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CLAIMING RIGHT TO THE CITY
Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family
One of the most powerful ways in which social space can be conceptualised is as constituted out of social relations, social interactions, and for that reason always and everywhere an expression and a medium of power.
—DOREEN MASSEY
Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power.
—MICHEL FOUCAULT
PUBLISHED IN 1948, CHINATOWN FAMILY BY LIN YUTANG IS THE first novel about Chinese American lives in New York City and its Chinatown during the 1930s.1 Unlike the predominant merchant-class Chinese immigrant families in Sui Sin Far’s journalist reports and short stories, and in contrast to the upper-class Chinese American family in Pardee Lowe’s autobiography set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Father and Glorious Descendant (1943), the family in Lin’s novel, the Fongs, is working-class and “illegal” according to the United States’ Chinese exclusion laws.2 The 1875 Page Law barring the entry of Chinese, Japanese, and “Mongolian” contract laborers and women for the purpose of prostitution was an effective measure for restricting immigration of Chinese women to the United States, as Sucheng Chan contends in her essay “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943.” Chan shows with abundant evidence that “[g]iven the widely held view that all Chinese women were prostitutes, laws against the latter affected other groups of Chinese women who sought admission into the country as well” (95). Najia Aarim-Heriot further demonstrates that “[f]rom 1876 to 1882, the number of Chinese women entering the United States declined by 68 percent from the previous seven-year period—from 4,142 to 1,338” (178). The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers and declared Chinese ineligible for citizenship, was renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902 until its repeal in 1943 (Takaki, Strangers 111). In addition, antimiscegenation laws in several states implemented since the late nineteenth century, and the 1922 Cable Act stipulating that American women citizens would lose their U.S. citizenship if they married aliens ineligible for citizenship (repealed in 1931), made it extremely difficult, if not entirely impossible, for working-class Chinese immigrants to have families in the United States (Yung, “Chronology” 426). When the 1924 Immigration Quota Act extended immigration exclusion to all Asians (except Hawaiians and Filipinos), it allowed entry of alien wives of Chinese merchants only (Peffer).
Chinatown Family alludes to those exclusionary laws and their underlying racism. The family’s patriarch, Tom Fong, Sr., who comes to the United States during the gold rush, is driven out of the West Coast by anti-Chinese violence and becomes a laundryman in New York City. Forbidden by law to have a family in the United States, Fong goes back to China every five or six years to be with his wife and to father a child. The Chinese Exclusion Act is still in effect when, with the help of his second son, Frederick, an insurance agent, who entered the United States by jumping ship while working as a seaman at age sixteen, Fong eventually has enough money to bring his wife and their two youngest children to New York City during the 1930s (Chinatown Family 7).3 Lin situates the Fongs’ family union in New York in the context of U.S. exclusionary laws through an ironic, yet seemingly matter-of-fact, statement by the narrator: “There were those immigration officials, and there were immigration laws, laws made, it seemed, especially to keep Chinese out of America, or to let in as few as possible” (9). Hence, to live as a family, the Fongs have to circumvent the law: “A laundryman certainly could not bring his family into the country legally. But a merchant could if the children were not yet twenty-one years old. And Uncle Chan was a merchant, with a fine busy grocery store in Chinatown.” He “was glad to help to bring his sister and her children over.” So “to satisfy the law,” Uncle Chan made his brother-in-law Tom Fong legally a joint owner of the grocery store. “Thus in the somewhat blinking eyes of the law, Tom Fong became a merchant” (10).
Given the historical context of Chinese exclusionary laws, Lin’s choice of a working-class Chinese American family for his book set in New York City during the 1930s challenges not only the exclusion of the Chinese from immigration and U.S. citizenship but also the criminalization of the Chinese in the U.S. nation-space.4 Chen Lok Chua in his introduction to the 2008 edition of Chinatown Family points out the significance of the novel’s title and its implications:
Lin Yutang’s calling his novel Chinatown Family during the early twentieth century could have been viewed as an act of mischief or even subversion. It was at least done tongue in cheek, for the paterfamilias in Lin’s Chinatown Family, an otherwise very innocuous Tom Fong, is not only a Chinese man but a laundryman to boot! And in the early twentieth century, the mighty machinery of the U.S. Immigration Service was geared precisely to preventing Chinese laborers such as Fong from having a family on American soil. In fact, in the 1930s, which is when the action of Lin’s Chinatown Family takes place, Fong’s family was downright illegal in America. (xiii)
By situating Chinatown Family within its historical context, Chen draws critical attention to the ways that the novel exposes the violation of Chinese immigrants’ human rights through legalized discrimination on grounds of race, class, and national origins. “The subtextual question in Lin’s portrait of his Chinatown family,” Chen contends, “is whether social and human units such as this should be discriminated against and even criminalized” (xv). Chen’s remarks about Chinatown Family point to the novel’s subversive possibilities, which have often been overlooked by critics.
However, by emphasizing cultural conflicts in terms of “acculturation and assimilation” in Chinese immigrants’ pursuit of the American Dream, Chen’s reading of the novel scants the spatial strategies Lin employs in critiquing the exploitation and social exclusion of the Chinese in the United States and in portraying the formation of Chinese American subjects. In his 1981 article “Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston” Chen contends that Lin “depicts a conflict between the materialistic dream that motivated the immigrants and the Confucian ideal of the family” through “the perspectives of several ways of thought: Christianity, individualistic materialism, Confucianism, and Taoism” (61). This reading that interprets the Fongs’ modest upward mobility in terms of their successful adaptation to the dominant culture while maintaining the Confucian ideals of the family unwittingly reiterates the myth of cultural assimilation that elides structural inequalities. Adopting a similar approach, Katherine Karle reads Chinatown Family as “a story of Chinese immigrants, a comparison of two cultures, and a Bildungsroman,” with an emphasis on the novel’s structural and thematic “balance” between “yin and yang” and between “traditional Chinese philosophy and attitudes” and “new world ‘American’ concepts” (93, 95, 97). Such emphasis on Chinese culture as a resource for overcoming racial exclusion and exploitation unwittingly absolves the necessity of structural redress of racial inequality. The ideology of cultural assimilation promoted by Edward E. Park, a theorist of the Chicago school of sociology, seems to underlie both the novel’s immigrant narrative and Chen’s and Karle’s ethnocentric approach to the novel.5 Critics such as Elaine H. Kim, Robert G. Lee, David Palumbo-Liu, Christopher Douglas, and Yoonmee Chang, among others, have pointed out the pitfall of the “ethnographic imperative” (Y. Chang’s phrase, Writing 8) in Asian American writings that highlight Asian Americans’ upward mobility at the expense of eliding structural inequality.6
Although other critics have rightly pointed out the novel’s problematic representation of the Chinese immigrant family’s upward mobility, their examinations tend to focus on Lin’s depiction of the characters as stereotypes, hence overlooking the social critique and the subversive, interventional possibilities embedded in the novel. E. H. Kim, for instance, observes that the characters in the novel “are modeled after familiar stereotypes of docile, grateful Chinese who can accept brutality, injustice, and hardship cheerfully” (Asian American Literature 104). Moreover, Kim argues that despite their experience of racism, the characters perpetuate the myths of the American Dream and freedom: “All of the characters in Chinatown Family call America ‘a good country’ where opportunities abound and where one can do whatever one pleases without government interference” (105). In a similar vein, Xiao-huang Yin contends that Chinatown Family “reinforced Western stereotypes of China and the Chinese” by suggesting that “the Chinese were able to succeed and get along with people everywhere because they knew how to follow Taoist teachings and avoid confrontations” (171–72). Drawing on Taoist wisdom to survive racist violence and to avoid direct confrontation of social injustice is precisely what a new generation of Asian American writers and critics find deplorable. Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong, the editors of one of the earliest Asian American anthologies, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), condemn Chinatown Family as a “euphemized portrait of Chinatown” that caters to “the white reading audience” who “has been steeped in the saccharine patronage of Chinatown culture” (Chin et al., introduction 16). Their denunciation of Lin’s depiction of Chinatown in the novel as a discursive production catering to “the white reading audience” actually alerts critical attention to the spatially constituted racial position and cultural identity underlying the narrative strategies of Chinatown Family.
Yet the spatiality of identity construction and subject formation in Chinatown Family remains overlooked in critical analyses of the novel, even though recent scholarship on Lin’s work has advanced beyond largely ethnographical readings of assimilative immigrant narratives of upward mobility through adherence to hard work and family values and by overcoming cultural conflicts. While continuing to explore the implications of Chinese immigrants’ assimilation as portrayed in Chinatown Family, Palumbo-Liu shifts critical attention from Lin’s depiction of stereotypical Chinese culture to the formation of the Chinese American subject through the “model minority” discourse.7 In his analysis of the assimilation process of Tom Fong, Jr., Palumbo-Liu highlights the pedagogical relationship between Tom and his white English teacher, Miss Cartwright, who embodies the norm and ideal of the desirability of being American (Asian/American 157). As described in the novel: “[Tom] had never believed it possible that there were such Americans. Miss Cartwright spoke with a kind of angelic sweetness. . . . Her accent was feminine, clear, softly vibrant, and seemed to Tom divine” (61). This raced and gendered pedagogical relationship evokes the relationship between Chinese male immigrants and white female missionary patrons and Sunday school teachers in several short stories by Sui Sin Far. The function of this relationship, however, becomes more complex when its impact on white America is taken into account. As Palumbo-Liu observes:
Cartwright not only inculcates in Tom the desire to be Americanized; he revives in her the same impulse. In fact, there is an aspect of envy in the excitement that is generated in Miss Cartwright over Tom’s learning experience. . . . Thus this episode reveals at once the interrelationship between sexuality, race, and culture, and the complex impetus for learning to be American and its therapeutic effect on America: the “model minority” serves both as a model for other minorities to follow in the process toward Americanization and as a secondary modeling system for whites. (Asian/American 157)
The effort Tom puts into the learning of English as an “indispensable part of learning to be American,” Palumbo-Liu notes, “signals an ethical and moral strength now lacking in the ‘west,’ which has become complacent and spoiled” (157).
Richard Jean So, in his article “Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature” (2010), reiterates the pedagogical function of Tom’s assimilation by situating Lin’s portrayal of the Chinese immigrant experience within both the Chinese and American sociohistorical and cultural contexts. So contends that Tom Fong, Jr., represents a model of “the incorporation of Chinese subjects into US liberal democracy” through “his experience of America as a kind of political pedagogy, and the classroom appropriately becomes the site of his assimilation” (54). He notes that Tom’s wrestling with the language of the Declaration of Independence led to his comprehension and absorption of “the text’s significance” when his history teacher, Mr. Watson, rendered the meaning of the text “sentence by sentence, into plain colloquial English” (54). By linking Tom’s study of the Declaration of Independence to Lin’s earlier socially engaged intellectual work in Shanghai, which in part motivated his translation of the Declaration of Independence into colloquial Chinese, So argues that “Tom is the utopian afterlife of Lin’s Republican Chinaman” (54). Moreover, when he is called upon by Mr. Watson to present to the class what the Declaration of Independence says, Tom explicates the text in plain English so successfully, to the surprise of his classmates and the satisfaction of his teacher, that he embodies the “model minority,” reinforcing the myth of the American Dream in terms of American ideals detached from the reality of structurally produced social and racial inequality.8
Both Palumbo-Liu’s and So’s examinations of the pedagogical functions of Tom’s assimilation help advance critical studies of Chinatown Family and other Asian American literary texts. Their emphasis on the formation of the subject through language and discourse, however, leaves the spatial formation of Chinese American identity and subjectivity in the novel unexamined. Although their readings of Chinatown Family offer provocative insights into the significance of Lin’s problematic representation of Chinese American experience, they overlook the characters’ spatially enacted resistance and subversion in the novel.
Recent scholarship on urban space explores “not only what has increasingly been called the ‘social production of the built environment’ but also, how built environments both represent and condition economies, societies, and cultures,” as sociologist Anthony D. King observes. King explains: “[T] he built environment is more than a mere representation of social order (i.e. a reflector), or simply a mere environment in which social action takes place. Rather, physical and spatial urban forms actually constitute as well as represent much of social and cultural existence: society is to a very large extent constituted through the buildings and spaces that it creates” (1). If the spatial is where the social and the cultural are constituted, then identity and subject formations are also shaped by the spatial. As Grosz argues, “[T]he city is both a mode for the regulation and administration of subjects but also an urban space in turn reinscribed by the particularities of its occupation and use” (Space 109). Hence possibilities of resistance and intervention are embedded in the mutually constitutive and transformative relationship between the urban space and the embodied subject: “[T]he city is . . . the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed. In turn, the body (as cultural product) transforms, reinscribes the urban landscape according to its changing (demographic) needs, extending the limits of the city” (Space 108–9). From this perspective, the spatiality of identity construction and subject formation must be investigated to better understand not only the ways the dominant ideology constitutes its subjects through discourses and spatially constituted social relations but also the possibilities of resistance and intervention through the subject’s relationship to and activities in the social space, which is in part constituted by the gendered, racially marked body and space.
Chinatown Family’s most distinctive subversion, I would argue, lies in Lin’s explicit employment of urban topography through the characters’ everyday practices to resist the exclusion and segregation of the Chinese, to explore the formations of Chinese American identity and subjectivity, and to claim Chinese Americans’ right to the city. In so doing, Lin, like Sui Sin Far, at once undermines and reinvents the privileged white male flâneur figure of urban observation and urban exploration and dismantles the myth of Chinatown as a self-closed, morally decrepit, “foreign” terrain in American cities. While resonating with the spatially mobilized subject formation embedded in Sui Sin Far’s stories such as “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior Woman,” Lin’s spatially oriented narrative strategies are more overtly deployed in representing the characters’ identity formations. The spatial mobility of the Fongs in the city facilitates their becoming American, shapes their subjectivity, and maps out the connections between Chinatown and the city as the Fongs seek to participate in the life of the city and to become part of the Chinese American community. In fact, the Fongs and the Chinese American community in New York City claim their right to the city by inhabiting public spaces through sightseeing and travel and by using parades in the streets to assert their belonging and their political agendas.
De Certeau’s theory on the spatial practices of everyday life can shed light on the subversive and interventional effects of Lin’s portrayals of the streets of New York City and Chinatown. While discussing how the mechanisms and technical procedures of power transform “a human multiplicity into a ‘disciplinary’ society,” de Certeau asks: “But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?” De Certeau’s question points to the ways that “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life.” By investigating “these multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised,” de Certeau develops “a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city” (96). This concept of subversive possibilities embedded in everyday practices of lived space sheds light on Lin’s deployment of urban topography through the living and working environment of the Fongs and their everyday activities.
RESISTANCE TO SPATIAL CONFINEMENT AND SOCIAL ISOLATION
Much of the sociopolitical valence of Chinatown Family resides in Lin’s representations of how space is inhabited in New York City. The location of the Fongs’ laundry reflects the subordinate, marginal social position of the Chinese laundrymen in American society.9 When Mrs. Fong and Tom and Eva finally arrive at “TOM FONG HAND LAUNDRY”—the family business and home in New York City—they are dismayed. “The little rathole of a shop on a cross street near the corner of Third Avenue was a great disappointment to Tom and Eva and even mother.” The family business in America is nothing like what Tom had expected it to be. He “had had visions of a spic-and-span shop, all American style, crowded with hundreds of American customers, all talking the gibberish that was English” (15). It is in this “little rathole of a shop” that Tom Fong, Sr., and his eldest son, Loy, or “Daiko” (big brother), have been laboring for decades. “Father and son ironed and ironed and ironed deep into the night, silently and contentedly, in the room and a half in the basement of the house in a crosstown street in the Eighties” (10). Even though Tom Fong, Sr., and Loy do not seem to have any complaints about their work, Lin tactfully exposes their humiliation and exploitation through the eyes of Tom: “Tom watched his father and Daiko at work in their shirt sleeves, ironing shirts, undershirts, towels, sheets, girls’ dresses, workmen’s blue denims, and ladies’ silk pajamas” (61). The laundry items indicate the class, gender, and racial backgrounds of their customers. For men to make a living out of washing and ironing the clothes not only of rich people and other workmen but also of women in a male-dominant society constitutes a humiliation marked by the inequality of race and class. Even the less privileged whites in American society—white women and workmen—can enjoy the privilege of having their laundry done for a cheap price by Chinamen.
Tom’s experience and observation of the spatially confined working conditions of the family laundry serve to critique the inequality of race and class. In summer evenings the basement becomes suffocating: “[N]o breath of fresh air reached that little room. Tom saw his father and Daiko covered with perspiration, the heat from the pressing irons accumulating until they had to open the door. They had to keep the window shut to guard against the dust from the streets” (61). Through the closed window Tom “saw the legs of men, women, and children passing by on the sidewalk,” and “[e]arnestly he wished some day that they could come up from the basement and own a shop on the street level” (60). This spatially confined underground condition of the Fongs’ laundry shop at once reflects and reinforces the Chinese laundrymen’s subordinate, marginal social status, against which the Fong family struggles.
Lin employs visual and spatial strategies to reveal and resist Chinese immigrants’ social isolation and cultural marginalization in the city by placing the Fongs’ home on the third floor above their shop, near Third Avenue on Manhattan’s East Side. He allows Mrs. Fong to be the subject of gaze who interprets the scene in the streets and reveals how she feels about where she lives as she watches everyday life activities from her apartment window:
Often Mrs. Fong went to the window to survey the strange scene below and to watch Americans, men and women and children. . . . Only a stone’s throw away was Third Avenue, which was dark, noisy, and familiar. There was something about the darkness and familiarity and busyness of the avenue that she liked. She had never wanted to live in a deserted street, which meant that one was living in reduced circumstances. She has always wanted to live in a busy, prosperous thoroughfare, with lots of noise and people, and to be on the same footing with all the struggling millions. Third Avenue seemed to be just that. (35–36)
Unlike the Chinese merchants’ wives in Sui Sin Far’s short stories, who feel alienated from the street scene they observe from their balconies, Mrs. Fong wants to be part of it, on equal terms. Her longing to participate in city life and her desire never “to live in a deserted street, which meant that one was living in reduced circumstances” challenge the myth of Chinatown’s self-containment and critiques its segregation, while highlighting the racial inequality implicated in the spatially managed hierarchy of race and class, to which the Fongs’ “rathole”-like basement laundry shop—the fruit of more than thirty years’ labor in the United States—testifies.
Yet Third Avenue seems to hold open possibilities of New York City for Mrs. Fong and her family. Living within a stone’s throw of Third Avenue, and among European immigrants, Mrs. Fong is able to observe the everyday hustle and bustle of the city on the thoroughfare, to feel its energetic activities around her, and to begin imagining her American Dream: “All this rumble, this intense activity of people going somewhere, gave her a sense of excitement and of being in the midst of things. Where there were plenty of people in a city such as New York, she was sure there was money to be made. . . . As she sat before the window, the conviction grew in her mind that there was plenty of money to be made in New York, and she was going to make it” (36). Mrs. Fong’s gaze serves multiple functions. Apart from depicting the urban environment of her everyday life, it reveals the impact of the city on the formation of a Chinese immigrant subject. Seeing the bustling commerce and crowds on Third Avenue, Mrs. Fong believes that she “needed only to wash the block, and perhaps, in the not impossible future, cook to feed the block” to make a lot of money (36). Conditioned as Mrs. Fong is by her gendered and raced social status, however, her American Dream is still limited to the subordinate service and nurture of others—to “wash the block” and “cook to feed the block.” Moreover, despite her ability to help expand the family’s business through hard work and good service, her dream of making enough money to open a restaurant in Chinatown is eventually materialized only as a result of her husband’s sudden death in a car accident. The conditions for the Fongs’ upward mobility from owning a tiny basement laundry shop near Eighty-Fourth Street to owning a small restaurant on the street level in Chinatown raise questions about, rather than reinforce, the myth of America as a country “where opportunities abound and where one can do whatever one pleases without government interference,” to quote E. H. Kim again (Asian American Literature 105). Nevertheless, Mrs. Fong’s belief that “there was plenty of money to be made in New York,” though it echoes a typical myth about America, asserts an immigrant Chinese woman’s subjective agency and undermines the stereotype of mute, obedient Chinese women who resist anything “American” out of fear or jealousy as portrayed in some of Sui Sin Far’s stories.
The agency embedded in Mrs. Fong’s gaze of the American urban scene also serves to return the gaze of white America and to reconstruct idealized American identity. While observing from her window the mixed, diverse European Americans of “all nationalities” in her neighborhood, Mrs. Fong asserts her sense of dignity and comments on the “disgrace even in this street of anonymous neighbors” (36). Her gaze simultaneously constructs and undermines American identity coded in moral superiority:
Mother Fong surveyed it all. Clearly, there were face and disgrace. From the Idle Hour Tavern at the corner she saw drunken men, filthy and besotted, emerge staggering to stand or crouch on the sidewalk in various stages of intoxication. The young girls in the streets were prettily dressed, walking head up at a pace that sent their golden hair flopping up and down around the nape. It was the characteristically American gait. Before the third house, where the sloppy woman lived, a group of small children were playing. They looked filthy, and she was sure they were the children of the woman who looked like a drudge. (36–37)
Even though Mrs. Fong’s sense of “face”—dignity and respectability—seems characteristically Chinese, the encoding of morality and immorality on bodily types and hygiene in her gaze reinforces gender norms and racial hierarchy, yet not without subversive effect.
Mrs. Fong’s observations of her white neighbors also serve to demonstrate her eligibility for American “cultural citizenship.” Nayan Shah, among others, has shown with compelling evidence that by the early twentieth century cleanliness in the United States had become a sign of civic virtue, a technique for disciplining cultural citizenship.10 “The management of space and the care of the body were perceived to be an index of American cultural citizenship and civic belonging,” observes Shah. “The American system of cultural citizenship combined class discourses of respectability and middle-class tastes with heteronormative discourses of adult male responsibility [and] female domestic caretaking” (Shah 204). Mrs. Fong’s commentary gaze on European Americans at once evokes and undermines the norms of cultural citizenship embodied by middle-class whites. Tidiness and cleanliness correlate with the blond girls whose gait is “characteristically American,” whereas laziness and filth are associated with the “sloppy” woman “who looked like a drudge.” Similar attributes of disgrace are also visible in the filthy and drunken men staggering in the street or emerging from the tavern. These European immigrants and white Americans, then, are far from being superior to the Chinese as portrayed in the popular newspapers and official discourses. The moral code of bodily care and conduct that structures Mrs. Fong’s gaze is subversive to white supremacy, though it in part reinforces the normative discourse on morality, hygiene, and bodily appearances. The interpretive and constitutive gaze of Mrs. Fong as a female Chinese immigrant also conveys her own culturally shaped sense of responsibility and normative standard of hygiene. Nevertheless, Mrs. Fong’s observation of both desirable and disgraceful white Americans undermines the binary opposites of racialized identities—white American citizens who exemplify cleanliness, morality, and progress versus Chinese aliens who embody filth, moral decrepitude, and backwardness.
The diverse, racially marked, gendered bodies with their encoded values and meanings constitute part of the urban environment that shapes Mrs. Fong’s and her children’s adaptation to American culture. As Shah contends, bodily care identified with middle-class respectability and domesticity is “perceived to cultivate citizen-subjects capable of undertaking the responsibilities of American citizenship” (205). Eager to prove their capability for American cultural citizenship, Mother Fong is determined to “discipline” the bodies of Tom and Eva for “surveillance” in the public space. She makes sure that Tom and Eva are scrubbed clean and dressed like Americans when they go out. In her eyes, “American clothes for boys and girls were pretty, and they looked well on Tom and Eva” (37). She admires American girls’ ringlets and has her Italian daughter-in-law, Flora, wife of her eldest son, Loy, make Eva’s hair the same way. As for Tom, he must remember to have his hair cut every two weeks “at the Lexington Avenue barber shop,” “a sacred and inviolable institution.” “His head was cropped clean and close at the back, and a small wisp of hair always fell across one side of his forehead” (37). Mother Fong is pleased with Tom’s new gentlemanly appearance. The bodily care Eva and Tom receive demonstrates their conformity to American culture, as well as Mother Fong’s desire to be respected and accepted by white America. The environment of the American city is constitutive and reflective of the body inscribed with values and identities. As sociologist Bryan S. Turner theorizes: “[T]he body is a site of enormous symbolic work and symbolic production. Its deformities are stigmatic and stigmatizing, while at the same time its perfections, culturally defined, are objects of praise and admiration. . . . [T]he body is both an environment we practise on and also practise with. We labour on, in and with bodies. . . . [O]ur body maintenance creates social bonds, expresses social relations and reaffirms or denies them” (191). Mrs. Fong’s efforts in producing and maintaining the Americanized looks of Tom and Eva express her desire to create a social bond with mainstream America by distancing her family from the stigmatized bodily appearances in the street observed from her apartment window.
However, the Americanization of Tom’s and Eva’s irreducibly raced bodies demonstrates more than the assimilation of Chinese immigrants; it asserts resistance to the exclusion of the Chinese from the American body politic and undermines its racial homogeneity. Cognizant of the meanings inscribed on the body in the public space, Mrs. Fong regularly dresses up her two younger children at four o’clock in the afternoon, “Tom with his hair parted and his neck scrubbed, and Eva with her pretty ringlets and a clean cotton dress.” Then she orders them to go out of the house somewhere, no matter where, as if Tom and Eva are to be “walking signboards of Tom Fong’s Hand Laundry.” For “Mother Fong reasoned that people would not send their laundry to a place where the children looked as filthy as those in the third house opposite” (37). But more often than not she wants her children to “march” to Central Park, the East River, or anywhere they want far away from the area of their shop, where people would recognize them not as the laundryman’s children but always as Chinese, no matter how American their hair styles or clothes might be. “We are Chinese,” says Mrs. Fong to Tom and Eva as she is dressing them up for the city’s public space, “and you do not want to disgrace China” (37). Chinese immigrants’ Americanized “body maintenance,” then, expresses multiple social bonds—identifications with the middle class, American culture, and Chinese ethnicity. If the body “is both an environment we practise on and also practise with,” as Turner contends, the Americanized “alien” body of the Chinese, though it may signify assimilation, introduces a subversive difference into the environment it inhabits.
By inhabiting the city otherwise than as prescribed by racial exclusion and segregation, the Fongs resist their spatially reinforced confinement to the margins of American society. Grosz’s argument that the body as “cultural product” can in turn transform and reinscribe the urban environment and unsettle binarized identities suggests that Tom’s and Eva’s Americanized appearances in the city’s public space signify more than conformity to the dominant culture. The “Americanized” yet racially marked body of the Chinese in the city streets and Central Park alters the white American body politic in the urban space, reconstituting the urban environment. When the body is understood as the “primary sociocultural product,” Grosz contends, “[i]t involves a double displacement, an alteration or realignment of a number of conceptual schemes that have thus far been used to think bodies: on the one hand, it involves problematizing a whole series of binary oppositions and dichotomous categories” (Architecture 30). Furthermore, Grosz argues: “[M]inorities . . . aren’t ‘imprisoned’ in or by space, because space (unless we are talking about a literal prison) is never fixed or contained . . . because space is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation. The more one disinvests one’s own body from that space, the less able one is to effectively inhabit that space as one’s own” (Architecture 9). Inhabiting the city as equal citizens is precisely what Mrs. Fong encourages her children to do.
For the Fongs, deliberately going out dressed up as Americans to occupy and experience the public spaces in the city enacts what de Certeau calls the politics of “everyday practices, of lived space” (96). By regularly urging her children to go to Central Park and to explore the city, Mrs. Fong encourages them to participate in city life, to experience being part of the American urban populace, and to refuse the confinement of their basement shop, their small apartment, and even their neighborhood. Their everyday practices in inhabiting the city resist the social isolation and spatial containment of working-class Chinese immigrants like Tom Fong, Sr., who spends most of his time doing laundry in the basement. When he goes out at all, Chinatown is the only place Tom Fong, Sr., visits. Having experienced racism almost on a daily basis, he is aware that as a Chinaman and laundryman to boot, he is unwanted, despised, and marginal in the country and city where he has made his home. “Tom Fong had been so used to being called a Chink that it did not really hurt” (122). He walks with his head bending down, looking at the pavement when he has to go out onto the street. The public space of the city remained hostile or at least unfriendly to him until suddenly the American attitude changed toward the Chinese when China fought against Japanese invasion in 1937. “Tom Fong no longer stooped and looked at the pavement as he walked the streets. He held his chin level and met the eyes of the people who passed, and he knew that they were admiring his people for fighting” (123).
In contrast to her husband’s submission to the marginal, abject identity of the Chinese in the United States and in the city, Mrs. Fong wants her children to walk the streets with pride to claim right to the city. “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered,” de Certeau contends (97). For de Certeau, walking “is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language)” (97–98). If walking in the city can spatially act out the place by appropriating the topographical system, then the body and its movement are constitutive of the place it acts out, just as the pedestrians act out the place of Third Avenue. But, given their racially marked yet Americanized bodies, Tom and Eva act out a different place, one that undermines racial and cultural homogeneity, by regularly walking the streets, visiting places where Chinese Americans like their father would never go. Hence their walking, in a way, transforms the urban environment, claims their belonging, and inhabits the American urban space “on the same footing with all the struggling millions” (36).
Inhabiting the city through flânerie and activities in public spaces for Chinese immigrants, then, also functions as a transformative process of their identity and subjectivity formation. What Eva sees on her walks and at school has exposed her to alternative ways of being a female. At twelve, one year younger than Tom, Eva is a well-disciplined, proper Chinese girl. Unlike her inquisitive and assertive brother, who constantly asks questions and refuses to accept easy answers, Eva often “said nothing and seemed to accept everything.” She is constantly reminded by her mother that she is “a girl, a nu-tsai.” Eva understands that the term nu-tsai (literally “female material”) defines what she can become and how she is supposed to behave as a girl: “In Eva’s mind it meant vaguely that a girl had to be put in her place” (50). By learning the proper good manners of a girl the female subject is disciplined to assume the subordinate roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother. Eva seems to have accepted the role of a nu-tsai, but underneath her quiet manner something has disturbed her sense of female propriety. When she is outside her home, something awakens in Eva: “On the streets and at school, she saw hustling, bustling, boisterous, screaming, yelling, scuffing, ball-batting children, girls as well as boys. . . . American girls yelled at the top of their voices, and how proud and straight they stood! How fast they walked, with free swaying strides! . . . On the park playground, she saw how the grown-up girls . . . stood in bloomers, arms akimbo, legs wide apart, beautiful, strong, unafraid” (51). Eva’s access to the city’s streets, parks, and public school enables her to witness different ways of being a female, ways that challenge the role of being a traditional Chinese nu-tsai prescribed by patriarchy at home. Significantly, Eva perceives liberating possibilities of being a female through an urban environment that offers her different models and alternative ways of being and thinking, which are unavailable at home. By the time she reaches seventeen, Eva has become “independent and self-confident.” “She walked straight and unafraid like American girls and with the American gait” (133). It is worth noting, however, that the formation of Eva as a confident female is supposed to be the result of her Americanization, which is equated with freedom, progress, independence, and individuality, eliding gender inequality in the United States and indirectly casting Chinese society as the opposite. Nevertheless, Eva’s development indicates the significance of mobility in the public space for women’s subject formation. Unlike several of the young immigrant women who are mostly confined to the domestic space in Sui Sin Far’s stories of an earlier era, Eva has much more mobility in the city, in part because of her age and her brother Tom, who is tireless in his eagerness to explore the city and who likes to invite Eva to walk with him. But Tom often ventures into the city by himself, and what he perceives on his walks defers from what Eva experiences. Both the act and effect of their walking in the city are gendered, producing different stories about their respective subject formations. These stories resist the exclusion of Chinese Americans and claim their right to the city even as they in part reiterate the assimilation myth.
URBAN EXPLORATION AND THE SUBJECT FORMATION OF TOM FONG, JR.
Much of the novel’s narrative is devoted to Tom’s exploration of the city, which is central to his coming of age and to his becoming someone other than a laundryman like his father or a shop owner in Chinatown like his uncle. Flânerie plays a crucial role in Tom’s formation as a Chinese American. Given his cultural background and social position as a Chinese immigrant forbidden by law to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, Tom, an urban explorer in New York City, reinvents the flâneur figure in Western urban literature, intervening in the privileged, bourgeois, white male gaze. Benjamin’s study of the relationship between the observer and the observed in the city and of the intricate connections among the economic, technical, and literary developments as a phenomenon of modernity provides a useful framework for understanding the role of urban exploration in the formation of Tom’s subjectivity. In his analysis of modern literary genres in relation to the development of capitalism and technology, Benjamin suggests that commercial arcades—glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors with shops and departments on both sides, extending through whole blocks of buildings—emerged in Paris during the 1820s and 1830s, giving rise to the figure of the flâneur and new genres of writings (Benjamin, Arcades Project). “Strolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades,” observes Benjamin. “As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into the market-place.” Subsequently, new topics and new modes of writing appeared: “Once a writer had entered the marketplace, he looked around as in a diorama. A special literary genre has preserved his first attempts at orienting himself. It is a panorama literature. . . . In this literature, the modest-looking, paperbound, pocket-size volumes called ‘physiologies’ had pride of place. They investigated types that might be encountered by a person taking a look at the marketplace” (Charles Baudelaire 36, 170, 35). Visual mastery of the cityscape and urban crowd is key to this new genre of city literature. Scenes and people in the streets become objects of study by the flâneur-writer, who categorizes types of people and constructs their identities according to their appearances through seemingly scientific observations and apparently realistic descriptions. The flâneur-writer’s relationship to the urban space also characterizes that of the participant-observer journalist and the cultural sociologist doing fieldwork.
Similar to the method of observation and the subject position of the flâneur “who goes botanizing on the asphalt” in the city (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 36), observation of life in the city was a primary research method of the Chicago school of sociology, on which Robert E. Park had a formative impact, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. Before he eventually joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1914, Park worked as a reporter and as an editor on newspapers in Minneapolis, Detroit, New York, and Chicago between 1891 and 1898.11 He attributed his interest in sociology to his journalist fieldwork in the city: “I have actually covered more ground, tramping about in cities in different parts of the world, than any other living man. Out of all this I gained, among other things, a conception of the city, the community, and the region, not as a geographical phenomenon merely but as a kind of social organism” (“Autobiographical Note” viii). According to his “earliest conception of a sociologist,” Park adds, “he was to be a kind of super-reporter, like the men who write for Fortune” (viii–ix). In his seminal article “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment,” published in the American Journal of Sociology (1915), Park proposes the notion of “the city [as] a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied” (612). Like the flâneur, the reporter and the Parkian sociologist assume the authoritative position of knowledge production. As an “institutionalised voyeur,” the historian Fred Matthews points out, “[t]he city beat reporter from the first fulfilled the role of informal and intuitive sociologist, acting as eyes, ears, and moral censor for the audience removed by size and distance from the direct exercise of their traditional communal roles” (qtd. in Lal 18). Detached from life in the street, the “institutionalised voyeur” maintains his distance from and his authority over what he observes. The writer, journalist, or sociologist as the flâneur—the urban stroller and spectator—then, is the privileged subject of observation, analysis, and interpretation, who assumes mastery and authority over the cityscape, including bodies marked by differences of gender, class, race, and culture. Moreover, underlying Park’s notion of the sociologist as a “super-reporter” and Benjamin’s discussion of the flâneur in urban literature is a simultaneous, mutually constitutive relation between the institutionalized voyeur’s subjectivity and the urban space, including the crowds in the streets.
But unlike the fieldwork of the urban sociologist or the reporter on the beat, the writings of the flâneur-writer are as much about the self as about the city. The subjectivity of the flâneur-writer and the cityscape are mutually informing and constitutive in writings about the city. Benjamin in his study Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism contends that “[w]ith Baudelaire, Paris for the first time became the subject of lyrical poetry.”12 Yet it is not only Paris but also the poet’s sense of his social alienation that the poet’s gaze reflects. As Benjamin states: “[Baudelaire’s] gaze which falls upon the city is rather the gaze of alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur . . . [who] still stood at the margin, of the great city as of the bourgeois class. . . . In neither of them was he at home. He sought his asylum in the crowd. . . . The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur” (Charles Baudelaire 170). Paradoxically, the flâneur who stands “at the margin of the great city” finds himself at home among the urban crowd:
For the perfect flâneur . . . it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow. . . . To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial [!!] [exclamation marks in the original] natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. . . . We might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . which, with each one of its movements, represents the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. (Benjamin, Arcades Project 443)
As a detached, participant, invisible observer, the perfect flâneur enjoys the pleasure of voyeurism, of knowing through seeing without being seen. Embedded in Benjamin’s definition of the flâneur is the privilege of the bourgeois male subject, whose voyeuristic gaze is supposed to be neutral and inclusive. Indeed, “to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world” and to represent “all the elements of life” is a gendered, classed, and raced privilege in cities, where women and racial minorities encounter violence in the streets, where people like Tom Fong, Sr., lower their gazes and look at the pavement as they walk the streets outside of Chinatown. The freedom of movement, the sense of belonging everywhere, and the power of interpretation constitute the flâneur as a privileged, authoritative masculine subject who produces meanings and constructs identities through seemingly realistic representations.
Critics of urban literature and urban studies have pointed out that freedom of movement in the city and its subsequent cosmopolitan experience are a privilege of class and gender. Richard Sennett emphasizes the flâneur’s privilege of both gender and class. For Sennett, Walkowitz notes, “[c]osmopolitanism, ‘the experience of diversity in the city as opposed to relatively confined localism,’ . . . was a bourgeois male pleasure. It established a right to the city—a right not traditionally available to, often not even part of, the imaginative repertoire of the less advantaged” (410–11). From a feminist perspective, Elizabeth Wilson highlights the gendered privilege of the flâneur: “[T]he flâneur as a man of pleasure, . . . who takes visual possession of the city, . . . has emerged in postmodern feminist discourse as the embodiment of the ‘male gaze.’ He represents men’s visual and voyeuristic mastery over women. According to this view, the flâneur’s freedom to wander at will through the city is essentially a masculine freedom” (65). Likewise, Walkowitz contends that “to stroll across the divided spaces of the metropolis, whether it was London, Paris, or New York, to experience the city as a whole” belonged to the “privileged urban spectator” who acts as “flaneur” (410). Rather than accept this privilege as out of reach, however, Lin uses the everyday spatial practices of his disenfranchised Chinese immigrant characters, particularly Tom Fong, Jr., as a strategy to claim their right to the city. Given Tom’s gender and age—thirteen when he arrives in New York City and turning eighteen by the end of the novel—he more than any other member of his family enjoys the freedom of urban exploration.
