Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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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.