Abjection, masculinity, and violence in Brian Roley's American Son and Han Ong's Fixer Chao

In a similar way, the protagonist of Han Ong's Fixer Chao gets himself into a "complicated, manufactured" life (133) when he agrees to embark on a scheme of revenge for another. In Ong's novel, globalization, the movement of culture, people, and goods from the Third World to the First World, is viewed with irony and skepticism. Fixer Chao tells the story of a Filipino hustler, an ex-prostitute, William Narciso Paulinha, who is remade into Master William Chao, a revered Feng Shui expert from Hong Kong with the help of Shem C, "a disreputable, social climbing writer embittered by his lack of success" (Ong, inside cover). William is lured deeper and deeper into a life of fraud and crime for many of the same reasons as Tomas and Gabe: racism and sense of self-abjection, the gap that he sees between the life of rich New Yorkers around him, and his own hand-to-mouth existence. Like Tomas and Gabe, William is a Filipino who lives on the margins of society, never fully integrated into American culture because of a sense of rootlessness, and class and racial difference.

Like Roley, Ong depicts social and economic inequities that have resulted from the global migration of Filipinos. Racial prejudice is present in the background of the text, which is largely a satire of the life of the privileged. The characters in Ong's novel also "view America through the fractured lens of its broken promises" (Freeman par 2). As John Freeman notes, "the nation invites them in, only to deny them the privileges of comfort in their own skins" (par 2). When the novel begins, William tells us that in his twenties, he worked as a small time prostitute in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. After that, he drifted from one clerical job to another without much drive or success. Apart from these, the jobs in which he finds himself are directly linked to his identity as an Asian man in a predominantly white society. Shem chooses him to be the Feng Shui expert because of his Asian features, not distinguishing between Chinese and Filipino.

At the Bus Terminal, race played a significant part in his job. He had to "compete with frisky Puerto Ricans and athletic black boys for a cut of the overweight white businessman business" (12). His typical client was a "portly white gentleman, with a bald spot in the middle of his head [...] on [his] way home to the suburbs" (12). Young Asian, Latino, and African American boys serve to boost the egos of these businessmen and to enable them to reassert their position of dominance in American society. As William says,

   They've had disastrous days and want to take out their frustration
   on someone. I'm perfect, a skinny colored kid, almost like the ones
   they see a lot of nowadays on TV, except shabbier. They're
   witnessing their time in the spotlight stolen by a whole crew of
   new, mystifying faces. Or so they think. And they want somebody to
   pay, be humiliated, physically put under them like restoring their
   natural position in the world. (12)