Autism Vox

What is autism and what is the movies?

by Kristina Chew, PhD on March 29th, 2007

“What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”

writes Maxine Hong Kingston at the beginning of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which was published 30 years ago last fall. To restate the question in words more obviously connected to this this blog:

What is autism and what is the movies?

Or: How autistic is “Rainman”?

Let me back up a bit.

The “genius” of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is described by Jess Row in a March 27th essay on Slate that highlights the author’s “deliberately” acknowledging that

to write autobiography is to stand at the borderline between memory and invention. Like the “ghosts” in its subtitle (the word refers to the white Americans around whom Kingston grew up in Sacramento), The Woman Warrior stubbornly refuses to be either entirely fictive or entirely real. Perhaps the second most remarkable thing about the book is that in its wake, the American literary world still seems to regard the tissue-thin boundary between memoir and fiction as absolute and inviolable.

Without hesitation and certainly without apology, Kingston combines myth—-the story of a “No Name Aunt” who throws herself and her illegitimate baby down a well; of Hua Mu Lan, a “Chinese folk heroine” who disguises herself as a man to defend her village—with her life growing up as the daughter of immigrants who own a laundry in agricultural Stockton, California. Critics have long attacked Kingston for “presenting a Westernized, sanitized view of Chinese culture (by, among other things, comparing Hua Mulan to Joan of Arc).” Her flagrant melding of the fantasies of Chinese myths with her memories of growing up Asian American has led to criticisms that The Woman Warrior makes it seem that “all Asian Americans” (or at least “all Chinese Americans,” to which group I belong) alike inhabit a magical realist world in which the mythical, the supernatural, ghosts (as Kingston translate gwai) are just around the corner, or even in the next thought.

This mixing of the mythical and the real is deliberate, as suggested by that question I quoted at the start: What is the “real” Chinese tradition and what is representation and imaginings like those of a movie—what is “really” Chinese vs. a representation of being Chinese? Does not Kingston’s own combining of Chinese myth and her American life in her memoir not veer dangerously close to the fantasies, the dreamland, that come out of Hollywood? Or is the point rather that, as Row suggests, that “our mental lives are made up of overlapping narratives—some invented, some inherited, some remembered—rather than one sequence of ‘true’ events”—that to write one’s life, a little invention may be required? The genius of The Woman Warrior is precisely that Kingston announces this notion from the start: To write one’s past, some myth-making is inevitable and caveat lector—especially the reader who is not aware that, when it comes to memoir writing, the truth is there, but maybe at a slant.

The Woman Warrior can also be seen as a myth-busting book; its very title suggests that, contrary to any previous cinematic stereotypes of Asian woman dutifully obeying a father or husband, this book’s narrator is a fierce and independent fighter. Ann Hulbert identifies a similar “demystifying impulse” in two memoirs about autism that she reviews in the March 28th Slate, Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir by Daniel Tammet and Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and the Quest To Unlock the Hidden World of Autism by Portia Iversen. Hulbert opens by speculating whether autism is the disease du jour, the “engineer’s disease” of the hyper-abled hi-tech worker, who stands at the other end of a “fuzzy spectrum” from those with “severe autism” that has been tied to “anti-technological paranoia” about mercury and vaccines as the culprits that turn normal toddlers into autistic children.

Both books, Hulbert writes, offer “a reprieve from facile diagnoses of high-tech-era victims or heroes” by “probing an elusive neurological disorder.” Alongside Tammet’s “rote self-help prose” is a “surreal perspective”: “His synesthetic mind is crowded with colorful numbers, which he perceives as having personalities and shapes that shift to help him do computational and memory feats.” Tammet has indeed been referred to as brainman, in a not-so-subtle pun on the 1988 film Rainman with Dustin Hoffman as the title character. Iversen is described as “a woman with a cause” who possesses a “missionary energy” that impels her to found an autism organization (Cure Autism Now); track down Soma Mukhopadhyay and her autistic son Tito in Bangalore, India, and bring them to the US; advance the progress of our knowledge of autism by convincing numerous scientists to study Tito; and get her yearned-for miracle when Dov learns to communicate via Soma’s method of pointing to letters on an alphabet board: “[S]he declares herself a believer in miracles on the first page of a book that builds to a made-for-movie discovery toward the end.”

Hulbert compares the first-person narrators of these two books, Tammet and Iversen, with each other and indeed comes close to suggesting that Iversen is herself somewhat autistic, or at least takes on an autistic way of thinking in Strange Son:

In fact, they are curiously akin: What Iverson and Tammet (and Tito and, it turns out, Dov as well) set their minds to, they will not be deterred from, despite distractions. In fact, they focus so intently precisely because there are so many stimuli clamoring for their attention as they tackle the difficult task of trying to communicate the experience of struggling to communicate. The passionate persistence they share helps push these memoirs well beyond broad-brush bromides about liberating trapped souls, to convey something of the daunting challenge of making connections. ……..

……..And so both Tammet and Iverson [sic], through Tito, burrow into the bewildering details of skewed perceptions, conveying a dizzying hint of what wide variations there are in a condition that is at once utterly strange and yet not completely alien.

The same single-minded focus is apparent in the narratives of both Tammet and Iversen, Hulbert notes. In Tammet’s, this takes the form of at times immersing the reader in “a landscape all but lost to most of us”—-”the chestnuts he caresses to the silence, ’soft and silvery,’ he seeks out”: Tammet’s narrative of growing up differently is able to “send messages about ‘normal’ development, too, without normalizing his own experience.” Born on a Blue Day does not so much normalize autistic experience as show to what extent it is an experience that has more in common to that of anyone who has struggled “to construct a sense of a self in relation to others” can see themselves reflected in. Tammet’s memoir, according to Hulbert, is “unstrange” in the way that the word is used in the title of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker: Born on a Blue Day shows how “the autistic person is no longer strange or foreign” but “unstrange.” And it is precisely in Tammet’s rendering of autism, and of himself, as “unstrange” that his book demystifies autism, while also still—in the manner of Kingston in The Woman Warrior—drawing on something a little more than fantastic: Tammet’s book can be considered entirely typical as autobiography in its narrative of a self coming into being, acknowledging its difference and uniqueness while growing and changing.

The narrative in Iversen’s Strange Son takes a more convoluted path. Tammet is simply telling his story, while Iversen (as her subtitle indicates) has to work in those of at least three other people—of Soma and Tito Mukhopadhyay and Dov, not to mention of her husband, Jon Shestack, other children, neuroscientists, et alia. Hulbert emphasizes not only Iversen’s single-minded focus on researching autism, but also “her immersion in Tito’s one-of-a-kind cognitive world”:

Iverson’s quest supplies a different jolt: a reminder of how hard it is, as adult perceivers and thinkers, to pick up on what goes against the grain of our expectations. …….Wedded to their particular expertise and testing methods, the researchers she visits are often flummoxed in taking Tito’s measure. They get frustrated by their vain efforts to make sense of his strange responses in terms of their own preconceptions. With an almost autistic obsession to explore the many anomalies of Tito’s mind, Iverson herself actually accomplishes the hardest feat of empathy: She works from an acute awareness that none of us really knows what it is like to inhabit someone else’s head, which serves as a goad to scrutinize and probe as tirelessly as possible.

Iversen, as Hulbert writes, has a singular ability both to be conscious of the impossibility of knowing what might be going on in another person’s mind, and, not at all daunted by this prospect, to carry on thanks to a relentless desire to “unlock the hidden world of autism”—to demystify autism. Iversen’s book is steeped in science as she consults with neuroscientists all over the country and takes Tito to their labs for testing. In developing a novel hypothesis about the two types of autism, auditory and visual (in chapter 13), Iversen does nothing less than to put herself at the center of an investigation into nothing less than the human brain, a terra incognita so close and yet so far away. Co-existing with extensive accounts of the workings of the brain and of the various kinds of neurological tests that Tito undergoes are references to fairy tales and myths, such as that of the changeling; Soma is compared to no one less than the pied piper (p. 349). Further, both Tito and Soma are often represented in such a way that their foreignness—-their exoticism—-is emphasized, as I wrote in Orientalism in Portia Iversen’s Strange Son:

It is just such an Orientalist view that can be seen in Iversen’s portrayal of Soma and Tito, and of the other Asian figures in Strange Son. In Chapter 9, “Four Minus One,” Iversen takes Soma and Tito to a “downscale mall” (p. 156):

To commemorate the experience, I took Soma and Tito’s picture on the landing by the escalator, in front of a giant clay vessel filled with artificial reeds, a mockoff of ancient Egypt. How or why ancient Egypt related to this scrappy little mall was beyond my imagination. Soma stood as tall and proud as anyone under five feet ever could, smiling demurely in her flowing aubergine-colored sari with gold-embroidered edges as she wound a small arm around her large son. Tito’s head was turned away from his mother, as he stared upward, transcending the inconsequential architecture, staring up through clouds, out into the cool expanse of the universe. An unexpected shaft of sunlight suddenly illuminated Tito’s profile, his fish-shaped eyes, his aquiline nose, and stoic smile, and he was transformed into the majestic head of a pharaoh. I snapped my photo. (p. 157)

Iversen’s describes the mall—it has a “knockoff” of the great monuments of ancient Egypt and “inconsequential architecture,” it is “scrappy”—-as mundane and ordinary; Tito, in constrast, “transformed” by a mere beam of sunlight, is an authentic Easterner—-is comparable to a pharaoh himself. Soma, too, for all her small size stands out with a purple—Iversen uses a more elaborate word, “aubergine”—sari that is “flowing,” like the robes of a queen. The notion of Soma and Tito as royalty—as autism royalty under the careful watch of Iversen—-is further suggested by the use of the words “aquiline” and majestic. Strange Son demystifies one autism myth—-that a non-verbal, “severely” autistic child cannot be intelligent—-while drawing on, but not fully acknowledging, other myths and mythologies.

Such mythologizing is perhaps inevitable, and is perhaps a tacit acknowledgement of, in Hulbert’s words, that “hardest feat of empathy……that none of us really knows what it is like to inhabit someone else’s head.” Some aspects of autism are demystified in Strange Son, but autism remains “strange,” a mystery still; the quest of the autism mother continues. Iversen’s book takes us inside her mother’s quest to understand her son Dov, but autism—while its science may be much better understood—remains something different and strange: We know much about Iversen on closing the cover of Strange Son but not so much, perhaps, of Dov; regarding Tito, you can read this comment left yesterday.

“[T]o write autobiography is to stand at the borderline between memory and invention” says Row on The Woman Warrior’s simultaneous myth-making and myth-undoing. This is why the book’ subtitle is “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts”: Kingston understand that there are the facts of life, the “what truly happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, in the words of my high school history teacher, who was himself German, quoting Leopold von Ranke), and then there is how you turn that into art; into a memoir, that takes the reader into and through your memories and on a journey into how the you that is writing these pages became that You of today; became an I, an ego, a coherent, unstrange self.

What is autism and what is Rainman ?

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POSTED IN: Adulthood, Asia, Autism Lit, Books, China, Family, Literature, Movies, Myth, Neuroscience, Parenting