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1. “American Girls” in Three Acts: Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Macao and Hong Kong
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
From the earliest years of the Sino-American encounter, women helped to shape and then communicate “American values” beyond geographical boundaries of the nation. The three acts referred to in the title represent three case studies and types of cultural encounters that took place in the nineteenth century and that foreshadowed what followed. Harriett Low narrates aspects of women’s lives within the merchant community of Macao, and Henrietta Shuck bridges the gap between Macao and Hong Kong, offering a glimpse into early Protestant missionary encounters in both places. Macao is an important precursor to Hong Kong in this story of American women and nation. Not only did Shuck and other Americans live and work in both places, there were continuities between Macao and Hong Kong in terms of business connections, notions of national identity, habits of community formation, and attitudes towards the Chinese and the British. Low’s and Shuck’s articulations of the pedagogical impulse serve as prelude to later manifestations of the phenomenon in Hong Kong. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of American prostitutes, who leave traces and clues about their lives rather than complete narratives . Yet despite the lack of concrete evidence of their experiences, they represent an important model of American womanhood and Americanness in China. They also introduce us to the ways stereotypes of “the American Girl” circulated in the intimate as well as public spaces of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the ways in which these “fallen” women simultaneously affirmed and subverted Victorian ideals of womanhood. They round out the discussion of the nineteenth century, reminding us that American women in Hong Kong were a heterogeneous group. 1 “American Girls” in Three Acts Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Macao and Hong Kong 18 | Troubling American Women While they constituted a small cohort in nineteenth-century China trade communities, American women’s experiences affirm Anne McClintock’s assertion that “gender dynamics were, from the outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise.” Although McClintock’s work focuses on Britain, I believe it is relevant in this study as well. American women’s narratives address both commonalities and differences between various foreign communities in Macao and Hong Kong. Like their male compatriots, they imagined themselves as having certain roles to fulfill as representatives of a new nation. In general, American women supported and identified themselves with the British in terms of sharing a Western identity yet there were also instances when they distanced themselves from their former colonizers. While it is true, as McClintock notes, that “the rationed privileges of race all too often put white women in positions of decided — if borrowed — power, not only over colonized women but also over colonized men,” there were many ways in which American women in foreign ports felt marginalized as well as privileged.1 The Growth of the US Presence in the China Trade Although this study of women’s lives and narratives focuses on Hong Kong, it begins with a discussion of Canton and Macao. As Paul Van Dyke asserts, “The Canton trade was one of the most important contributors to the rise of modern ‘global’ economies.”2 In scholarly fields ranging from business history to postcolonial and diaspora studies, there is a deepening understanding of the long history of transnational and global linkages between westward expansion in settler colonies in America and Australia (among others), processes of industrialization, and networks of maritime trade.3 America’s economic presence in southern China expanded rapidly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1790, as Foster Stockwell has shown, just six years after The Empress of China’s maiden voyage from New England to China, the trade constituted “approximately one seventh of all America’s imports, and provided the greatest profits of any branch of foreign trade” with 154 vessels leaving the US for China between 1804 and 1809.4 Stockwell links the acceleration of commercial trade to the socioeconomic and intellectual development of various New England [35.170.64.185] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:48 GMT) “American Girls” in Three Acts | 19 communities. He writes, “All the Concord transcendentalists soon began to study translations of the writings of Confucius and Mencius, and many phrases in Thoreau’s Walden show how familiar he was with the subject of the China trade.”5 Gary Okihiro suggests that Americans who traveled and lived in China during this period, including women, had a significant influence as “authorities...