The past is not waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against.
It is always retold, rediscovered, reinvented. It has to be narrativized. We go to our own pasts through history, through memory, through desire, not as a literal fact.
—Stuart Hall
“Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities”
Whereas identity politics—with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity—governed earlier theoretical and critical formula-tions, the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora. The shift has been from seeking to “claim America” to forging a connection between Asia and Asian America; from centering on race and masculinity to revolving around the multiple axes of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality; from being concerned primarily with social history and communal responsi-bility to being caught in the quandaries and possibilities of postmodern-ism and multiculturalpostmodern-ism.
—King-Kok Cheung
“Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies”
Asian American literary studies in the new millennium appears fully ener-gized, as evinced by the accelerating rate of publication of Asian American literary texts and scholarly books mentioned in the Introduction. This “ren-aissance” in Asian American literary studies suggests that the field has reached an important maturity. And yet, the fundamental question of how to define Asian American literature remains. Besides geographical and racial factors, a linguistic issue has emerged—an issue that further complicates the problem of remapping Asian American literature. Scholars have for some time advocated for a transnational expansion of the field to include texts written in languages other than English. The LOWINUS (Languages of What Is Now the United States) project of the Longfellow Institute at Har-vard University, for instance, argues for a multilingual approach to American literature. From this perspective, works created in the mother tongues of Asian immigrant authors should also be regarded as part of Asian American literature.1 While I support this breaking down of linguistic hegemony, at
1 In his paper, “Redefining Chinese American Literature from a LOWINUS
Perspec-Remapping Chinese American Literature 152
the same time I strongly believe we must also require relevancy in terms of subject matter. That is, such works should at least address social and cultural experiences of immigration and issues about American society. The Chinese novels and stories about transnational migrations by Yan Geling, who emi-grated from China to the United States in 1989, become exemplary in this case.2 I will therefore base my discussion of remapping Chinese American literature on Yan’s two Chinese-language novels about Chinese immigrants in the United States, Fu Sang and Ren Huan.
Yan Geling’s texts about Chinese diasporic experiences are, by my de-finition, a part of Chinese American literature. We may classify Yan as an immigrant writer because she has been writing about the immigrant experi-ence in the United States ever since she left China, and because she always refers to herself as a writer of immigrant literature. The complicated political and linguistic issues inside the text and behind the writing and publishing of Yan Geling’s works make her a crucial figure as we attempt to remap Chi-nese American literature. In fact, after carefully going over the collective body of her work, we can detect a pattern in Yan’s immigrant writings, which involves a systematic exploration of Chinese American women of different temporal locations and geopolitical positions.
Yan Geling’s immigrant writings pose a challenge to English linguistic hegemony in the study of ethnic American literatures. Here we come across the thorny problem of classification, which is closely related to the politics of inclusion/exclusion of “canon” formation. As such, we need to address at least the following two questions: Is there an “official” language for Asian American literature? Can someone who writes in a language other than Eng-lish be regarded as an Asian American writer? With the hindsight of a post-colonial perspective, we can certainly interrogate the legitimacy of claiming any official version of history or language. However, multilingual or trans-national approaches are not without their limitations. In his essay on rede-fining Chinese American literature, Te-hsing Shan aptly pointed out the dif-ficulties involved in the LOWINUS project.3 In “Denationalization
tive—Two Recent Examples,” Te-hsing Shan discusses in detail how the LOWINUS Project helps open up a new terrain of possibilities for American literature. This essay is anthologized by Werner Sollors in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature.
2 Yan Geling was born in Shanghai in 1959 and joined the People’s Liberation Army at twelve, serving in ballet and folk dance troupes. She began her writing career when she worked as a correspondent for the Sino-Vietnamese border war. After the Tiananmen massa-cre she went to America to study for a MFA degree at Chicago’s Columbia College. She started published in Taiwan in 1990. Yan has won numerous prestigious literary awards in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Two of her short stories, “Xiao Yu” and “Celestial Bath,” are well received internationally and have been adapted into films.
3 According to Shan, there are several dilemmas while trying to put the LOWINUS perspec-tive into practice: first, English as a common linguistic tool is still needed; second, even under
Remapping Chinese American Literature 153 sidered,” Sau–ling Wong also voiced her reservations of what she terms “de-nationalization” in current Asian American cultural criticism, which includes the easing of cultural nationalist concerns, growing permeability between the terms “Asian” and “Asian American,” and a shift from a domestic to a dias-poric perspective. Nevertheless, both Shan and Wong earnestly and actively promote the inclusion of Chinese texts into the field of Chinese American literary studies. Personally, I consider the reorientation to a diasporic per-spective a necessary step in the process of breaking away from Eu-ro-American cultural hegemony, and remapping Asian America literature.
Nevertheless, I concur with Wong’s insistence that “claiming Amer-ica”—“establishing the Asian American presence in the context of the United States’ national cultural legacy and contemporary cultural produc-tion”—should be the basis of Asian American cultural politics (“Denation-alization Reconsidered” 16). The definition of Asian American literature should not be limited to the amorphous concept of “Asian American sensi-bility,” as prescribed by the Aiiieeeee! editors, nor any arbitrary determinant based on geographical location. The deciding factor should be whether a conscious effort is made to claim America for Asian immigrant groups. Fu Sang, for instance, with its retrieval of forgotten Chinese American history, its construction of mythical folk memory and its practice of difficult cultural translation, is a Chinese American text.4 As well, the exploration of trau-matic experiences resulting from the Cultural Revolution and transnational migration in Ren Huan also reveals specific concerns for the immigrant con-dition. Taken together, the different emphases of the two novels in fact effec-tively embody the “shift” in Asian American literary studies identified by King-Kok Cheung.
This chapter will demonstrate how non-English texts can also contrib-ute significantly to American minority literature by reading the representa-tions of Chinese immigrant women in Yan’s two novels. Specifically, I ex-amine issues of race, gender, and space in Fu Sang and the double action of remembering China and constructing Chinese American identity in Ren Huan.
the general rubric of Chinese American literature there already exist several sub-groups; third, those languages included in the LOWINUS project somehow are replicating the linguistic hegemony enjoyed by English since they are relatively strong and powerful in comparison with those not included; fourth, there is an imminent danger of geographical determinism in the LOWINUS perspective that needs to be dealt with; finally, one needs to be aware of a possible trap of Sinocentrism while trying to contest U.S.-centrism or Eurocentrism (“Rede-fining Chinese American Literature from a LOWINUS Perspective”118-19).
4 An English translation of Fu Sang by Cathy Silber, entitled The Lost Daughter of Happi-ness, was published in 2001. Chinese American actress and filmmaker Joan Chen has been working closely with Yan on a film adaptation of the novel. The English version of Fu Sang and its film adaptation certainly further ensure the enlargement of its circle of readership.
Remapping Chinese American Literature 154
Surviving in the Land of the Gold Mountain in Fu Sang
In contrast to Fae Myenne Ng’s Chinatown as a site of ethnic memory, Yan Geling surveys the space of San Francisco Chinatown from an immigrant perspective. Interestingly, Yan’s Chinatown fictions have thus far always addressed the period during which this urban enclave was still in its forma-tive stage, which gives these works a distinct sense of historical retrospec-tion unlike that in writings by other Chinatown immigrant women, such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Yan’s first novel about Chinese women in the United Sates, Fu Sang, archives the life of a nineteenth-century Chinatown prostitute through whose body Yan allego-rizes the early history of Chinese America. The rediscovery of a buried and unsightly past of Chinatown history counts as Yan’s first contribution to Chi-nese American literature since none of the fictional texts in English has paid much attention to this important subject matter. Fu Sang courageously forays into forgotten history and expands our understanding of Chinese America.
And the title character Fu Sang, with her perseverance and generosity in the face of material suffering, is an appropriate, though somewhat mystified, figure of the Chinese American foremother.
Although neglected by writers, there have been numerous historical studies on the lives of the Chinese women transported to the Gold Mountain to satisfy male sexual desire. Historian Benson Tong sketches these women’s difficult position: “In the minds of Euro-Americans of the Victorian period, the champions of middle-class respectability, Chinese women deserved pity and sympathy but not respect. These ‘public women’—women who were willing to associate with all men, not just one—occupied the lowest rung in the social hierarchy, both within the Chinese community and without” (xvii).
Nevertheless, Tong insists that these “public women” who were “pressed into commercialized sex in this cosmopolitan city of the American West”
were not passive victims of their fate “but ones who possess[ed] the ‘powers of the weak’” (xix). Arguing that Tong’s monograph and other research on Chinatown prostitution in nineteenth-century America are insightful but
“narrow-focused,” Huping Ling offers a broader and more comprehensive perspective of the Chinese sex industry, positing these public women as
“victims of the exploitation of global capitalism” (54). It matters little whether these women were victors or victims; at issue here is the undeniable materiality of their sufferings and their struggles for survival in a particular moment in the history of the United States. These sufferings and struggles demand to be addressed, and Yan Geling could not have chosen a better sub-ject through which to enter Chinese American literary tradition.
A close reading reveals Yan’s conscious effort to describe the difficult conditions early Chinese immigrant women suffered, embodied in Fu Sang.
Remapping Chinese American Literature 155 This character, a slave woman abducted from China in her teens, falls in love with a white teenager named Chris. Somewhat melodramatically, Fu Sang’s owner, Da Yiong (the Brave), a chameleon-like Chinese trickster and gang-ster, turns out to be her long-lost betrothed. Finally, Fu Sang rejects Chris’s proposal and marries Da Yiong on the day of his execution. Da Yiong is ex-ecuted; Fu Sang survives but disappears.
Besides this intricate “inner story” of a melodramatic love triangle, the author further complicates the plot by adding a metafictional frame to this semi-historical novel with autobiographical overtones. Yan employs a first-person narrator, a recent immigrant from China who describes herself as
“a fifth generation Chinese American,” to unearth some 160 volumes of his-torical documents about San Francisco Chinatown, and to piece together a story of the title character. This deliberate act of inserting herself into Chi-nese American genealogy shows the narrator’s—and the au-thor’s—determination to claim a Chinese American identity and to create a Chinese American text.
Although the narrator and the protagonist have apparently different lived experiences—Fu Sang is forced into prostitution after her abduction, while the narrator is a voluntary immigrant and a middle-class intellec-tual—the author establishes a connection between these two women. Au-thorial intrusions constantly penetrate and interrupt the third-person “story proper,” at once reflecting the fragmentary nature of the narrator’s research and the physical violation involved in prostitution, as well as creating a dia-logue between the narrator and the female protagonist. The narrator often addresses Fu Sang directly in her self-reflective comments, whereas Fu Sang speaks to the other woman through her photos and her silence. These two women are also similar in another respect: they both are involved in interra-cial relationships. The narrator has a Caucasian husband; Fu Sang, a white lover. The close affinity between the narrator and the protagonist bridges the gap of different temporalities—more than 128 years in total—between the two women. But what really connects them across time is their shared im-migrant status. This metafictional frame obviously aims to highlight the ma-jor theme of the novel: immigration. It is the situation that is closest to the author’s heart, since the uprooting experience of immigration provides her with a chance to scrutinize human nature in its most extreme state—a kind of
“human aquarium,” as Yen has called it in an interview (Hsu 41).
Fu Sang is the one chosen for close inspection in this text. As someone who has always been gazed at, she is textually constructed by a relay of vis-ual codes. Our first encounter with Fu Sang is actvis-ually guided by the gaze of the narrator. Through a unique second-person point of view, the narrator ap-pears to address Fu Sang directly while subjecting her to a gaze of appraisal through detailed external description:
Remapping Chinese American Literature 156
So this is you.
You are the woman in that scarlet satin jacket, rising slowly from a screeching bamboo bed. The elaborate embroidery work on your jacket weighs more than ten pounds….
Turn up your chin a bit higher and bring your mouth closer to this dim light. There. That’s good. Now I can really see your face. That’s all right. Although your face is kind of short and flat, it will only be seen as something truly Oriental. Your every imperfection was a special feature for hunters of exoticism at your time.
Come on. Turn around. Just like what you used to be doing at every auction block. A beautiful prostitute like yourself gets to know your own price through one auction after another…. (1)5
Fu Sang’s to-be-looked-at-ness has its origin in how the author first comes across this image of a nineteen-century Chinese woman.6 More significantly, Fu Sang is further dehumanized and commodified with the reference to hu-man auctions. Staging this slave wohu-man as the central character comes close to selling her as a piece of Oriental curiosity, a fact of which the narrator is clearly aware. The narrator is very conscious of the fact her project of recov-ering a significant part of Chinese American history could very easily objec-tify and Orientalize her protagonist. She could well be accused of providing a guided tour around the pre-earthquake San Francisco Chinatown, a suspi-cion that constantly haunts the subgenre of Chinatown literature. Thus, with a self-conscious address to Fu Sang—“You know that I am auctioning you off, too” (3)—the narrator acknowledges her possible collusion with an Ori-entalist enterprise. Nevertheless, her strategy of frequently quoting official historical documents that openly exoticize and objectify Chinese women bring us straight to the source of this racist and capitalist gaze, and subtly reveals the fact that she is actually advancing an anti-Orientalist project, a point on which I will expand later.
Fu Sang is also constantly exposed to the male gaze since, as a prosti-tute, she procures customers by showing herself at the window of her cell or crib, which again constitutes an important part of her immigrant experience.7
5All the quotations from Yan’s works in this chapter are my translations and the page refer-ences are for the original Chinese texts.
6 In Yan’s lecture at Williams College, she points out that the image of Fu Sang derives from a photo exhibit in a historical museum inside San Francisco Chinatown. Interestingly, Yan describes how she was fascinated by this image of a Chinese prostitute of the 1880s after a prolonged engagement of gazing: “I watched the photo for a long time. Suddenly she became a riddle-like fantasy to me” (Po xi mi ya lou [Villa Bohemia] 203).
7 The practice of “crib prostitution” was a regular feature in the early days of North American Chinatowns.
Remapping Chinese American Literature 157 In fact, what brings Chris to her in the first place is his fascination with the sight of this Asian woman. The narrator describes how Chris used to hide and peep at Fu Sang: “Fu Sang was not aware that he had already surveyed every part of her with a small mirror. Ever since the early days of his child-hood, he had learned to use this mirror to collect all the spectacles of the big wide world, making them his instant possession and acquisition” (9). The source of this gaze partially originates in the Orientalist mystique generated from the physical segregation of Chinese prostitutes.8 Chris’s voyeurism is both hormonally and racially determined. Armed with his mirror, he repre-sents those Caucasian boys who go to Chinatown for a taste of exotic sex, as such practice is well recorded in historical documents. His obsessive watch-ing reflects his emergent sexual desire and aggressive possessiveness, and his boyish curiosity mirrors the racial ideology of his elders. Here the author seems to furnish us with an ironic rendition of the Wordsworthian axiom,
“The child is father of the Man.” This child in fact has the full potential of growing up to be a racist man.
While Fu Sang is subject to various levels of gazes, the author also gives her the power to undermine any prescribed boundary. The relationship between Fu Sang and Chris illustrates this. Yan’s emphasis on the relation-ship between Fu Sang and Chris represents the quintessential encounter be-tween east and west. Chris’s entrance into Fu Sang’s world was intended as a mere rite of passage for a white teenage boy. He hoped that through the pur-chase of this “alien” body he could gain access to adulthood and participate in a family tradition, since every man in his family has a mistress of a dif-ferent race. Presumably, this mandatory rite of passage would make him a
While Fu Sang is subject to various levels of gazes, the author also gives her the power to undermine any prescribed boundary. The relationship between Fu Sang and Chris illustrates this. Yan’s emphasis on the relation-ship between Fu Sang and Chris represents the quintessential encounter be-tween east and west. Chris’s entrance into Fu Sang’s world was intended as a mere rite of passage for a white teenage boy. He hoped that through the pur-chase of this “alien” body he could gain access to adulthood and participate in a family tradition, since every man in his family has a mistress of a dif-ferent race. Presumably, this mandatory rite of passage would make him a