précis of "Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter"

Shih employs the narratives of two Chinese women’s experience with the western-centric regime, which she terms as “transnational encounter,” as her point of departure. The fact that the two women are both racialized as representatives of Chinese women regardless of their status as either immigrant or traveler (a product of cultural ethnicist reductionism and the Universalist reductionism of the west) suggests the inapplicability of postcolonial theory. Hence the post-socialist conditions that Chinese women faced beg a new reading focusing on the relationality among different entities, instead of the western affect-induced mode which leads to either assimilationist or conflictual reactions. Shih debunks and critiques the ignorance and arrogance characteristic of the west’s practice of value-coding the non-west in terms of time/space, ethnicity, and subjectivity, hence neatly weaving the two narratives and her ensuing arguments into this veritably titled article: “When” does a “Chinese Woman” becomes a “Feminist.”

The immigrant Chinese writer chooses an assimilationist strategy by passively subjecting herself to the western universalism. She subconsciously surrendering her particularity, through portraying the Chinese Cultural Revolution from a feminist perspective that caters the west’s essentialist imagination and expectation of a non-humanist/liberalist China, therefore her autobiography achieves success in the book market, winning her fame and profit. In contrast, Li Xiaojiang, the Chinese feminist scholar, takes a conflictual stance against western feminists as well as the mediatory diasporic intellectuals. Li’s indignant reaction results from the former’s imposition of an absolutist/western-centric concept of feminism on Chinese feminism, and she also takes issue with the latter’s usurpation and mis-representation of local Chinese women’s voice. This perforce makes Shih to reflect upon the role of diasporic/postcolonial intellectuals based on her personal experience. She points out the western feminists’ interest in wielding “asymmetrical cosmopolitanism” (non-western intellectuals have to be equipped with knowledge about the west but not the other way around) due to their lack of interest to learn about the Other. This inertia and ignorance lead directly to “selective recognition,” or “modernist ideology,” meaning to see history in linear terms and the Other as the backward past of today’s west, the practice of value-coding of time. This obsession or narcissism with the Self betrays the west’s disguised efforts of anti-Orientalism and anti- Universalism, absolving the west from the responsibility of stepping out of its comfortable zone to learn about the Other. Shih then delineates the women’s history in China, quoting Li Xiaojiang to point out that feminism in China, the seemingly state-instituted equality between men and women was in fact naturalization of women’s difference and femininity, and gender-equality was only labor-wise. The sudden twist of Chinese feminism from an “advanced” to a “backward” mode further exposes the problematic temporal value assignment. Shih gives her long overdue explanation of what Zhang Jie really meant by “there was no such thing as Feminism in China,” and calls upon cultural mediators to refrain from executing the tempting representative/spokesperson role to create a “tripartite structure,” further complicating and mystifying the dyadic communication between the west and the non-west.

Using the immigrant woman’s example, Shih problematizes the west’s lure of coevality and critiques some of the diasporic women who unreflectively become complicit in creating a western discursive hegemony and in ethnicizing the non-western feminism. Shih regards this displacement of the immigrant writer with the Chinese women as an underside of transnational encounter. Her critique of the west’s value-coding of Chinese is reminiscent of her Sinophone theory that deconstructs the chain of equivalence among Chinese nationality, culture, and ethnicity. Shih is critical of both the immigrant writer’s irresponsible translation of Chinese national culture to the U. S. domestic ethnicity and Li Xiaojiang’s nativist overreaction in the face of western-centralism, which can easily turn into xenophobic ethnicity-based Chinese centralism. The ethical conundrums exposed by the two modes of transnational encounter inspire Shih to propose an ethics of “relationality beyond affect and recognition.” Transnational encounter constitutes a good example where her relational comparison methodology aptly applies.

P.S. This summary of her 2002 published article is not included in The Lure of the Modern (2001), but there is a thread running throughout the development of her literary theory with regard to feminism, sinophone, which I deem closely related to the piece I read.
The most valuable takeaway that I benefited from her visit to WUSTL this past week was her insightful point of the positionality of us diasporic intellectuals. For a period of time I struggled between the desire to become a local and the ubiquitous presence of my inescapable Chinese-ness. My turning to Japanese studies is, though justifiably necessitated by my field of Buddhology, partially and subconsciously, motivated by my attempt to run away my diasporic identity. Many immigrant writers such as An-chee Min tend to portray China in a non-humanist/liberalist way that caters to the Western expectation and imagination to the effect of winning fame and profit in the literary market. It is that part of Chinese-ness that I loath and despise, I do not have a high regard for those Chinese people (and oddly enough, most of them are female, my sex) for I think their agenda to profit in material terms from (mis)representing the homeland that they left behind is just not noble at all. The intellectual engagement of those people with China and everything Chinese is what I call "cheap tricks." Shih helps me to come to clarity that just because of the existence of those false representations, there is all the more reason for me to face my Chinese-ness, to think of it as a privilege, a responsibility, to motivate myself to write with the utmost of my intellectual conscience, and to strive for the most insightful perspective despite all my ignorance as a human being.
:-p