Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Column written for weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . "On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born," so memorably writes James Baldwin at the beginning of his essay "Notes of a Native Son." "A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass." Reading the essay in order to teach it in the new school year, I was struck not just by the depth of feeling and the eloquence, but also, more surprisingly, by a strain of sardonic humor that runs like quicksilver throughout the writing. After being turned away by the ironically named "American Diner"—"We don't serve Negroes here."—Baldwin in his fury marched into a fashionable restaurant in which he knew "not even...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  An advertisement created to encourage e-payment in Singapore featured a Chinese actor in brownface, dressed up variously as an Indian man with a curly wig and a Malay woman in a headscarf. It was widely, and rightly, condemned as racist. Mediacorp, the agency responsible for the advertisement, gave a half-hearted apology and withdrew it. When comedian Preeti Nair, known as Preetipls, and her brother, rapper Subhas Nair, released a rap video criticizing the advertisement, however, they were judged by the Law Minister to have crossed a line in attacking the dominant Chinese majority in Singapore and the artistes were subjected to a police investigation. The state's action is not only heavy-handed but also unfair, because it is patently clear from the video that the duo are not attacking Chinese Singaporeans per se, but Chinese racists for their racism. Although the refrain goes, "Chinese people always o...

Saw the show "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Curated by Denise Murrell as her PhD thesis, the show argued that Manet broke from the Orientalist and ethnographic depiction of black women current during his time, that Matisse took his cue from Manet in his painting of his black models, and that subsequent painters have been in part influenced or reacted against these two forerunners, in particular, Manet's famous "Olympia." I was particularly happy to see Matisse's "Dame a la robe blanche" (1946) in which negative space defines the woman's chest, and for a second time his cutout "Creole Dancer," now rendered visibly black due to this show. I was also taken with Charles Alston's "Girl in a Red Dress" (1934), showing a modern and sophisticated young Harlemite.

"Growing up in Singapore, I was teased by Chinese schoolmates for being a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. They were mocking my love for the English language and my apathy towards Mandarin Chinese. At home my family spoke a mixture of English and Cantonese. Mandarin was for me a school language. The schoolyard teasing turned me off from learning it properly. Now, as if in belated protest against those ancient taunts, I’d like to think of myself as a Chinese writer who writes in English, if only to expand the notion of what a Chinese writer is." Read the interview . Thanks, Jennifer Wong, for interviewing me, and Peter LaBerge, for publishing the interview.

The weekend was spent read Frantz Fanon. Yes, I'm late for the party. Black Skin, White Masks (1952) A penetrating study of colonized Martinique society and the colonized young man who thought of himself as French, only to go to the metropole of France and realized that he was black. A daring attempt to synthesize psycho- and social analyses. A Dying Colonialism (1959) or The Fifth Year of the Algerian Revolution Fanon's account of the Algerian War of independence. In the war the women learned to instrumentalize their veils as revolutionary soldiers and agents. Fanon shows why the rural Algerians first rejected the radio because it was perceived as the voice of the enemy, the colonial authorities and culture, and later embraced it when it broadcast the Voice of the revolution. In like manner Fanon argued for why Algerians first rejected and then embraced Western medicine. (After reading this chapter, I understand better now my own position on female circumcision.) In th...

On Gopika Jadeja's invitation, I attended the third IAAC Literary festival yesterday. The 3-day festival, organized by the Indo-American Arts Council, was attended mainly by South Asian Americans. It was a fascinating glimpse into the relationship between them and Indians from India. The Americans were intensely interested in social and political developments in India. They were also captivated by celebrity culture, that of Bollywood and of nationalist politics. The panels on the the first biography of film legend Shashi Kapoor and on the secret diary of Kasturba Gandhi were very well attended. I particularly enjoyed the panel "This Unquiet Land," also the title of the debut work of non-fiction by award-winning broadcast journalist Barkha Dutt. She has reported on a wide range of issues, famously on the disputed region of Kashmir. She was impressively sharp and articulate, and was well-matched by the nimble acuity of her interlocutor Suketu Mehta, the New York-based aut...

Dorothy Wang invited, and we attended, a reading by John Tipton, Mary Margaret Sloan, and Michael Autrey at at Berl's Poetry Shop in Dumbo last night. Tipton read from his forthcoming book Paramnesia and his translation of Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes . The poetry of Sloan, a friend of Dorothy's, was more experimental. Autrey read from his book Our Fear . The rumbling of trains over the Manhattan Bridge made it quite difficult to hear the readers, especially since the men insisted on not using the mic. Before the reading, Dorothy and I had dinner at Almar, an Italian place just a block away from Berl's. We had a lively discussion, as usual, about poetry, politics, and friendships. divided on race while sharing a side of broccoli rabe

In a Slate interview about the New Group production of his play Burnings at Theater Row, directed by Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw explains that his characters are so different from mainstream theater's because they say what is on their mind and they do what they want, without hypocrisy or self-deception. "Where my work departs from traditional drama," he says, "is the fact that my characters pretty much have no self-awareness and are almost acting on pure id. There is never any subtext in my plays." It is a bold artistic aim that is mostly but unevenly achieved in Burnings . Two partnered white men adopt a 14-year-old white boy for help around the house and for their sexual satisfaction. A successful black painter commits adultery against his white wife by visiting a black prostitute. A white brother-and-sister pair swear to uphold their deceased parents' neo-Nazist beliefs. All of them say what they want, and pretty much do what they want in the next...

I was in Philadelphia, from Wednesday to Saturday, attending my second People of Color Conference. My first experience of the conference took place in Denver, and I wrote about my impressions of that conference on this blog. Learning from that experience, I decided to be very selective about the talks and workshops I would attend, and so had a much more pleasant time than before. It was also fun to be with KH and A. The highlight of the conference, for me, was the screening of the documentary feature film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin , directed by Nancy D. Kates and Bennett Singer. A Communist briefly in his youth, a lifelong pacifist, and an openly gay man, Rustin has been erased from traditional accounts of the civil rights movement in the States. He mentored, however, the younger Martin Luther King, Jr. and organized the 1963 March on Washington. After the screening, during the Q&A, a black female teacher from Alabama swore that she would fight to right the ...

The debut feature of director Chris Mason Johnson, and the inexperience shows. But as one sympathetic imdb reviewer puts it, the rough-round-the-edges quality paradoxically gives the movie its authenticity and appeal. Seven years after graduation, five college friends living in New York City find their relationships tested by sexual infidelity, drugs and an internet start-up. What I find interesting is that the movie is not about being gay or Asian, though it has three gay characters and two Asian American characters in it. Sure, the gay couple (played by Bill Sage and Andrew Wei Lin) has to tussle with one of them being HIV positive, and the gay single (Colin Fickes who gives the best acting of the movie) goes on-line to hook up, but there is no angst-filled coming-out or starry-eyed first love or strident political protest, the usual topics in gay movies. Of the two Asian characters, one (played by Nicole Bilderback) is an investment banker who got her job by telling her interviewe...

I returned last night from the People of Color Conference with a mixed bag of impressions and one main thought. The impressions first: 1. I do not like the term "People of Color." It implies White is not a color. It assumes too much similarity or solidarity between different ethnicities. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity over other kinds of diversity such as gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status. It is also not a term with which I can imaginatively identify. 2. John Quinones, an award-winning TV journalist, told the compelling story of his rise from immigrant poverty to mainstream success. The story highlighted the personal qualities of ambition, perseverance and talent. It described racist discrimination but also the advantages afforded by his ethnicity. My impression is that the crucial difference in Quinones lies, not in his circumstances, but in his response to his circumstances. The difference is the mystery of character. 3. It is easier to ta...

TB and I watched this Spike Lee film at the IFC last night. He spliced together his filming of the last three performances of the similarly-titled Broadway show, created by rock musicians Stew and his partner Heidi Rodewald. The story, loosely based on Stew's life, is simple but well-told: young African American man leaves his middle-class South Central Los Angeles Baptist home for Europe in search of art and "the real." Amsterdam gives him "the keys" to a druggy, sexy paradise, but when love calls, he escapes to Berlin where he encounters nihilism, and, in order to belong, passes for "ghetto black." The story ends with him returning to LA for his mother's funeral, where he realizes the value of real love. The message is finally conservative, though the resolution, with its rousing music, still packs an emotional punch. We seek the real in art, because we miss the real in life. For an artist, passing as an existential condition, perhaps. Behind ...

As translated by Walter Kaufmann. Nietzsche's perspectivism: The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values . It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary--even if they vowed to themselves, " de omnibus dubitandum ." For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the va...