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Article Reference 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. 1 / 1 1 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. Hong Kong 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.
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