Cities of Others
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Cities of Others

Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature

Xiaojing Zhou

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Cities of Others

Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature

Xiaojing Zhou

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Asian American literature abounds with complex depictions of American cities as spaces that reinforce racial segregation and prevent interactions across boundaries of race, culture, class, and gender. However, in Cities of Others, Xiaojing Zhou uncovers a much different narrative, providing the most comprehensive examination to date of how Asian American writers - both celebrated and overlooked - depict urban settings. Zhou goes beyond examining popular portrayals of Chinatowns by paying equal attention to life in other parts of the city. Her innovative and wide-ranging approach sheds new light on the works of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese American writers who bear witness to a variety of urban experiences and reimagine the American city as other than a segregated nation-space. Drawing on critical theories on space from urban geography, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies, Zhou shows how spatial organization shapes identity in the works of Sui Sin Far, Bienvenido Santos, Meena Alexander, Frank Chin, Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others. She also shows how the everyday practices of Asian American communities challenge racial segregation, reshape urban spaces, and redefine the identity of the American city. From a reimagining of the nineteenth-century flaneur figure in an Asian American context to providing a framework that allows readers to see ethnic enclaves and American cities as mutually constitutive and transformative, Zhou gives us a provocative new way to understand some of the most important works of Asian American literature.

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1
“THE WOMAN ABOUT TOWN”
Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings
Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.
For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics.
—MICHEL DE CERTEAU
[B]oth the external and internal design and layout of the City symbolize male power and authority and men’s legitimate occupation of these spaces.
—LINDA MCDOWELL
IN DECEMBER 1896, AFTER SPENDING SIX MONTHS IN THE THUNDER Bay District by Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada, as a correspondent for the Montreal Daily Star, Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton replaced her sister Winnifred Eaton as a full-time reporter in Kingston, Jamaica, for Gall’s Daily News Letter. She stayed there for half a year as a socially and culturally engaged journalist, covering an electoral campaign, legislative council proceedings, and other social events, discussing issues such as womanhood and women’s rights, and writing reports on the prison, orphanages, charity schools, the market scenes, and department stores, as well as short stories, reviews, and a children’s column. The wide range of topics in her writings for the Jamaican paper reflects the freedom of spatial mobility Eaton enjoyed in Jamaica, where she was identified as white, not Eurasian or “the half Chinese writer,” as she was in North America.1 Among her writings published in the Gall’s Daily News Letter are four articles, all titled “The Woman about Town”—a term that refers to Eaton herself, the journalist.2 As a female reporter, columnist, and fiction writer who goes about town, looking for stories to write, “the woman about town” is indeed a proper, yet unsettling, definition for Eaton, or any other female journalist of her time, whose role as a reporter and writer on the urban scene alters the gaze of the flâneur and intervenes in the male-dominant traditions of journalism and urban literature.
But the term “the woman about town” meant something quite different for Eaton in North American cities, where she volunteered as a Sunday school English teacher in Chinatowns and worked as a journalist and fiction writer whose topics were often about lives in Chinatowns. In North America, Eaton did not use the term “the woman about town” to refer to herself in her publications about Chinatown lives; rather, against the widespread anti-Chinese movement and sentiment of her time, she chose a Chinese name, “Sui Sin Far,” for her essays and short stories published in newspapers, popular magazines, and major literary journals in the United States.3 Nevertheless, Sui Sin Far remains “the woman about town” in her missionary and journalist work in Canadian and American Chinatowns. Moreover, “the woman about town” appears in Sui Sin Far’s journalist reports and short stories as embodied by female narrators or characters. This figure, like the flâneuse, enacts Sui Sin Far’s spatial and visual strategies in her portrayal of Chinatown lives. When the female figure in the streets is marked by both gender and race, and when the urban space in which she moves about is divided by the differences not only of class and gender but also of race and ethnicity, “the woman about town” in Sui Sin Far’s stories mobilizes multiple subversions and interventions.
However, critics tend to overlook the spatiality in the narrative strategies of Sui Sin Far though they offer insightful readings of her essays and stories that challenge racist and sexist representations of Chinatowns and undermine the ideology of racial purity.4 For example, editors Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks in their introduction to Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and Other Writings by Sui Sin Far, single out three significant aspects of Sui Sin Far’s stories:
First, they present portraits of turn-of-the-century North American Chinatowns, not in the mode of the “yellow peril” or zealous missionary literature of her era but with well-intentioned and sincere empathy. Second, the stories give voice and protagonist roles to Chinese and Chinese North American women and children, thus breaking the stereotypes of silence, invisibility, and “bachelor societies” that have ignored small but present female populations. Finally, in a period when miscegenation was illegal in nearly half the United States, Sui Sin Far’s stories are the first to introduce the plight of the child of Asian and white parents. (6)
These insights highlight the significance of Chinatowns in Sui Sin Far’s writings. But with an emphasis on the thematic and the sociohistorical, Ling and White-Parks overlook Sui Sin Far’s subversive spatial strategies for re-representing raced, gendered space, especially for portraying a mutually constitutive and transformative relation between space and subject.
Although critics such as Elizabeth Ammons, Dominika Ferens, and White-Parks have examined the aesthetics and narrative form of Sui Sin Far’s writings, the spatiality of identity and subject formation is not a major concern in their discussions. Ammons and White-Parks explore Sui Sin Far’s employment of devices such as irony, voice, and trickster play, while Ferens investigates the ways in which Sui Sin Far subversively appropriates and revises the tradition of missionary ethnographies. In Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (1995), White-Parks devotes a whole chapter to Sui’s “Pacific Coast Chinatown stories” and provides detailed important historical and cultural contexts for the stereotypes of Chinatowns. Her reading highlights the fact that “Sui Sin Far clearly challenged the images of Chinatowns as moral ‘swamps’ depicted by such authors as [Frank] Norris and [Olive] Dibert,” not only by breaking “stereotypes about Chinatowns as bachelor societies of ‘alien others’” but also by depicting “communities vibrant with women, children, and family life” (124, 120). Although spatiality of identity construction is embedded in her observation of Sui Sin Far’s journalistic portrayals of Los Angeles’s Chinatown, White-Parks emphasizes Sui Sin Far’s use of voice and tone that are “allied with the communities about which she writes” (121). Thus White-Parks, like other critics, does not devote enough attention to Sui Sin Far’s spatial strategies, which, I would argue, are largely shaped by the period’s dominant discourses on Chinatown.5
Most characteristic of Sui Sin Far’s spatial strategies is her employment of the female characters’ spatial mobility and their observations of street scenes, particularly those of Chinatown, which at once evoke and undermine mainstream representations of Chinatown by the white male gaze of the journalist, the ethnographer, and the photographer who sauntered idly as the flâneur in the streets of Chinatown, seeking sensational stories or exotic sights. Freedom of movement in the metropolises and the privilege to observe and write about urban scenes constitute the gendered, raced, and classed identity of the flâneur of Sui Sin Far’s era. Slumming in Chinatown became a popular way for white men to gather materials for travel sketches, photographs, fiction, and journalist reports on Chinatown. The thematic concerns and spatial strategies of Sui Sin Far’s stories constitute a counter-discourse in response to European Americans’ portrayals of Chinatown as a piece of China, a place of vice, filth, and crimes, as well as an enigmatic, seductive, and dangerous tourist spot. The dominant discourses construct Chinatown as everything that America is not. As Yong Chen contends: “For many white tourists, Chinatown satisfied not only their curiosity about the unfamiliar but also their need to rediscover their superiority. For them Chinatown stood as a site of comparison: one between progress and stagnation, between vices and morality, between dirtiness and hygiene, and between paganism and Christianity” (98–99). Mutually exclusive identities of race and culture like these are spatially produced and reinforced.
SPATIALITY OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
Nayan Shah in his well-researched, provocative study Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001) provides ample evidence showing that “[t]he cartography of Chinatown that was developed in government investigations, newspaper reports, and travelogues both established ‘knowledge’ of the Chinese race and aided in the making and remaking of Chinatown” (18). Shah notes that the “three key spatial elements” that characterize the production of Chinatown as a racialized space are “dens, density, and the labyrinth”: “The enclosed and inhuman spaces of dens were where the Chinese lived. High density was the condition in which they lived. And the labyrinth was the unnavigable maze that characterized both the subterranean passageways within the buildings and the streets and alleys aboveground” (18). Spatialized identity construction as such turns Chinatown into a racially marked place of filth, disease, and backwardness and naturalizes socially produced poverty, undesirability, and segregation as the inevitable results of innate racial traits of the Chinese.
Embedded in the implied correlate between the identities of Chinatown and the Chinese residents, and underlying the contrast between the Chinese “race” and American citizens, are mutually constitutive relations between space and body, between the built environments and their inhabitants. These relations, however, are mutually transformative as well. Their implications and effects render Chinatown open to change and irreducible to the uniform, homogeneous, and discrete identity constructed by the popular media of white America. In other words, if the characteristics of Chinatown as a lived space are defined by its residents, then those characteristics can be redefined and transformed in part at least by the people who live there, as well as by alternative ways of seeing and representing Chinatown and its relationship to the larger society. Elizabeth Grosz has compellingly argued for an alternative to the conventional view of space as a fixed background or container. She contends: “[S]pace is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation” (Architecture 9). This unstable, dynamic relationship between space and its inhabitants underlies the representations of Chinatown lives by Sui Sin Far and other Asian American writers.
At once a product and medium of identity construction, a segregated urban ghetto, an ethnic enclave, and a transnational, multicultural community, Chinatown has been a contested terrain in writings by Asian Americans, among whom Sui Sin Far is a literary forerunner in challenging spatially policed boundaries of race, class, gender, culture, and sexuality in American cities. To better understand the significance of the narrative strategies that Sui Sin Far employs to undermine the predominant stereotypical portrayals of Chinatown, it is necessary to briefly examine the spatiality—spatial organizations of social relations and their effects—of identity construction in the dominant discourses of her time.
With their privilege of mobility in the city, white American male writers as the flâneur played a central role in producing the “knowledge” of Chinatown and the Chinese. The commodification of writings about the urban scene in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States helped popularize stereotypes of Chinatown, which were often featured in travel sketches, newspapers, magazines, journals, and photographs. Charles W. Stoddard in his book about San Francisco’s Chinatown, A Bit of Old China (1912), depicts with sensuous ambience the uncanny experience of strolling through Chinatown: “The air is laden with the fumes of smoking sandalwood and strange odors of the East; and the streets, swarming with coolies, resound with the echoes of an unknown tongue. There is hardly room for us to pass; we pick our way, and are sometimes curiously regarded by slanted-eyed pagans” (qtd. in Chen 98–99). Apart from the alienating smells of the East, the crowdedness of Chinatown streets with strange-looking heathens who gaze upon tourists with curiosity enhances the unsettling foreignness of Chinatown. The racially marked bodies of the Chinese, then, become part of the Chinatown space and its foreign identity. Through a deceptively descriptive style and the authenticity of actually strolling in the street, this white flâneur inscribes the Chinatown space and bodies with racial meanings by rendering the Chinese cultural and bodily differences as deviant from the “American” norm. As is characteristic of Orientalist representations, the construction of Chinatown as “a bit of Old China” “in the heart of a Western metropolis” requires a particular kind of aesthetics that elides the historical and sociopolitical forces underlying the formation of Chinatown, thus isolating it from the American city.6 Arnold Genthe’s photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown collected in Pictures of Old Chinatown (1913), with text by the journalist Will Irwin, are salient examples of inscribing “Chineseness” on aestheticized Chinatown spaces and bodies by the white male gaze.7 Irwin writes in his interpretive text accompanying Genthe’s photographs: “From every doorway flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish masters. . . . Perfectly conceived in coloring and line, you saw a balcony, a woman in softly gaudy robes, a window whose blackness suggested mystery” (in Genthe, Pictures 12). The white male gaze as such reduces Chinatown and the Chinese to commodified objects and provides an aesthetic framework for visual mastery of the Chinatown scenes severed from the American urban space.
While some middle-class white men, particularly members of the San Francisco Bohemian Club and the California Camera Club, such as Genthe and Irwin, found Chinatown a pleasurable place for a thrilling and aesthetic experience, many white San Franciscans regarded this “foreign” place and community with fear and anxiety, especially after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and when cholera and smallpox epidemics struck San Francisco in the mid- and late nineteenth century, followed by an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1903.8 The intersections of racial formation and the fear of an impending epidemic catastrophe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shah contends, created “a new articulation of space and race” that made Chinatown “a singular and separate place that henceforth could be targeted in official inspections and popular commentary” (24–25). The production of fear reinforces the boundaries of the raced body and space.
Discourses on medicine and social morality played a significant part in the networks of racial identity and knowledge production. In 1878, when anti-Chinese sentiments in the United States became a formidable political force, Dr. Mary Priscilla Sawtelle published an editorial article, “The Foul, Contagious Diseases: A Phase of the Chinese Question; How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison into the Anglo-Saxon Blood,” in the Medico-Literary Journal, arguing that “our nation is threatened with destruction” by “the Chinese courtesans.” Compared with the destructive influence of these women, she asserts, “Chinese cheap labor pales into insignificance” (1). Sawtelle’s medical background lends authority to her naturalizing the raced Chinese female body as a source of contagious diseases infecting the white body, which she equates with “our nation,” and corrupting white American morality. As Donna Haraway argues, in the construction of race through discourses on the body: “[W]here race was, sex was also. And where race and sex were, [there were] worries about hygiene, decadence, health” (338).
It is worth noting, moreover, that in Sawtelle’s argument against the Chinese women’s lethal contamination of the American national body, she inscribes the threat of Chinese immigrant’s racial Otherness and inassimilable foreignness in spatial terms: “In the very heart of San Francisco there is a Chinese empire. . . . Several streets are devoted to mercantile and manufacturing pursuit, while the alleys are lined with the tenements of the Chinese courtesans” (4). Sawtelle’s article offers a salient example of the predominant stereotypical representations of Chinatown by white Americans, in which Chinatown is turned into what Shah calls a “perverse geography” that “provided a schema of the dangers of Chinatown and Chinese residents to middle-class white society in San Francisco and beyond” (79). Inscribed as “a Chinese empire,” Chinatown, then, is neither simply a passive outcome of socioeconomic and political systems nor the end result of discursive identity construction; it becomes constructive material “evidence” of the supposedly innate racial attributes of the “Chinese race,” justifying racial segregation and exclusion. Like the Chinese body, Chinatown functions as an apparently stable site for simultaneous construction and naturalization of racial identities and social positions and for surveillance, containment, and exclusion of the Chinese from U.S. citizenship and the nation-space.9
Yet, being part of the city spatially and in the vicinity of the busy commercial district and white neighborhoods, San Francisco’s Chinatown was often depicted as a dangerous masculine place where white women were reputed to be lost mysteriously or become corrupted in opium dens by Chinese men beyond any hope of returning to the outside world. Frank Norris in his short story “The Third Circle” (1897) tells of the sinister disappearance of a young white woman, Miss Ten Eck, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As the title suggests, Norris relies heavily on spatial metaphors in portraying Chinatown’s hidden vices: “There are more things in San Francisco’s Chinatown than are dreamed of in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatown—the part the guides show you, the part the guides don’t show you, and the part that no one ever hears of ” (1). Norris suggests that it is into this underground third circle of opium dens and slave girls that Miss Ten Eck vanished.
The raced, gendered, and sexualized space of Chinatown’s “third circle” also informs the works of Norris’s associates, Genthe and Irwin, “whose art,” Emma J. Teng notes, “was intimately associated with their flâneurie—their observations of and participation in the city’s street life,” particularly their slumming in Chinatown (“Artifacts” 59). Genthe evokes “The Third Circle” in his memoir, while portraying life and culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown in terms of a spatialized social hierarchy racialized as characteristically Chinese within a self-sustained architectural structure of a Chinatown theater: “The [theater] building itself was a study in ways Chinese. In it were housed all the strata of life to be found in the district. Above the theater, on the second story, lived the manager and stage director. . . . On the third flight down were the opium dens where the smokers in various stages drew their dreams from the long pipes. It was this retreat which was immortalized by Frank Norris in his story, The Third Circle” (qtd. in Teng, “Artifacts” 63–64). In her discussion of this passage, Teng notes that “[w]hat Genthe does here is reinscribe Norris’s trope as physical space: metaphorical circles become architectural structures—three stories segregating classes of people and activities. For Genthe, a building serves as a microcosmic articulation of socioeconomic relations in Chinatown society” (“Artifacts” 65).
Moreover, the self-contained architecture of the theater suggests the self-enclosure of the Chinatown community isolated from the American city. Hence Chinatown’s apparently discrete and stagnant Chinese culture simultaneously constructs an opposing American national and cultural identity of progress and enlightenment coded as the norm equated with whites and things European. Spatial metaphors that depict Chinatown as an embodiment of cultural and racial homogeneity also underlie Irwin’s interpretive essays on Genthe’s old Chinatown photographs. Evoking “The Third Circle,” Irwin asserts that Genthe’s photographs capture Chinatown’s mystery and inscrutability: “These pretty and painted playthings . . . furnished a glimpse into Frank Norris’s Third Circle, the underworld. We shall never quite understand the Chinese, I suppose; and not the least comprehensible thing about them is the paradox of their ideas and emotions” (in Genthe, Old Chinatown 112–13). Paradoxically, the inscrutable Chinese appear completely knowable to Norris, Genthe, and Irwin, whose white male gaze masters and domesticates the Otherness of the Chinese they encounter. By assuming an anthropological authority of detached observation and interpretation of Chinatown, Irwin, like Genthe and Norris, among others, produces the knowledge of a separate Chinese society and culture, apart from and undisturbed by things American. The Chinese, then, may be “with us, but not of us.”10
Similar representations also characterize portrayals of New York City’s Chinatown in mainstream media. Apart from constructing it as a site for encountering the unknown, Mary Ting Yi Lui notes: “Tourist guidebooks and sensational newspaper and social reform reports frequently linked Chinatown’s topography to the various vice activities in the area. Doyers Street for example was described in the 1904 tourist guidebook, New York’s Chinatown: Ancient Pekin Seen at “Old Bowery” Gate, as ‘the crookedest in [the] city, making half a dozen turns in its short stretch from Chatham Square to Pell St.’ Crooked streets, though a common feature of lower Manhattan, came to reflect the immorality and hidden criminal nature of the neighborhood and its residents” (Lui, Chinatown 39–40). Although the journalist Louis J. Beck claimed to offer a “fair and just” view in his book on New York City’s Chinatown, he depicted this neighborhood as a “self-contained environment where all material, cultural, and spiritual needs c...

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