond to Lena St. Clair,
Rose Hsu Jordan, and Waverly Jong’s struggles in their marriages in the United
States. Part III of the book, in fact, is titled “American Translation,” revealing