Tan Lin on TV With a Life, Insomnia and the Aunt, & More

At the Asian American Writers' Workshop blog, The Margins, "no-single-medium man" Tan Lin discusses his 2011 book, Insomnia and the Aunt (Kenning Editions), "which explores the relationship between technology, television, and human experience." A new edition of Insomnia and the Aunt is planned for 2016.

"The book, more a Fluxkit than a written work, consists of black and white photographs, postcards, footnoted Google reverse searches, letters, appendices, and an index to an imaginary novel. The story itself chronicles the memories of a fictional aunt who owns a motel and watches Conan meditatively into the late hours of the night," writes David Foote, who talks with Lin. Some of the exchange:

David Foote: Insomnia and the Aunt tells the story of a man relating to his aunt by spending hours watching late night television with her in a motel. The story interrupts the normal narrative of immigration, the usual story focusing on the cultural price paid to come to America, [and] norms of genre (it is often billed as literary nonfiction, and you are often billed as a poet)…. Did you ever have an aunt in Washington?

Tan Lin: No. But I did watch huge amounts of TV while growing up. I think of the TV set as a member of our family—like a mother, father or imaginary aunt. TV watching resembles a family; it’s sort of an ongoing affair with blurry temporal markers. So yes, this is not a “normal” immigration narrative, mainly because it’s not really a narrative. In this work, narration is replaced by description and static absorption in front of a TV. TV watching is not idle time. People philosophize [while] watching TV; the more TV people watch, the more philosophizing they do. Philosophizing while switching channels is what I call “mediation.”

Technology serves as a tool for the integration and navigation of family relationships in Insomnia and the Aunt. It serves as a way of blocking out chunks of time or remembering each other’s company, allowing family members to be bored in each other’s company and thus coexist. How does the TV change the immigrant’s experience of America?

Insomnia is an ethnographic and sociological accounting, i.e. a fiction. This fiction concerns a group of people, Chinese people in America, and examines how Chinese people in America become Chinese people in America. And the answer is by watching TV.

It is a mistake to say that TV is a global capitalist or monolithic phenomenon that is appropriated or domesticated by Chinese Americans in a comical or “ethnic” way. TV exists only as an extension of the people who watch it, which is to say, all TV is mediated by a particular group. The last thing I wanted was something quirky, exotic, or ludicrous. Mediation is surreal, but also utterly natural, in that what is produced in the book—in and through various genres and modalities of philosophizing—is something Bruno Latour would term a hybrid. And I am not only speaking about genres and their mediation, but about two things customarily considered to be set apart in most sociological discourse: people or society on the one hand, and technology—in this case, television—on the other. From a standpoint that is not necessarily mine, my aunt does not really exist. This makes perfect sense to me; she is an emanation of a TV set. But the same is true of the TV too. It has no life apart from my aunt. And in this story, it has a life, just as my fictive aunt does. The tale being told might as well be told by a TV set. I should probably make this more explicit. There needs to be a sentence in which the narrator says, and I think I will add this to the next edition...

Find out what she says at The Margins.