Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality

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>Who better to represent modern Asian multiculturalism than Eurasian females, those doubly liminal figures in the Asia Pacific region who are at once stigmatized for their racial ambiguity (exoticism) and are yet valorized as Westernized subjects (in build, looks, and cultural practice)? Certainly they are viewed as more accessible to Asians than white women, for whom their images operate as a stand-in.36 On MTV and Star TV advertisements, the Eurasian woman is a figure of desire for the transnational Chinese male subject, whose travels and new affluence have stirred hopes for cross-racial encounters. The conjurers of such mobile masculine fantasies are Chinese venture capitalists such as Richard Li, who, as noted above, was interviewed in 1993 by the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, which was seeking more routes to Asia. Li, then only twenty-three, represents the new cosmopolitan Asian: “I’ve lived exactly 50 percent of my time here [in Hong Kong], and 50 percent in North America. . . . Do I feel Westernized? Well, Hong Kong has always been a very international city. I mean, I would feel as comfortable living in Shanghai, Los Angeles, London, or Zurich. . . .”37>Familiarity with global financial centers requires a culturally flexible corporate subject. More cross-culturally nimble than the Japanese, who also control an extensive media empire that is studded with Eurasian subjects (who are seen as both ideal and comic figures by the domestic audience), ethnic-Chinese media barons have reached a vaster, more diverse Asian audience through a galaxy of satellites.38>The Chinese audiences of MTV Asia and Star TV are merely the most visible of translocal spheres presided over by other ethnicized elites in Asia. The Indian cinema (emanating from “Bollywood,” in Bombay, and from alternative filmmakers) deploys iconic images associated with the moral dilemmas of upwardly mobile families, the rural and urban poor, and ethnic conflicts.39 The lively Malay film and TV industries normalize images of modern subjectivities associated with a moderate Islam that can coexist with globalization.40 By raiding Asia’s rich and diverse cultural treasures, the media public emanating from Singapore seems to lay claim to a neo-Confucian “sink” modernity that is sometimes a “(self-) parodic incorporation of the ‘authentic’ ”41 The Hong Kong-centered media public discussed above appears less ironic in its production of cultural codes and more frantically multicultural in its normalizing images and messages. Despite the imagery of cultural hybridity and racial mixing, the overall framing of messages suggests that the identity at stake is that of an Americanized Asian subject who is under twenty-five, watches MTV, wears jeans, owns a car, wields a wireless phone, and haunts shopping malls. An American economist calls these new consumers “a global MTV generation. They prefer Coke to tea, Nikes to sandals, Chicken McNuggets to rice, credit cards to cash.”42>Fusing Oriental mystique and Western style, the mass-media public then recasts modern Chineseness as a cultural half-breed—the Asian postmodern subject who will bring home the trophy. These normalized images suggest the ethnic power of an ascendant capitalist group in negotiating and bridging the political, cultural, and economic ruptures of Asian modernity.