Song Liling and Cheng Dieyi: An Orientalized Asian and His Native Informant — Comparing M. Butterfly...

<jats:p>When depicting Asians, both the Asian American play M. Butterfly and the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine utilize Beijing Opera and homosexuality as two selling points to create an enticingly exotic dish to pique the curiosity of Occidental viewers, which makes the two works comparable. They demonstrate how Orientalism has insinuated itself in the discourse of “Asian minorities living in the West” and “the Orient,” a venture that Sheng-mei Ma claims Edward Said “seldom” undertook and he himself partially pursued in his book Immigrant Subjectivities: In Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Ma, 1998:24).</jats:p>