around hem as if they were in a workshop. (Mrs. Spring 208)12
As readers follow the speaker’s perambulation, observation, and reflection, a different Chinatown emerges. Contrary to the predominant portrayals of Chinatown as a dangerous place for women, particularly white women, and a place saturated with “strange odors of the East,” Chinatown as experienced on the female journalist’s flânerie is a pleasant, lively place where women like Sui Sin Far (who looked white and dressed American) can stroll the streets freely and safely.
By performing the tourist, the journalist, and the ethnographer doing “fieldwork” on her walks in Chinatown, Sui Sin Far turns Chinatown into a contested urban space. Her enactment of a counter-discourse against the dominant “epistemology of the street” produced by tourist guidebooks, travel writings, and popular newspaper reports from white America can be better understood in terms of de Certeau’s theory on the politics of walking the city streets, in which he contends that “[w]alking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (99). Drawing on de Certeau’s theories on the practice of everyday life in the urban space, Benjamin Rossiter and Katherine Gibson, in their essay “Walking and Performing ‘the City’: A Melbourne Chronicle,” argue that “[t]he practice of walking and the reflection on urban walks contribute to a counter-discourse of the urban” (439). They emphasize “the enabling potentialities of re-presenting the city from the street—from the perspective of the walker and the street inhabitant” (440). Particularly relevant to my investigation in what Sui Sin Far achieves in her writing through walking the streets of Chinatown as a journalist and ethnographer is Rossiter and Gibson’s application of de Certeau’s concept of walking as a “pedestrian speech act”—an interventional gesture that reinvents stories of the city and transforms the urban space (de Certeau 98). For Rossiter and Gibson, the “speech act of walking creates stories, invents spaces, and opens up the city through its capacity to produce ‘anti-texts’ within the text” (440). Moreover, by allowing the city to “speak,” Rossiter and Gibson suggest that the centrality of the urban stroller’s subjectivity gives away to the sensual perception of his or her body and to other bodies in the streets, leading to the constitution of multiple “urban subjectivities.” With this shift, “[t]he body is introduced as a sensual being—smelling, remembering, rhythmically moving—jostling with other bodies and in the process constituting active, perhaps multiple, urban subjectivities. The walker becomes lost, allows the city—street signs, bars, cafes, billboards, passers-by—to ‘speak’ to her as does a bird call in the wild or a twig crackling under foot in a forest” (440). While the emphasis on the walker’s sensual experience and her immersion in her surroundings undermines the controlling gaze of the privileged male subject, the replacement of the female “sensual being” with the constructive male gaze, however, casts the walker as merely a passive, receptive vessel of a given environment. Hence the active role that the urban stroller plays in constructing or defining the urban spaces becomes hidden. So, too, are the subject positions underlying the selection and organization of the sights, smells, and stories that the city is allowed to tell through the walker’s sensual experience as a mode of knowledge production.
Sui Sin Far’s Chinatown reports indicate that it is not simply the act of walking but also, and more importantly, the identity and subject position of the flâneuse that enable the subversive potentials of re-representing the urban spaces. As the examples referred to earlier show, much of the apparent authenticity of the “yellow peril” images of Chinatown and its foreignness was based on white male writers’ sensory experiences as they strolled down Chinatown streets, smelling “strange odors of the East,” hearing “echoes of an unknown tongue,” and seeing “slanted-eyed pagans” crowding the streets (Stoddard 2, qtd. in Chen 99). Sui Sin Far’s walk in Chinatown produces a different place, undermining the stereotypes of Chinatown and the Chinese from her perspective as a Eurasian female journalist and from the perspectives of Chinatown’s residents.
To allow Chinatown and its residents to speak from their perspectives, it was not enough for Sui Sin Far to describe and interpret what she observed on her walks. Several of her reports on Los Angeles’s Chinatown are based on her journalist investigations and interviews with residents. For example, in “Chinatown Needs a School,” Sui Sin Far incorporates Chinatown residents’ perspectives in her story: “Mrs. Sing, the most prominent Chinese woman in Los Angeles . . . says I was misinformed as to her visit to San Francisco. . . . Mrs. Sing’s great hope is that before long a government school will be established in Chinatown for the Chinese boys and girls who are above the age of 10 or 12. There is a crying need for such a school” (202–3).13 While arguing for a public school in Chinatown and for the admission of Chinese children into American schools, Sui Sin Far shows that Chinese immigrants and their American-born children integrated Chinese and European American cultures in their homes as well as in the public spaces of Chinatown, where in juxtaposition to a missionary English school and “several Christian Chinese families,” “three joss houses [stood] conspicuous” (“In Los Angeles’ Chinatown” 199). Appropriating the flâneur’s gaze and the ethnographer’s participatory observation, she highlights the fact that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans live a bicultural life. “Mrs. Sing’s house is furnished tastefully in a semi-eastern, semi-western style,” observes Sui Sin Far (“Chinatown Needs a School,” 203). “Americanized” with “a liberal education” from a mission school in Baltimore, Mrs. Sing remains “loyal to her own country and people,” and she and her husband, a man of “ability and character” and “one of the best known merchants in Los Angeles’ Chinatown,” have always worked “for the good of the Chinese with whom they come in contact” (203, 202, 203). This detailed description of a Chinese American family and their home’s interior design counters the dominant gaze of white America, which criminalized the Chinese body and Chinatown space. Even though her appropriation and revision of the flâneur’s gaze and strolling in the urban spaces seem to be confined to Chinatown, they contest the boundaries that separate Chinatown and its communities from white America.14
However, limited by the speaker’s position as an outsider of Chinatown and by the generic conventions of journalist reportage and ethnographic “fieldwork” of her time, Sui Sin Far’s portrayal of the mutual transformation of the Chinatown community and American identity in her newspaper reports remains superficial. As she shows through her observations in the streets, schoolrooms, and a Chinatown household, the coexistence of Chinese and European American cultures is restricted to cultural practices contained in Chinatown. At the same time, Chinese immigrants’ acculturation seems to be smooth and unproblematic, and the bilingual and bicultural American-born Chinese Americans such as the Sing children are happy and content in Chinatown. But in her fiction Su Sin Far is able to explore in depth the complex mutually transformative process and effects of encounters between Chinese immigrants and white Americans.
In her short stories set in Chinatown, she at once appropriates and undermines the authority of participatory observation as a reliable method of obtaining knowledge of the Other. Embedded in the contested epistemological and ethnical questions concerning modes of knowing is not only an implicit subversion of the flâneur figure as a neutral spectator and interpreter of the urban scene but also a disruption of the raced hierarchical relationship between the observer and the observed. Moreover, by exposing the harms that white female English teachers and Christian missionaries can bring to Chinese families in Chinatown, Sui Sin Far calls critical attention to the ways that race complicates the gendered and classed flâneur figure in urban literature.
Critics of literature and photography of urban exploration often emphasize the classed and gendered privilege of visual observation. John Urry in his essay “City Life and the Senses” examines the social and cultural conditions that have contributed to placing the visual “at the top” of the “hierarchy of sense within Western culture over the past few centuries” (389). The assumed superiority of the visual, Urry suggests, resides in its potential for the seeing subject to possess and control what is seen. “The visual sense enables people to take possession, not only of other people, but also of diverse environments. It enables the world to be controlled at a distance,
