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149 I stumbled upon the wedding photo on the book cover at the Knight Library at the University of Oregon during early stages of research for this book in 2002. As a new ABD unsettled by the lack of attention to female intimacies in both contemporary and historical scholarship on U.S.-Asia relations, I eagerly searched for their traces here and also in other archives in California, Madison (Wisconsin), Chicago, and New York City, but to no avail. Apparently, I underestimated both the power and the limitations of imperial archives. Little did I know that this photo, which at first sight seemed to be completely dictated by white heterosexual imperial logic, would so vividly capture the dynamic between what is represented and what appears unrepresentable—precisely the central problem that this book struggled to grapple with as it developed. Apparently, this photo is about a white missionary woman’s successful conversion of “heathens” through the Christian marriage that she authorizes—it is a demonstration of female imperial tutelage of proper domesticity as a specific form of civilizing discourse. As if this message is not obvious enough, the handwritten notes on the photo’s margins stress that this is “a real Christian wedding [with underlined emphasis]” in which “the husband and wife really love each other,” in contrast to most of the Chinese homes, where “it is sad and true that there isn’t much real love.” The bride’s dress and her physical position in relation to the white woman—who is simultaneously a matron, a bridesmaid, and according to the notes, a matchmaker—symbolize the bride’s closer relationship to “civilization” compared with the two darker -skinned men in modernized (read: westernized) traditional long robes (or changshan ९૝). Moreover, the subtle cleavage between the bride and the groom right in the middle of the photo betrays other stories that haunt this wedding. When I asked people what they saw in this photo, one friend put it humorously and brilliantly, “two gay couples!” Postscript The Obama Paradox 150 U N CO U P L I N G A M E R I C A N E M P I R E Indeed, the photo’s visual composition suggests that this “proper” imperial domesticity is made possible by two non-heterosexual formations that this wedding forcefully brings together into visibility and yet also violently severs: on the one hand, the story of the bride and the white matron, a figurative representation of rescue narratives and transnational adoption; on the other hand, the story of the two men, who evoke the formation of bachelor society under exclusionary laws in the U.S. and also the long traditions of male intimacies and non-heteropatriarchal practices in “other” cultures (in this case, mainstream Chinese culture and ethnic cultures in southern China) that were decimated by the advent of Western sexual modernity. One cannot help but wonders: what other stories are lurking behind the purview of imperial archives, what other desires are struggling into visibility, and what will—and perhaps should—remain forever illegible ? Does this photo only concern what happened in southern China, where it was said to have been taken, or more broadly about transnational power structures that shaped changing relations of race, labor, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. proper and beyond? The questions prompted by this enigmatic photo, albeit without clear and immediate answers, compel us to continue to exert pressure on the boundaries of imperial archives—to read both against and beyond their official desire while also unraveling how they (fail to completely) overdetermine “other” desires, social relations, and knowledge formations. For more than a decade, historians have complicated the Chinesefocused paradigm of the gold rush history as well as the traditional scholarship on nineteenth-century U.S. westward movement as a tale of “white men and red skins” by excavating its multiracial and multiethnic complexity.1 More recently, Najia Aarim-Heriot and Moon-Ho Jung both uncover the intertwined histories of nineteenth-century Chinese and black racialization: while the Chinese were framed as “yellow slaves,” the anti-Chinese slogan that “The Chinese must go!” served as a caution against white discrimination discouraging southern blacks from leaving the southern states, where a labor shortage was predicted and the import of Chinese labor was proposed.2 Just as the anti-Chinese commentaries examined in chapter 2 already made clear more than 100 years ago, these emergent histories as well as recent literary and cultural studies scholarship on comparative racialization illuminate...

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