Dr. Fu-Manchu at the Disappearing Moon Cafe

Maria Noëlle Ng Representing Chinatown: Dr. Fu-Manchu at the Disappearing Moon Cafe In Rush Hour (1998), Brett Ratner's Hollywood inter- pretation of ethnic bonding, the black Los Angeles detective Carter takes his Hong Kong counterpart, Lee, to Chinatown. While Jackie Chan's character is nonplussed by his surroundings, Carter gestures toward some gaudy architecture in Chinatown and quips, "Look familiar? Just like home, ain't it?... I ain't never been to China, but I bet you it probably looks like this, don't it?" Lee's response is to be literally and metaphorically speechless. Ironically, the film director has replaced the traditionally white racist with a black one, pitting one marginalized race against another. He thereby adds an extra dimension to a scenario of anti-Asian racism in America. Yet, this scene also remains symptomatic of well-established western assumptions about Chinese people and Chinese culture. First, the scene highlights the stereotypical idea that a Chinese will automatically want to visit or feel comfortable in Chinatown, because it resembles his or her native milieu.1 Second, the exchange between Carter and Lee also insidiously suggests that a Chinese living in a western culture belongs to an area designated as Chinatown. Third, Carter's action illustrates the métonymie power the con- cept of Chinatown has over the western popular imagination.2 All of these assumptions raise complex questions regarding the interconnection between race, place, and representation. For instance, what kind of knowledge of Chinese culture and history will compel someone to equate Chinatown, a small urban neighbourhood, with a people of great diversity and long cultural history? The stereotypical image of Chinatown has been, I57 Canadian Literature 163 I Winter 1999 Chinatown and continues to be, in part a legacy of literary fiction. What is needed to counteract the persistence of stereotyping Chinese in North America, and to resist the way Chinatown is represented, is for readers to become more knowledgeable about Chinese cultures and history, and to be aware of the changes in immigrant culture within western society. Furthermore, readers must remain critical of orientalist practices in texts written by ethnic writers. As Sheng-mei Ma suggests, it is necessary to read ethnic texts "along with the ever-shifting social realities" (5-6). To support my claim that stereotypes of the Chinese in Chinatown are of long fictional standing, I wish to examine representations of Chinatown in fiction from the first and the last decades of the twentieth century. My first text is the extremely popular The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913) by Sax Rohmer, which has spawned a series with many titles, as well as adaptations on the radio, in film and on television, and in comics (Robert Lee 114). 3 As examples of works from the 1990s, I concentrate on Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) and a detective novel by the Anglo Chinese writer Irene Lin-Chandler, entitled The Healing of Holly-Jean (1995). Although published eight decades later, these recent texts share with Rohmer's fiction stereotypical features westerners have come to associate with Chinatown and with the Chinese. As Kay Anderson explains in Vancouver's Chinatown (1991), Chinatown was seen as lawless in the 1910s, because the Chinese were inveterate gamblers. As the site of opium dens and prostitution, the area was condemned as morally pestilential (92). The typical fictional Chinatown, beginning with Rohmer's version, is based on the model of an ethnic enclave analysed in Anderson's book. While the socio-economic conditions of immigrant culture have changed, representations of immigrant lives have not. The recurrent image of the Chinese as forming an enclave which excludes outsiders, an image that legitimizes the accusation that the Chinese people do not acculturate in a western society, needs to be reexamined. Although Chinese Canadian writing has gained increasing readership and critical attention, fiction about Chinese Canadian culture is very much about the past and of a specific historical context (see M. Ng 182-84). The persistent representation of the Chinese as huddling in Chinatown will not only discourage public acceptance of the Chinese as an integral part of western society, it will also encourage reactionary response against the Chinese community whenever debates over immigra- tion policy surface.4 I58 Canadian Literature 163 I Winter 1999 Obviously, a more differentiated general knowledge of Chinese cultures and history will help resist stereotypes; attention to changing immigrant culture will offer the western imagination a different understanding of the Chinese living in western society, so that the Chinese will not be indexed to a "territorial place-based identity" in the minds of the non-Chinese (Harvey 4). To achieve these various ends, readers of fiction about Chinese living in Chinatown need to bear in mind not only the aesthetic aspects of the work, but also the historical and social contexts within which the fictional narra- tive is enmeshed. That Rohmer's Fu-Manchu stories are orientalist is self- evident; more problematic is the tendency to self-orientalization in fiction by writers of Chinese origin. Or as Sheng-mei Ma writes of Asian Americans, they "often take on the white gaze at their nonwhite object" (25). The comparison made in this paper between Rohmer's, Sky Lee's, and Lin-Chandler's Chinatowns shows that they are disturbingly similar. The persistence of representing Chinatown as a den of criminal activities and a place with its own interests which are contrary to those of the general public, indicates that this is the Chinatown that the writers, whether of Anglo- Saxon or Chinese descent, believe will attract readership, in spite of the changing face of the non-fictional Chinatown. To contextualize the analysis, this paper begins with a brief history of early Chinatown in the London of Sax Rohmer and the Vancouver in Disappearing Moon Cafe. Then it examines fictional images of Chinatown by Rohmer and Sky Lee. A brief profile of recent Chinese immigrants in Canada, a country which has witnessed a dramatic rise in ethnic Chinese population since the 1970s, underscores the differences between fictional Chinese immigrant lives and social reality. The paper ends with some scenes of criminal Chinatown from Lin-Chandler's detective novel set in contem- porary London. These examples show the tenacious influence of Rohmer's Chinatown as well as surprising similarities between two ethnic Chinese writers' portrayals of a Chinese neighbourhood. Chinatowns in London and Vancouver The history of Chinatown in London, England, like that of Vancouver and other North American cities, is not a savory one. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinatown was established because early Chinese immigrants were excluded from every walk of life in Caucasian society; Chinatown was a product of cultural and economic segregation. In London, I59 Canadian Literature 163 I Winter 1999 Chinatown the turn-of-the-century Chinese immigrants were predominantly seamen who had settled in the East End. In spite of the term, Chinatown in London was made up of only two small streets in the Limehouse area (Ng Kwee Choo 17-18). Since its destruction in the Second World War, London Chinese have established themselves throughout the metropolis, thus changing the social pattern of an ethnic group which confines itself, in self-protection, to a small area. However, this change in ethnic settlement pattern does not imply that anti-immigrant and racist sentiments against the Chinese have been eradicated. The persistence of the need to perceive and represent the Chinese as the Other will be shown in the analysis of The Healing of Holly-Jean. The settlement history of Vancouver's Chinatown is the history of Chinatown everywhere, in that "[w]hite racism was one factor in the cre- ation of a Chinatown." In Vancouver, "[w]hite landlords would not sell or lease their properties to the Chinese unless the lands were on the fringe of the town and thus unattractive to the white community" (Lai 34). While Chinese immigrants to the west coast of Canada in the 1880s and 90s were railway labourers, the white population reacted to these labourers in much the same way the English did to the Chinese seamen in England. Fear of the so-called yellow peril5 and the unquestioned belief in their own racial supe- riority encouraged white residents to practice and sanction residential segregation. Thus, the area of East Pender and Main in Vancouver was linked to those "saffron coloured sons of the East" ( Vancouver News 3 June 1886, qtd in Anderson 81). The colour saffron, an evocation of the yellow peril, became a short-hand description of the Chinese, whose qualities include immorality, the "herd instinct," and a propensity to contract and spread infectious diseases. To prevent any kind of racial contagion, Chinese immigrants were confined, through social and economic measures, to a few streets of undesirable real estate. In order to survive in a hostile society, Chinese immigrants voluntarily banded together and formed ethnic enclaves in which various systems of support, through schools, trade associations, political associations and dialect associations, were developed to help Chinese immigrants. However, as Zhou Min points out in Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (1992): Because of the need for social and cultural support from fellow sojourners and the need to maintain ethnic identity and kinship ties with China, immigrants chose a way of life in Chinatown that reminded them of home. This voluntary IDO Canadian Literature 163 I Winter 1999 snlf isolation croatod s t e r e o t y p e of unassim ilab ilit y t ha t in turn reinforced the community's irrelevance t o t h e larger society.

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