Asiatic Aspie: Millennial (ab)use of Asperger's Syndrome

International Journal of Cultural Studies 1 –16© The Author(s) 2015Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1367877915595982ics.sagepub.com

Asiatic Aspie: Millennial (ab)use of Asperger’s Syndrome

Sheng-mei MaMichigan State University, USA

AbstractInstead of artistic or poetic license in general, millennial novelists and filmmakers have been taking a particular kind of “aspic license” in their use or abuse of Asperger’s Syndrome for characterization and plot. A mental disability turns out to enable lead characters in their respective pursuits, as in the British TV comedy Doc Martin (2004-2013) and Mai Jia’s Chinese spy thriller Decoded (2002). Doc Martin associates Aspie with Asiatic, both betokening the Other, the opposite to neurotypicals and Western universalism. When the mystique of Orientalized Aspies in Western texts morphs into that of their doppelganger of Occidentalized Aspies in Eastern texts, qualitative changes occur. Whereas Asiatic Aspies in the West don the Asiatic like the emperor’s new clothes, skin-deep and stylized, Asiatic Aspies in the East flaunt Asperger’s Syndrome like an imported luxury to boost the value of the East.

Keywordsthe Asiatic, Asperger’s Syndrome, Decoded, Doc Martin, Mai Jia

Instead of artistic or poetic license in general, millennial novelists and filmmakers have been taking a particular kind of ‘Aspic license’ in their use or abuse of Asperger’s Syndrome for characterization and plot. A mental disability turns out to enable lead char-acters in their respective pursuits. Mostly in the genre of thrillers in the East and the West, these works generate the plotline right from the characters’ ‘genes’: the echolalic and idiotic Chance in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (1970); the Aspergirl Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and the other books

Corresponding author:Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State University, C614 Wells Hall, 619 Red Cedar Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. Email: [email protected]

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in the trilogy (2009 [2006], 2010 [2007]);1 Lionel Essrog with his Tourette’s tics and autistic fixation in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999); Garon Tsuchiya’s tycoon mastermind in the eight-volume manga Oldboy (2006 [1997]); the incommuni-cado master cryptographer Rong Jinzhen – himself a riddle in the image of Stuart Murray’s (2006) ‘sentimental savant’ or ‘idiot savant’2 – in Mai Jia’s Decoded (2014 [2002]); and Jet Li’s autistic son in the tear-jerking film Ocean Heaven (2010). Not con-fined to thrillers, an Aspie even graces British TV comedy series Doc Martin (2004–13), which features a London surgeon fallen from grace owing to the mysterious onset of hemophobia, and who winds up a general practitioner in a quaint coastal town – Portwenn – in Cornwall. Doc Martin diagnoses and cures townspeople with the instinct of a master detective and with the brusqueness and human interaction deficits worthy of any Aspie. Dr. Martin Ellingham, or Doc Martin as the town’s folks call him, fights myriad health conditions just as Salander et al. fight crime, while their Asperger’s Syndrome, men-tioned in passing in each case, justifies their social maladroitness, unwavering focus, and intuitive clairvoyance. Fighting fire with fire, artists turn a medical disorder into a weapon to eliminate disorder.

The ‘boom industry’ or ‘epidemic’ of ‘Autism narrative’, described by Ian Hacking in ‘Autism fiction’ (2010: 632, 640), rarely makes an effort to adhere to any semblance of clinical definitions of Asperger’s Syndrome, which, to be fair, range far and wide. Indeed, to follow the trail of Asiatic Aspies in literature and visual culture, it is self-defeating to be fixated on any one medical theory on Asperger’s Syndrome, which unduly excludes cases of millennial (ab)use. To insist on a scientific, even neurological, approach ignores the Aspic license taken by creative artists. A brief overview of medical opinions, how-ever, is in order. Fred R. Volkmar and Ami Klin, in ‘Diagnostic issues in Asperger syn-drome’, cite the World Health Organization’s 1993 Research Diagnostic Guidelines for Asperger Syndrome, stipulating the following symptoms: ‘motor clumsiness’, ‘qualita-tive abnormalities in reciprocal social interaction’, ‘unusual intense, circumscribed inter-est, or restricted, repetitive, and stereotypical patterns of behavior interests and activities’ (2000: 26). Michael Fitzgerald in The Genesis of Artistic Creativity (2005) generalizes symptoms as ‘social impairment, narrow interests, repetitive routines, speech and lan-guage problems, non-verbal communication problems, and motor clumsiness’ (2005: 11). Ian Hacking in ‘Humans, aliens and autism’ (2009: 47–8) defines autists as people with ‘various kinds of disadvantage in social interactions’, ‘difficulties acquiring spoken language’, and who find change upsetting. Dispensing with such a wealth of diagnoses, millennial artistic (ab)use capitalizes on, as Ami Klin notes in ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’, ‘the geek syndrome’ where ‘individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome’ are portrayed ‘as eccentric individuals’ in ‘stereotyped views that sensationalize intellectual prodigies while ignoring the majority’s life struggles’ (2011: 45). Klin emphasizes that Asperger’s Syndrome is ‘a stable personality disorder marked by social isolation’ and ‘difficulties in socialization’ (2011: 45).

While ‘the geek syndrome’ energizes such single-minded sleuths as Sherlock Holmes and Lisbeth Salander in whodunnit narratives, or a medical sleuth like Doc Martin, geeks all speak Greek, as it were, with a clarity of vision so akin to visionary prophecy that it is unfathomable. Thus, Asperger’s Syndrome remains very much a mystery, concurrently the narratological raison d’être and a cursory textual reference intimating the Other,



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nearly transcendent. Larsson’s trilogy mentions it twice in the three tomes; Lethem not at all, as it is crowded out by Tourette syndrome; Tsuchiya not at all, drowned out by the tycoon’s perverse, homoerotic vindictiveness; Mai Jia once; and Doc Martin once in six seasons of the TV series thus far. The condition is never explored in depth, merely graz-ing textual fringes. The discrepancy between clinical diagnosis and artistic deployment of Aspie gives rise to the liberty of imaginative empowerment. Arguably, Asperger’s Syndrome exists as much inside the text as outside, that is, in viewers’ collective mind. Given the genre of the graphic novel in the case of Oldboy, one can visualize the texts being connected to the context (subtext?) of Asperger’s Syndrome, which looms above novels and films like a thought balloon in dotted lines. The condition resembles a para-textual gloss that explains away what used to be regarded as madness, temperamental quirks and eccentricity, schizophrenia, and other symptoms that have long been part of the literary landscape. Not until the late 20th century did the medical diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome expand the repertoire of modern characterization. Textually or paratextually, these rare, oblique asides shroud Aspie characters in an aura of mystique. The minimalist presentation of Aspies’ core problems renders the unspoken or barely spoken pivotal to the stories, as if the texts suppress the secret that sets the plot in motion. By the power of suggestion, what is peripheral becomes central.

‘Aspic’ license, hence, derives not only from my coinage of the adjective ‘Aspie’ (and noun at times); it further suggests that autism spectrum disorder has become a trope to deal the coup de grace to all forms of evil in the underworld and in human bodies, just as the ‘service’ rendered Cleopatra by the asp. A convenient prop that brings about the Egyptian Queen’s demise, the asp in Shakespeare’s play vanishes as soon as it delivers its venom. Aspic license is, therefore, the expedient ploy by which detective and medical narratives rationalize their triumphant happy ending, a ploy as quickly forgotten as ‘the soldier’s incomplete leg’ in The Steadfast Tin Soldier (1990), on which David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder elaborate in Narrative Prosthesis (2000: 56). Millennial viewers, anomic despite being surrounded and overstimulated by virtual realities on multiple screens, project themselves onto the damaged goods of Aspies, damaged since birth and hence innocent victims of fate. Identification with Aspies intensifies as the characters live out with impunity viewers’ own urges to defy stifling social mores and to battle cor-rosive social ills. Each of them isolated and affectless by definition, Aspies are nonethe-less the millennial breed of anti-heroes popping out of the world womb, from Stockholm to Tokyo to Tongzhen, Southern China, from Brooklyn to Portwenn, Cornwall. They are doppelgangers to American superheroes of half-human/half-robot frenemy cyborgs, or superhuman/subhuman Batman and Spiderman.

An uncanny twist disturbs the cavalier allusion to and invocation of Asperger’s Syndrome in these literary and filmic texts, namely, such Aspies are made to conceal an arbitrary, otherworldly ‘Mongolian spot’ of empathetic voidness. This alleged hollow-ness, or even soullessness,3 comes bundled with Asiatic affectlessness. Despite its erst-while association with Western or Central Asia, the term ‘Asiatic’ is preferred here for its conceptual fuzziness in comparison to ‘Asian’, which is closer to the etymological root ‘Asia’, bounded by definitive geography, and also in comparison to the loaded Saidian ‘Oriental’, although all three adjectives are interconnected and interchangeable on occa-sion. The most blatantly racist manifestation of Asiatic affectlessness lies in the so-called




Oriental countenance of a wide, flat, and blank face, where small slanting eyes betray scant emotion. On this image, the West is wont to read a plethora of metaphors, all bipo-larized. Take, for example, the quaint outlandish junks, flat-bottomed ships with battened sails, in Hong Kong or in any portrayal of colonial-era Chinese harbors. An overdeter-mined accessory to the Chinese seascape for western eyes seeking exoticism, the term ‘junk’ also means exactly what it is – useless trash compared to western gunboats, its Dutch or Javanese word-root notwithstanding. Like ‘beady’ eyes, a junk, being what it is, closes off cross-cultural access to any inherent value, which comes to intimate, dialecti-cally, paramount value hailed in mysticism. Dilapidated Oriental junks in a harbor such as Hong Kong or Shanghai open up, as does the rabbit hole, an exotic wonderland.

In the same way that Asperger’s Syndrome is the Zen moon being pointed at, distant yet fraught, the Oriental finger-figure conjures up considerable mystique at the textual margins.4 Barely registered and routinely suppressed in viewers’ reception, the Asiatic in western texts often triggers Aspic license, both Aspies and the Asiatic betokening the Other, the opposite to neurotypicals and western universalism. Dangling between useless junks and the moon of enlightenment, the West thus deploys Asiatic Aspies in an uncriti-cal manner, out of a sense of assumed universality. Magnanimous and self-assured, west-ern artists stay within the West most familiar to themselves, dispensing an ornamental Orient, an overdetermined constellation of banalities. Owing to the ill-defined, tangen-tial, almost whimsical asides to the Asiatic, such ‘first impressions’ sediment in the sub-conscious and color what comes after. Examples include Jonathan Lethem’s Essrog, who finds himself embroiled in a case of murder perpetrated at the behest of a Zendo sensei, reflecting America’s own bipolarization of 1990s Japan-bashing and of the Zen fad since the 1960s counterculture. Stieg Larsson’s Salander also hails as a half-Russian ‘girl with the dragon tattoo’, symbol of the mystical Orient to Sweden and the West, demonized through the mythologies of the dragon-slaying St George and Beowulf. Confident in its centrality, the West can afford to ignore the Aspie mutants in the East.

This oversight regrettably touches on the emerging disability studies in US academe. The pioneering works of Snyder and Mitchell (2006) designate disability as ‘the master trope of human disqualification’, without considering the dialectical overcompensation or ultra-qualification via the superhuman abilities attributed to Aspies or other mental disabilities. Indeed, ‘the master trope’ reigns not only as a trope but disabilities become the enabling masters, all deriving from the alterity of the ‘Mongolian spot’. Whereas dis-ability studies explores the otherness of deformed bodies and minds to the extent that disabilities are ‘a crutch … for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight’, the field has so far stayed within the comfort zone of a western para-digm and taken-for-granted western universalism (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000: 49). This militates against an investigation of Asiatic Aspie, for what Mitchell and Snyder dub as ‘narrative prosthesis’ in the West merely shifts from ‘negative imagery’ to ‘transgressive reappropriation’ (2000: 15). Moving beyond the West, however, prosthetic disabilities turn from crutch-like to well-nigh prehensile, so versatile and endowed that Asiatic Aspies seem downright prophetic. In a strange twist of Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy (1995), disability studies that seek to upend able-bodied normalcy render western paradigms as the normalcy, whereby a cross-cultural pursuit of Asiatic Aspie appears abnormal and requires some justification.



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Doc Martin

Given that disorder recognizes no territorial and cultural sovereignty, a student of the East would be remiss to mimic western writers and scholars. The mystique of Orientalized Aspies in western texts morphs into that of their doppelganger of Occidentalized Aspies in eastern texts. The latter, to borrow from Larsson’s metaphor, wear the tattoo of the Other, not only on their person but also in their heart and soul. Whereas Asiatic Aspies in the West don the Asiatic like the emperor’s new clothes, skin-deep and stylized, Asiatic Aspies in the East flaunt Asperger’s Syndrome like an imported luxury to boost the value of the East. Despite the commonality of Asiatic Aspie, the East and the West (ab)use this motif in diametrically opposed ways, which illustrate the power dynamics between the two. The West is unto itself, the aberrant Asiatic Aspie made to flirt with the apocalyptic. The East is Asiatic, so unsure of itself that its Aspie comes anointed by the West. This contrast is readily apparent if we turn from an ITV comedy in Britain to a People’s Republic of China (PRC) spy thriller, both chosen for their representativeness for the state of play of Asiatic Aspie in West and East. Western deployment of Asiatic Aspie has become such a given that the popular British TV drama Doc Martin simply makes off-hand, tangential allusions to the East. Asiatic Aspies in the West have ‘mellowed’ from superhuman detectives to comedic ‘straight-face’. By contrast, Asia’s own Aspie, Occidentalized Cold War warrior-cryptographer in Mai Jia’s smashing hit Decoded, is deadly serious, no joking matter at all. In contrast to ITV’s casual Oriental touches, Decoded gives us a causal Sino-West kinship. Doc Martin’s mere caprices become Mai Jia’s mediocre yet winning formula, signaling a fixation on catching up with and out-stripping the West, one tantamount to a culture’s collective unconscious, in the vein of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Doc Martin stays within the West’s comfort zone, shift-ing between ‘Doc Martin’, the title Cornwall locals favor, and ‘Dr Ellingham’, on which he insists as a formal self-identity. By contrast, when autism is brought to bear in Mai Jia’s Decoded, the high-functioning Aspie cryptographer protagonist is a genius because of the West: Rong Jinzhen is sired by western science; his power continues to shine in opposition to the West; and his power is finally eclipsed by the West.

The transcendental Asiatic thus comes to animate the ITV comedy set in Cornwall, far away from any traces of the East, apart from Doc Martin’s Buddha and chinoiserie – junks moored predictably at the mouth of a narrative meant to be larger and stranger than British life. Arrayed on the surgery mantelpiece facing Martin’s desk are a Buddha statuette, a chinoiserie cabinet, and a pagoda. As Doc Martin sits at his desk diagnosing sundry ill-nesses and dispensing prescriptions, the Buddha figurine is his de facto familiar. The viewers must deliberately take their eyes off the center of the frame in order to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Buddha, present in nearly every frame in Doc Martin’s surgery but always occluded in the peripheries of the backdrop, half of the figurine practically cut off, about to go off-frame. The viewers must also imagine the Buddha’s proverbial enigmatic smile, for no close-up is ever offered. A grim-faced Martin, who never smiles, has a dop-pelganger with a perpetual grin, presumably. Behind Doc Martin is also a shelf with his grandfather’s clock on it. From series 1 to series 4 (2004–9), the Buddha is comparatively small, dark-colored, unobtrusive, yet the Orientalist kitsch proliferates toward the end of series 4; by which time there are two Buddhas, the older one still on the mantelpiece, a




gleaming golden one added to another shelf. In the episode ‘Preserve the romance’ of series 5 (2011), Martin, having recovered from hemophobia, is about to resume his illus-trious career as a London surgeon. But first he drives Louisa and their newborn baby James Henry from the hospital back to Portwenn. The golden Buddha is fastened down by the seatbelt right beside Louisa and the baby, as if Martin were playing the role of the head of a household of four, unmarried to Louisa, offering a last ride for her and their son, to be accompanied on his return to London by a golden double.

Later in the TV drama’s run, the locations of the Buddha and his grandfather’s clock are switched, the clock ending up on the mantelpiece facing Martin and the golden Buddha behind him, appearing in nearly every frontal shot of Martin sitting at his desk. Unlike the earlier avatar of muted color and miniature size, this golden Buddha contrasts sharply with the office décor and functionality. This golden Buddha, not to mince words, lurks like a first impression or even a Freudian primal scene, no longer recalled but sub-liminally shaping viewers’ reception. The Buddha is in fact such a prized possession that Doc Martin always coddles it near his person during relocations of his surgery. When Doc Martin first arrives in Portwenn, he nestles the Buddha on the surgery mantelpiece before placing any other office equipment. When he moves back to London, he is so put off by the bumbling movers that he retrieves the Buddha, which is on top of the boxes, to secure it in the backseat of his own car. The man arrives in Portwenn with his shadow, and he returns to London with it, forming a parenthesis of this sojourn. In addition, being such a practical man, Doc Martin keeps only functional medical instruments in his sur-gery. The only exception is the Buddha from his private life which has no medical pur-pose at all, a keepsake from the London woman he once loved, a reminder of his repressed emotions. Useless to the general practitioner yet full of significance for the man, the Buddha figures in precisely the same way, that is, tangentially, across the ten-year span of the TV drama thus far. Golden and glistening, it stands out against the muted, dimly lit office décor and the stern, detached Doc Martin. Silent and ornamental, it nonetheless bespeaks his longing not just to heal but also to feel. He wants to be Martin, not just Doc.

The Buddha figurine’s discursive absence, despite its ever-presence, its cross-legged meditation, in a great number of shots of Doc Martin at his surgery, invokes two other ambiguities – inconspicuous latency that causes Doc Martin’s present condition – throughout the show. Early on, Doc Martin’s fall to become a moorland GP is attributed to his hemophobia, inexplicable panic and nausea at the sight of blood, bringing to an abrupt halt his celebrated career wielding a scalpel. In the episode ‘Gentleman prefer’ of series 1 (2004), Doc Martin has managed to alienate the entire town of Portwenn by fir-ing the first of his three secretaries, the sloppy, beachcomber-type Elaine. The only patient left is a Roger Fenn, stricken with throat cancer and quite in tune with Doc Martin’s eccentricity for Fenn himself is just as irascible. Their asocial brotherhood seems confirmed when Doc Martin visits Fenn on the eve of his risky operation. In the hospital hallway, a bleeding patient bumps into Doc Martin, who is visibly queasy due to the bloodstain left on his light-colored macintosh. Haltingly, Doc Martin lets slip to Fenn his own condition of hemophobia: ‘panic attacks … nausea, sweating, chest pain’ brought on by ‘the smell of cauterized fish and … blood’. The exact moment of onset is recalled vividly: ‘I used to have the Midas Touch … but one day it dawned on me, this is some-body’s wife, somebody’s mother.’ Since that realization, Doc Martin has never performed



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that ‘high-wire act’ of surgery. This appears to be a rare moment of mutual confiding, one to be operated on for metastasized growth, the other no longer ‘operational’ because of psychic metastasis. The ‘twins’ go on to share their miserable family relationships, Fenn’s daughter who has grown to shun the father and Doc Martin’s parents who have always rejected him.

The trigger of panic attacks, ‘the smell of cauterized fish and … blood’, deserves close scrutiny. Like a newborn rooting for breast milk, guided by smell rather than sight, Martin’s hemophobia is also a knee-jerk reaction to smell. Martin is ‘demoted’ to be a country doctor and to be reborn by such smells. The awkward pause before ‘blood’ makes it uncertain whether it is blood per se or the smell of blood that induces Martin’s reaction. Given that Portwenn is a picturesque fishing port radiating from the square by the pier, and that fresh fish wrapped in newspaper is Martin’s daily staple, ‘cauterized fish’ is a bizarre choice to characterize his physical repulsion. What he favors on the din-ner table happens to be what he dreads when singed. Like a taboo, Martin fears the very thing that he is drawn to the most, not so much fish, cauterized or sautéed, rotten or fresh, as blood and human passion. Martin’s bedside confession to Fenn, who may well lose his voice or die from cancer, is a mere half-truth, veiled by psychic displacement. As it is impossible to have cauterized fish near an operating table, Martin arguably transfers the flow of blood from ‘someone’s mother’ to the fleeting smell of fish. Martin the surgeon used to be a highly skilled automaton, detached from the human bodies he operated on. He succeeded in, as he shares with Fenn, ‘fixing’ patients’ problems in part because of his own problem of affectlessness. One who is sick in the mind has come to care for a community of rustic grotesques with weird diseases.

To drive the message home, series 1 even includes an episode on ‘Haemophobia’. Many later episodes also show a Doc Martin instinctively averting his eyes, holding his breath, vomiting occasionally, and in general recoiling from blood, so much so that his second secretary, Pauline, is trained to be a phlebotomist so she can draw blood and handle blood tests. The main plot of Doc Martin’s romance with the local schoolteacher Louisa is constantly obstructed not only by Doc Martin’s social ineptness but also by his gradual recovery from hemophobia, which means he can qualify for a post in London. The TV drama’s raison d’être, hemophobia, centers on what Michael Davidson in Concerto for the Left Hand observes, namely, that blood is ‘a discursive feature’ (2008: 47). ‘Hemophobia’, according to Davidson, is originally used in the context of hemo-philia, when AIDS can be contracted through blood transfusion, giving rise to the pub-lic’s ‘fear of blood or bleeders (hemophobia)’ (2008: 39). Davidson further explains that:

If hemophilia means ‘love of blood,’ its phobic counterpart refers to the anxiety felt by health care workers, employers, teachers, and parents over the fear of infected blood.… Bleeding disorders raise concerns about the porousness of boundaries, the vulnerability of the bodily envelope, the infection of bodily fluids – concerns that parallel phobias about sexual deviance and racial mixing. Hemophobia, in other words, represents the merging of two discourses – one of blood, the other of sexuality. (2008: 41–2)

In sum, bleeding out of a body, externally as well as internally, means a human being breaking out of the set corporeal conduits of heart, artery and vein, and body surface, as




well as, figuratively, out of conventional codes of conduct. This suggests a dangerous outflow when a robotic Aspie ventures beyond himself and comes into contact with his own emotions, or rather, the lack thereof.

On the other hand, Martin, as a medical doctor, is surely cognizant of the fact that cauterization was once used to seal wounds and stop bleeding. The pain of burning body tissues saves lives, akin to Martin’s ignominious retreat to the backwaters to restart his life, or to deliver an electrical shock to his human heart that has atrophied through dis-use. After all, Martin’s neurosis revolves around blood, symbol of heart and passion: he is afraid of blood because he intuits his own cold-bloodedness, which brings him to a seaside community where he comes face to face with each patient, no longer anesthe-tized, insentient on the operating table and himself no longer insulated by a surgical mask. He also transfers the sight of blood to its smell and then to that of a ‘cauterized’ dead fish, which is several removes from fish as a Christian and Darwinian symbol of the source of life.

Blood and its potential for transgressing fixed domains unite the triple themes of hemophobia, Asperger’s Syndrome, and, of course, the East-West montage. Like a three-legged stool, they prop up the decade-long impressive run of Doc Martin in the domestic and global television market, already making it a hot item in America’s PBS. While blood may be the front leg most conspicuous to viewers, hemophobia is just as fanciful and airy as the two hind legs – Asiatic and Aspie – all three requiring a suspension of logic for the comedy to work. There is a common denominator that strings together all three elusive motifs, that is, the Buddha figurine shadowing Doc Martin, the hemophobia that plagues him and vanishes, and the tease of Asperger’s Syndrome that justifies Martin’s increasing rigidity. That commonality is the alterity or alien nature in the make-up of Doc Martin. First of all, a western TV drama reaches out to eastern tropes of the Buddha and Oriental art objects to ‘outsource’ Doc Martin. Second, the inexplicable onset of blood repulsion points to that which he craves the most – human warmth and passion, symbolized by the rise of blood. This quandary crystallizes in the enigma of Asperger’s Syndrome assumed to contain the duality of, in Stuart Murray’s words in ‘Autism and the contemporary sentimental’, ‘the alien within the human, the mystical within the rational’ (2006: 26). Or, as Ian Hacking posits in ‘Humans, aliens and autism’, neurotypicals5 and autists see one another as aliens (2009: 44). Hacking explains that alien ‘is a second-order metaphor. At zero order, an alien is a foreigner. At first order, an alien is a rational and sentient being from outer space. At second order, the word is used as a metaphor for the strangeness of autistic people’ (2009: 45–6). As his performance gradually invokes the clinical definition of autism spectrum disorder, Doc Martin turns stranger and more affectless and, hence, more melancholic, reminiscent of Eric G. Wilson’s The Melancholy Android (2006). Unable to express his love, he loses Louisa and their son James Henry. He is further wounded by the visits of his selfish, emotionally frigid parents, particularly his mother, played by Claire Bloom. That thickening melan-cholia, in turn, endears Doc Martin the robot to viewers worldwide, a reflection of the new millennium’s quiet desperation for connection amid high-tech atomization.

Asperger’s Syndrome debuts in series 3 (2007). The episode ‘Breaking up is hard to do’ shows a Louisa in love initiating a kiss, only to elicit Martin’s lengthy scientific analy-sis. Drawing away from Louisa’s passionate kiss, Martin asks if she is wearing the



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perfume of sandalwood. Louisa replies, ‘Kenzo, Flower.’ Martin launches into a tirade on hormones, hypothesizing that Louisa is experiencing a mood swing brought on by ‘the pheromones’ found in sandalwood, specifically ‘Androstenone 5’ that comes with a ‘faint urine-like’ scent. Deeply insulted and hurt, Louisa storms off with the warning that men-strual periods are not the only reason women have mood swings, namely, passion brings her to kiss Martin. On the drive back, a chastened Martin continues nonetheless with how ‘estrogen-progesterone imbalance’ may cause mood swings. Subconsciously, Martin resists any fluctuation of emotions, trying to maintain a flattened psychological state, a near-insentient regressiveness associated with infantile smell rather than adult visuality. Typical of any Aspie, Martin is unable to read social cues and reciprocate Louisa’s ges-tures of love. Instead, Martin peels the onion of human actions, exposing biological func-tions and endocrine circulation. Harking back to the off-frame Buddha statuette, the exchange of sandalwood and Kenzo smacks of chinoiserie and japonisme, yet exotic romance piqued by alluring fragrances from afar is anatomized, autopsied down to hor-monal imbalance, culminating as urine and menstrual blood. The potential consummation of their romance collapses into an anti-climax. Yet it is also the pinnacle of Martin’s per-formance, dispassionate and curt as a matter of course throughout the show, when his eyes grow suddenly red and teary as Louisa bids farewell and as his Aunt Joan tries in vain to comfort him. Rare jewels of minimalist acting, these moments are profoundly touching. The android has turned not only melancholic but also as vulnerable as any human being.

Martin Clunes, who played Doc Martin, juggled the shooting of this show with that of the last two seasons of William and Mary (2003–5), series 2 and 3, which overlapped with Doc Martin series 1 and 2. Clunes professed in Doc Martin’s bonus interviews that he was almost schizophrenic, having had to play two diametrically opposed characters. In William and Mary, Clunes plays an undertaker, an amateur guitarist, and a church choir member, with a passion for Mary (Julie Graham). Widowed father of two teenage girls, Clunes embodies Everyman in his search for romance and love, hooking up via a dating agency with Mary, a no-nonsense Scottish midwife with two mixed-race teenage boys whose deadbeat dad returns after a seven-year absence to disrupt William and Mary’s relationship. In the jargon of autism, William is ‘neurotypical’ in every sense of the word, gentle and loving to his family and colleagues, dignified and professional as an undertaker. Both William and Mary are beset by terribly hectic work and home sched-ules, and financial burdens, in a faithful representation of ordinary life. Clunes’ perfor-mances of an Everyman versus an eccentric, even pathological, doctor is less sharply divided at first. In series 1 and 2, Doc Martin has more flexible facial expressions, even smiling at times. In other words, his mechanical rigidity takes over his performance in the latter part of the show. Such progressive stiffening is unmistakable in view of the movie version of Doc Martin (2001), where Martin behaves like any cuckolded husband raging, pleading and fleeing his shame to Portwenn. This movie coincided closely with Clunes and Graham’s TV drama Dirty Tricks (2000), in which they play a scheming and sex-crazed pair, a universe apart from Doc Martin.

This staggered evolution from one show to the next and then back suggests that Clunes incrementally nudges his Doc Martin acting toward the extreme of rudeness and asociality. His uncanny, God-like power to diagnose and cure inches toward a Bergsonian robotic inelasticity6 and a distancing from humanity. Accordingly, the show is compelled




to offer an explanation of sorts for his out-of-the-ordinary manners. His Aunt Joan drops hints throughout that his parents are to blame for an insecure little ‘Marty’ being dis-patched prematurely to boarding schools and prone to bed-wetting. This rationale culmi-nates in the remarks from another family member, the psychiatrist Aunt Ruth, in the last episode ‘Departure’ in series 6 (2013). Based on her expertise in psychology, Aunt Ruth parallels Louisa’s departure with Martin’s hemophobia. Ruth attributes both to Martin’s ‘childhood trauma’, when a perfectly normal and happy child was obliterated by the age of six as a result of ‘the remoteness of your father and the coldness of your mother’. Joan’s and Ruth’s testaments regarding Martin’s imperious and self-serving parents are borne out by the parents’ cameo appearances in the episode ‘The family way’ in series 2 (2005) and in ‘Departure’. Martin’s mother, played by a frosty Claire Bloom, sends chills down an adult viewer’s spine, let alone a preschooler whose mother blames him for hav-ing ruined her marriage. Neglected and traumatized at an early age, Martin feels unde-serving of the estimation due the office of a surgeon, which is his father’s profession, and of the true love of Louisa. In private life, Martin subconsciously turns Louisa away since idealized womanhood – his mother – has long spurned him. In Ruth’s professional opin-ion, Martin develops hemophobia and rebuffs Louisa because of stunted emotional growth. There exists, however, a contending theory by yet another psychiatrist three seasons prior to Aunt Ruth’s trauma hypothesis.

In the episode ‘Love thy neighbor’, a.k.a., ‘City slickers’, of series 3 (2007), a liberal, New Agey family, the Oakwoods, arrive with their delinquent of a son, who has been spoiled by a laissez-faire upbringing. Their son vandalizes the townspeople’s automo-biles at will; the family barges unapologetically into a private rendezvous between Martin and Louisa; and the couple cremate a badger to release its soul, fouling the air in the neighborhood. His nasal whine grating on one’s nerves, Anthony Oakwood is a hip-pie-style university psychiatrist and an opportunistic academic who immediately sees in Martin pronounced symptoms of a high-functioning person with Asperger’s Syndrome and the potential subject of ‘a book’. While toying with Asperger’s Syndrome, the show discredits this explanation through the unsavory messenger, Anthony Oakwood, the ‘deadwood’. To discredit something, needless to say, only puts it under erasure rather than making it disappear. This is the very definition of Aspic license, the layers of ambi-guity allowing tremendous leeway for imagination. While Oakwood implies that Martin is an Aspie, the drama neither disabuses viewers of that notion nor confirms Oakwood’s assessment. The show claims neither that Martin is not an Aspie nor that he is not not an Aspie. Doc Martin is transformed into a negative space to be reckoned with episode after episode, season after season, by various characters’ thwarted attempts, the most poignant of which, of course, is Louisa’s. Doc Martin is a space holder, akin to the unfathomable Buddha figurine or the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ neurosis of hemophobia. Both psychiatrists’ theories are just that, speculation with a touch of fallacy, but each provides a narratological pivot for the unfolding of the screen life of Doc Martin.

Decoded

In Mai Jia’s Decoded, Doc Martin’s Buddha practically walks off the mantelpiece to take on the role of the spy protagonist Rong Jinzhen, whose uncanny, near-alien intelligence



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is bonded with, and parasitic on, the West. First of all, he is mentored by his uncle who shapeshifts between an English and a Chinese name: John Lillie and Rong Zilai. Moreover, the protagonist has a second instructor-rival, Professor Liseiwicz, a Polish-Jewish mathematician. The name of the Aspie game has changed. Doc Martin’s names manifest the town and country divide in England and the developed first world, the show’s global target audience. Decoded opts to traffic between East and West, to belabor and stretch its plot, wedding western high culture icons and Chineseness. The glory of the West is paraded repeatedly to demonstrate China’s eventual triumph and superiority. This perpetual need to beat the West in its own game exposes self-doubt, even an inferi-ority complex, the denial of which escalates into self-aggrandizement. Before interrogat-ing the West, however, one must acknowledge the imaginary East-West borderland, specifically, Russia and Eastern Europe, where each side reads signs of the Other. Larsson finds in Russia the lurking evil dragon; Kosinski pits a Soviet ambassador against his idiot savant; and Mai Jia’s espionage aims at a Liseiwicz recruited by an X-country – the US or the Soviet Union – whose cryptography poses threat to China’s national security during the Cold War.

Mai Jia’s is an opiate of a book, with quite a few faults, artistically mediocre, but addictive. For the New China, in search of ideological underpinnings for its millennial ascent, Decoded (Mai, 2014 [2002]) offers opportune self-gratification. For the Old West inured to Orientalist junk, Decoded soothes via its curio-style, kitschy second-rateness. Both Chinese ethnocentrism and western Orientalism are encoded in Decoded. The story is less a modern novel than a fable in the oral tradition, afflicted by weak logic, far-fetched emplotment, cardboard characters devoid of psychological depth, and structural fissures. It is filled with overwriting and purple prose, bathos and sentimentality strewn across the pages. Giving birth to the protagonist Rong Jinzhen’s ‘Killer’ father, the grandmother known as ‘Abacus Head’ dies in the difficult labor, the family trait of over-sized heads pointing to a Darwinian-Fascist eugenics of mathematics prodigies and attendant abnormalities, which resurface in the grandson Jinzhen’s ‘Killer Head’ and autism. The grandmother’s death is one of many hyperbolic scenes and expressions: ‘her screams resounded constantly for two days and two nights, as the stench of blood per-vaded first her room at the hospital, then the corridor, before finally making its way onto the main road’ (Mai, 2014 [2002]: 13). While it is slightly more credible insofar as the spreading ‘stench of blood’ is concerned, Jinzhen’s own trying birth abandons all pre-tense of credibility: ‘The blood dripped from the bed down onto the floor, only to spread across and out over the doorsill. Once out of the room it continued to seep into the cracks between the dark stones set into the path, and on until it reached the roots of a couple of old plum trees’ (2014 [2002]: 24). With all due respect, Mai Jia makes her bleed even more copiously than a chop-socky actor convulsing in his death throes, coughing up pints of red ink. Nonetheless, both the dying and new lives are encapsulated in birthing blood. Whereas blood symbolizes human passion in Doc Martin, Mai Jia vests in these over-the-top metaphors both heredity and bloodline, for the plum trees become the prov-ince of old Mr Auslander, Jinzhen’s adoptive father.

Native intelligence inherited from the Rongs and embodied in monstrous heads is discovered by foreigners, first by the dream interpreter Auslander and then by the math-ematician-turned-code-maker Liseiwicz. Dreams and codes are inextricably combined




given Jinzhen’s absurd one-line self-criticism, which could have landed anyone in seri-ous political trouble during the Cultural Revolution, ‘all the secrets in the world are hid-den in dreams and that includes ciphers’ (Mai, 2014 [2002]: 170). China and the West conspire to sire the Asiatic Aspie, at once a riddle, a riddler, and one who solves the rid-dle. Both foreign characters make and unmake Jinzhen. With his codes PURPLE and BLACK developed through the computer’s artificial intelligence, Liseiwicz is indirectly responsible for Jinzhen’s rise in China’s covert spy agency. Jinzhen has made his reputa-tion decoding PURPLE and is then mentally defeated by the futile attempt to crack BLACK. Auslander, on the other hand, adopts the young Jinzhen whose bizarre behavior and selective mutism have convinced everyone else that he is retarded. But Auslander’s habit of drinking strong plum tea has ruined Jinzhen’s stomach and fragile health, setting the stage for his eventual collapse. At the height of his career during the Cold War, Jinzhen excels in covert operations because his poor health, courtesy of Auslander’s plum tea and Chinese genes, prevented him years before from attending mathematics programs at ‘Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford or any other world-class university’ (Mai, 2014 [2002]: 89). Such name-dropping raises the question of ‘China Dream’, President Xi Jinping’s widely publicized announcement in 2013, which entails compet-ing with the West and outstripping it. Evidently, Grandmother Rong’s strange dream needs a possibly Freudian Auslander to decipher. The Rongs’ ‘bad dream’ of an autistic descendant Jinzhen is never ‘read’ properly until the math genius Liseiwicz comes along. To be fair, the western-trained John Lillie sees Jinzhen’s potential as well, while advising a measured incremental approach, which has stranded Jinzhen in China. With his accom-plishment shrouded in the secrecy of a spy agency, Jinzhen still grows in stature since he, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954), ‘coulda been somebody’ at ‘world-class’ institutions. What Mai Jia does and what caters to Chinese readers is the paradox of ‘having the cake and eating it too’. China’s self-image hinges on outwitting western high culture, beating the opponent at the chess games and cryptographical duels with Liseiwicz, Jinzhen’s former teacher. A proud culture that has lasted unbroken for thou-sands of years, China is turned by Mai Jia and his fans into a rebellious youth against the West, only to secretly, compulsively return to the stepfather – ‘Daddy’ Auslander (2014 [2002]: 9), teacher Liseiwicz, great-uncle John Lillie – for blessing.

Stylistically, the novel’s cross-generational twin births and Jinzhen’s dual heritages belong less to realism than to myth-making or folklore for an apocalyptic milieu. This proclivity toward hyperboles and superlatives is a time-honored PRC tradition, from Chairman Mao’s premature 1949 declaration of ‘China has stood up!’ to grand political propaganda throughout the communist regime, including the Great Leap Forward to famines (1958–62) and the (De)Cultural Revolution (1966–76), to the fifth-generation filmmakers’ cinematic epics to the sumptuous visual feast of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to Xi’s dream in 2013. In this collective, absolutist crusade, Mai Jia gravitates to power of both the Chinese and western strain. While ‘Lillie’ may be a surname denoting an identification with the ‘lily white’ race, ‘Rong’ harks back to Rong Hong (Yung Wing in Cantonese), the first Chinese overseas student in the US, a Yalie. The Rong of the ‘Abacus Head’ fame is said to have designed the Wright Brothers’ airplane wings. Archimedes’s heroic aphorism ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth’ is repeated twice (Mai, 2014 [2002]: 30, 193).7 The cryptographer Klaus Johannes is



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worshipped by Jinzhen: ‘You’re my sun: my brilliance can never be separated from yours, never outshine yours …’ (2014 [2002]: 204), where the ellipsis signifies ineffable hero worship. Even Jinzhen’s illnesses are of epic proportions: autistic total creativity or schizophrenic total annihilation. This discursive overkill unequivocally taints the charac-terization of Jinzhen, the one who is ‘chosen’ by John Lillie, Liseiwicz, Zheng the Gimp or the spy master, and even Chairman Mao. The Great Helmsman is alleged to have personally intervened on Jinzhen’s behalf to rescue his sister and family from marauding Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. A Jew, Liseiwicz has been most explicit when he recommends that Jinzhen study artificial intelligence, ‘a form of intelligence completely alien to humankind’ (Mai, 2014 [2002]: 194) because ‘this is what he was born to do; God has chosen him’ (2014 [2002]: 96). The undertone is that only a superhu-man autist like Jinzhen can master his own kind – computers. Additionally, since Liseiwicz advocates dedicating Jinzhen’s talent to artificial intelligence, which Liseiwicz has designed and which is the heart of computer-driven postmodernity, Mai Jia subcon-sciously splices China’s millennial chosenness with western technological patrilineage.

Perry Link (2014) in his New York Times book review of Decoded, ‘Spy anxiety’, pointedly raises the protagonist’s autism as the rationale for his genius. In the milieu of the autism ‘boom industry’, an insightful western scholar seizes upon Mai Jia’s literary device of Aspic license straightaway, albeit the term ‘autistic’ (Mai, 2014 [2002]: 56) appears once only in the 300-plus-page novel. In fact, the novelist seems almost haphaz-ard, dismissive of the Aspic license he has taken early on. Similar to Doc Martin’s touch and go with Asperger’s Syndrome, Mai Jia never recycles the term autism again, electing to spell out Jinzhen’s symptoms instead: ‘idiot-savvy’, ‘idiot savant’, photographic memory,8 mathematical wizardry, belching and farting at will, oblivious to others, selec-tive mutism, obsessive fixation, resistance to change, and others. Similar to Doc Martin’s collage of Aspie and hemophobia, Mai Jia shifts from autism to schizophrenia to account for Jinzhen’s demise. Through the flimsy excuse of losing his blue leather notebooks, Jinzhen loses his mind and becomes schizophrenic. These notebooks are state property, given to each cryptography unit member to record thoughts and events, part of the mind-control apparatus. The notebook writings constitute not so much private diary secrets for one’s eyes only as public assets subject to the authorities’ surveillance. Realistically, losing such notebooks does not deal as devastating a blow as losing one’s wallet or as in the case of identity theft. A multitude of expedient, illogical plot twists such as this one move Decoded closer to a biblical parable than to modern fiction. Such a plot would be almost comical if it were not so wildly popular in an ethnocentric China.

The proximity to the Christian Bible arises in particular from the novel’s, so to speak, ‘last words’, an appendix of sorts under the title ‘Rong Jinzhen’s Notebook’. This appen-dix is a narrative substitute for the missing notebooks, comprising 90 redacted entries that the narrator-novelist copies from one such notebook still in state possession, sup-plemented by an introduction and some concluding remarks. Mai Jia emulates the vener-ated Lu Xun’s style in ‘The Diary of a Madman’ (1918, in Lu, 1978 [1923]). Fragmented, nonsensical, this appendix distinguishes itself from the bulk of the novel in terms of lit-eral biblical quotations, Christian figures of speech and concepts. Just as the opening of the novel with a gratuitous West – the dream reader Auslander, Mai Jia closes Decoded in elusive Christian codes, a compilation of alien thoughts to demonstrate how the alien




of an Asiatic Aspie has moved further afield, beyond the pale of rationality and sanity. While Doc Martin is poised for the seventh season, purported to be its last, and while Mai Jia continues to produce an unabated stream of spy thrillers and such film adapta-tions as The Message (2009), the millennial (ab)use of Asiatic Aspie has consistently taken leave of the disability known as Asperger’s Syndrome. Autism spectrum disorder has very little to do with the cultural discourse of Asiatic Aspie, which is a fictional ava-tar of casual western Orientalism and causal eastern Occidentalism9 persisting into the new millennium. Orientalism and Occidentalism are equally problematic in their taking the Aspic license to kill and to raise the phantom of Asiatic Aspie repeatedly. The pathol-ogy of Asiatic Aspie writers and artists use in their millennial texts and soon forget is symptomatic of deep-seated neuroses within the new bottle called globalization.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. See chapter 4, ‘My Aspergirl: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and visualizations’, in Sheng-mei Ma’s Alienglish: Eastern Diasporas in Anglo-American Tongues (2014).

2. See Stuart Murray’s Representing Autism (2008), which contends that autism has become ‘badges of personality, signs of eccentricity’ (1) through ‘sentimentalizing narratives of mainstream news media’ (4). Autism turns into ‘cause célèbre’, a ‘fashion’ (11), rendering ‘[A]utism and savantism . . . synonymous’ (65). Murray also advances the notion of ‘idiot savant’ (66).

3. Ian Hacking in ‘Humans, aliens and autism’(2009) notes that autists routinely make no eye contact with others, nor do autists’ eyes show much emotion. ‘Some neurotypicals are fright-ened by the blankness’, Hacking continues, ‘for they feel that maybe there is no soul there’ (2009: 52).

4. A favorite Zen koan, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. This is used by Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973) when Lee urges ‘emotional content’ in kung fu kicks and the need to ‘feel’ a certain spirituality beyond the body’s extremities, be it one’s foot or one’s finger.

5. In ‘Humans, aliens and autism’, Ian Hacking theorizes an egalitarian relationship between ‘neurotypicals’ and autists in a ‘neurodiversity movement’ (2009: 46). In The Reason I Jump, Naoki Hidashida (2013 [2007]: 45), an autistic 13-year-old, also advances that autism is nor-mal to people with autism.

6. Henri Bergson, in Laughter (1928 [1900]), argues that mechanical inelasticity or the inability to adapt constitutes comical performances. For the audience, readers, and spectators to laugh at the comic’s misery and faux pas, requires them to distance themselves from compassion, even to become heartless.

7. Even the satirist-novelist Yu Hua uses Archimedes’ maxim in the Preface to China in Ten Words (2011), which goes to show how prevalent the drive for earth-shaking excellence is in contemporary China, that even someone with as iconoclastic a streak as Yu Hua would fall for Archimedes’ rhetorical inflation.

8. Photographic memory is a trait often attributed to fictitious characters with Asperger’s Syndrome, such as Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s millennium trilogy. The other oft-alleged Aspie, Bartleby in Herman Melville’s eponymous story, is a scrivener, a copyist, who



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predates cameras and Xerox machines. Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures (2006 [1995]) professes that her autism dictates not only photographic memory but also a thinking process in pictures.

9. By eastern Occidentalism, I am not referring to Xiaomei Chen’s Occidentalism (1995), which is on a China very different from today’s.

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Author biography

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian diaspora/Asian American studies and East-West comparative studies. His books in English include: The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); and Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998).



Asiatic Aspie: Millennial (ab)use of Asperger's Syndrome

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