FED UP WITH HER HUSBAND'S ABSORPTION in the kungfu 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."" 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 to be what I can be"' (SA, 91). What Evelyn experiences as his violation of the cultural codes by which a black couple endures the oppression of middle-class middle age, as his debasement of familiar modes of identity formation, Rudolph scripts as a purely personal project of self-salvaging. And he does so echoing the U.S. Army's famous slogan of the early 1980s-"Be All You Can Be"-a slogan meant to recode the post-Vietnam military as the site of postpatriotic self-realization.2 Indeed, as the title of Charles Johnson's story intimates, "China" (1983) troubles itself to locate the dynamics of re-embodiment elsewhere, beyond the Washington that is already the nation's other, peripheral Washington. To the degree that Rudolph's new body is predicated on a globalizing media-distribution network, the story anticipates the moment of globalization when, as len Ang has put it, "every identity must define and position itself in relation to the cultural frames affirmed by the world system."' At the same time, the story describes a process of self-realization released from the physical/metaphysical binary; it posits an ontological alternative to what Eldridge Cleaver long ago called the Western "gulf between Mind and Body" that structures "the gulf between the two races."4 It is as though the story longs to teach us the obsolescence of both "the nation" and "the body." The lesson begins not with philosophy but with a question about everyday life: How does the transnational flow of goods and services extend the consuming subject's affiliative horizon, and how does it thus revise (or leave unrevised) existing accounts of ethnic, national, and mass subjectivity? Rudolph Jackson is a fifty-four-year-old national employee, a post office worker with high blood pressure, emphysema, flat feet, skinny legs, a big belly, and a "pecker" that shrinks "to no bigger than a pencil eraser each time" he sees