Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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“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