Here is a Story For Me: Representation and Visibility in Miss Saigon and The Orphan of Zhao

Abstract

This article places The Orphan of Zhao casting controversy into dialogue with another problematic theatrical representation of East Asians, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Richard Maltby Jr.’s musical Miss Saigon. Drawing on his personal experiences of playing the role of Thuy in Miss Saigon in 2005, Chow suggests that the problematic hyper-visibility of East Asian performers in a number of stereotypical roles in Miss Saigon may actually lead to moments in which the labour of the East Asian actor might be perceived in excess of the character. Therefore, while Miss Saigon’s narrative constructs an orientalist vision of the East, its embodiment in the theatre creates moments of possible resistance. Understanding the relation of actor to role in this way, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) casting of The Orphan of Zhao can be seen as exclusionary, as its particular distribution of roles polices East Asian embodiment, presence, and speech. Chow suggests that rather than being problematic for the use of ‘yellow-face’, the RSC’s casting of non-East Asian actors in East Asian roles was troubling for a different reason: it silenced its East Asian actors and hid them in plain sight, therefore replicating the way East Asian subjects are hidden and silenced within contemporary British discourse.

Notes

1. In actual fact, it was two-thirds of a dog, and a maid.

2. Broderick Chow, ‘Two Dogs and a Maid: Theatricality, Visibility and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Orphan of Zhao’, BroderickChow.com, 19 October 2012 <http://dangerology.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/two-dogs-and-a-maid-theatricality-visibility-and-the-royal-shakespeare-companys-the-orphan-of-zhao/> [accessed 25 June 2014].

3. Mr Yunioshi is a Japanese character in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, subsequently portrayed by Mickey Rooney in Blake Edwards’s (1961) film of the same name; Fu Manchu is author Sax Rohmer’s iconic Chinese villain, portrayed by, among other actors, Christopher Lee and Peter Sellers in film adaptations of Rohmer’s novels.

4. In addition to the underrepresentation of British East Asians on screen and onstage, hiding and silencing also touches on other contemporary East Asian experiences in the UK. Consider, for example, the hiding of East Asian migrant labour – for example, Filipino domestic workers, or Chinese labourers and sex workers. See, for instance, Hsiao-Hung Pai, Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour (London: Penguin Books, 2008).

5. Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2013), p. 1.

6. Ibid., p. 2.

7. Ibid. She draws here on the playwright Glecy Atienza’s statement that ‘Kaya pala mukhang maarte ay dahil may mga di masabi’ [She is overacting precisely because there are things she cannot say], Ibid.

8. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and ed. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006).

9. This is the preferred Canadian term for non-white persons.

10. National Household Survey 2011, Vancouver, Statistics Canada, <http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dppd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=5915022&Data=Count&SearchText=Vancover&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&A1=All&B1=All&Custom=&TABID=1> [accessed 22 February 2014; URL no longer active].

11. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 78.

12. Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson and Elizabeth W. Son, ‘Performed Otherwise: The Political and Social Possibilities of Asian/American Performance’, Theatre Survey, 54.1 (January 2013), 131–39 (p. 133).

13. Maria Degabriele, ‘From Madame Butterfly to Miss Saigon: One Hundred Years of Popular Orientalism’, Critical Arts, 10.2 (1995), 105–18, (p. 105).

14. Ibid., p. 115.

15. Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 32.

16. While the first act’s primary antagonist, Thuy, claims a ‘right’ to Kim’s body and hand in marriage, he is not presented as a romantic threat to Chris. Rather, his claim to Kim is about filial piety and tradition; in this way, he slips into the asexual stereotype of the East Asian male.

17. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, ‘The Bind of Representation: Performing and Consuming Hypersexuality in Miss Saigon’, Theatre Journal, 57.2 (May 2005), 247–65 (p. 248).

18. Ibid., pp. 257–58.

19. Documented in The Heat is On – The Making of Miss Saigon, dir. by David Wright (London: Fremantle Media, 2008 [1988]), DVD.

20. San Pablo Burns and Tzu-I Chung both examine the global circulation of specifically Filipino labour in the stage industry of Miss Saigon. Tzu-I Chung, ‘The Transnational Vision of Miss Saigon: Performing the Orient in a Globalized World’, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 36.4 (Winter 2011), 61–86.

21. San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte, p. 119. Emphasis added.

22. Ibid.

23. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), p. 41.

24. Ibid., p. 7.

25. Cited in San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte, p. 126.

26. Wright, The Heat is On DVD.

27. Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Richard Maltby Jr., Miss Saigon (New York: Musical Theatre International), p. 105.

28. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 94–100.

29. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 36. Emphasis in original.

30. Bhabha, Location, pp. 122–23.

31. See the ‘Don’t Buy Miss Saigon: Our Truth Project’ collaborative website at <http://dontbuymiss-saigon.tumblr.com/> [accessed 18 February 2014].

32. ‘Don’t Buy Miss Saigon: Our Truth Project’ <http://dontbuymiss-saigon.tumblr.com/post/62719445243/i-am-a-vietnamese-american-womyn-and-this-is-my> [accessed 18 February 2014]. Emphasis in original.

33. One contributor to ‘Don’t Buy Miss Saigon: Our Truth Project’ points out that forced marriage is not a part of Vietnamese culture, and that in fact traditional Vietnamese culture ensures property rights for women as well as inheritance rights for daughters: <http://dontbuymiss-saigon.tumblr.com/post/61968240562/i-am-a-vietnamese-american-woman-and-this-is-my> [accessed 18 February 2014].

34. Boublil et al., Miss Saigon, p. 175.

35. The name refers to the derogatory expression ‘F.O.B.’ or simply ‘Fob’, meaning ‘Fresh Off the Boat’, which is also the name of a 1980 play by David Henry Hwang. David Henry Hwang, FOB and Other Plays (London: Penguin, 1991).

36. Muñoz, Disidentifications, p. 11.

37. At the top of each scene, a character enters, states his/her name, and recounts their purpose in the plot. While this initially appears over-laboured, it soon becomes a necessary aid in parsing the complicated narrative.

38. The Royal Shakespeare Company, Facebook page, 2012, <https://www.facebook.com/thersc/posts/10151107942763235> [accessed 15 February 2014] (para. 3 of 4)

39. Ibid. (para. 4 of 4).

40. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, pp. 12–13.

41. I am deliberately referring to the dual meaning of ‘sense’ here, following Rancière’s lead, meaning both a perception through the senses and the meaning or understanding that arises therefrom. This dual meaning exists in the original French word sens as well.

42. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 89.

43. RSC, Facebook page, para. 4 of 4.

44. James Fenton, The Orphan of Zhao (London: Faber 2012), p. 31.

45. Ibid., p. 16.

46. Ibid., p. 17.

47. Spoken by Guard (Siu Hun Li), Ibid., p. 19.

48. The connection between ‘dogs’ and ‘Chinese’ has historical resonance with the exclusion of both dogs and Chinese from Huangpu Park in Shanghai prior to 1928, as well as the use of ‘dog’ as a derogatory term among Han Chinese for other Chinese ethnic minorities. See Robert A. Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, ‘Shanghai’s “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol’, The China Quarterly, 142 (June 1995), 444–66.

49. Fenton, The Orphan of Zhao, p. 5. Emphasis in original.

50. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Emphasis added.

51. Chris’s Act 2 aria (‘Let Me Tell You the Way It Was’) conflates his relationship with Kim with justification for America’s interventionist war in Vietnam: ‘So I wanted to save her/protect her/Christ, I’m an American! How could I fail to do good?’ (Boublil et al., Miss Saigon, pp. 331–32). Clearly, ‘her’ refers to both Kim and Vietnam itself.

52. Boublil et al., Miss Saigon, p. 164.