Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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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.
2
CLAIMING RIGHT TO THE CITY
Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family
One of the most powerful ways in which social space can be conceptualised is as constituted out of social relations, social interactions, and for that reason always and everywhere an expression and a medium of power.
—DOREEN MASSEY
Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power.
—MICHEL FOUCAULT
PUBLISHED IN 1948, CHINATOWN FAMILY BY LIN YUTANG IS THE first novel about Chinese American lives in New York City and its Chinatown during the 1930s.1 Unlike the predominant merchant-class Chinese immigrant families in Sui Sin Far’s journalist reports and short stories, and in contrast to the upper-class Chinese American family in Pardee Lowe’s autobiography set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Father and Glorious Descendant (1943), the family in Lin’s novel, the Fongs, is working-class and “illegal” according to the United States’ Chinese exclusion laws.2 The 1875 Page Law barring the entry of Chinese, Japanese, and “Mongolian” contract laborers and women for the purpose of prostitution was an effective measure for restricting immigration of Chinese women to the United States, as Sucheng Chan contends in her essay “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943.” Chan shows with abundant evidence that “[g]iven the widely held view that all Chinese women were prostitutes, laws against the latter affected other groups of Chinese women who sought admission into the country as well” (95). Najia Aarim-Heriot further demonstrates that “[f]rom 1876 to 1882, the number of Chinese women entering the United States declined by 68 percent from the previous seven-year period—from 4,142 to 1,338” (178). The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers and declared Chinese ineligible for citizenship, was renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902 until its repeal in 1943 (Takaki, Strangers 111). In addition, antimiscegenation laws in several states implemented since the late nineteenth century, and the 1922 Cable Act stipulating that American women citizens would lose their U.S. citizenship if they married aliens ineligible for citizenship (repealed in 1931), made it extremely difficult, if not entirely impossible, for working-class Chinese immigrants to have families in the United States (Yung, “Chronology” 426). When the 1924 Immigration Quota Act extended immigration exclusion to all Asians (except Hawaiians and Filipinos), it allowed entry of alien wives of Chinese merchants only (Peffer).
Chinatown Family alludes to those exclusionary laws and their underlying racism. The family’s patriarch, Tom Fong, Sr., who comes to the United States during the gold rush, is driven out of the West Coast by anti-Chinese violence and becomes a laundryman in New York City. Forbidden by law to have a family in the United States, Fong goes back to China every five or six years to be with his wife and to father a child. The Chinese Exclusion Act is still in effect when, with the help of his second son, Frederick, an insurance agent, who entered the United States by jumping ship while working as a seaman at age sixteen, Fong eventually has enough money to bring his wife and their two youngest children to New York City during the 1930s (Chinatown Family 7).3 Lin situates the Fongs’ family union in New York in the context of U.S. exclusionary laws through an ironic, yet seemingly matter-of-fact, statement by the narrator: “There were those immigration officials, and there were immigration laws, laws made, it seemed, especially to keep Chinese out of America, or to let in as few as possible” (9). Hence, to live as a family, the Fongs have to circumvent the law: “A laundryman certainly could not bring his family into the country legally. But a merchant could if the children were not yet twenty-one years old. And Uncle Chan was a merchant, with a fine busy grocery store in Chinatown.” He “was glad to help to bring his sister and her children over.” So “to satisfy the law,” Uncle Chan made his brother-in-law Tom Fong legally a joint owner of the grocery store. “Thus in the somewhat blinking eyes of the law, Tom Fong became a merchant” (10).
Given the historical context of Chinese exclusionary laws, Lin’s choice of a working-class Chinese American family for his book set in New York City during the 1930s challenges not only the exclusion of the Chinese from immigration and U.S. citizenship