Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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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