nowhere else in popular American fiction, and the detailed web of facts about daily life that she provided created a realistic environment in which her characters could interact” (92). But rather than a passive background or environment, the Chinatown neighborhood and its everyday activities constitute a counter-discourse, one that engages with the story’s central conflict and ambivalence as noted by Ferens in her discussion of the story. Ferens states that “the story deplores the parochialism that hampers cross-cultural contacts.” Yet it is “a deeply ambivalent story that cannot be reduced to one reading.” According to Ferens: “The fundamental problem it raises is that the two cultural groups are limited or limit themselves to just looking at each other. This leads to the reification of cultural difference and, subsequently, to a struggle for dominance fought over the body of a child” (107). Given the sociohistorical context of this story, the struggle of immigrant Chinese women to keep their children from Americanization seems to be more a matter of resistance to assimilation and to losing their children to the dominant culture than “a struggle for dominance.” Underlying their fear and resistance, as well as the hegemony of white America, is the denial of racial and cultural hybridity, which is already taking place in Chinatown. Pau Lin’s observation of the “American Chinatown” as “a motley throng made up of all nationalities” (49) subverts precisely the reification of cultural difference and resists the dominance of any supposedly discrete ethnic or national culture. Sui Sin Far’s depiction of the heterogeneous American Chinatown through the gaze of Pau Lin offers an alternative perspective to the reification of either culture or race and renders Chinatown an “American” urban space of multiplicity and hybridity, open to change.
Sui Sin Far produces such an undercurrent counter-narrative in the story by using the vantage point of the balcony and the organizing power of the visual sense to depict a “detailed web of facts about daily life” in Chinatown “that existed nowhere else in popular American fiction,” as Yin notes. No less remarkable about Sui Sin Far’s narrative strategies is her positioning of Chinese merchant wives like Pau Lin and her neighbors as the urban spectators on the balconies. Critics of urban literature have pointed out the significance of the spatial relationship between the balcony and the street. For Walter Benjamin, the balcony vantage point in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short piece “The Cousin’s Corner Window” enables the cousin/observer to frame and examine the scenes below according to the “principles of the art of seeing”: “His attitude toward the crowd is, rather, one of superiority, inspired as it is by his observation post at the window of an apartment building. From this vantage point he scrutinizes the throng. . . . His opera glasses enable him to pick out individual genre scenes” (Benjamin, “On Some Motifs” 173). Such a voyeuristic gaze gives the spectator the power not only to select what to see but also to control how to see, thus reducing the “throng” below to framed objects of artistic gaze. Exploring the privilege of the voyeuristic gaze from the balcony, Urry offers another perspective on the functions of the balcony in nineteenth-century urban life and literature: “More generally, the upper class mainly sought to gaze upon the other, while standing on their balconies. The balcony took on special significance in nineteenth-century life and literature as the place from which one could gaze but not be touched, could participate in the crowd yet be separate from it” (392). Both Benjamin’s and Urry’s remarks about the balcony observer’s superiority over the crowd below suggest that the spatial relationship between the observer and the observed in part constitutes the subjectivity of the former. Moreover, the observer on the balcony is not a passive recipient of what is already there down in the street; he or she selects, organizes, and interprets the sights, thus producing the identity and knowledge of the objects of his or her gaze.
Sui Sin Far disrupts this controlling voyeuristic gaze and undermines its mastery by placing socially marginalized characters—Pau Lin and other Chinese merchants’ wives—as the observers from the balconies. While the balcony vantage point reflects Pau Lin’s middle-class status and distances her from the crowd in the streets, this spatial relationship of her voyeuristic gaze at the strange “throng” of everyday life activities below reflects her gendered social isolation and cultural alienation. What she beholds below her balcony is beyond her control and at once fascinating and unsettling. Those in the heterogeneous crowd in the American Chinatown streets are interacting with, rather than simply looking at, one another. And these daily-life Chinatown sights of unlikely intermingling—such as a fat Chinese barber “laughing hilariously at a drunken white man who had fallen into a gutter,” “a stalwart Chief of the Six Companies engaged in earnest confab with a yellow-robed priest from the joss house,” and an interracial couple, who consist of a Chinese man “dressed in the latest American style and a very blonde woman, . . . entering a Chinese restaurant together”—are depicted as part of the urban American scene of modernity, “the hubbub of voices” of a heterogeneous crowd mixed with “the clang of electric cars and the jarring of heavy wheels over cobblestones” (“The Wisdom of the New” 49). This scene of everyday practice in the urban space, then, reveals less “the inner world” of the story’s Chinese female characters than their sense of alienation and a real world irreducible to the gaze of a single point of view or a unitary subject position. The apparently incongruous blending of variegated and multifarious bodies in the American Chinatown street disturbs both the traditional Chinese woman’s gaze and the gaze of the white male flâneur who portrays Chinatown as a self-enclosed foreign terrain ridden with filth, disease, and crimes innate to the peculiar Chinese “race.”
But in stories like “The Wisdom of the New” it is white women like Mrs. Dean and Adah Charlton who tutor Chinese young men how to be Chinese American, and it is white women like them who have the privilege of mobility in and out of Chinatown as “the woman about town.” As Mrs. Dean says to Adah, “to become American” while remaining Chinese “in a sense” is precisely “what we teach these Chinese boys” (54). Empowered by her race and class, and motivated by her Christian compassion, Mrs. Dean has devoted herself “earnestly and whole-heartedly to the betterment of the condition and the uplifting of the young workingmen of Chinese race who came to America.” With her colonialist condescension and good intentions, Mrs. Dean assumes that bettering conditions and uplifting Chinese workingmen in the United States depend on their understanding of “the Western people,” thereby disavowing racial inequality and eliding social change. She tells Adah that the “appeal and need” of the Chinese immigrants “was for closer acquaintance with the knowledge of the Western people, and that she had undertaken to give them, as far as she was able” (52). For white women like Mrs. Dean, Chinatown becomes a site of assimilation as a way of “uplifting” the heathen Chinese, who have become a white women’s “burden.” While for Chinese men assimilative Americanization seems to automatically lead to economic upward mobility, the dominant stereotype of the racialized inability and unwillingness of the Chinese immigrants to adapt to American culture is displaced onto Chinese women.
White women’s privilege is in part reflected in their freedom of walking and interacting with Chinese men in the street. When Chinatown is celebrating the “Harvest Moon Festival,” Mrs. Dean serves as tour guide for her niece: “Mrs. Dean, familiar with the Chinese people and the mazes of Chinatown, led her around fearlessly, pointing out this and that object of interest and explaining to her its meaning” (54). Mrs. Dean’s authority in knowing the Chinese people and culture enhances her privilege and courage (“fearlessly” walking through “the mazes of Chinatown”) in crossing the divided spaces in the city. Even though the narrator mentions that everybody in Chinatown—“men, women, and children”—seems to be out of doors for the festival celebration, Mrs. Dean and Adah meet and talk with only Chinese men, including Sankwei, in the street. The socialization of Pau Lin is limited to the circle of Chinese merchants’ wives and confined to the domestic space. Crossing the boundaries of race and gender and socializing in the public space of Chinatown seem to be the privilege of white women and Chinese men, while middle-class Chinese women like Pau Lin remain on their balconies as voyeurs of street life.
Sui Sin Far breaks away from this pattern of raced and gendered relationships and redefines the racialized identity of Chinatown in her other stories, such as “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,”
