SOURCE: Brown, Bill. “Global Bodies/Postcolonialities: Charles Johnson's Consumer Culture.” Representations, no. 58 (spring 1997): 24-48.

In the following essay, Brown discusses Johnson's short story “China” from The Sorcerer's Apprentice in terms of theories about masculinity, spectatorship, and commodity culture.

Fed up with her husband's absorption in the kung fu culture of Seattle, Evelyn Johnson finally explodes: “You can't be Chinese.” She can't imagine Rudolph's longing for a new body, for a new self, as anything but his longing for a new ethnonationality. “‘I think it's strange! Rudolph, you didn't grow up in China,’ she said. ‘They can't breathe in China! … They all ride bicycles, for Christ's sake! They want what we have.’”¹ Her xenophobia grants the transnationality of wants but not the multidirectionality of transcultural desire. Exasperated by his wife's failure to understand his new preoccupation, Rudolph patiently explains that he doesn't “want to be Chinese”: “‘I only want...