city is the emblematic space for the encounter with the stranger, the other, the different.
—KIAN TAJBAKHSH
Cities have long been key sites for the spatialization of power projects—whether political, religious, or economic.
—SASKIA SASSEN
THE CITY AS “THE EMBLEMATIC SPACE FOR THE ENCOUNTER WITH the stranger, the other, the different” and as a “key [site] for the spatialization of power projects” is a contested space and a space open to change. As such, it is a site embedded with possibilities for an inclusive democracy and a site for the emergence of new subjects, communities, and creative works. The democratic possibilities of the city are in part reflected in the election of a Chinese American as the mayor of San Francisco. January 11, 2011, was a landmark day in the city’s history. As an article in the San Francisco Chronicle states: “A new era in San Francisco politics began today when Edwin M. Lee was appointed and sworn in as mayor, the first Chinese American to hold the post” (Coté, “Ed Lee”). Appointed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors to serve out the remaining year of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s term after Newson was sworn in as lieutenant governor, Lee became the city’s forty-third mayor. For Asian Americans, Lee’s appointment has profound implications beyond the political establishment. “This is a big step we’re making as a city,” says Supervisor Eric Mar, one of four Asian Americans serving on the eleven-member board. For others, the symbolic meanings of Lee’s mayoral post are particularly significant for Asian Americans nationwide: “With Lee serving as the city’s 43rd mayor,” says Don Nakanishi, director emeritus of the Asian American Studies Center of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), “San Francisco is now the largest [city] in the country with an Asian-American leader” (Hindery, “Edwin Lee”). Yet Lee refuses to be an “ethnic politician,” representing only Asian Americans. He vowed to be a mayor for all San Franciscans, including the city’s most disenfranchised groups: “I was a progressive before progressive was a political faction in this town. I present myself to you as a mayor for everyone” (qtd. in Coté, “Ed Lee”). This apparently neutral statement has momentous implications precisely because of Lee’s Chinese American identity and its connection to the history and now the stewardship of the city.
From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, San Francisco was a site of institutionalized exclusion of racial minorities, including the Chinese, and a site of their struggles for equality. Even before the nationwide Chinese Exclusion period of 1882–1943, numerous laws were implemented in San Francisco to exclude the Chinese. In 1854, when Chan Young, a Chinese immigrant, applied for citizenship in the federal district court in San Francisco, he was denied on the grounds of race. In 1878, new California state laws empowered cities and counties to confine the Chinese within specific areas or to throw them out completely. Other discriminatory laws targeted at the Chinese also banned them from attending public schools and from being hired by state, county, or municipal governments for public work.1 Lee is keenly aware of the history and reality of racial discrimination in the city. When he was elected to his own term on November 8, 2011, he stated that his election to the mayor’s office “marked the closure of dark chapters in the city’s history when Chinese and other immigrants were persecuted” (Coté and S. Lee). In fact, Lee’s decision to run for mayor was due at least in part to the possibilities of achieving greater equality for all citizens and residents of the city. He was strongly urged to enter the mayor’s race by prominent figures such as Rose Pak, a consultant at the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce, who considers herself “a community advocate” but is known as a “Chinatown power broker,” and Willie Lewis Brown, Jr., who served as the forty-first mayor of San Francisco, the first African American to do so. While Brown’s remarks about Lee that “[h]e’s the people’s choice” and “[h]e always was the people’s choice” (qtd. in Coté and S. Lee) indicate Lee’s popularity, Pak’s words suggest the challenges Chinese and other Asian Americans face in obtaining the mayor’s position. As she says: “I happen to know the city fairly well. And I happen to know if Ed Lee did not seize that opportunity, it might be years or decades before we have such an opportune time to have a Chinese American get there” (qtd. in Coté and Riley).
The connection between Lee’s political career and San Francisco’s Chinatown and other Asian American communities in the city can be traced back decades before his election to the mayor’s office. In many ways, his involvement in the civil rights and housing rights struggles of Chinatown and other communities in the city helped prepare Lee as a public servant. In the late 1970s, Lee was a student activist fighting against the demolition of the International Hotel (also known as the I-Hotel) in the city’s Chinatown-Manilatown section and against the eviction of its elderly Chinese and Filipino residents. When he was a law student–intern at the Asian Law Caucus in 1978, Lee represented residents of the Ping Yuen public housing complex in Chinatown, who, fed up with unsafe and unsanitary conditions, staged the first tenant rent strike against the San Francisco Housing Authority. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, Lee went on to “forge a distinguished career as a civil rights attorney, often representing low-income tenants,” and, in 1989, he “represented Asian and female firefighters who joined others in successfully suing the city for discrimination at the Fire Department” (Coté and Wildermuth). His active participation in the struggles for equity for the disadvantaged have helped bring progressive social changes to the city, even as Lee himself was transformed by those struggles from the son of marginalized immigrants from China to the mayor of San Francisco. If Lee’s relationship with Chinatown and other Asian American communities in the city during his law school years was formative, his relationship with the city could be considered transformative.
Lee’s mutually (trans)formative relationship with Chinatown and the city is indicative of the dynamics and possibilities of urban space, where the identities of ethnic enclaves or segregated ghettos and the city are mutually constitutive in a process of becomings. Philip Ethington argues in his study The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 that “‘the public’ of the public city was itself a constantly reconstructed sphere of action” (412). The changing residents of the city are a major catalyst of change in urban politics as shown in nineteenth-century American cities: “As industrialization produced the great cities during the second half of the nineteenth century, masses of immigrants and workers pushed aside the middle and upper classes to enjoy the benefits of urban machine politics” (xiii). But being “white” by law, the masses of immigrants and workers who enjoyed “the benefits of urban machine politics” also used the political machine to exclude “nonwhites” from participating in democracy.2 As Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith, editors of the anthology Racism, the City, and the State, contend, an examination of the urban context in the process of racialization in the United States demonstrates that “the city provides the institutional framework for racial segregation, a key process whereby racialization has been reproduced and sustained” (frontispiece). Although it is in part produced by racial segregation, Chinatown resists being defined as simply a product of dominant racial ideologies and practices. Its spatial and symbolic relationship to the American nation-space embodied by the “American” city has been fiercely contested by European Americans and Asian Americans since the nineteenth century. Asian Americans’ resistance to racial exclusion is well captured in Asian American city literature, which reimagines and re-represents American urban space where racialized Others remain “outsiders” or invisible. How to inhabit the segregated urban space otherwise with irreducible and transformative difference is a major concern of this study of Asian American city literature.
MUTUALLY CONSTITUTIVE AND TRANSFORMATIVE SPACES
To better understand Asian American writers’ strategies for portraying the impact of racial exclusion on Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the city, it is necessary to recognize the ways in which American urban space as the nation-space and its excluded Others are mutually constitutive and transformative. A lived and constructed space in the “heart” of the metropolises of the United States, Chinatown is irreducible to a passive product of racial segregation. It plays an active, and even a subversive
