Amy Tan's The Chinese Siamese Cat: Chinoiserie and Ethnic Stereotypes

I was never able to describe precisely my discomfort with Amy Tan until I chanced upon her children’s books—The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), both illustrated by Gretchen Schields. Schields’s graphics along with Tan’s written texts are an amalgamation of the style of chinoiserie, on the one hand, and of ethnic stereotypes of Chinese, on the other. Both sources for Schields’s creation are orientalized images of China. Chinoiserie idealizes Cathay, a mythic China; ethnic stereotypes demonize the Chinese people. The representation of China is hence polarized between two frozen moments—a timeless golden age of ritualistic festivity and a debased recent past of the Ching dynasty. The contradiction of the two Chinas recalls the coexistence of Charlie Chan, the good and entertaining detective, and Fu Manchu, the evil Oriental, in the American popular culture. ¹ The West simplifies the Other in stark black-and-white contrast in order to situate itself squarely in the middle, resisting the evil heathens but aided by the loyal Asian servant. The female counterparts of the two archetypal males are the Japanese geisha of Madame Butterfly, eager to please, and the Chinese Dragon Lady, eager to displease.

In this article, I argue that Amy Tan partakes in the creation of a new, “alternative” Orientalism. Schields’s illustrations provide a starting point in demonstrating Tan’s Orientalism because the paintings embody what lies behind Tan’s mass appeal. Tan is actually in an inextricable double bind. Having grown up in the 1960s when ethnic consciousness movements permeated the United States, particularly her home city, San Francisco, Tan must have felt compelled, with the instant sensation of The Joy Luck Club in 1989, to come to terms with the issue of ethnicity as an eminent Chinese-American novelist. But the root-searching is equally informed and conditioned by the 1990s, where the urgency of racial identities has slowly given way to the exigencies of class interests. ² Ethnicity in Amy Tan serves rather as a front for the psychological needs of her middle-class readers. Tan’s racial essentialism, one based on a mystical landscape called China and a hidden yet indestructible Chinese bloodline, is articulated as a feel-good project for the writer and the reader, who wish to probe into ethnicity on paper, in fiction, so that real pains and afflictions in our midst can be avoided. People of color are welcome in American society as writers and as characters, so long as they comple(i)ment the mainstream culture. Indeed, with her well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, yuppie protagonists, Amy Tan is irresistible to her devotees who are desperately seeking an alternative American myth.

Let me acknowledge at the outset that it would seem unfair to critique Tan the novelist solely on her choice of illustrator. Tan clearly endorses her coworker’s imaginings of China but is perhaps not responsible for Schields’s use of chinoiserie and stereotypes. But what is at stake here is not a straightforward matter of legal accountability as, for example, in copyright disputes. Indeed, the personal relationship of the two partners is quite amiable. One cannot help suspecting that the books carry more than Tan’s blessings for joint business ventures. Schields is in all likelihood a close friend of Tan’s as The Moon Lady bears the dedication of “For our nieces with love” (both Schields’s and Tan’s nieces). In addition to their cooperation on two children’s books to date, Tan includes Schields in the acknowledgements to all three of her novels. Not only is Schields apparently a confidante, but the subject-matter of The Chinese Siamese Cat is close to Tan’s heart as well. The book carries the dedication “For Sagwa and Sluggo.” Sagwa happens to be the name of the feline protagonist. Instead of a dedication to some fictitious characters, Sagwa (probably Sluggo as well) is Tan’s own pet cat, as we learn from the blurb to the hardcover edition of The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) that Tan and her husband live in “San Francisco...