Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels

Jennifer Ho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415972062
• eBook ISBN: 9781135469191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This interdisciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.

Chapter One

Consuming Asian American History in Frank Chin's Donald Duk

INTRODUCTION

“‘[T]he family lets me cook the stuff that no Chinese, no one on this earth has seen in a Chinese family dinner before. And yet, like Confucius himself, I will restore ways that have become abandoned and recover knowledge that has been lost.’”

—Frank Chin, Donald Duk

While on vacation in Lake Tahoe when I was nine years old, my family took a tour of the Ponderosa Ranch, former television setting of the hit 1960s western Bonanza. Although most of the show was shot on a Hollywood film lot, many scenes of ranch life were filmed on location at Incline Village, Nevada. After its cancellation, this former TV set was converted into a Lake Tahoe tourist attraction, and so I found myself in the late 1970s walking through the famous ranch where Ben Cartwright and his three sons—Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe—lived, worked, and played. In the middle of the tour, our guide took us into the kitchen, where we were greeted with a life-size replica of the Ponderosa's cook Hop Sing wearing his trademark coolie labor clothes and sporting the ubiquitous queue he wore episode after episode. Our tour guide made some type of joke about Hop Sing chasing chickens around the yard with his trusty Chinese meat cleaver, and the guide used the same pidgin English that actor Victor Sen Yung was forced to recite—the way television audiences believed Chinese people spoke English—using a funny, un-grammatical, stilted Chinese accent. Looking up at the laughing adults in the tour group, I felt that my family had become the butt of this guide's joke: the laughter initiated by Hop Sing's replica was now directed at me and my Chinese American family as extensions of the comical Chinese cook.

Hop Sing elicits laughter from both the tour group of my late 1970s memory and 1960s television audiences because he is the comical “other,” a foreigner who speaks with a funny accent, wears Chinese pajamas, dresses his hair in a long braid down his back, and performs domestic work typically associated with women. He is a derisive figure, especially in comparison with the virile men of the Ponderosa. The laughter at his expense affected my entire family but was felt most keenly by my father, a naturalized American citizen who still speaks with traces of his Szechuan accent. Hop Sing, my father, and Asian American men in general suffer from the stereotype of the comic Chinese cook because it perpetuates the myth that Asian or Asian American men, no matter how long they have lived in the U.S., remain foreign.

In his bildungsroman, Donald Duk, Frank Chin, Chinese American writer, provocateur, and pioneer, challenges the happy-go-lucky Hop Sing of Bonanza by replacing him with a warrior chef and centering his novel on the coming-of-age and growing ethnic pride of his twelve-year old protagonist, Donald Duk. Chin uses this coming-of-age plot to re-inscribe Chinese men into American history. By recuperating the excruciatingly hard labor performed by the Chinese railroad workers in the 19th century, the novel undermines images of feminized male-Asian servants found in 19th-century magazines and late-twentieth century television shows. In Donald Duk, Chin reclaims food as a source of ethnic pride rather than a mark of ridicule by using food as a coded language, a series of signs that signify pride in Chinese American culture and history. Although initially Donald repudiates his father's “yellow” stories and histories, he eventually learns to comprehend their messages and, with them, his Chinese American identity.¹ By the end of the novel, Donald has taken his place at his family's Chinatown banquet table on the final night of the lunar New Year celebrations, consuming the food, stories, and histories of his Chinese American community.

Along with an analysis of Donald Duk, I examine Chin's non-fiction essays in order to understand how a “yellow” identification fosters Donald's coming-of-age and ethnic identity.² Few Asian American scholars have chosen to read Frank Chin's fiction as isolated from his political essays, since Chin's non-fiction writings help to elucidate the contradictions of his fiction. My critical examination of Chin's fiction and non-fiction writings will not replicate the debates surrounding what John Goshert terms the “already-foreclosed Chin-Kingston battle” (par. 1); instead, I hope to strike a middle-ground by attending to the literary qualities of Donald Duk by recognizing the strengths of this father-son narrative.³ However, I will conclude this chapter with an examination of the women in Donald Duk in order to show that the novel's constraint of its female characters ultimately limits Chin's vision of “yellow” pride.

From early essays like “Racist Love” to more recent non-fiction writings such as “Roshomon Road,” Chin has excoriated Asian American writers who have written about themes of ethnic or racial identity conflict. Chin claims that “[t]hose who suffer the stereotype of the dual identity crisis … are playing ignorant of both Asian and American culture” (Chin “Roshomon Road” 291). Yet Donald Duk opens with clear signs of Donald's ethnic and racial self-hatred. “‘Only the Chinese are stupid enough to give a kid a stupid name like Donald Duk’” (Chin 2), the young protagonist observes angrily. But a further reading of Chin's essays makes clear that he rejects an either/or, Asian/American identity crisis in favor of a more pluralistic Asian American subjectivity: “The notion of an organic, whole identity, a personality not explicable in either the terms of China or white America (in the same way the black experience is not explicable in either the terms of Africa or white America), has been precluded by the concept of the dual personality” (“Racist Love” 76). Understanding his use of “black” experience as an analog to Asian American life, it is then easier to understand Chin's claims for being neither Asian nor American nor both (“Roshomon Road” 290), since he wants to create a category of “yellow” in much the same way that “black” is understood to refer to African American life. In another essay, “Come All Ye Writers of the Real and the Fake,” he uses the term “yellow” when referring to Asians in America.⁴ Thus, Chin's “yellow” project—claiming an organic and unfragmented Asian American identity— can be understood through his literature as an alternative site for identity formation, one that acknowledges an Asian American identity that cannot be reduced to an ancestral point of origin or an immigrant destination; his definition, instead, includes ethnic, cultural, and historic influences from both locales that together comprise a “yellow” sensibility.

19TH CENTURY IMAGES OF CHINESE MEN: RAILROAD COOLIES AND TREACHEROUS RAT EATERS

“For all his industry, endurance and willingness the Chinese was, essentially, unskilled labor … He was, besides, a handy butt for good, soul-satisfying scorn; a sort of exotic new rube or greenhorn, gabbling to his fellows in high twittering singsong; feeding on rice, dried cuttlefish, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, dried seaweed and similar outlandish fodder (all brought in by the company and sold to him as part of the hiring agreement) instead of the Irishman's own good old bully beef, beans, potatoes, and bread.”

—James McCague, Moguls and Iron Men

In order to understand the importance of Chin's “yellow” project of re-instituting Chinese American men into the history of the American West, one needs to understand both the presence and absence of Chinese men in the history of U.S. Western expansion and the cultural imagination of America. Migrating to California during the mid-19th century, the majority of Chinese immigrants left China with the original intention of improving their financial situation and returning to China as prosperous sojourners.⁵ These men came to work the gold fields of the California Sierras, but they were also recruited to help build the Transcontinental Railroad, an ambitious feat of industrial technology that would connect the East and West coasts of the continental United States. Unfortunately, the role of Chinese labor in the Western expansion of the U.S. has been under-recorded by both Asian American and non-Asian American scholars. Chinese labor in the gold fields and on the railroads receives only brief attention, at best, in most Asian American historical texts, usually a paragraph or a few pages documenting the first entry of Asian Americans in the U.S.⁶ Similar treatment of Chinese labor is found in many non-Asian American historical works, with the additional problem of authors unselfconsciously using slurs specific to the late 19th century, referring to Chinese laborers as “coolies,” “John Chinaman,” or “Celestials.”⁷

Although Chinese men labored in the Sierra Nevada's, both in their prospecting ventures and in their work for the Central Pacific, they were regarded as beasts of burden rather than as robust railroad men. The foreman of the Central Pacific Railroad, James Strobridge, was skeptical when Charles Crocker proposed hiring Chinese men to solve their labor shortage in 1865.⁸ In Strobridge's view, the Chinese men were scrawny and effeminate, intellectually incapable of understanding principles of engineering, and without the ability to do fine masonry work or to handle explosives. Pointing to the Great Wall of China and the ancient use of gunpowder as refutations, Crocker insisted on hiring Chinese men. Yet, even Crocker saw the Chinese laborers as more pliant and passive than their Irish counterparts. Although Crocker and Strobridge eventually recognized the Chinese as the Central Pacific's main work force, their hard labor was never truly acknowledged, whether through proper remuneration or accurate historic accounts.⁹ Additionally, the Chinese men who laid track from California to Utah were not allowed to participate in the golden spike ceremony at Promontory Point Utah: in the famous photograph of the two engines meeting, although railroad men can be seen hanging from the cars alongside the owners and other political figures involved in the Transcontinental Railroad, all the faces in the photograph are white. And when Central Pacific Chinese railroad men won an historic track-laying contest against Union Pacific's mostly Irish laborers, history books only record the names of the Central Pacific's eight Irish rail handlers, reducing the contribution of individual Chinese men (who represented the bulk of the labor) to a mass of Chinese tracklayers.

19th century Chinese labor in America consisted of brutal work performed by men of extraordinary vigor. Yet the strength and power of these men went unrecognized by either the Railroad bosses or American society. Indeed, the images in popular magazines from this period depict strange foreigners who are mainly identified as domestic help, with no reference to their vigor or brawn.¹⁰ And after the Chinese won the track-laying contest against Union Pacific, General Grenville Dodge “appraised the Cantonese tracklayers and found them eminently desirable as employees—’very quiet, handy, good cooks and good at almost everything they are put at’” (Bain 640). This comment by Dodge, clearly meant as a compliment, ignores the fortitude shown by the Chinese laborers who won the historic contest and instead focuses on qualities of meekness, domesticity, and pliancy.

Even though a few Chinese workers found other railroad jobs after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the most socially acceptable and available occupations for these laborers were either as menial labor or in domestic areas of cooking and cleaning. Deemed a threat to “white” labor, Chinese men were targets of abuse and hostility when they tried to seek employment in non-domestic arenas.¹¹ Explaining the rationale for tolerating Chinese labor on the railroad, Alexander Saxton writes: “Chinese employment was tolerated—perhaps even welcomed—for unskilled, menial, or otherwise undesirable tasks, the performance of which would enhance the job opportunity and earning capacity of non-Chinese workers” (66). However, Chinese prospecting ventures often met with violence from white miners in competition with them, since their success in mining threatened white labor. In contradistinction to the anxiety created by Chinese miners, their work as storekeepers, cooks, houseboys, and laundrymen filled a gap in the domestic economy of the West. Chinese men often performed tasks associated with women—cooking, cleaning, and laundering—because they were denied other job opportunities and because women were scarce out West. As King-kok Cheung notes: “Because of unequal employment opportunities [Chinese men] were forced to be cooks, waiters, laundry workers, and domestics—jobs traditionally considered ‘women's work’” (“Of Men and Men” 175).

Because Chinese men were forced to perform work associated with women, their gender identity became feminized—neutralized by the socioeconomic restrictions placed on them due to their ethnic status. Like ethnic and racial identities, gender identities are also determined by cultural forces, as Jachinson Chan observes: “male identities are social constructs and they change according to historical transitions” (4). The gender-neutrality that Chinese men occupied in the late 19th century American public imagination was a result of the historical forces that feminized Chinese men into labor roles deemed appropriate for a heathen race.¹² In an 1871 Scribner's Monthly article entitled “A Plea for Chinese Labor: by an American Housewife,” a beleaguered white middle-class woman advocates that Chinese men “be imported here and put on trial as domestic cooks, chamber-maids, and laundresses” (Richardson 289). Apparently Chinese men fit readily into female domestic roles. As another Scribner article attests, “it has been noticed that where Chinese men are employed to perform the menial duties usually given to female servants, they perform them with a rigid exactitude of order and care really remarkable” (Norton 69). To conceive Chinese men as well suited for domestic chores also ensures that they would not compete in the white male realm of ranching, farming, and mining. In the 19th century American West, Chinese men were reinscribed in what Robert Lee refers to as a “third sex,” where Asian American male “sexuality was constructed as ambiguous, inscrutable, and hermaphroditic” (85). Chinese men could be cooks and laundresses and maids because they were sexless: whether in pro- or anti- Chinese labor propaganda Chinese men were portrayed and thus seen as unthreatening—emasculated—in the public imagination.¹³

THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD IN DONALD DUK

“A hamburger, an omelet, a chicken-fried steak starts Dad telling the story of how he passed the war in the kitchens of presidents, prime ministers, premiers, lords, and generalissimos.”

—Frank Chin, Donald Duk

In contrast to the feminized portrait of Chinese men in late 19th century popular culture, Frank Chin's Donald Duk depicts a Chinatown community of strength and masculinity, imbued with “yellow” pride.¹⁴ Twelve-year old Donald Duk begins the novel on the eve of Chinese New Year full of ethnic self-loathing. Embarrassed by all things Chinese, including his name, his family (father, King Duk, mother, Daisy Duk, and twin sisters Penelope and Venus Duk, and Uncle Donald Duk, his namesake)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Feeding Identity, Subverting Stereotypes: Food and Consumption in Contemporary Asian American Bildungsromane
• Chapter One Consuming Asian American History in Frank Chin’s Donald Duk
• Chapter Two To Eat, To Buy, To Be: Consumption as Identity in Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
• Chapter Three Feeding the Spirit: Mourning for the Mother(land) in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge and Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman
• Chapter Four Fusion Creations in Gus Lee’s China Boy and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land
• Conclusion Hungry for More?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index