Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for ex-ploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth:
the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like pre-cious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
—Walter Benjamin
“A Berlin Chronicle”
Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secrets itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of mem-ory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.
—Pierre Nora
“Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”
The plot of Fae Myenne Ng’s first novel Bone pivots around a violent death in a San Francisco Chinatown family. The suicide of the second daughter Ona Leong becomes the narrative drive behind her half-sister Leila Fu’s first-person inspection of their family history. The scope of the narrative, however, goes beyond the confines of family trauma and becomes a story about a unique urban space, San Francisco Chinatown, and about Chinese American memory. Written by a second-generation Chinese American woman writer born and raised in Chinatown, Bone is a daughter’s homage to
Representing Chinatown 28
her parents’ generation,1 and follows in the train of a long tradition of Chi-nese American writings about Chinatown, such as Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948), C. Y.
Lee’s Flower Drum Song (1957), Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1990), and Frank Chin’s Donald Duk (1991). Yet Ng neither abides by the dominant ideology of assimilation nor adopts a self-Orientalizing gesture in her depiction of Chinese immigrants of the post-Exclusion era and their descendants.2 Rather, she strives to strike a balance between aesthetics and politics by presenting Chinatown as a “lived” lieu de mémoire, or site of memory; lived, in the full sense of Walter Benjamin’s “lived Berlin.” Besides distinct class stratification, Ng’s “lived Chinatown” is as much a racialized space as a gendered one. As Liam Kennedy points out, much modern and postmodern urban aesthetics and theorizing strive to satisfy “a common de-sire for urban legibility” (1). It is also my goal to make the spatialization of Fae Myenne Ng’s Chinatown—and with it a part of Chinese American his-tory—legible.
My analysis of the spatialization of memory in Bone is divided into three parts. In the first part, after a brief discussion of the tradition of China-town literature and the politics of representation entailed therein, I explore the idea of “lived Chinatown” and the flânerie in Bone based upon Benja-min’s recherché of Berlin. The next two sections focus on explicating the racialized and gendered spatial representations in Bone.
Lived Chinatown
One of the central concerns in Bone is the representation of San Francisco Chinatown as a space that is intimately connected with the memory of its residents. This concern places the novel well within the tradition of what Mao-chu Lin terms “Chinatown American Literature.”3 I want to explore the
1 While describing her novel to her parents who cannot read English, Ng clearly identifies her intention of writing the novel as an homage to them, “I tell them that the book celebrates the hard work and living that they endured in order to give future generations a better life. It’s always very important to them to know that we appreciate their labor.” This is quoted from Louis B. Jones’s New York Times review of Bone, in which he records part of his telephone interview with Ng.
2 In 1882 the U.S. government imposed an Exclusion Law against the entrance of “idiots,”
“lunatics” and “Chinese laborers.” The law was not repealed until 1943 and only after 1965 when the immigration law changed to select system did the nation witness a dramatic increase in Chinese American population. See Bill Ong Hing’s important study about the influence of US immigration legislative practices on Asian Americans, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990.
3 Lin’s 1987 dissertation, one of the pioneer studies of representations of Chinatown in the post-World War II Chinese American literature, divides this body of literature into groups that include romanticized, stereotypical autobiographies, realistic fiction, historical literature,
Representing Chinatown 29 ways in which writers of the American-born generation attempt to represent the landscape and mindscape of San Francisco Chinatown from an “insider’s view.”4 A search through the primary and secondary materials regarding this body of literature reveals that at least three models of representing China-town emerge before the writing of Bone: Orientalizing, denigrating, and cel-ebratory to the extent of mythologizing.
Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, one of the earliest efforts by American-born writers to represent Chinatown, has often been criticized for its self-Orientalizing stance. In her discussion of Maxine Hong King-ston’s The Woman Warrior, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong summarizes a common complaint against this type of Chinese American autobiographical literature:
“Removed from Chinese culture in China by their ancestors’ emigration, American-born autobiographers may still capitalize on white curiosity by conducting the literary equivalent of a guided Chinatown tour: by providing explanations on the manners and mores of the Chinese-American community from the vantage point of a ‘native’” (“Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour?” 262).5 In Jade Snow Wong’s case, then, the question of representa-tion is not only ideological but also generic. A major argument against Fifth Chinese Daughter is that an autobiography of this sort is constituted by very little auto/self in it except an imposed group identity. The success story of the third-person autobiographer in Fifth Chinese Daughter bespeaks not a personal success, but rather the myth of Asian Americans as “the model mi-nority,” a myth predicated on the ideology of Asian American upward mobil-ity “which serves both as a model for other minorities to follow in the proc-ess toward Americanization and as a secondary modeling system for whites”
(Palumbo-Liu 157).6 The rhetorical stance of the author who declines to give herself a first-person voice ironically confirms this lack of individual-ity.7
Here I would like to digress to consider this important political issue of representation and to communicate a personal conviction. Both critics and writers of Asian American literature grapple with questions of cultural rep-resentation, albeit from different positions. One might ask, in a simplistic fashion, is, or should there be, a “correct” way of representing Chinatown
writings of “Chinatown Cowboys,” and the woman warrior identity as represented in Maxine Hong Kingston’s works.
4 The trajectory of my research is different from K. Scott Wong’s investigation of how non-resident observers construct conflicting images of Chinatown.
5 Wong’s position in the paper, however, is to defend Kingston’s revisionist writing strategy.
6 I am quoting from David Pulumbo-Liu’s comment on the Asian/American introjection of the Cold War era in Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family.
7 “The gaze of cultural voyeurs” looking for exotic spectacle, Sau-ling Wong points out, “ef-fectively ‘disappears’ the people: every Chinese in its sight is reduced to a specimen of Otherness devoid of individuality and interiority” (“Ethnic Subject” 253).
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that takes into consideration issues of authenticity, accountability, agency, and so on? Such a question has plagued Asian American studies from the beginning, initiating countless “pen wars,” as Sau-ling Wong calls them (“Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour?” 248). David Leiwei Li rightly observes that Asian American writers face “a condition for double allegiance and double agency,” (Imagining the Nation 177) and that the relationship between Asian American authors and their audiences is “one of compulsory representation, a vicarious performance without consent” (181).8 While there is understandably no easy way out of this role as an involuntary repre-sentative for the writer, I believe as critics we should try to seek a balance between aesthetics and politics without overlooking the changing variables of history. This eclectic position, I would argue, allows us to take a more nuanced approach to Asian American texts, and saves us from the pitfalls of harsh condemnation or undifferentiated celebration.
Reading Jade Snow Wong from this perspective, we can make two ob-servations. First, despite the tendency of self-Orientalization, Fifth Chinese Daughter was produced at the point when Sino-American relationships had reached a new height because of the political alliance of the two nations during the Second World War, and mainstream American society discovered a new interest in Chinatowns and their Chinese American residents. Hence, the popularity of Fifth Chinese Daughter in the 1950s and 1960s had as much to do with the demand of a white readership as it did with the need of a Chinese American author to express herself. Second, in the pre-dawn of 1960s second-wave feminism, Jade Snow Wong’s self-effacing portrayal of her selfhood paradoxically appears to be a way of claiming female inde-pendence. Kingston has thus credited this work as inspiring to Chinese American women. At issue here is the persistent gaze of mainstream society that continues to haunt the imagination of Chinese America. The critical is-sue in terms of politics of representation, then, lies in how Chinese Ameri-cans write their subjectivity into being under such a gaze.9
8 In Imagining the Nation, Li dedicates a chapter to the discussion of the problematic agency of ethnic writers and the challenge of representation they are facing. Li starts his investigation of representation by drawing on the insight of Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s The Concept of Repre-sentation to explore the concepts of formal, symbolic and descriptive repreRepre-sentation and the question of agency. According to Pitkin, there are two formal arrangements of representation:
“authorization” and “accountability” (175). What complicates the formalistic views, as Li contends, originates in the problem of “symbolic representation” since “the Asian American writer is in general authorized by a constituency other than his or her own ethnic group but will ultimately be considered a part of it” (177). The insistence on mimetic resemblance and reflection in descriptive representation also severely limits the agency of the Asian American writer.
9 I agree with David Pulumbo-Liu that we need to analyze the ideological complexities be-hind what he calls a “model minority discourse.” Pulumbo-Liu defines model minority dis-course as “an ideological construct coexistent not with the texts themselves, but rather
desig-Representing Chinatown 31 While Wong paradoxically attempts to insert her selfhood within cul-tural voyeurism, other Chinese American writers try their hands at rehabili-tating the space of Chinatown. Yet as long as one is still under the influence of the white gaze, the task of constructing a counter-vision is never easy. As Sau-ling Wong convincingly argues, “rehabilitative representation,” or the representation of Chinatown in a non-stereotypical way, is always “in danger of reproducing the contours of the ‘ethnic experience’ as it has been pre-scribed” should Chinese American writers continue to center around cultural conflict in their Chinatown tales (“Ethnic Subject” 257). The early Frank Chin, for example, with all his militant and Asian American nationalist sen-timent, sees nothing but absences and ruins in Chinatown. In his short stories and plays of the 1970s, as Mao-chu Lin notes, Chin focuses his creative en-ergy on writing about “the ills in Chinatown” resulting from the white su-premacist ideology which inevitably erases Chinese American language and culture (Frank Chin Writes Back! 43-44).10
Along with the passing away of the oldtimers, or the immigrant gen-eration, in Donald Duk Frank Chin rehabilitates the degenerated Chinatown into a land of regenerative vitality. Chin frames this novel within the fif-teen-day count-down toward the Chinese New Year, and interweaves the history of Chinese railroad workers and the legends of The Water Margin into the life of contemporary Chinatown through dreams. The reader wit-nesses the ethnic transformation of the title character, a twelve-year old boy named Donald Duk from a Chinese American Fred Astaire to the Chinese American Black Tornado Lee Kuey. Most importantly, as David Leiwei Li notes, in Donald Duk Chin changes “the fictional typography of Chinatown”
by crediting it as the site of pedagogical authority (Imagining the Nation 127). By transforming the image of Chinatown from that of disease into one of vitality, Chin liberates this primary space of Chinese American commu-nity from white captivity and endows it with full autonomy. As Li aptly ob-serves, “The anger at the tourist’s colonization of Chinatown’s existential space, so characteristic of his earlier works, gives way to a narrative format of ‘heritage festival’” (132).
At the same time, this celebration of ethnic pride through mytholo-gizing is double-edged, as Chin packages the the narrative as a success story,
nating a model of apprehending, decoding, recoding, and producing Asian American narra-tives” (396). In model minority discourse, “we find the instantiation of a collective psychic identification that constructs a very specific concept of the negotiations between social trauma and private health, assigning the ways that minority subjects are to ‘mature’ through achieving a specifically prescribed understanding of their place in the national community” (398).
10 Sau-ling Wong analyzes a story from Chin’s The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R. R., “A Chinese Lady Dies,” in which Chinatown appears to be populated with dying elderly immi-grants and have “no room left to develop a viable Chinese American selfhood” (“Ethnic Sub-ject” 256).
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just like Fifth Chinese Daughter. This choice of narrative form is particularly ironic considering Chin is one of the most vocal critics of Jade Snow Wong.
Furthermore, Donald’s gradual initiation into Chinese American ethnicity takes the form of a Bildungsroman, the genre par excellence of western indi-vidualism and enlightenment ideology. It seems that Frank Chin cannot himself evade the danger of rehabilitative representation for all his change of heart toward Chinatown.
In the context of this history of San Francisco Chinatown literature, Ng faces the challenge of how to represent another Chinese daughter’s story without falling into the pitfalls of self-Orientalization, denigration, or mysti-fication. At one level Ng strives to present the oldest and biggest Chinatown in North America as a representative site of Chinese American ethnicity; at another, she is preoccupied with the persistent question of stereotypes, about how mainstream society perpetuates an Orientalist vision of Chinatown and how to construct a revisionist spatial configuration.
Sau-ling Wong astutely observes that Ng provides “a viable mode of rehabilitative representation” of Chinatown in her writing (“Ethnic Subject”
261).11 Without Orientalizing, denigrating, or mythologizing Chinatown, Ng enacts in Bone the representation of a “lived Chinatown,” analogous to Wal-ter Benjamin’s “lived Berlin” in his “A Berlin Chronicle.” This piece of autobiographical writing is seldom cited among the canon of Benjamin’s work, as critics often base their interpretation of the relationships between Benjamin and cities from his writings on Baudelaire and Paris. Nonetheless,
“A Berlin Chronicle,” inspired by Marcel Proust, offers a theory of memory that is intricately connected with urban space.12 Benjamin’s Berlin is in fact born at the specific intersection of spatiality and temporality. As Graeme Gilloch aptly puts it in his study on Benjamin and the metropolis, “The city [Berlin] is not simply a space remembered by Benjamin. It is, rather, the in-tricate interweaving of the memory of a particular site and the site of that memory which occupies Benjamin. Remembrance and metropolis become porous; they interpenetrate” (66). We find a similar materialist approach to space and memory in Bone, despite the fact that the latter is neither autobio-graphical in terms of genre, nor chronological in terms of narrative temporal scheme. Reading “A Berlin Chronicle” with Bone, I believe, affords us im-portant insights into mapping the relationship between space and memory.
11 Wong points out that for Ng Chinese American life “is not an archetypal battleground but an ever-shifting working alliance of many forces, of which cultural imperatives from the land of origin and from dominant American society are only two; the others include survival in-stincts, assessments of available resources, individual personality, family history, attachments and aversions to others not based on ethnicity, and not least the human capacity to grow and change” (261).
12 Benjamin’s Berlin writings include “A Berlin Chronicle” and “A Berlin Childhood Around 1900.” Here I focus on the former piece.
Representing Chinatown 33 Benjamin, in fact, also disclaims his remembrance of the past as a writing of autobiography in the traditional sense but “talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities” (Reflections 28). Benjamin’s “A Berlin Chronicle” is in fact a materialist representation of the city through recollec-tion. Three of the images he deploys to illustrate the work of memory that are closely connected with spatial imagination stand out: “the fan of mem-ory,” the digging archeologist, and a diagram of life.13 The first two images emphasize the significance of excavating details. The diagram of life pre-sents an embodiment of memory that metamorphosizes from “a series of family trees” to a “labyrinth” with endless “primal entrances” (31). Benja-min is first inspired by the Proustian exercise of searching for the Benja-minutest particles of consciousness: “He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside;
that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest de-tails, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier” (6). Next there comes the persistent archeologist who keeps on digging further and further into these micro-cosms.14 The diagram of life that illuminates all his interpersonal relation-ships comes to Benjamin in a moment of epiphany. Importantly, what first seems perfectly clear and discernable finally turns into a labyrinth with mul-tiple entrances. What is particularly fascinating is that the diagram is lost, which seems to suggest that the satisfaction of gaining a holistic overview of one’s past is forever deferred. One can only return to the unfolding and dig-ging of details to ferret out a preliminary picture of the past in a textual space.
Gilloch succinctly comments on the labyrinth motif in Benjamin’s Berlin
Gilloch succinctly comments on the labyrinth motif in Benjamin’s Berlin