Between Foreigners and Heroes: Asian-Argentines in a Multicultural Nation by Chisu Teresa Ko

Sebastián Borenzstein's Un cuento chino, the highest-grossing Argentine film in its year of release, is a formulaic odd-couple story about Roberto (Ricardo Darín), a bitter, middle-aged Argentine recluse and Jun (Ignacio Huang), a considerate but helpless young Chinese man who comes to Argentina with no money (he was robbed by a taxi driver as soon as he landed) or language skills, and who seeks his uncle at an outdated address. Good at heart, Roberto begrudgingly gives Jun room and board, teaches him some Spanish, and helps him navigate Buenos Aires. The film follows the story of their developing bond, comically highlighting moments of cultural and linguistic miscommunication.

Gaspar Scheuer's *Samurai* presents an unsettling premise to Argentine viewers, who imagine Asians as strictly contemporary and urban migrants, through the story of a Japanese family in nineteenth-century rural Argentina. The film follows the formula of an odd-couple road movie with Poncho Negro (Alejandro Awada), a disillusioned *gaucho* or cowboy wandering the Pampas after losing both arms in the Paraguayan War, and Takeo (Nicolás Nakayama), a still-illusioned descendant of samurai who is in search of Saigo Takamori, the historical samurai leader. On his deathbed, Takeo's grandfather suggests that Saigo is hiding "in a faraway place," and Takeo interprets this to mean that he is hiding in the Argentine Pampas – where Takeo and his family live – waiting for his opportunity to return to Japan. Takeo sets out to find Saigo in order to join his fight against Japan's modernization and restore the old order in his native country.

Finally, Verónica Chen's *Mujer conejo* is a thriller about Ana Yang (Haien Qiu), a young city inspector of Chinese descent, who gets in trouble with the Chinese mafia of Buenos Aires when she refuses to authorize unlawful business permits. The conflict between the ruthless Chinese gangsters and Ana is interwoven with her personal identity conflict as an Argentine of Chinese descent who does not speak Chinese and does not identify with Chinese culture.

The three films, although apparently very different from one another, have in common not only their Asian protagonists but also a deep concern to address questions of national identity at a time of crisis. In a post-crisis Argentina that rearticulates the national as a "contestatory exercise, both denouncing the failure of the state and resisting the rhetoric of globalization," film scholar Joanna Page argues that recent Argentine cinema has played a "significant role in representing the nation to itself" and "rebuilding national identity in the absence of a functioning state."

All three films evidence the desire to condemn state-sponsored projects of modernity and their accompanying discourses of Argentine exceptionalism (racial, cultural, economic) while still preserving the discourses of nation. While the seminal film *Bolivia* (2001) – produced closer to the economic crisis than to the Bicentennial and concerned more with denouncing xenophobia than with a heightened rhetoric of multiculturalism – reveals "the extent to which ‘nationness' as a unifying concept has broken down," these three post-Bicentennial films attempt to restore the unity of the nation that precedes or supersedes the nation in crisis.

Set in the late nineteenth century, *Samurai* criticizes Argentina's modernity project at the moment of its emergence. The railway is arriving to the desolate countryside scarcely populated by hard-drinking gauchos, greedy *criollo*, or native-born, landowners, and, it turns out, an unlikely Japanese family that still wears traditional clothes, eats Japanese food, and lives in a Japanese-style house with sliding paper doors. At the same time, the state is forcing men from the countryside to join its military. None of these modernity projects, however, seems to bring progress. Poncho Negro, a war hero, has been left armless and homeless, rewarded with two medals of honor that he had to sell for food. The deception Argentina's nation-building process perpetuated on the gaucho mirrors the Japanese family's failed immigrant dream. Takeo's father, Satchiro (Jorge Takshima), seeks to improve his position through hard work and assimilation, but his family refuses to give up Japanese customs and he loses everything when he is conscripted by the military. Takeo's samurai grandfather accuses Satchiro of betraying his tradition by wearing Western clothes and speaking Spanish at home, and Takeo seeks to follow in his grandfather's tradition rather than his father's. The presentation of the railway project also appears to affirm Takeo and Poncho Negro's disillusion with modernity. When Takeo works as a hired hand to clear the land for the railway, the film resists the possibility of the railway's linear vision, insisting on short-range shots that dive deep into the density of the Pampean shrubbery. Furthermore, as he journeys with Poncho Negro in search of the famed "last samurai," they seem to go uselessly in circles, as they ride through scenic yet indistinguishable sierras and repeatedly run into the same people.