过眼烟云(字):  an homage to Tan Lin

"People can be so sentimental. Twelfth Master is not himself."

—Rouge (1987)

It's difficult for me to write about Tan Lin's work because for a long time now, I've felt like my reading of it is somehow inadequate. To be fair, this sense of inadequacy is not because I think of myself as a poor reader, so much as I think of myself as a consumer of TV. These days I watch less American TV than I do Chinese serial melodramas, and thus have become more American. What I mean is: I am happily, through my own conscientious efforts, stupider than others.

I watch C-dramas on viki.com, an American website that specializes in streaming Asian content that is then crowd-source-subtitled by users and community volunteers. This makes the subtitles less stylistically consistent but more attentive to idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms, some of which are familiar to me and others which I am likely to miss. This is because I speak Cantonese better than Mandarin, read Mandarin better than Cantonese, and keep English subtitles on because they are reassuring. I prefer period dramas that feature palace intrigue, wuxia swordplay, or xianxia tales of reincarnation — 40-60 episodes, each an hour-long. Watching them, I am inundated with tropes and narrative devices that are designed to evoke intense emotions such as revenge, love, betrayal. These dramas are not about contemporary life so much as they are aggregations of Chinese cultural markers: the beautiful hanfu and their draping sleeves, the demons and immortals, the Qing dynasty politics. I don't feel the intense emotions I'm supposed to feel so much as I enjoy the nonsensically twisted, drawn-out plots; how they eventually house themselves in a limited number of arbitrary endings.

In other words, the Chinese melodrama is an archive that reproduces and circulates objects of genre and history to produce emotions that are "geometrically crafted to repeat perfectly."1 Chinese melodramas feel interchangeable and so watching them constantly, like I do, is like living in an infinite matrix of climax and denouement, but generic too, like MSG, a "flavor-enhancer."2 Typically, I watch episodes on fast forward at x2 speed, while cooking.

When I cry watching TV, it is not because I am moved, but because markers that are hyperlegible to me and should feel authentic (or perhaps overladen with cultural meaning) instead slide into a pleasant, impermeably opaque surface. I cry because an intense quality of recognition weirdly remains. That same recognition — at once intimate and opaque — also occurs when confronted with the presence of Jackie Chan Green Iced Tea in a list as part of a performance text dump, or when a young, experimental poet such as myself encounters terms such as "reading," "novel," or "emotion" in a novel that doesn't look like a novel, written for the purpose of describing its perfect form. As Lin describes in the latter, ambience is a novel with a logo, this quality "resembles a junk heap that is changing because inside it is a fire burning."3

I like to consume Lin's work in a similar manner as I do C-dramas, by crying. This might not be an adequate way to read, but personally, I find crying to be extremely relaxing.

* * *

Objects feature prominently in Lin's ambient literature, which accumulate lists, photos, hyperlinks, appropriated language, even scanned ephemera, as a means of reproducing, in book form, the "relaxing" sensation of an RSS feed or technologically mediated field. 

But these choreographed channels are not entirely neutral so much as the product of individualized perception. Reading Lin's writing, I notice most the Asian American cliches swimming in and out of the frame: The Joy of Cooking as English instruction manual; the generic model minority aunt in Insomnia and the Aunt; Chloe Sevigny's Hello Kitty underwear in Seven Controlled Vocabularies; the narrator's supposed resemblance to Bruce Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Margaret Cho in ambience is a novel with a logo.

Given a history of Asian subjects being aestheticized as expressionless or mute, it would be easy to read Lin's employment of these tropes and objects as satirical, or as a form of critique.4 But that seems too functional a description for the way these actually appear — not randomized or argumentatively laden, so much as repeated impassively, in the same way that facts tend to be. Not refuted so much as their contradictions are accrued. In Insomnia and the Aunt, for example, the narrator conflates two offensive tropes: "someone said 'The Oriental, we are good at killing emotions, and I think that person was right.'"5 Because of his vague agreement, these do not outrage so much as they are blandly neutralized through repetition.

For Lin, its arguable that Asianness is rendered as weak copy, like a TV rerun, mass produced porcelain, or a looped GIF. It has the grain of a memory that has not been made from life, but has been manufactured retroactively from a photograph or home video. Yet there is no negative connotation to this copying either. It simply means that it's worth remembering, as Rachel Jane Carroll writes, that the process of racialized abstraction is, to some degree, aesthetic, in that the aesthetic is "a space of social relation where racial meaning is produced, circulated, and transformed.6 It simply means that what's articulable about Asianness, especially diasporic Asianness is never metonymic or whole. And rather than seeking the unattainable original, Lin is interested in this representational weakness. As he writes, "what is the difference between a world that is recorded, and one that is not? I believe there is no difference at all. Everything that happens is the perfect mirror of everything not happening."7 By proposing an elliptical equivalence between the replica and the real, action and inaction, cliché and truth, Lin's work generates an affect of familiarity that means reproducibility in his work feels not inauthentic, so much as an essential quality of Asian life.

Reading Tan Lin, overly-recognizable objects scan past me, forming a vaguely racialized atmosphere, like how it feels like to walk into an Asian supermarket in a part of California that isn't my own. The specificity of this experience is comforting exactly because it is repetitive — Ajinomoto, Kikkoman, Hello Panda — a generic ambience, resonating not despite but because of its mediated flatness.

My phone background is a photograph of the sauce aisle of the Ranch 99 in Pacific East Mall, El Cerrito. I find this to be very emotional.  

* * *

Back in Singapore in the '90s, there was a Hong Kong Tourism Board ad that played constantly on TV. A montage shows a young woman with short, spiked Faye Wong hair and a slim tank top careening through the neon-lit streets, the night market, eating bubble waffles. Her hands are laden with shopping bags. 买东西, 吃东西 ("mai dong xi, chi dong xi," translatable to "shop and then eat"), is the breathless, repetitive soundtrack, increasing then decreasing in its fevered velocity. Interior monologue rendered aloud to Cantopop music. The actress was so perky and cute. I liked watching this ad because I grew up in Singapore, but spent many summers in Hong Kong, where my mother is from. The ad is a memory, but not a memory of my life. My time in Hong Kong was also spent eating squashed next to strangers in my favored hawker stalls or walking till my feet hurt, shopping for cheap goods — Little Twin Star hairclips, colorful socks, handbags.

The things that we bought were often branded knockoffs, from the Gucci sunglasses and Louis Vuitton purses down to the Sanrio pencil cases. My mother was very serious about making sure that what we purchased were not only haggled down to the best price, but the most accurate counterfeits possible. She'd bring photos of the original models of purses, both their interiors and exteriors, check the color of the leather, the shapes of the zips. "Isn't Hello Kitty's bow supposed to be on the left side, not the right?" she'd frown, when I proffered a plushie I wanted to buy.

I liked the Hong Kong Tourism ad on TV because it seemed to understand that shopping is a kind of false advertising for the kind of person who one might become. To me, 买东西, 吃东西 is a durational art piece reminiscent of Tehching Tsieh's performance work8 or time spent reblogging from Tumblr's eternal scroll. It is a mood that accrues time and objects that occasionally appear as people.  

* * *

In 7 Controlled Vocabularies, Tan Lin speaks of the logo as "a pure code wherein words and reading are synthesized into looking and staring i.e. they become primitive and unmoving structures for the channeling of static information."9 In other words, looking at a logo is not a practice of reading, but an event of "non-reading."10 Encountering a logo, as Kristen Gallagher writes, creates moment of immediate recognition, when the "the logo has claimed a small bit of real estate in your brain," and therefore becomes branding.11

Branding is what makes luxury goods highly sought after, not for their inherent value in terms of the quality of the fabric or any superior craftsmanship, but for the information communicated by the logo stamped upon them. Branding means what is being bought is an illusion: of wealth, of attention, of belonging, of uniqueness. The logo becomes a kind of visual commodity that marks the elite, at the same time as it is eminently reproducible. The logo must be plastered over store windows or on the sides of buses, because without a cultural ubiquity that render it recognizable to the masses, it has no power. Such is the beautiful paradox of branding: it makes an object exclusive only because it is recognizably generic.

In Insomnia and the Aunt, Lin lists the inventory of a vending machine, with particular attention to the branding of its interior objects:

Elmer's glue, Coppertone suntan lotion, band-aids, Bayer aspirin, Duco plastic cement, Dramamine, hair bands, bobby pins, Cracker Jacks [ . . . ] Ho Hos, a tiny squirt gun (for the kids), a Duncan yo-yo (also for the kids) [ . . . ] a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer (for some reason, my aunt thought it was illegal to serve cold beer from the soda machine but warm beer was OK).12

Irene Kim notes that these objects "conjure a deceased aunt, who may or may not be an aunt at all (perhaps "just a Chinese auntie")," interrupted as they are by parenthetical asides that evoke family life through the banality of childcare and beverage preference.13 I have become taken by the idea that it is the generic brands that invoke to Kim the equally generic trope of the Chinese aunty, who might refuse to buy the cheap Chinatown tissue paper and prefers Kleenex, whose relationship to branded goods is articulate about her relationship to American immigrant assimilation.

In her article "Fake it Till You Make it: The Trouble with the Global East Category," Magda Szcześniak describes the ability to distinguish between counterfeited and original luxury goods in 1980s Poland as a cultural indicator of class. "Counterfeits began to function as a prime example of our inability to practice capitalism properly," she writes. "Either willingly buying fakes, and thus maliciously failing to abide by the (supposedly logical) rules of capitalist markets, or unintentionally mistaking counterfeits for originals, and thus lacking a skilled enough eye to recognize the (supposedly obvious) difference between them, Poles were regularly chastened as immature consumers."14 The ability to recognize originals became synonymous with a kind of sophisticated, capitalist Europeanism.

This logic of buying counterfeit objects as representative of, or being synonymous with being a counterfeit, i.e., not really American, certainly similarly applies to the Chinese immigrant experience, with one crucial difference. Here, the counterfeit, as a branded original's flatter replica, is specifically racialized, characterized globally as having been "made in Asia" and as "kitschy chinoiserie,"15 like the clusters of handbags widely available in the shops along Canal Street. Because of this, the counterfeit should be a trope to be avoided at all costs. And yet, according to another Chinese trope, American Dream logic or Confucian cliche, the counterfeit should also be valued for its frugality — not only is it is accessible and humble, but locating a good counterfeit is the result of much research and hard work.

Musing upon the aunt in Insomnia and the Aunt and how the TV is continuous with her affective presentation, Takeo Rivera writes, "perhaps this could very well be the very essence of the Asian American condition: becoming thinglike in one respect (model minority) to escape being thinglike in another (inscrutably foreign)."16 But I would argue that the counterfeit as racialized object embodies this binary while also partially disrupting it. Because of branding, the counterfeit's signifying power is made utilitarian, expanded and diffused. Like information, it is meant to be circulated to the point of ubiquity.17 The counterfeit meant, in some ways, to vanish.

I don't notice branded goods unless someone is bragging about them.

Every work by Lin I own is either a bootlegged copy or free PDF.

* * *

Lin writes, "every logo should contain the death of your family inside it."18

A Chinese woman pulling Kleenex out of a counterfeited handbag to wipe her tears away is several generic items colliding in a florescent-lit shopping arcade, which is also a scene from a melodrama. Technicolor. Everything dyed Jello-green by the light. This scene is not unlike the one in Insomnia and the Aunt, where every time the narrator visits, his aunt "cri[es] in exactly in the same manner, in front of the neon NO VACANCY sign in the window, with the same uncontrollable wailing and tears and half-Chinese words I do not understand."19 Both scenes are of the C-drama variety and I, too, might require subtitles.

When I say melodrama, I am not talking about the emotional excesses that one usually associates with the cinematic. I am talking about a form in which elements of everyday life are displaced onto aesthetic components, whether these are house slippers, the glow of a bakery case, rice cooker steam, or a bibliography. As Christine Gledhill writes, melodrama "forces into an aesthetic presence, desires for identity, value, and fullness of signification beyond the powers of language to supply."20 It creates tableaux where items and architecture are not neat symbols with corresponding meaning so much as revolving, mirrored spaces. Their lurid style generating a sense of suburban claustrophobia, making felt what's inarticulable; what's lurking outside the frame that's consistently on the verge of disappearing.

In the same way that melodrama is capable of registering an unsettling sense of social repression without directly capturing it, Lin's work and its ambient accumulation of Asian facsimiles manages, as Kim writes, to "register without resolving what remains unassimilable into the fictions of the immigration and development of a Chinese family in America."21 After all, one's relationship to one's family or identity is most real when it is imagined, invisible or better yet, forgotten.

Bernadette Mayer once wrote in Studying Hunger, "Keep going is a pose. Accumulate data is a pose."22 The best poses are adopted. Adopting anything is a kind of amnesia.

* * *

As anyone who has ever made experimental writing will tell you, often you are accused of being a fraud, and if you are not, you will end up feeling that way.

During the years in New York that I co-hosted the Segue Reading Series, it was common that poets would gather afterwards at a dive bar on East 5^th street and Cooper that we called "Scratcher's." The bar is in fact called The Scratcher, which is a realization I made only five minutes ago while looking up the exact cross streets on Google Maps. The name of the bar is not important, but my memories of the bar are not important, so much as they are sticky, like the tables that were never clean of alcoholic residue, or my mouth, every time it pronounced "See you at Scratchersesss?" with a little drawled mumble at the end so as to project certain knowledge when I was aware I had none.

There were many arguments about experimental poetry at The Scratcher, some of which were interesting or heated, and some of which were very thin fronts for personal dislike or for flirting. At the time, it was very difficult for me to tell the difference between either. We made claims that were ridiculous because, of course, things that are ridiculous have no emotion behind them and because "the era of emotions [was] over."23 Often, I would be wearing something old that had belonged to another person, projecting the shape of a fictive life lived without me, but my Yohji Yamamoto boots were real.  

I don't drink, but one night I was nursing a Midori and sprite. The bartender had to dust the liquor bottle when he brought it down from the shelf. "Asian chicks ask for this shit like, twice a year," he said, winking. I told my friends and they grimaced. We laughed. I sat with neon green encased in glass between my fingers, spilling sweet and toxic onto the wood. That night, we talked about Tan Lin, or I was always already talking about Tan Lin.

In one version of this story, I started reading Lin because I couldn't shake the feeling of being counterfeited, a bad copy of an experimental writer because of reasons of race or about gender that were latent in my consciousness and that I didn't know how to articulate. In this version of the story, which one could call "a generic story, Chinese American Mirror, translated Generische, or text message novel," you would experience great pathos because of my diasporic feelings of loss and suffering.24 You would be shocked at my attempts to counterfeit avant gardism by embodying a cute affective flatness. You would scoff at my attempts to achieve the limit of an aestheticized form in order to dissolve and therefore touch what was most inarticulable about my identity. You would gasp at the climactic moment, where reading Lin helped me think about how to engage Asianness not as a discursive contribution to questions of race and the avant garde, but as an arbitrary part of a set of formal concerns about how external technologies can be considered to be on the same plane as sentiment and perception — which is also to say our lives. It would be touching. You would cry.

In another version of this story, I read Tan Lin because I have a fascination with the fact that I share the same initials as Tan Lin and that he is often mistaken for Tao Lin, an alt lit writer much disregarded. I enjoy looking up at the top right-hand corner of my Gmail screen, seeing "TL" in its little username circle, and feeling nestled or superimposed. I have Google alerts set for both their names but not my own. I collect the notifications in a separate folder, also marked "TL." I never read the emails.

* * *

One thing that used to confuse me: it is no secret that my family is wealthy, my mother more than able to afford designer originals. But her ability to counterfeit was something she took delight in. Often, she'd whisper loudly at family gatherings about how accurate her knockoff purses were — not hiding, but pointing out their very minor flaws and differences.

It would be a mistake to think of the counterfeit as an exclusively Asian object. But the way that I understand my family's aspirations and ambitions to be mediated by the dynamics of counterfeiting might be specifically Asian.

In other words, as I have learned in my conversations with friend and scholar, Jane Hu, my love of Asian objects such as Hello Kitty or boba is less a matter of becoming Asian than becoming American, since it is Americans, not Asians, who typically recognize these items as Asian.25 Similarly, Lin writes, "my father, thinking from the inside out, thought he could become more American by buying American cars, but he only became more Chinese when he did that."26

买东西, 吃东西 — a continuum of logos and prints through each season's sleek designer lookbooks. The laminated sheets of wares displayed in illicit shops, hidden away in repurposed apartments above Hong Kong's night markets. I behold my mother holds in her series of counterfeits and originals, undifferentiated and equally spaced, on the same set of shelves.

One might argue that counterfeiting is one of "the most beautiful emotions" because it is "half-hearted."27 This essay is counterfeited, clearly.

* * *

The 2003 collaboration of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami with Louis Vuitton yielded a new design. A kitschy print of anthropomorphized cherry blossoms, smiling wide and superimposed upon the elegant browns of classic Louis Vuitton monogrammed leather. Louis Vuitton initially started coming out with variations on their classic print in order to confound and interrupt counterfeiting businesses by making their items more difficult to reproduce. Unsurprisingly, this cherry blossom print became overwhelmingly popular globally to Western and Asian consumers both and counterfeits proliferated due to the demand.

In Hong Kong, when I asked my favorite Chinese aunty selling counterfeit wares if this print was difficult to reproduce, she told me that the cheesiness of the Japanese print, its clean lines and block colors meant that it was actually easier: the originals already looked fake, and the fakes always seemed original. A kind of over-iterated mimesis that causes one print to segue into another — one endless, buttery surface, fading into a sea of handbags.

In her book Surface Relations: queer form of Asian American inscrutability, Vivian L. Huang explores Asian American invisibility, "the historical epistemology of Asian American visual representation as a processual and romanticized vanishing from disciplining knowledges," and seeks to reframe it "as a strategy against visual capture and toward alternative sensory worlds."28

Perhaps this feels apt to my experience of Lin's work, in which Asian markers float by me — transitory, unconnected by narrative or history — but still vibrate between truth and untruth with that ambiguous quality of recognition. Crucially, Lin's weak copies are never stereotypes that allow for efficient assimilation into Americaness. Rather, they are shifting, subjective constructions that cannot be singularly contextualized so much as made and remade within a fashioned ambience. That negotiable space in which contradictions and aberrances are not to be understood or resolved so much as they simply pass through — neglected, vaguely registered, re-rehearsed.  

Perhaps it will always feel difficult for me to read Tan Lin adequately because the Asianness in his work tends, like the wallpaper in a melodrama, to vanish, repeat, or blur — and yet feels all the more tactile and resonant for it.

I like crying best when I don't know why I am.

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Trisha Low is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions, 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books/Coffee House Press, 2019). She is the recent recipient of a 2023 Creative Capital Award for a novel called FATED, which she hopes to build out of endings. She lives in the East Bay of California.

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References