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“THE WOMAN ABOUT TOWN”
Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings
Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.
For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics.
—MICHEL DE CERTEAU
[B]oth the external and internal design and layout of the City symbolize male power and authority and men’s legitimate occupation of these spaces.
—LINDA MCDOWELL
IN DECEMBER 1896, AFTER SPENDING SIX MONTHS IN THE THUNDER Bay District by Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada, as a correspondent for the Montreal Daily Star, Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton replaced her sister Winnifred Eaton as a full-time reporter in Kingston, Jamaica, for Gall’s Daily News Letter. She stayed there for half a year as a socially and culturally engaged journalist, covering an electoral campaign, legislative council proceedings, and other social events, discussing issues such as womanhood and women’s rights, and writing reports on the prison, orphanages, charity schools, the market scenes, and department stores, as well as short stories, reviews, and a children’s column. The wide range of topics in her writings for the Jamaican paper reflects the freedom of spatial mobility Eaton enjoyed in Jamaica, where she was identified as white, not Eurasian or “the half Chinese writer,” as she was in North America.1 Among her writings published in the Gall’s Daily News Letter are four articles, all titled “The Woman about Town”—a term that refers to Eaton herself, the journalist.2 As a female reporter, columnist, and fiction writer who goes about town, looking for stories to write, “the woman about town” is indeed a proper, yet unsettling, definition for Eaton, or any other female journalist of her time, whose role as a reporter and writer on the urban scene alters the gaze of the flâneur and intervenes in the male-dominant traditions of journalism and urban literature.
But the term “the woman about town” meant something quite different for Eaton in North American cities, where she volunteered as a Sunday school English teacher in Chinatowns and worked as a journalist and fiction writer whose topics were often about lives in Chinatowns. In North America, Eaton did not use the term “the woman about town” to refer to herself in her publications about Chinatown lives; rather, against the widespread anti-Chinese movement and sentiment of her time, she chose a Chinese name, “Sui Sin Far,” for her essays and short stories published in newspapers, popular magazines, and major literary journals in the United States.3 Nevertheless, Sui Sin Far remains “the woman about town” in her missionary and journalist work in Canadian and American Chinatowns. Moreover, “the woman about town” appears in Sui Sin Far’s journalist reports and short stories as embodied by female narrators or characters. This figure, like the flâneuse, enacts Sui Sin Far’s spatial and visual strategies in her portrayal of Chinatown lives. When the female figure in the streets is marked by both gender and race, and when the urban space in which she moves about is divided by the differences not only of class and gender but also of race and ethnicity, “the woman about town” in Sui Sin Far’s stories mobilizes multiple subversions and interventions.
However, critics tend to overlook the spatiality in the narrative strategies of Sui Sin Far though they offer insightful readings of her essays and stories that challenge racist and sexist representations of Chinatowns and undermine the ideology of racial purity.4 For example, editors Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks in their introduction to Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and Other Writings by Sui Sin Far, single out three significant aspects of Sui Sin Far’s stories:
First, they present portraits of turn-of-the-century North American Chinatowns, not in the mode of the “yellow peril” or zealous missionary literature of her era but with well-intentioned and sincere empathy. Second, the stories give voice and protagonist roles to Chinese and Chinese North American women and children, thus breaking the stereotypes of silence, invisibility, and “bachelor societies” that have ignored small but present female populations. Finally, in a period when miscegenation was illegal in nearly half the United States, Sui Sin Far’s stories are the first to introduce the plight of the child of Asian and white parents. (6)
These insights highlight the significance of Chinatowns in Sui Sin Far’s writings. But with an emphasis on the thematic and the sociohistorical, Ling and White-Parks overlook Sui Sin Far’s subversive spatial strategies for re-representing raced, gendered space, especially for portraying a mutually constitutive and transformative relation between space and subject.
Although critics such as Elizabeth Ammons, Dominika Ferens, and White-Parks have examined the aesthetics and narrative form of Sui Sin Far’s writings, the spatiality of identity and subject formation is not a major concern in their discussions. Ammons and White-Parks explore Sui Sin Far’s employment of devices such as irony, voice, and trickster play, while Ferens investigates the ways in which Sui Sin Far subversively appropriates and revises the tradition of missionary ethnographies. In Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (1995), White-Parks devotes a whole chapter to Sui’s “Pacific Coast Chinatown stories” and provides detailed important historical and cultural contexts for the stereotypes of Chinatowns. Her reading highlights the fact that “Sui Sin Far clearly challenged the images of Chinatowns as moral ‘swamps’ depicted by such authors as [Frank] Norris and [Olive] Dibert,” not only by breaking “stereotypes about Chinatowns as bachelor societies of ‘alien others’” but also by depicting “communities vibrant with women, children, and family life” (124, 120). Although spatiality of identity construction is embedded in her observation of Sui Sin Far’s journalistic portrayals of Los Angeles’s Chinatown, White-Parks emphasizes Sui Sin Far’s use of voice and tone that are “allied with the communities about which she writes” (121). Thus White-Parks, like other critics, does not devote enough attention to Sui Sin Far’s spatial strategies, which, I would argue, are largely shaped by the period’s dominant discourses on Chinatown.5
Most characteristic of Sui Sin Far’s spatial strategies is her employment of the female characters’ spatial mobility and their observations of street scenes, particularly those of Chinatown, which at once evoke and undermine mainstream representations of Chinatown by the white male gaze of the journalist, the ethnographer, and the photographer who sauntered idly as the flâneur in the streets of Chinatown, seeking sensational stories or exotic sights. Freedom of movement in the metropolises and the privilege to observe and write about urban scenes constitute the gendered, raced, and classed identity of the flâneur of Sui Sin Far’s era. Slumming in Chinatown became a popular way for white men to gather materials for travel sketches, photographs, fiction, and journalist reports on Chinatown. The thematic concerns and spatial strategies of Sui Sin Far’s stories constitute a counter-discourse in response to European Americans’ portrayals of Chinatown as a piece of China, a place of vice, filth, and crimes, as well as an enigmatic, seductive, and dangerous tourist spot. The dominant discourses construct Chinatown as everything that America is not. As Yong Chen contends: “For many white tourists, Chinatown satisfied not only their curiosity about the unfamiliar but also their need to rediscover their superiority. For them Chinatown stood as a site of comparison: one between progress and stagnation, between vices and morality, between dirtiness and hygiene, and between paganism and Christianity” (98–99). Mutually exclusive identities of race and culture like these are spatially produced and reinforced.
SPATIALITY OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
Nayan Shah in his well-researched, provocative study Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001) provides ample evidence showing that “[t]he cartography of Chinatown that was developed in government investigations, newspaper reports, and travelogues both established ‘knowledge’ of the Chinese race and aided in the making and remaking of Chinatown” (18). Shah notes that the “three key spatial elements” that characterize the production of Chinatown as a racialized space are “dens, density, and the labyrinth”: “The enclosed and inhuman spaces of dens were where the Chinese lived. High density was the condition in which they lived. And the labyrinth was the unnavigable maze that characterized both the subterranean passageways within the buildings and the streets and alleys aboveground” (18). Spatialized identity construction as such turns Chinatown into a racially marked place of filth, disease, and backwardness and naturalizes socially produced poverty, undesirability, and segregation as the inevitable results of innate racial traits of the Chinese.
Embedded in the implied correlate between the identities of Chinatown and the Chinese residents, and underlying the contrast between the Chinese “race” and American citizens, are mutually constitutive relations between space and body, between the built environments and their inhabitants. These relations, however, are mutually transformative as well. Their implications and effects render Chinatown open to change and irreducible to the uniform, homogeneous, and discrete identity constructed by the popular media of white America. In other words, if the characteristics of Chinatown as a lived space are defined by its residents, then those characteristics can be redefined and transformed in part at least by the people who live there, as well as by alternative ways of seeing and representing Chinatown and its relationship to the larger society. Elizabeth Grosz has compellingly argued for an alternative to the conventional view of space as a fixed background or container. She contends: “[S]pace is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation” (Architecture 9). This unstable, dynamic relationship between space and its inhabitants underlies the representations of Chinatown lives by Sui Sin Far and other Asian American writers.
At once a product and medium of identity construction, a segregated urban ghetto, an ethnic enclave, and a transnational, multicultural community, Chinatown has been a contested terrain in writings by Asian Americans, among whom Sui Sin Far is a literary forerunner in challenging spatially policed boundaries of race, class, gender, culture, and sexuality in American cities. To better understand the significance of the narrative strategies that Sui Sin Far employs to undermine the predominant stereotypical portrayals of Chinatown, it is necessary to briefly examine the spatiality—spatial organizations of social relations and their effects—of identity construction in the dominant discourses of her time.
With their privilege of mobility in the city, white American male writers as the flâneur played a central role in producing the “knowledge” of Chinatown and the Chinese. The commodification of writings about the urban scene in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States helped popularize stereotypes of Chinatown, which were often featured in travel sketches, newspapers, magazines, journals, and photographs. Charles W. Stoddard in his book about San Francisco’s Chinatown, A Bit of Old China (1912), depicts with sensuous ambience the uncanny experience of strolling through Chinatown: “The air is laden with the fumes of smoking sandalwood and strange odors of the East; and the streets, swarming with coolies, resound with the echoes of an unknown tongue. There is hardly room for us to pass; we pick our way, and are sometimes curiously regarded by slanted-eyed pagans” (qtd. in Chen 98–99). Apart from the alienating smells of the East, the crowdedness of Chinatown streets with strange-looking heathens who gaze upon tourists with curiosity enhances the unsettling foreignness of Chinatown. The racially marked bodies of the Chinese, then, become part of the Chinatown space and its foreign identity. Through a deceptively descriptive style and the authenticity of actually strolling in the street, this white flâneur inscribes the Chinatown space and bodies with racial meanings by rendering the Chinese cultural and bodily differences as deviant from the “American” norm. As is characteristic of Orientalist representations, the construction of Chinatown as “a bit of Old China” “in the heart of a Western metropolis” requires a particular kind of aesthetics that elides the historical and sociopolitical forces underlying the formation of Chinatown, thus isolating it from the American city.6 Arnold Genthe’s photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown collected in Pictures of Old Chinatown (1913), with text by the journalist Will Irwin, are salient examples of inscribing “Chineseness” on aestheticized Chinatown spaces and bodies by the white male gaze.7 Irwin writes in his interpretive text accompanying Genthe’s photographs: “From every doorway flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish masters. . . . Perfectly conceived in coloring and line, you saw a balcony, a woman in softly gaudy robes, a window whose blackness suggested mystery” (in Genthe, Pictures 12). The white male gaze as such reduces Chinatown and the Chinese to commodified objects and provides an aesthetic framework for visual mastery of the Chinatown scenes severed from the American urban space.
While some middle-class white men, particularly members of the San Francisco Bohemian Club and the California Camera Club, such as Genthe and Irwin, found Chinatown a pleasurable place for a thrilling and aesthetic experience, many white San Franciscans regarded this “foreign” place and community with fear and anxiety, especially after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and when cholera and smallpox epidemics struck San Francisco in the mid- and late nineteenth century, followed by an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1903.8 The intersections of racial formation and the fear of an impending epidemic catastrophe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shah contends, created “a new articulation of space and race” that made Chinatown “a singular and separate place that henceforth could be targeted in official inspections and popular commentary” (24–25). The production of fear reinforces the boundaries of the raced body and space.
Discourses on medicine and social morality played a significant part in the networks of racial identity and knowledge production. In 1878, when anti-Chinese sentiments in the United States became a formidable political force, Dr. Mary Priscilla Sawtelle published an editorial article, “The Foul, Contagious Diseases: A Phase of the Chinese Question; How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison into the Anglo-Saxon Blood,” in the Medico-Literary Journal, arguing that “our nation is threatened with destruction” by “the Chinese courtesans.” Compared with the destructive influence of these women, she asserts, “Chinese cheap labor pales into insignificance” (1). Sawtelle’s medical background lends authority to her naturalizing the raced Chinese female body as a source of contagious diseases infecting the white body, which she equates with “our nation,” and corrupting white American morality. As Donna Haraway argues, in the construction of race through discourses on the body: “[W]here race was, sex was also. And where race and sex were, [there were] worries about hygiene, decadence, health” (338).
It is worth noting, moreover, that in Sawtelle’s argument against the Chinese women’s lethal contamination of the American national body, she inscribes the threat of Chinese immigrant’s racial Otherness and inassimilable foreignness in spatial terms: “In the very heart of San Francisco there is a Chinese empire. . . . Several streets are devoted to mercantile and manufacturing pursuit, while the alleys are lined with the tenements of the Chinese courtesans” (4). Sawtelle’s article offers a salient example of the predominant stereotypical representations of Chinatown by white Americans, in which Chinatown is turned into what Shah calls a “perverse geography” that “provided a schema of the dangers of Chinatown and Chinese residents to middle-class white society in San Francisco and beyond” (79). Inscribed as “a Chinese empire,” Chinatown, then, is neither simply a passive outcome of socioeconomic and political systems nor the end result of discursive identity construction; it becomes constructive material “evidence” of the supposedly innate racial attributes of the “Chinese race,” justifying racial segregation and exclusion. Like the Chinese body, Chinatown functions as an apparently stable site for simultaneous construction and naturalization of racial identities and social positions and for surveillance, containment, and exclusion of the Chinese from U.S. citizenship and the nation-space.9
Yet, being part of the city spatially and in the vicinity of the busy commercial district and white neighborhoods, San Francisco’s Chinatown was often depicted as a dangerous masculine place where white women were reputed to be lost mysteriously or become corrupted in opium dens by Chinese men beyond any hope of returning to the outside world. Frank Norris in his short story “The Third Circle” (1897) tells of the sinister disappearance of a young white woman, Miss Ten Eck, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As the title suggests, Norris relies heavily on spatial metaphors in portraying Chinatown’s hidden vices: “There are more things in San Francisco’s Chinatown than are dreamed of in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatown—the part the guides show you, the part the guides don’t show you, and the part that no one ever hears of ” (1). Norris suggests that it is into this underground third circle of opium dens and slave girls that Miss Ten Eck vanished.
The raced, gendered, and sexualized space of Chinatown’s “third circle” also informs the works of Norris’s associates, Genthe and Irwin, “whose art,” Emma J. Teng notes, “was intimately associated with their flâneurie—their observations of and participation in the city’s street life,” particularly their slumming in Chinatown (“Artifacts” 59). Genthe evokes “The Third Circle” in his memoir, while portraying life and culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown in terms of a spatialized social hierarchy racialized as characteristically Chinese within a self-sustained architectural structure of a Chinatown theater: “The [theater] building itself was a study in ways Chinese. In it were housed all the strata of life to be found in the district. Above the theater, on the second story, lived the manager and stage director. . . . On the third flight down were the opium dens where the smokers in various stages drew their dreams from the long pipes. It was this retreat which was immortalized by Frank Norris in his story, The Third Circle” (qtd. in Teng, “Artifacts” 63–64). In her discussion of this passage, Teng notes that “[w]hat Genthe does here is reinscribe Norris’s trope as physical space: metaphorical circles become architectural structures—three stories segregating classes of people and activities. For Genthe, a building serves as a microcosmic articulation of socioeconomic relations in Chinatown society” (“Artifacts” 65).
Moreover, the self-contained architecture of the theater suggests the self-enclosure of the Chinatown community isolated from the American city. Hence Chinatown’s apparently discrete and stagnant Chinese culture simultaneously constructs an opposing American national and cultural identity of progress and enlightenment coded as the norm equated with whites and things European. Spatial metaphors that depict Chinatown as an embodiment of cultural and racial homogeneity also underlie Irwin’s interpretive essays on Genthe’s old Chinatown photographs. Evoking “The Third Circle,” Irwin asserts that Genthe’s photographs capture Chinatown’s mystery and inscrutability: “These pretty and painted playthings . . . furnished a glimpse into Frank Norris’s Third Circle, the underworld. We shall never quite understand the Chinese, I suppose; and not the least comprehensible thing about them is the paradox of their ideas and emotions” (in Genthe, Old Chinatown 112–13). Paradoxically, the inscrutable Chinese appear completely knowable to Norris, Genthe, and Irwin, whose white male gaze masters and domesticates the Otherness of the Chinese they encounter. By assuming an anthropological authority of detached observation and interpretation of Chinatown, Irwin, like Genthe and Norris, among others, produces the knowledge of a separate Chinese society and culture, apart from and undisturbed by things American. The Chinese, then, may be “with us, but not of us.”10
Similar representations also characterize portrayals of New York City’s Chinatown in mainstream media. Apart from constructing it as a site for encountering the unknown, Mary Ting Yi Lui notes: “Tourist guidebooks and sensational newspaper and social reform reports frequently linked Chinatown’s topography to the various vice activities in the area. Doyers Street for example was described in the 1904 tourist guidebook, New York’s Chinatown: Ancient Pekin Seen at “Old Bowery” Gate, as ‘the crookedest in [the] city, making half a dozen turns in its short stretch from Chatham Square to Pell St.’ Crooked streets, though a common feature of lower Manhattan, came to reflect the immorality and hidden criminal nature of the neighborhood and its residents” (Lui, Chinatown 39–40). Although the journalist Louis J. Beck claimed to offer a “fair and just” view in his book on New York City’s Chinatown, he depicted this neighborhood as a “self-contained environment where all material, cultural, and spiritual needs could be met by the Chinese residents themselves. . . . The life of the community was . . . set apart from the rest of the city.” Portrayed as such, “Chinatown, then,” says Lui, “was in New York, but not of it” (Chinatown 25, 32).
Underlying those spatially confined identities of Chinatowns and the Chinese residents is the controlling gaze of the flâneur, the all-seeing and knowing male subject of the privileged white journalist, photographer, or tourist who enjoys the freedom of strolling about town across divided urban spaces. Yet the descriptive details of the seemingly transparent alien Chinatown space and the Chinese body turn the flâneur into merely a passive recipient and a discerning observer of a given environment; thus the flâneur’s role in simultaneously constructing the identities of Chinatown and white America is elided, or rather becomes hidden. At the same time, the subjectivity and identity of the white male observer and narrator are constituted by the power of his gaze and superior social position and by the racial inferiority of the Chinese, who are rendered mute objects, part of the Chinatown space that is at once mysterious and transparent to the white male gaze. Or, when the Chinese were portrayed in writings like Norris’s story as more than objectified curiosities that made up Chinatown streets, they were morally decrepit seducers who victimized white women.
These dominant views of Chinatowns and their narrative strategies provide a useful context for our understanding of the significance of Sui Sin Far’s writings about Chinatown, especially the ways that Sui Sin Far restores the humanity and subjectivity of the Chinese and re-represents Chinatown as an American urban neighborhood. Moreover, given the contradictory functions of the storied Chinatown and its inhabitants, which are “socially peripheral” yet “symbolically central” in the formation of the body politic of the U.S. nation-state, Sui Sin Far’s representation of Chinatown as part of the American city unsettles American identity, which is supposed to be racially “white” and culturally Eurocentric.11
A FLÂNEUSE IN LOS ANGELES’S CHINATOWN
Sui Sin Far in her counter-narratives of Chinatown lives appropriates and revises the flâneur figure and the conventions of journalism and ethnography of her time. Employing the white subject’s privileged gaze and freedom of spatial mobility to simultaneously subvert racial stereotypes of Chinatown, she undermines the authority of participatory observation as a reliable method of obtaining knowledge of the Other. Rather than seek to master, control, or domesticate the Other or Otherness, as is characteristic of “the panopticism” of urban spectatorship in nineteenth-century American urban literature (Brand 184–85), Sui Sin Far’s flânerie undermines the street epistemology of the colonizing white male gaze, partly from the white woman’s perspective and partly from the perspective of the Chinese. “Who is entitled to look at and represent whom is a charged question in a racially stratified society,” states Ferens in her insightful analysis of Sui Sin Far’s Chinatown stories and their reception by white readers (80). Ferens calls critical attention to Sui Sin Far’s ambivalent subject position and her complex revisionist appropriation of the conventions of ethnography and white middle-class Christian values (57). She observes that Christian missions in Chinatown were in part mobilized and justified by the normative discourse whose “rhetoric of lack associated with Chinese culture was an insidious one that Edith [Eaton] had trouble rejecting outright since it was the imagined lack in the world’s spiritual economy that moved white Canadians to charity and goodwill toward the ‘heathen.’” Nevertheless, Ferens contends that Eaton “often wrote against the rhetoric of lack in Chinese culture” (52). In so doing, I would argue, Sui Sin Far at once reiterates and displaces middle-class “American,” “Christian” values onto Chinese immigrants, but not without dismantling the normative discourse’s assumptions about American identity and the Chinese alien Other.
Given the anthropological authority that white male journalists and fiction writers who sauntered Chinatown streets as flâneurs assume in representing Chinatown, the ethnographic tendency in Sui Sin Far’s reports on Chinatown could be considered a strategy of counter-narrative. In 1903, Sui Sin Far spent several months in Los Angeles, working as a journalist for the Los Angeles Express. Her position as a journalist enabled her to write and publish interventional narratives about Chinatown. Appropriating the method of journalist investigation and ethnographic participatory observation, Sui Sin Far employs the conventions of flânerie to resee and reexperience Chinatown anew.
In reports such as “Chinese in Business Here” for the Los Angeles Express, Sui Sin Far takes her readers on a tour of Chinatown. Instead of dark alleys or opium dens, she leads the reader through Chinatown streets, while commenting on and explaining what is seen:
If one will visit the stores, and other places of business of the Chinese of Los Angeles, he will gain a clearer idea of the industry and ingenuity of the people than the most learned books and treatises on the Chinese. . . . I have passed many a pleasant half hour or longer in the Chinese stores, taking a cup of tea, here and there and a pinch of instruction in between whiles. . . . Many of the poorest business man work at their trade or profession in the streets of Chinatown and sit with their tools, materials or compounds around hem as if they were in a workshop. (Mrs. Spring 208)12
As readers follow the speaker’s perambulation, observation, and reflection, a different Chinatown emerges. Contrary to the predominant portrayals of Chinatown as a dangerous place for women, particularly white women, and a place saturated with “strange odors of the East,” Chinatown as experienced on the female journalist’s flânerie is a pleasant, lively place where women like Sui Sin Far (who looked white and dressed American) can stroll the streets freely and safely.
By performing the tourist, the journalist, and the ethnographer doing “fieldwork” on her walks in Chinatown, Sui Sin Far turns Chinatown into a contested urban space. Her enactment of a counter-discourse against the dominant “epistemology of the street” produced by tourist guidebooks, travel writings, and popular newspaper reports from white America can be better understood in terms of de Certeau’s theory on the politics of walking the city streets, in which he contends that “[w]alking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (99). Drawing on de Certeau’s theories on the practice of everyday life in the urban space, Benjamin Rossiter and Katherine Gibson, in their essay “Walking and Performing ‘the City’: A Melbourne Chronicle,” argue that “[t]he practice of walking and the reflection on urban walks contribute to a counter-discourse of the urban” (439). They emphasize “the enabling potentialities of re-presenting the city from the street—from the perspective of the walker and the street inhabitant” (440). Particularly relevant to my investigation in what Sui Sin Far achieves in her writing through walking the streets of Chinatown as a journalist and ethnographer is Rossiter and Gibson’s application of de Certeau’s concept of walking as a “pedestrian speech act”—an interventional gesture that reinvents stories of the city and transforms the urban space (de Certeau 98). For Rossiter and Gibson, the “speech act of walking creates stories, invents spaces, and opens up the city through its capacity to produce ‘anti-texts’ within the text” (440). Moreover, by allowing the city to “speak,” Rossiter and Gibson suggest that the centrality of the urban stroller’s subjectivity gives away to the sensual perception of his or her body and to other bodies in the streets, leading to the constitution of multiple “urban subjectivities.” With this shift, “[t]he body is introduced as a sensual being—smelling, remembering, rhythmically moving—jostling with other bodies and in the process constituting active, perhaps multiple, urban subjectivities. The walker becomes lost, allows the city—street signs, bars, cafes, billboards, passers-by—to ‘speak’ to her as does a bird call in the wild or a twig crackling under foot in a forest” (440). While the emphasis on the walker’s sensual experience and her immersion in her surroundings undermines the controlling gaze of the privileged male subject, the replacement of the female “sensual being” with the constructive male gaze, however, casts the walker as merely a passive, receptive vessel of a given environment. Hence the active role that the urban stroller plays in constructing or defining the urban spaces becomes hidden. So, too, are the subject positions underlying the selection and organization of the sights, smells, and stories that the city is allowed to tell through the walker’s sensual experience as a mode of knowledge production.
Sui Sin Far’s Chinatown reports indicate that it is not simply the act of walking but also, and more importantly, the identity and subject position of the flâneuse that enable the subversive potentials of re-representing the urban spaces. As the examples referred to earlier show, much of the apparent authenticity of the “yellow peril” images of Chinatown and its foreignness was based on white male writers’ sensory experiences as they strolled down Chinatown streets, smelling “strange odors of the East,” hearing “echoes of an unknown tongue,” and seeing “slanted-eyed pagans” crowding the streets (Stoddard 2, qtd. in Chen 99). Sui Sin Far’s walk in Chinatown produces a different place, undermining the stereotypes of Chinatown and the Chinese from her perspective as a Eurasian female journalist and from the perspectives of Chinatown’s residents.
To allow Chinatown and its residents to speak from their perspectives, it was not enough for Sui Sin Far to describe and interpret what she observed on her walks. Several of her reports on Los Angeles’s Chinatown are based on her journalist investigations and interviews with residents. For example, in “Chinatown Needs a School,” Sui Sin Far incorporates Chinatown residents’ perspectives in her story: “Mrs. Sing, the most prominent Chinese woman in Los Angeles . . . says I was misinformed as to her visit to San Francisco. . . . Mrs. Sing’s great hope is that before long a government school will be established in Chinatown for the Chinese boys and girls who are above the age of 10 or 12. There is a crying need for such a school” (202–3).13 While arguing for a public school in Chinatown and for the admission of Chinese children into American schools, Sui Sin Far shows that Chinese immigrants and their American-born children integrated Chinese and European American cultures in their homes as well as in the public spaces of Chinatown, where in juxtaposition to a missionary English school and “several Christian Chinese families,” “three joss houses [stood] conspicuous” (“In Los Angeles’ Chinatown” 199). Appropriating the flâneur’s gaze and the ethnographer’s participatory observation, she highlights the fact that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans live a bicultural life. “Mrs. Sing’s house is furnished tastefully in a semi-eastern, semi-western style,” observes Sui Sin Far (“Chinatown Needs a School,” 203). “Americanized” with “a liberal education” from a mission school in Baltimore, Mrs. Sing remains “loyal to her own country and people,” and she and her husband, a man of “ability and character” and “one of the best known merchants in Los Angeles’ Chinatown,” have always worked “for the good of the Chinese with whom they come in contact” (203, 202, 203). This detailed description of a Chinese American family and their home’s interior design counters the dominant gaze of white America, which criminalized the Chinese body and Chinatown space. Even though her appropriation and revision of the flâneur’s gaze and strolling in the urban spaces seem to be confined to Chinatown, they contest the boundaries that separate Chinatown and its communities from white America.14
However, limited by the speaker’s position as an outsider of Chinatown and by the generic conventions of journalist reportage and ethnographic “fieldwork” of her time, Sui Sin Far’s portrayal of the mutual transformation of the Chinatown community and American identity in her newspaper reports remains superficial. As she shows through her observations in the streets, schoolrooms, and a Chinatown household, the coexistence of Chinese and European American cultures is restricted to cultural practices contained in Chinatown. At the same time, Chinese immigrants’ acculturation seems to be smooth and unproblematic, and the bilingual and bicultural American-born Chinese Americans such as the Sing children are happy and content in Chinatown. But in her fiction Su Sin Far is able to explore in depth the complex mutually transformative process and effects of encounters between Chinese immigrants and white Americans.
In her short stories set in Chinatown, she at once appropriates and undermines the authority of participatory observation as a reliable method of obtaining knowledge of the Other. Embedded in the contested epistemological and ethnical questions concerning modes of knowing is not only an implicit subversion of the flâneur figure as a neutral spectator and interpreter of the urban scene but also a disruption of the raced hierarchical relationship between the observer and the observed. Moreover, by exposing the harms that white female English teachers and Christian missionaries can bring to Chinese families in Chinatown, Sui Sin Far calls critical attention to the ways that race complicates the gendered and classed flâneur figure in urban literature.
Critics of literature and photography of urban exploration often emphasize the classed and gendered privilege of visual observation. John Urry in his essay “City Life and the Senses” examines the social and cultural conditions that have contributed to placing the visual “at the top” of the “hierarchy of sense within Western culture over the past few centuries” (389). The assumed superiority of the visual, Urry suggests, resides in its potential for the seeing subject to possess and control what is seen. “The visual sense enables people to take possession, not only of other people, but also of diverse environments. It enables the world to be controlled at a distance, combining detachment and mastery” (389–90). Such a possessive and controlling gaze, Urry notes, is the privilege of the upper and middle classes, who have the power to mediate urban spatial organizations in such a way as to reinforce social hierarchy and regulate social interactions (390–91). Other critics contend that such visual privilege and power characterize the male gaze. Elizabeth Wilson, for example, in her essay “The Invisible Flâneur,” included in the volume Postmodern Cities and Spaces (1995), notes that the flâneur, “as a man who takes visual possession of the city,” “has emerged in postmodern feminist discourse as the embodiment of the ‘male gaze’” (65). Exploring further the implications of the classed and gendered gaze of the flâneur, Judith Walkowitz states, “The fact and fantasy of urban exploration had long been an informing feature of nineteenth-century bourgeois male subjectivity” (410). Moreover, Walkowitz suggests that while the bourgeois male subject is in part constituted by the urban investigation as a way of knowing and mastery of the urban scene, he plays a significant role in constructing the urban geography and communities. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, “urban explorers adapted the language of imperialism” and “emulated the privileged gaze of anthropology” that “transformed the unexplored territory of the London poor into an alien place” and represented “the poor as a race apart, outside the national community” (412–13).
However, Walkowitz argues that the presence of women in urban public spaces disturbs the cityscape constructed by the male gaze. “No figure was more equivocal, yet more crucial to the structured public landscape of the male flâneur, than the woman in public.” She adds: “In the mental map of urban spectators, they lacked autonomy: they were bearers of meaning rather than makers of meaning. As symbols of conspicuous display or of lower-class and sexual disorder, they occupied a multivalent symbolic position in this imaginary landscape” (414). The “public symbol of female vice” and “embodiment of the corporeal smells and animal passions that the rational bourgeois male had repudiated and that the virtuous woman, the spiritualized ‘angel in the house,’ had suppressed,” Walkowitz contends, “the prostitute established a stark contrast to domesticated feminine virtue as well as to male bourgeois identity” (414). Yet these apparently polarizing identities are unsettled by the prostitute as “the permeable and transgressed border between classes and sexes” and “as the carrier of physical and moral pollution” (415).
Unlike the prostitute—“the quintessential female figure of the urban scene” (Walkowitz 414)—white women in Chinatown, as portrayed in stories like Norris’s “The Third Circle” and in the dominant media, embody innocence, vulnerability, and the victimization of Chinese vices. Their presence in Chinatown reinforces the raced and gendered threat of the “Chinese quarters” to white America. In contrast to white female prostitutes in the city or white male tourists in Chinatown, white women in Sui Sin Far’s stories occupy an ambivalent position as English teachers and Christian missionaries in Chinatown—white flâneuses, who are both “makers” and “bearers of meaning.” Their racial and class identity enables them to enjoy in part at least the privilege and authority of the bourgeois white male, while their observations undermine the mastery of the male gaze and their interactions with Chinese men challenge the boundaries of race, gender, and class. It is precisely by employing this ambivalent position of white middle-class women that Sui Sin Far calls into question the authority of the white gaze and anthropological participatory observation, which produce normative knowledge that reinforces the polarizing identities of Chinatown and the American city.
One of her short stories set in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, “A Chinese Boy-Girl,” offers a salient example of Sui Sin Far’s strategies for engaging the dominant discourses to disrupt their production of knowledge about both the Chinatown community and white America. The story opens with a description of Chinatown’s location in Los Angeles, as part of the neighborhoods of the city’s Plaza, where multiple, heterogeneous cultures and peoples meet and interact. Like the camera eye, the narrator’s gaze moves from a panoramic view to close-ups, portraying Chinatown as spatially and culturally connected and open to the city: “The persons of mixed nationalities loung[ed] on the benches. . . . The Italians who ran the peanut and fruit stands at the corners were doing no business to speak of. The Chinese merchants’ stores in front of the Plaza looked as quiet and respectable and drowsy as such stores always do” (155). Contrary to the spatially, architecturally, and culturally self-enclosed Chinatown images in the dominant media, Chinatown and the Chinese are depicted as an integral part of the city’s geography and demography of “mixed nationalities” through Sui Sin Far’s appropriation of the flâneur’s controlling gaze over the urban scene.
Having thus spatially established Chinatown as part of the city, she tactfully leads the reader into Chinatown and to the story’s major characters—Miss Mason, the young, white American teacher, and Ku Yum, the “little girl,” who is Miss Mason’s bright but naughty student. As time goes by, Miss Mason is troubled by Ku Yum’s repeated absence from school, and other girls report that Ku Yum “is running around with the boys” (156). The situation continues for a year until Miss Mason becomes convinced that “some steps would have to be taken to discipline the child,” who after school “simply ran wild on the streets of Chinatown, with boys for companions.” Miss Mason discovers that Ku Yum’s mother has passed away, and the girl’s father shrugs off her concerns about his daughter’s inappropriate behavior and playmates, intensifying her sense of urgency. She contacts the president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, “the matron of the Rescue Home,” about Ku Yum’s case (157). However, no sooner has Miss Mason accomplished her task than she begins to wonder whether it is right “to deprive a father of the society of his child, and a child of the love and care of a parent” (158). Meanwhile, as a result of her efforts, the state superior court decrees that Ku Yum be removed from her father’s custody and placed in a home for Chinese girls in San Francisco. But Ku Yum is nowhere to be found by those authorized to take her to the shelter, and Miss Mason becomes alienated in Chinatown. “Where formerly the teacher had met with smiles and pleased greetings, she now beheld averted faces and downcast eyes, and her school had within a week dwindled from twenty-four scholars to four” (158). Eventually, Ku Yum comes to Miss Mason one evening, while the latter is walking home through Chinatown after visiting a sick student. Because of Ku Yum’s plea, Miss Mason meets with the father and finds out from him that Ku Yum is actually a boy, the only one of his five sons to have survived. To prevent the jealous evil spirit from taking away his only son, the father dresses him as a girl. Rather than dismiss the father’s fear as superstition, Miss Mason realizes her own mistake, as her parting words to Ku Yum indicate: “Your father, by passing you off as a girl, thought to keep an evil spirit away from you; but just by that means he brought another, and one which nearly took you from him too” (160).
That Miss Mason almost has Ku Yum taken away from his father points to both the blind spot of her perspective and the power of her social position as a white woman. Although she has taught in Chinatown for a year, Miss Mason remains an outsider; she is unaware of Ku Yum’s cross-dressing—which is known to Ku Yum’s playmates and the Chinatown community. Without intimate interactions with the Chinatown residents, Miss Mason’s participatory observation proves to be inadequate in knowing the Other. And her patronizing sense of duty enhanced by her assumption of the father’s lack of parenting responsibilities compounds her blindness. The implied mutually informative relationship between Miss Mason’s subject position and her interpretive gaze undermines the privileged visual sense and its mastery of the urban scenes and, with it, the knowledge about the Other, as well as the authority in the interpretive power of the white male journalist, the photographer, and the ethnographic fiction writer portraying Chinatown. It is worth noting that this subversion is implied in Miss Mason’s insight gained through her recognition of her blindness, and her recognition, moreover, is made possible through her friendship with Ku Yum and her willingness to meet with Ku Yum’s father and to be open to his perspective. Hence Sui Sin Far challenges the privileged visual sense and the mastery of knowledge of the racialized Other by simultaneously appropriating and undermining the bourgeois male privilege of authority, autonomy, and subject position as “maker of meaning” for her white female character, Miss Mason.
Unlike most of Sui Sin Far’s white male contemporaries writing about Chinatown, Miss Mason does not assume an anthropological knowledge of Chinese culture, nor does she maintain certainty about the righteousness of her own judgment and actions. Even her subject position as the observer is unsettled in the story. Rather than merely objects of her voyeuristic gaze, the Chinese look back and observe her. When the court order regarding Ku Yum is issued, Miss Mason notices that as she walks around Chinatown, she beholds “averted faces and downcast eyes” instead of smiles or “pleased greetings” as before. Apart from indicating her alienation from the Chinese community as a result of her actions, Miss Mason’s experience in the Chinatown streets suggests that she is being observed and judged. Her privileged, yet unstable and vulnerable, subject position enables her to learn about the Chinese she encounters, not by detached observation, but through direct interactions and through recognizing her own misassumptions.
DISRUPTING THE GAZE OF WHITE AMERICA
By refusing to privilege the white gaze, Sui Sin Far is able to portray white Americans and Chinatown through the eyes of Chinese immigrants in stories such as “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” and “The Wisdom of the New.” In both stories, middle-class white women embody what is desirable for Chinese immigrants, particularly educated Chinese young men of the merchant class, who seem to have successfully adapted to American culture. Instead of being morally corrupted and physically violated by Chinese men in Chinatown as portrayed in the popular media, white women in these stories are Chinese men’s friends and confidants, offering them support, advice, and moral guidance. Such representation of gendered interracial friendship, though it reiterates to a certain degree white superiority embodied by white women, counters dominant narratives about the degradation of white womanhood by lascivious Chinese men who use opium to lure white women. Representations of white women’s victimization by Chinese men not only perpetuate the “yellow peril” myth, but they also reinforce raced and gendered hierarchy. Sui Sin Far’s re-representation of white women in her stories, then, undermines both racism against Chinese men and sexism against white women. However, while undermining the stereotypes of white women as the weaker vessel of morality and in critiquing Chinese patriarchy, Sui Sin Far contrasts progressive American women with conventional backward Chinese women, thus reinforcing another gendered and raced stereotype.
Moreover, Sui Sin Far highlights the privileged social position of white women and its impact on Chinese immigrants, suggesting that acculturation entails subject formation shaped by competing ideologies inscribed on raced, gendered bodies and spaces. I would argue that the gendered interracial relationship and the implications of white women’s mobility in Chinatown and their intimate interactions with Chinese immigrants render Sui Sin Far’s stories such as “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” and “The Wisdom of the New” much more complex and subversive than mere descriptions of Chinatown life. The white “woman about town” plays a central role in the politics of gendered interracial relationships, facilitating or impeding Chinese immigrants’ process of acculturation, as shown in both stories. But in “The Wisdom of the New” a counter-narrative emerges as an undercurrent below the main narrative. To explore this undercurrent demands an interpretation that resists conformity with the gaze that inscribes dominant ideologies of race, gender, and culture on the raced, gendered body and space. It is from an apparently passive background that this counter-narrative emerges to render Sui Sin Far’s stories more complex, ambivalent, and subversive than their central narratives would suggest. Read as a subversive, interventional narrative against racism and sexism, “The Wisdom of the New” is a path breaker in exploring the intersections of gender and race. It deals with the impact of gendered interracial relationships on Chinese immigrants’ acculturation as depicted in “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” but with a more complex portrayal of the gendered and raced subjectivity of its major characters, particularly Pau Lin. Confined to a life of subordination to her husband, Pau Lin is jealous of her husband’s white American friend, Adah Charlton, the niece of Mrs. Dean, a Sunday school teacher in Chinatown, who takes Wou Sankwei under her wing shortly after his arrival in San Francisco at age nineteen and remains a motherly figure and close friend to him. White women in this story, as in “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” help facilitate the assimilation of immigrant Chinese young men like Sankwei but, in doing so, contribute to the alienation of the young men’s wives. Hence Americanization, or rather assimilation, is a privilege for Chinese men, particularly those of the merchant class, whose spatial and social mobility is gendered and classed. While Sankwei sees no need for his wife to learn English or American culture, he is determined to send their son, Yen, to an American school against the strong disapproval of his wife. Jealous of her husband’s affection for Adah and unable to adapt to American culture because of the inequality of race and gender, which has shaped her thinking and feeling to an extreme, Pau Lin kills her son to prevent him from becoming “American.” The narrator comments on Adah’s initial ignorance of Pau Lin’s feelings about her, revealing white women’s privilege while also highlighting the intersections of gender and race underlying Pau Lin’s jealousy: “Secure in the difference of race, in the love of many friends, and in the happiness of her chosen work, no suspicion whatever crossed her mind that the woman [Pau Lin] whose husband was her aunt’s protégé tasted everything bitter because of her” (“The Wisdom of the New” 51). But other narrative details suggest that jealousy is not the only reason Pau Lin’s resists her son’s Western education. In fact, Pau Lin finds support for her resistance among her Chinese female neighbors, who help confirm her fear of losing her son to white America.
Sui Sin Far employs the architectural characteristics of Chinatown apartment buildings for multiple purposes, including establishing a network of communication for Pau Lin. The balconies of the surrounding apartments become a social space for exchanging information among Chinese women, whose opinions of white America reinforce Pau Lin’s fear for her son. Sien Tau, leaning over her balcony, says to Pau Lin: “You did perfectly right. . . . Had I again a son to rear, I should see to it that he followed not after the white people” (48). The narrator reveals that Sien Tau’s son has married a white woman, and their children behave like strangers to their grandmother. Another Chinese woman, Lae Choo, echoes Sien Tau’s words: “In this country, she is most happy who has no child.” Then she goes on to deplore Lew Wing’s young daughter’s “bold and free” ways with white men. Pau Lin joins in “at another balcony door,” saying, “One needs not to be born here to be made a fool of ” (48). Their conversation moves from the harms white Americans have brought to Chinese families to the violence resulting from missionary practice in China. Their complaints reveal their resentment about the loss of respect for the Chinese and their culture and suggest a connection between the degradation of the Chinese and the colonialist Christian missions in both China and Chinatown. The exchanges among immigrant Chinese women on the balconies help validate Pau Lin’s view of the deplorable “wisdom of the new” that may “contaminate” her son (52).
Below the balconies, the Chinatown street scenes seem to mock the Chinese women’s parochialism. In fact, the balcony provides Pau Lin with a bird’s-eye view of Chinatown’s streets, whose scenes simultaneously serve as evidence of what she deplores about things American and offer a point of view that challenges the Chinese women’s bemoaning of the “contamination” of Chinese values by American culture. As she gazes “below her curiously,” Pau Lin is fascinated by what she sees:
The American Chinatown held a strange fascination for the girl from the seacoast village. Streaming along the street was a motley throng made up of all nationalities. . . . There went by a stalwart Chief of the Six Companies engaged in earnest confab with a yellow-robed priest from the joss house. A Chinese dressed in the latest American style and a very blonde woman, laughing immoderately, were entering a Chinese restaurant together. Above all the hubbub of voices was heard the clang of electric cars and the jarring of heavy wheels over cobblestones. (49)
The visual details and their implications of this motley “American Chinatown” made up of diverse racially and ethnically marked bodies, however, suggest an inevitable, irresistible cultural hybridization in process that counters the reification of either Chinese or Western culture. The presence of electric cars running through Chinatown renders it resolutely part of the American city.
Critics, however, tend to overlook this undercurrent of counter-narrative embedded in the spatial and bodily images of Chinatown in “The Wisdom of the New.” Xiao-huang Yin, in discussing “the subtlety of Sui’s writing,” refers to the passage quoted above as an example of how Sui Sin Far uses “background” to indicate “the cultural shock a newly arrived Chinese woman is experiencing” (92, 91, 92). Yin further observes that the “minute description provides details that existed nowhere else in popular American fiction, and the detailed web of facts about daily life that she provided created a realistic environment in which her characters could interact” (92). But rather than a passive background or environment, the Chinatown neighborhood and its everyday activities constitute a counter-discourse, one that engages with the story’s central conflict and ambivalence as noted by Ferens in her discussion of the story. Ferens states that “the story deplores the parochialism that hampers cross-cultural contacts.” Yet it is “a deeply ambivalent story that cannot be reduced to one reading.” According to Ferens: “The fundamental problem it raises is that the two cultural groups are limited or limit themselves to just looking at each other. This leads to the reification of cultural difference and, subsequently, to a struggle for dominance fought over the body of a child” (107). Given the sociohistorical context of this story, the struggle of immigrant Chinese women to keep their children from Americanization seems to be more a matter of resistance to assimilation and to losing their children to the dominant culture than “a struggle for dominance.” Underlying their fear and resistance, as well as the hegemony of white America, is the denial of racial and cultural hybridity, which is already taking place in Chinatown. Pau Lin’s observation of the “American Chinatown” as “a motley throng made up of all nationalities” (49) subverts precisely the reification of cultural difference and resists the dominance of any supposedly discrete ethnic or national culture. Sui Sin Far’s depiction of the heterogeneous American Chinatown through the gaze of Pau Lin offers an alternative perspective to the reification of either culture or race and renders Chinatown an “American” urban space of multiplicity and hybridity, open to change.
Sui Sin Far produces such an undercurrent counter-narrative in the story by using the vantage point of the balcony and the organizing power of the visual sense to depict a “detailed web of facts about daily life” in Chinatown “that existed nowhere else in popular American fiction,” as Yin notes. No less remarkable about Sui Sin Far’s narrative strategies is her positioning of Chinese merchant wives like Pau Lin and her neighbors as the urban spectators on the balconies. Critics of urban literature have pointed out the significance of the spatial relationship between the balcony and the street. For Walter Benjamin, the balcony vantage point in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short piece “The Cousin’s Corner Window” enables the cousin/observer to frame and examine the scenes below according to the “principles of the art of seeing”: “His attitude toward the crowd is, rather, one of superiority, inspired as it is by his observation post at the window of an apartment building. From this vantage point he scrutinizes the throng. . . . His opera glasses enable him to pick out individual genre scenes” (Benjamin, “On Some Motifs” 173). Such a voyeuristic gaze gives the spectator the power not only to select what to see but also to control how to see, thus reducing the “throng” below to framed objects of artistic gaze. Exploring the privilege of the voyeuristic gaze from the balcony, Urry offers another perspective on the functions of the balcony in nineteenth-century urban life and literature: “More generally, the upper class mainly sought to gaze upon the other, while standing on their balconies. The balcony took on special significance in nineteenth-century life and literature as the place from which one could gaze but not be touched, could participate in the crowd yet be separate from it” (392). Both Benjamin’s and Urry’s remarks about the balcony observer’s superiority over the crowd below suggest that the spatial relationship between the observer and the observed in part constitutes the subjectivity of the former. Moreover, the observer on the balcony is not a passive recipient of what is already there down in the street; he or she selects, organizes, and interprets the sights, thus producing the identity and knowledge of the objects of his or her gaze.
Sui Sin Far disrupts this controlling voyeuristic gaze and undermines its mastery by placing socially marginalized characters—Pau Lin and other Chinese merchants’ wives—as the observers from the balconies. While the balcony vantage point reflects Pau Lin’s middle-class status and distances her from the crowd in the streets, this spatial relationship of her voyeuristic gaze at the strange “throng” of everyday life activities below reflects her gendered social isolation and cultural alienation. What she beholds below her balcony is beyond her control and at once fascinating and unsettling. Those in the heterogeneous crowd in the American Chinatown streets are interacting with, rather than simply looking at, one another. And these daily-life Chinatown sights of unlikely intermingling—such as a fat Chinese barber “laughing hilariously at a drunken white man who had fallen into a gutter,” “a stalwart Chief of the Six Companies engaged in earnest confab with a yellow-robed priest from the joss house,” and an interracial couple, who consist of a Chinese man “dressed in the latest American style and a very blonde woman, . . . entering a Chinese restaurant together”—are depicted as part of the urban American scene of modernity, “the hubbub of voices” of a heterogeneous crowd mixed with “the clang of electric cars and the jarring of heavy wheels over cobblestones” (“The Wisdom of the New” 49). This scene of everyday practice in the urban space, then, reveals less “the inner world” of the story’s Chinese female characters than their sense of alienation and a real world irreducible to the gaze of a single point of view or a unitary subject position. The apparently incongruous blending of variegated and multifarious bodies in the American Chinatown street disturbs both the traditional Chinese woman’s gaze and the gaze of the white male flâneur who portrays Chinatown as a self-enclosed foreign terrain ridden with filth, disease, and crimes innate to the peculiar Chinese “race.”
But in stories like “The Wisdom of the New” it is white women like Mrs. Dean and Adah Charlton who tutor Chinese young men how to be Chinese American, and it is white women like them who have the privilege of mobility in and out of Chinatown as “the woman about town.” As Mrs. Dean says to Adah, “to become American” while remaining Chinese “in a sense” is precisely “what we teach these Chinese boys” (54). Empowered by her race and class, and motivated by her Christian compassion, Mrs. Dean has devoted herself “earnestly and whole-heartedly to the betterment of the condition and the uplifting of the young workingmen of Chinese race who came to America.” With her colonialist condescension and good intentions, Mrs. Dean assumes that bettering conditions and uplifting Chinese workingmen in the United States depend on their understanding of “the Western people,” thereby disavowing racial inequality and eliding social change. She tells Adah that the “appeal and need” of the Chinese immigrants “was for closer acquaintance with the knowledge of the Western people, and that she had undertaken to give them, as far as she was able” (52). For white women like Mrs. Dean, Chinatown becomes a site of assimilation as a way of “uplifting” the heathen Chinese, who have become a white women’s “burden.” While for Chinese men assimilative Americanization seems to automatically lead to economic upward mobility, the dominant stereotype of the racialized inability and unwillingness of the Chinese immigrants to adapt to American culture is displaced onto Chinese women.
White women’s privilege is in part reflected in their freedom of walking and interacting with Chinese men in the street. When Chinatown is celebrating the “Harvest Moon Festival,” Mrs. Dean serves as tour guide for her niece: “Mrs. Dean, familiar with the Chinese people and the mazes of Chinatown, led her around fearlessly, pointing out this and that object of interest and explaining to her its meaning” (54). Mrs. Dean’s authority in knowing the Chinese people and culture enhances her privilege and courage (“fearlessly” walking through “the mazes of Chinatown”) in crossing the divided spaces in the city. Even though the narrator mentions that everybody in Chinatown—“men, women, and children”—seems to be out of doors for the festival celebration, Mrs. Dean and Adah meet and talk with only Chinese men, including Sankwei, in the street. The socialization of Pau Lin is limited to the circle of Chinese merchants’ wives and confined to the domestic space. Crossing the boundaries of race and gender and socializing in the public space of Chinatown seem to be the privilege of white women and Chinese men, while middle-class Chinese women like Pau Lin remain on their balconies as voyeurs of street life.
Sui Sin Far breaks away from this pattern of raced and gendered relationships and redefines the racialized identity of Chinatown in her other stories, such as “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” “Her Chinese Husband,” “Pat and Pan,” “Its Wavering Image,” “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” and “The Inferior Woman.” Rather than tourists, Sunday school teachers, or patronizing visitors in Chinatown, white women in those stories are residents of the neighborhood, living with the Chinese as families or neighbors. Chinese women, instead of white women, are the subject of gaze and enjoy mobility in and outside of Chinatown in stories such as “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” and “The Inferior Woman.”15 If space is “a product of relations,” thus “always in process,” as Massey contends (For Space 11), and if space must be understood as “a moment of becoming,” as “emergence and eruption, oriented not to the ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the event, to movement or action,” as Grosz argues (Architecture 119, 115), then the lived space of Chinatown and its identity are constantly altered by both Chinese immigrants’ and white women’s transgressions of the boundaries of race, gender, class, and sexuality in everyday practices. Such transformative transgressions are uncontainable to Chinatown, as “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior Woman” demonstrate.
A CHINESE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE ABOUT TOWN
The mutually constitutive becomings of the lived space and its inhabitants are embedded in Sui Sin Far’s narrative strategies for “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and its sequel, “The Inferior Woman.” In contrast to the subordinate, dependent, and conventional immigrant Chinese women in stories such as “The Wisdom of the New” and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” Mrs. Spring Fragrance is independent and resolutely Chinese American and is becoming an author. Most important, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is “the woman about town,” a new kind of flâneuse, whose mobility in urban and suburban spaces reinscribes raced and gendered spaces, reasserts Chinese women’s identity and subjectivity, and makes available materials for her writing.
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior Woman” undermine precisely what their titles evoke—titillating glimpses into the exotic, strange, mysterious, and inscrutable “Chinese” attributes and sensational stories of the Chinese slave girls and prostitutes often found in European Americans’ portrayals of Chinatown. As Ferens points out, readers who expect “a narrative of strange goings-on in Chinatown” will find these two stories “disconcerting.” “The most Chinese thing anyone does here is to fold a fan. The Spring Fragrances lead well-regulated, respectable lives. They read the paper, celebrate a wedding anniversary, and take walks in the park” (Ferens 103–4). The Spring Fragrances and their Chinese and white neighbors are middle-class Americans. Mr. Spring Fragrance, whose business name is Sing Yook, is a young curio merchant. “Though conservatively Chinese in many respects, he was at the same time what is called by the Westerners, ‘Americanized.’ Mrs. Spring Fragrance was even more ‘Americanized’” (“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” 17). Countering the seemingly innate subordinate and submissive image of Chinese women, Mrs. Spring Fragrance has an equal relationship with her husband and her white American friends. She travels by herself between Seattle and San Francisco, visiting both Chinese and American friends and attending parties, picnics, theaters, and public lectures (20–21). She also loves reading American poetry and even aspires to write “a book about Americans for her Chinese women friends” (“The Inferior Woman” 28). A most subversive and disconcerting aspect of these stories is the reversed subjective positions of the Chinese and white Americans, as indicated by Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s relationship with the subject of her book-in-progress—the “interesting,” “mysterious,” and “inscrutable” Americans (“The Inferior Woman” 28, 33). Instead of a mute “bearer of meaning” without autonomy, Mrs. Spring Fragrance seeks to become a “maker of meaning,” to again borrow Walkowitz’s phrases (414). But rather than reduce Americans to merely the object of her gaze or analysis, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, to the delight of her American friends, makes them participants in her book project.
Such equal relationships between Chinese and white Americans are at once reflected and made possible by the spatial location and organization of their dwellings. Instead of Chinatown, the Spring Fragrances and their neighbors live in the suburbs. To the right of their house is a Chinese American family, the Chin Yuens, and on the left, an Irish American family, the Carmans. This spatial arrangement is also crucial for the plots and narrative developments of both “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior Woman.” The Spring Fragrances and their next-door neighbors on both sides are good friends, and their everyday interactions are at the centers of both stories. While the first story focuses on Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s role in helping her close friend Laura, the Chin Yuens’ daughter, marry the man she loves, the second story deals with Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s involvement in the happiness of the Carmans—their son Will’s marriage to Alice Winthrop, the woman he loves. On the surface these stories are like conventional situation comedies, ending with star-crossed lovers happily married. Their subversion and provocation reside in the stories’ undercurrent themes—cultural hybridity, interracial friendship, and transgression of the boundaries of race, gender, and class.
The two stories of love and marriage are the means by which Sui Sin Far reveals the Chinese Americans’ bicultural life and interactions with European Americans, particularly those of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which facilitate the becomings of both herself and her Chinese and European American neighbors. Sui Sin Far’s descriptions of the Chin Yuens and Laura’s sweetheart in the first story show that unlike their parents, second-generation Chinese Americans are bicultural in their appearances and attitudes. Laura’s Chinese name is “Mai Gwi Far (a rose),” but nearly “everybody called her Laura, even her parents and Chinese friends.” Laura’s sweetheart, Kai Tzu, is American-born, and despite his Chinese name and its implied insistence on his Chinese identity, he is “as ruddy and stalwart as any young Westerner,” is “noted amongst baseball players as one of the finest pitchers on the Coast,” and can “also sing, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ to Laura’s piano accompaniment” (“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” 17). Only Mrs. Spring Fragrance knows of their love for each other, because Laura’s apparently Americanized parents, in following an old Chinese tradition, betrothed their daughter “at age fifteen, to the eldest son of the Chinese Government school-teacher in San Francisco” (17–18). As it turns out, the schoolteacher’s son, Man You, is in love with Ah Oi, who has “the reputation of being the prettiest Chinese girl in San Francisco and the naughtiest” (20). However, as a result of Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s mediation during her long, multipurposed visit to San Francisco, Man You and Ah Oi are married by an American priest in San Jose, hence enabling Laura to marry Kai Tzu. The situation forces Laura’s traditional Chinese parents to change their belief in the ideals of their Chinese ancestors.
A “woman about town,” Mrs. Fragrance breaks away from conventional flânerie. Rather than simply observe the scenes in the streets, she inhabits the urban space as an active, social urbanite. Her activities in San Francisco reveal a Chinese American woman’s lively social life beyond the city’s Chinatown. Through Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s movement about town, Sui Sin Far portrays Chinatown as part of San Francisco by refusing to draw any spatial boundaries between the ethnic ghetto and the rest of the city. “Mrs. Spring Fragrance, in San Francisco on a visit to her cousin, the wife of the herb doctor of Clay Street, was having a good time. . . . There was much to see and hear, including more than a dozen babies who had been born in the families of her friends since she last visited the city of the Golden Gate” (“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” 20). In fact, the word Chinatown does not appear in the story even though Clay Street runs through San Francisco’s Chinatown and the theater parties given in Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s honor most likely take place in Chinatown. Spatial divides between Chinatown and the city are further eliminated when Mrs. Spring Fragrance invites Ah Oi to “a tête-à-tête picnic” (20) in Golden Gate Park, and the two have a wonderful time contriving against the arranged marriage between Laura and Man You. Sui Sin Far allows Chinese women not only to break away from oppressive Chinese traditions but also to unapologetically claim right to the city’s public spaces, as well as those in Chinatown, by inhabiting them through everyday activities.
Sui Sin Far’s refusal to spatially confine the Chinese to Chinatown inevitably entails crossing racial boundaries. In a letter home, Mrs. Spring Fragrance tells her husband: “I am enjoying a most agreeable visit, and American friends, as also our own, strive benevolently for the accomplishment of my pleasure. Mrs. Samuel Smith, an American lady, known to my cousin, asked for my accompaniment to a magniloquent lecture the other evening” (21). Friendly interracial interaction, however, does not eliminate racial inequality, which Sui Sin Far tactfully reveals through Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s advice to her husband not to dwell on being charged one dollar for a shave that white American men pay only fifteen cents for or to be overly outraged when his brother, on a visit, is detained by the U.S. government (21). Such advice seems to suggest accommodation of racial inequality even though it tactfully exposes it. But by showing racial inequality as an everyday life reality, Sui Sin Far renders the friendship between Chinese and white Americans more subversive of racial hierarchy. The social life Mrs. Spring Fragrance enjoys with white Americans and her apparently frequent visits to Golden Gate Park may be unrealistic portrayals, but they point to the possibilities of racial equity, while refusing to accept racism as an unchangeable fact. Social change could begin with imagining alternatives to social reality shaped by racism and sexism. Resistance to gender discrimination and to racial exclusion and containment can be enacted through the politics of everyday life. It is precisely through everyday activities that Sui Sin Far reinscribes the gendered, racially marked topography of San Francisco and Chinatown as her female Chinese character crosses the divided spaces. As Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s letter to her husband describes: “[T]he Golden Gate Park is most enchanting, and the seals on the rock at the Cliff House extremely entertaining and amiable. There is much feasting and merrymaking under the lanterns in honor of your Stupid Thorn” (21). Scenes and activities of Chinese culture merge into San Francisco’s cityscape in this depiction that disrupts the portrayal of the “Chinese quarters” as a “foreign” terrain of vice and strange spectacles.
Sui Sin Far also challenges spatially maintained boundaries of gender in Chinatown through Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s mobility in her social life. Chinatown’s historically and discursively constructed masculine space of the “bachelor society,” “slave girls,” and “opium dens” is reinhabited and reinscribed by Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s frequent visits with friends and by numerous dinners and parties held for her. According to John Kuo Wei Tchen, Chinese women in the United States during the exclusion period were limited to three primary roles—“a merchant’s wife, a house servant, or a prostitute.” While merchants’ wives, abiding “by traditional customs,” “were seldom seen in the streets of Chinatown,” servant girls and prostitutes “were closely guarded and highly valued commodities” (“Women and Children” 96). These subordinate and subjugated positions of Chinese women within the Chinatown patriarchal community seem to explain the predominant portrayals of Chinatown as a male-dominant space. Lui, however, calls into question such seemingly realistic representations. She notes that contemporary scholars often comment on “Chinatown’s overwhelmingly male ‘bachelor’ population, emphasizing the absence of Chinese women in the neighborhood. Descriptions of the few Chinese women who did reside in the area, as wives or servants in merchant families, were accompanied by extensive commentaries on their trapped and invisible existence based on Chinese social practices that forbid women to walk the streets” (Chinatown 37). Lui points out gender bias in representations of Chinatown as a “predominantly masculine space” (38). In different ways, both Tchen and Lui call critical attention to Chinatown as a space that is not only raced but also gendered in terms of how men and women inhabit it.
Feminist writers and scholars have shown that predominantly masculine spaces, whether public or private, reflect unequal gender relations. Grosz’s perspective on women’s relationship to the domestic space indicates that immigrant Chinese women’s alienation at home and in American society as portrayed in Sui Sin Far’s stories is in part the result of women’s inferior social status. “The containment of women within a dwelling that they did not build, nor was even built for them,” Grosz argues, “can only amount to a homelessness within the very home itself: it becomes the space of duty, of endless and infinitely repeatable chores that have no social value or recognition, the space of the affirmation and replenishment of others at the expense and erasure of the self, the space of domestic violence and abuse, the space that harms as much as it isolates women” (Space 122). Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s active social life in San Francisco contests women’s subordination to men and disrupts women’s isolation and containment within the private space. An autonomous female subjectivity emerges along with Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s spatial mobility—her freedom to travel by herself, to walk the streets, to attend public events, and to visit parks. In fact, the transformative agency of female subjectivity operates as the driving force of the development of the plots and characters of both “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior Woman.”
Sui Sin Far allows Mrs. Spring Fragrance even more spatial mobility and subsequently a more complex interventional role in “The Inferior Woman.” While her book project mobilizes the plot, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s middle-class status, her apparently equal relationship with her husband, and her freedom of movement in public make her aspiration to write the book possible. Both the idea and the subject of the book come to her as she is walking in a Seattle park (28). Not burdened by domestic duties or confined to her house, Mrs. Spring Fragrance has the leisure to enjoy the city’s park, to think, and to develop ambitions such as writing a book about Americans. Her mobility in the public space also makes it possible for her to have unexpected encounters and to discover interesting topics for her book. As she turns down a bypath she sees her Irish American neighbor’s son, Will Carman, coming toward her, with a girl by his side. Mrs. Spring Fragrance realizes that the girl is “the Inferior Woman” with whom Will is in love (28–29). A good friend of the Carmans, Mrs. Spring Fragrance has heard Mrs. Carman disapprove of Will’s love for “the Inferior Woman” because of her working-class status. Living next door to the Carmans, Mrs. Spring Fragrance has the opportunity to observe Will, offer him encouraging advice, and intervene on his behalf. This relationship with her white American neighbors makes available the content of her book.
In addition, the architectural design of the Spring Fragrances’ house and its spatial relation to the Carmans’ house are instrumental in Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s becoming a writer on European Americans. The veranda of the Spring Fragrances’ house functions as an observation station and a site of communication. They regularly retire to the veranda to talk, and Will often happens to pass by. On one of these occasions, the sight of Will prompts the couple’s discussion of Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s desire to write a book. “Will Carman has failed to snare his bird,” says Mr. Spring Fragrance to his wife, who “sighed” sympathetically. Then she says with great enthusiasm: “Ah, these Americans! These mysterious, inscrutable, incomprehensible Americans! Had I the divine right of learning I would put them into an immortal book!” (33). Encouraged by her husband that “it is not necessary to acquire the ‘divine right of learning’ in order to accomplish things,” Mrs. Spring Fragrance decides to begin the project without delay, and her first subject will be “The Inferior Woman of America.” While ironically evoking the stereotypical attributes of the Chinese represented in mainstream American media, her remarks about these “mysterious, inscrutable, incomprehensible Americans” undermine the predominant normative image of white Americans as well. Moreover, Mrs. Spring Fragrance does not assume the authority to know the subject of her book. Instead, she wants to investigate it and asks her husband for advice on becoming informed about the Inferior Woman. He recommends an American method: “It is the way in America, when a person is to be illustrated, for the illustrator to interview the person’s friends. Perhaps, my dear, you had better confer with the Superior Woman” (34). With her parasol and folding fan in hand, Mrs. Spring Fragrance acts upon the advice right away, telling her husband, “I am going out for a walk” (35).
While walking about town, gathering information about the “interesting and mysterious Americans” (28) through observation and interviews for her book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance at once evokes and undermines the flâneur figure and his raced and gendered white male privilege and controlling gaze in the urban space. Rather than assume the authority of the knowing subject or relying on observation as a primary method of knowledge production, she investigates her book’s topic by eavesdropping on and meeting with the Superior Woman to learn about the Inferior Woman, all the while taking notes and verifying them with her “informant.” Her dual approach of participatory observation and interviewing of the American “native informant” seems to parallel the cultural anthropologist’s “fieldwork.” Ferens’s insightful discussion of “The Inferior Woman” sheds light on Sui Sin Far’s parodist and revisionist appropriation of the ethnographic tradition of her era: “Like the true scientist who aims to be nonintrusive, Mrs. Spring Fragrance contrives to listen without being heard. Although she intends to interview her ‘native informants,’ the college-educated Superior Woman and her mother, she first takes the opportunity to eavesdrop on their conversation through an open window. . . . With her notebook and pink parasol, Mrs. Spring Fragrance comes across as a comical version of the cultural anthropologist in the field” (105). But Sui Sin Far only appropriates to a certain extent the anthropologist’s “scientific” method as shown through her protagonist. Instead of relying on a sustained subject-object relationship, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s investigation involves “partnership, exchange, and the participation of the ‘native informant’ in the production of the ethnographic text” (106). Mrs. Spring Fragrance translates her notes for her informants’ correction. Such a “participant” process, to “tirelessly ‘question,’ ‘inquire,’ ‘interview,’ and ‘confer’ with Anglo-Americans,” Ferens emphasizes, is where Sui Sin Far “differs most from turn-of-the-century ethnographers, both lay and academic” in her own writings (106).
Apart from her middle-class position and her friendships with white women, the spatial mobility of the female Chinese protagonist is indispensable to her method of involving her “informants” as partners in the production of her book and to her becoming a writer. Her spatial mobility, as in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” actually mobilizes the plot development, leading to the resolution of the conflict. Not only can Mrs. Spring Fragrance take walks by herself to the local park, but she can also walk by herself to the houses of her white women friends to gather information for her book. Unlike the cultural anthropologist, who assumes a neutral position with his or her subject, Mrs. Spring Fragrance intends to intervene in the life of the Inferior Woman, Alice Winthrop. Her note taking of a conversation between the Superior Woman, Ethel Evebrook, and her mother about Alice becomes authentic evidence and convincing argument for Alice’s worthiness for Will when Mrs. Spring Fragrance pays Mrs. Carman a special visit to tell her about her “book about Americans.” Unlike the cultural anthropologist, who is already established as a writing subject, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is a housewife who is in the process of becoming a writer on Americans, a process that requires the Americans to believe in and cooperate with her. Hence her spatial mobility and her investigative method are central to her becoming the writing subject. In seeking to become a Chinese American writer on Americans, Mrs. Spring Fragrance brings positive changes in the attitudes and lives of white Americans even as she herself is undergoing the transformation from an immigrant and a merchant’s wife to an author. Herein lies the ultimate difference between her writing on Americans and her contemporary ethnographies on exotic or primitive peoples and their cultures.
Rather than produce knowledge of the Other, or reinforce the boundaries between “them” and “us” as turn-of-the century ethnographic fiction does, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s book-in-progress challenges the boundaries of race, gender, class, and culture without erasing their respective differences. This challenge is enacted by a new female subject unlike any of the Chinese characters, male or female, in Sui Sin Far’s other stories. A most subversive aspect of Sui Sin Far’s poetics of space is embedded in Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s spatial mobility, which actualizes her agency in intervening in raced, gendered, classed stereotypes and in the lives of both her Chinese and white American friends. As a biracial child who received objectifying gazes from the Chinese and experienced verbal and physical violence from white children while walking in the street, as an Eurasian woman who often hears respectable white Americans’ humiliating remarks about the Chinese, and as a reporter on and Sunday school teacher in Chinatowns, Sui Sin Far knows well spatially produced and enforced boundaries of race, gender, class, and culture.16
In seeking to subvert racist, sexist, and classist identities, Sui Sin Far employs future-oriented narrative strategies for reimagining spatialized social relations in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior Woman.” While both stories suggest that a new subject such as Mrs. Spring Fragrance can emerge from new social relations of gender, race, and class, the spatial mobility of a Chinese woman in American cities enacts multiple subversions. De Certeau’s notion of the politics enacted through walking may shed light on the significance of Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s walks to parks, restaurants, and theaters and to her white American friends’ houses. As he contends: “If it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements” (de Certeau 98). Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s walks make heterogeneous, inclusive spaces emerge, and masculine, segregated spaces recede, while actualizing the possibilities of female agency, hybrid cultural identity, and interracial friendship.
Like white women’s walks in Chinatown as portrayed in Sui Sin Far’s other stories, which privilege, transform, or abandon those spatial elements that construct Chinatown as a deviant, pollutant space of foreign terrain, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s walks privilege women’s autonomy and rights to public spaces and challenge, transform, or abandon spaces divided by differences of race, gender, class, and culture. By allowing her Chinese female characters to inhabit American urban space, Sui Sin Far re-represents the raced and gendered body as part of the American cityscape, of which Chinatown is an integral part with irreducible, transformative difference. Her spatially oriented narrative strategies for reinscribing the raced and gendered body’s relation to the urban space anticipate other Asian American writers’ renegotiations of the excluded and marginalized Others’ relation to the American cityscape and the nation-space of the United States decades later.
