Page 87 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

OF DESIRE, THE FARANG, AND TEXTUAL EXCURSIONS 81

is the not yet decolonized subject, when the questions of identity, self-
sufficiency, and self-knowledge are never raised by or for her?

In the popular representations of Asians, we appear in the timidity of our
bodies, unable to express our pleasures, and reveled in the obscure
religious complexity of our pains. Such representations cast us as the
handmaids of bourgeois history, the servants of some larger economic
machine, as servants, cheap labor, and whores.
The Orientalist imagination sees South and Southeast Asia as societies
worthy of embarrassment, if not ridicule: there is the image of the cheap
sexual labor on the one hand, and the idea of a sexually ‘craved’ race on
the other. Therein lies the double humiliation rooted in a diasporic
economy, and in the political, religious, and psychical repression
associated with the Asian character.
In general, the US media assures us that in Asia, AIDS is spread by Asianto-
Asian heterosexual contact, not by contact with foreigners. Stories of female
prostitutes are told to suggest their ignorance and helplessness when it comes to
protecting themselves and their foreign customers. Scattered throughout the First
World media’s sporadic coverage of Asian AIDS are images of and obligatory
references to the Asian society and the cultural traits of the Asian people: they
are poor, underdeveloped, reserved and custom bound, complacent,
superstitious, and war-stricken. Moreover, there are tales of Thai and Indian men
who drink profusely, visit brothels regularly, and bring home to their wives
AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Visiting brothels, we are told, is a
cultural sign of Asian masculinity, a local custom, even an ethic. Here, media
orientalism delivers an ethnicization of the virus. In this ethnic turn, AIDS in
Asia is constructed as a crisis internal to the Asian world, cultures, peoples,
indigenous character; in short, its Third Worldness’.
The impotence of the Asian character, it seems, may have been the reason for
the West to call into question the ability of the Asian region to deal with AIDS, a
crisis associated with drug use and sexual labour. A sexual and narcotic crisis, in
a tautological turn, confirms the cultural marker of ‘Asian’ as the tragic by-
product of civilization, unable to control our fate and reduced to narcotic and
sexual indulgences.
The metaphors of depravity, filth, darkness, repression, and illness have once
again delivered the Orient to the West.
‘Excuse me, how much is an Asian body worth?’

Notes

1 I have presented a portion of this article as a performance piece using slides and
sound-tracks at the Second Asian American Renaissance Conference, Minneapolis