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 and busyness of the avenue that she liked. She had never wanted to live in a deserted street, which meant that one was living in reduced circumstances. She has always wanted to live in a busy, prosperous thoroughfare, with lots of noise and people, and to be on the same footing with all the struggling millions. Third Avenue seemed to be just that. (35–36)
Unlike the Chinese merchants’ wives in Sui Sin Far’s short stories, who feel alienated from the street scene they observe from their balconies, Mrs. Fong wants to be part of it, on equal terms. Her longing to participate in city life and her desire never “to live in a deserted street, which meant that one was living in reduced circumstances” challenge the myth of Chinatown’s self-containment and critiques its segregation, while highlighting the racial inequality implicated in the spatially managed hierarchy of race and class, to which the Fongs’ “rathole”-like basement laundry shop—the fruit of more than thirty years’ labor in the United States—testifies.
Yet Third Avenue seems to hold open possibilities of New York City for Mrs. Fong and her family. Living within a stone’s throw of Third Avenue, and among European immigrants, Mrs. Fong is able to observe the everyday hustle and bustle of the city on the thoroughfare, to feel its energetic activities around her, and to begin imagining her American Dream: “All this rumble, this intense activity of people going somewhere, gave her a sense of excitement and of being in the midst of things. Where there were plenty of people in a city such as New York, she was sure there was money to be made. . . . As she sat before the window, the conviction grew in her mind that there was plenty of money to be made in New York, and she was going to make it” (36). Mrs. Fong’s gaze serves multiple functions. Apart from depicting the urban environment of her everyday life, it reveals the impact of the city on the formation of a Chinese immigrant subject. Seeing the bustling commerce and crowds on Third Avenue, Mrs. Fong believes that she “needed only to wash the block, and perhaps, in the not impossible future, cook to feed the block” to make a lot of money (36). Conditioned as Mrs. Fong is by her gendered and raced social status, however, her American Dream is still limited to the subordinate service and nurture of others—to “wash the block” and “cook to feed the block.” Moreover, despite her ability to help expand the family’s business through hard work and good service, her dream of making enough money to open a restaurant in Chinatown is eventually materialized only as a result of her husband’s sudden death in a car accident. The conditions for the Fongs’ upward mobility from owning a tiny basement laundry shop near Eighty-Fourth Street to owning a small restaurant on the street level in Chinatown raise questions about, rather than reinforce, the myth of America as a country “where opportunities abound and where one can do whatever one pleases without government interference,” to quote E. H. Kim again (Asian American Literature 105). Nevertheless, Mrs. Fong’s belief that “there was plenty of money to be made in New York,” though it echoes a typical myth about America, asserts an immigrant Chinese woman’s subjective agency and undermines the stereotype of mute, obedient Chinese women who resist anything “American” out of fear or jealousy as portrayed in some of Sui Sin Far’s stories.
The agency embedded in Mrs. Fong’s gaze of the American urban scene also serves to return the gaze of white America and to reconstruct idealized American identity. While observing from her window the mixed, diverse European Americans of “all nationalities” in her neighborhood, Mrs. Fong asserts her sense of dignity and comments on the “disgrace even in this street of anonymous neighbors” (36). Her gaze simultaneously constructs and undermines American identity coded in moral superiority:
Mother Fong surveyed it all. Clearly, there were face and disgrace. From the Idle Hour Tavern at the corner she saw drunken men, filthy and besotted, emerge staggering to stand or crouch on the sidewalk in various stages of intoxication. The young girls in the streets were prettily dressed, walking head up at a pace that sent their golden hair flopping up and down around the nape. It was the characteristically American gait. Before the third house, where the sloppy woman lived, a group of small children were playing. They looked filthy, and she was sure they were the children of the woman who looked like a drudge. (36–37)
Even though Mrs. Fong’s sense of “face”—dignity and respectability—seems characteristically Chinese, the encoding of morality and immorality on bodily types and hygiene in her gaze reinforces gender norms and racial hierarchy, yet not without subversive effect.
Mrs. Fong’s observations of her white neighbors also serve to demonstrate her eligibility for American “cultural citizenship.” Nayan Shah, among others, has shown with compelling evidence that by the early twentieth century cleanliness in the United States had become a sign of civic virtue, a technique for disciplining cultural citizenship.10 “The management of space and the care of the body were perceived to be an index of American cultural citizenship and civic belonging,” observes Shah. “The American system of cultural citizenship combined class discourses of respectability and middle-class tastes with heteronormative discourses of adult male responsibility [and] female domestic caretaking” (Shah 204). Mrs. Fong’s commentary gaze on European Americans at once evokes and undermines the norms of cultural citizenship embodied by middle-class whites. Tidiness and cleanliness correlate with the blond girls whose gait is “characteristically American,” whereas laziness and filth are associated with the “sloppy” woman “who looked like a drudge.” Similar attributes of disgrace are also visible in the filthy and drunken men staggering in the street or emerging from the tavern. These European immigrants and white Americans, then, are far from being superior to the Chinese as portrayed in the popular newspapers and official discourses. The moral code of bodily care and conduct that structures Mrs. Fong’s gaze is subversive to white supremacy, though it in part reinforces the normative discourse on morality, hygiene, and bodily appearances. The interpretive and constitutive gaze of Mrs. Fong as a female Chinese immigrant also conveys her own culturally shaped sense of responsibility and normative standard of hygiene. Nevertheless, Mrs. Fong’s observation of both desirable and disgraceful white Americans undermines the binary opposites of racialized identities—white American citizens who exemplify cleanliness, morality, and progress versus Chinese aliens who embody filth, moral decrepitude, and backwardness.
