Meg Green
English 316
Easter 2017
My So-Called “American” Meats: Reterritorialization in the Global Frontier of Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
Ruth L. Ozeki’s 1998 polemic My Year of Meats succeeded in calling attention to the seemingly disparate yet related issues of meat, woman’s body, and transnational media. Despite the novel’s many achievements, it remains problematic at its core, precisely because of its endorsement of transpacific female alliances through a white, nationalist narrative of the United States shored by the multicultural family and their American children of varying shades. In narrating this discourse of the new millenia, the novel disseminates the nation’s imagined ability to remake itself as capable of embracing diversity and difference, but still retain a core of global hegemony; instead, it reconstitutes the very localized, national framework that it initially attempts to subvert. In essence, globalization is hardly global. Ozeki’s reinstatement of Americanism masked in global affiliations of the female alludes to the capitalist ability to deterritorialize and reterritorialize without affecting its inherent centrality.
The character of Jane – a six-foot-tall, green-eyed, Japanese American wannabe documentarian – aptly represents a U.S.-centered deterritorialization in conjunction with corporate capitalism. Outwardly, Jane’s emphasis upon her hybridity and mobility transforms her into a global citizen, unconstrained by conventional gender roles and racialized biases. Capitalizing upon this difference, she assumes a figure of androgyny in the workplace; paralleling this social ambiguity, she even marries (albeit, briefly) Emil, an African American whose image of exoticism – with a voice “like chocolate” and a stance “hungry … like a panther” (151) – compliments her own. Jane’s girlhood dream to create an “embodied United Nations” (12) through reproduction of a mixed-raced baby looks to her contrived vision of a cosmopolitan adulthood as a “go-between” and “cultural pimp” (9) of the transnational media industry. In reality, it is in her “halved” status, “neither here nor there” (31) that ultimately leads Jane astray, unmoored and unsure of her origin and, thus, natural allegiance; despite these internal rumblings, our pseudo-heroine rarely considers such dated questions as identity or ethnic roots. As opposed to her implausibly harsh and stifled Japanese mother and her thinly-sketched Minnesotan father, Jane indulges in all of the advantages of her foreign (Asian) heritage while simultaneously claiming her status as an American national. For example, while speaking to her soon-to-be-lover for the first time on the phone in a seedy rural motel, Jane describes herself as a boyish exotic in “an old army-green sleeveless undershirt and brand-new boxer shorts from Wal-Mart.” She humorously adds that the scene resembles a “post-Vietnam nostalgia-porn thing” or “a quick little R and R fantasy in Tokyo or Seoul” (52). But later in the novel, Jane notes how her “honest, earnest face” works well with the “Asian-American Woman thing”: “we’re reliable, loyal, smart but nonthreatening.” (157) These examples show that Jane conveniently moves across, but never beyond, the superficial Asian American binary of an exotic and a model minority citizen. Notwithstanding, when asked to identify herself by an Arkansan veteran, Jane answers, “I… am… a … fucking AMERICAN!”(11). This dialogue, primarily intended to ridicule an aged white rustic, reveals the ironic way Jane’s hybridity and mobility is predicated upon her nationality.
Less a border-free cosmopolitan desire than a neo-liberalist multicultural cliché, hybridity and mobility are essential to other privileged American characters of the novel, too. Kenji, the New York office producer of My American Wife!,was educated in England and wears his “British accent like his Armani suit, casually draped, with a sense of perfect global entitlement” (26). But despite his global education and distinguished career, Kenji has no interest in understanding Akiko’s predicament, choosing rather to simply ignore her as a “deranged” (227) Japanese woman. Jane’s lover, Sloan Rankin, is the epitome of global mobility. A postmodern jazz musician based in Chicago, Sloan gratifies an ultimate female fantasy for a “tall dark stranger in cowboy boots” (56); producing records in New York, scoring films in Los Angeles, and being in the Suntory Dry Beer commercial in Japan playing his saxophone, this world-famous indie musician makes Jane willingly succumb to him and the “titanic sex” (159) with two condoms. In a novel in which the heroine believes herself to be exceptionally competent – both professionally and sexually – while she claims the male characters lack physical and emotional attractiveness and maturity, Jane’s long-limbed, languid lover is positioned almost too good to be true. Sloan’s embodiment of a superficial and hyper-individualized ideal of cosmo-multiculturalism subverts the allure of the exotic, displacing native foreignness with domesticated – or, American – mimicry.
Produced by Kenji and directed by Jane, My American Wife!turns out to be exactly like its creators: a ‘global’ television program subject to Americanism and commercialism. A neo-colonialist ideology is apparent in Jane’s note on “all-American values: “My American Wife!of the ’90s must be a modern role model, just as her mother was a model to Japanese wives after World War II.” Jane goes on to say that the series should promote to Japanese housewives an “old-fashioned consumerism with contemporary wholesome values, represented […] by good, nourishing food for her entire family [which] means meat” (13). Despite its farcical effect, Jane’s note, in the guise of conveying “wholesome values,” putsMy American Wife!in the forefront of neocolonialism. The longstanding American romance with the frontier has proceeded from territorial expansion to technological and commercial expansion. In essence, multiculturalism, information technology, and even environmental problems have become the realms within which this ‘new frontier’ of the modern world is being reconstructed. Because of this, seemingly innocuous entertainment, such as My American Wife!,makes a perfect vehicle through which to reorganize an American frontier in foreign countries
by pushing forward the nation’s ‘wholesome values.’ Jane does criticize the frontier culture of America. Mentioning the murder of a Japanese student by a white Louisiana butcher, she divisively claims, “In America we fancy that ours is still a frontier culture, where our homes must be defended by deadly force from people who look different” (89). Jane’s solution to this violent frontier culture, however, is not to relinquish it, but rather to expand on it so as to include the “people who look different.” Jane justifies her mainstream television work by saying that she “use[s] wives to sell meat in the service of a Larger Truth” (27). But when Jane announces, “I’d show them some real Americans” (57), and casts multiracial families, it becomes evident that her “Larger Truth” means to enlarge the boundaries of America, rather than reexamining them critically.
Yet another reason why My American Wife!stands for neo-colonialism, or cultural imperialism, is because it joins meat and womanhood in the context of American witticism and commercialism. In Jane’s own words, the American wife ideal for the show is the “Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest” (8). Jane’s boss tells her that her job is to “catch up healthy American wives with most delicious meats” (10). Funny yet cruel examples like these abound in Ozeki’s text, as in the Texas stripper’s “round rump” (43) inspected by Joichi and the description of Bunny Dunn as “amplitude personified, replete with meats” (252). The all-American recipes marketed in the show, such as “Beef Fudge,” “Hallelujah Lamb Chops,” and “Pigs-in-a-Blanket,” are at once entertaining and disturbing. In discussing the seemingly innocuous trash culture of America, none of this humor proves harmless, for it exhibits a lack of respect for women, minorities, and animals alike through obscene imagery and jarring diction. While an acknowledgement of the novel’s astute way of employing meat as a metaphor for womanhood, a locus of political and public health and environmental concerns, and an object through which the violence of capital upon the (often female) body is played out, these seemingly mindless jokes only act to perpetuate the archaicly pernicious association between meat and women. Tolerated in the name of amusing commercialism, this association displays the extent to which both women and meat become commodities on the global market whose bodies are shaped, deformed, and violated for commercial profit. Such is the case of Jane’s enragement upon receipt of Joichi’s reprimandation of her own episode featuring lamb chops. Despite her disgruntled spew of, “Beef is Best. Hah, he was base. His wanton capitalist mandate had nothing to do with my vocation!” (167), Jane soon finds herself subjugated to commercialism; when approaching the direction of the episode, Jane refers to the heroine of the lamb chop episode, Christina Bukowsky’s paraplegia as “truly an American story”, later assuring her boss that “we just won’t film her legs” (132). Instead, they will focus on her beauty – a universally misogynistic, commercialist endeavor! Just as Jane’s “heart-wrenching documentary” (173) erasing discomforting truth is no documentary, watching My American Wife!for one’s weekly fill of culture is far from a genuine understanding of American culture. With little interest in the Japanese diet or the health of Japanese consumers, all My American Wife!fulfills is to increase America’s wealth by selling tainted meat and inculcate clichéd media images of multiculturalism in the Japanese household. Jane’s neo-liberalist take on the show deterritorializes the realm of the white, middle-class American Wife, but the same realm is soon reterritorialized with the racially mixed, middle-class American Wife; hence, the centrality of the American Wife remains unchallenged. In the neocolonialist cycle of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, a reliable and loyal Asian American woman undertakes the role of the millennial pioneer who rebuilds the new American frontier in her mother’s homeland, Japan.
Owing to their lack of hybridity and mobility, the Asian and the rural characters of My Year of Meats are diametrically opposed to the lot of Jane, Sloan, and Kenji. Neatly polarized along the binary of good and bad, open and closed, and pure and mixed, these characters on the periphery of globalization become objects to be acculturated to multiculturalism. Critics and readers alike have duly indicated the national and gendered stereotypes and orientalist images Ozeki unscrupulously amplifies in Meats,resulting in a formulaic victimization of these personas.
If Jane’s character stays positive, albeit inconsistent, throughout the novel, the character of Akiko Ueno develops dramatically from a helpless and battered wife to an independent mother-to-be, leaving her husband and homeland for the sake of her unborn daughter. Perhaps Ozeki seeks to present a dichotomy implied in Jane/Akiko, stemming from their shared nationality and impending (at once) motherhood; if so, Meats could be summarized at once as an inspirational story whereby a mature and worldly Japanese American woman educates an immature Japanese woman in order to pull her out of “that small string of Pacific islands” (9) and transform her into an American mom. Admittedly, no reader (or decent human being) would want Akiko to stay in her suffocating, rage-filled, pretended life with Joichi. However, it should be questioned just how “autonomous” and “authentic” her new life, gained by severing all her previous ties and grafting herself onto a small group of American feminists, can actually be. Rather, are Akiko’s newfound feminist virtues of autonomy and authenticity entirely her own? Or does Akiko’s new global mobility amount to nothing more than the triumphant export of American liberal feminism? Akiko’s education of liberal feminism and multiculturalism is flimsy and misleading, precisely because it occurs through Jane’s cartoon-like mainstream cooking show. In essence, the inspiration and wisdom Akiko picks up from My American Wife!is in large part adolescent in nature. Akiko’s impression of the first episode is that she “like[s] the size of things American” and is jealous of Suzie Flowers’s “beautiful name” and her “easy laughter” (19). After the Beaudroux episode, Akiko likes the background blues music and buys a CD of Bobby Joe Creely. When Joichi tells her about the canceled casting of a black household, Akiko regrets it because “it sounds …different”. She then asks him if they sang “authentic gospel music” because she would “like it very much” (129). In an effort to exoticize, romanticize Akiko’s notion of “different” and “authentic”, Ozeki shallowly
grounds it in skin color and stock ethnic image. As Akiko is forced by Joichi to watch the series again and again, she is imprinted with the American wives’ “brimming, child-filled lives” (190) and decides to have a baby by enticing Joichi. Though questioning persists as to why Akiko must have a baby with the brutally abusive Joichi, she continues trying to “get sexy” through mimicking “OL” (office ladies) (212) in a pornographic magazine and masturbating. Scarred for life by anal rape and misinformed by My American Wife!,Akiko, finally pregnant, makes a life-changing decision and tells her friend Tomoko, “That’s why I’m going to America. It doesn’t matter so much for a son, but since she’s a girl, I want her to be an American citizen. So she can grow up to become an American wife.” (318). Immediately afterwards, Akiko instinctually kisses Tomoko’s lips, copying the lesbian couple in My American Wife!;this precise moment represents a victory for Jane’s global ideology. Meanwhile, Akiko’s grand feeling that “[f]inally she’s done something […] worthy of the women in Bobby Joe’s songs” (321) is rendered trivial when the six-foot-tall Jane first sees Akiko in New York City and thinks of her matter-of-factly: “exactly what I’d imagined Ueno’s wife to be … petite and shaking” (328). Until the very end of the novel, Akiko is uniformly described as needy and childish. The years of humiliating sex Akiko has had to suffer and the sad letters she writes to Jane in broken English are graphically depicted and are instrumental to reducing Akiko to an object of redemption. Even after the “rescue” and her arrival in the United States, Akiko remains naïve: she calls the Amtrak train operating across the nation a “magic train” (335) that “pump[s] spurts of happy life into her fetus” (339). Mere moments later, Akiko displays an emphatic amazement at the Southern communal spirit of the poor black people singing inside the train, delightfully claiming, “This is America!” (339) This blissful moment presages Akiko’s trouble-free motherhood in “life-pumping” America. If readers cannot help but sense bitterness in this feminist triumph, it is because such “triumph” is founded upon a disparaging (and rather xenophobic) assumption that the Japanese women are unable to separate fact from fiction.
Akiko is not the only victim of Jane’s manipulation of fact and fiction in My American Wife! Jane’s supposedly inclusive yet strictly judgmental multicultural ideology is made palatable in the meat recipes of the show and victimizes unsuspecting housewives by branding their lives as “unauthentic.” The set of white housewives featured in the series – Suzie Flowers from Iowa, Mrs. Klinck from Oklahoma, Becky Thayer from Tennessee, and Mrs. Payne from Montana – are “nice” women whom Jane “inveigle[s] […] with [their] civic duty to promote American meat abroad and thereby help rectify the trade imbalance with Japan” (35). Taken in by Jane’s appeal to patriotism, all of them try their best to make their homes look spotless and cook delicious meat dishes for the Japanese crew. But their efforts are all together punished for no better reason than they are common and white – according to Jane, they are “entirely predictable” (108) , yet are “so … perfect” (129) in Akiko’s mumbling words. The results are, of course, rather calamitous. Suzie’s life is shattered when she discovers her husband’s affair with a cocktail waitress during the show’s survey time; Mrs. Klinck’s German veal dish drives a Japanese crew member into an anaphylactic shock; Becky’s pleasant bed and breakfast house in a tourist area receives only a 2 for Authenticity from Akiko; and Mrs. Payne’s “Beef Fudge” recipe includes a sickening amount of sugar and fat and is mocked by Jane as “wholesome” and “normal” (183) for white Americans. Although it is no fault of theirs to follow the protocol of the show and refashion themselves according to the traditionally American 1950’s fantasy of white domesticity, Jane labels them boring and unenlightened in terms of her pure-hybrid bifurcation. These wives’ simplified television images are consumed by Akiko without criticism and give her the illusion that she can “separate fact from fiction”; on watching the Thayer episode, she opines that “[i]t seemed like they were making things up. Like it was artificial, just something they were doing for the program” (128). In as much as the global medium connecting Akiko and the American wife is uninterested in individual particularities, their alliance is based on false stereotypes of each other and victimizes both of them.
What Jane suggests as the new face of America is exemplified by the Martinez, the Beaudroux, and the Lara and Dyann couple, each of whom represent an ideal minority household in a contrived way. Squarely falling into an immigrant narrative, Alberto “Bert” and Catalina “Cathy” Martinez emigrate from Mexico “just in time for Bobby [their son] to be born an American citizen.”. Although Bert has lost his left hand to a hay baler and cannot play his guitar any more, they still dance and dream to become “a real American success story” (58). Jane notes that Cathy’s Texas-style Beefy Burritos are “the symbol of their hard-earned American lifestyle, something to remind them of their roots but also of their new fortune” (61). But Jane’s mediation between Mexican roots and the American Dream via burritos appears too facile to convey any real problems of contemporary American Hispanic society; rather, it only works on a near vacuous realm of entertainment. The Beaudroux episode promotes the same type of multiculturalist propaganda. In an opening shot with the “classical Southern perspective [of] Gone With the Wind” and “sliding Cajun blues riff,” Asian children “in varying shades, descending in size and age,” greet the audience in a plantation house (65). Vern and Grace Beaudroux are a white Louisiana couple who feel for “all the little Oriental babies from Korea and Vietnam” (69) and adopt eight children – seven Koreans, one Brazilian – for helping control world population. Contextually, the troubling analogy is, of course, between Vern and Grace’s old plantation teeming with the “colored” adoptees and similar plantations of the town filled with “negro manservant[s]” (68) until a hundred years ago. Despite Jane’s characterization of the Beaudroux family as intertwining hybridity and true joy, it is in this hybridity, the result of well-meaning American philanthropy on the surface, that is often entangled with painful histories of invasion and uprootedness.
Finally, Lara and Dyann ’s episode advocates an alternative sexuality and completes the tripod of American multiculturalism circumscribing all fronts: racial, national, and sexual. Hailing from Massachusetts, Lara is a white, upright district attorney, and Dyann is a well-published author and joyful black. They shop for sperm together that matches their respective skin color and intellect and conceive two “unusually smart and cute” daughters, one for each. Better yet, they are vegetarians for political reasons. As unconvincing as this exuberantly idealistic formula appears, it also includes the couple’s social reputation: they are the “pillars of their community” and “exemplary mothers” (173). Ironically, their social status, not their progressive sexual orientation, is that which finalizes the decision to feature them in the show. Regardless, the episode is a great success and helps Akiko understand that “[s]he wanted a child; she never wanted John; once she became pregnant, she wouldn’t need him ever again” (181). Lara and Dyann’s marriage appears to be endearing, pacifying, and liberating, compared to Akiko’s loveless and abusive marriage. However, Ozeki’s uplifting portrayal of the couple turns out to be as pernicious as Akiko’s married life, perhaps because the conflict-free coexistence and the democratized variety highlighted in this American power couple does little but propagate a utopian ideology which obliterates the very real power struggles between heterogeneous people(s). In envisioning a world where everybody shares ethnic food and lives harmoniously despite his or her differences, Meats boosts an ideological optimism for multicultural society. Although Joichi’s belief in “positive thinking” (37) and admiration of Jane’s “hybrid vigor” (43) are derided as crass and sham, Jane’s romanticization of the diverse yet fraternal American family is no less sentimental and spurious. In essence, Jane’s flattening and homogenizing of difference veers little from Joichi’s approach.
Jane’s acknowledgment of the confluence of “bad knowledge” and the “faux-dumb aesthetic” (334) in mainstream media is, in many ways, seemingly self-reflective of Ozeki’s novel. Despite Jane’s earnest attempt to connect people and broaden the boundary of America (and particularly that of the American female and mother), Meatsspurs the conversation of alternatives, but never tackles the boundary per se; Jane’s effort to portray the “real” America and liberate Akiko proves incomplete, as it restores the norm in this “ever-shrinking world” (15) under Americanism. If the interminable rotation of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is the requisite of America-oriented global capitalism, My Year of Meatsfluently testifies that such global capitalism allows for options within, but does not approve of a radical rebellion against it.
Works Cited
Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats.United States of America: Viking Penguin, 1998. Print.