By Joshua E. Livingston
“This is heavy.” - Marty McFly
“My burden is light.” - Jesus
I
have always felt a vague presence of “Asianness” in Robert Zemekis’ 1989 film Back to the Future, Part II. Recently I came across an article that unpacked it for me. Written, appropriately, in the year 2015, commentator Wendy Lee describes how the film went to great lengths in order to establish its sense of futurity by equating avant garde technologies with Asian American aesthetics. While I appreciate how Asian American presence is normalized in 2015 Hill Valley, what the film gets wrong is its superficial take on what Asian American studies scholars David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu call “techno-orientalism,” that is, how “the future looks Asian and Asians look ‘futuristic.’”
This is a trope that, structurally speaking, echoes the historical logic of American opportunism with regard to Asians. Cathy Park Hong reminds us, after the immigration ban was lifted in 1965, America was strategically selective about who could obtain visas. She writes,“This screening process … is how the whole model minority myth quackery began: the US government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took credit for all their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream!” In other words, the dream itself entails the commodification of “Asianness.” It’s this dream where we can find ourselves yoked to the perpetual desire for more – it functions like a “hole.”
Over and over in the Back to the Future trilogy, Marty McFly wakes up believing his space-time shenanigans have all been a dream, only to encounter some variation of his mother: an embodied mediator of the desire of the Other. Similarly, despite our illusions of the pursuit of liberty, the American dream always seems to cradle us in desire. Advent is the season where we can find ourselves crying out from within this harrowing narrative: “How long, O Lord?” Here we are tempted to satiate ourselves with this annual reminder of “hope,” which in lieu of our habits of instant gratification, can devolve into the unsatisfying consolation of an ever-deferred commodification of desire.
As Christians, we understand Advent as the perpetual season of hope. As it’s written in the book of Hebrews, this hope is the source of our faith. But as an Asian American, the word that sticks with me here is less “hope” than it is “perpetual.” What if we allowed ourselves a bit of linguistic free association as a way of touching on aspects of hope that we may unconsciously resist? In doing so, I hope to gain fresh insights on the season, where “hope” is transfigured as “hole,” or a way of describing the space that desire inhabits. The main question here is: Who’s desire? It is helpful to remind ourselves that desire is not a natural, biological function. It is always a learned posture, bequeathed to us, internalized via the projection of the desire of the Other, or mediated phenomena that are sometimes theologically personified as “powers and principalities.”
So what happens if we reimagine this commodification of hope as a "hole" in the cosmos? Rather than a time that can be objectified and pedaled through holiday pleasures, perhaps it's a time on the church calendar that functions more as a negative, liminal, or as Sheldon Wolin says, “occasional” space that theologically reorients our unique perspective as disciples of Christ. Call it reorientalism.
Of course, the temptation is always to simply fill the hole. This is a symptom of the ubiquitous “societal imperative to enjoy,” as Todd McGowan describes it. The very function of desire is to accommodate a felt lack and indeed, and we’ll find every possible way to accomplish this. Perhaps the reason why the experience of the “perpetual foreigner” is perpetual is that the wheel itself never stops. What if the problem is not our perceived foreignness at all, but our perpetual propensity to play the game? Maybe the way out of this perception is not ultimate economic empowerment, but a transfigured desire that perpetuates the possibility inherent in the empty space of Advent.
As such, Advent, and the Christian faith itself, is inherently about the possibility. What’s miraculous, however, is that this very possibility is itself retroactive. It informs the everyday life of today and even transfigures the inherited traumas of the past. Does any of this relieve us of our pain and suffering? No. Not in the least. Advent as “hole” reminds us of the “dark night of the soul” through which we may identify with the Suffering Servant and find godliness, with contentment, in light of the cultural scripts, the projected fantasies, handed to Asian Americans. To paraphrase the book of Hebrews again, we confess that we are strangers and foreigners on the earth (an experience we are familiar with as “perpetual foreigners”). But if we have been thinking of the land that we have left behind (or the dream of finally assimilating into a new land), perhaps we do have this opportunity to return (or repress). However, we are reminded of the desire for a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called our God; indeed, God has prepared a city for us.
Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash
Joshua E. Livingston is a writer and community developer residing in Indianapolis. He is the director of Cultivating Communities and the author of Sunrays on the Beachhead of the New Creation (Wipf & Stock, 2021). His writing has been featured in The Plough, The Other Journal, and The Englewood Review of Books.