Race, Masculinity, and Cold-War America in C.Y. Lee's The Flower Drum Song

Abstract

Young-Hee KwonIn this essay, I analyze C. Y. Lee's The Flower Drum Song, which is better known for the Rogers and Hammerstein musical. I foreground such issues as race relation and the masculinist subject-formation of Chinese immigrants in Cold-War America. San Francisco Chinatown was shifting from a bachelor society into a family-based society in the mid-twentieth century, primarily due to a series of liberalist reform of immigration laws. As Christina Klein argues, such an epochal change was intertwined with the US foreign policies of the time geared toward expansion of the country's military and economic hegemony over Asia-Pacific region. Contextualizing the novel in this way, this essay highlights how it embodies the problematic process of 're-making' Chinese-American males from aliens into "normal" citizen-subjects. From this angle, I reference Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation with an emphasis on heterogenous parameters that complicate the mechanism. If the narrative linchpin of The Flower Drum Song is the generational conflict between Wang Ta and his father, the story unfolds along the line of the romance/marriage plot. Beneath this somewhat banal narrational surface, the novel in fact exemplifies that Chinese immigrants in the mid-century were encouraged to desire and imitate dominant White masculinity, yet never were allowed to possess it entirely as their own. I examine how such a problematic way of subject-formation results in some peculiarly illuminating intersections of race and sexual relations between the main Chinese immigrant characters, on the one hand, and between them and the minor characters of other racial groups, on the other.