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

In addition to the way Ong deploys criticism about globalization and global capitalism to show his perspective on the way transnational labor and people figure in the US, is his wry and humorous view of the way culture from the Third World has been received, marketed, and commodified. In Fixer Chao the easiest clients to dupe are those who, like Lindsay S. the poet, are Orientalists. Lindsay loves Oriental art and has a collection of beautiful Chinese scrolls, "teapots and teacups, Japanese swords, calligraphic ink sets, [...] hundreds of Buddhas of dazzling variety" (71). Lindsay believes that the "Chinese and the Japanese" have the "two greatest cultures in the world" (79). His appreciation of these cultures is manifested mainly through the acquisition of objects and commodities from the East. For people like Lindsay, the East is a large marketplace, a shopping paradise that enhances his stature as consumer and collector. Master Chao's services are merely part of the gift of Eastern harmony in his life.

At the same time, for people in developing countries, transnational trade has also created a skewed version of the West as a place of unlimited wealth, material goods, and promise. In one of the rare moments when William recollects his past, he tells his Filipino friend, Preciosa, that he came to America with his parents who "wanted a better life" (262). The images of this "better life" consist of luxury, "wall-to-wall carpeting," brand names like "General Electric, Sunbeam, Hoover, Proctor-Silex, Pfizer, Zenith" (263). He thinks, "They were all a short-hand for beauty, for quality, things that wouldn't break--as our appliances often did. That, for the longest time, had been my family's going definition of a better life: to own things that took a while to malfunction" (263). This dream, tied as it is to brand names, is a telling comment about the global impact of American culture. People in the Third World are interpellated by American media and advertising so much that their desires are structured around these products. Hence, the worship of America and American consumer culture starts before one enters America. Ironically, these products are now manufactured through transnational labor, so that what William's family covets is very likely produced in his own or other Asian countries by using cheap laborers.

For William, ten years in America have made him only too aware of the foolishness of those early dreams. In the bathroom of the Port Authority, "There had been a hyperactive automatic hand dryer which was a Proctor-Silex" (263). Recalling his family's reverence for the brand names, William thinks he has finally understood the hidden meaning of Proctor-Silex "as a shorthand for all the changes that are bound to happen in the process from wanting to get there to finally getting there, the process from dreaming the dream to eventually getting it--or some would say, killing it" (263). Wall-to-wall carpeting and the brand names do abound in America, but William and other Filipino Americans discover that they do not necessarily have the means to "walk on softness, coolness" (263), as they expected. Instead they find themselves cast as those who are expected to clean and maintain them for others to enjoy.