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Contested Space of San Francisco Chinatown in Sui Sin Far's Mrs English Language and Literature Vol. 58 No. 6 (2012) 1023-39 Contested Space of San Francisco Chinatown in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings Yoon-Young Choi “How beautiful above! How unbeautiful below!” exclaimed Mark Carson involuntarily. -Sui Sin Far “Its Wavering Image” (63). “We Are Here Because You Were There” has become one of the most evocative anti-racism slogans held by the (post-)colonial diasporic sub- jects inhabiting the metropolises of the West. As the Western domination of Asian countries gradually shifted in its form from direct colonialism to indirect interventions with the system of globalized capitalism, the posi- tion of Asian immigrants in the metropolitan cities became a double-bind locus for the persisting projects of western imperialism in Asia. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigra- tions from Asian and African colonies to European or American metrop- olises had been mainly provoked by the Western societies’ demands for cheaper labor in their still developing capitalist economies. However, the growing infiltration of the racial “others” into the Western urban spaces disrupted the rigid spatial division that the imperialists had endeavored to maintain between themselves and the colonized subjects. The develop- ment of immigrant communities within the metropolitan spaces could thus hold double meanings. On the one hand, these communities could provide physical and/or emotional sanctuaries for the immigrants who had been abruptly displaced into unfamiliar environments. On the other hand, these spaces could be exploited by the imperialists in their attempt to maintain the spatial division between themselves and the colonized “others.” The rapid growth of Asian immigrant population was one of the most significant aspects of the rising urban spaces in the late nineteenth-centu- ry United States. Although China was not an official colony of the United States, it came under a heavy influence of American military and economic controls from the mid-nineteen century like many of its neigh- 1024 Yoon-Young Choi boring countries. The United States had greatly depended upon the cheap labor force of the Chinese immigrants in the nation’s project of industrial development such as building railways or mining. Yet, at the same time, the great influx of the Chinese population into the United States pro- voked great uneasiness for the dominant white American society. The tension between the labor-management relations was aggravated by a devastating commercial panic and depression in the late 1860s. Thousands of white laborers were unemployed, and they began to blame the Chinese workers for their troubles. Even under such circumstances, however, the number of Chinese immigrants constantly grew and eventually a neigh- borhood called “Chinatown” emerged as one of the most distinct immi- grant community within the American urban spaces. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “Chinatown” ghettos proliferat- ed in both cities and small towns throughout North America.1 The increase in Chinese population during the last three decades of nineteenth century exacerbated dominant white Americans’ fear of Chinese immigrant spaces. The idea of Chinatown as a self-contained and alien society, in turn, justified persistent acts of surveillance, investi- gation, and statistical surveys that “scientifically” corroborated the racial classification. The exposés of Chinatown began to increase in forms of government investigations, newspaper reports, travelogues and fictions. These narratives established “knowledge” about the Chinese race and aided in the making and remaking of Chinatown. While various fictional and non-fictional accounts proliferated at the turn of the century, most of these works would support the anti-Chinese sentiments of the period. In order to reaffirm the inferiority, or notoriety, of the Chinese immigrants — which served as the rationale for exercising discriminative gestures and xenophobia toward them— most of these accounts attempted to stress the radical differences that separate the Chinese aliens from white 1 Although the area called “Chinatown” had a variety of inhabitants through- out the late nineteenth century, the predominance of Chinese residents meant the entire location had only one racial identity. While the physical boundaries of these Chinatowns constantly shifted, the name signaled a potent racial desig- nation of Chinese immigrant inhabitation. Businesses and residences occupied by Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Mexican, Canadian, and Anglo Americans contin- ued to thrive in so-called Chinatown, but they were of little interest in the accounts regarding the space. While the physical boundaries of these Chinatowns constantly shifted, the name signaled a potent racial designation of Chinese immigrant inhabitation. Contested Space of San Francisco Chinatown in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings 1025 Americans. The space of Chinatown was depicted as the dark, uncivi- lized subterranean world which stands in direct contrast to the decent, rational aboveground space of white Americans. Sui Sin Far entered the literary field during these periods when such binary attitudes prevailed.2 As a Eurasian woman writer, Far attempted to provide distinctive portrayals of the space of Chinatown and its inhabi- tants that were far different from those of her contemporaries. San Francisco Chinatown, one of the major sites explored in Far’s narratives, emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to intense periods of anti-Chinese violence between 1870s and 1890s and the government’s authorization of residential segregation in 1878.3 The drastic differences between Far’s stories and the dominant white American narratives of these periods in their representations of San Francisco Chinatown reveal the tension between the immigrants and the natives—along the axes of race, class, and gender—in the nineteenth-century American urban space. In this essay, I examine the dominant narrative representations of San Francisco Chinatown at the turn of the century which endeavored to pro- duce and maintain the spatial dichotomies between the orderly spaces of natives and the disruptive immigrant communities within the larger boundary of modern American city space. Through her portrayals of San Francisco Chinatown in her collection of short-stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (1912), Far challenges against the false stereotypes and misreading of this unique immigrant space within and efforts to present the Chinatown as a heterotopic diaspora space where the “insiders” and the “outsiders” of the American urban space intermin- gle and influence each other. 2 Edith Maude Eaton, who published her works under the pen name “Sui Sin Far,” is regarded as the first fiction writer of Asian descent to achieve profes- sional publication in North America. 3 Although Far examines the Chinatowns in several different cities throughout the North America in her narratives— such as, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, Seattle and New York—I will mainly focus on her depiction of the Chinatown in San Francisco. As Philip P. Choy points out, in The Coming Man, the situation of San Francisco Chinatown is distinctive in many ways since it became the “‘dumping ground of the entire country’ with no help from the state or federal government to handle the influx of Chinese kicked out from the other American communities” after the Chinese Exclusion Act (137). 1026 Yoon-Young Choi I. Mapping the San Francisco Chinatown California was both the foothold of Chinese immigrants where they made their greatest contribution to the nation’s economic development, and the locale where anti-Chinese sentiment first turned severe. As a city that housed the largest Chinese population in the United States, San Francisco produced a great amount of fictional and non-fictional dis- courses on Chinatown and its inhabitants throughout the turn of the twentieth century. The rhetoric and propaganda of anti-Chinese sentiment— the so-called “Yellow Peril” discourse—intensified as the struggles over labor-control and capital increased amongst different social groups.4 The claim that Chinese labor displaced white labor pro- voked massive riots in many American cities. The huge number of Chinese immigrants who were forced to leave those cities sought refuge in San Francisco’s Chinatown. For the Chinese immigrants, the period of free migration to the United States ended with the 1880 Angell Treaty and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.5 However, the question of how to control the already established community of Chinese immigrants within the city remained as a persistent problem. The dominant narrative discourses presenting the “reality” of San Francisco Chinatown at the turn of the century typically divided the city into two separate spaces. The vivid visceral narration of the journey through Chinatown became one of the standard forms of knowledge used in popular accounts to establish the “truth” of Chinatown as the preemi- 4 An article in a Californian newspaper, Marin Journal, published in 1876, proves a useful example of anti-Chinese sentiments of the period: “We have won this glorious land inch by inch from the red man in vain; we have beaten back the legions of George the Third for nothing; we have suppressed rebellion and maintained the integrity of our country for no good purpose whatsoever, if we are now to surrender it to a horde of Chinese, simply because they are so degraded
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