“experience the city as a whole” establishes the privileged flâneur’s “right to the city—a right not traditionally available to, often not even part of, the imaginative repertoire of the less advantaged” (414–15). Yet “the public landscape of the privileged urban flaneur” of the late nineteenth century “had become an unstable construct” challenged by “social forces” to be reworked and reconstructed (412). “No figure was more equivocal, yet more crucial to the structured public landscape of the male flaneur, than the woman in public,” who was “presumed to be both endangered and a source of danger to those men who congregated in the streets” (414). Walkowitz’s approach to “the permeable and transgressed border between classes and sexes” (415) in Victorian London is applicable to racially segregated areas in American cities.
What happens, then, when flânerie—strolling and observation in the city street as a mode of knowledge production, identity construction, and enactment of the right to the city—is carried out by those whose body is marked not only by the differences of gender and class but also by the “Otherness” of race and ethnicity? What palimpsest histories are recovered, what marginalized places are foregrounded, what invisible lives emerge to transform both the ethnic enclaves and the cities they inhabit? These are some of the central questions I explore in my examination of the poetics and politics of space in Asian American urban literature. By drawing on interdisciplinary critical theories like those referred to above, and on existing Asian American scholarship on urban space, my study seeks to overcome disciplinary oversights and blind spots and to explore neglected yet significant aspects of familiar and understudied Asian American writings about Chinatown and the city. In so doing, my investigation seeks to offer perspectives that not only are alternative to but also contest predominant representations of the American city, in which Asian Americans are conspicuously absent as explorers of the urban space, as participants in the polis of the city, or as visionaries and agents of change in redefining not just ethnic enclaves but also the American cityscapes and nation-space.
OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS
Cities of Others consists of eight chapters in addition to the introduction and the conclusion. Chapter 1, “‘The Woman about Town’: Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings,” examines the ways that Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton appropriates and reinvents the flâneur figure and the conventions of journalism and missionary ethnography of her time to produce counter-narratives about Chinatown and the city. Her writings about American urban space undermine stereotypical representations of Chinatown as an abject “foreign” terrain within the “American” city. I borrow the phrase “The Woman about Town” from the series title of five pieces of journalism by Sui Sin Far that appeared in the Gall’s Daily News Letter when she was working as a full-time reporter in Kingston, Jamaica, from December 1896 to June 1897.10 Given her position as a female reporter, columnist, and fiction writer who crisscrossed the city looking for stories, the phrase is a proper yet unsettling definition for Eaton, whose role as a reporter and writer on the urban scene alters the gaze of the flâneur and intervenes in the male-dominated traditions of journalism and urban literature. But “The Woman about Town” meant something quite different for Eaton in North American cities, where she volunteered as a Sunday school English teacher and worked as a journalist in Chinatowns. Drawing on theories about the agency of the gendered and racially marked body in the public space, I examine the subversive strategies of Sui Sin Far’s representation of white and Chinese women as “the woman about town,” whose flânerie mobilizes a counter-discourse on Chinatown and the city.
Chapter 2, “Claiming Right to the City: Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family,” further explores the relationship between the raced, gendered body in American urban space as portrayed in Lin’s 1948 novel about Chinese Americans in New York City and its Chinatown. My reading expands on the predominant interpretations of this novel as a “model minority” narrative of assimilation, which overlooks the social critique and the characters’ resistance to exclusion embedded in the subversive, interventional spatial strategies Lin employs. I argue that Lin’s narrative strategies allow his characters to reinhabit the city through everyday activities that resist racial segregation, claim Chinese immigrants’ right to the city, and facilitate the formations of Chinese American identity and subjectivity. In so doing, Lin, like Sui Sin Far, at once undermines and reinvents the privileged white male flâneur figure of urban exploration and dismantles both the myth of a self-enclosed Chinatown and the myth of an American city capable of assimilating immigrants while remaining intact from the presence of its heterogeneous populations.
Chapter 3, “‘Our Inside Story’ of Chinatown: Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone,” examines Ng’s strategies for making visible in American urban space the hidden history of racial exclusion and exploitation. I argue that Ng’s narrative leads the reader through Chinatown streets, alleys, stores, restaurants, crammed apartments, and the public square as it traverses the lives of the “paper son” Leon and his family, to reveal the family’s “secrets” entangled with the United States’ national history of racial exclusion and exploitation. By historicizing the public and private spaces of Chinatown lives in San Francisco, Bone at once engages with and departs from representations of Chinatown either by European Americans or by Asian Americans like Sui Sin Far or Lin Yutang. Drawing on theories about the social production of space and the everyday practice of what de Certeau might call “spatial vernacular,” my reading examines Ng’s narrative strategies that highlight not only the “social production of the built environment,” or the ways in which “built environments both represent and condition economies, societies, and cultures” (King 1), but also the psychological effects of spatialized social positions of race, class, and gender.
The meanings and functions of San Francisco’s Chinatown are radically destabilized in the writings of Frank Chin examined in chapter 4, “Chinatown as an Embattled Pedagogical Space: Frank Chin’s Short Story Cycle and Donald Duk.” Chinatown in Chin’s writings means many things—a segregated ethnic ghetto, a dying community, a spectacle on display, a commoditized tourist spot, a site of resistance to assimilation, a counter-pedagogical space, and a dynamic multicultural neighborhood of the American city. While it is all of the above, Chinatown in Chin’s writings is first and foremost an embattled space for the formation of Chinese American subjectivity and for the construction not only of Chinese American but of American identities. It is embattled, because Chinatown is not just a product of the social; it is a site where “the social is constructed,” as Massey contends in arguing for the significance of space (For Space 13). Understood from this perspective, Chinatown is a site where “the white national ideal” is constructed and “sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others,” to borrow Anne Anlin Cheng’s words about “[r]acialization in America” (10). While highlighting the mutually constitutive and transformative relationship between Chinatown and Chinese American subjectivity, between the identities of Chinatown and the American city as embedded in Chin’s stories and his novel Donald Duk, I argue that Chin represents Chinatown as a counter-pedagogical space in redefining this historically, spatially, and discursively produced ethnic ghetto, transforming it into a transnational, multicultural American urban neighborhood.
Chapter 5, “Inhabiting the City as Exiles: Bienvenido N. Santos’s What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco,” explores different modes of dislocation and exile that Filipinos and Filipino Americans experience. My reading of Santos’s novel highlights their exile, displacement, and transnational belonging in the United States, especially their collective and personal irrecoverable loss resulting from the Spanish and American colonial legacies. I contend that Santos’s treatment of loss in the novel generates what David L. Eng and David Kazanjian call the politics of melancholic mourning, which establishes “an active and open relationship with history”
