Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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her two younger children at four o’clock in the afternoon, “Tom with his hair parted and his neck scrubbed, and Eva with her pretty ringlets and a clean cotton dress.” Then she orders them to go out of the house somewhere, no matter where, as if Tom and Eva are to be “walking signboards of Tom Fong’s Hand Laundry.” For “Mother Fong reasoned that people would not send their laundry to a place where the children looked as filthy as those in the third house opposite” (37). But more often than not she wants her children to “march” to Central Park, the East River, or anywhere they want far away from the area of their shop, where people would recognize them not as the laundryman’s children but always as Chinese, no matter how American their hair styles or clothes might be. “We are Chinese,” says Mrs. Fong to Tom and Eva as she is dressing them up for the city’s public space, “and you do not want to disgrace China” (37). Chinese immigrants’ Americanized “body maintenance,” then, expresses multiple social bonds—identifications with the middle class, American culture, and Chinese ethnicity. If the body “is both an environment we practise on and also practise with,” as Turner contends, the Americanized “alien” body of the Chinese, though it may signify assimilation, introduces a subversive difference into the environment it inhabits.
By inhabiting the city otherwise than as prescribed by racial exclusion and segregation, the Fongs resist their spatially reinforced confinement to the margins of American society. Grosz’s argument that the body as “cultural product” can in turn transform and reinscribe the urban environment and unsettle binarized identities suggests that Tom’s and Eva’s Americanized appearances in the city’s public space signify more than conformity to the dominant culture. The “Americanized” yet racially marked body of the Chinese in the city streets and Central Park alters the white American body politic in the urban space, reconstituting the urban environment. When the body is understood as the “primary sociocultural product,” Grosz contends, “[i]t involves a double displacement, an alteration or realignment of a number of conceptual schemes that have thus far been used to think bodies: on the one hand, it involves problematizing a whole series of binary oppositions and dichotomous categories” (Architecture 30). Furthermore, Grosz argues: “[M]inorities . . . aren’t ‘imprisoned’ in or by space, because space (unless we are talking about a literal prison) is never fixed or contained . . . because space is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation. The more one disinvests one’s own body from that space, the less able one is to effectively inhabit that space as one’s own” (Architecture 9). Inhabiting the city as equal citizens is precisely what Mrs. Fong encourages her children to do.
For the Fongs, deliberately going out dressed up as Americans to occupy and experience the public spaces in the city enacts what de Certeau calls the politics of “everyday practices, of lived space” (96). By regularly urging her children to go to Central Park and to explore the city, Mrs. Fong encourages them to participate in city life, to experience being part of the American urban populace, and to refuse the confinement of their basement shop, their small apartment, and even their neighborhood. Their everyday practices in inhabiting the city resist the social isolation and spatial containment of working-class Chinese immigrants like Tom Fong, Sr., who spends most of his time doing laundry in the basement. When he goes out at all, Chinatown is the only place Tom Fong, Sr., visits. Having experienced racism almost on a daily basis, he is aware that as a Chinaman and laundryman to boot, he is unwanted, despised, and marginal in the country and city where he has made his home. “Tom Fong had been so used to being called a Chink that it did not really hurt” (122). He walks with his head bending down, looking at the pavement when he has to go out onto the street. The public space of the city remained hostile or at least unfriendly to him until suddenly the American attitude changed toward the Chinese when China fought against Japanese invasion in 1937. “Tom Fong no longer stooped and looked at the pavement as he walked the streets. He held his chin level and met the eyes of the people who passed, and he knew that they were admiring his people for fighting” (123).
In contrast to her husband’s submission to the marginal, abject identity of the Chinese in the United States and in the city, Mrs. Fong wants her children to walk the streets with pride to claim right to the city. “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered,” de Certeau contends (97). For de Certeau, walking “is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language)” (97–98). If walking in the city can spatially act out the place by appropriating the topographical system, then the body and its movement are constitutive of the place it acts out, just as the pedestrians act out the place of Third Avenue. But, given their racially marked yet Americanized bodies, Tom and Eva act out a different place, one that undermines racial and cultural homogeneity, by regularly walking the streets, visiting places where Chinese Americans like their father would never go. Hence their walking, in a way, transforms the urban environment, claims their belonging, and inhabits the American urban space “on the same footing with all the struggling millions” (36).
Inhabiting the city through flânerie and activities in public spaces for Chinese immigrants, then, also functions as a transformative process of their identity and subjectivity formation. What Eva sees on her walks and at school has exposed her to alternative ways of being a female. At twelve, one year younger than Tom, Eva is a well-disciplined, proper Chinese girl. Unlike her inquisitive and assertive brother, who constantly asks questions and refuses to accept easy answers, Eva often “said nothing and seemed to accept everything.” She is constantly reminded by her mother that she is “a girl, a nu-tsai.” Eva understands that the term nu-tsai (literally “female material”) defines what she can become and how she is supposed to behave as a girl: “In Eva’s mind it meant vaguely that a girl had to be put in her place” (50). By learning the proper good manners of a girl the female subject is disciplined to assume the subordinate roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother. Eva seems to have accepted the role of a nu-tsai, but underneath her quiet manner something has disturbed her sense of female propriety. When she is outside her home, something awakens in Eva: “On the streets and at school, she saw hustling, bustling, boisterous, screaming, yelling, scuffing, ball-batting children, girls as well as boys. . . . American girls yelled at the top of their voices, and how proud and straight they stood! How fast they walked, with free swaying strides! . . . On the park playground, she saw how the grown-up girls . . . stood in bloomers, arms akimbo, legs wide apart, beautiful, strong, unafraid” (51). Eva’s access to the city’s streets, parks, and public school enables her to witness different ways of being a female, ways that challenge the role of being a traditional Chinese nu-tsai prescribed by patriarchy at home. Significantly, Eva perceives liberating possibilities of being a female through an urban environment that offers her different models and alternative ways of being and thinking, which are unavailable at home. By the time she reaches seventeen, Eva has become “independent and self-confident.” “She walked straight and unafraid like American girls and with the American gait” (133). It is worth noting, however, that the formation of Eva as a confident female is supposed to be the result of her Americanization, which is equated with freedom, progress, independence, and individuality, eliding gender inequality in the United States and indirectly casting Chinese society as the opposite. Nevertheless, Eva’s development indicates the significance of mobility in the public space for women’s subject formation. Unlike several of the young immigrant women who are mostly confined to the domestic space in Sui Sin Far’s stories of an earlier era, Eva has much more mobility in the city, in part because of her age and her brother Tom, who is tireless in his eagerness to explore the city and who likes to invite Eva to walk with him. But Tom often ventures into the city by himself, and what he perceives on his walks defers from what Eva experiences. Both the act and effect of their walking in the city are gendered, producing different stories about their respective subject formations. These stories resist the exclusion of Chinese Americans and claim their right to the city even as they in part reiterate the assimilation myth.
URBAN EXPLORATION AND THE SUBJECT FORMATION OF TOM FONG, JR.
Much of the novel’s narrative is devoted to Tom’s exploration of the city, which is central