LA DIVERSIDAD COMO INNOVACIÓN COMPLEJA Y ESTRUCTURAL Y COMO PROBLEMA DE GESTIÓN

Introduction

In a journalistic sketch called “Night Scenes in Chinatown, San Francisco” published in Eclectic Magazine in 1895, author W.H. Gleadell describes his perception of being looked at by the neighborhood’s residents: “…The same stony, unemotional gaze met our eyes wherever we looked” (379). Nonetheless, Gleadell’s dislike of this gaze does not prevent him from looking voraciously at Chinatown’s sights: among other things, he describes “a blaze of color from the myriads of paper lanterns of every conceivable shape, size, and hue”; the “Mongol”’s

“monoton[ous]…blue breeches gathered tight around his ankles, black smock, yellow

parchment-like skin, almond eyes, shaven forehead, and long black pigtail”; “gaudy signs in the vernacular”; “scrolls of red paper and black hieroglyphics” on “the the lintels and door-posts.” Gleadell summarizes the scene, “…Everywhere there was that unmistakable sheen of Oriental tawdriness which irresistibly strikes the Western eye when viewing an Eastern scene for the first time” (379). With these words, Gleadell describes entering San Francisco’s Chinese quarter and gazing at a striking array of visually enticing but foreign and illegible objects, only to feel disconcerted when he finds that he is being stared at in return.

This passage exemplifies a body of turn-of-the-cenutry tourist literature, journalistic writing, and ethnographic work in which white visitors foray into the nation’s early

Chinatowns—most typically in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York—to take in the sights, and become alarmed when the visual delights they encounter are illegible to outsiders.

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These works capture a prevailing impression that Chinatowns were the creations of an incommunicative and unassimilated labor force responsible for the dissemination of foreign goods on American soil. Gleadell’s narrative exemplifies a catch-22 at the center of these accounts: on display in the nation’s Chinatowns were an array of visually fascinating people, objects, and architecture that attracted tourists from around the nation; at the same time, the very qualities that attracted these visitors also unsettled them, as they failed to understand what they saw.

This chapter examines and accounts for such expressions of anti-Chinese xenophobia, which emphasize a pervasive yet invisible and incomprehensible Chinese population that nonetheless yields beautiful, ornate, and visually arresting commodities. Taking up both narrative descriptions of Chinatowns’ visual qualities and the myriad illustrations and

photographs that often accompanied these writings, I argue that representations of Chinatowns’ sightscapes during this period reflect an unresolved desire to access forms of interiority

perceived to be missing. Unlike the feelings of regional access and belonging conferred by tasting in the previous chapter, in this chapter the ability to see the colorful and ornamental goods available in Chinatowns fails to facilitate understanding of the people or cultures responsible for creating and disseminating these goods.

Indeed, Anglo-American writers during this period often express a desire to understand the people responsible for creating Chinatown goods and infrastructure, and frustration when opportunities for such understanding are not available. These moments of desire and frustration convey Anglo American anxieties about economic and geographic displacement at the hands of Chinese immigrants. Despite the rich and stimulating visual experiences on offer to Chinatown visitors and to readers of Chinatown literatures during this period, many depictions of these

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neighborhoods exhibit a preoccupation with the ostensibly unassimilated or hidden people responsible for creating these experiences. Turn-of-the-century Chinatowns offered forms of visual delight that tourists sought in increasing numbers during this period and that readers enjoyed across the nation; yet, a part of their fascination derived from a fear of unperceivable economic domination and cultural influence on American soil. In Chinatown, what ground did Anglo Americans risk ceding while they busied themselves seeing the sights?

The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which codified racial inequality into law and sanctioned myriad forms of racial discrimination, emerged from and further fostered a climate of anti-Chinese racism grounded in such fears. According to historian Yuning Wu, the act forbade Chinese laborers—both skilled and unskilled—from entering the U.S. as a result of a “grassroots anti-Chinese sentiment.”26 _{Citing California Senator John F. Miller, Yuning}

describes how the Chinese represented a perceived threat to Anglo American workers: they were, in Miller’s words, “machine-like…of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron.” Literary scholar Hsuan Hsu further highlights such

understandings of the Chinese as robotically productive and illegible, referring to “widespread conceptions of the Chinese as a stoic, mechanical, effeminate, and unassimilable group” (Hsu 15). These perceptions of Chinese immigrants both led to and justified their exclusion from the U.S.: their efficiency was seen as a risk to Anglo-American jobs and livelihoods; and their seemingly mechanical, non-human qualities legitimized their persecution.27

26 _{Amy Ling articulates the devastating consequences of the Chinese Exclusion Act: it had the effect of “forbidding} entry to all Chinese except five classes of people who were admitted in small regulated numbers: tourists,

merchants, diplomats, students, and teachers. This law officially confirmed the inferiority and undesirability of the Chinese and seemed to sanction any expressions of hatred so that, particularly in the western states, Chinese were robbed, assaulted, lynched, burned, and entire populations driven out, even murdered with impunity” (24). 27 _{As literary scholar Yoon-Young Choi notes, “The idea of Chinatown as a self-contained and alien} society…justified persistent acts of surveillance, investigation, and statistical surveys that ‘scientifically’ corroborated…racial classification” (1024).

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As Hsu points out, public sentiment toward Chinese workers “was expressed in dozens of often violent purges of Chinese settlers from towns across the western U.S. in the 1880s,”

resulting in the resettlement of Chinese immigrants and people of Chinese descent in urban Chinatowns (15-16). As these neighborhoods grew, they became tourist destinations for Anglo- American visitors, as well as a popular subject of fiction and journalism for white writers and readers.28 In these texts, vivid surfaces reveal little. When Chinatown inhabitants seem capable of showing white onlookers only a superficial and mediated vision of Chinese culture, entire segments of America seem to become unavailable to Anglo American readers and tourists. In dramatizing perceptions of inscrutability, writers and publishers suggest that American values of transparency and assimilation are under threat: narrative and visual representations seem

incapable of illuminating Chinatowns’ dark corners, not to mention the minds of the immigrants who built it.

Scholars of regional literature including Amy Kaplan, Lora Romero, Hsuan Hsu, and Stephanie Foote have examined the ways by which late nineteenth-century regional fiction mobilizes images of the local, domestic, and diminutive to advance far-reaching political and economic agendas. Yet, while these scholars have attended to the ways that conceptions of region bear on conceptions of nation, they have not as extensively examined how the publishing industry negotiated a perceived lack of access into regional spaces. As literary scholar Yoon- Young Choi notes in her analysis of contested spaces in San Francisco’s Chinatown, “The space

28 _{As I discuss in the following section of this chapter, Chinese authors and readers also attended to the subject of} Chinese experience in America; most texts reflecting on these topics were published in Chinese-language newspapers in the nation’s early Chinatowns, and are thus outside the scope of this dissertation. For more

information, see Xiao-huang Yin’s Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (2000) and “Between the Local and the Global: Characteristics of the Chinese-Language Press in America,” and Yumei Sun’s chapter on the Chinese- language press from 1900-1920 in the U.S. in Print Culture in a Diverse America, ed. James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand (1998). English-language Chinatown writings also make an appropriate object of study given this project’s focus on sensory evocations of place for mainstream middle-class readerships across the nation.

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of Chinatown was depicted as the dark, uncivilized subterranean world which stands in direct contrast to the decent, rational aboveground space of white Americans” (1025). Choi’s reference to notions of rationality invokes twin values of cultural assimilation and transparency of

knowledge, understood by many white Americans to be at risk with the urban growth of a Chinese immigrant population. Because this population’s constituents shared common systems of knowledge and communication, white visitors found themselves barred from full access to or participation in the Chinatown communities through which they forayed.

Building upon Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities, I thus take up a definition of regionalism that focuses less on geographically bounded spaces than on spaces sharing common defining attributes—in this case, a set of optical qualities that seems to bar viewers from deeper insight into Chinatowns’ inner workings. In the service of fascinated readers across the country, publishers capitalized on the appeal of these qualities by purveying them in print, so that visual signifiers of Chinatown life traveled far beyond the neighborhoods’ geographic borders. Like a decorative Chinese vase or an embroidered doll, the narrative and visual representations of Chinatowns that populated periodical publications and books during this period contributed to and affirmed prevailing understandings of Chinese visual culture.

In his examination of how magazines helped to create a “national mass culture” at the turn of the century (Ohmann vii), Richard Ohmann makes a case for the mutually constitutive and interdependent meanings of image and text at the turn of the century. In periodicals, he writes, “The initial impression, and perhaps the appeal, was as much of pictures accompanied by print as vice versa” (224). Thus, while images had previously functioned primarily as

paratextual—existing in support of the written text alongside which they appeared—their

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from decorative floral motifs to representations of traditional Chinese costumes.29 Chinatowns thus came to function in a popular imaginary as geographically disparate places that were nonetheless connected by virtue of how they signified not only to Chinatown visitors but to readers across the nation. Literary representations of Chinatowns and the paratextual images accompanying them combine to form a composite picture of an alluring but illegible Chinese culture. This chapter seeks to examine text and paratext side by side, as each one bears on and constitutes the meanings of the other.

By developing and disseminating a visual language of arresting but inscrutable Chinese cultural forms, publishers encouraged American readers to understand Chinatown residents in these terms, in the service of a xenophobic stance on Chinese presence and employment in the U.S. The images and narratives conveying these attitudes largely fail to offer insight into the rich visual cultures, creative decisions, or forms of handicraft responsible for the development of the nation’s Chinatowns. Such a lack of insight, in turn, serves to dramatize the potential threat to Anglo American culture posed by Chinese presence in the U.S. In the following examinations of the representations and imitations of Chinese visual culture that appeared in print at the turn of the century, I explore a range of attitudes toward Chinese presence in the U.S. on the parts of publishers, writers, illustrators, and photographers. I begin with a brief historical section

examining the factors and events that led to notions of Chinatowns as unassimilated and opaque spaces in America. In turn, this lack of legibility came to represent a threat to a free and

transparent exchange of knowledge, information, and understanding in America.

In the next sections, I trace how the publishing industry responded to this perceived threat. I turn first to several works of popular literature that narrate the visual pleasures on offer

29 _{The term “paratext” was originally coined by literary theorist Gérard Genette, in Paratexts: Thresholds of}

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in American Chinatowns in journalistic sketches by D.E. Kessler and Will Brooks, and several illustrated short stories by Eurasian author Edith Maude Eaton, all of which exhibit a fascination with Chinese decorative objects. These textual interpretations of Chinese visual culture

demonstrate a preoccupation with optically arresting surfaces that fail to reveal their origins or meanings.

In the third section, I turn to three texts that dramatize the consequences of this perceived lack. Jacob Riis’s foundational work of photojournalism How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Frank Norris’s short story “The Third Circle” (1909) evoke the visually striking streets of New York’s and San Francisco’s Chinatowns, respectively—only to suggest that hidden and possibly dangerous channels of communication undergird these neighborhoods, unbeknownst to visiting tourists. In her short story “The Chinese Empire” (1878), Helen Hunt Jackson takes a small step in bridging this perceived communication divide: after mocking the preponderance of seemingly identical illustrations of Chinese men for sale in San Francisco’s Chinatown, she encounters a real man who exhibits “Christian patience” under her “insulting and curious gaze” (63). Here, Jackson briefly relinquishes her desire to understand in favor of acknowledging his forebearance.

In the chapter’s final section, I take up a story by Eaton that allows for the possibility that Chinatown’s visual enticements are, in fact, meaningful components of a rich and intelligible culture. At first, “‘Its Wavering Image’” (1913) seems to recapitulate the coded language that she and other authors frequently use to conjure an image of a visually arresting but unintelligible Chinatown—but she also identifies the forms of human creativity and feeling responsible for creating this neighborhood. Even further, she insists that it is up to white visitors—not Chinatown residents—to cultivate the forms of trust that would allow these visitors to gain access not only to the neighborhood’s beauty, but to the rich emotional life that this beauty

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engenders in those who care to appreciate it. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the cover and visual matter inside the pages of the first edition of Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), and the ways in which Eaton and her publisher combined signifiers of both Anglo and Chinese American cultures to advance an incipient ethic of racial harmony.30

Taken together, the sections comprising this chapter reflect broadly on how trends in immigration, resulting politics of exclusion, and a compensatory culture of suspicion informed representations of American Chinatowns as visually alluring but ultimately incomprehensible spaces at the turn into the twentieth century. In turning to Jackson and Eaton at the end, it also considers a few of the rare portrayals of these neighborhoods that seek to remediate these negative associations.

While not all middle- and upper-class Americans had the means, opportunity, or desire to visit Chinatown neighborhoods in person, many nonetheless participated in a culture of literary tourism, enjoying the visual pleasures of slumming from the comfort of their own homes. At the same time, a print culture informed by a political climate of exclusionary rhetoric ensured that these readers maintained skepticism about the validity of these pleasures: who might be lurking behind Chinatown’s vivid surfaces, they ask, and what might they take from us? These questions reveal the extent to which writers, publishers, and readers dramatized the limits of sight to confer ownership of place or feelings of belonging.

30 _{Prominent Eaton scholars including Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks have focused on locating her on an} ideological spectrum between, on one hand, an adherence to the racist, orientalizing rhetorics that prevailed in many contemporaneous writings about Chinese culture in America and, on the other hand, a socially progressive

iconoclasm that replaces such rhetorics with a celebration of Chinese culture. However, Eaton scholars such as Dominika Ferens, Hsuan Hsu, and Mary Chapman have offered more tempered readings of Eaton’s progressivism. For example, in what we might consider a direct response to Ling’s comparison of the Eaton sisters, Ferens writes that “when criticism indulges in the ‘good sister–bad sister’ paradigm, both Winnifred’s subtle antiracist

interventions and the muted orientalism of Edith’s work go unnoticed” (2). Hsu and Chapman have historicized Eaton’s roles as a transnational writer, a cosmopolitan writer (Hsu 22-23), and a writer of sentimental and popular fiction (Hsu 21), thereby elucidating Eaton’s place in the complex socioeconomic dynamics of turn-of-the-century publishing, further complicated by her racial status and the racial themes that she advanced in her work.

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Early Chinatown Optics

The widespread conception of Chinatowns as enticing products of a hidden and unassimilated labor force can be attributed, in part, to rapid globalization at the turn of the century. The coterminous rise of consumer capitalism and increased immigration and trade at the end of the nineteenth century fomented a proliferation of imported objects on American soil. As literary scholar June Hee Chung notes, “The large numbers of imported people and things” in Chinatown “made the rise of international trade especially conspicuous” to the American public (34). Philip P. Choy traces the commercialization of Asian goods to the middle of the nineteenth century, when, “Embarking from the Atlantic States, ships would sail around the Horn of South America, cross the Pacific to Canton, and return carrying hundreds of Chinese laborers and cargoes of Chinese goods” (Choy 30). Choy provides a list of the types of imports that could be found in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the second half of the nineteenth century: bedsteads, lounges, furniture, silk, shawls, ivory work, stoneware, and more (30). Goods such as these came to project competing meanings for white Americans: they were attractive as collectible objects at a moment defined by “decoration crazes of Chinoiserie” (Chung 29), but, crowded together within the crowded shops and streets of Chinatown, they came to signify an optical

bombardment of foreignness.

The architecture of the neighborhood, too, reflects the increasing presence of Chinese imports in the U.S. As Choy describes, “Hundreds of prefabricated wooden houses added to the City’s housing inventory” during the nineteenth century, many of which were “imported from Canton” and “put up by Chinese carpenters” (30). In addition to these wooden homes, “…Brick and stone buildings” made of Chinese granite “were built on California, Sansome, Battery, and Montgomery Streets” (Choy 32). The very source of these buildings—many of them tenements

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inhabited by Chinese immigrants—not to mention the Chinese laborers who installed them,