novel’s title and its implications:
Lin Yutang’s calling his novel Chinatown Family during the early twentieth century could have been viewed as an act of mischief or even subversion. It was at least done tongue in cheek, for the paterfamilias in Lin’s Chinatown Family, an otherwise very innocuous Tom Fong, is not only a Chinese man but a laundryman to boot! And in the early twentieth century, the mighty machinery of the U.S. Immigration Service was geared precisely to preventing Chinese laborers such as Fong from having a family on American soil. In fact, in the 1930s, which is when the action of Lin’s Chinatown Family takes place, Fong’s family was downright illegal in America. (xiii)
By situating Chinatown Family within its historical context, Chen draws critical attention to the ways that the novel exposes the violation of Chinese immigrants’ human rights through legalized discrimination on grounds of race, class, and national origins. “The subtextual question in Lin’s portrait of his Chinatown family,” Chen contends, “is whether social and human units such as this should be discriminated against and even criminalized” (xv). Chen’s remarks about Chinatown Family point to the novel’s subversive possibilities, which have often been overlooked by critics.
However, by emphasizing cultural conflicts in terms of “acculturation and assimilation” in Chinese immigrants’ pursuit of the American Dream, Chen’s reading of the novel scants the spatial strategies Lin employs in critiquing the exploitation and social exclusion of the Chinese in the United States and in portraying the formation of Chinese American subjects. In his 1981 article “Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston” Chen contends that Lin “depicts a conflict between the materialistic dream that motivated the immigrants and the Confucian ideal of the family” through “the perspectives of several ways of thought: Christianity, individualistic materialism, Confucianism, and Taoism” (61). This reading that interprets the Fongs’ modest upward mobility in terms of their successful adaptation to the dominant culture while maintaining the Confucian ideals of the family unwittingly reiterates the myth of cultural assimilation that elides structural inequalities. Adopting a similar approach, Katherine Karle reads Chinatown Family as “a story of Chinese immigrants, a comparison of two cultures, and a Bildungsroman,” with an emphasis on the novel’s structural and thematic “balance” between “yin and yang” and between “traditional Chinese philosophy and attitudes” and “new world ‘American’ concepts” (93, 95, 97). Such emphasis on Chinese culture as a resource for overcoming racial exclusion and exploitation unwittingly absolves the necessity of structural redress of racial inequality. The ideology of cultural assimilation promoted by Edward E. Park, a theorist of the Chicago school of sociology, seems to underlie both the novel’s immigrant narrative and Chen’s and Karle’s ethnocentric approach to the novel.5 Critics such as Elaine H. Kim, Robert G. Lee, David Palumbo-Liu, Christopher Douglas, and Yoonmee Chang, among others, have pointed out the pitfall of the “ethnographic imperative” (Y. Chang’s phrase, Writing 8) in Asian American writings that highlight Asian Americans’ upward mobility at the expense of eliding structural inequality.6
Although other critics have rightly pointed out the novel’s problematic representation of the Chinese immigrant family’s upward mobility, their examinations tend to focus on Lin’s depiction of the characters as stereotypes, hence overlooking the social critique and the subversive, interventional possibilities embedded in the novel. E. H. Kim, for instance, observes that the characters in the novel “are modeled after familiar stereotypes of docile, grateful Chinese who can accept brutality, injustice, and hardship cheerfully” (Asian American Literature 104). Moreover, Kim argues that despite their experience of racism, the characters perpetuate the myths of the American Dream and freedom: “All of the characters in Chinatown Family call America ‘a good country’ where opportunities abound and where one can do whatever one pleases without government interference” (105). In a similar vein, Xiao-huang Yin contends that Chinatown Family “reinforced Western stereotypes of China and the Chinese” by suggesting that “the Chinese were able to succeed and get along with people everywhere because they knew how to follow Taoist teachings and avoid confrontations” (171–72). Drawing on Taoist wisdom to survive racist violence and to avoid direct confrontation of social injustice is precisely what a new generation of Asian American writers and critics find deplorable. Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong, the editors of one of the earliest Asian American anthologies, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), condemn Chinatown Family as a “euphemized portrait of Chinatown” that caters to “the white reading audience” who “has been steeped in the saccharine patronage of Chinatown culture” (Chin et al., introduction 16). Their denunciation of Lin’s depiction of Chinatown in the novel as a discursive production catering to “the white reading audience” actually alerts critical attention to the spatially constituted racial position and cultural identity underlying the narrative strategies of Chinatown Family.
Yet the spatiality of identity construction and subject formation in Chinatown Family remains overlooked in critical analyses of the novel, even though recent scholarship on Lin’s work has advanced beyond largely ethnographical readings of assimilative immigrant narratives of upward mobility through adherence to hard work and family values and by overcoming cultural conflicts. While continuing to explore the implications of Chinese immigrants’ assimilation as portrayed in Chinatown Family, Palumbo-Liu shifts critical attention from Lin’s depiction of stereotypical Chinese culture to the formation of the Chinese American subject through the “model minority” discourse.7 In his analysis of the assimilation process of Tom Fong, Jr., Palumbo-Liu highlights the pedagogical relationship between Tom and his white English teacher, Miss Cartwright, who embodies the norm and ideal of the desirability of being American (Asian/American 157). As described in the novel: “[Tom] had never believed it possible that there were such Americans. Miss Cartwright spoke with a kind of angelic sweetness. . . . Her accent was feminine, clear, softly vibrant, and seemed to Tom divine” (61). This raced and gendered pedagogical relationship evokes the relationship between Chinese male immigrants and white female missionary patrons and Sunday school teachers in several short stories by Sui Sin Far. The function of this relationship, however, becomes more complex when its impact on white America is taken into account. As Palumbo-Liu observes:
Cartwright not only inculcates in Tom the desire to be Americanized; he revives in her the same impulse. In fact, there is an aspect of envy in the excitement that is generated in Miss Cartwright over Tom’s learning experience. . . . Thus this episode reveals at once the interrelationship between sexuality, race, and culture, and the complex impetus for learning to be American and its therapeutic effect on America: the “model minority” serves both as a model for other minorities to follow in the process toward Americanization and as a secondary modeling system for whites. (Asian/American 157)
The effort Tom puts into the learning of English as an “indispensable part of learning to be American,” Palumbo-Liu notes, “signals an ethical and moral strength now lacking in the ‘west,’ which has become complacent and spoiled” (157).
Richard Jean So, in his article “Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature” (2010), reiterates the pedagogical function of Tom’s assimilation by situating Lin’s portrayal of the Chinese immigrant experience within both the Chinese and American sociohistorical and cultural contexts. So contends that Tom Fong, Jr., represents a model of “the incorporation of Chinese subjects into US liberal democracy” through “his experience of America as a kind of political pedagogy, and the classroom appropriately becomes the site of his assimilation” (54). He notes that Tom’s wrestling with the language of the Declaration of Independence led to his comprehension and absorption of “the text’s significance” when his history teacher, Mr. Watson, rendered the meaning of the text “sentence by sentence, into plain colloquial English” (54). By linking Tom’s study of the Declaration of Independence to Lin’s earlier socially engaged intellectual work in Shanghai, which in part motivated his translation of the Declaration of Independence into colloquial Chinese, So