Race is the place

Memoirs of a Geisha does more than just offend its Asian American viewers – it rhapsodizes the disappearing Asian actress.

By Kimberly Chun

I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, just another Buddha head simmering under a tropical sun and bobbing in a Polynesian polyglot stew, ready to pour over a plate-lunch two scoops of rice and another of macaroni salad. Back then everyone I knew liked to play the Guess That Race game, which I'm sure everyone everywhere knows how to play, though perhaps only in Hawaii is it perfectly acceptable to ask someone within seconds of meeting them "whadda you?"

It was a matter of social and cultural survival living in such a tiny, island-bound calabash of races: You needed to know what your unsuspecting listener was before you unleashed your most offensive "Portagee," or Portuguese, joke (the local equivalent of a Polish howler). Or bitched about some annoying, pasty Tokyo tourist. Or kicked off another Kill Haole (Whitey) Day (or its cousin, Slap a Jap Day).

Traveling through geisha-central Kyoto a few months back, my Japanese mother continued to play Guess That Race, commenting to herself on the number of English-speaking Chinese bellhops and picking them out by appearance alone rather than accent. You can play it too on the site All Look Same (www.alllooksame.com), testing your ability to discern the differences between assorted tricky Chinese, Korean, or Japanese faces from behind the safety of your monitor.

Which makes the recent splashy end-of-the-year prestige production of Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha even more bewildering in its naïveté. Doesn't director Rob Marshall realize how popular Guess That Race is, even on the increasingly multicultural and mixed-race mainland – and how jarring it is to see ethnically Chinese actresses like Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh playing haute Japanese geishas (with the noticeable, token exception of Mystery Train's Youki Kudoh), phonetically squawking in pidgin English of varying intensity and quality – the worst of which emanates from the glaringly American hapa girl Zoe Weizenbaum.

I guess Asians and Asian Americans should feel fortunate that, at the very least, Asian actresses were installed in the central roles of Memoirs, rather than, oh, Christina Ricci kitted out with the fake Japanese accent she "perfected" for the last Beck album. Nonetheless, it's surreal for Guess That Race-ists, watching clearly Chinese faces transposed on already well-stylized geisha paper dolls.

Considering Japan's history as a colonializing power and its efforts to scrub its textbooks of shameful wartime atrocities in China and the enlistment of "comfort women" into sexual servitude in Korea, Memoirs' racial swap is like a bad ethnic joke with no easily parseable punch line.

As Japan's waning movie industry continues to founder in the decadent throes of horror and fantasy (and is subsequently cannibalized by the Hollywood remake machine), are Chinese women's faces simply more commonly eroticized – with Zhang's face becoming a familiar standard of Asian beauty with this year's 2046, as well as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Rush Hour 2, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers? Is this yet another sign of China's rising economic and commercial power – as its actresses' dominance in Memoirs translates into a form of Japanese yellow (or rather, powder-white) face?

The film wants to be your one-stop shopping spot for Asian femininity, a reductive Cliff Notes version of Kenji Mizoguchi's gently heartfelt stories of Japanese women. In contrast to Wong Kar-wai's more recent real-unreal ode to women, memory, and place, 2046 – Memoirs generally comes off like an '05 Japanese version of Flower Drum Song, a comforting, quaint Orientalist Cinderella story, set a safe, decorative remove from reality with a ferocious "they all look alike" track backward. Regardless of intention, the movie appears to be yet another bizarre, bass-ackwards love-hate letter to Japan: Any semblance of truth is again Lost in Translation and filtered through a tourist's perspective.

It's a throwback viewpoint as blue-eyed, mutant, and faux as Zhang's colored contacts and Chiyo/Sayuri's stage-set world – batting coyly in backlash, about a decade after the '90s stateside emergence of Chinese actors such as Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-fat and behind-the-camera counterparts like directors John Woo and Ang Lee and fight choreographer Yuen Wo-ping. Even Asian film-phile Quentin Tarantino showed more sensitivity and, yipes, subtlety, in casting Chinese American Lucy Liu as Kill Bill's half-breed assassin O-Ren Ishii, torn between her Chinese wuxia and Japanese samurai traditions of cinematic arterial spray.

So where was Oren in 2005? Apart from the pan-Pacific, time-traveling lovers of 2046, onscreen Asian women seemed to be shifting into absence and dislocation this year – missing in action or sequestered with the missing mother of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Nobody Knows and the vanishing wife of Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani. Instead of Guess That Race, I find myself playing Hide and Seek in the moviehouse. Rather than recalling a fictional, fantastic Memoirs of a Geisha, I'm looking for the real woman.

Kimberly Chun's thematic top 10

Child's play Dare mo shiranai (Nobody knows) (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Japan, 2004); Thumbsucker (Mike Mills, USA)

Knife play Caché (Hidden) (Michael Haneke, France)

Tragic kingdom Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, USA); The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, USA)

We love journalism Capote (Bennett Miller, USA)

We love hopeless love Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, USA); The New World (Terrence Malick, USA); Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, Japan, 2004)

Sexy electronics big-box culture The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, USA)

Sexy Christians A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, USA); Palindromes (Todd Solondz, USA)

Sex-emoticons Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, USA)

Denis without borders L'Intrus (The Intruder) (Claire Denis, France, 2004)

Shall we dance? Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, China/Hong Kong, 2004); Rize (David LaChapelle, USA)