Imagined community: Chinatown narrative in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon theories of space, postcolonialism, and studies of community, this article evaluates the multifaceted role of Chinatown within American society. As a heterotopic space and symbol that carries the collective memory of diasporic Chinese traditional culture, Chinatown’s cultural and geographical connotations also allude to the Chinese pursuit of dreams and endurance in a foreign land. The article examines Chinese American writer Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1994) and Steer Toward Rock (2008) as evidence of Chinatown’s tangible and psychological basis for the Chinese American community, and their testimony to the othering and isolation of Chinese immigrants. The precarious foundation and gradual disintegration of this community, propelled by escalating internal conflicts, Chinese immigrants’ identity anxiety, and their yearning for departure from Chinatown, is also discussed. Finally, the article considers the prospects of constructing a combinatorial community through hybridity and negotiations, fostering a renewed sense of hybrid identity in this in-between space.

KEYWORDS:

• Diasporic literature
• Chinatown narrative
• Chinese community
• Fae Myenne Ng
• Bone
• Steer Toward Rock

Acknowledgement

I am sincerely grateful to the anonymous reviewers’ valuable feedback on my paper. I am also thankful to Professor Janet Wilson and Professor Jonathan Locke Hart for their insightful comments and suggestions on my manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The “paper son” system involved an immigrant buying papers from a Chinese American citizen under the pretence that the latter was the immigrant’s relative, because immediate family members of US citizens could be legally admitted under the exclusion law.

2. This followed the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882, which banned Chinese labourers from immigrating to the USA for ten years. It was officially abolished by the US government in 1943.

3. Soja builds on the argument of bell hooks (1990) that a “re-visioned spatiality” is an opportunity for “the construction of interconnected and non-exclusionary communities of resistance”. He posits, by contrast, “combinatorial communities” rather than “competitively fragmented and separated communities of resistance” (Soja 1996, 96).

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of a research project funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education for the Humanities and Social Sciences [No.22YJC752006] and Guangdong Provincial Social Science Foundation [No.GD22YWW03].

Notes on contributors

Xiujuan Lan

Xiujuan Lan (兰秀娟) has a PhD in English language and literature, and is associate professor in the English Department of the School of Foreign Languages, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China. A member of the “Hundred Young Talents Programme” at Guangdong University of Technology, she manages projects funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Guangdong Provincial Social Science Foundation. She specializes in literary theory, narratology, and Chinese American literature and has published a number of academic papers on these topic in recent years.