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âTHE WOMAN ABOUT TOWNâ
Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Farâs Writings
Every story is a travel storyâa spatial practice.
For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics.
âMICHEL DE CERTEAU
[B]oth the external and internal design and layout of the City symbolize male power and authority and menâs legitimate occupation of these spaces.
âLINDA 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 Gallâs 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 womenâs rights, and writing reports on the prison, orphanages, charity schools, the market scenes, and department stores, as well as short stories, reviews, and a childrenâs 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 âthe half Chinese writer,â as she was in North America.1 Among her writings published in the Gallâs Daily News Letter are four articles, all titled âThe Woman about Townââa 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, âthe woman about townâ 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 âthe woman about townâ 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 âthe woman about townâ 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, âSui Sin Far,â 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 âthe woman about townâ in her missionary and journalist work in Canadian and American Chinatowns. Moreover, âthe woman about townâ appears in Sui Sin Farâs journalist reports and short stories as embodied by female narrators or characters. This figure, like the flâneuse, enacts Sui Sin Farâs 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, âthe woman about townâ in Sui Sin Farâs 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 Farâs stories:
First, they present portraits of turn-of-the-century North American Chinatowns, not in the mode of the âyellow perilâ 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 âbachelor societiesâ that have ignored small but present female populations. Finally, in a period when miscegenation was illegal in nearly half the United States, Sui Sin Farâs 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 Farâs writings. But with an emphasis on the thematic and the sociohistorical, Ling and White-Parks overlook Sui Sin Farâs 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 Farâs writings, the spatiality of identity and subject formation is not a major concern in their discussions. Ammons and White-Parks explore Sui Sin Farâs 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 Suiâs âPacific Coast Chinatown storiesâ and provides detailed important historical and cultural contexts for the stereotypes of Chinatowns. Her reading highlights the fact that âSui Sin Far clearly challenged the images of Chinatowns as moral âswampsâ depicted by such authors as [Frank] Norris and [Olive] Dibert,â not only by breaking âstereotypes about Chinatowns as bachelor societies of âalien othersââ but also by depicting âcommunities vibrant with women, children, and family lifeâ (124, 120). Although spatiality of identity construction is embedded in her observation of Sui Sin Farâs journalistic portrayals of Los Angelesâs Chinatown, White-Parks emphasizes Sui Sin Farâs use of voice and tone that are âallied with the communities about which she writesâ (121). Thus White-Parks, like other critics, does not devote enough attention to Sui Sin Farâs spatial strategies, which, I would argue, are largely shaped by the periodâs dominant discourses on Chinatown.5
Most characteristic of Sui Sin Farâs spatial strategies is her employment of the female charactersâ 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 Farâs 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 Farâs stories constitute a counter-discourse in response to European Americansâ 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: âFor 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 Christianityâ (98â99). 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 Franciscoâs Chinatown (2001) provides ample evidence showing that â[t]he cartography of Chinatown that was developed in government investigations, newspaper reports, and travelogues both established âknowledgeâ of the Chinese race and aided in the making and remaking of Chinatownâ (18). Shah notes that the âthree key spatial elementsâ that characterize the production of Chinatown as a racialized space are âdens, density, and the labyrinthâ: âThe 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 abovegroundâ (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 âraceâ 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: â[S]pace is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitationâ (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 spatialityâspatial organizations of social relations and their effectsâof 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 âknowledgeâ 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 Franciscoâs Chinatown, A Bit of Old China (1912), depicts with sensuous ambience the uncanny experience of strolling through Chinatown: âThe 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 pagansâ (qtd. in Chen 98â99). 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 âAmericanâ norm. As is characteristic of Orientalist representations, the construction of Chinatown as âa bit of Old Chinaâ âin the heart of a Western metropolisâ 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 Gentheâs photographs of San Franciscoâs Chinatown collected in Pictures of Old Chinatown (1913), with text by the journalist Will Irwin, are salient examples of inscribing âChinesenessâ on aestheticized Chinatown spaces and bodies by the white male gaze.7 Irwin writes in his interpretive text accompanying Gentheâs photographs: âFrom 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 mysteryâ (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 âforeignâ 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 âa new articulation of space and raceâ that made Chinatown âa singular and separate place that henceforth could be targeted in official inspections and popular commentaryâ (24â25). 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, âThe Foul, Contagious Diseases: A Phase of the Chinese Question; How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison into the Anglo-Saxon Blood,â in the Medico-Literary Journal, arguing that âour nation is threatened with destructionâ by âthe Chinese courtesans.â Compared with the destructive influence of these women, she asserts, âChinese cheap labor pales into insignificanceâ (1). Sawtelleâs 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 âour nation,â and corrupting white American morality. As Donna Haraway argues, in the construction of race through discourses on the body: â[W]here race was, sex was also. And where race and sex were, [there were] worries about hygiene, decadence, healthâ (338).
It is worth noting, moreover, that in Sawtelleâs argument against the Chinese womenâs lethal contamination of the American national body, she inscribes the threat of Chinese immigrantâs racial Otherness and inassimilable foreignness in spatial terms: âIn 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 courtesansâ (4). Sawtelleâs 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 âperverse geographyâ that âprovided a schema of the dangers of Chinatown and Chinese residents to middle-class white society in San Francisco and beyondâ (79). Inscribed as âa Chinese empire,â 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 âevidenceâ of the supposedly innate racial attributes of the âChinese race,â 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 Franciscoâs 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 âThe Third Circleâ (1897) tells of the sinister disappearance of a young white woman, Miss Ten Eck, in San Franciscoâs Chinatown. As the title suggests, Norris relies heavily on spatial metaphors in portraying Chinatownâs hidden vices: âThere are more things in San Franciscoâs Chinatown than are dreamed of in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatownâthe part the guides show you, the part the guides donât show you, and the part that no one ever hears of â (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 Chinatownâs âthird circleâ also informs the works of Norrisâs associates, Genthe and Irwin, âwhose art,â Emma J. Teng notes, âwas intimately associated with their flâneurieâtheir observations of and participation in the cityâs street life,â particularly their slumming in Chinatown (âArtifactsâ 59). Genthe evokes âThe Third Circleâ in his memoir, while portraying life and culture in San Franciscoâs Chinatown in terms of a spatialized social hierarchy racialized as characteristically Chinese within a self-sustained architectural structure of a Chinatown theater: âThe [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 Circleâ (qtd. in Teng, âArtifactsâ 63â64). In her discussion of this passage, Teng notes that â[w]hat Genthe does here is reinscribe Norrisâs trope as physical space: metaphorical circles become architectural structuresâthree stories segregating classes of people and activities. For Genthe, a building serves as a microcosmic articulation of socioeconomic relations in Chinatown societyâ (âArtifactsâ 65).
Moreover, the self-contained architecture of the theater suggests the self-enclosure of the Chinatown community isolated from the American city. Hence Chinatownâs 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 Irwinâs interpretive essays on Gentheâs old Chinatown photographs. Evoking âThe Third Circle,â Irwin asserts that Gentheâs photographs capture Chinatownâs mystery and inscrutability: âThese pretty and painted playthings . . . furnished a glimpse into Frank Norrisâs 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 emotionsâ (in Genthe, Old Chinatown 112â13). 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 âwith us, but not of us.â10
Similar representations also characterize portrayals of New York Cityâs Chinatown in mainstream media. Apart from constructing it as a site for encountering the unknown, Mary Ting Yi Lui notes: âTourist guidebooks and sensational newspaper and social reform reports frequently linked Chinatownâs topography to the various vice activities in the area. Doyers Street for example was described in the 1904 tourist guidebook, New Yorkâs Chinatown: Ancient Pekin Seen at âOld Boweryâ Gate, as âthe crookedest in [the] city, making half a dozen turns in its short stretch from Chatham Square to Pell St.â Crooked streets, though a common feature of lower Manhattan, came to reflect the immorality and hidden criminal nature of the neighborhood and its residentsâ (Lui, Chinatown 39â40). Although the journalist Louis J. Beck claimed to offer a âfair and justâ view in his book on New York Cityâs Chinatown, he depicted this neighborhood as a âself-contained environment where all material, cultural, and spiritual needs c...