“Constructing an Ethnic Space through Cultural Production: The Case of the Tusan and Nikkei in Peru”

Included in Le comparatisme comme approche critique. Local et mondial : Circulations / Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach. Local and Global: Circulations. Vol. 5 Ed. Anne Tomiche. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017. 269-78

To read the printed copy click here

Ignacio López-Calvo

University of California, Merced

In spite of the unquestionable influence of the Chinese and Japanese communities in Peru’s history and culture, the study of their cultural production has been, for the most part, overlooked. This presentation will focus on the cultural production of these two Peruvian minorities and migrant groups. Through their literature, they negotiate cultural difference and propose a decolonial knowledge that repositions contemporary Peruvian culture as transnational. As will be seen, writing ultimately provides these communities with a voice and a collective agency. Asian Peruvian cultural production contests the traditional dichotomy that limits Peruvian culture to the traditional confrontation between the Andean/indigenous and Criollo/coastal worldviews. However, for different reasons, while certain Asian Peruvian authors reflect their ethnic background in their writings, others do not; these differences can be considered as evidence of the heterogeneity within their respective ethnic communities. The emergence of Tusán (Chinese Peruvians) and Nikkei writers in Peru in recent decades reflects the emergence of two diasporic, minority discourses. In the case of Tusán cultural production, we go from Zulen’s indigenist writings, to Siu Kam Wen’s self-exploitation narratives, to Sui Yun’s and Julia Wong’s cosmopolitan perspectives, Julio Villanueva Chang’s chronicles and profiles, or Mario Wong’s and León’s analyses of political violence in 1980s Peru. Nikkei cultural production, in turn, offers Seiichi Higashide testimonial of the deportation of Japanese Peruvians to internment camps in the United States, explicit Okinawan nationalism in the works of Doris Moromisato, Ricardo Ganaja, and Juan Shimabukuro Inami, Nippo-Peruvian self-identification in Augusto Higa’s fiction and testimonial, Fernando Iwasaki’s ostensive delinking from Nikkei or Japanese identity, Carlos Yushimito’s post-nationalist and post-identitarian short stories, and José Watanabe’s politics of cultural belonging.

Beyond the study of the exotic ethnographic object or of stereotypical representations of the cultural other, it is far more appropriate to problematize stable Tusán and Nikkei identities, allowing them to emerge, with all their complexities, as fluid, hybrid, and changing subjectivities. In both Sino-Peruvian and Nippo-Peruvian literature, authors and characters undergo processes of de-ethnification and re-ethnification that complicate the idea of a unified identity.

Tusán Ethnocultural Discourse

Certain Tusán literary and cultural productions, e.g., Pedro Zulen’s privileging of indigenous issues, Mario Wong’s and Julio León’s narrative rendering of political violence, Julio Villanueva Chang’s stress on international topics and personalities in his chronicles and profiles, or Eugenio Chang Rodríguez’s experiences as a Peruvian academic living in the United States, are void of ethnicity. In contrast, other Sino-Peruvian works rely on Chinese ethnicity as a source of inspiration: Siu fictionalizes his trials and tribulations, as a Chinese-born, Peruvian-reared young man, in confronting racial discrimination and family self-exploitation; Julia Wong and Sui Yun reflect on their ethnicity through a post-national and cosmopolitan approach. Some texts denote a yearning for an unrecoverable past (e.g., Siu Kam Wen’s La primera espada del imperio2 and Julia Wong’s Bocetos para un cuadro de familia3); others denounce past oppression and marginalization to avoid future silence, dismissal, and societal amnesia (Siu Kam

Viaje a Ítaca4, and Julia Wong’s Doble felicidad5). I believe that the conjuring of a historical past, i.e., a timeless ancestral land and traumatic episodes of oppression in Peru, denotes an incipient and veiled Tusán nationalistic discourse. An internal colonial scar resulting from historical discrimination, along with a nostalgia for an often idealized, mythical Chinese past, inform the creation of an imagined Tusán community. The Tusán identity emerging from this cultural production is, therefore, the outcome of a process of reification of fantasies and of sometimes idealized individual and social “memories”. In some cases, it leans dangerously toward self-orientalization and self-nativism (Siu Kam Wen’s La primera espada del imperio); in others, the author excludes her non-Chinese readers from knowledge shared by all Chinese (Julia Wong’s Los últimos blues de Buddha6). All in all, among authors who establish direct links between their ethnicity and their writing, we find the unstated intent of first shedding their internal colonial trappings to then affirm their own identities as either Peruvian or cosmopolitan subjects.

There is also a turn, in Tusán cultural production, toward cosmopolitism (Sui Yun and Julia Wong) and postmodernism (Mario Wong). It is tempting to see a connection between this evolution and the neoliberal, late capitalist reforms that have taken place in Peru in recent decades. After all, Frederic Jameson argues that “every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatization – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today7”. Jameson links the economic changes that took place in the base during this third stage of capitalism to the generation, in the superstructure, of postmodern cultural production: “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods . . . now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation8.”

I argue, however, that in the case of Tusán cultural production other factors are involved (cultural trends and personal beliefs or circumstances, among others) that are perhaps more influential than the economic changes taking place in Peru and in countries where Sino-Peruvian authors live. While it may be argued that ideological transformations in Peru are indeed intimately linked to recent economic changes, the evolution of Tusán cultural production has not been tied to the emergence of a modern, capitalist publishing industry. This is particularly relevant to a literary corpus that finds its identitarian coherence along ethnic rather than social class lines.

Inter-ethnic minority relations must be taken into account when studying these works. Besides the interactions between Afro-Peruvians and Chinese during the coolie period and Nikkei-Tusán relations (noticeable in Julia Wong’s and Seiichi Higashide’s works), some authors confess to having learned important lessons from other minority groups. Siu, for example, admits, in the preface to the Casatomada edition of El tramo final9, the profound influence on his work of Isaac Goldemberg’s (b. 1945) literary depictions of his Jewish Peruvian ethnic group. Given that Goldemberg was born in Chepén, like Julia Wong, he apparently influenced her writing as well. Of particular interest is Zulen’s inter-ethnic relation with the indigenous community and his devotion to their emancipation, while surprisingly keeping silent in regard to physical attacks on the Chinese community. Furthermore, the identification of Tusán and Nikkei authors with Peru’s indigenous people may be read as a creation of strategic and imaginary genealogical links to aid in the national acceptance of their belonging. Authors such as Pedro Zulen, Julia Wong, and Ricardo Ganaja at times go so far as to claim their own indigeneity by rhetorically considering themselves as “one of them”. Similarly, Sui Yun appeared dressed in Amazonian indigenous attire at the presentation of one of her collections of poems.

Interestingly, Sui Yun and Julia Wong have expressed their awareness of how the People’s Republic of China’s new economic and political influence on Latin America (the ironic term “Lachinoamérica” depicts this power) has changed the image of local ethnic Chinese communities in the region and will probably increase their political weight as well. It is to be expected that, since Chinese corporations see Sino-Latin American communities as a strategic asset, Tusán cultural production will gain increasing traction. Thus, whereas in Siu Kam Wen’s and Julia Wong’s stories the shop counter becomes the quintessential Tusán chronotope, the office of a Chinese corporation or bank may become the new chronotope in the future. As Lausent-Herrera argued, ethnic Chinese in Peru and other countries (approximately fifty million Chinese living abroad) may resent China’s excessive influence in their local affairs. Another possible risk for the survival of the Tusán community in Peru, in my view, is similar to what the Nikkei community is facing: the possibility of renewed immigration. In Peru, however, the creation of the Asociación Peruano China, led by the influential Erasmo Wong, is proof that the Tusán community is aware of their strategic position. It plans to stand its ground against the increasing power of mainland Chinese corporations and the influence of new immigrant entrepreneurs at the head of many Chinese associations in Peru. In the first chapter of China, Past and Present, Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) states: “Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break10.” If one follows the historical trajectory of the Chinese and Tusán in Peru, from oppression to expression, from semi-slavery to major contributions to Peruvian society and culture, it is safe to assume that they will resiliently continue to develop new strategies for empowerment. Hopefully, Tusán cultural production will remain one of these strategies.

Nikkei Ethnocultural Discourse

Why study literature and other forms of cultural production in relation to Nippo-Peruvian identity and history? Nikkei writing may be interpreted as a call for acceptance into the imaginary of the Peruvian nation, which challenges the traditional criollo-indigenous duality (as Sino-Peruvian, Afro-Peruvian, or Jewish Peruvian cultural productions do as well). While some discursive practices establish cultural differences between Nikkei and non-Nikkei, or between Okinawans and Nihonjin, others are devoted to proving the essential Peruvianness of Nikkei writers and their ethnic community. These works construct an ethnic space that inscribes the Japanese and their descendants in Peru’s present and future history (in this regard, Alberto Fujimori positioned the Nikkei community as a model for a future Peru). It also reflects the process of racial formation and the evolution of this community’s public image from the negative “yellow peril” to the more recent idea of a “model minority” that can set the path to a better future for the country. A series of symbolic and historic milestones has become recurrent in this racialized group’s representative writings: the inception of the immigration process, the lootings of May 1940, the deportations during World War II, the victory of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990 presidential election, and the dekasegi phenomenon, which threatens to continue weakening a community that has lost many of its young and most promising members. Nikkei writing also depicts the evolution from insular mentality with closely and firmly integrated organization and institutions to a new generation of Japanese Peruvians who are open to integration and intermarriage, and whose choice of ethnic self-identification is less rigid. Evidence of a surviving fear of victimization persists, as found in the Nikkei community’s anxiety about the potentially adverse consequences of Fujimori’s victory in the 1990 presidential election.

Several texts, such as Augusto Higa’s La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu11, or Doris Moromisato’s Diario de la mujer esponja12 expose the at times insurmountable obstacle that their Asian phenotype poses for the Nikkei in their quest for integration into mainstream Peruvian society. On the other hand, this physical appearance nowadays carries with it positive connotations of honesty and diligence, a stereotype that, paired with Japan’s international prestige, Fujimori used to his advantage during his political career. His campaign’s motto during the first presidential election, “work, honesty, and technology”, suggested that Peru was a country in need of “Japanization”. More importantly, besides the many cases of nativism, xenophobia, Nippophobia, and racism depicted in works such as Adiós to Tears13 by Seiichi Higashide, several texts, such as Okinawa, Un siglo en el Perú14 by Doris Moromisato and Juan Shimabukuro Inami, Okinawa, el reino de la cortesía, y testimonio de un peruano okinawense15 by Ricardo Ganaja, La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa, and Doris Moromisato’s poetry collections also show the often painful process of transculturation and cross-cultural hybridization that have taken place in Peru since the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants. In addition, they reveal an obvious negotiation of national allegiances and cultural identities that exposes the fluidity of identitarian layers. This process sometimes allows the character or testimonialist (author of the testimonio) to enjoy multiple public and private identities, or to enter and leave Japaneseness strategically, depending on what approach is politically advisable in each case.

Referring to Chinese in West Indian literature and to those narratives used in the articulation of national identity as belonging, Anne-Marie Lee-Loy argues: “There is more than one way to imagine the boundaries of national belonging, and the fictional images of the Chinese capture this inherent instability16.” Indeed, one could argue that the same may be said about the Japanese in Peru: Japanese and Nikkei characters often represent the human borderland between the Peruvian and non-Peruvian, becoming self-evident in the recurrent phrase “even the Japanese”. In texts written by Nikkei authors, traces of an inner struggle are found, a quest for one’s own identity that goes beyond the authors themselves to encompass the rest of their ethnic communities. These heterogeneous representations and explorations of the self also contest the often stereotypical, anamorphous, or grotesque Japanese and Nikkei characters appearing in works by non-Nikkei Peruvian authors, such as José María Arguedas’s novel El sexto17; Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels La casa verde, Historia de Mayta, and Travesuras de la niña mala18; and Mario Bellatín’s novel El jardín de la señora Murakami19, Shiki Nagaoka, Una nariz de ficción, Biografía ilustrada de Mishima, and his short story “Bola negra20”, among many others. And by so doing, it explores and challenges notions about what it means to be a Nikkei and what constitutes Peruvianness.

Other than the formal innovations of Watanabe’s take on Japanese haiku (adopting its visual and conceptual approach and its thematic content, but rarely its form), Nippo-Peruvian writing does not deviate much in form from the rest of Peruvian and Latin American cultural production. Neither does it present a significant chronological evolution in its themes or worldviews, which should not be surprising if we consider that most Nikkei Peruvian cultural productions have been recently published. What is recurrent, as mentioned, are the different levels of ethnic identification as well as the different phases, from ethnification to de-ethnification (or vice versa) and sometimes an ulterior re-ethnification, noticeable in particular in Ricardo Ganaja’s Okinawa, el reino de la cortesía and Higa’s La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu and Japón no da dos oportunidades. On the other hand, while some texts concentrate on political and historical vindication while embracing internationalism (Adiós to Tears), others, such as Okinawa, el reino de la cortesía and Okinawa: Un siglo en el Perú, add Okinawan (sub)ethnic difference and pride. Equally important are the examples of the opposite: a more or less explicit rejection of ethno-cultural and national identity that sometimes flirts with a postmodern worldview, as seen in most of Fernando Iwasaki’s and Carlos Yushimito’s texts. When studying these authors’ works, it is particularly important not to overemphasize their Japanese cultural heritage to avoid reaching simplistic conclusions. Doris Moromisato’s poetry adds, to the Okinawan cultural identity already present in her narratives, dimensions of gender and sexual identification, as well as an ecological perspective. These approaches complement one another in and its place within Peruvianness.

Conclusion

My study of Tusán and Nikkei cultural production is an attempt to contribute to Antonio Cornejo Polar’s Escribir en el aire21 (Writing in the Air, 1994) by providing an Asian ethnicity component to his concept of sociocultural heterogeneity. Intellectuals such as Zulen, in fact, connect directly with Cornejo Polar’s analysis of the relation between writing and orality among Andean cultures: Zulen’s goal was to apply the power of the written word to gaining the liberation of indigenous peoples with only oral traditions. Through this literary corpus, Tusán and Nikkei struggles, desires, and dreams weave themselves into the fabric of Peruvian national imagination. To Cornejo Polar, the Peruvian subject begins to understand “that his identity is also the Other’s destabilizing identity, a mirror or shadow that he incorporates, in a dark and conflictive manner, as an option between alienation or fulfillment22”. Tusán and Nikkei writings sustain a longstanding Peruvian tradition of legitimization of the mestizo condition that, as Cornejo Polar points out, began with Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas, 1609). Tusán and Nikkei authors, through their writing, try to validate and vindicate their ethnicity. By historicizing their experience, they also demand a place in the Peruvian social imaginary. In Siu Kam Wen and Julia Wong, for example, the recovery of the collective history of the Chinese community goes hand in hand with the self-exploration implicit in their (semi-)auto-biographical texts. These authors claim the right to their ethnic heritage by proposing an alternative modernity and a decolonial knowledge liberated from traditional, Eurocentric, and homogenizing worldviews.

As Walter Mignolo posits, “it requires an act of humility to realize that there is no longer room for abstract universals and truth without parenthesis. And it takes a moment of rage and of losing fear to move from the colonial wound to decolonial scientia23”. Tusán and Nikkei writings provide numerous examples of these types of parentheses that negotiate cultural differences and suspend essentialist notions of overarching Chineseness, Japaneseness or Peruvianness. They likewise exemplify the movement from a simplistic cultural celebration or a nostalgic lamentation of past subjection to a development of an alternative, decolonial knowledge that challenges eurocentrism and other homologizing discourses. Homi Bhabha argues that “The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness24’”. Tusán and Nikkei literature often reflects this encounter with otherness, whether mainstream, criollo Peruvian or Nikkei culture. Several texts are avowed acts of self-exploration (most by Sui Yun, Julia Wong, Siu Kam Wen, Doris Moromisato, Augusto Higa) that also contribute to articulate a counter-narrative challenging how the Tusán and Nikkei communities have been racialized and “Othered”. Certain works may be read as both claim to national belonging (Zulen, Mario Wong, Julio León, Watanabe, Higa) and condemnation of the exclusion of Asian Peruvians from the national discourse. The erasure of this group from the national imagination is apparent, for instance, in the Casa de la Literatura Peruana’s selection of authors or in Escribir en el aire, which focuses almost entirely on the criollo- indigenous dichotomy, with sporadic passages devoted to Afro-Peruvians.

It is my hope that these studies will contribute to the inclusion of Tusán and Nikkei authors in the Peruvian cultural canon, which would amplify the understanding of what it means to be Peruvian and would also highlight the complexities of racial and ethnic identity in Peru and Latin America.

Notes

1 Part of the information included in this essay was previously published in my books Dragons in the Land of the Condor, Writing Tusán in Peru, Tuscon, University of Arizona Press, 2015, and The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2013.

2  Siu Kam Wen, La primera espada del imperio (The First Sword of the Empire), Lima, Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1988. 


3  Julia Wong, Bocetos para un cuadro de familia (Sketches for a Family Portrait), Lima, Borrador, 2008. 


4  Siu Kam Wen, Viaje a Ítaca (Voyage to Ithaca), Morrisville, North Carolina, Diana, 2004. 


5  Julia Wong, Doble felicidad (Double Happiness), Lima, Editatú, 2012. 


6  Julia Wong, Los últimos blues de Buddha (Buddha’s Last Blues), Lima, Noevas Editoras, 2002. 


7  Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke 
University Press, 1991, p. 3. 


8  Id., p. 5. 


9 Siu Kam Wen, El tramo final (The Final Strech), Lima, Casatomada, 2009.

10 Pearl S. Buck, China, Past and Present, New York, John Day Co., 1972, p. 19.

11  Augusto Higa, La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu (Katzuo Nakamatsu’s Enlightenment), Lima, San Marcos, 2008. 


12  Doris Moromisato, Diario de la mujer esponja, (Diary of a Panja Woman), Lima, Flora Tristán, 2004.

13  Seiichi Higashide, Adiós to Tears, The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2000. 


14  Doris Moromisato and Juan Shimabukuro Inami, Okinawa: Un siglo en el Perú (Okinawa, A Century in Peru), Lima, Ymagino Publicidad S.A.C, 2006. 


15  Ricardo Ganaja, Okinawa, el reino de la cortesía, y testimonio de un peruano okinawense (Okinawa, the Kingdom of Kindness, and the Testimonial of an Okinawan Peruvian), Lima, OKP, 2008. 


16  Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2010, p. 4. 


17  José María Arguedas, El sexto (The Sixth), Lima, Horizonte, 1969. 


18  Mario Vargas Llosa, La casa verde (The Green House) Madrid, Alfaguara, 1999; Historia de Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta), Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1984; Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl), Lima, Alfaguara, 2006. 


19  Mario Bellatín, El jardín de la señora Murakami (Mrs. Murakami’s Garden), Barcelona, Tusquets, 2001. 


20  Shiki Nagaoka, Una nariz de ficción (A Nose of Fiction), Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2001; Biografía ilustrada de Mishima (An Illustrated Biography of Mishima), Lima, Matalamanga, 2009; “Bola negra” (“Black Ball”), in Tres novelas, Mérida, Venezuela, El Otro, El Mismo, 2005. 


21  Antonio Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire: Ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas [1994], Lima, Latinoamericana Editores, 2003. 22  “Que su identidad es también la desestabilizante identidad del otro, espejo o sombra a la que incorpora oscura, desgarrada y conflictivamente como opción de enajenamiento o de plenitud.” (Antonio Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire, op. cit., p. 80. Unless otherwise indicated, all further translations are mine.) 


23  Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham/London, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 114. 


24  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London / New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 12. 


 *U.S. copyright law prohibits reproduction of the articles on this site "for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research" (see Title 17, US Code for details). If you would like to copy or reprint these articles for other purposes, please contact the publisher to secure permission.