A Class Response Paper on Spider Lilies (2017)

This response speaks to Sin Lin’s Chinese Lily and "Spider Lilies," a 2017 Taiwanese film by the director Zero Chou span a century apart and, in broad and bold ink, bring together Asian femininity and desire. This response examines the ways in which auto-ethnography complicates and reclaims race, disability, and queerness as a feminist rhetorical agency in the film and short story. Putting together two lilies, two centuries, two forms, and two narratives risks the metaphorical simplification of making one as if it is the other. 
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First, what is a Lily? Drawing on some unreliable sources, I attempt to answer the question. The Chinese Water Lily is a rhizomateous aquatic herb…. Flowers are solitary, bisexual, radial, with a long pedicel and usually floating or raised above the surface of the water, with girdling vascular bundles in receptacle. Japanese Spider lilies have showy, bright-red flowers. When in full bloom, spindly stamens, likened to the image of spider legs, extend slightly upward and outward from the flower's center. Both lilies are untouchable, yet they touch tenderly through the embodied representations and signification in the texts examined. The Chinese Lily is beautiful but a mirage; it can be seen and not touched like the moon in the water. The spider lily is beautiful in its power of poison and its association with death and superstition.
Intentionally naming oneself through a pen name or inserting oneself into a text is a form of feminist agency. Helene Cixous (1976) calls for a rhetoric that returns to the body, “Woman must write her body, must make up the unimpeded tongue that bursts partitions, classes, and rhetorics...go beyond the discourse with its last reserves, including the one of laughing off the world “silence” (Cixous, p. 95). Autoethnographic accounts blend the self and other in their form, and from a crip/queer Asian American lens, one sees the uncanny weight of such ink. I see the author/director as both inserting themselves and using the characters to reclaim the passive body, rewriting a more complex embodiment that challenges able bodied norms. 
In the film, Jade is a sex webcam teen who lives with her grandmother, she wants a tattoo and goes to a tattoo parlor where she meets Takeko, the tattoo artist and asks for the same tattoo that adorns her arm. She then remembers that Takakeo is her former neighbor and crush, and Takekor refuses. Takeko’s refusal is based on her flashback memory of when her mentor tattooed her and warned her that the tattoo was poisonous, a flower of death. As the film progresses the audience learns that Takeko’s father had the same tattoo and was killed in an earthquake in which the sun falls to the earth in a fantastically painted background. Takeko’s brother witnesses this and stops speaking, Takeko’s tattoo is linked to trying to help bring her brother closer to her. The film uses tattoos as a way of talking about the embodiment of trauma and the use of tattoos as a rhetorical mode of communication identity. Takeko chooses to forget her childhood traumas, and uses tattooing and her tattoo as ways of telling stories of others on her skin, Jade wants to remember everything; she does not want to forget anything in response to her own trauma. The differing ways of dealing with memory and trauma in the characters opens doors to thinking about embodied agency, the reclamation of crip bodies, and alternative rhetorical modes of embodying a text. The queer intimacy in Spider Lilies is passed via marked bodily inscription. 
The queer tale of erotic disability and Lilies in Sui Sin Far’s ‘The Chinese Lily’ revolves around, Mermei, whose disability leaves her in her room alone except for her relationship with her brother, John Lin, one night, when he does not return, she makes a new friend, Sin Far (meaning Pure Flower, or Chinese Lily”. Their friendship flirts with queerness. A fire overtakes the building, and her brother is left with the impossible choice of choosing a possible future reproductive partner or his sister; he chooses the latter. This text has intertextual links to her autobiographical essay as Hsu articulates both, which reference disability and what he and I would agree to say a queering of romance. The insertion of self into the text and intertextual references by authors happens in both film and the short story. In the movie, Pecic notes the ways that the director, Chou, uses a poster in Spider Lilies and Drifting Flowers with the Golden Bear logo of the Berlin International Film Festival as well as “the poster also serves as Chou’s means for establishing herself as a Taiwanese female auteur” (2016).
Hsu finds that ‘The Chinese’ Lily reveals the impossibility of belonging fully in a world of White Supremacy. Her bi-racial identity and disability, alongside the yellow peril and association of Asians with contagion and Sui Sin Far, reveals that whiteness is environmental harm; whiteness is the framework that harms racialized individuals (p. 60-61). Regarding racism and disability, the larger social structure is the barrier, not the individual. 
Similarly, the environment plays a crucial role in thinking through individual experiences with trauma, and memory is inextricably tied to disability and race. The earthquake in Spider Lilies is not only about the actual quake of 1999 but about how disruptions refigure our lives. How queerness and disability disrupt and open new ways of thinking through embodiment and our links to the past. The fire in Chinese Lily is another traumatic event that causes a crisis in the stability of the narrative and disrupts the romantic heteronormative possibilities of its alternate ending. Following Freeman’s articulation of queer time, from a neo-materialist embodied rhetorical stance, disaster is embodied as disrupting heteronormative narrative temporality and is kin to an eco-body-logic that opens to lines of flights and the agential possibilities of poisonous disruptive ecologies, holding the potential to rewrite their elixirs.