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10 | MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITIONLOS ANGELES“Miss Saigon” is revived
and on tour again, playing in a theater
near me. This is exciting news for
some fans of Broadway musicals, and
for Asian and Asian-American actors
with the chance for important roles.
For others, to whom “Miss Saigon”
perpetuates deeply held notions of
Asian inferiority, this is bad news.
“Miss Saigon” is about a Vietnamese
prostitute in Saigon during the war
years who falls in love with a white
male American G.I. He leaves for
America without knowing that she is
pregnant. She bears his son and when
he returns, gives up the child to him so
that he can save the boy and take him
to the United States, far from Vietnam.
Left behind, our prostitute kills herself.
I saw the musical in New York City
in 1996, paying for tickets in the fourth
row, an extravagant expenditure for a
graduate student on a minimal fellow-
ship. In my earnest idealism, I believed
that I should see a work before I criti-
cized it. But sometimes things are as
they appear on their yellowface.
All around me, audience members
sobbed at the tragic love story. I was
disgusted. I could not help but think of
how “Miss Saigon” was based on
Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,”
set in Japan. In Puccini’s by-now uni-
versal story, two star-crossed lovers, a
Japanese woman and a white man,
together embody Rudyard Kipling’sdictum: “East is East and West is West
and never the twain shall meet.” Be-
cause East and West are fundamen-
tally opposed, the lovers are doomed,
or, to put it more accurately, one lover
is doomed — the Japanese woman.
Happy to see that her child will live a
better life in the West, she takes her
own worthless life.
The playwright David Henry Hwang
saw the absurdity of this story. His
still-relevant play “M. Butterfly” pre-
cedes “Miss Saigon"
but might as well be
satirizing it, too. In
this ultimate sendup
of “Madama Butter-
fly’s” wish-fulfill-
ment fantasy of
white male desire, he
reverses the roles of
seducer and se-
duced. In Mr.
Hwang’s play it is
the white male,
Gallimard, a French
diplomat, who is
conned by Song Liling, a beautiful
Chinese opera singer who plays Mad-
ama Butterfly. “What would you say if
a blond homecoming queen fell in love
with a short Japanese businessman?”
Song says. “He treats her cruelly, then
goes home for three years, during
which time she prays to his picture and
turns down marriage from a young
Kennedy. Then, when she learns he
has remarried, she kills herself.
Now, I believe you would consider
this girl to be a deranged idiot, cor-
rect? But because it’s an Oriental who
kills herself for a Westerner — ah! —you find it beautiful.”
As it turns out, however, Song Liling
is actually not a woman. Gallimard’s
fantasy is the West’s fantasy of the
Orient, where Asian women stand in
for Asia as a whole — feminized, weak,
in need of a strong hand to rescue her
from oppressive Asian patriarchy. The
gift of rescue is so appreciated by the
weak Asian woman that she will do the
most O. Henry of things, kill herself in
gratitude for having had her life saved.
Mr. Hwang draws a direct connection
between these interpersonal, individ-
ual fantasies and the American con-
duct of the war in Vietnam. The United
States’ biggest mistake in that war was
to think, like Gallimard, that Asians
were small, weak, effeminate people
who could be cowed by the strong
masculine power of the West.
Some people who are irritated by
these criticisms of “Miss Saigon’s”
enduring popularity will say, It’s only a
show, nothing more.But the enjoyment
of the show’s fantasy is precisely why
the show matters. Fantasy cannot be
dismissed as mere entertainment,
especially when we keep repeating the
fantasy. Fantasy — and our enjoyment
of it — speaks to something we deeply
want to believe. The enjoyment of this
show is based on the privilege that the
audience feels, the privilege of not
being that Asian woman who kills
herself, the privilege of seeing the
world from the viewpoint of the power-
ful white male savior who can both be
so attractive that a woman would kill
herself over him and be so paternal
that he can adopt the mixed-race child
who will stand in for childlike Asia, inneed of Western benevolent guidance.
Racism and sexism are not incom-
patible with art, as Chinua Achebe
showed in his attack on Joseph Con-
rad’s “Heart of Darkness” as racist.
Our enjoyment of a work of art does
not mean that the work cannot be
racist or sexist, or that our enjoyment
does not come from a deep-seated well
of derogatory images of Asians and
Asian women. The unsettling paradox
here is that we can indeed love and
desire people whom we see in com-
pletely racist and sexist ways. That is
the real, unintended universal truth of
“Miss Saigon.”
Should “Miss Saigon” therefore be
censored or canceled? The question is
a distraction from the real answer,
which is that censorship or cancella-
tion does little to address the inequities
of Broadway and Hollywood. Perhaps
those of us who detest the musical
would not be so upset if there were
other stories about Asians or Vietnam-
ese people that showed their diversity.
If there were a thousand stories on-
stage and onscreen about us — or even
if there were just a dozen — we might
forgive “Miss Saigon.”
In 1993, not long after the Broadway
debut of “Miss Saigon,” the writer
Jessica Hagedorn titled her anthology
of Asian-American literature “Charlie
Chan Is Dead.” Charlie Chan, indeed,
seems to be dead. Now it’s “Miss
Saigon’s”turn to die.Viet Thanh Nguyen
Contributing WriterVIET THANH NGUYENis the author of “The
Refugees” and the editor of “The Dis-
placed: Refugee Writers on Refugee
Lives.”‘Miss Saigon’ must die
Eva Noblezada in “Miss Saigon,” which was nominated in 2017 for a Tony award for best revival of a musical.SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMESWhy is a
musical that
perpetuates
a Western
fantasy of
Asians as
weak and
effeminate
people still
so popular?Nations, like people, may change
somewhat, but not in their essential
characteristics. The United States is
defined by space and hope. It is an
optimistic country of can-do strivers.
They took the risk of coming to a new
land. They are suspicious of govern-
ment, inclined to self-reliance. Euro-
peans ask where you came from.
Americans ask what you can do.
The Declaration of Independence
posited a universal idea, that human
beings are created equal, that they are
endowed with certain inalienable
rights, and that among these are “life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Americans, then, embraced an idea,
however flawed in execution, when
they became a nation. Their govern-
ment, whatever else it does, exists to
safeguard and further that idea, in the
United States and beyond.
President Trump, in the name of
making American great again, has
trampled on America’s essence. He is
angry, a stranger to happiness, angrier
still for not knowing the source of his
rage. He is less interested in libertythan the cash of his autocratic cronies.
As for life, he views it as a selective
right, to which the white Christian
male has priority access, with women,
people of color and the rest of human-
ity trailing along behind for scraps.
Adherents to an agenda of “national
conservatism” held a conference last
month in Washington dedicated, as my
colleague Jennifer Schuessler put it,
“to wresting a coherent ideology out of
the chaos of the Trumpist moment.”
Good luck with that. One of the
meeting’s leading lights was Rich
Lowry, the editor of National Review.
Lowry’s forthcoming book is called
“The Case for Nationalism.” Enough
said. The endpoint of that “case” is on
display at military cemeteries across
Europe.
Nationalism, self-pitying and ag-
gressive, seeks to change the present
in the name of an illusory past in order
to create a future vague in all respects
except its glory. Trump is a self-styled
nationalist. The “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
U.S.A.!” chants at his rallies have
chilling echoes.
Lowry holds that “America is not an
idea” and to call it so is a “lazy cliché.”
This argument denies the essence of
the country — an essence palpable at
every naturalization ceremony across
the United States. Becoming American
is a process that involves the inner
absorption of the nation’s founding
idea.
The gravest thing Trump has done is
to empty this idea of meaning. His has
been an assault on honesty, decency,
dignity, tolerance and civility. On thispresident’s wish list, every right is
alienable. He leads a movement more
than he does a nation, and so depends
on fear to mobilize people. Any victori-
ous Democratic Party candidate in
2020 has to counter that negative
energy with a positive energy that lifts
Americans from Trump’s web.
I watched the Democratic Party
debates among presidential contend-
ers through a single prism: Who can
beat Trump? In the end, nothing else
matters because another five and a
half years of this will drag Americans
into an abyss of
moral collapse.
Yes, how far left,
how moderate that
candidate may be is
of some significance,
but can he or she
bring the heat and
the hope to stare
Trump down and
topple him is all I
care about. That’s
the bouncing ball all eyes should be on,
with no illusions as to how vicious and
devious Trump will be between now
and November 2020.
With reluctance, because he is a
good and honorable man of great per-
sonal courage, I do not believe that Joe
Biden has the needed energy, mental
agility and nimbleness.
Nor do I believe that the nation of
can-do strivers I described above is
ready for Bernie Sanders’s “democrat-
ic socialism.”
Forms of socialism work in Europe,
and the word is widely misunderstoodin America, but socialism and Ameri-
ca’s essence are incompatible.
Elizabeth Warren’s couching of a
campaign for radical change as “eco-
nomic patriotism” is a much smarter
way to go, and her energetic advocacy
of ideas to redress the growing injus-
tices in American life has been power-
ful. Still, I am not convinced that
enough Americans are ready to move
as far left as she proposes or that she
passes the critical commander in chief
test.
Kamala Harris does that for me. The
California senator is a work in
progress, with uneven debate perform-
ances, and policies, notably health
care, that she has zigzagged toward
defining. But she’s tough, broadly of
the center, has a great American story,
is passionate on issues including immi-
grants, African-Americans and women,
and has proved she is not averse to
risk. She has a former prosecutor’s
toughness and the ability to slice
through Trump’s self-important blus-
ter.
Last month Harris said Trump was a
“predator.”
She continued: “The thing about
predators you should know, is that they
prey on the vulnerable. They prey on
those who they do not believe are
strong. And the thing you must impor-
tantly know, predators are cowards.”
Those were important words.
It’s early days, but Trump’s biggest
electoral vulnerability is to women.
They have seen through his misogy-
ny at last, and they know just where
the testosterone of nationalism leads.The who-can-beat Trump test leads to Kamala Harris
Bringing the
energy and
hope to stare
down the
president
and his
movement.Roger Cohen
opinion
While President Trump has escalated pressure on Iran,
even coming close to launching a military strike, most
Americans want the United States to reduce tensions
and return to the 2015 nuclear agreement from which
Mr. Trump withdrew, according to a new poll by the
Center for American Progress.
The leading contenders for the Democratic presiden-
tial nomination are on that wavelength. Most would
rejoin the deal provided that Iran resumed full compli-
ance, although there were variances in how the candi-
dates would go about it, according to questions sent to
the candidates who rated at least 2 percent in the Real-
ClearPolitics polling average — former Vice President
Joe Biden; Senators Cory Booker, Kamala Harris,
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; Mayor Pete
Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.; and the former House
member Beto O’Rourke.
All the candidates said that by breaking the deal Mr.
Trump had damaged American interests and credibil-
ity, and had given Iran, which had been in full compli-
ance, reason to inch back into nuclear activities the
deal had prohibited.
“Whatever its imperfections, this was perhaps as
close to a true ‘art of the deal’ as it gets,” said Mr.
Buttigieg. It “helped constrain the military threat that
Iran poses to Israel and Europe without leading us
down the path to another Middle Eastern war.”
Mr. Booker was the only one to acknowledge that
despite the difficulty it took to reach the agreement
before tensions were heightened by Mr. Trump, the
deal would have to be updated.
“We cannot turn back the clock and pretend the
damage that President Trump has caused over the last
three years hasn’t happened,” he said. “The 2015 deal
was premised on continued negotiations with the Irani-
ans so that we could work toward a longer-term solu-
tion. We will have had four years wasted under
Trump."
Not only has Mr. Trump ruptured any trust the Irani-
ans had that the United States will honor its commit-
ments, but Iran has resumed some activities because of
the turmoil Mr. Trump has created, and sunset clauses
for some restrictions are getting closer.
Other candidates are also concerned about the sun-
set clauses, as well as Iran’s ballistic missile program
and the country’s support for forces in Syria and Yem-
en and for Hezbollah. But they would address those
concerns in a subsequent agreement.
“I would rejoin the agreement and work with our
allies to strengthen and extend it,” Mr. Biden said in a
July address on foreign policy.
Returning to the nuclear deal is “the beginning of the
job, not the end,” said Ms. Warren, who advocates a
follow-on agreement and believes that “we have time
and leverage, and if we are smart about how we use
them, diplomacy can be successful.”
Mr. O’Rourke seemed of two minds, faulting Mr.
Trump for heightening the risk of military conflict in
the Persian Gulf while asserting “Iranian aggression
cannot go unchecked or unpunished.”
Mr. Sanders said that to reach an agreement that
would demand more of Iran, the United States would
have to offer additional sanctions relief and incentives,
and “it will have to acknowledge that Iran is not the
only problematic actor in the Middle East.”
Many of the Democrats said they were open to direct
contact with Iran’s leaders, but all left the circum-
stances vague. Mr. Sanders said he would meet with
President Hassan Rouhani or Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei if that was the best way toward an agree-
ment, while Mr. Booker stressed the need to first estab-
lish “clear goals” and a “demonstrated commitment to
good faith negotiations.”
Ms. Warren described summits as a tool that must
be part of a “clear strategy,” while Mr. Buttigieg said he
would meet the Iranian president “under the right
conditions.”
Mr. O’Rourke did not reply to this question, nor did
Ms. Harris, whose responses to the questions were
very brief. Mr. Biden’s campaign did not answer the
questions at all. His address last month was his most
substantive discussion of foreign policy, but it did not
address whether Mr. Biden would meet with the Irani-
an leaders.
Iranian and European officials met in Vienna last
month in an effort to salvage the nuclear deal that has
been unraveling under the weight of sanctions re-
imposed after the United States withdrew. And on
Wednesday, the United States imposed sanctions on
the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, a
move that nearly certainly will make it harder to en-
gage in diplomacy with Tehran. The situation could be
quite different by the time of the election.
It seems clear, though, that Mr. Trump’s hard-line
stance is not popular among voters, especially Demo-
crats and independents, who would like to avoid an-
other military conflict. Democratic candidates need to
persuade them that they have a better solution.One point
of agreement
for the U.S.
presidential
candidates:
The nuclear
deal needs to
be restored.DEMOCRATS HAVE COOLER HEADS ON IRAN
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