environment that shapes Mrs. Fong’s and her children’s adaptation to American culture. As Shah contends, bodily care identified with middle-class respectability and domesticity is “perceived to cultivate citizen-subjects capable of undertaking the responsibilities of American citizenship” (205). Eager to prove their capability for American cultural citizenship, Mother Fong is determined to “discipline” the bodies of Tom and Eva for “surveillance” in the public space. She makes sure that Tom and Eva are scrubbed clean and dressed like Americans when they go out. In her eyes, “American clothes for boys and girls were pretty, and they looked well on Tom and Eva” (37). She admires American girls’ ringlets and has her Italian daughter-in-law, Flora, wife of her eldest son, Loy, make Eva’s hair the same way. As for Tom, he must remember to have his hair cut every two weeks “at the Lexington Avenue barber shop,” “a sacred and inviolable institution.” “His head was cropped clean and close at the back, and a small wisp of hair always fell across one side of his forehead” (37). Mother Fong is pleased with Tom’s new gentlemanly appearance. The bodily care Eva and Tom receive demonstrates their conformity to American culture, as well as Mother Fong’s desire to be respected and accepted by white America. The environment of the American city is constitutive and reflective of the body inscribed with values and identities. As sociologist Bryan S. Turner theorizes: “[T]he body is a site of enormous symbolic work and symbolic production. Its deformities are stigmatic and stigmatizing, while at the same time its perfections, culturally defined, are objects of praise and admiration. . . . [T]he body is both an environment we practise on and also practise with. We labour on, in and with bodies. . . . [O]ur body maintenance creates social bonds, expresses social relations and reaffirms or denies them” (191). Mrs. Fong’s efforts in producing and maintaining the Americanized looks of Tom and Eva express her desire to create a social bond with mainstream America by distancing her family from the stigmatized bodily appearances in the street observed from her apartment window.
However, the Americanization of Tom’s and Eva’s irreducibly raced bodies demonstrates more than the assimilation of Chinese immigrants; it asserts resistance to the exclusion of the Chinese from the American body politic and undermines its racial homogeneity. Cognizant of the meanings inscribed on the body in the public space, Mrs. Fong regularly dresses up her two younger children at four o’clock in the afternoon, “Tom with his hair parted and his neck scrubbed, and Eva with her pretty ringlets and a clean cotton dress.” Then she orders them to go out of the house somewhere, no matter where, as if Tom and Eva are to be “walking signboards of Tom Fong’s Hand Laundry.” For “Mother Fong reasoned that people would not send their laundry to a place where the children looked as filthy as those in the third house opposite” (37). But more often than not she wants her children to “march” to Central Park, the East River, or anywhere they want far away from the area of their shop, where people would recognize them not as the laundryman’s children but always as Chinese, no matter how American their hair styles or clothes might be. “We are Chinese,” says Mrs. Fong to Tom and Eva as she is dressing them up for the city’s public space, “and you do not want to disgrace China” (37). Chinese immigrants’ Americanized “body maintenance,” then, expresses multiple social bonds—identifications with the middle class, American culture, and Chinese ethnicity. If the body “is both an environment we practise on and also practise with,” as Turner contends, the Americanized “alien” body of the Chinese, though it may signify assimilation, introduces a subversive difference into the environment it inhabits.
By inhabiting the city otherwise than as prescribed by racial exclusion and segregation, the Fongs resist their spatially reinforced confinement to the margins of American society. Grosz’s argument that the body as “cultural product” can in turn transform and reinscribe the urban environment and unsettle binarized identities suggests that Tom’s and Eva’s Americanized appearances in the city’s public space signify more than conformity to the dominant culture. The “Americanized” yet racially marked body of the Chinese in the city streets and Central Park alters the white American body politic in the urban space, reconstituting the urban environment. When the body is understood as the “primary sociocultural product,” Grosz contends, “[i]t involves a double displacement, an alteration or realignment of a number of conceptual schemes that have thus far been used to think bodies: on the one hand, it involves problematizing a whole series of binary oppositions and dichotomous categories” (Architecture 30). Furthermore, Grosz argues: “[M]inorities . . . aren’t ‘imprisoned’ in or by space, because space (unless we are talking about a literal prison) is never fixed or contained . . . because space is open to how people live it. Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation. The more one disinvests one’s own body from that space, the less able one is to effectively inhabit that space as one’s own” (Architecture 9). Inhabiting the city as equal citizens is precisely what Mrs. Fong encourages her children to do.
For the Fongs, deliberately going out dressed up as Americans to occupy and experience the public spaces in the city enacts what de Certeau calls the politics of “everyday practices, of lived space” (96). By regularly urging her children to go to Central Park and to explore the city, Mrs. Fong encourages them to participate in city life, to experience being part of the American urban populace, and to refuse the confinement of their basement shop, their small apartment, and even their neighborhood. Their everyday practices in inhabiting the city resist the social isolation and spatial containment of working-class Chinese immigrants like Tom Fong, Sr., who spends most of his time doing laundry in the basement. When he goes out at all, Chinatown is the only place Tom Fong, Sr., visits. Having experienced racism almost on a daily basis, he is aware that as a Chinaman and laundryman to boot, he is unwanted, despised, and marginal in the country and city where he has made his home. “Tom Fong had been so used to being called a Chink that it did not really hurt” (122). He walks with his head bending down, looking at the pavement when he has to go out onto the street. The public space of the city remained hostile or at least unfriendly to him until suddenly the American attitude changed toward the Chinese when China fought against Japanese invasion in 1937. “Tom Fong no longer stooped and looked at the pavement as he walked the streets. He held his chin level and met the eyes of the people who passed, and he knew that they were admiring his people for fighting” (123).
In contrast to her husband’s submission to the marginal, abject identity of the Chinese in the United States and in the city, Mrs. Fong wants her children to walk the streets with pride to claim right to the city. “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered,” de Certeau contends (97). For de Certeau, walking “is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language)” (97–98). If walking in the city can spatially act out the place by appropriating the topographical system, then the body and its movement are constitutive of the place it acts out, just as the pedestrians act out the place of Third Avenue. But, given their racially marked yet Americanized bodies, Tom and Eva act out a different place, one that undermines racial and cultural homogeneity, by regularly walking the streets, visiting places where Chinese Americans like their father would never go. Hence their walking, in a way, transforms the urban environment, claims their belonging, and inhabits the American urban space “on the same footing with all the struggling millions” (36).
Inhabiting the city through flânerie and activities in public spaces for Chinese immigrants, then, also functions as a transformative process of their identity and subjectivity formation. What Eva sees on her walks and at school has exposed her to alternative ways of being a female. At twelve, one year younger than Tom, Eva is a well-disciplined, proper Chinese girl. Unlike her inquisitive and assertive brother, who constantly asks questions and refuses to accept easy answers, Eva often “said nothing and seemed to accept everything.” She is constantly reminded by her mother that she is “a girl, a nu-tsai.” Eva understands that the term nu-tsai (literally “female material”) defines what she can become and how she is supposed to behave as a girl: “In Eva’s mind it meant vaguely that a girl had to be put in her place” (50). By learning the proper good manners of a girl the female subject is disciplined to assume the subordinate roles of wife,
