The Tao of S: America's Chinee & the Chinese Century in Literature and Film

By Sheng-mei Ma

A study of recent shifts in the depictions of Asian cultural stereotypes

The Tao of S is an engaging study of American racialization of Chinese and Asians, Asian American writing, and contemporary Chinese cultural production, stretching from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheng-mei Ma examines the work of nineteenth-century "Sinophobic" American writers, such as Bret Harte, Jack London, and Frank Norris, and twentieth-century "Sinophiliac" authors, such as John Steinbeck and Philip K. Dick, as well as the movies Crazy Rich Asians and Disney's Mulan and a host of contemporary Chinese authors, to illuminate how cultural stereotypes have swung from fearmongering to an overcompensating exultation of everything Asian. Within this framework Ma employs the Taoist principle of yin and yang to illuminate how roles of the once-dominant American hegemony—the yang—and the once-declining Asian civilization—the yin—are now, in the twenty-first century, turned upside down as China rises to write its side of the story, particularly through the soft power of television and media streamed worldwide.

A joint publication from the University of South Carolina Press and the National Taiwan University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643363080

Book preview

Introduction

The Tao of S

May I have a word, Beautiful Country, about the ugly word Chinee? Meiguo (美國 Beautiful Country) is the centuries-old Chinese translation of America by cherry-picking the second syllable, stretching and third-toning it to "mĕi (美) for beautiful in Mandarin. Americans such as Bret Harte in The Heathen Chinee (1870) and his fans returned the favor by dropping the s to disfigure Chinese. The long ee suffix of Chinee raises the specter of turn-of-the-last-century laundrymen’s No Tickee No Washee, Harry R. Williams’s popular tune Ah Sin: Chinee-Song (1877), and the party game pin the queue on the chink, a riff on pin the tail on the donkey." The 2016 MacArthur Genius Awardee Gene Luen Yang wears the epithets like a red badge of courage in his graphic novel American Born Chinese (2006). Yang’s alter ego, white wannabe protagonist Jin, homophone of Gene, is haunted by his conscience Chin-Kee—Chink pidginized—in the Asian stereotype of buckteeth, slanted eyes, and transposing r and l ever since his debut Harro Amellica! (48). Whitewashing oneself presupposes self-hate. Yet each page of Chin-Kee’s chapters bears a header in red, a square Chinese colophon inscribed with 錦西 (Jinxi, or Beautiful West). Jinxi not only transliterates Chin-Kee, but it travesties Jin’s fetishism of the West as the object of beauty. Given the American Harte’s (Heart’s?) racial slur and ABC Gene Yang’s code-switching riposte of Chin-Kee/Chink/Jinxi, this Tao (Way) of S, pregnant with the ampersand &, conjoins the contesting circles of Part I’s American and Part III’s Chinese Century through the wasp waist of Part II’s Asian America. Turned slantwise and merged, the stacked rings of & sharpen into one Taoist circle (☯), as in one world, one earth—no matter the splits between the First World and the rest. This way, please, readers lay and academic, for a belated reckoning with the interdependent hologram of Anglo-Original Sin and Sino-Song of Self.

Emptying the s of self or soul leaves, in its stead, a stranger less than us, spelled U.S. Let us, for a moment, reboot our cultural memory, namely, the popular children’s game Maxine Hong Kingston satirizes in Tripmaster Monkey (1989): "‘Is it true what they say about Chinese girls’ twats?’ They think they’re sideways, that they slant like eyes. As in Chinese Japanese Koreean. He put his fingers on the tails of his eyes, and pulled them up, ‘Chinese,’ pulled them down, ‘Japanese,’ pulled them sideways, ‘Koreean’" (317). Kingston could have been more phonetically accurate had she transcribed what Harte and other Western—both from the American West Coast and the Western hemisphere—writers had on the tip of their tongues or deep in their hearts as they make (three) faces: chinee, japanee, KOHlean, all of them distorted by violence against language and anatomy, race and gender, Oriental eyes and Oriental vaginas.

In order to cherchez la Chinee in the Beautiful Country, this book commences with Bret Harte’s white lie, which debuted in San Francisco as Plain Language from Truthful James. It was subsequently republished across the US like a game of Chinese Whisper under the title The Heathen Chinee. The missing letter s in Chinese is the synecdoche of, or embodies in and of itself, the stereotypical physique of a Chinaman. Conspicuous precisely because of its absence, the invisible s visualizes a bowing head, a slant to the hunched shoulders with hands hidden in loose sleeves, a hairpin curve at the buttocks, and yet another curve in reverse at well-nigh bended knees, stopping at slip-on cloth shoes. The disappeared s, as in stereotype, only invites readers to fill in the blank, to conjure up that Oriental idée fixe. Instead of Genesis’s Let there be light, the Tao of S springs from Let there be S-less. Extracting the crooked spine of s from Chinese in effect debones the Other into food for thought-lessness, onto which America imposes its fallacy. Unlike its racist cousin Blackface, Yellowface—and the twisted body below it—has been worn with relative impunity in Western consciousness. Lest one dismiss Chinee, like slant eyes and pigtails, as prejudice from a bygone era no longer relevant, behold the carnage wreaked by the Trump virus passing itself off as the sharpied CHINESE virus, fomenting resentment against Asians and Asian Americans in the hearts of their fellow Americans. Judging from the fact that nearly half of US voters favored Trumpism in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, that viral regressiveness has already made its way from the White House to the greater White House of America—or the other way around—in a feedback loop, a transmission route.

This book on the twain of East and West spans one hundred fifty years of Anglo-America’s and China’s debates with themselves and with each other. As Western colonialism reaches a fever pitch toward the end of the nineteenth century, the West’s overheating body contracts into a defensive posture to fight lowly, insidious outsiders, inhaling and holding its breath throughout global expansion. When the mid-twentieth century rolls around, the body of the West cannot but breathe out the stale nativist air, relaxing its muscles in the flight to Oriental high, opening to the cool East, the yEast for its self-kneading. This swing constitutes the poles of thesis and antithesis of a Hegelian dialectic. The nativist Sinophobes Harte, Jack London, and Frank Norris set forth the thesis of the Yellow Peril of negative stereotypes, overcompensated by the mid-century antithesis of Sinophiliac Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, and counterculture pilgrims to the East with a crush for positive stereotypes. If Sinophobes share what Richard Hofstadter calls the paranoid style, riddled with conspiracy theories, then Sinophiles soar into ecstasies of Oriental tranZENdence. As Collen Lye puts it in America’s Asia (2005), in a fifty-year period, a vision of California as a post-frontier about to be engulfed by coolie hordes and Oriental despotism is succeeded by premonitions of a Pacific Rim utopia (11).

This dialectic culminates in the millennial Asian American synthesis of Orientalism and ethnic identity, beholden to neither the Demonic nor the Divine Other exclusively, yet sometimes given to both impulses of tarring and deifying the unfathomable. To recast this evolution in Harte’s name-calling: in the expansionist American empire around the turn of the last century, Harte’s heathen Ah Sin embodies Western vitriol against the alleged invader of its territorial and psychic integrity, displacing the West’s aggressiveness onto others. Offense against peoples of color is whitewashed as self-preservation. In the iconoclastic counterculture around the sixties, Steinbeck, Philip K. Dick, and Gary Snyder construct Ah Sin’s doppelganger Ah Sing, to borrow Earl Derr Biggers’s and Kingston’s character, lavishing praise on a spiritual, mystical Orient. Ah Sin and Ah Sing, and Sinophobia and Sinophilia, are both of the West’s own making! Subsequently, Asian American fusion resembles a confusing hologram between Ah Sin and Ah Sing, between betrayal of and betrothal to the ethnic self.

Nevertheless, halfway through this evolution, mid-century liberal Sinophilia presents its own challenge. Just as Steinbeck’s Irish poet-prophet Samuel Hamilton in East of Eden (1952) quizzically describes the character Cal as having rip[ped] the backbone out of your name (299) of the biblical Caleb, the novelist fillets Chinee as well. Steinbeck first deploys the racial slur through his mouthpiece Lee, the Chinese servant-nanny-surrogate mother and wife: Dlinkee Chinee fashion (301), followed by Lee’s employer-master-husband’s in-joke: You mean Chinee hatchet man fightee Tong war over slave girl (302). The strong bond between the white master and the domesticated, feminized Lee enables them to banter facetiously as a rebuff of racism. Or this is simply an acknowledgement of the reality, as in a bum’s query to Younghill Kang’s Korean protagonist in his 1937 novel East Goes West: Ain’t you Chinee? (23). Yet Orientalism, unbeknownst to Kang, a self-styled Oriental Yankee, lashes out against not only mental images and social reality, but it also corrodes the narrative itself. Steinbeck’s biblical allegory of East of Eden sprouts in part from Lee, the East in Eden, a shapeshifting East barely registered because of its fleeting, marginal, and highly unstable cameos in the West, particularly Steinbeck et al.’s West Coast machismo. With the backbone pulled out, just like stripping one of a full name and identity, the Chinee turns into invertebrate, pliable clay for the White Maker.

This book opens with California Dreamin’, both Sinophobic and Sinophiliac, by Harte, London, Norris, Steinbeck, Beat poets, and Dick. Prospecting for literary and cinematic gold, the Papas (sans the Mamas) leave behind tailings, or mine (mind?) dumps, with scraps of Asianness. The Chinee—as well as the chopped-off, offed Jap and the mis-stressed, mistressed KOHlean, since they all look alike—who used to be pitched down Old Gold Mountain, the Chinese name for San Francisco or America broadly, begins to stand up straight, shaken awake from the never-ending American Nightmare. Specifically in ethnic writing and performance, Asian Americans rediscover and repurpose trashed tropes and stock characters.

Yet this off-white, Yellowish, even WASPy corrective to white discursive supremacy comes with its own side effects on skin and speech: either self-Orientalizing Yellowface speaking in Anglophone monolingualism, exemplified by Crazy Rich Asians (2013, 2018), Little Fires Everywhere (2017), and Severance (2018), or ethnic comedies of global fusion in the likes of Saving Face (2004) and Re Jane (2015). Straightening and straightening up the Chinee lands certain Asian American artists in dire straits, straitjacketed between West and East like the wasp waist of the ampersand or the thin line of S dividing yin and yang. In the nativist fever pitch The Chinese Must Go! and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943), the West’s cherchez for disenfranchised, feminized Chinee borders on search and destroy. By contrast, Westerners of Asian descent deputize themselves for a search and rescue mission, as much a search for Asian stereotypes of yesteryear as a rescue of their own American and global standing here and now. Millennial Asian American artists negotiate between the white language and culture, of which they are a part, and Asianness, from which they are apart, except in the world’s undiscerning eye.

A curved S holds in abeyance the two halves of a Taoist circle, the yang of white hegemony and the yin of the ascending Chinese Century. From the latter perspective, the Chinese Century is the yang and the receding American Century the yin. The first part of this book focuses on the white side of California Dreamin’; the third and last part of the millennial Chinese Century marked by global soft power in the form of Chinese film and television streaming online for free. As the Sinophone viewers binge on China’s free lunch, a parallel universe takes shape against Anglophone US-centrism. Despite the particularism of TV series on entrance exams, Sino-Fi, and the wolf’s substitute family (dimensions unique to Chinese culture), the Chinese Century perpetuates a Confucian tianxia (under the heaven) universalism, one that clashes with the dominance of Beautiful Country, setting in motion yet another cycle.

Each chapter in Part III, The Chinese Century, strains to cohere diametrically opposed TV series to the point of bursting. TV dramas on contemporary college and high school entrance exams pair with Sino-Fi, or futuristic Chinese sci-fi. The emblematic alpha wolf hailed in the current Chinese parlance reigns in both social realist settings and in wuxia fantasies of swords(wo)manship. Unlike its anemic American counterpart, Chinese web fiction is the preeminent genre that translates itself into film and television throughout Part III. These Chinese odd couples manifest the collective unconscious no different from the strategic Sinophobia from Harte to Trump, the Orientalist Sinophilia of Steinbeck and Dick, and the tort(u)ours self-hate and self-love of Asian America. The Tao of S weds such yin–yang and us–them binaries as America’s Chinee & the Chinese Century. What used to be disparate disciplines and top versus bottom orbits of &—Anglo-American versus Asian American versus Asian Studies—click into one Tai Chi circle, half of which is shaded along a curving S, so shaded by the other pristine half. Accordingly, a Beautiful Country’s ugly word from our haunting past meets a Beautiful Century bondmaided to their holographic China Dream.

Part I, California Dreamin’, consists of three chapters. Sinophobia/Sinophilia turns to those literary figures of the last century—Harte, Frank Norris, and Jack London—whose name-calling of Chinee has been updated by President Trump’s Kung Flu. Oriental High Gone to P(l)ot charts the other extreme of the national bipolar syndrome, as Sinophobic fearmongering is shadowed by its opposite Sinophilia, as evidenced in Philip K. Dick and counterculture pilgrims’ emplotting of Oriental tranZENdence. Afro-Asian Filmic Duet zooms in on African American and Asian American representations in popular culture, which is oftentimes a cross between a duet and a duel. The two symbols of power, the quick fist of Yellow kung fu and the quick tongue of Black entertainers, join forces from the 1970s onward, all the way to the 2018 film Black Panther.

Part II, Asian America Awakenin’, comprises four chapters. Pacific Envy critiques the phenomenon of Crazy Rich Asians that taps into millennial American anxiety and jealousy over the rise of China, as embodied by its filthy lucre. From A(sian) to Z(ombie) contextualizes Ling Ma’s Severance within the Western genre of plague and zombie narratives, yet with an ethnic twist: the source of contamination being the China Bug of Shen Fever from Shenzhen. Asian America Double Tonguing explores the style of fetishizing Asianness, both materialized and disavowed in the same breath, in the works of Asian American novelists Patricia Park and Celeste Ng. LONG LIVE the waste! internationalizes the minority complex, now further afield in the Belgian Korean adoptee Jung’s graphic novel.

Part III, The Chinese Century, concludes this book with four chapters. Online Bingeing of Free Chinese TV Bound to Soft Power interrogates free streaming of Chinese movies and TV shows that bind diasporic subjects to Chineseness, as manifested in shows on entrance exams and Sino-Fi. The Wolf’s Substitute Family in Chinese TV Series continues the pairing of odd couples of contemporary social realism and historical wuxia (martial arts or knight-errantry) fantasy, in which protagonists double as both the pitiless alpha wolf and the pitiable runt. Soul Mates Can’t Mate parses the repressed homoerotic tease in Annibaobei’s web fiction and Derek Tsang’s film adaptation, SoulMate. By traditional Chinese count, after ten months or chapters of gestation, this initial Tao of S, coupled with the book subtitle’s &, begets the last chapter in the eleventh hour, connecting old–new and Sino–Anglo, as "Private Slant Eye" from the West Coast morphs into a touring, surveilling Beijinger.

Thus, the East-West twain cohabit like hemispheric twins from 1870 to 2020 and beyond in twelve units in these pages, commencing with the introduction The Tao of S. Twain happens to mean two fathoms of twelve feet, navigable for English speakers on this wild steamboat ride across the Pacific, as though spanning the dozen animals on the Chinese zodiac: its head the Heathen Chinee Rat from San Francisco, its tail the slant-eyed Beijing Boar. Rife with such mixed metaphors from two cultures, and laden with such traumatizing words back and forth, the East-West twins, mutually unfathomable, turn to face each other with an equal share of wonderment and woe.

▶

Part I

California Dreamin’

CHAPTER 1

Sinophobia/Sinophilia, circa 1870–2020, Harte–Trump

Bret Harte’s popular poem The Heathen Chinee (1870) is the tip of the spear of nineteenth-century Sinophobia that culminates in the West Coast’s The Chinese Must Go! movement and the US Congress’s passage of The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Harte takes point for Frank Norris and Jack London’s turn-of-the-last-century literary naturalist battle with the Chinese Other, among other enemies. Never had the three musketeers been given to a career of total crazed racism. Rather, Sinophobia appears as an expedient trope, even a whim, for storytelling. Such is the power white men wield over the Yellow Peril. They will it into existence to justify their own paranoia and then shoo(t) it away. The integrity of the white body and his white body of works remains un-breached, the white corporeality and corpus un-Yellowed. Each of the musketeers expends a few strokes of his pen on Orientals, so their poems, stories, and novellas offer mere cameos of the Other that are entirely negligible and readily dismissed. The naturalists’ penchant for the half rise and quick fall of the Sinitic parallels their conjuring of the Semitic. Racial Others present and past, Chinese and Jewish, are similarly evoked to silhouette fear and are summarily discharged.

Sinophobic fearmongering, however, is shadowed, or lightened, by Sinophilia, its opposite. The warring horde from China(town), for example, is predictably comical, sabotaging itself. Alternately, the Fu Manchus against white heroes are thwarted from within by Charlie Chans or Fu’s mixed-race daughters. It is quite natural, even for naturalists, to play the child’s game of Freudian fort/da, real nightmare/fake sweet dream, all for the purpose of the incontrovertible centrality of white masculinity! So human is this balancing act that Sinophiles nearly half a century later embrace it as well. Steinbeck and counterculture writers of the sixties splice their beloved Orient with stereotypical linguistic turns and images inherited from the bigoted fathers they have nominally disowned. What better proof of the complementarity of Sinophobia and Sinophilia than the Swedish Yellowface Warner Oland cast as both Dr. Fu Manchu and Detective Charlie Chan, the bad and the good Chinese, in 1930s Hollywood.¹

► Bret Harte

Born in Albany, New York, in 1839, Harte moved with his widowed mother to California in 1854. He became the first editor of The Overland Monthly, established in 1868 in San Francisco to rival East Coast literary magazines. Originally published in The Overland under the title Plain Language from Truthful James, the poem was reprinted as The Heathen Chinee across the land. Far from plain and truthful, the public discourse filtered and distilled the title to its bare essence of American prejudice caricaturing a representative non-Christian. Supposedly hood-winked by a Chinese cardsharp at a euchre game, the narrator James and his pardner, Bill Nye, manifest a number of slippages in logic that are taken for granted.² The overarching slippage, however, is the title switch from us to them. As catering to the reader’s sympathy as the original title may sound, it is not as titillating as The Heathen Chinee, which intimates a twin fall from Christianity and the English language. Revolting paganism, doubled by atrocious pidgin, becomes the catchy titular cover design for the wildfire of a poem raging across the Promised Land, gaining in republications multiple illustrations that in effect fill in the blank of the cardsharp’s stereotypical facial and physical features that were never specified in the poem. A Chinese Whisper indeed, the image grows with republications, particularly the slant eyes, long queue hairstyle, and traditional Chinese garb.

The shortening of Chinese by one letter s is attributed by the narrator and his sympathetic readers to the Chinese themselves, namely, their Cantonese-inflected elongation of the suffix e. Thus goes the usual tactic of blaming the victim. The alleged provenance of Chinee matches the illustrations’ stock images: both their speech and their physical characteristics are allegedly copied from the original Chinese rather than fabricated by white people. But the real cause points away from the Sino to the Anglo, the latter’s incomprehension of the former’s speech and mannerisms. Unfamiliar phrasing and behavior posing too much of a burden on the psyche, the American mind familiarizes them by subconsciously reading into the unknown, seizing upon and decoding surface traits identifiable to American eyes and ears. Even when the traits are absent, such as Ah Sin’s slant eyes that are nowhere to be found in Harte, the American heart supplies them aplenty, makes them up with an upward tilt, as Harte does in See Yup.

The poem switches from the first stanza’s The Heathen Chinee to the second stanza’s Ah Sin. Subliminally, that disemboweled s hollows the Chinee, only to reemerge as a revenant to reveal his true identity of Sin. In time the cloaked figure would be unmasked, assures the narrator James. The prefix Ah reprises chronic Anglo attribution of stereotypes to the Other in the name of objective documenting. In this case, it arises from the Cantonese habit of attaching Ah to one’s name for familiarity and bonding. Failing to capture the drift of a foreign tongue, American ears fixate on the most distinctive features to generate and generalize meaning. The greatest logical leap lies in the seventh stanza’s conspiracy theory. The indisputable proof of foul play comes from two right bower[s] (Heathen Chinee l. 47), or when the Chinese plays what he believes to be the winning hand, the trump card of the right bower, which exposes his cheating because it duplicates the Jack of the trump suit that the narrator has just dealt to Bill Nye. The aggrieved engages in a team effort, a communal uncovering of Chinese intrigue and the subsequent ousting under the subterfuge of self-defense. In terms of the crime, the Chinese are said to excel in cloning without Anglo originality, exposed in a card game in which he plays duplicate cards.

The white reaction constitutes a fundamental flaw in logic that is the bedrock of Sinophobia. Bill Nye sighs before concluding, Can this be? / We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor, (ll. 52–53). Nye contextualizes Ah Sin, the gamblin’ man caught red-handed, within multiple Ah Sins—the laborers flooding the US job market, both involving cheap, dirty tricks to rig the card table or the US immigration system. From singular to plural, Chinese laborers are implied to look and act alike. All slick under unreadable demeanor, their tricks originate from the supposed Chinese proclivity to multiply, to replicate bowers or laborers. Bill Nye’s switch from cards to labor, from a game of euchre to the job market, triggers the sudden outburst of what lies deep in the narrator’s and his readers’ collective unconscious. Barely veiled under the rules of a game, white paranoia erupts on the slightest provocation. Violence is justified on grounds of personal and collective survival against encroachment, against what white supremacists have termed replacement by peoples of color, or the hyperbolic white genocide. Instead of being cleaned out and kicked out, Bill and the like-minded launch preemptive strikes against Ah Sins.³

Such racial pogroms come to pass, however, when Bill Nye, one of us, also hides cards up his sleeve: Nye’s sleeve, / Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers (ll. 30–31). The implication is that white treachery is human and understandable, whereas Chinese duplicity is sinful, calling for a robust retaliation. Put another way, Chinese offense is taken to be greater and more devious based on the Anglo strategy of reading (into) Chinese surfaces for intent. Ah Sin’s long sleeves of his Chinese tunics hide twenty-four packs (l. 62), and his taper[ing] (l. 65) long fingernails are coated with wax (l. 66) to mark the cards. Both stock images of long sleeves and fingernails are stereotypes easily called forth and thus resonate effortlessly with the American public. Yet long fingernails are sported by the leisure class of Mandarins or the business class rather than laborers working with their hands, the group dreaded by Bill Nye. Sleeves and fingernails that are overly long signal excessive, ornamental accessories without any practical function other than play—foul play, to be exact. In reverse, should Ah Sins play dumb, disavowing any knowledge of the card game with expressions pensive and childlike and childlike and bland, such absence and innocence denote conspiracies. Sinophobia thrives on seeing what is not there, since it sees not what is there.

Can Harte be simply critiquing white racism such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729)? Many critics, some Harte apologists, have come to the author’s defense in claiming that Harte satirizes white racism of his time. Gary Scharnhorst, in his book Bret Harte (2000), appears to be torn, stating that Harte in the poem ridicules class resentment based on the economic threat the Chinese posed to the Irish underclass (53), with the caveat that rather than an ironic indictment of anti-Chinese sentiment, Harte’s poem seemed to license that sentiment (54). The poet Harte and the narrator James are, after all, two different people, differing yet again from the cheating and violence-prone Bill Nye. James appears to be a mere observer rather than participant in the violence against Ah Sin. In addition to racial divide, class distinction develops as the narrator distances himself from working-class xenophobia. The poem, nonetheless, never calls out racist rhetoric. On the contrary, it perpetuates it, as Harte remains blithely unconcerned with the retitling of his poem in republications, a retitling based on, of course, his own coinage of The Heathen Chinee. Harte seems quite content to ride with the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment, which has, in turn, made his name.

Harte’s ambiguous relationship with things Chinese manifests itself whenever he deigns to take on Chinese subjects in his otherwise lily-white corpus. In John Chinaman, a short essay in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1929), Harte professes incomprehension and apprehension of the Chinaman, following his poem’s flip from the individual to the collective. He opens with the Chinese face, which Harte cannot read. The face becomes a site for speculation, validating the stereotype of perennial aliens. The most heartfelt, spontaneous expression of smiles is said to never appear on a Chinese face. Given the persecution against the Chinese around the turn of the last century, only an idiot would give forth grins, which are yet another stereotype against Chinese deemed insensate to pain.

The long opening paragraph segues from the Chinese face to the Chinese theater performance Harte obviously frequents. The failure of reading the face morphs into the failure to follow the stage performance. Instead of focusing on the play on the stage, Harte tries to read the audience’s reaction to the play in terms of their facial expressions and body language, only to be thwarted once again. Harte apparently laughs at the wrong moments, eliciting the Chinese audience’s stare. Harte’s own response to the play diverges from those of the Chinese audience to the extent that Harte could not even decide whether the performance was a tragedy or farce (John Chinaman 242), which imposes a Western distinction onto the action on stage. Unable to decipher the words, Harte proffers fragments of his impressions of action sequences, including somersaults, the run[ning] a-muck behind the scene, and audience applause and facial spasms (243). The two quotations indicate the depth of Harte’s confusion: How do actors run a-muck behind the scene? What are facial spasms? Bursts of laughter? Cries of bravo accompanying standing ovations? Harte concludes by acknowledging the impossibility of deciding upon the outward and superficial expression of Chinese mirth (243). Instead, Harte bases his essay on his limited encounter with one Chinese laundryman, a clown in and of himself, who is likely the model for his short story See Yup. The second half of the essay elaborates on his dealings with the laundryman nicknamed John Chinaman, a type rather than an individual. Blocked in his attempt to penetrate the Other, Harte resorts to strategic Sinophobia-cum-Sinophilia: the unknown Chinese is a pair of conjoined twins of ludicrous funnyman and lurid foe.

See Yup displays Harte’s signature jumps of imagination, from the individual laundryman, as childlike as Ah Sin, to the Chinese race of Ah Sins conning American miners and authorities. America’s obsessive-compulsive disorder whenever it comes to the Oriental Other leads Harte to parse See Yup’s exterior of physical and linguistic traits for the interior of intention. From the perspective of a white schoolteacher who is one rung above working-class miners, no different from truthful James above Bill Nye, Harte opens with the question of the Chinese name: See UP—it meant that lifting of the outer angle of the eye common to the Mongolian (See Yup 93). The Chinese, both the person and the language lumped into one, is a sign to be decoded however the West sees fit, even if it entails omitting the Y in Yup and misstressing the second word of the name, reminiscent of dropping the s from Chinese. The sound of the Chinese name is made to match the slant eyes, indeed a Christian miracle of the word made flesh. A child’s game of defacing and denaming catapulted Harte to the Heart of America. Truth be told, the name See Yup is but a regional reference, alluding to Four Counties in Cantonese for the four counties west of Guangzhou or Canton, from which the majority of turn-of-the-last-century Chinese migrants hailed.⁴

The schoolteacher narrator’s perception of the laundryman is one of bemusement. See Yup’s abuse at the hands of schoolboys, stuck with his pigtail jammed into the classroom window, and the threat of his debtees turn ridiculous, given his paralysis and infelicity with English. Pidgin and malapropism alchemize his pain into the reader’s pleasure. See Yup’s power of imitation renders him suspect, however, evoking Ah Sin’s ruse of duplicate cards. The narrator’s washing-bill comes with a bouquet of camellia in which only the flower at the very top is real, wired together with other blossoms cut from potato. Digital dexterity and mental patience work in cahoots to produce fake flowers. Such patience, exhibited in the suffering of abuse, appears to be a commendable racial characteristic but one with a dark undertone. Great patience implies a long wait. Like the Heathen Chinee’s long sleeves and tapering fingernails, See Yup and his associates play the long game of conspiracy, waiting out their Caucasian counterparts and beating Americans at their own game.

Facing a seemingly harmless See Yup, Harte evinces discomfort out of an abundance of caution:

In our confidential intercourse, I never seemed to really get nearer to him. His sympathy and simplicity appeared like his flowers—to be a good-humored imitation of my own. I am satisfied that his particularly soulless laugh was not derived from any amusement he actually felt, yet I could not say it was forced. In his accurate imitations, I fancied he was only trying to evade any responsibility of his own. THAT devolved upon his taskmaster! In the attention he displayed when new ideas were presented to him, there was a slight condescension, as if he were looking down upon them from his three thousand years of history. (99)

The inscrutable perennial alien arises, inclined to copying without ingenuity. Whereas imitation of the West elevates the West, that power dynamic is undercut by See Yup’s instinctive condescension from three thousand years of history. The narrator projects onto See Yup not only his inability to penetrate the interlocutor but also his self-doubt over a young America’s lack of history and culture.

The story proceeds on two parallel lines of how Americans got beat at their own game, both the American body politic and the American