Third Wave Poco Asian Politik

from AngryAsianMan


A reflection on Waves.
I first learned of the metaphor of 'waves' of activist leanings from feminism. While arguably Eurocentric in its articulation, I still find it a helpful metaphor when considering some of the emergent sense of identity in being Asian in Australia.



Briefly, and from wikipedia:
1st Wave feminism
focuses on de jure inequalities (or sex/gender-based inequality enshrined in law)... The first of the most important struggles was/is of that to vote (to participate as full citizens in a nation).

"Women deserve the right to vote"

2nd Wave feminism
sees a slow shift to de facto inequalities (or sex/gender-based inequality enshrined in non-state-based institutional practices, as well as in socio-cultural norms). One of the major cultural issues I see at play here is, in particular, the importance of advocating for increased participation of women in historically demarcated 'male' or 'masculine' spheres of influence (e.g. 'public' spheres, managerial/government positions, etc.)

"Equal pay for Equal work!"
"Rights, not Roses!"
"The Personal is Political!"


3rd Wave feminism
sees yet another shifting disposition, into politicising the intersectionality of gender as one of and among many factors that constitute the lived material reality of women's lives. Thus a focus on pluralism, multiculturalism, inclusivity of sexual diverse, transnational discourse, migrant women's issues (as opposed, strictly, to woman-as-citizen) etc.
Here also: the 'reclamation' (or simple 'claiming') and radical valuation of positions historically constructed/demeaned as female/feminine: e.g. Slut-walks, 'lipstick feminism,' etc.

"The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house" (Audre Lorde)
"Stop slut shaming!"




Once again, I recognise that this is a very broad and sweeping brushstroke. I certainly do not mean to diminish the diversity and specificity of the actual histories and herstories of feminism(s) as it/they have unfolded til the present and hereafter.

My interest here is not in feminism per se,
but about the way that feminism, as a movement (or series of movements) has been historicised into 'waves'.
(i.e. my interest is not in history, but in historiography)


Can this metaphor of waves be helpful in considering the unfolding of postcolonial/diasporic Asian-ness (within Euro-/Anglo- American/Australian-dominant spaces)?



Here is a beginning stab at what this might mean:

1st Wave Poco Asian Politik
We see first the waves of migrants from Asian countries into European/White-dominated national settings, fighting around de jure inequalities... Most simply: To be regarded as naturalised citizens. Sometimes, historically, at least in the USA, as far as I know, this has taken on the fight by some ethnic migrants (particularly those of Indian and Japanese descent, as far as I am aware) to be regarded as "White" by the state (and thus be conferred citizenship).

"Let me be a citizen!"


2nd Wave Poco Asian Politik
We see new naturalised Asian citizens struggling around de facto inequalities, particularly pertaining to profession and cultural membership. These include being seen as individuals in highly individualistic cultures, politics of representation in historically white-dominant spaces. For some Asian men (certainly for myself), this can sometimes take on a body-politik of fashioning myself as passably 'masculine,' given Eurocentric body-/and behavioural norms.

"I speak English!"
"Asian men can be muscular / hot / athletic!"


3rd Wave Poco Asian Politik
Here, the issue of intersectionality... And also about the 'reclamation' (or simple 'claiming') and radical valuation of positions historically constructed as Asian/"Asiatic," particularly by those who experience the entitlements and privileges of citizenship.

"RESPECT: Take your shoes off when you come into my home"


Let's see how this one unfolds...

Acknowledging, for now, some of my limitations in this post:
Where women have been constructed as Euro-/White-/American women
and examples of Poco Asian Politik have been male...
No explicitly queer examples ------>        >:(

Wanting to expand and rectify in future posts.

Contingency and Essentiality

My reflections on this piece: 
"The Poetics of Subalternity"

by Michelle Cahill



"The essential argument of [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak['s piece, "Can the Subaltern Speak"] is that when the gendered subaltern performs an act of resistance without the infrastructure that would make us recognise resistance, her act goes unnoticed, it is not registered as a sovereign speech act. Or in other words, it is not that she cannot act or speak, it is that there is nobody listening. Subalternity provides us with a powerful metaphor then. It enables us to more fully acknowledge that it is the sovereign speech act, the endorsement, the registration of identity within speech that ultimately confers agency or subjectship."


Both ‘Contingency’ and ‘Essentiality’ are themselves contingent concepts.

To privilege contingency is to also forget its also metaphorical, amorphous nature... the term itself points to no-Thing in particular, and yet... After all... contingency is also the ‘nature’ of all phenomena. In other words, we could just as easily say that “the essence of all things is their inessence, their contingency”… Which is not, therefore, to suggest that there is NO essence, but rather that there is not one discrete thing that we will find anywhere..

For the subject who has political agency, it is powerful and important to stress Contingency, or relationality… We have seen all too often the pathologies of essentialism here, or self-reification, particularly for people with power. The emphasis on relationality here brings forth a potential for transformation of the self and its antecedent social structures, which can ripple out in the service of all of us.

However, this is only and especially relevant for the subject who not only HAS political agency, but who also is conscious of the agency she has.

For the person who is experiencing a vaulted sense of his own victimhood… The emphasis on relationality may not only be painful to hear (i.e. “You have no inherent self, your sense of your own victimhood is related to others keeping power, etc. etc.”), but it is also potentially cruel.

This is not to dispense with relational language entirely… It is simply that, it needs to be more strategically deployed: The victim in relation to those who can lend their support, rather than as determined exclusively and by definition in its relationality with the oppressor/perpetrator.

As Cahill writes, "Strategic essentialism can be a useful way for minority groups to utilise their common ground to achieve political goals."

Here, to add language which stresses an independence of selfhood (such as a sense of bounded self which can rely on other ‘selves’ for support) may be as helpful as relational language. 

“I am my own person!” 
“I am strong!” 
“I can do this!” 
“I believe in myself!”

In this integration of Contingency and Essentiality, my self-identity (in both the individual and collective self-sense) needs to be made coherent, on its own terms, while resisting both the monolith of a rigid, inflexible Guardedness, as well as another extreme of a forever deeply oppositional relationship to the Privileged Other.

Here: Self-Esteem...

Global Woman ... and some Thoughts on Work

Today, I went to the Melbourne City Library and borrowed
  Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy 
edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

So far, it has been an absolutely excellent read. The book is a compilation of essays covering the issues of mass migration of women from poor countries to rich countries to fill in what Ehrenreich and Hochschild call the "care deficit"...




Care Deficit?

In summary, many of the 'gains' and 'successes' of materialist feminism in wealthy, "Western," industrialised countries have revolved around the 'rights' of women within public and paid professional spheres, in other words, in spheres typically more traditionally demarcated as 'male' (rights of citizenship, rights of property ownership, etc.). While this increase in access and opportunity has meant greater/increasing economic equality (in public spheres) for women citizens, this has not been correlated with as sharp an increase, particularly in late capitalist feminism dominated by bourgeois interests, in an incentive to prioritise and politicise the importance of domestic labour.

This means a lot of the roles historically fulfilled by women, in general and in particular, domestic & caretaker roles, are now being filled, in particular, by migrant women.

In the first essay of the book, "Love and Gold," Hoschschild says it best:

"Women who want to succeed in a professional or managerial job in the First World [sic]... face strong pressures at work. Most careers are still based on a well-known (male) pattern: doing professional work, competing with fellow professionals, getting credit for work, building a reputation, doing it while you are young, hoarding scarce time, and minimizing family work by finding someone else to do it. In the past, the professional was a man; the 'someone else' was his wife. The wife oversaw the family, itself a flexible, preindustrial institution concerned with human experiences the workplace excluded: birth, child rearing, sickness, death. Today, a growing 'care industry' has stepped into the traditional wife's role, creating a very real demand for migrant women.


But if First World [sic] middle-class women are building careers that are molded according to the old male model, by putting in long hours at demanding jobs, their nannies and other domestic workers suffer a greatly exaggerated version of the same thing. Two women working for pay is not a bad idea. But two working mothers giving their all to work is a good idea gone haywire. In the end, both First and Third World [sic] women are small players in a larger economic game whose rules they have not written."


Elsewhere, Ehrenreich and Hochschild mention that this gap has certainly not been narrowed by any significant increase in involvement (within the domestic sphere) of men. After all, there is a huge economic disincentive for individuals socialised within so-called "First World" settings to participate in labour that is not only financially uncompensated, but also socially undervalued. This may be experienced as especially 'disenfranchising' for men who have especially vested interests in holding on to the privilege of access to and association with paid, public, professional worlds. Men may experience both deeply internalised and socio-cultural pressures to dissociate from spheres of experience which have been historically feminised and constructed as belonging to women.

Hochschild writes:
"...when the unpaid work of raising a child became the paid work of child-care workers, its low market value revealed the abidingly low value of caring work generally -  and further lowered it...
Just as the marker price of primary produce keeps the Third World low in the community of nations, so the low market value of care keeps the status of the women who do it - and ultimately all women - low..."


One notable exception to this trend has been Norway:

"One excellent way to raise the value of care is to involve fathers in it. If men shared the care of family members worldwide, care would spread laterally instead of being passed down a social class ladder. In Norway, for example, all employed men are eligible for a year's paternity leave at 90 percent pay. Some 80 percent of Norwegian men now take over a month of paternal leave. In this way, Norway is a model to the world. For indeed it is men who have for the most part stepped aside from caring work, and it is with them that the 'care drain' truly begins."






Caring As My Political Act

I am reflecting on the fact that I have been participating, for the most part of my professional life, in the community sector, particularly for the GLBT community. As a man, I have not necessarily consciously thought of this as a particularly feminist or even pro-feminist act. Yet, clearly coming from my undergraduate academic background in gender studies, it was no surprise to me to learn that this industry is not only typically feminised (a workforce disproportionately composed of women), but historically undervalued and underpaid as well.

I am excited about recent developments in Australia, where several unions within the community sector, particularly the Australian Services Union (ASU) have fought for, and recently won, an Equal Pay increase of between 19% - 41% for all community sector workers, which is to be phased in over the next 8 years. This is a landmark Federal ruling, which makes a huge difference in rectifying the problem of the gender pay gap.

I believe that this will have positive implications for all of us. It will allow community sector workers not only to have more economic agency, but it also is a powerful cultural statement about the value of caring work in this country.

I believe this also means that we are far more likely to achieve the outcome of increased incentive to do part-time public work (either for those of us who have had 'too little' work, constructed as 'unemployed' or 'underemployed,' or for those of us who have 'too much' work, typically people with 'full time,' 40 - 50 hour-a-week jobs). Part-time work, with increased pay within carer/community-/social work sectors, is far more likely to be financially sustainable while one is also trying to run a household (with its domestic duties), whether alone or in a shared household.

Ideally, this would free women (and men) in these sectors to pursue other more personal and domestic aspirations (family, self-care, etc.), and not perpetuate the cycle of the 'care deficit' which has been part and parcel of the problem of global inequity...

Oh this white elephant of an unfinished, late-capitalist feminist project, of which the hiring of oft-exploited migrant workers has been but one symptom.

On Being Called Upon To Speak Mandarin

A white colleague asked me today for what she called a "totally non-gay favor." Intrigued and always eager to please (or at least eager to appear eager to please) I said sure, what is it?

She had, she said, during her casual carpool, met a man who was facing some problems at work, possibly because of his race or language. He had also, during the car ride, been speaking with another passenger in some kind of Chinese dialect. When she asked him whether he had been speaking in Mandarin or Cantonese (because she could not tell the difference), he told her he had been speaking both.

"You speak Mandarin, right?" she asked me.

I felt a kind of fear rising in me. Being asked whether I speak Mandarin or another Chinese dialect is a fraught question and to me always carries overtones (intended or not, conscious or not) of "you're actually Chinese, aren't you?" Not only that, but even after being told by the man that he had spoken in both Cantonese and Mandarin, my colleague continued to assert that she did not know what dialect he was speaking. BOTH! I wanted to shout. JUST LIKE HE TOLD YOU! Instead I said "sometimes my parents speak in a mixture of dialects, or switch between them. Cantonese and Hokkien." I also felt that I should say that I didn't really speak Cantonese. Just to manage expectations, you know.

She said it seemed to her that he was not that comfortable speaking with her in English and would I speak with him in Chinese and give him contact information for some organizations she had found that might help him (two API legal organizations in California).

Umm sure I said.

Did I want to make the call together at my desk or at her desk?

In fact my first feeling was that I didn't want to make the call together at all. I hate being watched as I speak Mandarin, whether by a speaker of Mandarin or not. I feel like my very identity as a Chinese person is under examination. Maybe, I wanted to say, you could just give me his number and I could call him in my own time, by myself. I didn't say that, though. Instead I said let's make the call in my office.

Before that, though, we had a series of meetings to attend. I was distracted throughout, rehearsing in my head my Mandarin vocabulary, unable to completely focus on the subject of the meetings. What would I say? How would I say it? How would I not appear completely "Americanized" (which is to say white, which is to say unable to fluently speak Mandarin) in front of this stranger and my colleague? In short - how would I preserve and defend my image and identity as an ethnically Chinese immigrant from an Asian country?

We prepared for the call, sitting together in my office. I suggested that it would probably be best if my colleague spoke first so he wouldn't have the experience of a complete stranger calling him seemingly out of the blue. Also I wanted to have a little time to read his accent and determine the various things one sometimes "read" in an accent - native dialect, class, fluency with English.

As I listened to the ringtone, my senses keened. Everything in the room came into sharp focus. Sounds were crisper and clearer, and time itself seemed to slow down. I was acutely aware of my colleague's expression, the information on my computer screen, the papers on my desk, the feel of my new t-shirt on my chest.

He picked up, and my colleague introduced herself as the person whom he had met in casual carpool. Then I introduced myself as Ming and said I was her colleague. What's your surname, he asked. Wong, I said (or Huang, since we were speaking Mandarin). I quickly transitioned into giving him the information my colleague had prepared, unable to really make small talk, and again, aware the whole time of my colleague watching and listening to me. I started out with a disused bicycle feeling. Wobbly, uncertain. It got a little better as his reactions to my speech seemed to be comprehension and some amount of attentiveness. When he told me a bit more about his situation, I was surprised by how much I understood. Will there be people at these organizations who speak Chinese, he asked. I told him I was pretty sure there would be. He ended the call by thanking us in Mandarin and English (overly profusely, I thought, but maybe that's an immigrant trait coming out. I'm actually sure I do the much same thing - being unreasonably grateful for the smallest and most incompetently rendered of favors).

After the call, my colleague said she had learned the words for "zero" and "five" (digits that were repeated in the phone numbers I gave him), and that she guessed the word for "Yes" was "dui." I explained that I didn't think there was a direct gloss for "yes" in Mandarin, and that there were at least three distinct words, "dui," "shi" and "hao" that conveyed different aspects of what the word "yes" conveyed in English. I then summarized what I had talked about with the man. We went back to our day. I was flushed, relieved. I felt I had passed. Passed as Chinese enough. At least for the day.

Pomo Kopi

This is a simple nasi lemak, with the nasi (rice), sambal (chili paste), ikan bilis (fried small fish), and a small slice of thin omelette. The otak otak (fish cake) was extra. This particular nasi lemak was served on a banana leaf, and purchased from Kopi O, one of a number of new second (or third) wave Kopitiams.

Kopitiams (literally "coffee shop" in Malaysian/Singaporean Hokkien) are small self-seating eateries that serve a traditionally very limited menu (coffee, tea and Milo with various combinations of condensed milk or sugar, kaya toast, soft boiled eggs, and some cooked food items like nasi lemak).

The first wave of kopitiams were independently owned, non-airconditioned shopfronts that were ubiquitous in the commercial streets of the Singaporean "heartlands" (any place outside the Central Business District or CBD). Generally, the kopitiam was frequented by locals, and developed a reputation based on the quality of its coffee, and its kaya toast (it really takes a tour of kopitiams to realize how many variables must go into making a good version of the "simple" dish of kaya toast, which is basically kaya - a pandan flavored egg curd - with a pat of butter between two slices of toast).

This current wave (more on whether it's third or second wave later) of kopitiams are often set up by owners of particularly successful versions of the original kopitiams, retaining the names, limited menu, and, usually, the kaya recipe and probably coffee roasting technique, of the first instantiation, as well as the generally low prices (around $1 for kopi, and $1.50 for kaya toast) but in chain form. These new kopitiams have appeared in air-conditioned malls all over Singapore, and are fast approaching (and perhaps in Singapore have surpassed) the blanket coverage of foreign coffee chains like Starbucks. In addition to changed locations, generally the furniture is different (wooden or metal chairs instead of plastic) and the menu is printed up on pearlescent paper or a wooden board rather than on A4 laminated paper or a backlit plastic board.

The new wave of kopitiams offer a slice of "heartland" life for nostalgic second- and third- generation Singaporeans and PRs (children who were born well after Singaporean independence), and their indulgent parents, who might well be just as comfortable in the non air-conditioned versions with plastic chairs, but are happy to tag along to the cooler - literally and metaphorically - mall, and have a familiar kopi while their kids ask them questions about what's so special about Malaysian/Singaporean coffee that gives it that unique taste (turns out they roast the beans with sugar and wheat or corn).

As for whether these are second or third wave, it's arguable that the foreign cafes (e.g., Starbucks, Coffee Bean) were a "second wave" of coffee shops, though there is only a vague resemblance to the menu of the traditional kopitiam (espresso instead of coffee, no local hot foods, an abundance of pastries), and the prices would scandalize ($5 for a latte? $3 for a biscotti?!) first generationers.