influx of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants. As Shirley Hune argues, “the division within Congress and especially the conflict that took place between the legislative and executive branches over the Chinese issue centered largely over the means and not upon the goal of restriction itself.”33 With Asian immigrants figured as a threat to the national order, only a very small minority voiced support for a pluralist embrace of Chinese immigrants. Pinkerton’s desire to “keep out those who are out” would have resonated with popular sentiment about Asian subjects in general at the time.
Madame Butterfly was published nearly a decade after the US Supreme Court upheld Congress’s right to enact the first Chinese Exclusion Act.34 By the time that Long’s story hit the masses, it is likely that most readers would have been aware of the Court’s decision, Chae Chan Ping v. United States, which itself became something of a national drama. Indeed, media outlets turned to the rhetoric and narrative form of dramatic melodrama to report on the case, demonstrating the powerful role that aesthetic conventions play in mediating legal knowledge about Asian immigrants. The New York Times, writing about Chae Chan Ping’s deportation in 1889, described him thus: “The name of Chae Chan Ping is now familiar to American ears. He is a Chinese gentleman who has given the United States courts a great deal of trouble in his endeavors to force his unwelcome presence upon the citizens of this fair and free country.”35 Demonstrating the ways in which legal spectacles take on the conventions of fictional narrative forms, his legal battle is framed with the language of literary or theatrical melodrama. He is cast as an aggressive villain struggling to “force his unwelcome presence” on an innocent victim, “the citizens of this fair and free country.”36 The judiciary, in turn, is figured as a heroic patriarch, instructing him to “pack up his traps and be off.”37
In Chae Chan Ping, Justice Stephen Johnson Field issued the first articulation of Congress’s plenary power to, in Pinkerton’s words, “keep out those who are out”: “That the government of the United States, through the action of the legislative department, can exclude aliens from its territory is a proposition which we do not think open to controversy. Jurisdiction over its own territory to that extent is an incident of every independent nation. It is a part of its independence.”38 Thus, Field understood the right of exclusion as a fundamental component of the constitution of sovereignty and the composition of national independence.
Three years later, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this principle in a case that applied the Chae Chan Ping holding to an ethnic Japanese petitioner in Nishimura Ekiu v. United States.39 This 1892 case involved a woman who immigrated to the United States aboard a steamer, pursuing a husband who had previously arrived in the country. Resonating with Cho-Cho-San’s ultimate foreclosure from national belonging and reflecting the particular will to keep Asian women from immigrating to the United States (discussed in greater detail in the next chapter), she was denied entry. Once more, the right of exclusion was defined as a foundational power of the state. But the Nishimura Ekiu court, even more than in Chae Chan Ping, reveals the border as performance by focusing not on territory but instead on the regulation and choreographing of the immigrant’s body as it moves into and across the national space. As Justice Horace Gray wrote, “It is an accepted maxim of international law, that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominion, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.”40 In both Chae Chan Ping and Nishimura Ekiu, the act of exclusion produces, defines, and protects the identity of the sovereign nation through the law’s control of the immigrant’s movement across borders. But acts of legal choreography were not enough to manifest and police these borders. Aesthetic practices supported and, in the case of the theater, manifested flesh-and-blood figurations of Asian difference that would confirm and justify these actions in the minds of national audiences.
As we saw in the New York Times reportage on the Chae Chan Ping case, Congress and the courts were described as loving patriarchs, doing away with the villainous threat of Asian invaders with a protective decisiveness. This figuration is not at all dissimilar from the characterization of Pinkerton’s own management of his domestic sphere. Pinkerton’s will to “keep out those who are out” and the “American locks” both reflect the dominant consensus that Asian bodies should be excluded from the nation. At the same time, the United States was grappling with Asian bodies already within national borders. So if Cho-Cho-San’s family can be understood as representative of the “yellow hordes” that had to be excluded, the sanctioned presence of Cho-Cho-San’s “one small maid” (Suzuki) in Pinkerton’s home is significant of this other political dilemma.
Exclusion was often too late because the vacuum of both capitalism and imperialism had already drawn large numbers of Asians into the United States. In a concession to industries and employers who wanted to continue to exploit the labor of Chinese immigrants already within the country, the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese immigrants who entered before 1882 to leave the country and return, so long as they received a certificate of identification. Shortly before Chae Chan Ping, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Jung Ah Lung.41 The case involved a Chinese laborer who left the country with just such a certificate but lost it (reportedly stolen by pirates) before reentry. The justices ruled that this certificate was not the only piece of identification necessary for reentry.42
Not unlike Jung Ah Lung, as a domestic laborer, Suzuki moves in and out of Pinkerton’s house at ease, but this movement should not be confused with absolute inclusion. Her presence is emblematic of a long and ongoing history of the racialization of certain bodies whose status as exploitable labor sources allows them to pass through spaces that are otherwise explicitly closed to them, so long as they carry out the dances of domestic servitude and un(der)compensated labor. But such figures were and often are not to be understood as proper citizens or even subjects of the nation. While the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese laborers who entered the country prior to 1892 to exit and reenter the country, their presence was juridically figured as illegal. Justice Louis Brandeis observed this fact in Ng Fung Ho v. White, a 1922 case involving Chinese petitioners subject to the mandates of the Chinese Exclusion Act: “One who has entered lawfully may remain unlawfully.”43 In other words, some Chinese laborers were paradoxically tolerated because the state would not always remove them, but their presence was always already illegal in theory of the law. As I discuss in chapter 5, this is a status that continues to attach itself to Asian immigrants in the present. As we shall now see, Cho-Cho-San’s own sanctioned presence in the Pinkerton home explodes into a legal problem of tragic proportions.
Act II. Madame Butterfly and the Problem of Law
Scene 1. Between Interior and Exterior in Long and Belasco’s 1900 Play
If Long’s novella manifests the juridical unconscious of the dominant culture in narrative form, Belasco’s 1900 theatrical adaptation embodied it, giving audiences the rare chance for a flesh-and-blood, theatrical encounter with the exotic and mysterious body of the Asian Other. Turning now to the dramatic adaptation, Long and Belasco’s onstage representation of Cho-Cho-San as a character that blurs clear national and racial distinctions was of particular interest and consternation for audiences and reviewers alike. With white women such as Blanche Bates and later Valerie Bergere and Evelyn Millard playing the role of Cho-Cho-San in yellowface, spectators demonstrated significant angst over whether what they were seeing on the stage was an authentic representation of Japanese femininity.44 The Times complained, for example, “Bates’ portrayal is human and its imitations of Japanese manners and characteristics is facile.”45 Despite the Times’s complaint, it seems the actresses were relatively successful in convincing audiences of their character’s authenticity.
In 1904, Bergere gave an interview in which she described her decision to remain in costume after a performance of the play. A pair of tourists caught view of her and declared,
