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Lily Wong

American University, Literature, Faculty Member

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Lily Wong is an Associate Professor in the departments of Literature (LIT) and Critical Race Gender and Culture Studies (CRGC) at American University. Her research focuses on the politics of affect/emotion, gender/sexuality, racial capitalism, minor-transnational solidarity movements, as well as media formations of transpacific Chinese, Sinophone, and Asian American communities. She is one of the founding board members of the Society of Sinophone Studies (SSS). Her work can be found in journals including American Quarterly, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Asian Cinema, Asian American Literary Review, Pacific Affairs, and China Review International, among others. She has published book chapters in World Cinema and the Visual Arts (Anthem Press, 2012), Queer Sinophone Cultures (Routledge, 2013), Divided Lenses: War and Film Memory in Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2016), and Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020). She is the author of the book "Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness" (Columbia University Press, 2018).

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Papers by Lily Wong

Dwelling over China: Minor Transnationalisms in Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel. American Quarterly. 69.3 (2017.9): 719-739.

Karen Tei Yamashita published her novel I Hotel in 2010, five years after the physical Internatio... more Karen Tei Yamashita published her novel I Hotel in 2010, five years after the physical International Hotel (I-Hotel)—a center for the Asian American movement in the1960s and 1970s—was revitalized on its original site in the Manilatown–Chinatown section of San Francisco. This essay focuses on how Yamashita reimagines China and Chinese social movements in her narrative to recover a pivotal time in US movement politics (1968–77). Under Yamashita’s pen, “China” becomes a symbolic site through which her characters reassemble historical connections and reanimate political affiliations. By dwelling over “China,” Yamashita reengages the dynamism of anti-imperial politics before China’s rise as itself a neoliberal empire. In the act of recollection, the novel reinvents context, reconfigures meaning, and reorients symbolic trajectories. She activates the intervening slash in what David Palumbo-Liu terms “Asian/America,” illuminating the mutually constitutive histories between the United States and China. In so doing, Yamashita configures minor transnational connections: she decenters ideas of the nation-state (be it the United States or China) and ruptures narratives of global capital accumulation in a neoliberal order.

“Oscillating Histories: Representations of Comfort Women From Bamboo House Of Dolls to Imperial Comfort Women.” Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in Asia. Ed. Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada. Honolulu, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. 153-174.

Due to the Japanese government’s constant denial, the “comfort women issue” has long been dispute... more Due to the Japanese government’s constant denial, the “comfort women issue” has long been disputed and debated. Though struggling to have their plight legitimately recognized as a historical reality, the figure lives on in the cultural imaginary, taking up a near myth-like status within documentary films, historical docudramas, sexploitation productions, and even television miniseries. While many have discussed Korean and Japanese representations of the issue (or lack there of), relatively less attention has been placed on Chinese productions.

This chapter traces how representations of comfort women emerges and morphs in Hong Kong and later in PRC cultural production. Starting with one of the first films on the subject The Bamboo House of Dolls (女集中營) released in Hong Kong by the Shaw Brothers’ Studio in the early 70s, I in turn end with the television miniseries Imperial Comfort Women (帝國軍妓) produced in the PRC in the early 90s. By tracing the transforming figure of comfort women in Chinese-language productions, we see how they morph from historical figures into cultural symbols, embodying the oscillation between competing political and cultural imaginations of not only Pacific War history, but also cross-cultural relations in the contemporary. This paper thus discusses not only the need to uncover actual myths behind these historical figures, but also the on-going myth-making processes in which imaginations of comfort women are evoked to perpetrate desires and expectations for the past and present.

“Sinophone Erotohistories: The Shaw Brothers’ Queering of a Transforming ‘Chinese Dream’ in Ainu Fantasies.” Queer Sinophone Cultures. Ed. Larissa Heinrich and Howard Chiang. New York: Routledge, 2013. 84-105.

“Moving Serenades: Hearing the Sinophonic in MP & GI’s Longxiang Fengwu." Special Issue on Sound and Music, Ed. Jean Ma and Matthew Johnson. Journal of Chinese Cinemas. 7.3(2013.11): 225- 40.

As the first full-coloured film-musical produced in Hong Kong, Longxiang fengwu/Calendar Girl (Ta... more As the first full-coloured film-musical produced in Hong Kong, Longxiang fengwu/Calendar Girl (Tao Qin, 1959) is known for its restaging of 1930s Shanghai oldies and its resulting box office success. This article traces the transpacific and transmedial meaning-making processes the restaged tunes (lyric and sound) offer so to hear the social spaces, geographies and identities that the intersection of music and cinema can enable, reflect and prophecy. In particular, it discusses the ways the restaged Shanghai oldies in the film 'move' technologically, spatially and affectually. That is, in addition to tracking the geopolitics of the musical numbers' audiospatiality, I listen closely to the 'structures of feeling' that shift and mutate through the songs' travels through time, place and medium. Gesturing towards a 'Sinophone Geography of Affect', I argue that it is precisely through these 'movements' that the tunes are able to create spaces in which discourses of national and cultural nativity get both contested and consolidated, both sounded and silenced. As such, I submit that it is precisely through these movements that we find openings to complicate both the films' geopolitical rendering of Cold War-era Sinophone identities, and the disciplinary boundaries that govern past studies of the text in the academy.

$Research paper thumbnail of Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood’s Yellow Peril and its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema$

Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood’s Yellow Peril and its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema

“Intimate Temporalities: Affective Historiologies in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind.” Asian Cinema. 23.1 (2012.1): 214-25.

New Taiwanese Cinema emerged in the 1980s, bringing to the screen stories of ordinary people and ... more New Taiwanese Cinema emerged in the 1980s, bringing to the screen stories of ordinary people and their experiences amidst Taiwan's social economic changes. Hou Hsiao-hsien, one of the leaders of New Taiwanese Cinema, quickly gained notoriety in Taiwan and film-circuits for his signature long takes, fixed camera, decentered framing, temporal fragmentation, and complex compositions of personal stories. As the last of his “trilogy of growing up,“ Dust in the Wind depicts just such a personal narrative, drawing from the film's screenplay writer Wu Nienchen's own experience. In this article, Wong places Dust in the Wind center stage, regarding the film as a transitional cornerstone in Hou's larger body of work, in which Hou develops a cinematic narration of history and memory that bridges his earlier emphasis on the personal and autobiographical, with his later concerns of the national and transnational. Wong pays particular attention to the notion of “historiology“ in Hou's film, arguing that through “affective narratives“ Dust in the Wind, brings together the many public and personal marks of Taiwan's past reflected on individual, familial, national, and even international ties that compose the complexly intimate story of Taiwan's own “coming-of-age,“ projected on the screen of the Taiwanese New Wave.

Review of Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History, by Petrus Liu. Chinese Literature Today 3.1-2 (2013.12)

Book Review: Paola Zamperini, Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction. China Review International Vol. 17, No. 2 (2011).

Book Review: Edited by Poshek Fu, China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Pacific Affairs Vol. 83, No. 4 (2010.12)

Book Review: Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude. National Central University Journal of Humanities, Vol.31 (2007.7), 321- 326

Interview with Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature "From Practicalities of Life to Intellectual Pursuits: A Comparatist's Insights"

Podcasts by Lily Wong

Interview with Lily Wong, "Transpacific Attachments Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness"

by Christopher B Patterson and Lily Wong

New Books in Asian American Studies, 2018

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chines... more Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of anti-Asian racism as well as moments of sexism and nationalism within Chinese communities. Yet for Wong, the tensions and visibility of this figure also allows alternative and alternating forms of solidarity rooted in stepping back from ideologies of nation, race and gender. The sex worker thus allows us to see Chineseness and other forms of collectivity as an affective product, an attachment that mobilizes our emotions and frames how we see others as well as ourselves. By charting representations of the Chinese sex worker through histories of Pacific Crossing, Cold War era ideologies, and contemporary globalization, Wong’s book shows the multiple ways that sex work and prostitution have unsettled forms of collectivity, while providing new spaces for dwelling.

Dwelling over China: Minor Transnationalisms in Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel. American Quarterly. 69.3 (2017.9): 719-739.

Karen Tei Yamashita published her novel I Hotel in 2010, five years after the physical Internatio... more Karen Tei Yamashita published her novel I Hotel in 2010, five years after the physical International Hotel (I-Hotel)—a center for the Asian American movement in the1960s and 1970s—was revitalized on its original site in the Manilatown–Chinatown section of San Francisco. This essay focuses on how Yamashita reimagines China and Chinese social movements in her narrative to recover a pivotal time in US movement politics (1968–77). Under Yamashita’s pen, “China” becomes a symbolic site through which her characters reassemble historical connections and reanimate political affiliations. By dwelling over “China,” Yamashita reengages the dynamism of anti-imperial politics before China’s rise as itself a neoliberal empire. In the act of recollection, the novel reinvents context, reconfigures meaning, and reorients symbolic trajectories. She activates the intervening slash in what David Palumbo-Liu terms “Asian/America,” illuminating the mutually constitutive histories between the United States and China. In so doing, Yamashita configures minor transnational connections: she decenters ideas of the nation-state (be it the United States or China) and ruptures narratives of global capital accumulation in a neoliberal order.

“Oscillating Histories: Representations of Comfort Women From Bamboo House Of Dolls to Imperial Comfort Women.” Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in Asia. Ed. Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada. Honolulu, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. 153-174.

Due to the Japanese government’s constant denial, the “comfort women issue” has long been dispute... more Due to the Japanese government’s constant denial, the “comfort women issue” has long been disputed and debated. Though struggling to have their plight legitimately recognized as a historical reality, the figure lives on in the cultural imaginary, taking up a near myth-like status within documentary films, historical docudramas, sexploitation productions, and even television miniseries. While many have discussed Korean and Japanese representations of the issue (or lack there of), relatively less attention has been placed on Chinese productions.

This chapter traces how representations of comfort women emerges and morphs in Hong Kong and later in PRC cultural production. Starting with one of the first films on the subject The Bamboo House of Dolls (女集中營) released in Hong Kong by the Shaw Brothers’ Studio in the early 70s, I in turn end with the television miniseries Imperial Comfort Women (帝國軍妓) produced in the PRC in the early 90s. By tracing the transforming figure of comfort women in Chinese-language productions, we see how they morph from historical figures into cultural symbols, embodying the oscillation between competing political and cultural imaginations of not only Pacific War history, but also cross-cultural relations in the contemporary. This paper thus discusses not only the need to uncover actual myths behind these historical figures, but also the on-going myth-making processes in which imaginations of comfort women are evoked to perpetrate desires and expectations for the past and present.

“Sinophone Erotohistories: The Shaw Brothers’ Queering of a Transforming ‘Chinese Dream’ in Ainu Fantasies.” Queer Sinophone Cultures. Ed. Larissa Heinrich and Howard Chiang. New York: Routledge, 2013. 84-105.

“Moving Serenades: Hearing the Sinophonic in MP & GI’s Longxiang Fengwu." Special Issue on Sound and Music, Ed. Jean Ma and Matthew Johnson. Journal of Chinese Cinemas. 7.3(2013.11): 225- 40.

As the first full-coloured film-musical produced in Hong Kong, Longxiang fengwu/Calendar Girl (Ta... more As the first full-coloured film-musical produced in Hong Kong, Longxiang fengwu/Calendar Girl (Tao Qin, 1959) is known for its restaging of 1930s Shanghai oldies and its resulting box office success. This article traces the transpacific and transmedial meaning-making processes the restaged tunes (lyric and sound) offer so to hear the social spaces, geographies and identities that the intersection of music and cinema can enable, reflect and prophecy. In particular, it discusses the ways the restaged Shanghai oldies in the film 'move' technologically, spatially and affectually. That is, in addition to tracking the geopolitics of the musical numbers' audiospatiality, I listen closely to the 'structures of feeling' that shift and mutate through the songs' travels through time, place and medium. Gesturing towards a 'Sinophone Geography of Affect', I argue that it is precisely through these 'movements' that the tunes are able to create spaces in which discourses of national and cultural nativity get both contested and consolidated, both sounded and silenced. As such, I submit that it is precisely through these movements that we find openings to complicate both the films' geopolitical rendering of Cold War-era Sinophone identities, and the disciplinary boundaries that govern past studies of the text in the academy.

$Research paper thumbnail of Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood’s Yellow Peril and its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema$

Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood’s Yellow Peril and its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema

“Intimate Temporalities: Affective Historiologies in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind.” Asian Cinema. 23.1 (2012.1): 214-25.

New Taiwanese Cinema emerged in the 1980s, bringing to the screen stories of ordinary people and ... more New Taiwanese Cinema emerged in the 1980s, bringing to the screen stories of ordinary people and their experiences amidst Taiwan's social economic changes. Hou Hsiao-hsien, one of the leaders of New Taiwanese Cinema, quickly gained notoriety in Taiwan and film-circuits for his signature long takes, fixed camera, decentered framing, temporal fragmentation, and complex compositions of personal stories. As the last of his “trilogy of growing up,“ Dust in the Wind depicts just such a personal narrative, drawing from the film's screenplay writer Wu Nienchen's own experience. In this article, Wong places Dust in the Wind center stage, regarding the film as a transitional cornerstone in Hou's larger body of work, in which Hou develops a cinematic narration of history and memory that bridges his earlier emphasis on the personal and autobiographical, with his later concerns of the national and transnational. Wong pays particular attention to the notion of “historiology“ in Hou's film, arguing that through “affective narratives“ Dust in the Wind, brings together the many public and personal marks of Taiwan's past reflected on individual, familial, national, and even international ties that compose the complexly intimate story of Taiwan's own “coming-of-age,“ projected on the screen of the Taiwanese New Wave.

Review of Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History, by Petrus Liu. Chinese Literature Today 3.1-2 (2013.12)

Book Review: Paola Zamperini, Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction. China Review International Vol. 17, No. 2 (2011).

Book Review: Edited by Poshek Fu, China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Pacific Affairs Vol. 83, No. 4 (2010.12)

Book Review: Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude. National Central University Journal of Humanities, Vol.31 (2007.7), 321- 326

Interview with Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature "From Practicalities of Life to Intellectual Pursuits: A Comparatist's Insights"

Interview with Lily Wong, "Transpacific Attachments Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness"

by Christopher B Patterson and Lily Wong

New Books in Asian American Studies, 2018

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chines... more Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of anti-Asian racism as well as moments of sexism and nationalism within Chinese communities. Yet for Wong, the tensions and visibility of this figure also allows alternative and alternating forms of solidarity rooted in stepping back from ideologies of nation, race and gender. The sex worker thus allows us to see Chineseness and other forms of collectivity as an affective product, an attachment that mobilizes our emotions and frames how we see others as well as ourselves. By charting representations of the Chinese sex worker through histories of Pacific Crossing, Cold War era ideologies, and contemporary globalization, Wong’s book shows the multiple ways that sex work and prostitution have unsettled forms of collectivity, while providing new spaces for dwelling.