Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (review)

With the advent of multiculturalism in American academic circles, the field of Asian American Studies has grown steadily over the last decade or so, and today there are a handful of institutions across the country with vibrant programs in this area. However, it would be overly hasty to assume that either a newfound enthusiasm on the part of a few liberal-minded faculty or a rising popularity for Ethnic Studies among students has altered institutional thinking in really significant ways. On the contrary, vis-à-vis the more established national departments and regional programs—English and Chinese Studies to mention just two—Asian American Studies occupies a marginalized or, at best, ambivalent position, because the field's preoccupation with diasporic communities challenges the presumed homogeneity of cultural categories operative in the more traditional disciplines. A case in point is an experience that I and several colleagues encountered in 1995—incidentally, the same year that Unbound Feet was published. The annual Association of Asian Studies Conference was to be held in 1996 in Hawai'i, and I proposed a panel on the construction of Chineseness, a topic that would open up the field's preoccupation with a monolithic notion of cultural identity. One paper was to have focused on contemporary Hong Kong films, another on the only female director among China's much-acclaimed Fifth Generation film directors, a third on Chinese identity in Britain and Hong Kong, and a fourth on Wayne Wong and Asian American filmmaking. Unfortunately, the conference organizing committee rejected this panel without further explanation.

No doubt a variety of reasons motivated the negative decision, but it is probably safe to suggest that the panel's focus on diasporic Chinese communities was at least influential. To be sure, the AAS operates as the umbrella organization of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Southeast Asian Studies departments and programs in American academia, and, as such, it represents and protects the interests of the area studies model. This is neither the time nor place to explore further the specific ideological tenets that have shaped the area studies model as intrinsically Asian against the supposed neutrality of the term "area." Suffice it to say here that the model is a uniquely American invention and a product of the Cold War period that was initially conceived, under the auspices of government funds, to defend the national interests of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region. Contemporary knowledge about Asia, for this reason, betrays the Cold War concept of civilization, which honors a spatial notion of culture that is bounded by its geographical location. Consequently, the AAS conference organizes panels according to their respective Asian regions, with the more ancient civilizations further subdivided into a modern and a classical period. Within this framework of thinking, the nation-state becomes the privileged site where ethnicity, cultural identity, and national belonging are constituted around notions of purity, homogeneity, and authenticity. Diasporic communities, needless to say, are rarely, if at all, considered central to the development and fate of a nation's cultural and political well-being.

Unbound Feet might be considered a welcome contribution to rectify such institutionalized boundaries and disciplinary prejudices operative not just in Asian Studies, but also in the more traditional fields. Intended as a sociohistorical study that focuses on Chinese women in San Francisco, this book's critical energy draws on interdisciplinarity and aims at methodological revisions in feminism, sociology, and ultimately history. This the author supports in her lucid introduction:

As I attempted to write a social history of Chinese American women and provide a viable framework by which to understand how gender perceptions, roles, and relationships changed because of these women's work, family, and political lives in America, it became evident to me that current race and feminist theorists were inadequate for this purpose, since they generally fail to integrate...