of a spatialized social hierarchy racialized as characteristically Chinese within a self-sustained architectural structure of a Chinatown theater: “The [theater] building itself was a study in ways Chinese. In it were housed all the strata of life to be found in the district. Above the theater, on the second story, lived the manager and stage director. . . . On the third flight down were the opium dens where the smokers in various stages drew their dreams from the long pipes. It was this retreat which was immortalized by Frank Norris in his story, The Third Circle” (qtd. in Teng, “Artifacts” 63–64). In her discussion of this passage, Teng notes that “[w]hat Genthe does here is reinscribe Norris’s trope as physical space: metaphorical circles become architectural structures—three stories segregating classes of people and activities. For Genthe, a building serves as a microcosmic articulation of socioeconomic relations in Chinatown society” (“Artifacts” 65).
Moreover, the self-contained architecture of the theater suggests the self-enclosure of the Chinatown community isolated from the American city. Hence Chinatown’s apparently discrete and stagnant Chinese culture simultaneously constructs an opposing American national and cultural identity of progress and enlightenment coded as the norm equated with whites and things European. Spatial metaphors that depict Chinatown as an embodiment of cultural and racial homogeneity also underlie Irwin’s interpretive essays on Genthe’s old Chinatown photographs. Evoking “The Third Circle,” Irwin asserts that Genthe’s photographs capture Chinatown’s mystery and inscrutability: “These pretty and painted playthings . . . furnished a glimpse into Frank Norris’s Third Circle, the underworld. We shall never quite understand the Chinese, I suppose; and not the least comprehensible thing about them is the paradox of their ideas and emotions” (in Genthe, Old Chinatown 112–13). Paradoxically, the inscrutable Chinese appear completely knowable to Norris, Genthe, and Irwin, whose white male gaze masters and domesticates the Otherness of the Chinese they encounter. By assuming an anthropological authority of detached observation and interpretation of Chinatown, Irwin, like Genthe and Norris, among others, produces the knowledge of a separate Chinese society and culture, apart from and undisturbed by things American. The Chinese, then, may be “with us, but not of us.”10
Similar representations also characterize portrayals of New York City’s Chinatown in mainstream media. Apart from constructing it as a site for encountering the unknown, Mary Ting Yi Lui notes: “Tourist guidebooks and sensational newspaper and social reform reports frequently linked Chinatown’s topography to the various vice activities in the area. Doyers Street for example was described in the 1904 tourist guidebook, New York’s Chinatown: Ancient Pekin Seen at “Old Bowery” Gate, as ‘the crookedest in [the] city, making half a dozen turns in its short stretch from Chatham Square to Pell St.’ Crooked streets, though a common feature of lower Manhattan, came to reflect the immorality and hidden criminal nature of the neighborhood and its residents” (Lui, Chinatown 39–40). Although the journalist Louis J. Beck claimed to offer a “fair and just” view in his book on New York City’s Chinatown, he depicted this neighborhood as a “self-contained environment where all material, cultural, and spiritual needs could be met by the Chinese residents themselves. . . . The life of the community was . . . set apart from the rest of the city.” Portrayed as such, “Chinatown, then,” says Lui, “was in New York, but not of it” (Chinatown 25, 32).
Underlying those spatially confined identities of Chinatowns and the Chinese residents is the controlling gaze of the flâneur, the all-seeing and knowing male subject of the privileged white journalist, photographer, or tourist who enjoys the freedom of strolling about town across divided urban spaces. Yet the descriptive details of the seemingly transparent alien Chinatown space and the Chinese body turn the flâneur into merely a passive recipient and a discerning observer of a given environment; thus the flâneur’s role in simultaneously constructing the identities of Chinatown and white America is elided, or rather becomes hidden. At the same time, the subjectivity and identity of the white male observer and narrator are constituted by the power of his gaze and superior social position and by the racial inferiority of the Chinese, who are rendered mute objects, part of the Chinatown space that is at once mysterious and transparent to the white male gaze. Or, when the Chinese were portrayed in writings like Norris’s story as more than objectified curiosities that made up Chinatown streets, they were morally decrepit seducers who victimized white women.
These dominant views of Chinatowns and their narrative strategies provide a useful context for our understanding of the significance of Sui Sin Far’s writings about Chinatown, especially the ways that Sui Sin Far restores the humanity and subjectivity of the Chinese and re-represents Chinatown as an American urban neighborhood. Moreover, given the contradictory functions of the storied Chinatown and its inhabitants, which are “socially peripheral” yet “symbolically central” in the formation of the body politic of the U.S. nation-state, Sui Sin Far’s representation of Chinatown as part of the American city unsettles American identity, which is supposed to be racially “white” and culturally Eurocentric.11
A FLÂNEUSE IN LOS ANGELES’S CHINATOWN
Sui Sin Far in her counter-narratives of Chinatown lives appropriates and revises the flâneur figure and the conventions of journalism and ethnography of her time. Employing the white subject’s privileged gaze and freedom of spatial mobility to simultaneously subvert racial stereotypes of Chinatown, she undermines the authority of participatory observation as a reliable method of obtaining knowledge of the Other. Rather than seek to master, control, or domesticate the Other or Otherness, as is characteristic of “the panopticism” of urban spectatorship in nineteenth-century American urban literature (Brand 184–85), Sui Sin Far’s flânerie undermines the street epistemology of the colonizing white male gaze, partly from the white woman’s perspective and partly from the perspective of the Chinese. “Who is entitled to look at and represent whom is a charged question in a racially stratified society,” states Ferens in her insightful analysis of Sui Sin Far’s Chinatown stories and their reception by white readers (80). Ferens calls critical attention to Sui Sin Far’s ambivalent subject position and her complex revisionist appropriation of the conventions of ethnography and white middle-class Christian values (57). She observes that Christian missions in Chinatown were in part mobilized and justified by the normative discourse whose “rhetoric of lack associated with Chinese culture was an insidious one that Edith [Eaton] had trouble rejecting outright since it was the imagined lack in the world’s spiritual economy that moved white Canadians to charity and goodwill toward the ‘heathen.’” Nevertheless, Ferens contends that Eaton “often wrote against the rhetoric of lack in Chinese culture” (52). In so doing, I would argue, Sui Sin Far at once reiterates and displaces middle-class “American,” “Christian” values onto Chinese immigrants, but not without dismantling the normative discourse’s assumptions about American identity and the Chinese alien Other.
Given the anthropological authority that white male journalists and fiction writers who sauntered Chinatown streets as flâneurs assume in representing Chinatown, the ethnographic tendency in Sui Sin Far’s reports on Chinatown could be considered a strategy of counter-narrative. In 1903, Sui Sin Far spent several months in Los Angeles, working as a journalist for the Los Angeles Express. Her position as a journalist enabled her to write and publish interventional narratives about Chinatown. Appropriating the method of journalist investigation and ethnographic participatory observation, Sui Sin Far employs the conventions of flânerie to resee and reexperience Chinatown anew.
In reports such as “Chinese in Business Here” for the Los Angeles Express, Sui Sin Far takes her readers on a tour of Chinatown. Instead of dark alleys or opium dens, she leads the reader through Chinatown streets, while commenting on and explaining what is seen:
If one will visit the stores, and other places of business of the Chinese of Los Angeles, he will gain a clearer idea of the industry and ingenuity of the people than the most learned books and treatises on the Chinese. . . . I have passed many a pleasant half hour or longer in the Chinese stores,
