There's a moment in Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) in which you can clearly make out the writing, and this most awkward title's embedded warning, on the wall. The scene: a humid, tryst-friendly boudoir in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Our spunky, beauteous resistance heroine, Wang Jiazhi (the flowerlike Tang Wei, whose long, cheongsam-clad stems resemble those of Maggie Cheung in 2000's In the Mood for Love), and her supposed prey and the movie's antihero — secret police head, invading-force collaborator, and mild-mannered torturer in bespoke tailoring Mr. Yee (an appropriately ossified Tony Leung) — are caught up in a series of Kama Sutra–esque sexual positions. Even as she masquerades as Mrs. Mak, a rich man's cheating spouse, Wang is laid bare, in all her full-frontal, erect-nippled splendor, eyes closed and face contorted, as Yee thrusts at her from across the box spring, as intimate and as far away as a spy satellite.
Yee is far from transported.
Looking like a slender, slightly leathery brown lizard on a rock, he levels an unblinking, penetrating stare at Wang-Mak, all while eliciting pleasure and pain from his porcelain-fleshed paramour. Both unflinchingly creepy and unintentionally funny, the scene is as liable to draw nervous chuckles as it is to unsettle the tidy arc of this World War II espionage love story. The glare brings to mind golden age porn films, such as The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), in which the onscreen sex and gaze exchanged between actors and spectators are as likely to disrupt as to arouse. It's as if Chow, the suave, restrained writer in Wong Kar Wai films like the aforementioned Mood and 2046 (2004), also played by Leung, finally got to shed his skintight suits, only to reveal something truly startling: a glance more charged than — whoa — visible scrotum.
"Little Brown Fucking Machines Powered by Rice" is the title of a chapter in professor and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu's The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, referring to the myth — and popular Southeast Asian T-shirt slogan — centered on diminutive, impoverished, highly bangable Asian poonanny, available for a price and rhapsodized in confessional doc-cum-reality porns like 101 Asian Debutantes. In that film, Shimizu points out, the gaze that the LBFMPBRs level at the camera, midcoitus, is their only visible sign of agency or power against their camera-wielding johns. Likewise, Leung's look threatens to tear through the multiple fictions and revolutionary frictions propelling Lust, Caution. And like all spy-versus-spy stories, Lust, Caution hinges on the threat of betrayal — something Eileen Chang reveled in so bitterly in her original incandescent short story, begun in the 1950s and published in 1979, after she finally perfected the rewrite of her own compromising affair with a WWII collaborator.
A fresh-faced country girl possessing unexpected acting skills, Wang is plucked by her revolution-hungry theater group to play a plum part: that of a married femme fatale in the company's most daring production — the assassination of ...
I created 101 Asian Debutantes and this is what I have to say about chapter 6... let the truth be told...
It has come to my attention that you have discussed The Hypersexuality of race by C Perrenas
The author devotes a chapter to my work and I feel, she has distorted the phenomenon that I seek to document as well as the reasons and motivations of my work.
I have written a letter to Perreras and have not received a response. As a student of Anthropology, and having been trained by one of America's greatest anthropologists, I was taught that getting the sources "right" is essential. For Chapter 6 I am one of the key sources that Perreras never bothered to interview or check.
here is the text of my response to her:
Shimuzu's book, The Hypersexuality of Race, with regard to the chapter 6 "Little Brown xxx Machines" is offensive, inaccurate, and potentially libelous. Without fact checking, or investigation, in a complete disregard for the tradition of scholarship, she defames and misinforms readers on the motivations of myself, the creator of 101 Asian Débutantes, as well as the award winning filmmaker and creator of The Good Women of Bangkok. Shimizu's need to bend the unchecked "facts" towards her personal agenda have resulted in her branding myself, a completely non white male that comes from a matriarchal, non European, traditional society and culture, as a white male misogynist. This epithet and the implied characterization is the antithesis of everything I believe in, and the opposite of my code of conduct. I found it ironic that , out of the hundreds and thousands of Asian "porn" films available to her which more suit her biased needs, Shimizu choose works by two men who are in personality, the exact opposite of the stereotype that she has tried to perpetuate. My academic adviser in Anthropology at Columbia was non less than Margaret Meade who's adviser was the father of Anthropology in the U.S., Franz Boas. I hold graduate degrees in the fields of interest that led me to do my research and work. It should also be noted that I have collaborated with Asian women in every step of my process of creation, from the initial idea to the finished works. Shimizu and her academic mentors at Stanford and other schools, have made a inexcusable and unconscionable choice to disregard the rigors of the scholarly tradition, in order to portray through bad scholarship, a biased and ultimately wrong and libelous account of the scope and motivation of the work of myself and the other gentleman discussed in chapter 6. Her somewhat perverse fascination with explicit sexuality, while feigning academic interest and a prudish shock in witnessing it all, makes it clear that her career is more based on the economic and political exploitation of the subject matter as it will be popularly received, rather than the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and truth. In the presentation of this faux research for serious consideration, using obfuscatory, pretentious, and convoluted prose, The Hypersexuality of Race is revealed to be an exercise in self indulgent perversity, and as such exposes the complicated and troubled morality and sexuality of the author, revealing a need to publish for profit, and academic position. It thus, fails as scholarly insight into the premise of the book . Truth be damned and not even cared about, Shimizu proves that maintaining tenure, book and lecture benefits are more important than keeping true to the traditions of academic excellence and the scholarly tradition. I can only ask, if she gets chapter six completely wrong, if she has manipulated the chapter to fit her fantasies, how can anyone seriously see her work and professorship as deserving intellectual consideration as a whole, and under what light does this cast all her previous academic work?
Thank You
Jean Marc Roc
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