Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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of Independence says, Tom explicates the text in plain English so successfully, to the surprise of his classmates and the satisfaction of his teacher, that he embodies the “model minority,” reinforcing the myth of the American Dream in terms of American ideals detached from the reality of structurally produced social and racial inequality.8
Both Palumbo-Liu’s and So’s examinations of the pedagogical functions of Tom’s assimilation help advance critical studies of Chinatown Family and other Asian American literary texts. Their emphasis on the formation of the subject through language and discourse, however, leaves the spatial formation of Chinese American identity and subjectivity in the novel unexamined. Although their readings of Chinatown Family offer provocative insights into the significance of Lin’s problematic representation of Chinese American experience, they overlook the characters’ spatially enacted resistance and subversion in the novel.
Recent scholarship on urban space explores “not only what has increasingly been called the ‘social production of the built environment’ but also, how built environments both represent and condition economies, societies, and cultures,” as sociologist Anthony D. King observes. King explains: “[T] he built environment is more than a mere representation of social order (i.e. a reflector), or simply a mere environment in which social action takes place. Rather, physical and spatial urban forms actually constitute as well as represent much of social and cultural existence: society is to a very large extent constituted through the buildings and spaces that it creates” (1). If the spatial is where the social and the cultural are constituted, then identity and subject formations are also shaped by the spatial. As Grosz argues, “[T]he city is both a mode for the regulation and administration of subjects but also an urban space in turn reinscribed by the particularities of its occupation and use” (Space 109). Hence possibilities of resistance and intervention are embedded in the mutually constitutive and transformative relationship between the urban space and the embodied subject: “[T]he city is . . . the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed. In turn, the body (as cultural product) transforms, reinscribes the urban landscape according to its changing (demographic) needs, extending the limits of the city” (Space 108–9). From this perspective, the spatiality of identity construction and subject formation must be investigated to better understand not only the ways the dominant ideology constitutes its subjects through discourses and spatially constituted social relations but also the possibilities of resistance and intervention through the subject’s relationship to and activities in the social space, which is in part constituted by the gendered, racially marked body and space.
Chinatown Family’s most distinctive subversion, I would argue, lies in Lin’s explicit employment of urban topography through the characters’ everyday practices to resist the exclusion and segregation of the Chinese, to explore the formations of Chinese American identity and subjectivity, and to claim Chinese Americans’ right to the city. In so doing, Lin, like Sui Sin Far, at once undermines and reinvents the privileged white male flâneur figure of urban observation and urban exploration and dismantles the myth of Chinatown as a self-closed, morally decrepit, “foreign” terrain in American cities. While resonating with the spatially mobilized subject formation embedded in Sui Sin Far’s stories such as “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior Woman,” Lin’s spatially oriented narrative strategies are more overtly deployed in representing the characters’ identity formations. The spatial mobility of the Fongs in the city facilitates their becoming American, shapes their subjectivity, and maps out the connections between Chinatown and the city as the Fongs seek to participate in the life of the city and to become part of the Chinese American community. In fact, the Fongs and the Chinese American community in New York City claim their right to the city by inhabiting public spaces through sightseeing and travel and by using parades in the streets to assert their belonging and their political agendas.
De Certeau’s theory on the spatial practices of everyday life can shed light on the subversive and interventional effects of Lin’s portrayals of the streets of New York City and Chinatown. While discussing how the mechanisms and technical procedures of power transform “a human multiplicity into a ‘disciplinary’ society,” de Certeau asks: “But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?” De Certeau’s question points to the ways that “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life.” By investigating “these multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised,” de Certeau develops “a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city” (96). This concept of subversive possibilities embedded in everyday practices of lived space sheds light on Lin’s deployment of urban topography through the living and working environment of the Fongs and their everyday activities.
RESISTANCE TO SPATIAL CONFINEMENT AND SOCIAL ISOLATION
Much of the sociopolitical valence of Chinatown Family resides in Lin’s representations of how space is inhabited in New York City. The location of the Fongs’ laundry reflects the subordinate, marginal social position of the Chinese laundrymen in American society.9 When Mrs. Fong and Tom and Eva finally arrive at “TOM FONG HAND LAUNDRY”—the family business and home in New York City—they are dismayed. “The little rathole of a shop on a cross street near the corner of Third Avenue was a great disappointment to Tom and Eva and even mother.” The family business in America is nothing like what Tom had expected it to be. He “had had visions of a spic-and-span shop, all American style, crowded with hundreds of American customers, all talking the gibberish that was English” (15). It is in this “little rathole of a shop” that Tom Fong, Sr., and his eldest son, Loy, or “Daiko” (big brother), have been laboring for decades. “Father and son ironed and ironed and ironed deep into the night, silently and contentedly, in the room and a half in the basement of the house in a crosstown street in the Eighties” (10). Even though Tom Fong, Sr., and Loy do not seem to have any complaints about their work, Lin tactfully exposes their humiliation and exploitation through the eyes of Tom: “Tom watched his father and Daiko at work in their shirt sleeves, ironing shirts, undershirts, towels, sheets, girls’ dresses, workmen’s blue denims, and ladies’ silk pajamas” (61). The laundry items indicate the class, gender, and racial backgrounds of their customers. For men to make a living out of washing and ironing the clothes not only of rich people and other workmen but also of women in a male-dominant society constitutes a humiliation marked by the inequality of race and class. Even the less privileged whites in American society—white women and workmen—can enjoy the privilege of having their laundry done for a cheap price by Chinamen.
Tom’s experience and observation of the spatially confined working conditions of the family laundry serve to critique the inequality of race and class. In summer evenings the basement becomes suffocating: “[N]o breath of fresh air reached that little room. Tom saw his father and Daiko covered with perspiration, the heat from the pressing irons accumulating until they had to open the door. They had to keep the window shut to guard against the dust from the streets” (61). Through the closed window Tom “saw the legs of men, women, and children passing by on the sidewalk,” and “[e]arnestly he wished some day that they could come up from the basement and own a shop on the street level” (60). This spatially confined underground condition of the Fongs’ laundry shop at once reflects and reinforces the Chinese laundrymen’s subordinate, marginal social status, against which the Fong family struggles.
Lin employs visual and spatial strategies to reveal and resist Chinese immigrants’ social isolation and cultural marginalization in the city by placing the Fongs’ home on the third floor above their shop, near Third Avenue on Manhattan’s East Side. He allows Mrs. Fong to be the subject of gaze who interprets the scene in the streets and reveals how she feels about where she lives as she watches everyday life activities from her apartment window:
Often Mrs. Fong went to the window to survey the strange scene below and to watch Americans, men and women and children. . . . Only a stone’s throw away was Third Avenue, which was dark, noisy, and familiar. There was something about the darkness and familiarity