Article

Sexing the Sojourner: Imagining Nation: Writing Women in the Global Chinese Diaspora

MADSEN, Deborah Lea

Abstract

This essay is addresses the symbolic power of the Chinese female body in the Exclusion Era. Female Chinese migrants to the US in the late nineteenth-century found both their bodies and their work circumscribed by patriarchal efforts at nation-building exterted from both sides of the Pacific. When female immigrants began arriving in California only a few years after statehood had been granted, they became passive participants in political efforts to ensure that the West Coast be assimilated to the American nation. This meant that permanent settlers should be white, Christian and European; temporary immigrant workers should be prevented from reproducing families in the US but encouraged to produce future generations of temporary labor in China. However, the recent liberalization of Chinese Exclusion laws forbidding immigration to the US from China involved efforts to sustain and extend a complex diasporic network of economic, social, political and cultural relationships spanning the Pacific. While Chinese women were exploited through a trans-Pacific sex trade made possible by both Chinese and American patriarchy, they also [...]

Reference

MADSEN, Deborah Lea. Sexing the Sojourner: Imagining Nation: Writing Women in the Global Chinese Diaspora. Contemporary Women's Writing, 2008, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 36-49

Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:87627

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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Published in Contemporary Women's Writing, 1. 2 (2008), pp. 36-49.

Sexing the Sojourner: Imagining Nation / Writing Women in the Global Chinese Diaspora

Deborah L. Madsen

This essay is concerned with issues of literary globalization, specifically in the community of women writers of Chinese descent. My focus, in the work of these writers who dominate a section of the emergent transnational literary marketplace, is the deployment of a rhetoric of embodied femininity that turns upon the racialization of Asian immigrant women through their sexuality.1 Female Chinese migrants to the US in the late nineteenth-century found both their bodies and their work circumscribed by patriarchal efforts at nation-building exterted from both sides of the Pacific. On the one hand, when female immigrants began arriving in California only a few years after statehood had been granted, they became passive participants in political efforts to ensure that the West Coast be assimilated to the American nation. This meant that permanent settlers should be white, Christian and European; temporary workers should be prevented from reproducing families in the US but encouraged to produce future generations of temporary labor in China. On the other hand, the recent liberalisation of laws forbidding emigration from China involved efforts to sustain and extend a complex network of economic, social, political and cultural relationships spanning the Pacific and forming what Wei-ming Tu and other scholars refer to as "cultural China."2 So Chinese emigrants should remain economically bound to mainland China by ties of kinship. Thus, the bodies of Chinese migrant women became important sites invested with conflicting nationalistic imperatives. This diasporic perspective on the Chinese immigrant experience has always been in tension with the discourse of nationhood asserted by individual nation states. One of the significant developments in Asian American Studies as a maturing discipline is the shift away from analysis of the internal dynamics of particular nationally-defined communities (such as Chinese America) towards attention to the mechanisms by which the state constructs and enforces racial categories that are grounded in nation-state discourses. I want to contribute to this conversation some thoughts about the symbolic power of the Chinese female body in the Exclusion Era which, while exploited through a trans-Pacific sex trade that was made possible by both Chinese and Western (specifically US) attitudes towards Chinese women, at the same time articulated the contradictory demands made by the nascent nation state on its frontiers. Hence, Chinese women were demonized as disease-carrying prostitutes at the same time that they facilitated the bachelor lifestyle of the Chinese men who were to build the infrastructure of the American West. In this way Chinese immigrant women, many of whom were subjected to sexual servitude in frontier mining towns and growing coastal cities, made possible the permanent settling of the West by European American families, families that would reproduce as white Anglo-American "nationalized" bodies. I want to begin with a story which is neither by a woman nor is "writing" as such, but which sets the scene for the issues I will explore. film director Fruit Chan's work concerning the repatriation of the territory to the People's Republic of China (PRC) highlights the role of women in the complex cultural negotiations of national identity in what is known as "Greater" or "cultural" China.3 The film Durian Durian, which Fruit Chan (Chan Guo) made in 2000, concerns the return home to Mudanjiang in northeast China of a young woman, Xiao Yan, following her sojourn as a sex worker in Hong Kong. The figure of Yan, as a mainland prostitute, raises issues concerning the influx of immigrants from the PRC to 2 southern Chinese cities following the repatriation of Hong Kong, as well as further issues arising from the transnational movement of sex workers within and from mainland China. The latter part of the film is set in Mudanjiang, and addresses Yan's attempts to settle back into life at home. She is continually asked when she intends to return to Shenzhen, the southern city where she worked in a brothel before moving, on a three-month visitor's pass, to Hong Kong. The irony that Fruit Chan uses to generate a scathing critique of the situation of migrant mainland workers is that Yan cannot tell her family and friends the kind of work she has been doing in the south. But, as viewers, we the audience know what Yan cannot tell. This dramatic irony is emphasized when Yan cannot admit how she earned the money that her parents lavish on a grand banquet to mark her return home. When she confides to one of her friends that she does not know what work to take up in Mudanjiang or what kind of business she might invest in, her friend simply replies, "Do what you did in Hong Kong." This childhood friend and her young cousin both beg Yan to take them with her to Shenzhen and teach them how to succeed as she has done. Yan can neither tell them the truth nor can she bring herself to return south nor can she integrate back into her life in Mudanjiang. She is reduced to a condition of permanent dislocation by a number of linked factors: the willingness of her parents to embrace her new wealth without questioning its provenance; the performance she must sustain as a legitimate businesswoman; and by the divorce she seeks from the childhood sweetheart she left behind to sojourn in the south. This alienated condition is typical of the migrant worker and has been characteristic of descriptions of the Chinese sojourner (coolie or migrant worker) since the mid-nineteenth century. I want to argue that narratives like Fruit Chan's films, and the texts to which I will turn shortly, point to the existence of a long-neglected tradition of female sojourning that is slowly gaining recognition under the pressure exerted by contemporary discourses of global Chinese diasporic culture. Commonly, the figure of the Chinese sojourner is thought of as male. This is particularly true in discursive histories of the "coolie" laborer or the Chinese laundryman. The latter figure has been institutionalized in sociological literature through the efforts of Paul Chan Pang Siu, whose 1952 essay, "The Sojourner," has become a classic. For Siu, describing Chinese migrant workers in the US in the early part of the twentieth century, the sojourner is a variant of the sociological concept of "the stranger" (Siu, 1952-53, 34, 43). Rather than a mobile transnational worker, the sojourner lives as a permanent resident of an adopted nation state but is unwilling or unable to change his lifestyle so as to assimilate and become a full citizen of his adopted home. This view has been challenged by recent studies, which place the Chinese migrant worker in a transnational network of diasporic cultural spaces and interpret the refusal or inability to assimilate as positive identification with mobile trans-Pacific Chinese cultural networks.4 For Siu, the sojourner sustains personal family and cultural links with his birthplace, and seeks to return to the wife he has left behind as quickly as he can make his fortune, but frequently he finds himself unable to return. This model of the Chinese migrant worker informs generations of writing about the coolie laborer in North America, from Louis Chu's classic novel of New York's Chinatown as a bachelor society, Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), to Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children (1994). In Chong's fictionalized family history, her parents' overriding concern is to send money home to finance her father's desire to build the biggest and best furnished house in his ancestral village. When her father loses his job in the lumber mills and is unable to find work, her mother supports the family and continues to send remittences to China by waitressing in a liminal environment where the distinction between prostitution and other forms of service work is unclear. In much the same way as Fruit Chan's compromised heroine Xiao Yan, Denise's parents must preserve the myth of Gold Mountain and present her father to the "first" family in China as a hero and model success story. Thus, her mother's story remains untold. What Denise Chong's narrative does is expose another story, beneath the conventional narrative of the male sojourner: that of the concubine, the low-status woman, who also labors 3 in the global capitalist marketplace, and has done so since the earliest days of Chinese immigration to North America. In Louis Chu's fictional account of New York, it is the change brought about by the lifting of prohibitions against female Chinese migrants to the US that provides the central problematic of his plot. The story is set immediately after the 1948 reform of US immigration law, when the two aging sojourners – Way Way Gay and Lee Gong – decide that their offspring should marry. The problem is that Way Way Gay's son is so accustomed to living in a "bachelor" society, with no women except prostitutes, that he is rendered impotent by the innocence of his new wife. The emphasis here on the absence of women, and the difficulties that arise from the sudden introduction of women into this masculine environment, promotes the view that Chinese migration to the US, especially in the period following the introduction of anti-Chinese Exclusion laws in 1882, did not involve women.5 Denise Chong's story and others reveal that this assumption is not accurate.6 Ruthanne Lum McCunn's historical narrative, Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981), takes up this neglected subject of female sojourning, and specifically the forced prostitution and enslavement this could entail. I want to dwell on the details of this important text, which brings to light this silenced history or "herstory." McCunn subtitles the book "A Biographical Novel," a move that allows her to base in the historical record the story of Lalu Nathoy, a Chinese migrant woman who lived and died in rural Idaho under the name of , while filling in imaginatively the gaps that exist in the factual record.7 What Lalu's story highlights is the intersection of Western and Chinese discourses of femininity within a late nineteenth-century trans-Pacific sex trade in enslaved Chinese girls. This trade was at the same time in open defiance of legislative restrictions placed upon Chinese immigration to the US and also a consequence of the scarcity of Chinese women in the US produced by these restrictive immigration laws, a point to which I will return. Lalu's migration experience immediately predates the era of legislative exclusion that was directed specifically at Chinese migrants to the US. However, this was a period of intensifying diplomatic tension between the two nations and it is worth sketching the primary legislative environment that shapes the historical context of McCunn's narrative. This history effectively begins with the Treaties of Tientsin that brought to a close the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. These treaties allowed for the opening of numerous "treaty ports" in China and provided freedom of travel for foreigners within China. This freedom of movement was made reciprocal by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which accorded reciprocal legal status and protections to US citizens in China and to Chinese citizens in the US. It was also at this time that the imperial government for the first time allowed Chinese workers to travel abroad as contract or "coolie" laborers and foreign governments were granted the right to recruit Chinese laborers. In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, and the cessation of the transatlantic slave trade, but before the demise of Reconstruction, there was great demand for cheap Chinese labor.8 Between 1849 and 1930, around 380,000 Chinese migrants entered the mainland US, though the effect of exclusion legislation was to reduce the size of the Chinese community to little more than 60,000 by 1920.9 The vast majority of migrants were men who had left their wives and families in China. estimates that in California in 1852 the ratio of Chinese men to women was 1,685 men to every woman.10 In McCunn's narrative, Lalu finds herself the only Chinese woman in the mining town of Warrens, Idaho. This gender imbalance gave rise to the "bachelor societies" mentioned above. Increasing numbers of sojourning Chinese workers provoked among white communities resentment of the money that was remitted to their families in China. Together with concerns about economic competition and the lowering of wages, this led to the hysteria of the "Yellow Peril."11 Violence against ethnic Chinese in California and elsewhere escalated, especially during the economic depression of the 1870s when there no longer seemed any demand for cheap imported labor.12 The political response 4 to this widespread sinophobia was a series of increasingly restrictive laws designed to limit Chinese immigration and to suppress the establishment of Chinese communities in the US. If these acts of legislation did not specifically address Chinese women, that was because by 1882 there were very few female migrants to exclude. Most significant for the restriction of Chinese female immigration was the 1875 Immigration Act or the Page Law, which expressly forbade the importation of women for the purpose of prostitution but had the effect of drastically reducing female immigration. As Ronald Takaki observes:

The Page Law intimidated all women considering emigration: the number of Chinese women entering the United States between 1876 and 1882 declined from the previous seven-year period by 68 percent. In 1882, during the interval of a few months between the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its enforcement, 39,579 Chinese slipped into America. But this massive migration included only 136 women, testifying to the effectiveness of the Page Law.13

The preamble to the Act placed a duty upon the local port authority to withhold authorization to embark in the case of vessels transporting immigrants, specifically from "China, Japan, or any Oriental country," for the purpose of prostitution (initially defined by the Act as "lewd and immoral purposes"). By empowering a local official to exercise discretion in determining whether or not an individual woman could enter the US, the Act had the effect of excluding most Chinese women, who had long been stereotyped as prostitutes. This stereotype was not purely the result of anti-Asian racism: sociologist Lucie Cheng Hirata estimates that in 1860, 85 percent of Chinese women living in were prostitutes and in 1870, following a period of significant Chinese immigration to California and immediately before the introduction of the Page Law, the figure was 71 percent.14 This does not mean that there were large numbers of Chinese women working in the sex trade; rather, of those who had migrated to the US many were working as prostitutes, serving the needs of the overwhelmingly male Chinese communities in cities like San Francisco. Catherine Lee puts the number of Chinese female prostitutes at the time of the exclusion laws at 6 percent of the total Chinese population in the US, and in San Francisco in 1870 she estimates that of a population of approximately 2,000 Chinese women 1,400 were prostitutes. However, she qualifies these estimates with the observation that a key determinant of these numbers was the identity of the person who did the counting, given the widespread stereotype of the Chinese prostitute among white men.15 The effect of subsequent exclusion legislation was to perpetuate this gender imbalance and, by restricting female immigration and thus the reproduction of Chinese families, to inhibit and in fact to reduce the size of Chinese communities in the US. A further series of Congressional Acts in the period from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries provides the historical context of radical sinophobia within which Ruthanne Lum McCunn's narrative (which covers the period 1865-1923) is situated.16 The 1880 Angell Treaty, negotiated with the weakened Chinese imperial government modified the earlier Burlingame Treaty, by allowing the US government to limit and regulate but not yet prohibit Chinese immigration. In this way, the Angell Treaty facilitated the near-complete prohibition on Chinese immigration that was introduced two years later. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively suspended the Burlingame Treaty; subsequent acts of legislation codified and extended the provisions of the 1882 Act. The Scott Act of 1888 prohibited the granting of US citizenship to any person of Chinese ethnicity. Any US citizen who married a Chinese national lost his or her US citizenship, a provision that disproportionately affected European American women because Chinese women were so scarce and unavailable for marriage. Those who lost their citizenship in this way were considered to be citizens of their spouse's country (China) and were subject to the same 5 restrictions on their movements. The Scott Act, for example, prevented the re-admittance into the US of Chinese persons who traveled abroad and authorized the establishment of an immigration detention center, the forerunner of the notorious Angel Island Immigration Detainment Center in San Francisco Bay. In 1892, Congress passed the Geary Act, which extended the 1882 Act for another ten years and required all Chinese living in the US to carry with them at all times a certificate of residence. The Chinese Exclusion Extension Act of 1904 extended indefinitely the provisions of the 1882 Act, with its various amendments. The last of these amendments was passed in 1902, and was intended to prohibit all Chinese immigration and to regulate the residence of Chinese migrants and all people of Chinese descent in all the territories and possessions controlled by the United States. It is in the context of this legislative environment that Lalu/Polly realizes that she can never go home to China; that her "sojourn" in the "Gold Mountain" of the US will be permanent. But opportunities to make the US home were limited by the very laws that prohibit her return to China. She hopes to use the gold she has saved to buy land and farm her own ranch -- but then she discovers that, according to the Alien Land Act, she cannot. Ruthanne Lum McCunn offers a scathing critique of the mythology of the Chinese sojourner as an enterprising entrepreneur by dramatizing the legal and cultural obstacles that are repeatedly confronted by Lalu in her quest for self-determination. She underlines the patriarchal control of women's lives that forms a continuous thread in Lalu's life from rural China to the US. Thus, the happy ending that McCunn engineers is compromised and rendered ironic by the fact that for Lalu, as a Chinese woman, there can be no real freedom. In this respect, McCunn's historical narrative echoes Fruit Chan's contemporary filmic account of Xiao Yan's quest for financial security and personal freedom. In both cases, freedom in a transnational capitalist economy within which women are commodities for sale belies the myth of sojourning – where a period spent working abroad means making a fortune to be spent in the ancestral home. As Chan and McCunn show, for women trapped in the transnational sex trade the myth can never come true. Lalu is purchased by Hong King to work in his saloon in the mining town of Warrens, Idaho, where she is told she will be the only Chinese woman and "an attraction that will bring men, Chinese and white, from miles around" (106). It is in the mining town that the irony of the book's title, Thousand Pieces of Gold, becomes clear. Lalu is told by her father that he would not sell her for a thousand pieces of gold. In Hong King's saloon she saves the sweepings from the floor and sifts out the gold dust in an effort to save enough to buy herself. She discovers that Hong King is determined not to sell her at any price, though he gambles her away in a poker game. Even in old age, living on the ranch she has built with her Anglo- American husband, Charlie Bemis, Lalu is threatened by anti-Chinese riots and lynchings, and the ever-present fear of deportation. Indeed, McCunn suggests that it is in direct response to the Geary Act, which required all Chinese to carry evidence of their legal residence status, that Lalu and Charlie married after having lived together for years.17 In McCunn's story, there is little freedom and no security to be had by Chinese women: when Lalu/Polly learns about the abolition of American slavery, she wonders why she is still enslaved. Charlie explains: "Years ago special laws were passed in California to forbid the kind if auctions and contracts that made you a slave, but the laws only raised the price of slave girls" (139). He cannot explain why it is that African-Americans are free but laws against chattel slavery, like those that emancipated them, have only increased Polly's commodity value. The Chinese exclusion laws were repealed in 1943, ten years after the death of Lalu/Polly on 6 November 1933, at a time when China had become an important ally of the US in the war against Japan, and were replaced with a (very restrictive) quota for Chinese immigrants. In response to the labor needs left unmet after the exclusion of Chinese workers, numbers of Japanese, and to a lesser extent Korean and Indian, laborers began migrating to the US. Again, anti-Asian violence and legislative restrictions followed: in 1907 Japanese 6 immigration was restricted; in 1917 Congress declared that South Asian immigrants were subject to restrictions imposed upon the Pacific-Barred Zone of excluded Asian countries. Only Filipino immigrants escaped these restrictions because the Philippines had been annexed by the US after the 1898 Spanish-American War. However, one of the provisions of the Tydings-McDuffie Act (or the Philippine Independence Act) of 1934 was the introduction of a restrictive quota on Filipino immigration (of only fifty per year), such that this functioned effectively as a further Asian exclusion Act. Mary Douglas, in her studies of the social construction of dirt and hygiene, identifies the key role played by exclusionary boundaries in the establishment of taboos. In Purity and Danger (1996) she writes:

The idea of society is a powerful image. It is potent in its own right to control or to stir men to action. This image has form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. Its outlines contain power to reward conformity and repulse attack. There is energy in its margins and unstructured areas. For symbols of society any human experience of structures, margins or boundaries is ready to hand.18

Transgression of boundaries constitutes violation of the taboo; the drawing of the boundaries constitutively separates what is clean and healthy from what is dirty and diseased.19 In the rhetoric of American nation-building, national blood purity is opposed to the threat of tainted blood, often identified with foreign-born(e) disease. The period of Lalu's story after her abduction by Chen and his gang of bandits is dominated by the rhetoric of buying and selling. The symbolic transection of worlds (from the rural to the urban, for example) is represented in terms of the trade in commodities. Lalu becomes obsessed with the idea of buying her freedom. Not knowing that her body – the purity of her youthful body – is in fact the bandit's most valuable booty, she steals jewelry from their cache to buy herself back. Ironically, then, she fears sexual assault at the hands of the bandits not knowing that her virginity has a high price tag, one the bandits will not compromise. The high cash value of a virgin prostitute of course relates to the image of sex workers, and Chinese prostitutes in particular at this time, as diseased. A virgin is untouched, untainted and "clean." The figure of the syphilitic Chinese prostitute was such an important figure in the anti- Chinese movement of the 1880s that a specific and highly virulent form of the disease was attributed to Chinese immigrant women. This rhetorical figure was given visual representation in cartoons and other magazine illustrations of the period. The collection, The Coming Man, edited by Philip Choy, Lorraine Dong and Marlon Hom includes such images as "A Statue for Our Harbor," which features the Statue of Liberty as a coolie laborer whose crown emits the words "FILTH / IMMORALITY / DISEASES / RUIN TO WHITE LABOR" (The Wasp, 11 November 1881, 320: Choy et al., 136). Two illustrations from Harper's Weekly express fears of Chinese sexuality. "The Last Addition to the Family" (n.d., 135) shows the stylized icon of the US, Columbia, cradling in her arms a baby with the face of a demonized Chinese adult, his braided hair or queue draped over her forearm. Less metaphorical is "Pacific Railroad Complete" (12 June 1869) which features a white woman arm-in-arm with a Chinese man, standing before "the Church of Confucius" (134); in the murky background are two figures with their backs and queues presented to the viewer, underlining the fact that the scene is set in Chinatown. One of the most powerful motivations of the anti-Asian Exclusion laws was, precisely, the fear of miscegenation and Asian sexuality. Or, in other words, restrictions on Asian migration were supported by a constituency of US voters who had been led to fear Asian male sexual threats to white women and feminized sexual threats like the mythical strain of "Chinese syphilis," the study of which was sponsored by the American Medical Association 7 in 1875.20 A number of documented anti-Chinese riots during the decade of the 1880s were triggered by mob reactions to stories of Chinese sexual malfeasance.21 The hostile assumption that Chinese women would inevitably work as prostitutes arose from these general anxieties about mixed-race sexual relations and the impact of inter-racial reproduction upon the future profile of the nation. As Catherine Lee cogently explains, the settling of the West in the latter part of the nineteenth century involved contradictory demands: on the one hand, that cheap temporary labor be available for the work of building such infrastructure as the Trancontinental Railway and, on the other hand, that permanent settlements be comprised of white families to ensure the continuity of political and economic ties with the East Coast. The work of Chinese prostitutes served both these needs, according to Lee: Chinese sex workers satisfied the needs of Chinese men who lived without women (because prostitutes provided domestic as well as sexual services) and sustained the patriarchal structure of Chinese marriage, which demanded that the wives of sojourners remain with their husband's family in China. At the same time, Chinese prostitutes ensured that Chinese men did not form families with European American women, families which would "taint" the purported "purity" of the national bloodstock.22 The Chinese prostitute, though vilified as a threat to the moral hygiene of the nation, facilitated precisely the kind of national emergence that West Coast politicians were seeking. George Anthony Peffer's study of the 1875 Page Law, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here (1999), takes its title from Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the US Circuit Court, who went on to complete the sentence: "... they would never multiply. ... When the Chinaman comes here and don't bring his wife out here, sooner or later he dies like a worn out steam engine; he is simply a machine, and don't leave two or three or half dozen children to fill his place."23 The fear of miscegenation, of the Chinese man or woman as the progenitor of a mixed-race community, complicates the desire for national "purity." In McCunn's narrative, Lalu refuses Charlie's desire for children because she will not be the mother of mixed-race offspring. In an historical moment when theories of eugenics and racial purity dominated, she fears the racial hostility of Anglo-Americans towards those who are perceived to be "impure." The racial link to China precludes the possibility of a Chinese mother producing the next nationalized generation as "authentic" Americans. In this way, the cynical image of the coolie laborer as "a worn out steam engine" who cannot reproduce Americans in America while his wife remains in China finds a powerful counterpart in the figure of the female Chinese prostitute who labors temporarily in the work of nation-building but can reproduce herself neither in the US nor in China.24 This cynical attitude towards Chinese labor in fact was entirely consonant with Chinese attitudes towards the "Gold Mountain" of the US. As recent scholarship like Yong Chen's Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (2000) reveals, many Chinese workers did not perceive themselves as presented with a choice between China and the US but engaged in a flexible trans-Pacific network of economic, political, social and cultural ties. Rather than fail to assimilate to US cultural models, Chen argues that Chinese immigrants in the US sustained their ties to a "cultural China" that spanned the Pacific Rim. The Chinese practice of selling and enslaving unwanted girls also meshed easily with this trans-Pacific sex trade. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers make clear in their study of women sold by their families, Women and Chinese Patriarchy (1994), the important distinctions between mui tsai (servants sold into affluent families), san po tsai (child brides), and pipa tsai (girls sold to become entertainers or prostitutes).25 This distinction was blurred in the case of girls like Lalu/Polly, who was led to believe she had been sold to a husband in the US but in fact was sold as a prostitute (pipa tsai). In a China ravaged by civil disorder, as the Qing dynasty slowly collapsed under pressure of western colonialism, there was a ready supply of girls for sale – or even just for the taking. As Lucie Cheng Hirata explains: 8

Only a few women crossed the Pacific on their own in search of better compensation for their labor in prostitution. Usually the family, not the girl, arranged the sale. Girls often accepted their sale, however reluctantly, out of filial loyalty, and most of them were not in a position to oppose their families’ decision.26

Ruthanne Lum McCunn emphasizes this Chinese perspective on the trans-Pacific sex trade by beginning her narrative not in the US but in China. The subtitle of McCunn's 2003 essay "Reclaiming Polly Bemis" underlines this genealogy: "China's Daughter, Idaho's Legendary Pioneer."27 In this essay, McCunn explains: "I felt very strongly that in order to understand Polly in America, it would be crucial for the reader to know about Lalu in China" (76). Especially important in this history is the context of Confucian cultural values. The practice of filial piety, for example, informs Lalu's character from the beginning of the narrative. As a young child, Lalu is haunted by the parable of Guo Ju, which teaches her the virtue of filial piety. In a time of food shortage, such as Lalu's family was experiencing, Guo Ju offered to kill his child in order to save his mother. However, as he is digging the child's grave he hits upon a cask of buried treasure and the child is reprieved. Lalu asks repeatedly what would have happened if there had been no treasure? She fears that her body will prove to be her parents' treasure and that she will be sold to feed her younger and more valued brothers. These are not baseless, imagined fears: in the economically ravaged society of late Qing Dynasty China the selling of girls was not an uncommon practice. What the reader gradually discovers through Lalu's story is the existence of a complex, highly organized trans- Pacific trade in Chinese women. Between China and the US there operates a global capitalist network within which Chinese women are reduced to commodified sex objects. Lalu's insight dawns in the Shanghai bordello where the bandits sell her to a procuress who has a special buyer, someone who will not care that Lalu's feet have not been properly bound or that she still has rude country manners. This buyer will take her to America. The biographical story is closely focalized through Lalu's consciousness and, consequently, the reader shares both her naive assumptions about her destiny and the awakening to the harsh reality of the trans- Pacific slave trade in which Lalu finds herself. In 1872, at the age of twenty, Lalu is shipped to San Francisco, where she must pose as the wife of a Chinese merchant to deceive the immigration officials. She becomes, in other words, a "paper bride" and her voyage consists of learning an entire life-story, including an appropriate Southern dialect, to match her false identity papers. Here, her plain physical appearance is an advantage because she is said to look more like a wife than a desirable concubine, though her performance is ultimately superfluous given that, as she observes, "Gold flashed as she passed the papers up to the Chinese man beside the demon officer" (94). The historical record indicates that bribery of officials was one of the reasons why illegal female migrants sold for high prices. As in the stories of other smuggled women, Lalu naively believes that she is to be united with the "husband" who has purchased and transported her to the US.28 However, the procuress Li Ma brutally informs her that the false immigration papers are to be used again, to bring another woman illegally to the US; and then Li Ma turns to inform the remaining women, none of whom can read, that their contracts commit them to prostitution to cover the cost of their passage. The women's distress intensifies when they discover that, unlike indentured male workers, there is a specifically feminine twist to their conditions of work: their menstrual periods will be added as "sick days" to the end of their contracted time: "Two weeks for one sick day, another month for each additional sick day" (99). The women then begin to realize that their period of servitude will never end, that their sojourn will be permanent. As the threat of rebellion looms among these women, a further horror is presented to control them: the 9 bagnio. Li Ma asks if anyone noticed "doors with barred windows facing the alleys, ... the chickens inside, tapping and scratching inside, trying to attract a man without bringing a cop. ... charging twenty-five cents for a look, fifty cents for a feel, and seventy-five cents for action" (100). This threat has a silencing effect as the women begin to comprehend the existence of a complex US market in Chinese prostitutes: ranging from elegant bordellos for the young and beautiful, down to the bagnios. But beyond even this there is the threat of the "hospitals" inhabited by women so damaged by the voyage that they cannot be sold: "Those women are taken straight to the same 'hospitals' as slave girls who have ceased to be attractive or who have become diseased. There, alone in tiny, windowless cells, they're laid on wooden shelves to wait for death from starvation or their own hand" (102-3). What McCunn reveals here is a well-developed system for smuggling Chinese women and disposing of their bodies for profit in the US.29 Much has been written about the highly developed transnational recruitment networks that brought male laborers to the US; Lucie Cheng Hirata identifies a similarly complex network that sustained Chinese prostitution in the American West. She describes the:

widespread organization of the trade with a network of specialized functions extending across the Pacific to Canton and Hong Kong. The persons chiefly responsible for this trade were the procurers who kidnapped, enticed, or bought Chinese women; the importers who brought them into America; the brothel owners who lived by their exploitation; the Chinese highbinders who collected fees for protecting them from other highbinders; the police who collected monies for keeping them from being arrested; and the white Chinatown property owners who leased their land and buildings for exorbitant rents.30

Interests on both sides of the Pacific thus benefited from the sexual servitude of Chinese women. Chinatown tongs or secret societies played an influential role in this sex trade; families in China could benefit either from the sale of an unwanted daughter or from a share of her earnings remitted across the Pacific. Ruthanne Lum McCunn's narrative does not probe the social and economic networks that supported this trade; her effort is to represent one woman's individual experience, with her superficial and intermittent glimpses of the organized nature of this trade in women's bodies. However, I have dwelt at some length on Ruthanne Lum McCunn's narrative because it demonstrates that even during the nineteenth-century heyday of Chinese sojourning the trans-Pacific market in Asian labor incorporated women to a significant degree. At the same time, specific gendered conditions marked the experience of women who were engaged in the transnational sex trade. As I remarked above, this trans-Pacific trade represents the convergence of US and Chinese attitudes towards Chinese women: the sexualization of female Chinese migrants in the US and the traditional enslavement of unwanted girls in imperial China.31 The identification of "Old China" as the locale of girl slaves, of China as a fundamentally misogynistic patriarchal culture – in contrast to the US where slavery is assumed to have been abolished – remains a common motif in diasporic Chinese writings. The discursive ground for these national distinctions between China and the US is the female body and the embodied experience of transnational movement across the Pacific. What the figure of the female sojourner signifies most powerfully in McCunn's text is the gendered nature of diasporic experience itself. The strategic literary silence that McCunn shatters has shaped these transnational relations in certain ways, enabling an image of the Chinese homeland as a place of sexual enslavement and patriarchal oppression, and the hostland (the US) as a place of western freedom and the liberation of women. This is precisely the 10 mythology that McCunn ruthlessly dismantles. Thousand Pieces of Gold compels a reappraisal of the gendered understandings of the dynamics of transnational migrant communities; the history of women's experience of the trans-Pacific trade in Chinese labor, the largely silenced history of enslavement and prostitution, offers a powerful starting point for this revisionary work. 1 My focus here is the nineteenth-century trans-Pacific sex trade in Chinese women. Important and closely-related work on transnational systems of sexual servitude addresses the experience of Korean "Comfort Women" and Japanese "Picture Brides."

2 See, for example, Wei-ming Tu, The Living Tree: Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (1993).

3 This theme of the female body as positioned centrally to the experience of diaspora is found in other contemporary Hong Kong movies such as Clara Law's Farewell China and The City of Glass.

4 See, for example, Erika Lee, At America's Gates (2003), Colleen Lye, America's Asia (2005), and the work of Lisa Lowe.

5 The Page Law of 1875 predates this legislation and was directed specifically at excluding Chinese women: this is discussed below. Sucheng Chan argues that hostility towards Chinese women predates even the 1875 law: "In August 1854, a municipal committee visited [San Francisco's] Chinatown and reported to the board of aldermen that most of the women found there were prostitutes. The observation soon became a conviction, and it colored the public perception of, and attitude toward, and action against all Chinese women for almost a century," "The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1875-1943" in Entry Denied (1991), p. 97.

6 Historical and sociological studies such as Sucheng Chan, ibid., Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women, op. cit., and George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here (1999), have addressed the condition of the female Chinese migrant worker but the literary representation of this history has been neglected.

7 Describing the process of researching her narrative, McCunn writes: "The wealth of material was gratifying, but unfortunately, there were many conflicting 'facts' and huge gaps in the information, especially about her life in China. ... Instead of a biography, then, I decided to write a biographical novel." Ruthanne Lum McCunn, "Reclaiming Polly Bemis" (2003), p. 76.

8 See Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor (1991) for a general history of global Chinese migration, and Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts (1996) on the transnational labor market that shaped Chinese migration.

9 Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989, p. 31 and Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850, p. 68.

10 Takaki, ibid, p. 121.

11 Colleen Lye's chapter "A Genealogy of the 'Yellow Peril' " in America's Asia (2005) offers, among other things, an insightful critique of the discursive relations among whiteness, blackness, slavery, Asia, Western imperialism, and the need of contemporary US capital for a class of disempowered laborers. See especially her discussion pp. 12-24.

12 Jean Pfaelzer provides a powerful account of this anti-Chinese violence in Driven Out! Roundups, Resistance, and the Forgotten War Against Chinese America (2007). Maxine Hong Kingston also addresses this "forgotten" history in China Men. Andrew Gyory in Closing the Gate (1998) argues that rather than labor unions it was a group of national politicians who inflamed existing racial tensions to create anti-Chinese hysteria in order to gain votes. 13 Takaki, op. cit., p. 40.

14 Lucie Cheng Hirata, "Free, Indentured, and Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs, 5 (1979), pp. 23-24.

15 Catherine Lee, Prostitutes and Picture Brides: Chinese and Japanese Immigration, Settlement, and American Nation-Building, 1870-1920. The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, Working Paper No. 70 (February 2003), p. 14.

16 Amendments to the Chinese Exclusion Law and related acts were passed in 1884, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1898, 1901, 1902, and 1904 culminating in the complete ban on Asian immigration with the Immigration Act of 1924: Philip P. Choy, Lorraine Dong & Marlon K. Hom, ed., The Coming Man (1994), p. 20. This is a remarkable collection of illustrations of the Chinese in America that reveals both changing social attitudes towards Asian immigration and also satirical responses to contemporary legislation, such as the illustration of a Chinese Christian convert which is captioned: " 'But why is it,' asked the thoughtful Chinese, 'that I may go to your heaven, while I may not go to your country?' " p. 82.

17 McCunn, "Reclaiming Polly Bemis," op. cit., p. 92.

18 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1996), p. 114.

19 Douglas, ibid. See also Robert G. Lee, Orientals (1999), pp. 2-3.

20 Catherine Lee, op. cit., pp. 16-17. See also Nayan Shah, Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (2001).

21 See, for example, Victor Jew's account of the 1889 riots in Milwaulkee which were motivated by the arrest of two Chinese men on suspicion of sexual misconduct involving under-age white girls: " 'Chinese Demons' " (2003).

22 Catherine Lee, op.cit., pp. 11-16.

23 Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here, op. cit., pp. 108-109.

24 Amy Ling's pioneering work on the migrant "between worlds" condition was foundational to the establishment of the field of Chinese American women's literature. Ling contributed powerfully to the creation of a corpus of writings that could be studied and she highlighted the scholarly work that was being done and could be done in the field. What I hope to suggest in this essay is a critical reflection upon the ways in which the "between worlds" paradigm can be co-opted for exclusionary purposes that are contrary to Ling's original motivation.

25 Maria Jaschok & Suzanne Miers, ed. Women and Chinese Patriarchy (1994).

26 Hirata, op. cit., p. 6. See also Takaki, op.cit., pp. 41-42

27 McCunn, "Reclaiming Polly Bemis," op. cit., pp. 76-100.

28 See also the oral histories included in Jaschok & Miers, op. cit. 29 Hirata, op. cit., estimates that in San Francisco in the 1890s Chinese girls were each sold for up to three thousand dollars in gold after the Exclusion Laws rendered them scarce, p. 12.

30 Hirata, ibid., p. 9.

31 For an account of Western feminist interventions during the 1920s and 30s, see Sarah Paddle, "The Limits of Sympathy" (2003) and Jaschok & Miers, op. cit.

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