their inhabitants. These relations, however, are mutually transformative as well. Their implications and effects render Chinatown open to change and irreducible to the uniform, homogeneous, and discrete identity constructed by the popular media of white America. In other words, if the characteristics of Chinatown as a lived space are defined by its residents, then those characteristics can be redefined and transformed in part at least by the people who live there, as well as by alternative ways of seeing and representing Chinatown and its relationship to the larger society. Elizabeth Grosz has compellingly argued for an alternative to the conventional view of space as a fixed background or container. She contends: “[S]pace is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation” (Architecture 9). This unstable, dynamic relationship between space and its inhabitants underlies the representations of Chinatown lives by Sui Sin Far and other Asian American writers.
At once a product and medium of identity construction, a segregated urban ghetto, an ethnic enclave, and a transnational, multicultural community, Chinatown has been a contested terrain in writings by Asian Americans, among whom Sui Sin Far is a literary forerunner in challenging spatially policed boundaries of race, class, gender, culture, and sexuality in American cities. To better understand the significance of the narrative strategies that Sui Sin Far employs to undermine the predominant stereotypical portrayals of Chinatown, it is necessary to briefly examine the spatiality—spatial organizations of social relations and their effects—of identity construction in the dominant discourses of her time.
With their privilege of mobility in the city, white American male writers as the flâneur played a central role in producing the “knowledge” of Chinatown and the Chinese. The commodification of writings about the urban scene in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States helped popularize stereotypes of Chinatown, which were often featured in travel sketches, newspapers, magazines, journals, and photographs. Charles W. Stoddard in his book about San Francisco’s Chinatown, A Bit of Old China (1912), depicts with sensuous ambience the uncanny experience of strolling through Chinatown: “The air is laden with the fumes of smoking sandalwood and strange odors of the East; and the streets, swarming with coolies, resound with the echoes of an unknown tongue. There is hardly room for us to pass; we pick our way, and are sometimes curiously regarded by slanted-eyed pagans” (qtd. in Chen 98–99). Apart from the alienating smells of the East, the crowdedness of Chinatown streets with strange-looking heathens who gaze upon tourists with curiosity enhances the unsettling foreignness of Chinatown. The racially marked bodies of the Chinese, then, become part of the Chinatown space and its foreign identity. Through a deceptively descriptive style and the authenticity of actually strolling in the street, this white flâneur inscribes the Chinatown space and bodies with racial meanings by rendering the Chinese cultural and bodily differences as deviant from the “American” norm. As is characteristic of Orientalist representations, the construction of Chinatown as “a bit of Old China” “in the heart of a Western metropolis” requires a particular kind of aesthetics that elides the historical and sociopolitical forces underlying the formation of Chinatown, thus isolating it from the American city.6 Arnold Genthe’s photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown collected in Pictures of Old Chinatown (1913), with text by the journalist Will Irwin, are salient examples of inscribing “Chineseness” on aestheticized Chinatown spaces and bodies by the white male gaze.7 Irwin writes in his interpretive text accompanying Genthe’s photographs: “From every doorway flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish masters. . . . Perfectly conceived in coloring and line, you saw a balcony, a woman in softly gaudy robes, a window whose blackness suggested mystery” (in Genthe, Pictures 12). The white male gaze as such reduces Chinatown and the Chinese to commodified objects and provides an aesthetic framework for visual mastery of the Chinatown scenes severed from the American urban space.
While some middle-class white men, particularly members of the San Francisco Bohemian Club and the California Camera Club, such as Genthe and Irwin, found Chinatown a pleasurable place for a thrilling and aesthetic experience, many white San Franciscans regarded this “foreign” place and community with fear and anxiety, especially after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and when cholera and smallpox epidemics struck San Francisco in the mid- and late nineteenth century, followed by an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1903.8 The intersections of racial formation and the fear of an impending epidemic catastrophe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shah contends, created “a new articulation of space and race” that made Chinatown “a singular and separate place that henceforth could be targeted in official inspections and popular commentary” (24–25). The production of fear reinforces the boundaries of the raced body and space.
Discourses on medicine and social morality played a significant part in the networks of racial identity and knowledge production. In 1878, when anti-Chinese sentiments in the United States became a formidable political force, Dr. Mary Priscilla Sawtelle published an editorial article, “The Foul, Contagious Diseases: A Phase of the Chinese Question; How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison into the Anglo-Saxon Blood,” in the Medico-Literary Journal, arguing that “our nation is threatened with destruction” by “the Chinese courtesans.” Compared with the destructive influence of these women, she asserts, “Chinese cheap labor pales into insignificance” (1). Sawtelle’s medical background lends authority to her naturalizing the raced Chinese female body as a source of contagious diseases infecting the white body, which she equates with “our nation,” and corrupting white American morality. As Donna Haraway argues, in the construction of race through discourses on the body: “[W]here race was, sex was also. And where race and sex were, [there were] worries about hygiene, decadence, health” (338).
It is worth noting, moreover, that in Sawtelle’s argument against the Chinese women’s lethal contamination of the American national body, she inscribes the threat of Chinese immigrant’s racial Otherness and inassimilable foreignness in spatial terms: “In the very heart of San Francisco there is a Chinese empire. . . . Several streets are devoted to mercantile and manufacturing pursuit, while the alleys are lined with the tenements of the Chinese courtesans” (4). Sawtelle’s article offers a salient example of the predominant stereotypical representations of Chinatown by white Americans, in which Chinatown is turned into what Shah calls a “perverse geography” that “provided a schema of the dangers of Chinatown and Chinese residents to middle-class white society in San Francisco and beyond” (79). Inscribed as “a Chinese empire,” Chinatown, then, is neither simply a passive outcome of socioeconomic and political systems nor the end result of discursive identity construction; it becomes constructive material “evidence” of the supposedly innate racial attributes of the “Chinese race,” justifying racial segregation and exclusion. Like the Chinese body, Chinatown functions as an apparently stable site for simultaneous construction and naturalization of racial identities and social positions and for surveillance, containment, and exclusion of the Chinese from U.S. citizenship and the nation-space.9
Yet, being part of the city spatially and in the vicinity of the busy commercial district and white neighborhoods, San Francisco’s Chinatown was often depicted as a dangerous masculine place where white women were reputed to be lost mysteriously or become corrupted in opium dens by Chinese men beyond any hope of returning to the outside world. Frank Norris in his short story “The Third Circle” (1897) tells of the sinister disappearance of a young white woman, Miss Ten Eck, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As the title suggests, Norris relies heavily on spatial metaphors in portraying Chinatown’s hidden vices: “There are more things in San Francisco’s Chinatown than are dreamed of in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatown—the part the guides show you, the part the guides don’t show you, and the part that no one ever hears of ” (1). Norris suggests that it is into this underground third circle of opium dens and slave girls that Miss Ten Eck vanished.
The raced, gendered, and sexualized space of Chinatown’s “third circle” also informs the works of Norris’s associates, Genthe and Irwin, “whose art,” Emma J. Teng notes, “was intimately associated with their flâneurie—their observations of and participation in the city’s street life,” particularly
