not only inculcates in Tom the desire to be Americanized; he revives in her the same impulse. In fact, there is an aspect of envy in the excitement that is generated in Miss Cartwright over Tom’s learning experience. . . . Thus this episode reveals at once the interrelationship between sexuality, race, and culture, and the complex impetus for learning to be American and its therapeutic effect on America: the “model minority” serves both as a model for other minorities to follow in the process toward Americanization and as a secondary modeling system for whites. (Asian/American 157)
The effort Tom puts into the learning of English as an “indispensable part of learning to be American,” Palumbo-Liu notes, “signals an ethical and moral strength now lacking in the ‘west,’ which has become complacent and spoiled” (157).
Richard Jean So, in his article “Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature” (2010), reiterates the pedagogical function of Tom’s assimilation by situating Lin’s portrayal of the Chinese immigrant experience within both the Chinese and American sociohistorical and cultural contexts. So contends that Tom Fong, Jr., represents a model of “the incorporation of Chinese subjects into US liberal democracy” through “his experience of America as a kind of political pedagogy, and the classroom appropriately becomes the site of his assimilation” (54). He notes that Tom’s wrestling with the language of the Declaration of Independence led to his comprehension and absorption of “the text’s significance” when his history teacher, Mr. Watson, rendered the meaning of the text “sentence by sentence, into plain colloquial English” (54). By linking Tom’s study of the Declaration of Independence to Lin’s earlier socially engaged intellectual work in Shanghai, which in part motivated his translation of the Declaration of Independence into colloquial Chinese, So argues that “Tom is the utopian afterlife of Lin’s Republican Chinaman” (54). Moreover, when he is called upon by Mr. Watson to present to the class what the Declaration 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
