Re-Habilitating Chinatown

This book examines the politics of representation in Chinese American literature through cultural history and urban theory. Its central problem: how can Chinese American authors represent their realities when the signs they use have been predetermined by centuries of racist discourse? Popular imaginaries of 'Chinese-ness'—from foodways to ‘China-towns’—are sustained by a system of signs that renders ‘things-Chinese’ exotic, other, and inscrutable, with concrete socio-political consequences for the community's rights and representation. Early Chinese American writing resisted these discourses through life writing and de-exoticization. Later interventions—such as Chin's hypermasculinized "Chinatown cowboy"—attempted subversion but remained trapped within the same system of signs. The author departs from these approaches by turning to the lived and the everyday. Drawing on Lefebvre's Production of Space, she analyzes Chinatown as a socially produced lived space, reading Jade Snow Wong's "Fifth Chinese Daughter", Shawn Wong's "Homebase" and Fae Myenne Ng's "Bone", and Wayne Wang's "Chan is Missing" as sediments of everyday life that sublate the dominated, mystified spaces of discursive Chinatown.