It is a product literally filled with ideologies” (“Reflections” 341).
During the period of Chinese Exclusion, portrayals of Chinatown in mainstream America helped justify segregation laws that determined where the Chinese were allowed to live or open a business in the city.3 According to the legal historian Charles J. McClain, white Americans’ calls for the relocation of San Francisco’s Chinatown to “another less desirable part of the city” began to appear in newspaper editorials as early as 1854 and intensified in the 1870s and 1880s (223). In 1870, the Anti-Coolie Association militantly petitioned the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “demanding that something be done about the Chinese quarter of the city, described as being crowded and contaminated with disease.” Ultimately, the petitioners wanted the board to “‘provide some means of removing the Chinese beyond the city limits’” (McClain 44). White Americans’ concerted efforts to drive the Chinese out of the city continued into the early decades of the twentieth century. On May 31, 1900, the San Francisco newspaper Morning Call published an article calling for the elimination of Chinatown from the city: “In no city in the civilized world is there a slum more foul or more menacing than that which now threatens us with the Asiatic plague. Chinatown occupies the very heart of San Francisco. . . . The only way to get rid of that menace is to eradicate Chinatown from the city” (qtd. in McClain 44). As documented by Jean Pfaelzer in her well-researched study Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (2007), such epistemological violence in constructing the abject identity of Chinatown provoked physical violence aimed at driving the Chinese out.
Given this context, the persistent presence of Chinatowns in the metropolises of the United States testifies to the spatial significance of Chinese resistance to exclusion. Located geographically in the centers of cities, Chinatowns are crucial sites for Chinese communities to build networks beyond the borders of segregated urban neighborhoods. Pfaelzer in her discussion of the strategic struggles by Chinese Americans against racial discrimination observes, “The fear of Chinese lawsuits, their ability to tie up city and country coffers in extended litigation, was profound” (250). Against attacks on multiple fronts aimed at relocating Chinatowns or driving them out of cities, towns, and the U.S. nation-space, the Chinese stood their ground and demanded constitutional and civil rights through the federal courts. As Sucheng Chan, McClain, and Pfaelzer have shown, the “thousands of legal actions by the Chinese countered the ‘foreignness’ of anti-Chinese legislation” (Pfaelzer 249). Despite their well-organized protests and fight for equal rights in a series of municipal, state, and federal court cases, Chinese residents in the cities were eventually subjected to new city ordinances—early forms of segregation laws—that restricted their movement in the city and confined their businesses and residence to designated areas, thus institutionalizing their spatially reinforced exclusion from the resources and the social, cultural life of the city.4 However, the spatialization of Chinese immigrants’ and Chinese Americans’ racial position in the United States by law becomes naturalized along with the social construction of abject Otherness of the Chinese. The remarks of the Chicago school sociologist Walter C. Reckless about Chinatowns in American cities are a salient example of such naturalization of spatially reinforced racial segregation: “The relationship of Chinatown to the commercialized vice areas of American cities is too well known to need elaboration. It is only fair to say, however, that the assumption of the usual parasitic activities by the Chinese in the Western World is probably to be explained by their natural segregation at the center of cities, as well as by their uncertain economic and social status” (qtd. in J. Lin 8). Regarding Chinatown as “natural segregation” of the Chinese displaces the social production of this racialized, segregated neighborhood onto ethnic “traits” of the Chinese, thus turning the effect of racism into its cause.
Yet, with its spatially asserted difference in the heart of the American city, Chinatown bears witness not only to racial segregation in the United States but also to historical changes at home and abroad. The historian Mary Ting Yi Lui points out that during the early Cold War period in the United States “transnational, cultural, and political discourses recast Chinese Americans and Chinatowns as model ethnic minorities and communities” (“Rehabilitating Chinatown” 83). Operating as part of the U.S. Cold War “cultural diplomacy” in promoting the image of the United States as an inclusive democracy of cultural pluralism, Lui observes, official and mainstream media depicted Chinatown in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle “as an example of the nation’s ethnic and racial diversity” (91). Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, became a best seller, whose “autobiographical narration of personal triumph over racial bigotry . . . fits alongside the many Chinese American success stories found in USIS [U.S. Information Service] publications” (Lui, “Rehabilitating Chinatown” 94). In fact, the U.S. State Department published translations of Fifth Chinese Daughter in several Asian languages and sent Wong “on a four-months’ grant to speak to a wide variety of audiences in Asian countries” (J. S. Wong vii, viii). Christopher Douglas argues persuasively in his provocative essay “Reading Ethnography: The Cold War Social Science of Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth-Chinese Daughter and Brown v. Board of Education” that “a fundamental transformation in the social sciences in the early twentieth century, signaled by anthropology’s paradigm shift from race to ethnicity,” made it possible for Wong’s autobiographical narrative to be read as ethnography and “put to strategic use in the Cold War” (106). Despite the apparent upward mobility in the success story of the narrator as a Chinese American, her career as a pottery maker is spatially confined within a Chinatown portrayed as a culturally “foreign” neighborhood. As Douglas contends, a refashioning of the racial “Otherness” of the Chinese is embedded in Fifth Chinese Daughter promoted as a model-minority story, “but one with irreducible qualities that make the Chinese American community ever different from white norms of U.S. citizenry” (107).5 In model-minority ethnographies such as Wong’s autobiographical narrative, Chinatown serves both to showcase and to contain ethnic difference in the American city. Lui further notes that “[t]hough refashioned as spaces created out of voluntary ethnic association as opposed to racial segregation, popular fears of Chinatowns as ethnic ghettoes breeding economic poverty or ethnic and racial separatism that could foster political unrest uncomfortably persisted. Ethnic difference, reduced to goods or aesthetics made for Chinese and white consumption, remained accepted and encouraged by cultural producers as examples of US cosmopolitanism” (“Rehabilitating Chinatown” 98).
It is precisely the simultaneous disavowal and reinforcement of racial inequality in discourses on commoditized cultural diversity that render both Chinatown and the “American” city contested spaces. The complexity and ambivalence of Chinatown in its relation to the city underlie the debates in Asian American studies over its identities as a segregated ghetto or dynamic ethnic enclave. Elaine H. Kim contends in her groundbreaking study Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982): “Chinatown life was largely organized around the needs of these womanless, childless men who had been segregated from participation in the mainstream of American life by race discrimination” (91). Asian American sociologists have called into question the portrayal of Chinatown as a segregated ghetto of the “bachelor society” resulting from racial exclusion. Historian Yong Chen argues in his study Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943 (2000) that to “view Chinatown simply as a segregated urban ethnic enclave created by a hostile environment” would hinder “our ability to see the internal vitality of Chinatown” (47). He contends: “Racial prejudice affected but never totally dictated the lives of the immigrants. Chinatown’s longevity most clearly underscores its defiance of anti-Chinese forces that persistently tried but failed to eradicate or dislocate this large visible Chinese community from the heart of the city” (47). Chen emphasizes that San Francisco’s Chinatown is “a social and cultural center” and “a Pacific Rim community” (48, 7). In a similar vein, sociologist Min Zhou notes that “New York City’s Chinatown emerged as a direct result of the anti-Chinese campaign on the West Coast and the Chinese Exclusion Act” (6). But she emphasizes that New York City’s Chinatown has undergone profound changes and calls for more attention to “the bright face of this dynamic community” as an “urban enclave” where there are “signs of prosperity,
