“I submit.”
Gallimard uses Song’s shame to construct his sexual fantasy and sexualizes this shame. Song's shame becomes a performance of submissiveness to which Gallimard becomes attached. When Gallimard demands that Song strip for him, she agrees, because she knows this will keep him attached to her. Gallimard's desire to see Song’s naked body is not only a lust for her body, but a demand for her ultimate submission, a major feature of their relationship.
"It’s ridiculously funny that I’ve wasted so much time on just a man!”
The use of the word “waste” to describe their more-than-20-year-long affair denotes Gallimard's complete and utter rejection of Song. In this moment, Gallimard has finally seen that Song is biologically male and responds to his own homophobic shame by laughing maniacally at the absurdity of it all. Throughout the play, he had believed that he was sleeping with the "perfect woman," but now the veil is lifted and Gallimard is forced to face the reality of his love.
"Butterfly? Butterfly?"
At the end of the play, after Gallimard has dressed up as Madame Butterfly and killed himself, Song says this quietly, while smoking a cigarette nearby. At the end, their roles are reversed, and Gallimard becomes the Butterfly to Song's Pinkerton. Song is left alone, rejected by the man whom he has loved for so many years, and can only utter the pet name that Gallimard called him for all those years.
"One, because when he finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. And second, I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man."
In his testimony for the judge, Song gives this answer in reply to the question of how it could have been possible for Gallimard to go for so long without realizing he was a man. In Song's estimation, this has a great deal to do with Gallimard's implicit racial bias, his feminization and degradation of Asian-ness.
"Actor-oppressor, for years you have lived above the common people and looked down on their labor. While the farmer ate millet."
Chin, Song's domineering superior, launches this at Song after Gallimard is sent back to France. Ironically enough, even though Song has procured a great deal of information for the Communist cause, Song's profession as an actor is seen as frivolous, decadent, and counter to the cause of Communism, which rewards the common man and the worker. For all his work on behalf of the cause, Song is punished.
"The Orientals are people too. They want the good things we can give them. If the Americans demonstrate the will to win, the Vietnamese will welcome them into a mutually beneficial union."
In Act 2, Gallimard's boss, Toulon, asks for foreign policy advice, largely based on Gallimard's intimate association with an Oriental woman. Given his relationship with Song, Gallimard tells Toulon that it will not be too long before the Vietnamese cave to Western intervention. Of course, with the hindsight of history, the audience knows that this is not the case, that Gallimard's view is colored by his preconceived notions about Asian submissiveness, which will prove deeply wrong.
"All your life you've waited for a beautiful girl who would lay down for you. All your life you've smiled like a saint when it's happened to every other man you know. And you see them in magazines and you see them in movies. And you wonder, what's wrong with me? Will anyone beautiful ever want me? As the years pass, your hair thins and you struggle to hold onto even your hopes. Stop struggling, Rene. The wait is over."
Marc, Gallimard's old friend from school, appears to him as if in a vision and encourages him to pursue Song. Marc is a much more confident and lustful man, in contrast to Gallimard's wimpiness, and his imagined encouragement leads Gallimard to embark on an affair that will change his life.
"Like, I think the reason we fight wars is because we wear clothes. Because no one knows—between the men, I mean—who has the bigger...weenie. So, if I'm a guy with a small one, I'm going to build a really big building or take over a really big piece of land or write a really long book so the other men don't know, right? But, see, it never really works, that's the problem. I mean, you conquer the country, or whatever, but you're still wearing clothes, so there's no way to prove absolutely whose is bigger or smaller."
In the midst of her affair with Gallimard in Act 2, Renee, the brazen Danish student, posits that all foreign policy and military intervention has to do with anxiety about penis size. In a virtuosically pat monologue, she breaks down the fragility of the male ego as it relates to anatomical preoccupation. In this moment, she proves herself to be the opposite of submissive: a ball-buster, an empowered woman who can distill male aggression in one fell rhetorical swoop.
"Then let me be honest with you. It is because of you that l was promoted tonight. You have changed my life forever. My little Butterfly, there should be no more secrets: I love you."
After Toulon gives Gallimard a promotion, he goes straight to Song to tell her about his success. He tells her that his love for her and her submissiveness to him has given him power in his job, and that he loves her.
"Consider it this way: what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner—ah!—you find it beautiful."
Early on in their acquaintance, Song offers Gallimard a political critique of his beloved opera, Madame Butterfly. She suggests that the opera, in depicting the abuse and marginalization of an Asian woman, is celebrating this degradation as beautiful, and looking at a tragic story from a Western perspective. She suggests that if the story were about a white woman, Pinkerton would be a more reviled protagonist, and the story would not be hailed as beautiful. However, imperialism and racism lead Western audiences to applaud the opera, even though it stages the abuse of an Asian woman under imperialistic and misogynistic logics.
