Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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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,