Kingston's China Men : Circumscribing the Romance of Deterritorialization

To begin simply: Kingston’s China Men attempts to investigate the father. It is no easy task even to invent questions about this elusive figure. The narrator recalls how, as a child, she would follow her father to the quintessential “father place,” the gambling parlor where he worked as the surrogate owner. It is a “secret place” which “[a] pedestrian would. . . overlook,” defined for the girl by absence and emptiness: “Inside. . . no city street, no noise, no people, no sun.”¹ It is a place whose orientation is doubtful; frequented by Chinese gamblers, it also numbers among its customers “white men. . . [who] lived like China Men” (243). Neither within nor without the law, the gambling parlor survives through a tenuous complicity with the police: “Once a month, the police raided with a paddy wagon, and it was part of my father’s job to be arrested. . . He had a hundred dollars ready . . . with which he bribed the demon in charge” (242). In this “father place” even words lose their customary functions and values. In the “pigeon lottery” played there, “Gamblers had circled green and blue words in pink ink. They had bet on those words. . . finding lucky ways words go together” (241). Possessing color rather than semantic content, put together for luck rather than meaning, words in this masculine activity become little more than sites where contingency is explored and randomness refined: “‘white waterjade,’ ‘redearthjade,’ ‘firedragon,’ ‘waterdragon’. . . The gamblers would. . . laugh and exclaim” (241).² The girl imitates the gamblers, mimics the father: “He gave me pen and ink, and I linked words of my own. . . The lines and loops connecting the words, which were in squares. . . made designs too. So this was where my father worked and what he did for a living. . .” (241). She tries to replicate the actions performed by her father and the China Men for whom in her mind he stands, yet she fails to understand who they are. In contrast to their exuberant flight away from intention and meaning, the girl cannot help but pursue order and construct “designs.” She is intent on knowing the father, on placing him in a context within which his motives make sense: “I want to know what makes you scream and curse, and what you’re thinking when you say nothing,” she says to her absent father (15). But she cannot win, for in a sense she has too much at stake. This essay shows how Kingston’s book accounts for both the genesis of this project and its failure.

The obstacle which is foregrounded most prominently in Kingston’s text is not race or ethnicity—“You only look and talk Chinese” (14), she remarks disingenuously in this same apostrophe to her father—but the opacity of gender.³ China Men, I will argue below, builds on a limited set of historically given facts in order to construct a self-consciously vexed myth about gender. In the first place, it uses the ceaseless mobility or spatial deterritorialization of male Chinese immigrants as a way to figure an essentially anarchic masculine subjectivity. Anarchic within and disjointed from the world without, this masculine subjectivity seems to the narrator to eschew intention, disavow desire, and, as in the “gamblers’ schemes of words” (241), flout the customary and culturally determined organizations of meaning and value that are enforced in this book by women. The subjectivity of the China Men appears to have surpassed all forms of territorial affiliation, ideological as well as spatial. The places they inhabit are transformed into strangely liminal sites. Even when confined by their women within the domestic sphere and the exigencies of the everyday, the China Men subvert the normative cultural ordering of that space.

Yet Kingston’s book is energetic in articulating its own skepticism about this myth of deterritorialized masculinity. Her text hints at how this model may be discredited by the marks it bears of the context of its own production: the irony and the frustration of its own attempts to construe the China Men as objects of knowledge. The narrator, in her capacity as conscious representative of...