My article "A Neglected Queer Play Hidden in Plain Sight: Soon-Tek Oh's Tondemonai—Never Happen! (1970)" released in Journal of Asian American Studies!
Features archival stage photography both in the article and on the issue cover!
AI-generated summary:
This article recovers and analyzes Soon-Tek Oh's 1970 play Tondemonai—Never Happen!, which Williams argues is a "strangely neglected cultural artifact." Here is a summary of the key points:
1. The Play's Significance and Neglect:
Tondemonai was produced by the renowned East West Players and is the first commercially-produced play to dramatize the Japanese American incarceration.
It is also notable for featuring explicit queer themes and a bisexual protagonist, Koji. Despite this, the play has been largely forgotten and its script remains unpublished.
Williams argues the play was "hidden in plain sight," overshadowed by academic narratives that have homogenized early Asian American cultural nationalism as heterosexist and queerphobic.
2. The Play's Plot and Themes:
The play uses a nonlinear narrative, shifting between the 1960s and flashbacks to the WWII incarceration camps, to tell the story of Koji, a Kibei Nisei (Japan-educated) who is deemed "disloyal."
Koji’s life is marked by trauma: his family dies, his engagement to a white woman (Jane) ends in tragedy after she is raped and commits suicide, and he is physically assaulted by other Nisei (including his friend Michael) who break his fingers to prevent him from playing piano—a symbolic "castration" to enforce loyalty.
In the postwar period, Koji is in a relationship with a younger Chinese American man, Fred. Koji’s queerness is presented as a consequence of the violence of the incarceration and a form of resistance to assimilation.
3. Reinterpreting Asian American Cultural Nationalism:
Williams positions Tondemonai as an example of "Asian American queer cultural nationalism," a genre he argues has an "uncharted genealogy."
Unlike the contemporaneous and more famous work of Frank Chin (which sought to reclaim a heroic heteromasculinity), Oh’s play rejects heteromasculinity as a remedy for racial emasculation. Instead, Koji’s "Kibeiness" and queerness form the basis of his anti-assimilationist stance.
The play presciently critiques what Williams calls "proto-homonationalism." Koji's relationship with Fred ends not because of homophobia, but because Fred decides to enlist in the Vietnam War, buying into the very nationalist rhetoric that destroyed Koji's life.
4. A New Framework and Reinterpretation:
In the second half of the article, Williams outlines a framework for understanding "homonationalism's long emergence" in transpacific terms, linking it to Cold War politics and liberal individualism.
He uses this framework to reinterpret Lonny Kaneko’s classic 1976 short story "The Shoyu Kid." He argues that earlier critiques misread the story by framing it solely as an example of Japanese American boys/men being "queered" by whiteness. Instead, he suggests the story’s declaration that "everyone's queer" points to a more complex reality where the white camp guard represents the "queerly-inclined US state," and the incarcerated boys are forced to confront their own precarious position within it.
Conclusion
Williams argues that bringing Tondemonai out of the archive challenges an established timeline and homogeneity of Asian American cultural studies. The play’s existence demonstrates that explicitly queer themes for critiquing nationalism were present earlier than usually discussed in the field, prompting a necessary reconsideration of the field’s canon and its critical narratives.
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