New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882.

New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882. By John Kuo Wei Tchen (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xxiv plus 385pp.).

In this thought-provoking book, John Kuo Wei Tchen challenges the mainstream American history by pointing out that orientalism has played a significant role in the formation of American cultural identity and American racism. Well researched in a wide range of archival materials, and effectively conceived theoretically, the book offers, with compelling evidence, a new look at U.S social and cultural history before the 20th century.

How was orientalism played out in the development of American culture and American identity as a nation? Historian Tchen demonstrates that perception and representation of Chinese things, ideas and people--the otherness--shaped by American political, economic, and social elements have much to do with the creation and conception of American culture and the "white" identity--the self. "The formulators of U.S. identity ... sought to advance a unique form of American nationalism that often used China and the Chinese symbolically and materially to advance a revolutionary way of life--to make a culture infused with this faith in individualism and progress." (p. xvi) Situating his study in New York City, the author examines three overlapping cultural formations of orientalism that were intersected with U.S. elite socialization, commercial expansion, and political debates over labor.

The first formation was the patrician orientalism, as shown by the American elite's desire to imitate the culture and lifestyle of the Chinese (Orient) in the new nation of the United States of America. The founding fathers and mothers had deep fascination with the stylish Chinese porcelains, tea gear, silk, and books on China and Chinese political economy. Chinese things and the meanings associated with using them "had become one of the forms of currency for gaining cultural 'distinction"' and power. (p.13) Revolutionary Americans even enjoyed the westernized Chinese play Orphan of China, which illuminates the universal virtue of self-sacrifice for moral justice.

Americans who established trade with China were hailed as patriotic heroes for their successful competition with Britain for China market. But the American concept of "free" trade clashed with Chinese government's regulations over trade affairs. Hence, American merchants found common grounds with their European competitors against the Chinese Empire, and their prior romanticism about China began to recede. Tchen details the huge profits made by various New York merchants and their ambition to control the China market under the banner of "free trade rights" by engaging in opium smuggling and the shipping of indentured Chinese coolies to South Americas and the United States. The wealth gathered from China trade led to the rise of the port city of New York and helped build its civic culture.

The second formation was the commercial orientalism that characterized the period of 1825-1865 of American nation-building. Tchen creatively captures the power of "marketplace economics" in shaping and generating the representations of Chinese things, ideas and people, and the adaptive responses of real Chinese to the patrician and commercial forms of orientalism in the United States. Most striking of all was the commercialization of the representation of Chinese people and other Asians and Pacific peoples in many dime-museums, theaters and performing places in New York City, catering to American consumers' curiosity about exoticism. The exhibits of "Ursa the Bear Lady" from India, the Chinaman's long queue, a living Chinese beauty with feet of two and half inches long, the performing Siamese twins joined by a ligature at midtorso were all packaged as abnormal in bodies, clothes, and cultures. These shows "to edify curiosity" resulted in images of "narrow racialized types," forging a pan-European occidental i dentity of normality among the audience against the abnormal others as represented and stereotyped.

The reproduction of "otherness" in peoples and cultures driven by marketplace economics reinforced stereotyping so powerfully that people could hardly tell the real from the fake (stereotyped). Still, even in this commodifying of other cultures in the mid-l9th century America, there was room for "African Americans, Irish, Chinese, and everyone else" to intermingle and to have a good time in the port city (p. 73). Intermarriage of Chinaman and Irishwoman was common in the lower Manhattan. The Siamese twins even became self-possessed men and "made it" in America.

But the limited space of tolerance for otherness began to disappear in post-Reconstruction America as political debates over free labor evolved into a naked white racism against the Chinese and other nonwhites. This brought us to the third phase, the political orientalism. Tchen points out that political orientalism rooted in the outcry of organized labor against the non-organized Chinese labor, which was cheaply used by the capitalists to break strikes. Like other immigrants, many Chinese came as wage laborers, not as coolies. But Irish labor leaders and politicians, fearing Chinese competition for jobs, advocated ridding the country of the Chinese. In the racial hierarchy of post-Reconstruction America, Chinese were now portrayed as rat-eaters, slavish coolies, criminals, and morally inferior heathens. The old stock white Protestant American identity also changed into a simple white identity of superiority against the nonwhite inferiority. Tchen concludes that Chinamen, who used to live and work in highly m ulticultural working-class neighborhoods and professions, were pushed into "Chinatown" where they were ghettoized residentially and commercially. The fall of Quimbo Appo epitomized the shift of attitudes and perceptions of the Chinese in this increasingly anti-Chinese environment.

While the book offers a careful and meticulous study of New York City, it draws little comparison with other Chinese communities in the United States. A comparative account of Chinese experiences in San Francisco, for example, will definitely enrich the argument. Similarly, a comparison with European trade may better explain the role of China trade in the build-up of New York City. Finally, how different was American patrician culture from European elite's enthusiasm for consuming oriental goods when the American elite tried to create an independent and unique American identity? That said, the book is a must for students not only of ethnic studies and New York studies, but also of American studies, for it enhances our understanding of American history with a new perspective!