In their introduction to the collection Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out "much of the work on race within the United States has tended to emphasize a discussion of particular ethnicities. There has not been much engagement with the interrelations among such communities, nor with how the multicultural debates cross various national borders" (Shohat and Stam 3). In the past decade, nevertheless, discussions of ethnicity and identity among U.S. critics frequently note the prominent multiethnic and interethnic relations among racial groups [1].

In this paper, I build upon theories of multiethnicity and interethnicity in my examination of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity within the body we label "Asian diaspora." In particular, my argument is focused on the realization and construction of the diverse identities of Asian diaspora living in contemporary America in the context of interracial relationships. I choose to analyze Mississippi Masala (1991) directed by Mira Nair and The Wedding Banquet (1993) directed by Ang Lee since interracial romance in both films functions as the primary plot. The struggle for love and individuality is intertwined with the protagonists' complicated identities by way of negotiation between personal, familial, communal, and social concerns. I use this film analysis to suggest the intersection of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism in Asian diaspora's pursuit of their reconstructed, rather than prescribed, identities.

 

Masala: a Polyglot Identity Manifesto

As a controversial feature film, As a controversial feature film, Mississippi Masala portrays the Asian diaspora's diverse, and at times confused, identity in a multiethnic context through an interracial love affair between two non-Caucasians in the American South in 1990. The narrative focuses on a love story between a Uganda-born Indian woman, Mina (Sarita Choudhury), and an African American man, Demetrius (Denzel Washington), as well as on the resulting intolerance and hostility from both ethnic communities. Nair's film not only complicates the binary of black and white but also challenges the notion of monolithic national and ethnic belonging. The female protagonist Mina is Asian Indian by cultural origin, Ugandan by birth, and American by migration. Through the lovers' interracial relationship, which is strongly opposed by both minority (vis-à-vis mainstream white American) communities, the narrative addresses the characters' identity politics in the intensified interethnic encounter. At the end, due to the tension and pressure from both sides, the lovers are forced to elope in order to pursue a new life away from Mississippi.

Bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney have severely criticized Mississippi Masala as a "shallow comment on interracial, inter-ethnic, transnational 'lust'" (41). Their critique problematizes the stereotypes in Nair's film. The authors write of the film, "While we agreed that the film gives familiar images, we insist that the familiar need not embody the stereotypical. For that simply perpetuates hegemonic Western notion about Indian traditionalism or the parochialism of both the black and white in the deep South" (hooks and Dingwaney 41). Taking into account the film's representations along the trajectory of identity politics, I consider Nair's work a nuanced reflection on issues of identity in its portrayal of the lovers' experiences among two minority communities in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Born in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, on the east coast of India, and educated at University of New Delhi and Harvard, the director Mira Nair has an awareness of a multiethnic presence in the U.S. She chooses to use the word masala to articulate diaspora's concern about identity: "I believed strongly that to be a Masala, to be mixed, is the new world order. So many of us think in one language and are forced to speak in another" (Quoted in Xing 143). The Hindi word masala literally refers to a "bunch of hot spices" in Indian cuisine. Nair herself defines masala as a "polyglot culture of the Indians who were colonized in their own nation by the British and then forced by poverty to seek survival elsewhere" (Quoted in Freedman 13). In the film, masala becomes a metaphor of the racial and cultural amalgamation of the leading character Mina, whose identity embraces hybrid nature – Indian and Ugandan in the past and American in the present. Through Mina's self-identification of being a mixed masala, Nair destabilizes the "fixed, essentialized Asian American identities" (Xing 142). Rather, she presents a constructed identity of diversity in her artistic work.

In her review of Mississippi Masala, Sonia Shah states that Mina is "phenomenally unconcerned with issues of race, history, culture, and gender" (157). I, by contrast, view Mina as a self-conscious woman who negotiates her specific positionality through embracing multiple elements of her identity. She cherishes the memory of her childhood in Uganda in the 1970s: speaking Swahili, spending time with her father's best friend, a black African teacher named Okelo (Konga Mbandu), and befriending African children. Years later she still feels quite at ease in the black disco in Greenwood. Being a Ugandan by birth, Mina is aware of the African-ness in her identity that cannot simply be dismissed because of her family's exile from Africa.

On the other hand, after settling down in Mississippi with her family via England and working as a maid in her parents' motel, she belongs to the Asian Indian community in her adopted country. She attends a wedding ceremony and other social events of the community and is close to her parents and relatives. She is never a misfit nor an outcast among her fellow Indians until her affair with Demetrius is exposed. For Mina, her identity construction is more complicated than a given inheritance from her Indian cultural ancestors. Using Lisa Lowe's words, it is "a much 'messier' process than unmediated vertical transformation from one generation to another" (Lowe 27). Along this trajectory, I interpret Nair's film as a narrative about "the black" and "the brown" people that draws upon the ideology of ethnicity, gender, and class in the female protagonist's pursuit of identity.

Another intriguing aspect of Nair's cinematic representation is her treatment of the interrelations between diaspora Indians and other ethnic groups, to be more specific, African Americans in Mississippi. In this sense, Nair's film breaks new ground in telling a story between two minority people, "a bold adventure rarely attempted by Hollywood" (Xing 139). As being portrayed in Mississippi Masala, both Asian Indian and African American communities are aware of the prescribed elements of ethnicity and cultural origin in their mixed identity. In a family scene, Nair exposes the issue of individual identity as it is crisscrossed with one's cultural heritage and relations to "others." Mina explains how her grandparents' generation was brought to Africa by the British to construct the railway; thus her parents and herself were born in Uganda and then expatriated from there in 1972 after General Idi Amin gained power. In that sense, she is of Asian Indian descent but geographically disconnected with India; she is Ugandan but in exile. Demetrius's younger brother Dexter summarizes Mina analogically: "You just like us. We from Africa, but we never been there, either."

At the opening of the film narrative, different ethnic groups lead a peaceful life as minorities in the American south. "Black, brown, yellow, Mexican, Puerto Rican – all the same," as Mina's relative, uncle Jammubhai (Anjan Srivastava) claims, "as long as you're not white, means you are colored." "United we stand. Divided we fall." As the plot develops in the film, the tension between the two ethnic communities is intensified by Mina and Demetrius's love affair. Mina's parents' absolute objection represents "the ultimate fear" of miscegenation among many Asian parents, "especially if the 'outsider' is other than white" (Fung 168). In the context of a usually repressed taboo in Asian American films, the passion between the leading characters Mina and Demetrius highlights the under-represented theme of interracial sexuality among the minorities.

After being caught during a liaison in a motel in Biloxi, Mina and Demetrius experience intolerance from both communities and a boycott of Demetrius's rug cleaning business. To solve the dilemma, Nair designs a romanticized ending for her film. Holding the hope of a new life away from their ethnic communities, the young lovers decide to run away. Radhachrishnan takes the denouement of Nair's story as so idealized that it overpowers the political agenda raised in the film. He remarks, "individualized escapes (and correspondingly, the notion of the "history of the present" as a total break from the messy past) may serve an emotional need, but they do not provide an understanding of the histories of India, Uganda, or the racialized South" (Radhachrishnan 226). In contrast, I interpret the ending scene as a beam leading to "a more hopeful future – or at least a longing for a better world" (Mehta 231).

Ethnicity, Sexuality, Patriarchy: Negotiation of an Asian Diaspora Queer Identity

If Nair's Mississippi Masala presents a border-crossing experiment for multiethnic interpretation, Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet further transgresses the boundary through staging a relationship that is not only interracial but also homosexual. In Lee's cinematic narrative, a Taiwanese American young man, Gao Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), and his Caucasian gay partner, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), perform a fake wedding drama in order to hide their gay partnership and placate Wai-Tung's parents. Following their original plan, Wai-Tung marries to Wei-wei (May Chin), an illegal immigrant and a woman artist from Shanghai in order to solve a trio of problems: to satisfy Mr. and Mrs. Gao (Sihung Lung and Ah-Leh Gua), to fulfill Wai-Tung's responsibility as a son, and to rescue Wei-wei from the danger of deportation. Yet, the parents' impromptu visit to New York infuses new twist into this family drama. The marriage arrangement leads to a triangular relationship between the bridegroom Wai-Tung, the pretend bride Wei-wei, and the real lover and "housewife" Simon. After several chaotic scenes of the generational and cultural conflicts in the Gao's household in America, the film ends with a reconciliation: Wei-wei's pregnancy promises an heir for the Gaos while Mr. and Mrs. Gao return to Taiwan with an acceptance of Wai-Tung and Simon's partnership.

As a co-production between Central Motion Pictures in Taiwan and New York-based Good Machine Productions with a small budget of $ 750,000, The Wedding Banquet won the Golden Bear Award at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe as best foreign film of 1994. In exploring the reason for the film's attraction to a broad range of audiences, film scholar Gina Marchetti draws upon the complexity of its classification. She has made a list of the possible categories to classify The Wedding Banquet – "a Chinese film, a Taiwanese film, an Asian American film ... a New York Chinatown film, a 'green-card' story, a popular-comedy, a melodrama, an 'art' film, a gay film ... a 'multicultural' feature designed to raise the consciousness of viewers," to name only a few (276).

The Wedding Banquet's polyglot nature as a particular device to represent the issue of the Asian diaspora's identity as a mixture. Director Ang Lee has admitted his keen concern about identity that he was exploring in the film: "I'm a mixture of many things and a confusion of many things ... I'm a sort of foreigner everywhere. It's hard to find real identity" (quoted in Berry 1993, 54). Structured as a bittersweet family drama, The Wedding Banquet also explores notions of queerness in the triangulated relationship of two men and a woman in a transnational context. The film narrative starts with the tension between the Taiwanese parents' pressure for their son to get married (presumably to a woman) and Wai-Tung's present life in New York in a gay partnership. After the implicit negotiations between ethnicity, sexuality, and patriarchy, the plot moves to a reconciliation, which suggests the viability of Wai-Tung's reconstructed identity as an Asian diaspora queer. The complex entanglements of sexual and ethnic identity in The Wedding Banquet make it impossible to view the film in a monolithic ethnic or cultural context.

Taking the notion of sexuality as a metaphor for larger cultural issues, I examine the film as "identity disorientation" and as a consequential, and at times inevitable, reconstruction [2]. According to Chris Berry, The Wedding Banquet is probably the other isolated treatment of Asian characters' homosexual (dis) orientation in cinema after "the Taiwanese adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung's novel Crystal Boys (Niezi) (1984), which was made into the film The Outcasts in Taiwan around 1985" (165). As both diasporic and gay, Wai-Tung becomes "an anomaly," and thus is doomed to have no fixed identity. In her essay, Marchetti considers Wai-Tung to be "singular and atomistic" and therefore has "no identity, because he has no fellows in the film" (275-297).  Portraying Wai-Tung as an individual gay man of Asian heritage, the film does not prescribe for him a collective Asian diaspora queer identity to which to turn. Instead, his pursuit for a queer identity is engaged in negotiation between his ethnicity, sexuality, and his father's patriarchy. Through Wai-Tung's mediation of the conflicts between traditional values associated with heterosexual family structures and his homosexual desires, the film opens a space for a re-considered conception of identity for an Asian diasporic queer.

Through feminizing the Caucasian partner in the interracial gay relationship, Lee depicts Wai-Tung as a counter image of the usually effeminate Asian male in early American media [3]. In this sense, the film challenges the stereotypical cinematic image of the Asian male. Simon's femininity, symbolized by cooking, housekeeping, and taking care of Wai-Tung, helps to establish the representation of Wai-Tung as a masculine character in the gay relationship.

As has been widely noted by scholars, "for most Asian parents, being Asian and being gay are mutually exclusive. It is not only that homosexuality is a forbidden topic in most Asian communities. More significant, there is not a need to talk about 'it' because it is only a problem for white people: 'it is a white disease'" (Wat 155). Lee's film evades the direct confrontation between the son's interracial homosexuality and the father's patriarchy. During the time of his parents' visit, Wai-Tung leads a life of multiple split identities: a responsible son, a husband, and a gay partner. When Wai-Tung, Simon, and Wei-wei are infuriated by the unexpected trouble after the marriage, they quarrel in English at the breakfast table in the parents' presence. They presume that they are able to keep their secret underground fighting in a language that is impenetrable for Mr. and Mrs. Gao. In the following scene, the Taiwanese patriarch indicates his acknowledgement of the interracial queer relationship in his conversation with Simon. Mr. Gao presents Simon a red envelope with money as a gift usually given to the new daughter-in-law and thanks him in English for "taking care of" Wai-Tung. To put it in another way, Simon, as the embodiment of Wai-Tung's sexual (and ethnic) transgression in his reconstructed identity, has been accepted by the patriarch.

Given the racialized and politicized themes in both films as well as the directors' personal ethnic backgrounds as Asian diaspora artists, Asian American film studies has bestowed much attention on Mississippi Masala and The Wedding Banquet.   Instead of considering Asian American film production as merely oppositional to the "orientalist" and "racist" portrayal of Asians in early American cinema, I acknowledge that the diverse cinematic representations of Asian diaspora are engaged in the issue of interethnic encounters. Through contexualizing the two films, I hope to highlight the process in which Asian diasporic characters come to realize and negotiate for their individual identities of diversity and complexity at the dramatic point in the films when the interracial couples must confront their respective ethnic communities in contemporary America.

 

Berry, Chris. "Taiwanese Melodrama Returns with a Twist in the Wedding Banquet." Cinemaya: The Asian Film Magazine. 21 (fall 1993): 52-54.

---. "Sexual DisOrientations: Homosexual Rights, East Asian Films, and Postmodern Postnationalism." Eds. Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder. In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. 157-182.

Chiang, Mark. "Coming Out into the Global System: Postmodern Patriarchies and Transnational Sexualities in The Wedding Banquet." Ed. Peter X. Feng. Screening Asian Americans. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 273-292.

Freedman, Samuel. "One People in Two Worlds." New York Times, 2 Feb. 1992.

Fung, Richard. "Seeing Yellow: Asian Identities in Film and Video." Ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan. The State of Asian America. Boston: South End Press, 1994. 161-171.

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Lee, Ang. The Wedding Banquet. Samuel Goldwyn, 1993.

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Mississippi Masala. Dir. Mira Nair. Burbank, Calif: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1992. First released by Mirabai Films, 1991.

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Shah, Sonia. "Presenting the Blue Goddess: Toward a National Pan-Asian Feminist Agenda." Ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan. The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1994. 147-158.

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Wat, Eric C. "Preserving the Paradox: Stories from a Gay-loh." Ameriasia Journal 20.1 (1994): 149-160.

Xing, Jun. Asian America Through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity. Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: Altamira Press, A Division of Sage Publications, 1998.