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Trying on The Yellow Jacket at the Limits of Our Town
The Routines of Race and Nation
On the nearly bare stage of Thornton Wilderâs Our Town, the New England village of Groverâs Corners attains a tangibility, if not a visibility, through the bodies of the actors as they mime the daily activities of residents. Delivering milk, preparing meals, reading the newspaper, or doing homework, they carry out the routine tasks that give the unseen town its life, rhythm, and shape. Guided by these gestures, theatergoers are asked to fill the stage with their own vision of a particular place and time. Between the empty stage and the details supplied immediately by the Stage Manager (the townâs name, the townâs latitude and longitude, and the exact date),1 the actors and the audience must create a community from embodiments of the mundane.
Yet who exactly constitutes the community realized by these performances? The question of how far the borders of âour townâ actually stretch has troubled critical assessments of Wilderâs drama. Much like its juxtaposition of a blank stage with the minutiae of geographic coordinates, the play splits possible answers between the abstract and the specific. Although Our Town opens with the birth of twins to a âPolish motherâ (6), this family remains at the periphery of Groverâs Corners: offstage and âby the tracksâ (6), they await incorporation into a community that is mostly populated, a character later explains, by those who come from âEnglish brachiocephalic blue-eyed stockâ (22). Wilderâs own writings about the play, however, suggest a desire to imbue daily life in Groverâs Corners with a universal significance, to âset the village against the largest dimensions of time and place.â2 What mediates between the specificities of life in Groverâs Corners and the dramaâs more centrifugal tendencies are the quotidian activities that allow the audience to âseeâ the town without props or scenery. As actors simulate the motions of the townspeople, the degree of familiarity they bring to their roles and evoke in viewers generates relationships of affiliation and estrangement that modulate the expansiveness of the community articulated by the performance.
In the early twentieth century, the potential for routine behaviors to manifest social and cultural boundaries was weighed in heated political disputes, investigated in foundational sociological studies, and dramatized as part of a new movement in American theater. Each of these sites placed competing pressures on the mundane to enable passages between established racial and national demarcations, and to impede such crossings. Beginning with restrictions on immigration from China in the late nineteenth century, the United States set entry limits that targeted nations in Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe. In the debates leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and subsequent efforts to implement the new immigration laws, supporters of Chinese exclusion and government agents tasked with enforcing the border called on small behavioral tendencies to distinguish those who could enter the United States from those who could not. The embodiment of particular habits and the potential to assimilate new ones could position applicants for entry on either side of the U.S. perimeter. As I establish in the next section of this chapterâand trace across the bookâthe mundane offers only fleeting and capricious support when called on to make such distinctions; indeed, it threatens to undermine the very truths it presumably discloses and raises questions about the reliability of perception.
In an era when immigration restrictions attempted to draw strict lines between âChineseâ and âAmerican,â a drama purporting to replicate Chinese theater was hailed an American classic, and likely inspired the staging of Wilderâs Our Town. In 1912, J. Harry Benrimo and George C. Hazelton, Jr.âs The Yellow Jacket offered Broadway audiences a supposedly authentic experience of the Chinese theater, including elaborate costumes, minimal sets, props that served multiple functions, and a âproperty manâ who openly managed the stage during the performance. Mildly successful when it opened in New York, the drama became a favorite among prominent European and Russian directors during its international tour and returned to the United States as an aesthetically sophisticated and influential American play, rather than an amusing imitation of the Chinese theater. Despite the acclaim bestowed upon The Yellow Jacket and the revivals that continued to the midcentury, it has since slipped from classic to curiosity, leaving only secondhand traces on the American dramatic canon through its echoes in Our Town. In examining the two works together, I am less concerned with charting a line of influence than with comparing how they integrate the performance of quotidian activities with emphatically nonrealistic stage conventions. As the plays invite their audiences to trespass (or surpass) certain boundaries by seeing and not seeing the mundane, their experiments with Chinese theatrical practices become explorations of the relationship between habitual behaviors and social delineationsâthe site of so much contestation in debates about Chinese immigration.
Bad Habits and Exclusion Acts
In 1885, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors appointed a special committee to investigate and evaluate living conditions in the cityâs Chinatown. Appended to the yearly municipal report, the committeeâs assessment, which covers a variety of subjects including housing, crime, prostitution, and health, offers a stark picture of the neighborhood and its residents. It bluntly states, âHere [in San Franciscoâs Chinatown] it may truly be said that human beings exist under conditions (as regards their mode of life and the air they breathe) scarcely one degree above those under which the rats of our water-front and other vermin live, breathe and have their being. And this order of things seems inseparable from the very nature of the race.â3 Emphasizing that crowding, grime, and a general lack of hygiene are endemic to Chinatown, the report catalogues the habits of Chinese immigrants deemed responsible for creating living conditions akin to those of rats. It moreover ventures a connection between the âorder of thingsâ in the neighborhood and âthe very nature of the raceâ: the immigrantsâ way of living, it suggests, might be essential rather than circumstantial, and thus unchangeable.
Even as it repeatedly proposes an abiding bond between race and behavioral tendencies, the reportâs hesitation to claim a definitive link reveals a lingering uncertainty about their relationship. Tracing this uncertainty across seemingly disparate arguments about Chinese immigration, I contend that the ambiguous attachment of bodies to habits allowed the mundane to play dual roles in these debates. While calls for restricting Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century stressed the intransigence of particular modes of living and the incompatibility of âChineseâ and âAmericanâ habits, the potential for those of Chinese descent to adopt different habitsâwhether as part of the process of assimilation or as part of an attempt to foil immigration officialsâbecame a matter of serious consideration in the decades after entry limits were imposed. The mundane helped to substantiate claims of racial difference, but also served, through its performance in interrogation rooms as well as on the theatrical stage, as a vehicle for testing borders of race, nation, and class.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the gold rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad drew thousands of Chinese immigrants, largely from Canton, to the United States. These opportunities in mining and railroad construction had faded by the 1870s, however, and Chinese immigrants found themselves in competition for jobs with white Americans and European immigrants during a time of economic recession. The potential threat that Chinese labor posed the white working class became a central part of campaigns to regulate immigration. In his study of the factors that led to the passing of Chinese immigration restrictions, Andrew Gyory argues that the national labor movement played a much smaller part in the enactment of these laws than the politicians who found immigration an expedient issue for building political support.4 Protecting white American labor nevertheless became a major justification for the first U.S. law limiting immigration from a particular nation. The Chinese Exclusion Act, first passed in 1882, was continually renewed until it was superseded by the Immigration Act of 1924, which closed immigration from Asia. The initial restrictions on Chinese immigration, however, were less expansive in scope, and specifically distinguished Chinese laborers, who were barred, from merchants, scholars, diplomats, and leisure travelers, who were permitted temporary access. The government made other exemptions for entry and reentry for those who had immediate family in the United States and for those who were citizens by birth, although Chinese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens.
In defending their position, proponents of exclusion stressed that the Chinese could not assimilate: their living habits were too different from those of Americans and, moreover, could not be changed. In 1877, the California State Senate presented an address to Congress that declared, âThe Chinese have now lived among us, in considerable numbers, for a quarter of a century, and yet they remain separate, distinct from, and antagonistic to our people in thinking, mode of life, in tastes and principles, and are as far from assimilation as when they first arrived.â5 The alleged problem was not just that the Chinese âmode of lifeâ was too different, but that it seemed innate and unchangeable as well. Connecting the particular state of Chinatown to the particularities of the Chinese people, the 1885 report (cited above) similarly stated that forcing residents to abide by American standards of living by enforcing municipal regulations would probably not change them; it would, however, induce them to leave because of their deep resistance to changing. It claimed, âThe fact that the race is one that cannot readily throw off its habits and customs, the fact that these habits and customs are so widely at variance with our own, makes the enforcement of our laws and compulsory obedience to our laws necessarily obnoxious and revolting to the Chinese.â6 Thus, it was not just the habits themselves but also the supposed fixity of these habits that affirmed the obduracy of racial difference. Any conflict between this depiction and prevailing contemporary stereotypes of the Chinese as quintessentially imitative could be resolved by differentiating between the temporary adoption of acceptable behaviorsâfor example, while working as a servant in a white household or while under scrutiny by municipal officialsâand the ingrained habits to which the Chinese would always return.7
Yet if the possibility that the Chinese could assimilate was widely dismissed, the potential for Chinese habits to infiltrate and reshape American behaviors loomed over debates about Chinese immigration. In his study of San Franciscoâs Chinatown, Nayan Shah explains that anxieties about the Chinese âcontaminatingâ the American way of life were connected to fears that they would bring dirty and unsanitary conditions to cities, as well as force white workers to lower their standard of living. The comparison of Chinese immigrants to vermin, seen in the 1885 report on Chinatown, was a prevalent one in the late nineteenth century, in popular culture as well as in government-sanctioned studies. Shah observes, âIn health reports and journalistic reports of health inspections, Chinese were likened to a wide array of animals, including rats, hogs, and cattle. The choice of animals underscored a relationship to waste and an imperviousness to crowding.â8 The San Francisco report, for example, is thick with sensory details that convey the deplorable living conditions of Chinatown and the baffling habits of its residents: it describes âopen cess-pools, exhalations from water-closets, sinks, urinals and sewers tainting the atmosphere with noxious vapors and stifling odors,â and âpeople herded and packed in damp cellars, living literally the life of vermin, badly fed and clothed.â9 âHerded and packedâ into rooms like animals, the residents of Chinatown as depicted by this report are surrounded by similarly crowded receptacles of excrement. Multiple public health investigations of Chinatown stirred fears that such living practices and conditions would spread.10 Reports about white prostitutes living in the neighborhood recounted that their âmode of life seems to be modeled after that of the Mongolian, to a larger extent than after the manners and customs of the race to which they belong.â11 These public studies hinted that white Americans were in danger of taking up the behaviors of the Chinese, who, by contrast, remained impervious. Habitsâas well as diseaseâcould be contagious, but apparently moved in only one direction.
Anxieties about economic competition intensified trepidation about contact and contagion: supporters of immigration restrictions argued that because the habits and customs of the Chinese allowed them to subsist on much lower wages than white workers and their families, the latter would be forced to adopt similar practices just to compete. Shah contends that as unions advocated for better working conditions and living standards, âthe so-called American standard of living, or more bluntly âthe white manâs standard,â was defined in resolute opposition to the âAsiaticâ or the âcoolieâ standard of living.â12 The San Francisco municipal report determined of the Chinese, âTheir habits and mode of life render the cost of support less than one-fifth of that of the ordinary American laborer who exercises what is commonly recognized as the strictest rules of economy and thrift.â13 Among the tendencies that supposedly enabled the Chinese to live on so little, dietary choices emerged as key. Erika Lee notes that âChinese immigrantsâ purported diet of ârice and ratsâ was . . . cited as a clear sign that they had a lower standard of living, one that white working families could not (and should not) degrade themselves by accepting.â14 The California State Senate elaborated on the potential consequences of these different eating practices in âAn Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigrationâ:
Our laborers require meat and bread, which have been considered by us as necessary to that mental and bodily strength which is thought to be important to the citizens of a Republic which depends upon the strength of its people, while the Chinese require only rice, dried fish, tea, and a few simple vegetables. The cost of sustenance to the white is four-fold greater than that of the Chinese, and the wages of the whites must of necessity be greater than the wages required by the Chinese. . . . To compete with the Chinese, our laborer must be entirely changed in character, in habits of life, in everything that the Republic has hitherto required him to be.15
The address connected eating practices to the very vitality of the nation. Dietary preferences were not simply a matter of taste, but intrinsic to the American workerâs âcharacter,â and essential to fulfilling the responsibilities of a republican government. Offering its own theory of consubstantiation, the state senate located the body politic in the very meat and bread consumed by the nationâs citizens. The presumed irreconcilability of âmeatâ and âriceâ as metonyms for American and Chinese ways of living set distinct racial limits on the struggle for workersâ rights by suggesting that the very âstuffâ of Chinese and American labor differed.
Political addresses and government reports such as these attached the âproblemâ of Chinese immigration to the mundane, and their minute considerations of living habits lent their statements an ethnographic weight. Although polemic anti-immigration speeches made stronger claims about the relationship between the (racialized) body and its habits, municipal reports had the added purchase of being official, government-sanctioned studies. Moreover, their breadth in covering numerous corners of Chinatown life suggested a comprehensi...