Legitimating Visions: The Nanyang Imaginary in Contemporary Southeast Asian Cinemas

Abstract

The Asian Financial Crisis was a tumultuous international event that also resulted in a crisis of faith in the nation and the state in the region, the most dramatic result of which were the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta and elsewhere in Java in 1998. For the Chinese in Nanyang, or the “South Seas,” who had always occupied an ambivalent space in their adopted homelands, it was only one of the more recent key moments in a long timeline of historical trauma. But just as 危机 (Wei Ji), the Chinese term for “crisis,” consists of two characters that signify ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’, Nanyang Chinese filmmakers found this crisis as an opportunity to critically re-examine the nation, bending time and expanding space in order to reimagine home, family, belonging and nationhood. After a historical survey of the Chinese in Insular Southeast Asia, this study looks at the ideation of a unique Nanyang Chinese culture through a textual analysis of two contemporary semi-autobiographical melodrama films commemorating the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and its after-effects in the years after. Babi Buta Yang Ingin Terbang (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, 2008), an Indonesian-language film, revolves around the emotionally disconnected members of a Chinese-Indonesian family making sense of the anti-Chinese riots. Ilo Ilo (爸媽不在家, 2013), an English, Tagalog, and Mandarin-language film, explores the relationship between a Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny whose maternal nature provokes the jealousy of the child’s real mother. This Intra-Asian study will examine the intersections of nationalism and diaspora, as well as of Southeast Asian Cinema and Sinophone Cinema. Despite the differences in style, treatment, and language, these films seem to have a common goal, not as much countering as transcending the nation’s “empty, homogeneous time (and space)” in order to accommodate the Chinese Diasporic Imaginary.