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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Contested Urban Space
The city is the emblematic space for the encounter with the stranger, the other, the different.
—KIAN TAJBAKHSH
Cities have long been key sites for the spatialization of power projects—whether political, religious, or economic.
—SASKIA SASSEN
THE CITY AS “THE EMBLEMATIC SPACE FOR THE ENCOUNTER WITH the stranger, the other, the different” and as a “key [site] for the spatialization of power projects” is a contested space and a space open to change. As such, it is a site embedded with possibilities for an inclusive democracy and a site for the emergence of new subjects, communities, and creative works. The democratic possibilities of the city are in part reflected in the election of a Chinese American as the mayor of San Francisco. January 11, 2011, was a landmark day in the city’s history. As an article in the San Francisco Chronicle states: “A new era in San Francisco politics began today when Edwin M. Lee was appointed and sworn in as mayor, the first Chinese American to hold the post” (Coté, “Ed Lee”). Appointed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors to serve out the remaining year of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s term after Newson was sworn in as lieutenant governor, Lee became the city’s forty-third mayor. For Asian Americans, Lee’s appointment has profound implications beyond the political establishment. “This is a big step we’re making as a city,” says Supervisor Eric Mar, one of four Asian Americans serving on the eleven-member board. For others, the symbolic meanings of Lee’s mayoral post are particularly significant for Asian Americans nationwide: “With Lee serving as the city’s 43rd mayor,” says Don Nakanishi, director emeritus of the Asian American Studies Center of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), “San Francisco is now the largest [city] in the country with an Asian-American leader” (Hindery, “Edwin Lee”). Yet Lee refuses to be an “ethnic politician,” representing only Asian Americans. He vowed to be a mayor for all San Franciscans, including the city’s most disenfranchised groups: “I was a progressive before progressive was a political faction in this town. I present myself to you as a mayor for everyone” (qtd. in Coté, “Ed Lee”). This apparently neutral statement has momentous implications precisely because of Lee’s Chinese American identity and its connection to the history and now the stewardship of the city.
From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, San Francisco was a site of institutionalized exclusion of racial minorities, including the Chinese, and a site of their struggles for equality. Even before the nationwide Chinese Exclusion period of 1882–1943, numerous laws were implemented in San Francisco to exclude the Chinese. In 1854, when Chan Young, a Chinese immigrant, applied for citizenship in the federal district court in San Francisco, he was denied on the grounds of race. In 1878, new California state laws empowered cities and counties to confine the Chinese within specific areas or to throw them out completely. Other discriminatory laws targeted at the Chinese also banned them from attending public schools and from being hired by state, county, or municipal governments for public work.1 Lee is keenly aware of the history and reality of racial discrimination in the city. When he was elected to his own term on November 8, 2011, he stated that his election to the mayor’s office “marked the closure of dark chapters in the city’s history when Chinese and other immigrants were persecuted” (Coté and S. Lee). In fact, Lee’s decision to run for mayor was due at least in part to the possibilities of achieving greater equality for all citizens and residents of the city. He was strongly urged to enter the mayor’s race by prominent figures such as Rose Pak, a consultant at the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce, who considers herself “a community advocate” but is known as a “Chinatown power broker,” and Willie Lewis Brown, Jr., who served as the forty-first mayor of San Francisco, the first African American to do so. While Brown’s remarks about Lee that “[h]e’s the people’s choice” and “[h]e always was the people’s choice” (qtd. in Coté and S. Lee) indicate Lee’s popularity, Pak’s words suggest the challenges Chinese and other Asian Americans face in obtaining the mayor’s position. As she says: “I happen to know the city fairly well. And I happen to know if Ed Lee did not seize that opportunity, it might be years or decades before we have such an opportune time to have a Chinese American get there” (qtd. in Coté and Riley).
The connection between Lee’s political career and San Francisco’s Chinatown and other Asian American communities in the city can be traced back decades before his election to the mayor’s office. In many ways, his involvement in the civil rights and housing rights struggles of Chinatown and other communities in the city helped prepare Lee as a public servant. In the late 1970s, Lee was a student activist fighting against the demolition of the International Hotel (also known as the I-Hotel) in the city’s Chinatown-Manilatown section and against the eviction of its elderly Chinese and Filipino residents. When he was a law student–intern at the Asian Law Caucus in 1978, Lee represented residents of the Ping Yuen public housing complex in Chinatown, who, fed up with unsafe and unsanitary conditions, staged the first tenant rent strike against the San Francisco Housing Authority. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, Lee went on to “forge a distinguished career as a civil rights attorney, often representing low-income tenants,” and, in 1989, he “represented Asian and female firefighters who joined others in successfully suing the city for discrimination at the Fire Department” (Coté and Wildermuth). His active participation in the struggles for equity for the disadvantaged have helped bring progressive social changes to the city, even as Lee himself was transformed by those struggles from the son of marginalized immigrants from China to the mayor of San Francisco. If Lee’s relationship with Chinatown and other Asian American communities in the city during his law school years was formative, his relationship with the city could be considered transformative.
Lee’s mutually (trans)formative relationship with Chinatown and the city is indicative of the dynamics and possibilities of urban space, where the identities of ethnic enclaves or segregated ghettos and the city are mutually constitutive in a process of becomings. Philip Ethington argues in his study The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 that “‘the public’ of the public city was itself a constantly reconstructed sphere of action” (412). The changing residents of the city are a major catalyst of change in urban politics as shown in nineteenth-century American cities: “As industrialization produced the great cities during the second half of the nineteenth century, masses of immigrants and workers pushed aside the middle and upper classes to enjoy the benefits of urban machine politics” (xiii). But being “white” by law, the masses of immigrants and workers who enjoyed “the benefits of urban machine politics” also used the political machine to exclude “nonwhites” from participating in democracy.2 As Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith, editors of the anthology Racism, the City, and the State, contend, an examination of the urban context in the process of racialization in the United States demonstrates that “the city provides the institutional framework for racial segregation, a key process whereby racialization has been reproduced and sustained” (frontispiece). Although it is in part produced by racial segregation, Chinatown resists being defined as simply a product of dominant racial ideologies and practices. Its spatial and symbolic relationship to the American nation-space embodied by the “American” city has been fiercely contested by European Americans and Asian Americans since the nineteenth century. Asian Americans’ resistance to racial exclusion is well captured in Asian American city literature, which reimagines and re-represents American urban space where racialized Others remain “outsiders” or invisible. How to inhabit the segregated urban space otherwise with irreducible and transformative difference is a major concern of this study of Asian American city literature.
MUTUALLY CONSTITUTIVE AND TRANSFORMATIVE SPACES
To better understand Asian American writers’ strategies for portraying the impact of racial exclusion on Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the city, it is necessary to recognize the ways in which American urban space as the nation-space and its excluded Others are mutually constitutive and transformative. A lived and constructed space in the “heart” of the metropolises of the United States, Chinatown is irreducible to a passive product of racial segregation. It plays an active, and even a subversive and interventional, role in the social and spatial formations and contestations of identities, citizenship, and the nation-state. As Henri Lefebvre contends, “Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies” (“Reflections” 341).
During the period of Chinese Exclusion, portrayals of Chinatown in mainstream America helped justify segregation laws that determined where the Chinese were allowed to live or open a business in the city.3 According to the legal historian Charles J. McClain, white Americans’ calls for the relocation of San Francisco’s Chinatown to “another less desirable part of the city” began to appear in newspaper editorials as early as 1854 and intensified in the 1870s and 1880s (223). In 1870, the Anti-Coolie Association militantly petitioned the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “demanding that something be done about the Chinese quarter of the city, described as being crowded and contaminated with disease.” Ultimately, the petitioners wanted the board to “‘provide some means of removing the Chinese beyond the city limits’” (McClain 44). White Americans’ concerted efforts to drive the Chinese out of the city continued into the early decades of the twentieth century. On May 31, 1900, the San Francisco newspaper Morning Call published an article calling for the elimination of Chinatown from the city: “In no city in the civilized world is there a slum more foul or more menacing than that which now threatens us with the Asiatic plague. Chinatown occupies the very heart of San Francisco. . . . The only way to get rid of that menace is to eradicate Chinatown from the city” (qtd. in McClain 44). As documented by Jean Pfaelzer in her well-researched study Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (2007), such epistemological violence in constructing the abject identity of Chinatown provoked physical violence aimed at driving the Chinese out.
Given this context, the persistent presence of Chinatowns in the metropolises of the United States testifies to the spatial significance of Chinese resistance to exclusion. Located geographically in the centers of cities, Chinatowns are crucial sites for Chinese communities to build networks beyond the borders of segregated urban neighborhoods. Pfaelzer in her discussion of the strategic struggles by Chinese Americans against racial discrimination observes, “The fear of Chinese lawsuits, their ability to tie up city and country coffers in extended litigation, was profound” (250). Against attacks on multiple fronts aimed at relocating Chinatowns or driving them out of cities, towns, and the U.S. nation-space, the Chinese stood their ground and demanded constitutional and civil rights through the federal courts. As Sucheng Chan, McClain, and Pfaelzer have shown, the “thousands of legal actions by the Chinese countered the ‘foreignness’ of anti-Chinese legislation” (Pfaelzer 249). Despite their well-organized protests and fight for equal rights in a series of municipal, state, and federal court cases, Chinese residents in the cities were eventually subjected to new city ordinances—early forms of segregation laws—that restricted their movement in the city and confined their businesses and residence to designated areas, thus institutionalizing their spatially reinforced exclusion from the resources and the social, cultural life of the city.4 However, the spatialization of Chinese immigrants’ and Chinese Americans’ racial position in the United States by law becomes naturalized along with the social construction of abject Otherness of the Chinese. The remarks of the Chicago school sociologist Walter C. Reckless about Chinatowns in American cities are a salient example of such naturalization of spatially reinforced racial segregation: “The relationship of Chinatown to the commercialized vice areas of American cities is too well known to need elaboration. It is only fair to say, however, that the assumption of the usual parasitic activities by the Chinese in the Western World is probably to be explained by their natural segregation at the center of cities, as well as by their uncertain economic and social status” (qtd. in J. Lin 8). Regarding Chinatown as “natural segregation” of the Chinese displaces the social production of this racialized, segregated neighborhood onto ethnic “traits” of the Chinese, thus turning the effect of racism into its cause.
Yet, with its spatially asserted difference in the heart of the American city, Chinatown bears witness not only to racial segregation in the United States but also to historical changes at home and abroad. The historian Mary Ting Yi Lui points out that during the early Cold War period in the United States “transnational, cultural, and political discourses recast Chinese Americans and Chinatowns as model ethnic minorities and communities” (“Rehabilitating Chinatown” 83). Operating as part of the U.S. Cold War “cultural diplomacy” in promoting the image of the United States as an inclusive democracy of cultural pluralism, Lui observes, official and mainstream media depicted Chinatown in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle “as an example of the nation’s ethnic and racial diversity” (91). Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, became a best seller, whose “autobiographical narration of personal triumph over racial bigotry . . . fits alongside the many Chinese American success stories found in USIS [U.S. Information Service] publications” (Lui, “Rehabilitating Chinatown” 94). In fact, the U.S. State Department published translations of Fifth Chinese Daughter in several Asian languages and sent Wong “on a four-months’ grant to speak to a wide variety of audiences in Asian countries” (J. S. Wong vii, viii). Christopher Douglas argues persuasively in his provocative essay “Reading Ethnography: The Cold War Social Science of Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth-Chinese Daughter and Brown v. Board of Education” that “a fundamental transformation in the social sciences in the early twentieth century, signaled by anthropology’s paradigm shift from race to ethnicity,” made it possible for Wong’s autobiographical narrative to be read as ethnography and “put to strategic use in the Cold War” (106). Despite the apparent upward mobility in the success story of the narrator as a Chinese American, her career as a pottery maker is spatially confined within a Chinatown portrayed as a culturally “foreign” neighborhood. As Douglas contends, a refashioning of the racial “Otherness” of the Chinese is embedded in Fifth Chinese Daughter promoted as a model-minority story, “but one with irreducible qualities that make the Chinese American community ever different from white norms of U.S. citizenry” (107).5 In model-minority ethnographies such as Wong’s autobiographical narrative, Chinatown serves both to showcase and to contain ethnic difference in the American city. Lui further notes that “[t]hough refashioned as spaces created out of voluntary ethnic association as opposed to racial segregation, popular fears of Chinatowns as ethnic ghettoes breeding economic poverty or ethnic and racial separatism that could foster political unrest uncomfortably persisted. Ethnic difference, reduced to goods or aesthetics made for Chinese and white consumption, remained accepted and encouraged by cultural producers as examples of US cosmopolitanism” (“Rehabilitating Chinatown” 98).
It is precisely the simultaneous disavowal and reinforcement of racial inequality in discourses on commoditized cultural diversity that render both Chinatown and the “American” city contested spaces. The complexity and ambivalence of Chinatown in its relation to the city underlie the debates in Asian American studies over its identities as a segregated ghetto or dynamic ethnic enclave. Elaine H. Kim contends in her groundbreaking study Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982): “Chinatown life was largely organized around the needs of these womanless, childless men who had been segregated from participation in the mainstream of American life by race discrimination” (91). Asian American sociologists have called into question the portrayal of Chinatown as a segregated ghetto of the “bachelor society” resulting from racial exclusion. Historian Yong Chen argues in his study Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943 (2000) that to “view Chinatown simply as a segregated urban ethnic enclave created by a hostile environment” would hinder “our ability to see the internal vitality of Chinatown” (47). He contends: “Racial prejudice affected but never totally dictated the lives of the immigrants. Chinatown’s longevity most clearly underscores its defiance of anti-Chinese forces that persistently tried but failed to eradicate or dislocate this large visible Chinese community from the heart of the city” (47). Chen emphasizes that San Francisco’s Chinatown is “a social and cultural center” and “a Pacific Rim community” (48, 7). In a similar vein, sociologist Min Zhou notes that “New York City’s Chinatown emerged as a direct result of the anti-Chinese campaign on the West Coast and the Chinese Exclusion Act” (6). But she emphasizes that New York City’s Chinatown has undergone profound changes and calls for more attention to “the bright face of this dynamic community” as an “urban enclave” where there are “signs of prosperity, hope, and solidarity everywhere” (8, 6, 8).
However, the “bright face” of Chinatown as a dynamic ethnic urban enclave is in turn challenged by other scholars of Asian American studies. Yoonmee Chang in her book Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave (2010) argues that “[b]y recasting the ghetto as an ethnic enclave, by recasting a space of structurally imposed class inequality as a cultural community, the structural pressures of race and class that create racialized ghettos recede from view and are replaced by culture, by the idea that Asian American ghettos are voluntarily formed cultural communities” (2–3). Yet cultural Otherness has been a central component in the racialization of Chinatown by the dominant media. Exploring the impact of transnational geopolitics on New York City’s Chinatown after 9/11 and after the 2008 financial collapse, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen in a recent essay states, “Chinatown in the American imagination and lived reality has been a gilded, segregated ghetto” (“New York after Chinatown” 27). Even though “with the effective repeal of racial exclusionary immigration laws and the gradual desegregation of New York housing, Chinese immigrant communities spread into all five boroughs and the tristate suburbs,” Tchen notes, New York Chinatown continues to play “the recurring scapegoating role of ‘dirty’ Chinatown”—a “staged role in New York’s political culture” (27, 39). These insightful and provocative analyses of the images and functions of Chinatown, however, focus largely on the construction and refashioning of this ethnic neighborhood in the city by the state or the dominant media, ideologies, and discourses.
With attention to the interactive effects between an internally diverse Chinatown and the changing American metropolis shaped by both domestic and international socioeconomic forces, sociologist Peter Kwong offers a more complex, protean picture of New York City’s Chinatown. Countering the stereotypes of Chinatown as a self-isolated, static community of “docile, apolitical, and uncommunicative” cultural aliens, Kwong shows with abundant evidence that the Chinese “have tried repeatedly to break out” of the isolation of Chinatown, resulting from racial discrimination and exclusion.” In so doing they “have proved themselves active and militant opponents of racial and political oppressions” (Chinatown 148). During the 1960s, new political ideologies “penetrated deeply into Chinese communities,” as civil rights “activists’ activities, social-welfare agencies, unions, and political parties slowly eroded the power of the traditional order,” even though “they have not yet displaced the hegemony of the Chinatown business and political elite” (Kwong, New Chinatown 7). The impact of the civil rights era continues to transform Chinatown as shown by the demonstration of “20,000 residents of New York’s Chinatown” against police brutality” in 1978 (8).
While Kwong has called critical attention to the mutually transformative relation between Chinatown and the larger American urban environment, little attention in literary studies has been given to the impact of Chinatown and other ethnic communities, including those of postcolonial exiles and diasporans, on the cultural, economic, and political landscape of the American city, whose identity is subsequently thrown into crisis.
Bruce Harvey in his book American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–1865 points out that “[t]he nation as a whole . . . defined itself through hierarchical, racial taxonomies of foreign regions (the Orient, Latin America, Polynesia, and Africa)” (5). Such spatialized discursive construction of intertwined racial and national identities also characterizes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, popular newspapers, and anthropological writings that define the identity of the city by portraying Chinatown as a self-contained yet pollutant ethnic ghetto, an exotic foreign terrain that does not belong to the American city. Newspaper reports, travel writings, and short stories by European Americans construct a Chinatown whose abject foreignness threatens to contaminate the American city that embodies the nation-space. Posited this way, the American city, then, becomes a battleground where the boundaries of race and nation-state are drawn and policed, as well as transgressed and redefined. Asian American city literature produces an interventional American cityscape, one in which Chinatown and the city in the United States are mutually constitutive and transformative and immigrants, migrants, and diasporans from the global South are changing the cultural and political landscapes of cities in the United States
Cities of Others: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature is an in-depth study of eight Asian American writers’ representations of urban space in American metropolises, from the late nineteenth century to the present.6 One of the key discoveries of this study is that there is a wide range of distinctively spatial strategies in Asian American city literature since its emergence in the nineteenth century. These strategies not only reveal the impact of spatially reinforced social isolation, cultural marginalization, and political exclusion on Asian Americans’ identity formation and subject constitution, but they also demonstrate the possibilities of resistance and intervention through everyday practices that reinhabit ethnic enclaves and the American city otherwise. Rather than merely segregated spaces divided by differences of race, gender, culture, and class, and contained by national borders, Chinatowns and other urban spaces emerge as dynamic spaces by and through which collective, personal, and political identities are constituted.
Those strategies and their effects, however, are often overlooked by critics of Asian American literature, who tend to focus on space conceived in terms of national territories, or in association with the nation-state and transnational border crossings.7 Still less has been written about Asian Americans’ representations of the American city and its relation to segregated ghettos and the global South. Although critics such as David Palumbo-Liu and Lisa Lowe have adopted broader critical approaches to space as a manufactured environment, and particular places whose identities and meanings are constructed through discourses, representations, and social relations in their respective studies of Asian American literary texts, much remains unexplored with regard to the writers’ spatially enacted narrative strategies and their effects.8 So far, no comprehensive treatment of these strategies and effects in Asian American literature has been conducted in literary studies.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON (URBAN) SPACE
Building on existing scholarship in Asian American criticism, Cities of Others pursues an interdisciplinary line of inquiry by drawing on established and emergent concepts about space, particularly urban space, developed in both the humanities and the social sciences. While the term space in this study includes places, it has broader meanings beyond those bounded by specific locations. Sociologist Rob Shields’s explanation of the meanings and implications of space can help clarify the concepts of space and the spatial used in this study. Shields refers to space as “one of the ‘unsaid’ dimensions of epistemological and ontological structures’ (Sack 1980)”; hence “to question ‘space’ is to question one of the axes along which reality is conventionally defined.” He uses the term “social spatialisation to designate the ongoing social construction of the spatial at the level of the social imaginary (collective mythologies, presuppositions) as well as interventions in the landscape (for example, the built environment).” This term “allows us to name an object of study which encompasses both the cultural logic of the spatial and its expression and elaboration in language and more concrete actions, constructions and institutional arrangements” (Places 31). Other theoretical perspectives on space, especially urban space, have further broadened the conceptual and critical framework of my inquiry.
Rather than treat space as a stable, passive container, a background, or a stage, Cities of Others highlights the fact that space is an “actor” in shaping the formation and transformation of the social, cultural, and political, even as it is produced and redefined in this process of mutually constitutive and transformative becoming. Scholars on space such as geographer Doreen Massey, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and philosopher Elizabeth Grosz have convincingly argued that space is not simply a product of social relations; it in fact plays an active role in constructing the social. Rather than merely an outcome of social relations, space makes possible different kinds of social relations and interactions. “And precisely because it is the product of relations,” Massey explains, “relations which are active practices, material and embedded, practices which have to be carried out, space is always in a process of becoming” (“Spaces of Politics” 283). Understood as “the very product of multiplicity and thus a source of dislocation, of radical openness,” space, then, has a dynamic relationship with “politics as a genuinely open process” (287). A rethinking of the relation between space and politics, Massey adds, will lead to “a greater concern not just with ‘difference,’ but the nature of the constitution of difference, and the constitution of identity” (288). A similar notion of space underlies Sassen’s analyses of global cities in which “a new geography of centrality and marginality” emerges as a result of economic globalization (“Whose City Is It?” 71). Moreover, Sassen argues, “[t]he other side of the global city” constitutes “a sort of new frontier zone where an enormous mix of people converge,” making “possible the emergence of new types of political subjects arising out of conditions of often acute disadvantage”(“Reading the City” 15–16). Apart from highlighting the ways in which “Otherness,” group identities, and social positions are constructed spatially, Massey’s and Sassen’s respective arguments about the politics of space offer new approaches to social formation and social change in spatial terms.
Grosz’s theories about space further advance our understanding of difference as transformative of identities, of social relations, and even of seemingly static space. Instead of dismissing binary categories as fixed, opposing attributes, Grosz explores in them the possibilities of a complex mutually constitutive and transformative process of becoming. Rereading Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Grosz points out the vital roles of difference in social, cultural change, which can mobilize “a constellation of transformations, an event that imperceptibly affects everything” (Nick of Time 26). Moreover, Grosz argues that space “is emergence and eruption, oriented not to the ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the event, to movement or action” (Architecture 116). As such, space can be “transformed according to the subject’s affective and instrumental relations with it” (Grosz, Space 122). From these perspectives, the possibilities of mutual transformation are embedded in the process of immigrants’ and minorities’ self-inventions and resistance to assimilation and exclusion, a process that is uncontainable to the margins but is transformative of American identity and culture.
To fully recognize the significance of the multiple ways in which Asian American writers deploy spatially bounded or mobilized narrative strategies, it is necessary to engage with theories about urban space in literary and cultural studies as well. A mutually constitutive relation between space and the subject is also embedded in the relation between the urban environment and the raced, gendered body. These relations underlie the theoretical perspectives on the city developed by literary and cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau, as well as by feminist critics like Grosz and Judith Walkowitz, among others. Benjamin’s study of modern urban literature in relation to the emergence of new urban spaces such as the arcades in Paris, which gave rise to the flâneur—the bourgeois city stroller and spectator—and to new genres of writing, including journalism and detective fiction, reveals an intricate connection between the production of space and the formation of identity and subjectivity. The fact that commercialized urban spaces in the nineteenth century became the sites of fieldwork for the flâneur figure, “who goes botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 36), suggests the constitutive role of space in identity and subjectivity formation. Most relevant to Cities of Others is Benjamin’s examination of the voyeuristic gaze of the flâneur, whose participatory observation in the city streets or the Parisian arcades as the writer, the poet, or the journalist parallels the “fieldwork” of the anthropologist or the ethnographer, a mode of production of knowledge about the “Other.” As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson states in her essay “The Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris”: “Flânerie presupposes an urban epistemology” (30). Against the “potential unmanageability of the crowd” with increasing diversity resulting from demographic changes in postrevolutionary Paris, Ferguson contends, “[t]he flâneur domesticates the potentially disruptive urban environment” by reducing diversity to “a marvelous show” (31). Significantly, Ferguson considers flânerie a unique, privileged mode of knowledge production, a form of gendered power. “Like the narrator and like the detective,” the flâneur “is associated with knowledge” (31). While the “connection with authorship is telling in its exclusions” of women and the working class, flânerie is “key to urban control” (27, 32). Exploring further the mode of knowledge production underlying the connection between the flâneur and the journalist, and an affinity between the flâneur-journalist and social investigation, David Frisby in his essay “The Flâneur in Social Theory” contends that Benjamin “provides us with an analytic of flânerie that reveals potential affinities between this activity and the sociologist’s investigation of the social world” as shown in the significance of the city in works of sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Robert E. Park, Siegfried Kracauer, and others (Frisby 83, 89).
Rather than “urban control” or disciplinary knowledge about the “Other,” Shields in his essay “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie” relates the flâneur to the loss of control, to displacement, and situates flânerie in the context of nineteenth-century colonial empire. He observes that “[w] hile flânerie is an individual practice, it is part of a social process of inhabiting and appropriating urban space” (65). A “public and other-directed” practice in the metropolis, flânerie reveals “a changing ‘social spatialisation’ . . . of everyday social and economic relations” in nineteenth-century Paris, where “social encounters with strangers and foreigners . . . impinged on the life world of Europeans” (Shields 65, 67). However, Shields notes that Benjamin’s study of the flâneur leaves out “the popular European fascination not just with commodities but with distant cultures experienced through rubbing shoulders with foreigners.” (68). Drawing on Simmel’s (1950) sociological concept of “the Stranger” as an outsider who settles in the European city “as an insider who nonetheless maintains an outside status because of their [sic] difference,” Shields considers “the Stranger” “a counterpart” to the flâneur, an “urban native,” who “personifies the ideal-type of the citizen” (68, 61, 64). The encounters between “the Stranger” and the “urban native” are unsettling to both “foreigners” and citizens. As Shields contends: “The metropolis is a space in which both outsiders and insiders are ‘dis-placed.’ Neither are properly at home in the commodified spaces of the imperial metropolis” (68). In this case, Otherness is not comfortably reduced to spectacles by the flâneur’s gaze. Rather than being “domesticated,” the presence of the “outsiders” in the European metropolis disturbs the established social relations and homogeneous cultural and national identities.9 But social change required by the presence of the “outsiders,” Shields notes, “is elided in the escape” of the flâneur “into the fantasy world of the emporium” (77–78). Thus the “European encounter with the Other is postponed, as it has continued to be through the twentieth century” (Shields 78). Flânerie as a potential counter-discourse to “urban control” underlying Shields’s perspective on the mutual displacement of “outsiders” and “insiders” in the city is theorized by de Certeau in his examination of the politics of the everyday practice of space. In his study of the city, de Certeau proposes a rethinking of resistance to oppressive, dominant systems in terms of strategies of everyday-life activities, including walking the street, which can “privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements,” making interventions or alternative articulations emerge (98).
Further departing from Benjamin’s perspective on the relationship between the cityscape and the urban spectator, Grosz and Walkowitz in their respective writings call critical attention to the difference of the gendered body in the urban space. Grosz points out the mutually constitutive and transformative relation between the body and the urban environment. She argues that the city is “the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed.” Moreover, “the body must be considered active in the production and transformation of the city” (Space 108). Grosz’s argument alerts us to the implications and effects when the raced, gendered body is understood not as a passive reflection of innate identity attributes but rather as an active element in constituting, contesting, and transforming the environment of the city. Walkowitz’s study “City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London” offers a compelling example. Walkowitz contends that crossing “divided spaces of the metropolis” to “experience the city as a whole” establishes the privileged flâneur’s “right to the city—a right not traditionally available to, often not even part of, the imaginative repertoire of the less advantaged” (414–15). Yet “the public landscape of the privileged urban flaneur” of the late nineteenth century “had become an unstable construct” challenged by “social forces” to be reworked and reconstructed (412). “No figure was more equivocal, yet more crucial to the structured public landscape of the male flaneur, than the woman in public,” who was “presumed to be both endangered and a source of danger to those men who congregated in the streets” (414). Walkowitz’s approach to “the permeable and transgressed border between classes and sexes” (415) in Victorian London is applicable to racially segregated areas in American cities.
What happens, then, when flânerie—strolling and observation in the city street as a mode of knowledge production, identity construction, and enactment of the right to the city—is carried out by those whose body is marked not only by the differences of gender and class but also by the “Otherness” of race and ethnicity? What palimpsest histories are recovered, what marginalized places are foregrounded, what invisible lives emerge to transform both the ethnic enclaves and the cities they inhabit? These are some of the central questions I explore in my examination of the poetics and politics of space in Asian American urban literature. By drawing on interdisciplinary critical theories like those referred to above, and on existing Asian American scholarship on urban space, my study seeks to overcome disciplinary oversights and blind spots and to explore neglected yet significant aspects of familiar and understudied Asian American writings about Chinatown and the city. In so doing, my investigation seeks to offer perspectives that not only are alternative to but also contest predominant representations of the American city, in which Asian Americans are conspicuously absent as explorers of the urban space, as participants in the polis of the city, or as visionaries and agents of change in redefining not just ethnic enclaves but also the American cityscapes and nation-space.
OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS
Cities of Others consists of eight chapters in addition to the introduction and the conclusion. Chapter 1, “‘The Woman about Town’: Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings,” examines the ways that Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton appropriates and reinvents the flâneur figure and the conventions of journalism and missionary ethnography of her time to produce counter-narratives about Chinatown and the city. Her writings about American urban space undermine stereotypical representations of Chinatown as an abject “foreign” terrain within the “American” city. I borrow the phrase “The Woman about Town” from the series title of five pieces of journalism by Sui Sin Far that appeared in the Gall’s Daily News Letter when she was working as a full-time reporter in Kingston, Jamaica, from December 1896 to June 1897.10 Given her position as a female reporter, columnist, and fiction writer who crisscrossed the city looking for stories, the phrase is a proper yet unsettling definition for Eaton, whose role as a reporter and writer on the urban scene alters the gaze of the flâneur and intervenes in the male-dominated traditions of journalism and urban literature. But “The Woman about Town” meant something quite different for Eaton in North American cities, where she volunteered as a Sunday school English teacher and worked as a journalist in Chinatowns. Drawing on theories about the agency of the gendered and racially marked body in the public space, I examine the subversive strategies of Sui Sin Far’s representation of white and Chinese women as “the woman about town,” whose flânerie mobilizes a counter-discourse on Chinatown and the city.
Chapter 2, “Claiming Right to the City: Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family,” further explores the relationship between the raced, gendered body in American urban space as portrayed in Lin’s 1948 novel about Chinese Americans in New York City and its Chinatown. My reading expands on the predominant interpretations of this novel as a “model minority” narrative of assimilation, which overlooks the social critique and the characters’ resistance to exclusion embedded in the subversive, interventional spatial strategies Lin employs. I argue that Lin’s narrative strategies allow his characters to reinhabit the city through everyday activities that resist racial segregation, claim Chinese immigrants’ right to the city, and facilitate the formations of Chinese American identity and subjectivity. In so doing, Lin, like Sui Sin Far, at once undermines and reinvents the privileged white male flâneur figure of urban exploration and dismantles both the myth of a self-enclosed Chinatown and the myth of an American city capable of assimilating immigrants while remaining intact from the presence of its heterogeneous populations.
Chapter 3, “‘Our Inside Story’ of Chinatown: Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone,” examines Ng’s strategies for making visible in American urban space the hidden history of racial exclusion and exploitation. I argue that Ng’s narrative leads the reader through Chinatown streets, alleys, stores, restaurants, crammed apartments, and the public square as it traverses the lives of the “paper son” Leon and his family, to reveal the family’s “secrets” entangled with the United States’ national history of racial exclusion and exploitation. By historicizing the public and private spaces of Chinatown lives in San Francisco, Bone at once engages with and departs from representations of Chinatown either by European Americans or by Asian Americans like Sui Sin Far or Lin Yutang. Drawing on theories about the social production of space and the everyday practice of what de Certeau might call “spatial vernacular,” my reading examines Ng’s narrative strategies that highlight not only the “social production of the built environment,” or the ways in which “built environments both represent and condition economies, societies, and cultures” (King 1), but also the psychological effects of spatialized social positions of race, class, and gender.
The meanings and functions of San Francisco’s Chinatown are radically destabilized in the writings of Frank Chin examined in chapter 4, “Chinatown as an Embattled Pedagogical Space: Frank Chin’s Short Story Cycle and Donald Duk.” Chinatown in Chin’s writings means many things—a segregated ethnic ghetto, a dying community, a spectacle on display, a commoditized tourist spot, a site of resistance to assimilation, a counter-pedagogical space, and a dynamic multicultural neighborhood of the American city. While it is all of the above, Chinatown in Chin’s writings is first and foremost an embattled space for the formation of Chinese American subjectivity and for the construction not only of Chinese American but of American identities. It is embattled, because Chinatown is not just a product of the social; it is a site where “the social is constructed,” as Massey contends in arguing for the significance of space (For Space 13). Understood from this perspective, Chinatown is a site where “the white national ideal” is constructed and “sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others,” to borrow Anne Anlin Cheng’s words about “[r]acialization in America” (10). While highlighting the mutually constitutive and transformative relationship between Chinatown and Chinese American subjectivity, between the identities of Chinatown and the American city as embedded in Chin’s stories and his novel Donald Duk, I argue that Chin represents Chinatown as a counter-pedagogical space in redefining this historically, spatially, and discursively produced ethnic ghetto, transforming it into a transnational, multicultural American urban neighborhood.
Chapter 5, “Inhabiting the City as Exiles: Bienvenido N. Santos’s What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco,” explores different modes of dislocation and exile that Filipinos and Filipino Americans experience. My reading of Santos’s novel highlights their exile, displacement, and transnational belonging in the United States, especially their collective and personal irrecoverable loss resulting from the Spanish and American colonial legacies. I contend that Santos’s treatment of loss in the novel generates what David L. Eng and David Kazanjian call the politics of melancholic mourning, which establishes “an active and open relationship with history” and induces “actively a tension between the past and the present, between the dead and the living.” Alternative knowledge, perspectives, and possibilities of intervention and transformation are embedded in the politics of loss, in investigating “the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of how loss is apprehended and history is named—how that apprehension and naming produce the phenomenon of ‘what remains’” (“Mourning Remains” 1, 5–6). Understood in these terms, loss in Santos’s novel assumes agency, operating as a politics and aesthetics of mourning, making visible the deprivation of “homeless” working-class Filipino “old-timers,” and confronting erased, forgotten, or palimpsest colonial histories and their legacies in the formation of Filipino San Francisco. Against historical amnesia, Santos inscribes loss as integral to the Filipino/American experience, allowing that irrecoverable loss to haunt American urban space.
How to inhabit the American city otherwise than as assimilated subordinate Others or as nameless “aliens” lost in the margins of society, forever longing for a home far away, is a central theme explored in chapter 6, “The City as a ‘Contact Zone’: Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music.” For Alexander, the “radical migrancy” that marks the experience of “creatures of postcoloniality” who border nation-states and linguistic boundaries can compel “an exhilarating art, an art that takes as its birthright both dislocation and the radical challenge of reconceiving American space” (Shock of Arrival 161, 158). I borrow the concept of “contact zone” from Mary Louise Pratt as employed in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, which calls critical attention to the “interactive dimensions” of those encounters and “how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other” within “radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). In Manhattan Music the city is a protean “contact zone” constituted by people from around the world and by the diasporic communities and their connections to other parts of the world. Alexander re-represents the city as “American space” by allowing her female Asian Indian characters to inhabit the city through border crossings, transformative encounters, subversive memories, and artistic as well as social activism. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theories, I highlight the relationship between the raced, gendered body and the metropolitan space in the subject formation of South Asian women immigrants and diasporans, whose actual and symbolic crossings of streets in New York City mobilize a transformative process of both the postcolonial female subject and the American city.
Chapter 7, “‘The Living Voice of the City’: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” further explores Asian Americans’ struggles to claim belonging in the city and to inhabit the city with their irreducible difference as equal citizens. Unlike the earlier writings about the spatialized racial position of Asian immigrants, migrants, and Asian Americans in the American city discussed so far, Lee’s Native Speaker seeks to claim a rightful place in the city not just for one ethnic or racial group but for all immigrants and minority Americans, particularly the “countless unheard nobodies” (83). Moreover, its claim of belonging goes beyond the mobility and freedom of those considered racial and cultural “Others” to live where they wish to; it demands their equal participation in the political system of the city. Native Speaker raises questions about apparently conflicting claims of national and transnational belongings among Asian Americans and calls for new ways of inhabiting the city, which insist on equal participation politically and otherwise of “these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians,” who are changing the landscape of the American city and nation-space (83). I examine the ways in which the Korean American narrator’s flânerie and his observations of the political dramas and everyday scenes in the streets of the metropolis play a crucial role in articulating the novel’s thematic concerns.
Further pursuing Asian American writers’ enactment of the politics of space in the era of economic restructuring and globalization, chapter 8, “Mapping the Global City and ‘the Other Scene’ of Globalization: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,” examines the effects of Yamashita’s magical realist strategies for mapping the cityscape of Los Angeles on a global scale, especially the city’s relationship to the global South. Maps and mapping, the late geographer J. B. Harley convincingly argued, are not simply scientific depictions of geography. They are epistemological, political, and pedagogical tools for claiming territories and for legitimizing plunder, conquest, and divisions between peoples and nations (281).The major characters in Tropic of Orange offer alternative interpretations of the official map and insist on inscribing power relations along with layers of histories of the city, the Americas, and other parts of the world, as well as the everyday experience of the displaced, the marginalized, and the homeless in Los Angeles as a global city intricately bound up with the global South. By mapping the global South—the “other scene” of globalization (Spivak’s phrase in “Globalicities” 74)—in the global city, Yamashita registers not only large-scale social injustice but also powerful resistance uncontainable by spatial segregation or border control. The cityscape of L.A., then, manifests not just the “spatialization of global power projects”; it is a “new frontier zone” for a new politics of resistance (Sassen, “Reading the City” 15, 16). Employing magical realism to disrupt linearity of time and to dislodge space from bounded territories, Tropic of Orange marks a new departure in Asian American literature in both thematic concerns and narrative strategies, compelling a new mode of interdisciplinary approach, which my study seeks to advance by engaging with discourses and debates on globalization, as well as Asian American criticism.
In “Conclusion: The I-Hotel and Other Places,” I seek to further extend the conceptual and critical framework for reading Asian American city literature and for “thinking radical democracy spatially” (Massey’s phrase in “Thinking” 283). Given the diverse, heterogeneous histories, experience, and narrative strategies of Asian American writers, it is especially necessary to keep “our critical geographical imagination” open to “redefinition and expansion in new directions,” to borrow the phrases of Patricia Yaeger (15). I contend that to renew “our intellectual apparatus” in order to expand “our ethical and imaginative engagements,” as Yaeger urges in her introduction to the special topic on cities for a 2007 issue of PMLA (15), more critical attention must be given to city literature by minority American writers. Asian American writings about urban space offer incisive theorizing perspectives on metropolises, global cities, transnational ethnic enclaves, and inner-city ghettos. As a way of overcoming the thematic and methodological limitations in my reading of Asian American city literature, I include Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010) and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2004). My brief discussion of these two novels is also intended to call critical attention to the politics and poetics of space embedded in their respective narrative strategies in order to further open up the conceptual and historical frameworks for studying urban literature. If Yamashita’s novel shows how the I-Hotel became a catalytic site of grassroots community activism for human rights and housing rights, for racial and spatial justice, and thus demonstrates the transformative agency of the marginalized Others in shaping the history and geography of the city, thúy’s novel testifies to the legacy of U.S. imperialism and the social, cultural marginalization of Vietnam War refugees in American society. By depicting the trauma of the refugees, who bear witness to the destruction visited by the U.S. military on Viet Nam and in whose memories its disappeared forests, landscapes, and way of life exist, thúy, like Yamashita, embeds in the urban geography of the United States the “visions and voices” of those who are transforming the cultural and political geography of the American city and nation-space.
