Extended Hyphens: The Space Between the Virtual and the Real in Sung Rno’s wAve

Abstract

The ever-changing world in the 21st century calls into many questions on where an individual stands, mostly on who I am and where I belong. Globalization, transnationalism, capitalism, mass consumption, and mass media have affected the people of this era by blurring the boundaries formerly set to divide and define one's place in society. The quest for realizing the location of an individual is more evident in today's literature than any other form of art and more relevant to minority groups such as Asian-Americans compared to mainstream majorities. Since the very beginning of their history, Asian-Americans faced ceaseless struggles to identify themselves. However, identity is becoming more complex due to the ever-changing structures of borders (nation, ethnicity, race, and gender). In examining this fluctuating social structure and identity politics, the protagonist, M, in Sung Rno's wAve, depicts an acute awareness of the fluidity in the hyphenated identity. Rno's play offers an insight into the hyphenated identity that provides a space liberalized from tenacious limitations and boundaries constructed by external－social, political, and legal－and internal－virtual versus real－influences. By incorporating Bhabha's theory of hybridity and Third Space, the hyphen between the Asian and American is no longer a division but an elongation that exists in the inside and out, at times in-between the fissures of virtually imagined space and reality. Thus, the notion of identity evolves to a concept that embodies multiplicities in an individual living in the incessantly changing transnational culture where hybrid forms prevail in the both the virtual world and reality. Rno and his work provide a means to break away from insufficient fixation and find an individual-oriented, authentic identity.