Arts and Culture
Comparative Cultural Analysis
Master Thesis
The Good Life Fantasy and Post-migration
Life in China
A Close Reading of My Chinese
Flavor and This is Sanlitun
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter One The Spurious Construction of the Good Life Fantasy and the Full Control over the Foreigner in Narrative 10
Chapter Two The Fracture of the Good Life Image and Resistance Against the Ideological Affective Environment 23
Laughter, the Ideal Foreigner and the Good Life 25
Smile as a Challenge to the Good Life Fantasy
32
Chapter Three Fraying of the Good Life in the Impasse 44
Conclusion 58
Works Cited 61 Sun 2
Introduction
In recent years, a growing number of westerners have migrated to China in search for career opportunities, work experience or simply a different way of living, a phenomenon dubbed by the British media as the Great Escape where “the Old World escapees desperately seek exit strategies from economies in free fall” (Lehmann 2). Like all other forms of migration such as refugees or asylum seeker, the migration from the West to China against the background of neon-liberal globalization is not simply a geographical transferring of human capital, but always associated with desire, dreams and fantasies on the individual level. As Michaela Benson and Karen O'Reilly point out, there is always a common narrative underlying migration: “the search for a different lifestyle, a significantly better quality of life” (2). Such a narrative builds a comparative framework where “life after migration is presented as the antithesis of the life after migration” and home and destination are contrasted and put on unequal terms in the imaginings of the migrant, with the later infused with promises of better life (Benson and O'Reilly 20). Such desires and imagination of the migration destination are often shaped by the active construction of a desired place by the host country. David Harvey explains that “in globalization...the active production of places with special qualities becomes an important stake in spatial competition between localities, cities, regions and nations....Cities forge a distinctive image and to create an atmosphere of place and tradition that will act as a lure to capital” (11). While his emphasis is on the economic aspect of space construction to attract capital, with his wording such as “image” and “atmosphere of a place” and “qualities of a
space”, Harvey indeed hints at the constructed narratives, imaginings and images surrounding a certain place which flow through the personal and collective consciousness and constitute the national fantasy (Berlant, The Anatomy of National
Fantasy). So there is a circulation of the fantasies between the would-be migrants and
the host country: with the state, institutions or tourist industries actively building up fantasies of good life in the destination which plays on the migrants’ desire for the Other, the migrants, driven by the desires and fantasies, search for the good life promised.
I am interested in the relation between post migrant life and the fantasy of good life in the destination in the scenario of the westerners’ transnational migration to China and would like to unearth in this thesis how these fantasies are constructed and manipulated and how they interact with, affect the post-migration lives of foreigners in China and vice versa. Two documentaries depicting will be analyzed in this regard:
My Chinese Flavor1 and This is Sanlitun2.
My Chinese Flavor is an episode from the programme Foreigners in China
produced by CCTV4. CCTV4 is a state-owned channel whose aimed audience is Chinese worldwide, particularly overseas Chinese, Hong-Konger, Taiwainese and Macanese. The programmes produced under this channel mainly focuses on Chinese culture and history, such as, (apart from Foreigner in China) National Memory,
Chinese Medicine, Chinese Art, also including some recent news in China. According
to the CCTV website, the programme Foreigner in China “featuring lives of
1 Link to the video: http://tv.cctv.com/2016/12/17/VIDEf18pj80wKqynKaSmCkfx161217.shtml
2 Link to the video: https://www.iqiyi.com/v_19rrhuf8ik.html
foreigners in China, aims to showcase China’s profound traditional culture, openness, inclusiveness and developments of contemporary China through a personified view”, in short, to create a national image which contributes to the national fantasy. In the video, three short stories about three white foreigners living in China are juxtaposed through a shared feature: love for Chinese food. The story of the first character will be closely examined. It tells the story of the settlement of Jiangnan (Chinese name), an American man, in China, revolving around his experience with spice and hotpot. He came to study in Chengdu of China 17 years ago, a southwest city famous for spice-eating, and gained much popularity for his unusual ability to eat spice. This particular “quality” together with his fluent Sichuan dialect immediately made him the favorite of all sort of entertainment shows and cuisine shows. In the end, abundant experience with food and love for spicy food triggered him to open a hotpot of his own and forever settle there. In relating the story, the unique characteristics of Chengdu as a soothing and slow-paced city with rich food culture is stressed. The video’s nationalistic production background and its political agenda make it a suitable object for studying the process of constructing national fantasy and how the foreigners’ post migration life in the video is selectively portrayed, controlled and manipulated for this purpose.
The second video This is Sanlitun is a mock documentary produced by an Irish director showing the post-migration life of an Englishman in Beijing. The main character Gary left the traumatic past in England to pursue a better life China: to win back his Chinese ex-wife and start a business career. The documentary is of
observational mode, documenting the progression of migrant life without any interruption. Thus the video, made of the characters’ monologues and dialogues, are plain in style and has a touch of realism. In the video, Gary tries out different careers: selling shampoo, being a fake cook, teaching English, opening his company. At the same time, he tries multiples times to win back his ex-wife. However, in the end, he is still left poor and lonely. This detailed depiction of the migrants’ life in China allows an in-depth analysis of the discrepancy between the real migrant life and the good life fantasies.
There has been a rich literature concerning the subject of migration in China. With the process of globalization and capitalization going on in China, flows of capital also lead to prominent phenomenon of migration, both within China and from China. Much research work has been accomplished in these two directions, addressing the geopolitical, economic and cultural consequences of such migration. However, the inflow of foreigners into China are often left almost unnoticed due to its insignificant scale, constituting only 0.1% of total population in 2010 (Han 124). Nevertheless, the past decades has witnessed a growth in the number of foreigners, which subsequently spurs a emerging field for research. Lauren Gorfinkel in her book Performing Chinese Nation, the Politics of Identity in CCTV’s Music Entertainment Programs gives an informative and detailed description of foreigners performing on Music shows, focusing on how the portrayal of their “love” for China is scripted and used to showcase and promote China’s soft power. Similarly, in Imagining the Other:
Foreigners on the Chinese TV screen, Geng Song marks out the same phenomena:
foreigners are cast in Chinese drama in order to show the modernity and cosmopolitanism of the country and the drama tends to homogenize and other the west by arranging the foreign character in subordinate positions. These two works are approaching from the perspective of nationalism and Chinese national identity and the role of foreigners to it. The pioneering work of Beverley Hooper, Foreigners Under
Mao: Western Lives in China turns attention to the living condition of the community
of westerners in the Mao China. However exhaustive and detailed in content, the text’s focus on the specific historical period makes it outdated in terms of the current situation in China. The more recent work Transnational Lives in China : Expatriates
in a Globalizing City by Angela Lehmann, offered a fresh analytical trajectory.
Completed with interviews from foreigners in Xiamen, it focuses on the changes of their emotions and attachment to their national home when living in China and explores the relation between space, emotion and social structure which are “linked and dynamic sites of both the creation and contestation of values”(Lehmann 289). It needs to be pointed out that a solid theoretical framework is still lacking in this field.
This thesis aims at contributing to the emerging literature on international migration to China. As the migration to China is growing, this research is significant both for its academic contribution and for its practical importance. Different from the above sociological approach which foregrounds the social, economic and political impact of migration and deal with the migrants as economic units affected and affecting the social dynamics, this thesis will look at the cultural politics of migration and specifically focus on the everyday and ordinary life of the migrants in China and
to see how their migrant life in China is selected and manicured to enhance the good life fantasies of the migrant destination by the official media and how the good life fantasy is lived up to in the everyday life. So good life will be a key term in this thesis. Good life in post migration is hard to define, but it is always associated with happiness (Mckenzie) and easy movement (Benson). Thus this thesis will analyze the post-migration good life by tracing affect and movement in the two documentaries. In terms of affect, I will analyze the happiness/unhappiness in the migration life, migrant’s affective gestures such as smiling, laughter as well as the affectively-invested genres such the comic. In terms of mobility, I would like to extend mobility in this thesis to include both physical movement, upward social mobility and the textual movement(agency) in the documentary. By weaving this two threads together in the analysis of the two documentary, the thesis aims to reveal the instability of the good life fantasy and further to speculate what constitutes as a post-migration good life in China. Due to the specificity of the objects, while locating the object in the field of migration studies, the thesis will also be touching on media studies, literary analysis, affect theory.
Such a departure requires to analyze the two documentaries not only in terms of its narrative content but also its narrative form and its anesthetic forms such as genre and tone. In analyzing the narratives in these two documentary, the method here is to not to see the aesthetically mediated narratives of the foreigners’ life as equivalent of the real life experience of the migrants in China, but to derive from the affective scenarios in these works insights on the situations of the contemporary life, and by
reading patterns of the migrant’s tactics and adjustment in these texts, try to draw the collective and general features of foreigners’ lives in China from these singular and contingent cases and further discern the (in)stability of the good life fantasy.
The main argument will be divided into three chapters which are interlocked with each other. Chapter one and chapter two focus on the object My Chinese Flavor, while the third chapter will move on to discuss the second video This is Sanlitun.
Chapter one aims to closely examine the role of foreigner in the ideologically-oriented text, so as to reveal the inauthenticity of the good life image and consequently the falsity of the national fantasy of an open and cosmopolitanism China. Documentary, according to Bill Nichols, features a particular way of “control” and is ultimately an “institutional practice” subject to discursive regulation (14). In terms of My Chinese Flavor, the situation is complicated by the nationalistic production background of the documentary and its ideological purpose. Thus the way how foreigners and their post-migration life is mediated, controlled, shaped and moulded in the text betrays the fakeness of the good life image it attempts to create. To analyze the role of the foreigner in the text, I will use concept such as authoring agency, narrative prosthesis and spectacle.
Chapter two will shift from the narrative aspect of the video to its affective environment or mood and focus on the agency of the foreigners in it. The nationalistic production background of the video My Chinese Flavor has a intricate relation with its affective register. By using ambient aesthetics of Jim Bizzocch, this chapter comes to unpack the overflowing positive feeling in the video and its ideological function in
contributing the good life fantasy. Within this ideologically manufactured affective environment in the video, the affective gestures of the foreigner Jiangnan, such as smiling, laughing where the subject maintains a certain degree of agency, are worth noting in that they shows traces of the migrant subjects tactics of survival and occasionally reveals their subversive attempt. If Chapter one shows the meticulously controlled narrative where the fantasy of foreigner’s good life is firmly grounded, the analysis on affect which occasionally escapes the manipulation of the producer in chapter two shows this instability of the good life fantasy.
Chapter three will be a further concluding analysis building on the last two chapters, disclosing the illusional nature of the good life fantasy. As mobility in post-migration life is intrinsic to the better way of life that migrant sought (Benson 221), examining the movement of the foreigner Gary both in the physical aspect and social aspect offers an opening to analyze his post migration life in China. Thus the chapter turns to the everyday life of the foreigner, his driving, transportation, working etc. and his attempts at social mobility. A key feature of his movement is repetitive and paradoxical movement which looking far will appear as immobility: he attempts to move all the time but fails to make any substantial progress. I will analyze a specific scene of Gary stuck in the road, using John Urry’s concept of mobility to analyze power struggle. Also I will use Berlant’s concept of impasse and crisis ordinariness to analyze the paradoxical and repetitive movement in the scene. Behind Gary’s immobility is a impasse going on with its associated minor crisis and highly affective
state. The abundance of scenes of immobility in the text normalizes the existence of crisis which undermines the good life fantasy.
Chapter One The Spurious Construction of the Good Life Fantasy and the Full Control over the Foreigner in Narrative
My Chinese Flavor is produced by the state owned media CCTV 4, one of the 50
channels under CCTV (Chinese Central Television) broadcasting different programmes and has more than one billion viewers. Different from the Western media, almost all traditional media in China are still controlled and managed by the government. Despite the reformation of the media going on in recent years which led to the delegation of discretion power to the provincial broadcasting stations and development of other new media forms, the national media, to which CCTV 4 is exemplary, is still the dominant force in shaping the discursive public sphere (Chin).
My Chinese Flavor, one video produced under this channel, constitutes as one part of
this ideological force across the discursive public sphere in China. The aim of the programme as showed in the website description is “to showcase China’s profound traditional culture, openness and inclusiveness, and developments of contemporary China by featuring lives of foreigners in China.” In a word, it aims to create an ideological image of an open and cosmopolitan China, and the means to achieve it is by create another fantasy, that is, the fantasy of foreigner’s good life in China. It is obvious to see in the video that the foreigner featured here has a fulfilling career, enjoys popularity among locals and is culturally recognized. In a word, their living experience in China are presented as a good life which in turn shows the openness and inclusiveness. However the questions remain: How is this fantasy constructed? How does the migrants’ lives are manipulated to fit into the fantasy? Since ideological
construction is discursive and affective (Mckenzie), I will analyse the good life fantasy in both narrative and affective aspects of the video in chapter one and chapter two respectively. In this chapter, I will try to address these aforementioned questions by close reading the text’s narrative structure and its content, that is Chinese food, to analyzing the representation of the foreigner in the text and the foreigner’s relative agency in it. The approaches to the text will be authoring agency, narrative prosthesis, spectacle and food.
First of all, I want to look at the featured foreigner’s agency in writing the narrative. The most prominent aspect concerning the foreigner is about textual authority. To best analyse the form of the documentary and the role of foreigners in the narrative structure, it is productive to first of all locate its position in the documentary genre. Bill Nichols lists four modes of representation in documentary: expository mode, observational mode, interactive mode, and reflexive mode (32). Considering the overarching god-like commenting voice and its attempt to make an argument and intervention in the historical world, this documentary falls into the category of expository documentary. Such a mode almost predetermines the limited agency of the social actors or interviewees, in this case the foreigner, despite the fact that he is the main character. In the case of the observational mode where the filmmaker holds a disciplined detachment from the event and allow the story to unfold and people to act undisturbed (Nichols 34), the actual historical agent claims and controls the full author agency, either the progress of the story or the theme and argument. The expository mode offered exactly the opposite approach. In
Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts of Documentary, Nichols explains the
problem of authoring agency: ( in expository mode) : “The authoring or institutional agency is represented by the logos-the word and its logic-more than by the historical body of an actual agent. In another word, the actual existence or being of the subject is secondary and complementary to the overarching argument” (56).
Such a subordinate role is prevalent in the documentary. In the first video, nearly 70 percent of the narrative is done by the commentator, while only a small portion is left to the subject, either a fragmentary interview talk or a brief interaction with other social actors. And whenever the foreigner speaks up, his word is either to prove the argument just made by the commentator or to smooth the narrative flow. At around 1:40 of the documentary, after praising the city Chengdu for its soothing urban culture and well-known hotpot, the commentator points out visitors’ fascination for it, and relates that Jonathan’s passion for Chengdu cuisine is instantly evoked the moment he tasted it. Right after the commentary the documentary switches to an interview clip of him, short and concise without any redundant give and take between the interviewer and interviewee or any repartee, saying:“ since I have lived in Southern America near Mexico where pepper is grown, I have been used to eating spicy food. I agree with most people that Chengdu is a city where you will never want to leave once you arrive.” The first sentence explains the commentary on his fascination with food, while the second sentence confirmed the commentator’s opinion on Chengdu. Along with other clips, it can be seen that the subject foreigner’s talking and acting is meticulously edited, cut and scripted to fit into the whole argument of the video.
However, the textural authority is not all the time clasped in the hand of the filmmaker. There are a moment when the textual authority is delegated from the commentator to the social actor, however, interestingly, it is to the local Chengduer not to Jonathan. At 4:55 of the documentary, the Chengduer authoritatively comments on Jonathan: although he is an American, he has a professional knowledge of hotpot. Thus if he opens a restaurant, the quality of our hotpot can be guaranteed”. Then the following scene of Jonathan searching for the hotpot ingredients and his sharpness in selecting the right one all testified the former comment. So the textual agency of Jonathan is subject to both the commentator and local authentic Chengduer sometimes. The text is about the foreigner’s experience, however, it is the voice-over and the local Chengduer not himself who are relating his story, speaking for him, representing him.
However, this does not mean that the foreigner character is inconsequential. In the development of the narration, the foreignness of the foreigner played a crucial role. Given that the documentary narrative to some extent is of the same nature as the literature narrative, the concept of narrative prosthesis developed by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder in the book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and
Dependency of Discourse can be used for analysis and can offer new insights on the
role of foreigner in the narrative. Mitchell and Snyder argues that “disability functions as a narrative prosthesis in two ways: firstly, disability is the force driving plots forward by providing dilemmas that the narratives need to solve, secondly, the disabled body offers narrative the illusion of grounding abstract knowledge in bodily
materiality (metaphorical use of the disabled body) (64). Though being foreign bears no resemblance to disability on the surface, they do share a common ground: being outside the norm, being a deviation from the widely accepted. Mitchell and Snyder pointed out that “narrative prosthesis forwards the notion that all narrative operates out of the desire to explain the riddle of aberration, to compensate for a limitation or to reign in excess” (49). In another word, difference, strangeness is the propeller of the narrative development. So in the case of the documentary, the foreigner, being different from and strange to the locals, is the riddle to be deciphered, the lack to be fixed and addressed, and thus works perfectly as a narrative prosthesis.
This tendency can be detected in the progress of the narrative. At 0:57 of the documentary, there is a short clip showing Jonathan’s participating in the Chili eating competition: he eats one chili after another while a surrounding group of foreigners cheering him up. Immediately after this scene that comments : “every one is amazed. How can a foreigner be more capable of eating chili than locals?” The usage of the word “a foreigner” is worth noting. The word “foreigner” is derived from the word “foreign” which has all the connotations of mystery, otherness and aggressiveness. By commenting on and referring to him as “foreign”, Jonathan’s difference and strangeness is immediately marked out and demands an explanation. Then follows the process of the familiarization of the strange; a flow of information is given gradually: telling his origin and how he happens to be here; explaining his passion for chili; his having a Chinese name, showing his ability to speak surprisingly fluent Sichuan dialect. So far, the distance between the self and the other is diminished.
After this familiarization of the different other comes the fully assimilation. An obstacle is presented in the later part at 4:51 of the documentary: how can the foreigner open a authentic-flavored hotpot restaurant when he is not a local? Unsurprisingly, Jonathan is allowed to speak: “I am very confident of myself and I am already a 17-year-old Chengduer”. This claim suggests the extent of assimilation into the Chineseness: 17, an age at the thresh-hold of adulthood but still waiting for growth. And later there are scenes of Jonathan, with the assistance of some Chinese, doing fieldwork searching for the right hotpot. At 7:00, there is a particular scene when he is cooking the base soup for the hotpot with a Chengduer. Jonathan is (pretendingly) asking: “There is still more oil here. (why don’t you put this all together into the wok?)”. To this the local gave a teacherly professional answer: “It will be put in during the cooking process to cool down the oil. Such teaching process put Jonathan and the Chinese in an unequal teacher and student relation and is symbolic of the process of transforming and thus incorporating the Other. In the end of the video, Jonathan rides a bicycle across the streets and the lanes of the Chengdu city, a scene denoting that he is living here as a local, immersed in the local cultural environment. Therefore, the documentary starts with the foreigner being a stranger, a source of novelty, surprise in need of displaying and addressing and ends with the foreigner becoming almost the same as a local Chinese. Beside this, the foreigner also works as a prosthesis in the symbolic way, though not in the same fashion as disability does. The mere existence of the foreigner in a Chinese city in the narrative can provide a sense of the cosmopolitan status and open environment of the current
China, a symbolization which serves the purpose of the documentary narrative. Apart from being a narrative prosthesis for the documentary, Jonathan’s exotic features, the residue element of difference not to be assimilated, function as a spectacle to be fetishized. Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema analyzes the mainstream cinema’s narrative pattern through Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and points out that there is a active/passive heterosexual division of labor at work in film: women function as a spectacle/image which “holds the look of the male protagonist, and plays at men’s desire” (837), while the man is the bearer of the spectator’s look, not only the active looker but also “the active one of forwarding the narrative and making things happen” (838). Although Mulvey’s analysis is serving the feminist cause and specifically addressing the genre of fictional film, her notion of the spectacle and narrative split can be borrowed for the analysis of this documentary. Despite the fact that the foreignness of the foreigner is assimilated to the extent of language, culture identification and way of living, there is still an excess not to be addressed: the bodily difference of the foreigner. Jonathan’s apparent white skin color, exotic features, western physique stand out among the typical Asian looks of Chinese social actors. Different from the psychological reasons behind the woman-as-spectacle in Hollywood films: sexual desires ( scopophila/voyeurism), the foreigner’s bodily difference appeals to the local Chinese in another way, mainly in two levels. first of all, on the basic level, as it is a human need to search for variety, diversity and innovation, the physical difference is inherently a source of fascination (Fischler 277); secondly, on the historical level, whiteness is the signifier of privilege, property,
advancement (Harris), and thus adds more value to the bodily difference of Jonathan and makes it a potential object of fascination.
In the documentary, it can be easily noticed that there are many scenes where the Chinese, either social actors, or interviewers, look, with obvious curiosity and ready interest, at the foreigner, and easily get amused by the foreigner’s words, countenance or behavior. For example, at the moment of 5;15, the two Chinese women (one is the seller of chili, another the guide of Jonathan) holds a light and cheerful conversation with him and at the same time looked at him with full amusement. At this particular moment, the Chinese spectator, at whom this documentary seems to be directed, due to the similarity in terms of nationality and cultural background, can easily obtain identification and recognition with the Chinese social actor and look through and with them at the foreigner. So compared with the mainstream Hollywood film which is suffused with romantic plots and where the heterosexual love is an indispensable element, in this documentary featuring the foreign immigrants in China, nationality comes to the fore front. So the labor division shifts accordingly from gender to nationality terms. In this case, the white foreigner, the locus of desire, is objectified into “an image” to provide the spectator with the pleasure of looking, while the Chinese characters in the documentary, with whom the audience identify with, are “the bearer of the look”, who retains the power of looking. It needs to be noted that although the foreigner functions as a narrative prosthesis initiating the narrative, but he does not control the pace and progress of the narrative as the male protagonist in a fictional film does, since in this documentary, the expository mode determines the the
narrative control being in the hand of the commentator, as pointed out in the first part. Now after combing through the narrative structure, I would like to move on to the specific content of the documentary. It is evident from the name of the episode My
Chinese Flavor that food is the theme of this documentary, the thread connecting
three stories. In the documentary, there are plenty of visuals about hotpot, either the eating process or the ingredient preparing process. At 4:37, there is a scene of Chengduers eating Hotpot: a group of friends or family siting around the table: the mother holds the baby, the dad (probably) looking at them lovingly. At the same time on the table the hotpot stock is sizzling with spice aroma in the square-shaped container, around which plates of raw food is displayed. The hotpot eating scene and the hotpot container are rich with cultural references. The roundness of the hotpot (container) suggests unity/reunion; the hotness of the hotpot suggest humanly warmness; the fact that hotpot base incorporates spice and sauce produced all around the country and that literally any edible material, vegetable or meat, processed or raw, sweet or salty, bland or strong-flavored, all can be thrown into and cooked in the boiling stock denotes that Chinese culture’s receptiveness and inclusiveness (Yi). Apart from these, hotpot eating is also about personal relations: it is always a group act with everyone joyfully eating and chatting together instead of individual act. Thus hotpot is invested with Chinese values of harmony and collectivity.
Claudie Fischler in his essay Food, Self and Identity gives a clear yet profound explanation of the connections between culinary system, culture and
relation:
Any culinary system is attached to, or part of a world view, a cosmology. Man eats within a culture and this culture orders the world in a way that is specific to itself. It operates a kind of generalized implicit taxonomy, in which food has an important place... Basic taxonomies incorporates the individual into the group,situate the whole group in relation to the universe, and in turn incorporate it into the universe... they are part of the fundamental bond between the self and the world, the individual and the society, microcosm and macrocosm. (281)
So in the case of the Chengdu hotpot, it is the Chinese’s specific way of connecting to the universe. So what does it mean when Jonathan said that he loves eating hotpot and when he is eating hotpot with other Chinese (the scene at 00:10)?
Following Fischler’s logic, the individual eating food from another culture is adapting himself to a new taxonomy of world, and readjusting his position to the world. In another word, his subjectivity is negotiated, contaminated and reassembled in the process. This view is confirmed by Deborah Lupton in her book Food, the
Body and the Self. She argues that “it is not only the life and death of the eater that are
challenged by the incorporation of food, but also individual’s place in culture”(17). So Jonathan’s eating Chinese food is not only a biological process but also a cultural assimilation process. He is eating into a new food system and therefore into the new group which practices it and into new cultural imagination, new identity.
If eating hotpot is sign of his emerging Chinese identity, then Jonathan’s act of opening an authentic Chengdu hotpot is the sinking in of his Chinese identity or active self-creation of it. After 4:00, the video is actually all about his experience of learning to create the authentic Chengdu flavor. In the scene of the cook preparing the materials for eating, a great variety of food, surrounded by a circle of plates of food, he is skillfully slicing the lotus root and then arranging sliced beef on a decorated plate. In the background, the commentator says: “the technique to make Chengdu hotpot is rigorously taught”, suggesting that Jonathan needs to grasp these technique shown in the visual in order to open an authentic hotpot restaurant. It is easy to see that the act of slicing and displaying together with the decisions made unconsciously on what is or is not food for hot pot constitute as a series of Chengdu regional unique cooking process. The original and raw materials, through slicking and cooking, underwent a significant transformation, not just materially, but symbolically; it is transformed in the hands of the cook from Nature to Culture; it is stamped, labeled and identified with a specific regional Chinese culture (Fischler). Therefore, Jonathan learning these culturally specific cooking techniques, which renders Chengduer’s particular relation to the world, is a further assimilating process working on him.
By learning to grasp the slicing techniques, to find the chili with the right spiceness in the market and field, to stew the stock in the conventional Chengdu procedure, Jiangnan is portrayed as actively incorporating the local Chengduer’s position with food, and thus is moving gradually to and sinking into the Chengduer identity. So the video is in the end a recording of the process of his Chinese identity
formation: eating chili is his recognition of the local spice-eating food culture; loving hotpot is the assimilation into the Chengdu culture; opening hotpot restaurant is to some extent is a test which the self-affirmation of his Chengdu identity.
To conclude, with the national government having full writing agency over text, it could be said that the video is the nation’s attempt of writing a autobiography of itself or, more precisely, an act of projecting the nation’s selfhood. Therefore, the primary concern of this text is the being of the self, even the existence of the other, in this case, the foreigner character, is for the self. In other words, here ontology comes before ethics. Different from those migration narratives which aim to ethically address and respect the otherness of the other through dialogic imagination, in this text, the otherness of the other is to be either annihilated or assimilated. Such a fundamental stance towards the other determines the treatment of the other in both narrative structure and narrative content. Unsurprisingly, the text does not take an ethical approach which might include polyphony, the suspension of judgement and the order of content over form. Instead, the documentary resorts to monologue and deploys the form of expository mode to maximize the projection of the national self and curb the agency of the foreigner.
From the above analysis, it can be seen that under the full textual authority control of the commentator, representation of the foreigner is of an exploitative manner. An analysis of the foreigner Jonathan’s role in the narrative shows that the construction of the good life fantasy in the narrative is done with barely any authoring
agency from the foreigner. To some extent, the foreigner is almost paralyzed in the narrative text. His living experience in China is meticulously manipulated and controlled to work as a narrative propeller and his appearance to function as a spectacle. Thus the falsity and constructedness of the good life fantasy is exposed.
Chapter Two The Fracture of the Good Life Image and Resistance Against the Ideological Affective Environment
It is easy to notice when watching the video that My Chinese Flavor itself is not strongly narrative. Although three stories are presented in the documentary, they are stripped of specifics concerning the main character’s background, their living surroundings and interpersonal relations. The main storyline remains the same and is repeated again and again: foreigners love Chinese food and through Chinese food, they achieve upward social mobility in China. In terms of the flows of the narrative, no ups and downs are created in the plot in order to keep the viewers in suspense. There are, however, many elements in the documentary defying a narrative-focused interpretive regime. Most obviously, the video is dominated with laughter, smiling faces, pleasant conversations and cheerful background music. Particularly the foreigners in it take on a cheerful air and now and then smile and laugh. All of these things generate a rich affective environment.
In her analysis of autobiographical film Tarnation, Anna Poltetti elaborated this relation between narrative and excess: “ ‘the story may be the driving purpose for the text’s construction, but the materials drawn on to tell the story may often produce excess which troubles or complicates a narrative-focused reading, and which exceeds the intention behind the narrative’s construction” (158). Poltetti’s concept of excess,
drawn from Bill Nichols, refers to “that which escapes the grasp of narrative and exposition. It stands outside the web of significance spun to capture it...[for example] causal lines, colors, expressions, textures, rhythm, melody” (157). Though the two texts, Tarnation and My Chinese Flavor, diverge in many aspects, this concept of excess is also applicable to the documentary My Chinese Flavor. Weak in terms of narrative structure, excess abounds in the documentary; the collage of video clips and pictures as well as background music used in the video, though serving the narrative at a certain point, bring with them excesses which can not be absorbed in the narrative black-hole.
Affect as well as affective gestures such as laughing and smiling is one of the the excesses in the video and will be the focus of analysis in this chapter. So in this chapter I would shift from the narrative-based approach used in the first chapter to affect theory and politics of laughter in analyzing the affective excess in the documentary. Such a shift to affect is conceptually important. The last chapter shows the construction of a foreigner’s good life image and the national fantasy by fully exploiting the featured foreigner and holding his narrative agency under full control. Since ideology works both on the cognitive and affective level. It is necessary to look at the affective aspect of the video. In this chapter, I will move from the narrative aspect of the documentary to its affect register. I will first of all look at how the good life fantasy is further strengthened and constituted by the active production of happiness in this text then, by looking at the affective gestures of the featured foreigner in it, to reveal the instability of this ideologically constructed good life.
In the first part, I will focus on one scene where Jonathan laughs with two locals, and examine how the laughter and the emotions contained in it, help establish the facade of foreigners’ good life in China and also have a prescriptive power on the viewers. In the second part, I will analyze the affective environment in the text and analyse the role of the foreigners’ affective gestures in it. In this analysis, I will draw on Bergson’s theory on laughter, Sara Ahmed’s concepts of happy objects and happiness as well as pleasure, and Frances McDonald’s concept of self-reflexive laughter.
Laughter, the Ideal Foreigner and the Good Life
At 6:26 of the documentary, when Jonathan goes to a market searching for chilies, the woman in the stall first teased Jonathan good-naturedly while pretending to be uncaring: “It is not my responsibility if your tongue gets numb eating it.” Then the assistant woman said looking at Jonathan smilingly: that is exactly what we want. Subsequently, he repeated with a knowing smile: “ Yes! Getting numb is indeed what we want!” Then three of them burst into a roar of laughter. With the going on of the laughter, there is a series of transformations in their features and body movements: mouth wide open, teeth showing, eyes curving and even Jonathan’s body slightly lurching forward. Their cheerful interaction is permeated with happiness and joy. It is easy to see that when it comes to laughter, mainly three aspects are concerned: the content of laughing, the act of laughing itself and the emotions in laughing. I will briefly discuss the first aspect and then examine the laughing act itself and the
emotions going with it.
Fig. 1. Jonathan laughing together with two locals
In the scene, the source of the laughter is the humorous content: in responding to the tease of the seller, the assistant and Jonathan make a witty reply. And the object of the humor is the numbness effect of the chili. Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter in
Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is relevant here. Bergson points out
the relationship between intelligence and laughter :
The comic appeals to intelligence, pure and simple. But this intelligence must always remain in touch with other intelligence...Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo...It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. (32)
There are mainly two points here: the comic laughter is based on intelligence or knowledge; shared knowledge is the premise for the formation of the laughing group
and how far this particular knowledge is shared delineates the boundary of the group. However, Bergson’s argument here is based on the comic, a different source of laughter from the humorous, I would argue that the humorous and the comic are the same in terms of the first point. But as to the group formation, the humorous is different from the comic. The person being the object of the comic laughter more often than not possesses some social idiosyncrasies (which makes them laughable in the first place) that are in need of correction (20), thus is always excluded from the laughing group and laughed at at an emotional distance. Whereas in the humorous laughter, the person who is the source of it is also included in the laughing group. In a word, humorous laughter is a sign of inclusion and acceptance while the comic laughter defined by Bergson signifies the opposite.
Considering the scene in question, the knowledge of the flavor of chili determines the inclusion or exclusion of the group. If one does not have a professional command of the chili, in this scene, a witty response can not be returned, the humorous tease of the woman would be left unattended and thus the humorous laughter can not be created. So the echoing of laughter between Jonathan and the two locals proved Jonathan’s shared knowledge with the others on chili and further testifies his ability of appreciating and returning the humor and thus his inclusion into the group. In this way, we can see that laughter becomes the site of empowerment and entitlement. Laughing with the two Chinese locals is a sign of Jonathan belonging to Chinese society and of him further assimilating into the Chinese space.
Now let’s move on to the laughing act and its accompanying emotions. Laughter first of all is a physical movement. Anca Parvulescu points out the bodily transformation that occurs during laughing: ‘laughter is produced in more than one opening of the body (mouth) and addresses the multiple senses of the receiving body; sight, hearing and smell are involved in laughter; and therefore the eyes, ears, mouth, nose stays for now only with the face” (9). In other words, laughter does not only open the mouth but opens the whole body accordingly. In this scene, as I described before, with the laughter going on, the three people’s mouth gaped, revealing the teeth, the tongue, the tissue inside and the further darkness of the body, thus an opening of the “inside” to the “outside.” Or seen in another way, the boundary between bodies is loosened with laughter. Together with the mouth, their eyes are more concentrated and focused on each other’s face, and their bodies (most visibly Jonathan’s body) turn closer to and face towards the two other persons. In other words, the body laughs and opens as well. Thus, these bodies turn into readily receiving and open territories and the moment of laughing is also the moment of a bodily opening.
Sara Ahmed also address this in Cultural Politics of Emotion when she talks about pleasure: “pleasure opens bodies to worlds through an opening up of the body to others. As such, pleasure can allow bodies to take up more space” (164). To rephrase, different from pain which turns the body inwards, pleasure opens the body to others. Thus the laughing body is a body in pleasure which is open to other bodies. What is worthy of attention is that the bodies are different in appearance. With such
an opening, different bodies are drawn closer and the foreign features of Jonathan are familiarized, with the distance inherent in the foreign body lessened or even removed.
As is visible in the picture above, this opening between the foreign body and local body happens in a given space, and consequently has effects on the space itself. This spatial effect, I would argue, is one of the goals the documentary aims to achieve. Also in Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed points out the spatial relation between pleasure and power: “pleasure involves the capacity to enter into, or inhabit with ease, social space. Spaces are claimed through enjoyment” (165). Put in another way, the expansive nature of pleasure determines the power of pleasure to take over and colonize social space. Though it is not stated clearly by Ahmed, it can be concluded that the display of pleasure in public, by taking over space, also has the power to legitimize and naturalize the source or the scene of pleasure. One example listed by Ahmed illustrates this : “the display of enjoyment and pleasure by football fans can take over a city, excluding others who do not ‘share’ their joy, or return that joy through the performance of pleasure” (164). In this football scenario, the publicness of the joy/pleasure of the football fans is an open declaration of their existence: “we are here!”, and the display of pleasure enacts power to further ground the legitimacy of the joyous bodies of the fans in the city space and endow these bodies the transgressive and transformative power in the city space.
Similarly, the pleasure demonstrated in this scene of the documentary through the conversation between different nationalities takes over the space and transforms the
nature of the space. Located in an unknown region of the second tier city Chengdu, the market space, with the stalls ill-equipped, hygiene condition in poor standard, is by every means a local (or even to some extent backward) place which can be hardly associated with cosmopolitanness. The mere appearance of the foreigner in this place somewhat changes the dynamics of the space but in a limited way. However, the laughter and the display of pleasure and happiness exaggerate and magnify the presence of the foreigner in the market and naturalize and normalize this conversation and interaction between different nationalities, which somehow adds a hue of cosmopolitanness to the local market. In the programme description of the channel
Foreigners in China ( of which My Chinese Flavor is one episode) which I listed in
the introduction, it says that the series of videos aim to exhibit the openness, tolerance and cosmopolitanness of China. So in this regard, the display of foreigners laughing with the locals serves well the purpose of the documentary.
However, this display of happiness does more than this. This scene is not singular in the video. In the three stories, this familiar scene of the foreigner joyfully conversing with locals or laughing together with them keeps reappearing. What message does the documentary send by featuring or promoting this form of happiness or pleasure? In The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed discusses the orientation of happiness: “Happiness functions as a promise that directs us towards certain objects which then circulate as social goods” (29). To rephrase this, pleasure/happiness is bound up with value judgment and always has the prescriptive power; what is good is what tends to cause one pleasure/happiness. To approach the right object is always
promised with pleasure/happiness, and vice versa, if an object is recognized socially and publicly as pleasurable and “happy”, it is deemed as the “right” object in a given society.
So in the documentary, by consistently rendering the interaction between foreigner and local as pleasant and happy, this sort of interaction—an open and hospitable exchange with the other---is encouraged as the right thing to do and thus has an effect of directing and orientating the viewer, either Chinese or the foreigner, to behave accordingly in the pursuit of rewards of happiness. Besides, it is not just the interaction that is legitimized and idealized as “good”, the identity of the participant in this interaction is also rendered as “good” or “right”. By showing Jonathan the foreigner as pleasant and happy on the national TV Channel CCTV 4, which is accessible to foreigners and Chinese home and overseas, the video is sending an elusive but effective message to the viewers that Jonathan’s conduct is good and right and pleasure-deserving. In the context of the documentary, Jonathan starts a legitimate and successful career in China, actively participates and assimilates into Chinese society (speaking dialects, joining entertainment shows). These acts as well as his personal qualities such as diligence and innovation, are all rendered as laudable and “good” in the aura of pleasure or happiness. Thus Jonathan is set up as an ideal foreigner in China and thus retains a tautological relation to other social members: in following Jonathan’s deeds, one would be promised with happiness and a good life in China. Another more important ideological message to send along with this is that China provides a happy environment where migrants can enjoy a good life.
But what does such a value judgment which is external to the pleasure itself do to the three foreigners in the video who are occupying or inhabiting the ideals or the norms set by Chinese society? Another key phrase to pay attention to in Ahmed’s theorization of pleasure is “the capacity to inhabit social space with ease.” “With ease” suggests comfort, satisfaction, easiness without difficulty. In other words, pleasure is coupled with rightness and socially produced rightness guarantees comfort. Ahmed remarks that, as a result, “[n]orms may not only have a way of disappearing from view, but may also be that which we do not consciously feel” (148). Inhabiting the ideal or the norm, Jonathan’s comfort is left unmarked. This naturalized comfort, while hard to notice, is showed in the way he moves in the world: his ability to speak dialects and eating chili easily gets him attention from the media; the first coverage easily leads to his countless hosting experiences in the entertainment food shows; with these experiences with food, he easily opens his own restaurant. Also in the later part showing his process of preparing starting his own business, he readily has the assistance of other Chinese. Besides, this easiness and comfort also appears in the form of the narrative: the narrative flows on without any obstruction or ups and downs since there is an comfortable passage for the ideal foreigner. these easy movement both in Jonathan’s life and in the narrative structure all testifies the good life Jonathan enjoys in China and help construct the fantasy of migrant’s good life in China.
Smile as a Challenge to the Good Life Fantasy
Now after examining the construction of ideological fantasies in the text by dissecting a specific laughing scene, I would like to put the laughter of the foreigners in perspective together with their other affective gestures by analyzing them in the context of the affective flow of the whole documentary. The foreigner’s affective gestures are the sites where their agency and subjectivity can be traced, thus has some truth value in this ideological constructed text. in other words, the affective gestures of the foreigner has the potential of fracturing the good life image.
First of all, I would like to see how the affective environment is built in this video. If watching the documentary with full attention on the affects, we can see that nearly all elements in the documentary are presented as happy: the background music in the beginning of the video is fast-paced and has a cheerful note, and with the progress of the narrative, it remains positive. Thus the music is pleasant or pleasurable or “happy.” Food in this documentary is also a happy object; it offers pleasure in sight and taste, and it is the crucial object that leads to the successful careers and integration of the three main characters. The people in the documentary are happy: the happy restaurant-goers eating together with their family and friends , the happy seller woman and the happy foreigners. The city Chengdu and its weather, as suggested by the beautiful visuals, are happy, to list just a few. In the end, with happy content and happy form, the video itself becomes a happy object. The recurring of the happy objects forms a consistent affective flow through the whole text and creates an ambience or an atmosphere of happiness.
This ambient nature of the documentary is also of functional importance. In
Aesthetics of Ambient Video Experience, Jim Bizzocch gives a thorough definition of
the ambient video: “it should be visually engaging the first time you view it, it shouldn’t require your attention at any time; it should renew its engagement at whatever moment you choose to return to viewing; it should sustain visual pleasure over a great number of repeated viewings” (5). In other words, being ambient means being readily interesting but ignorable. In some way, the documentary picks up the ambient aesthetics of the ambient video as defined by Bizzocch, but is not an exact ambient video since there is still a narrative structure in it, however weak it is. In this documentary, the affective mood is foregrounded before the narrative itself. The three stories are repetitive in content and each of them is flat in narrative development. The atmosphere of the documentary is given central importance which allows the mood to provide the logic of the documentary rather than relying on narrative to move things forward coherently. In other words, the documentary is designed to impress, not to reason. In doing so, like the ambient video in Bizzocch’s definition, it does not demand intense attention and require the viewer to be completely immersed in the plot as in a strongly narrative cinema, but allows the viewer to drift in and drift out of it anytime with ease.
Let’s now look at the receiving end of the documentary: the documentary is shown through home television, a most common appliance at home, before which the majority of the time at home is spent and before which family activities such as eating, cooking, chatting, relaxing etc are organized. Bizzocch also discusses the
ambient nature of much of home television experience. In his opinion, the home television set is an ambient visual device, and when at home the average viewer “has the TV set switched on, but is giving it very little attention” (4). Put in another way, television viewing is of selective attention and most of the time, the television is a decorative window into the world fading into the background in the overall household setting. So different from a strongly narrative video, for instance, a suspense movie, whose value might be compromised by the ambient nature of the television, the documentary’s style (ambient documentary) fits well into the medium of television. As I explained in the first section of this chapter, the final aim of this video is propaganda and to create an image of “a happy China” where people live happily and to disseminate and insert this happy China image and the foreigner’s good life image in the viewer’s mind. This arrangement of the documentary as ambient and atmospheric serves well this purpose: the ideological messages are bound up with the affect flow of the video not the narrative, so the message can reach the viewer uninterrupted despite the fact that the video itself constantly fades in and out of the viewer’s attention.
Bearing this in mind, let’s now look at the role of foreigners affective gestures in it and see how these gestures work within the documentary as a whole. I would like to whether they enhance or diminish the affective charge of the whole documentary and whether they challenges the good life fantasy built up through the use of affect. Throughout the whole documentary, it is not hard to notice that the most frequent affectively-charged facial expression among the three characters are smiles and
laughter.
In the beginning of the video, there is a series of short clips of Jonathan
participating in all sorts of gourmet shows and entertainment shows where he laughs animatedly. The still above is one of the scenes in which Jonathan is simulating the affective gestures of the woman guest, their facial features are surprisingly identical: eyes wide open full of expectation, mouth gaping and lifting showing joy and happiness, hands clapping suggesting excitement. So Jonathan is mimicking the affective gestures of the local Chinese.
Fig. 2. Jonathan laughing in sync with the local in a food show
Jonathan’s laughter here could be explained by Frances McDonald’s concept of self-reflexive laughter. In her essay on Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Frances McDonald formulates the concept of self-reflexive laughter by which she means “an emotionally legible ‘ha-ha’ that fixes the laughing person as a general type and in so doing camouflages him or her among the crowds of caricatures” (541). By
reflexive, she means “a desire for stillness, as characters scrabble to stabilize their subjectivity in a recognizable form” and “the desire to aesthetically freeze any and all instances of precarity—whether it be ontological, epistemological, or affective—by fixing it as a general style, a caricatured expression, or a reproducible artwork” (545). In other words, the self reflexive laughter happens in a state of dissolving subjectivity and it is a attempt to grasp the minimal self left. However, when the self-reflexive laughter is produced in mimicry of the commodified comic type, it no longer preserves the subjectivity but leads to loss of subjectivity, since the individual capitulates to the generalizing forces of commodification and his or her singularities are dissolved into a ‘worthless totality’” (548). Put in simple terms, there are three main characteristics of self-reflective laughter: camouflaging, aesthetically stilling and loss of subjectivity. Putting on self-reflective laughter does not necessarily suggest a congruity between the affective form and content and such a gesture is always done in an attempt to fix oneself into a generalized aesthetic type which submerges one’s subjectivity.
Though McDonald’s self-reflexive laughter is situated in the context of mass production and comodification of laughter and happiness in the capitalistic society, it still fits well in the scenario here. In the video, as I said earlier, there is also a active production of happiness. So the laughter of Jonathan in this context is exactly a self-reflexive laughter in Mcdonald’s sense. Such a copying or mimesis is to some extent a form of camouflage: by copying the affect of the surrounding environment, Jonathan blends into the festive restaurant setting scene, and textually fits into the affective
flow of the whole documentary which consequently ensures his easy movement in both aspects. In this sense, his laughter is also a tactic of survival. In other words, just as the character Abe in the novel The Day of Locust whose mechanical laughter shackles him into the commodified comic stock character: the bad-tempered dwarf (549), in the scene above (as well as the following several scenes where he has the exact same expression) Jonathan becomes a passive conduit for the vibratory waves of affective tension that pulse through the whole documentary, and his exact simulation of laughter and bodily expression rigidifies him into a reduced form, or a generalized type: the happy Chinese-like foreigner. Also at these moments when the textual affective flow materializes in his bodily actions, that is, laughing, he subjectivity of Jonathan is flushed away in the nationalistic text.
Fig. 3. Jonathan pretends to be choked by a chili
However, this loss of subjectivity and thus a self-less foreigner is not consistent throughout the video. There are moments when their subjectivity does come to the
surface, specifically when the foreigner actively creates humor or happiness or when he smiles reticently in an attempt to show politeness and agreement. On the first occasion, the image of the happy foreigner is internalized in the foreign character and he arises out of passivity and takes an initiative in the affective flow by actively creating laughable and happy scenes and in the process he further inscribes the image of happy foreigner on himself. Later in the video Jonathan himself consciously creates humorous situations: when later in the field searching for chili, he pretends that the chill is so spicy as to make him cough (see Fig.3). After several seconds, he says with relaxation that: “It is not spicy at all.” This incongruity in behavior become the stimulus for humor and consequently elicits a burst of laughter from the accompanying woman with who Jonathan laughs together. Thus here a change occurs: he is no longer laughing with other Chinese now but is making others laugh. He is still trying to fitting in, but this time he strategically creates happiness thus actively and consciously controls the affective environment. Thus, Jonathan turns from a passive material container of happiness into a subject who effectively and appropriately controls the affective flow. It is exactly at this moment when he is in control the affective flow that his subjectivity surfaces.
Fig. 4. Jonathan smiling in agreement with the praise on Chengdu
Another occasion is when he smiles. The affective flow does not always flow smoothly through the bodies of foreigners in the form of a self-less laughter or is boosted by their conscious will. There are times when this affective flow is slightly obstructed and smiling is exactly such an occasion. Parvulescu argues that smile is not a lesser laughter, a matter of degree, but of a different register all together in that the smile is more of a sign of sense and self-control than laughter (7). Exactly this restrainedness and self-containment gives smile both a touch of politeness and also evasiveness in emotion. In the later part of her book Laughter: Notes on a Passion, she elaborates on the ambiguous nature of the smile: “the smile of double consciousness is a polite smile and also much more. There is a tension between what the face reveals (a smile) and an emotional world ‘beneath the surface’” (68). So different from laughter which exhibits the feeling to the fullest, the smile is elusive in this matter. At 2:16 of the documentary, when interviewed about his feeling about the city Chengdu, Jonathan says that: “I totally agree with others that once you come to
Chengdu, you will never want to leave it”. After saying it, he smiled a mild smile and kept nodding as if to add some affirmative force and more credibility to what he said. The smiling face as a signifier of joy and happiness enables this smile of Jonathan to sustain the flow of happiness in the documentary. However, the elusiveness of his smile also undermines the flow to some extent.
Jonathan’s smile bears resemblance to the black-American-smiling example listed by Parvulescu to elaborate the ambivalence of smiling. She quotes a scene from William Edward Burghardt’s The Soul of Black Folk. When asked a problematic question by a white man, the black American man (Burghardt himself) smiles and tells the questioner something that satisfies the white man while at the same time thinking in his mind that “knowing so little about us, the white man does not know what he is missing’” (68). Here, the smile of the black man means agreement on the surface and disagreement inside. Similarly, the smile of Jonathan is a seeming agreement and acquiescence which disguises yet at the same time can denote a deep-down disapproval or other evasive thoughts on the city Chengdu. It is at this moment of attitudinal ambivalence and suspense that Jonathan deviates slightly from the ideal image of happy and China-loving foreigner and the affective flow passes through his body weakened by the emergence of his own subjectivity.
Considering the subject of the smile is an westerner being in a Chinese context, the reticent and mild smile is not just affectively subversive but also has geopolitical meaning. So now allow me to digress from affect to the video’s geopolitics for a
moment. Jonathan’s smile, compared with the self-reflexive laughter discussed above which allows one to completely blend into the environment, is a passable or partial camouflage in the affective flow. It is here that Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimesis concerning the colonial subjects comes to mind. He argues that mimicry has a double articulation:
[Mimicry] is [on the one hand] a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, a difference[...] which poses an immanent threat to both
‘normalized’ knowledge and disciplinary power. (86)
Put in a more concrete way, the mimicry is a partial representation: the act of
representation suggests subjection to power and discipline, however the partial-ness or the excess of the representation is the site where mimicry borders on mockery and the disciplinary power is challenged. Although Bhabha’s theory is focused on colonial discourse, more specifically on the relationship between the colonial subject and “the reforming, civilizing mission” of the English colonizer (86), it is still applicable in this case, especially against the backdrop of massive transnational migration globally. Though different from the English’s colonial act of reforming and civilizing the colonial subject, what the Chinese government attempted to do is basically of the same vein to discipline, reform and assimilate the foreigner into the Chinese culture, in other words, to let the foreigner mimic the Chinese which is examined closely in discussion of Jonathan learning cooking hotpot base. However, the seemingly forced
smile of Jonathan is where the partiality and excess of mimicry comes to the surface and where mimicry has the potential of sliding towards mockery. It is at this moment of partial mimicry that the authority and disciplining power of the Chinese culture is contested and put at risk. So Jonathan’s smile at this scene does not only weaken the affective flow of the whole documentary, but also sways the authority and privilege of Chinese culture which this documentary intends to build up.
Now I’d like to move back to and give a conclusion on the discussion of affect in this documentary. In a word, the affective flow in the video has a tendency to fix the foreign characters into the ideal image of a happy foreigner in China and the positive affective gestures of the foreigners can be seen as a form of camouflage into it. In this affective flow, the foreigner retains some agency in propelling or weakening the flow at some specific moments. In so far as the affective environment in the documentary is constitutive and crucial in creating this fantasy of the foreigner’s good life in China, the moments when the foreigner’s subjectivity surfaces are tale-telling and subversive. The fact that foreigner who consciously joins to laugh with others, and consciously creates scene of laughing, uses laughing as a strategy, betrays the fakeness of the happiness under the camera and thus the in-authenticity of the foreigner’s good life portrayed in the video. What’s more, the forced smile of the foreigner further fractures the image of good life with its signification of mockery.
