Stories Without Faces
Review of Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus (USA: Graywolf Press, 2019)
By Valen Lim
6th December 2012. Ki Suk Han, 58, swiped his worn-out MetroCard at the turnstiles of the 49th Street station on the BMT Broadway Line. He was a father of one, struggling to make ends meet. Witnesses would later testify that he was drunk when he started arguing with another passenger. There was a quick shove, and he fell onto the train tracks. His death was caught on video, the platform filled with onlookers, a freelance photographer shooting his last moments. The next day, an iconic photo of Han—one arm resting on the platform; his head turned, as if to watch his inevitable death rolling into the station—would be on the cover of the New York Post.
Han, alongside several other Asian figures in Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus, takes the main stage of the collection. As its name suggests, Oculus is both about ways of seeing as it is about being seen. Mao explores how Asians have been exploited and erased in America, as echoed in the poem “No Resolution,” penned to Han’s daughter:
…The train whines
and goes. The stories about our lives do not have faces.
Oculus seeks to give these Asians the faces they deserve. Mao resurrects the marginalized, undoing their erasures and rewriting their histories, and her collection recognizes not only that their experiences continue to hold true for many, but also the very impossibility of righting these wrongs. Instead, the book suggests that to survive the landscape of exclusion is not to flee, but to face it and come together in spite of its divisive nature.
Mao’s title is illuminating. Borrowed from the Latin word, meaning ‘eye,’ the word ‘oculus’ refers to windows or other such openings that have a similar, eye-like shape. However, what one sees through this window is not the full picture. In particular, many of Oculus’s Asian subjects embody a double bind. While they are able to obtain representation and security, this often comes at the cost of one’s own dignity. As such, they are required to choose between perpetuating stereotypes in order to thrive, or to be erased entirely from the American consciousness. For instance, Mao writes of Afong Moy, the first female Chinese immigrant, in “The Diary of Afong Moy.” Mao brings Moy to life by envisioning her forgotten experiences of being exhibited in different venues as an object of curiosity for American audiences. Mao then chronicles how Moy rebels against the demand to perform her identity, and how the rebellion leads to her being viciously discredited by Phineas T. Barnum in the section “The Barnum Years, 1844-?”:
The show must go on. And on and on,
replaced by another show, and that’s the trouble
with artifice. It never ends. Mr. Phineas T. Barnum
loved his freaks, a prophet for profits…
In her poem, Mao positions Moy as acutely aware of her performativity. Moy, in Mao’s rendering, calls herself a “breathing mannequin,” a “living specimen,” a “button-eyed doll.” This realization belies her powerlessness. She is ashamed of being “The Chinese Lady,” describing visitors prostrating upon her request as “A vernissage / of [her] ancestors across my face. A slap.” Where others have only written about Moy after seeing her at exhibitions, Mao writes through Moy’s perspective and voice to highlight the private pain suffered by being forced into stereotypical roles for public consumption. Mao’s use of the first-person “I” recovers Moy’s pain at being exploited for her identity, then crudely dismissed:
As if there couldn’t be two respectable Chinese ladies
in America at the same time. To promote
one, strip the dignity of the other. There was no word
for tokenism in those days of yore.
When you were rare, when you were a Lady,
you had to be tender, you had to be good.
(from “The Diary of Afong Moy”)
The dilemma embodied by Moy’s having “to be good” is explored elsewhere through Mao’s poetic sequence on Anna May Wong, who is widely considered to be the first Chinese American Hollywood movie star. Like Moy, Mao’s Wong is caught in a double bind. She escapes the fates many of her fellow immigrants faced “in the sawmills” by becoming an actress, only to be restricted by the roles she starred in, trapped in a state of “cinematic death.” Mao, however, liberates Wong from her silence by giving her a literal time machine to generate new experiences for herself.
By not just giving Wong the deus ex machina of a time machine, but a personality that develops over time, Mao’s sequence is not only my favorite poem of the collection, but arguably its very backbone. It serves as a form of cinematic rebirth not only for Wong, but the other prominent Asian figures she visits. In “Anna May Wong Goes Home with Bruce Lee,” Mao has Wong share how both she and Lee were typecast, and their feelings on the matter:
We were born in the same golden state, surrounded
by cameras, chimeras for our other selves. He admits
some applause can be cruel, then steals a kiss.
Only he knows this terror—of casting so huge
a shadow over a million invisible faces. The silver
of our eyes dims them, and for that I don’t forgive
myself. But Bruce understands. He knows the same
shame. On the dance floor, he cups the small
of my back, his hands cold like gauntlets.
Mao is able to use Wong as a window for the reader to peer through, showing a side of Lee that feels vulnerable and real, one that transcends his place in American film mythos.
Of course, Wong’s future does not go so far as to imagine Paradise. In the entire sequence, she flits from timeline to timeline, only to find futures where she plays no part. Likewise, Mao is conscious that conditions for Asian representation have not necessarily improved, and weaves in these modern-day issues towards the end of Oculus. For example, Wong’s journey through time ends in her finding that the problems she faced continue to exist. She continues to “perish, of course” on screen in “Anna May Wong Makes Cameos.” This leads to a crescendo of rage in the poem “Anna May Wong Stars as Cyborg #86”:
…Am I surprised –
Hollywood still assumes we are all the bastard
children of the same evil dictator? That phosgene
and mustard will rack our titanium Maoist husks
until some white man with slanty eyes rescues us
from our mealy, pliant selves?
Mao not only documents Wong’s past, but also highlights in her speculative future the frustrating lack of progress on present-day issues. In other poems, Mao further addresses systemic issues in Hollywood such as whitewashing. In “Ghost in the Shell,” she invokes the casting controversy of Scarlett Johansson as cyborg police agent Motoko Kusanagi in the 2017 movie of the same name. Writing from the perspective of Motoko, Mao breaks into Hollywood’s preference for white bodies:
My name is Motoko Kusanagi, investigator
cyborg for Public Security Section 9,
reporting a cyberterrorist crime. Year 2017:
someone has implanted Scarlett Johansson’s
face onto mine, hacked my ghost, installed
an imposter’s memories, reprogrammed
my optic nerves, diluted my brain into a white
projection.
Perhaps Mao, by both engaging with the past and the present, hints at how Asian actors are treated as peripheral and disposable in the service of a white character’s development within the industry. This idea of sacrifice is especially apparent in “The Toll of the Sea,” titled after the 1922 film wherein Wong played the leading role of Lotus Flower. In the film, Lotus Flower saves the white male lead, nurses him back to health, has his child and sacrifices herself when her role is deemed complete. However, Mao’s Oculus is lined with multiple references to ‘rewriting the script’. In “The Toll of the Sea,” Mao envisions a version of the film in which Lotus Flower escapes her doomed relationship, using the color blue (absent in the original two-color Technicolor feature) to denote her ‘rewritten script’:
BLUE the color of our recovered narrative
BLUE the color of the siren sea, which refuses to keep a white shirt spotless
BLUE the color of our reclaimed Pacific
BLUE the ocean that drowns the liars
BLUE the shore where the girl keeps living
There she rises, on the opposite shore
There she awakens—prismatic, childless, free—
Shorn of the story that keeps her kneeling
BLUE is the opposite of sacrifice
The final two lines hint at the desire of several poems in Oculus to shear away the systems that keep Asians kneeling, to save them from their fates, to right all these injustices. And though Wong’s poetic sequence is not beyond presenting certain historical conditions as insurmountable even with a time machine (she is, for example, unable to tell Josephine Baker about her time machine in “Anna May Wong Meets Josephine Baker”), Wong is freed eventually in “Anna May Wong Goes Viral” where she imagines a life for herself in the present day. This version of Wong can choose when to drop out of the public eye (“After I go viral, I shut down my website”) and how she is presented (photoshopping “hyena spots,” wearing “dresses of kelp”). Mao presents this autonomy as a rallying call, ending the poem with Wong using her influence to uplift others:
Soon a crop of young girls will join me,
renouncing their dresses to wade
in the thrill of being animal.
Mao’s poetic sequence on Anna May Wong is perhaps indicative of the collection’s poetics at large. Rewriting the script will always be a pipe dream, but this is not a reason for us to run away or avoid contentious issues of ‘appropriating’ the experiences of our forebears. In an early poem titled “Occidentalism,” Mao accepts that history cannot be easily changed or remedied, lamenting, “If only recovering the silenced history // is as simple as smashing its container.” However, to accept the past is not to simply ignore it, as reiterated by the closing sequence in the book. Here, a juxtaposition is drawn—where Oculus begins with a poem titled “Ghost Story,” the final poem is titled “Resurrection.” In “Ghost Story,” Mao describes the forgotten as thoroughly powerless—even together in a chorus, they cannot be heard speaking. They remain insubstantial:
The words of apparitions do not belong
to a language. They flit over pines, meaningless,
and shed their skins in your hands.
In contrast, “Resurrection” culminates in a message of strength through solidarity. Although Oculus is dominated by celebrities, whether they be Asian-American movie stars or contemporary celebrities such as Solange, Mao brings the reader back to reality in “Resurrection.” Mao recounts her encounter with the visage of a young Anna May Wong, which ran on advertisements for the New York Historical Society exhibition, titled Exclusion/Inclusion. In this poetic world, Wong is long dead, and Mao is free from the ‘terror’ Wong faced in the spotlight. Yet, as with Ki Suk Han in “No Resolution,” the subway serves as another point of erasure—Mao notes that Wong is unidentified on the poster but for her ethnicity. With that, she realizes that she too deals with the same hunger that “tormented” and “haunted” Wong, but in this hunger, finds a sense of hope:
But dear universe: if I can recognize
her face under this tunnel of endless shadows
against the luminance of all that is extinct
and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.
The conclusion reached at the end of Oculus is simple – the forgotten are not powerless. Oculus performs throughout the act of remembrance: to bring these figures back to life, to give them voices where they lacked them, and, most importantly, to give them agency. Oculus criticizes the historically exploitative treatment of past Asian-Americans, but goes further by presenting the exhumation of forgotten histories as a difficult but necessary act. By reanimating and re-voicing these narratives, Mao allows the past to look into contemporary discussions about identity and race.
Valen Lim is an active member of Singapore-based literary collective /stop@BadEndRhymes ('/s@ber'). His work has been published in Eunoia Review, Mistake House, Quarterly Literature Review Singapore and elsewhere. He can be found at http://uglystage.com or on Instagram at @valenlimsg.