Asian Abstraction at the Packard Sawmill in Twin Peaks

• In Event: David Lynch and American Empire

Abstract

This paper examines the aesthetics and politics of lumber in the Pacific Northwest through the figure of Josie Packard (played by Joan Chen) in the first two seasons of David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks. The paper aims to explore how Josie Packard, the sole Chinese leading character of the show, represents and obfuscates Asian settler colonialism, 1990s Yellow Peril anxieties of Japan’s rising global economies, and the history of Chinese lumber labor in the Pacific Northwest since the late nineteenth century. This paper thinks alongside the historical context on Chinese and Japanese lumber industries in the Pacific Northwest, as shown in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Megan Asaka’s Seattle from the Margins (2022), and Asian American subjectless studies of abstraction, as in Leslie Bow’s Racist Love (2021) and Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia (2005). By focusing on other key moments of the show’s yellowfacing and use of the “salaryman” trope of Japanese workers, and engaging with the show’s popularity in Japan, this paper asks: how is Lynch thinking about the revenant of Japanese imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century? What is the role of Asia in American logging industries as presented in Twin Peaks? Through Josie Packard, how can we come to engage with late-stage American empire and its relationship to race, labour, and globalization?

Author

• Lilika Ioki Kukiela, Oxford College of Emory University