"In The Dream Of Their Dreams": Metaamericanism In H.T. Tsiang'S And China Has Hands

"Gentle Reader, this Work is neither a Novel nor a Passport"

—Ameen Rihani, The Book of Khalid (1911)

On November 9, 1896, a San Francisco Call headline reported: "Ah Soong Gets His Passport" ("Ah Soong" 1896, 7; see figure 1). To mark the occasion of "the first Chinese-American to be thus honored," not only was the recipient's portrait printed, but so too was his passport itself, including Soong's signature, age, height, complexion ("Mongolian"), face shape, and other physical features. The newspaper declared Soong "the happiest Mongol in San Francisco," then quickly reassured readers that he had letters from two rear-admirals in the U.S. Navy, one of whom he worked under as a "personal attendant" and, presumably, translator, since his fluencies in Chinese, Japanese, and English languages were noted prominently.

Figure 1.

Ah Soong's passport and portrait, San Francisco Call (Nov. 9, 1896).

Whether or not this was indeed the first U.S. passport granted to a Chinese American seems less significant than the newsworthiness of an administrative act. Within a global history of passports, the early twentieth-century U.S. played a key role in reconfiguring it as the normative document of modern national identity. Craig Robinson points out that:

Prior to World War I, immigration officials primarily understood the problem posed by immigration regulations to be the identification of somebody, not someone—the articulation of an individual to a racial group or set of behavioral traits via their body or personal appearance …[and] the passport had no significant role at the U.S. border prior to World War I.

(2010, 171)

Similarly, John Torpey has argued that the late nineteenth-century "open door era" of movement across national borders was ended by newly "rigid barriers of entry" established by European nations during the first world war, but extended and intensified by the United States after the war (2001, 117). Executive orders and federal laws after 1915 constrained movement; widened a "barred zone" forbidding Asian immigration; and established new criteria of race, geography, and language for citizenship. These shifts constitute deeply consequential trends that need not be rehearsed here, aside from recognition that the scope of events affected widely ranging sectors of U.S. society simultaneously, such that 1924 brought not only the Johnson-Reed Act, but also the establishment of the Border Patrol.²

The very definition of the word "passport" changed significantly during this era, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, from referring to documents permitting travel "to, from, or through 'foreign' lands" to a document "certifying the holder's identity and citizenship" and guaranteeing protection while abroad ("Passport" 1989). This shift from a document granting permission to enter or depart from non-native nations to one that materially constitutes one's identity had profound consequences. Under this new "passport regime," one standardized document would guarantee that an individual could be identified and tracked across national systems, thus ensuring a continuity of personhood across borders and through naturalization processes (Torpey 2001, 127). Torpey argues that "states have come decisively to depend on the unique and unambiguous identification of individuals in order to carry out their most fundamental tasks" and cites Foucault, who wrote that the modern state identificatory system "places individuals in a field of surveillance [and also] situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them" (2001, 16). In this essay, I pursue several related questions: what were the ramifications of state and global governance investments in the "unique and unambiguous identification of individuals" for how U.S. narratives of immigration were composed and consumed? And how did immigrant novels respond textually to the situation of being placed within a juridical "network of writing"?

Policies that were significantly revised during a wartime period of intense anti-immigrant demonization were normalized shortly after the war, creating the passport system still in effect in the twenty-first century. As one example of how rapidly this...