Ornamentalism by Anne Anlin Cheng

Author:Anne Anlin Cheng [Cheng, Anne Anlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780190604615
Google: N2J7DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-11-15T00:30:55.760551+00:00

Sushi, Otters, and Mermaids

Enter Luna.

We know by now that we do not need the presence of a yellow woman to invoke the logic of yellow femininity. In “Bottles of Beaujolais,” the other figure, in addition to the otter, that comes to join this strange little family unit is a white woman—but not just any white woman. When we first meet Luna, the female protagonist and the narrator’s romantic interest, she is coming into the restaurant, drawn by the lure of Mushimono in the window. She initially appears as the undoubtedly privileged human spectator of the exotic animal caged behind the glass. We are told, for example, about her snakeskin shoes, an exotic fashion accessory that surely underscores her human dominance in the food chain. Yet her humanness and whiteness waver the moment she crosses the threshold of the restaurant. The narrator begins by describing her in terms of food (“her baby shrimp lips”) and quickly comes to identify her with Mushimono: “I dreamed of Luna, naked as the otter, standing in the street outside the lakeshore, tapping at the window.” Luna, however, is not simply like Mushimomo in her feminine fishiness; they both seem to possess an uncanny quality for transformation:

Perhaps it was the eerie quality of the fog-sifted light … that caused the twin curves of Mushimono’s belly and spine to run congruously before taping together at the S of his thick, sibilant tail. … My thoughts drifted off to a moving figure of another sort: Luna, and the gentle crook of her neck, the soft slope of her shoulders, the slight downward turn of the corners of her mouth.31

In this moment of transgendered and trans-species queering, Mushimomo and Luna mirror one another in a simultaneous evolution, both becoming an other-other, a different sort of semiaquatic animal—a mermaid?

And can we resist hearing in the lines quoted above the echo of another sad-mouthed sibilant beauty, whom we saw earlier as an analog for Anna May Wong (plate 62)?

Plate 62: Detail of plate 44. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.