women's history discussion (historical essay)

“Yellow Slavery,” Narratives of Rescue, and Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s “Lin John” (1899)

Yu-Fang Cho

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 12, Number 1, February 2009, pp. 35-63 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Maryland University College Library (29 May 2017 18:51 GMT)

https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.0.0027

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/262237

35“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue, aNd Sui SiN far/ edith Maude eatoN’S “liN JohN” (1899)

yu-fang cho

The Absence of The U.s. empire And The “chinese QUesTion”1

In 1901, the year before the Geary act was up for renewal, “Well Up on Chinese Subjects” (Figure 1) appeared in the Wasp, a San Francisco weekly known for its political satire on the powerful and the pretentious.2

Alluding to the prevailing trope of “yellow slavery” in late nineteenth-

century anti-Chinese rhetoric, this illustration satirizes Uncle Sam’s

colossal undertaking to rescue Chinese women while reducing the

divergent perspectives on Chinese immigration to a univocal moral

indictment of “Chinese slavery” that plagued the U.S. nation: Chinese

prostitution and Chinese coolie labor. With the “super-sized” Uncle

Sam acting as a benevolent hero, the trafficking of Chinese women for

the purpose of “immoral business” is attributed solely to Chinese men.

The north-pole slant highlights the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, which

is paradoxically foreshortened by the disproportionate geographic scale

that reduces the distance between the U.S. and China to a single stride by

Uncle Sam. Dramatizing the imminent invasion of Chinese “slaves,” this

illustration vividly captures the moral agitation against their penetration

into the land of freedom, equality, and moral integrity. At the same time, it

satirizes the perception of the U.S. as a victimized hero who nobly assumes

the responsibility to rectify problems that he did not create.

jaas february 2009 • 35–63 © the johns hopkins university press

36 • JaaS • 12:1

Framed in an ostensibly benevolent scene of rescue, “Well Up on Chi-

nese Subjects” registers more than just the domestic preoccupation with

what the caption refers to as the “local slavery problem.” The setting and the

caption highlight the transnational connections between the histories of

racism and imperialism that the rhetoric of slavery and benevolent rescue

obliterate. The caption reads, “With his Oriental experience so extensive,

Uncle Sam should have no trouble to handle local slavery problem.” This

statement not only satirizes the U.S.’s incompetence to handle the “Chinese

question,” but it also belies the disavowal of U.S. imperial expansion into

the Asia Pacific. Indeed, well before “yellow slavery” besieged the home

front, the U.S. already had extensive “Oriental” experience, not only at

home but also abroad. The lure of the China market, which prompted

the invasions of European and Japanese imperial powers followed by

incessant warfare and China’s territorial concessions in the nineteenth

century, did not escape the attention of the United States. As early as

1844, the U.S. ventured to secure the trading advantages won by Britain

figure 1: well up on chinese Subjects. wasp, June 1901. courtesy of Bancroft librar y, university of california at Berkeley.

37“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

in the first Opium War, and ultimately signed the Wang-Hea Treaty of

Peace, Amity, and Commerce. In early mainstream textbook accounts

of U.S. history, nineteenth-century Chinese immigration had long been

associated with the Gold Rush in California that attracted masses of la-

boring people escaping economic devastation in southern China. These

accounts elide the active role that the U.S. had played in securing a labor

supply from China—the “other side” of the story of Chinese immigration

and exclusion that, albeit having become a consensus among scholars of

ethnic history by 1994, remains to be fully acknowledged in mainstream,

nationalist historical and literary scholarship.3 The Burlingame Treaty of

1868, for example, repealed China’s ban on emigration in order to facilitate

trading and emigration between China and the U.S., so that a sufficient

supply of Chinese labor for the railroad project after the 1867 strike could

be insured. The lure of the China market also propelled U.S. expansion

into the Asia Pacific, for which the occupation of the Philippines after the

1898 Spanish-American War served as a stepping stone. At the height of

anti-missionary and anti-foreign movements in China, historically marked

by the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, the U.S. sent its troops to China to protect

American missionaries, diplomats, and businessmen. Now, in 1901, Uncle

Sam is running “back” to the U.S. from the Far East, in order to rectify the

unexpected consequences of his ambitions to pump up his muscle through

incorporating the Chinese into the domestic labor market and to expand

his power beyond the continental frontier. The dramatic contrast between

the miniscule Chinese figures and the gigantic Uncle Sam exposes the

violent and unequal power relations in this act of ostensibly “benevolent”

rescue. As the focal point, the enlarged right hand of Uncle Sam enables a

shift in attention from the “immorality” of the Chinese to the actions of

the United States. Caught in the tug-of-war between an anxious Uncle Sam

and a malicious-looking Chinese coolie, the helpless, featureless Chinese

female “slave” foregrounds the racial logic of the U.S. empire as well as

trans-Pacific patriarchal economy that created the circumstances under

which the 1875 Page Law was passed, the first legislation in U.S. history

to exclude people on the basis of race, gender, and class.4

“Well Up on Chinese Subjects” encapsulates the seemingly conflicting

yet mutually constitutive tendencies in late nineteenth-century and early

38 • JaaS • 12:1

twentieth-century U.S. cultures of benevolence shaped by imperialism

and immigration: benevolent rescue and violent racial domination, and

also economic inclusion of exploitable, racialized labor and their social

and political exclusion.5 Within this context, this article reads Sui Sin

Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s “Lin John,” a deceptively simple short story

about a Chinese prostitute’s refusal to be “rescued” that was published in

1899 in the Land of Sunshine, an important California magazine based

in Los Angeles, in relation to sensational accounts of “yellow slavery” in

San Francisco newspapers. This essay builds upon the growing literary

scholarship on Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, a recently canonized

early Asian North American writer who was born to a Chinese mother

raised by missionaries in England and a British father.6 Through paying

attention to the important rhetorical context of “yellow slavery” for “Lin

John,” this article advances existing literary scholarship in at least two

ways: 1) by foregrounding one of the often overlooked or glossed-over

discursive contexts in biographically oriented analyses without discount-

ing their significance (i.e., by utilizing insights from archival research to

enrich literary analyses);7 2) by illuminating the relationship between the

construction of racialized female labor and the conventions of nineteenth-

century sentimental literary culture in Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s

works, which tend to be overshadowed by inquiries driven by individual

author-based approaches, such as questions of identity formation and

the author’s complicity in or resistance to racial ideologies. I examine the

sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese prostitute’s agency in “Lin John” in

relation to journalistic accounts that demonize Chinese men, infantilize

Chinese “slave girls,” and glorify white missionary women’s heroic rescue

efforts. These cultural narratives, as my analysis below will show, displace

the racial politics of transnational political economy onto gender politics

of national morality. Simultaneously promising and limiting the agency

of Chinese “slaves,” these narratives both obscure and legitimize the dis-

ciplinary actions taken against them. Of course, it is not my intention to

dismiss the effort of people who have participated in benevolent reform

and rescue, to belittle the suffering of historically racialized groups, or to

deny their agency. Rather, the discursive contexts and rhetorical effects of

emancipatory narratives that I foreground illuminate the production of

39“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

transnational racialized power structures through the universal trope of

individual freedom, which critical analyses of racial and cultural forma-

tions need to take into account.

“Yellow slAverY” And sensATionAl JoUrnAlism

Since the late 1990s, much scholarship on nineteenth-century Asian

America has moved beyond the earlier paradigm that focuses primar-

ily on the U.S. West Coast. For instance, John Kuo Wei Tchen’s study

illuminates that contrary to common perception, the importance of the

Chinese in U.S. imagination predates the first wave of mass migration of

Chinese laborers during the Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century.8

However, the presence of the Chinese on the West Coast in the last quarter

of the nineteenth century remains a crucial moment in U.S. history of

racialization. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning the entry of

all Chinese laborers, both skilled and unskilled, signified the first time in

U.S. history that a specific group of people were excluded on the basis of

race and class:9 this is now a well-recognized landmark in the country’s

immigration policy that established a precedent for later discriminatory

immigration acts.10 Singling out Chinese male laborers as the targets, the

1882 Exclusion Act also prohibited laboring-class wives from joining their

husbands by giving them the same legal status.11 Before 1882, however,

women had already been the targets of immigration law. Hostility against

Chinese women first surfaced in San Francisco in August 1854, when a

municipal committee reported that most of the women found there were

prostitutes, leading to the passage of Ordinance No. 546 “To Suppress

Houses of Ill-Fame Within the City Limits.”12 In 1875, the Page Law was

passed, disallowing entry of Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian felons, con-

tract laborers, and women for the purpose of prostitution.13 This act also

legitimized the criminalization of the Chinese, falsely averring that every

Chinese woman was seeking admission on false pretenses and that each

was a potential prostitute until proven otherwise.14 In the 1870s and the

1880s, Chinese as well as Latin American women were constantly singled

out for moral condemnation and legal prosecution, even though white

prostitution was also common.15 Despite the relatively small presence of

40 • JaaS • 12:1

Chinese immigrant women and prostitutes in the United States,16 civic

and religious leaders considered them as corrupting the morals of the

nation’s youth and endangering racial purity.17 By limiting the number of

Chinese women entering the United States, the Page Law and the Exclu-

sion Act reduced the percentage of Chinese prostitutes and contributed to

the formation of a “bachelor society.” Meanwhile, the scarcity of Chinese

women and the demand by both Chinese and white men for Chinese

prostitutes made Chinese prostitution a highly profitable enterprise.18

In the 1870s and 1880s, the composition of Chinese immigrant women

began to change as the percentage of prostitutes diminished and that of

both laboring-class and merchant wives increased due to anti-prostitution

measures, arrivals of wives from China, and marriage of ex-prostitutes to

Chinese laborers. Moreover, the number of wives continued to increase

after 1882, when merchant wives became the main category of female

immigrants from China.19

Despite this shift in the composition of Chinese immigrant women’s

population, the stigma of Chinese women as prostitutes persisted as the

focus of anti-Chinese discourses in the early twentieth century. As an even

more glaring example of unfree labor than Chinese coolies and a symbol

of moral degeneracy, Chinese prostitution epitomized the antithesis to the

founding values of the United States—the immoral “alien” practice that

posed an imminent threat to the nation’s morals, hygiene, racial purity, and

freedom.20 Perceived as venues for interracial sexual encounters, Chinese

brothels and opium dens represented the enemies to the institution of

marriage and U.S. family values, further reinforcing the moral stigma of

sexual arrangements often associated with the Chinese, such as polygamy,

bachelor societies, and female-dominated households, in an era when de-

fenders of the institution of marriage called for the reform of marital law

in order to protect marriage against increasing divorce rates.21 Newspaper

accounts of Chinese prostitution during this period commonly framed it

with the trope of “yellow slavery” or “Chinese slavery” by evoking a mor-

ally and historically loaded term, positing “slavery” as a practice specific

to the Chinese in the context of the post-emancipation United States. In

a xenophobic climate aggravated by economic recession, the prevailing

trope of “yellow slavery” reduced questions of a transnational racialized

41“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

economy and imperialism to simple matters of despotic Chinese patriar-

chy and Chinese women’s immorality couched in strictly domestic terms.

Moreover, this trope associated heterosexual encounters among Chinese

with abuse and exploitation, thereby positioning them as being outside

of normative forms of intimacy and sexual relations, thereby providing

justification for exclusion and discipline in the name of benevolent rescue

and reform. This rhetorical move, well exemplified by “Well Up on Chinese

Subjects,” characterizes much of the accounts of “yellow slavery” in the

period’s San Francisco newspapers, which constitute a crucial reading

context for Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s “Lin John.”

In April 1892, an article entitled “Chinese Slavery” in the San Fran-

cisco Chronicle underscores the significance of the white/black reference

for anti-Chinese rhetoric with an allusion to the Civil War in the opening

paragraph:

With the abolition of slavery through the terrible medium of the war

of the rebellion there came into the minds of progressive American

citizens a feeling of complacency somewhat akin to one who has laid

aside disreputable garments and donned a new suit of clothes. It is not

pleasant, therefore, for Americans to be told that . . . human beings

are to-day bought and sold into a worse slavery than ever Uncle Tom

knew of, and that the laws of our country are powerless to crush out

the curse.22

Positing Chinese prostitution as an irrepressible specter of the shameful

past, this paragraph exemplifies the prevailing rhetorical framework in

anti-Chinese discourses and rescue narratives, which are predicated on

an absolute demarcation between the domestic and the foreign, an in-

stant dehistoricization of Chinese prostitution, and obliteration of racial

violence against blacks that persisted after the Civil War. Thus, this para-

graph frames Chinese prostitution as a “new” domestic moral problem

disassociated from the “past” of African slavery, from the U.S. demand

for exploitable Chinese labor, and from U.S. economic interests in Asia

evident in treaty negotiations with China. The double move of “dehis-

toricization” and “domestication” thus constructs Chinese prostitution

as strictly a “Chinese” problem inflicted on the innocent United States,

thereby legitimizing the use of both violent and seemingly benevolent

measures for self-defense.

42 • JaaS • 12:1

“Chinese Slavery” later criminalizes and racializes the Chinese by

representing prostitution as a uniquely Chinese problem and the epitome

of crimes against humanity:

There are three classes of slave pens where Chinese girls are held in

bondage. Time was when these were not kept exclusively for Chinese

patronage . . . . There are not now a sufficient number of Chinese

prostitutes to meet the demands of their own race here. Other nations

have been levied on to fill the quota, but that is a branch of the subject

with which this article has nothing to do. It should be borne in mind

that the establishments herein described are filled with Chinese girls

for the accommodation of Chinese men only. It is part of the compact

of the Lan Wo Tong that this rule shall not be violated, and the aid of

the highbinders is summoned for the punishment of offenders in this

respect.23 (my emphasis)

While this passage alludes to racial diversity among the prostitutes and

the patrons in the beginning,24 it quickly focusses on one particular estab-

lishment characterized by racial exclusivity in terms of both its operation

and its patronage. Downplaying the racial complexities of prostitution

and attributing its racial exclusivity solely to Chinese “gangs,” this passage

highlights prostitution as a distinctively “Chinese” problem, thus reinforc-

ing the stereotype of Chinese men as abusive criminals while obscuring

the participation of non-Chinese in this “evil” enterprise.

Such a “race-exclusive” premise shaped public perceptions of “the

Chinese question” in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and

prefigured the construction of San Francisco’s Chinatown as a popular

tourist destination in visual representations in the early twentieth cen-

tury.25 The passage below, however, reveals the role of non-Chinese con-

sumers in the racialized tourism of San Francisco’s Chinatown:

Let it be borne in mind . . . that the places here described are not within

view of the street, but are in the center of the conglomerate heaps of

buildings for which Chinatown is so noted, which have apparently

but one entrance and no one knows how many exits. [ . . . ] Into these

establishments visitors of all shades of color are sometimes made welcome, as

spectators only. Chinese guides bring male tourists thither to gratify their

curiosity. The proprietors of these places are not necessarily members

of the Len Wo Tong . . . so that they compel their slaves to undergo any

indignity that brings money into their purses.26 (my emphasis)

43“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

While the rhetoric of “racial diversity,” here, seemingly undermines the

formerly established “race-exclusive” premise, the qualifications—that

diverse consumers are sometimes, not always, welcomed only as specta-

tors—further reinstates the distinction between non-Chinese consumers

as occasional innocent bystanders and the “evil Chinese” as greedy “slave

holders,” again erasing non-Chinese patronage from the representation

of Chinese prostitution. Capitalizing on the reader’s voyeuristic appetite

for sensational tales, the author offers the predominantly white readership

a “guided tour” to the “heart of the vices”—a tour that at once obscures

and implicates non-Chinese, particularly white constituencies, in the

production of Chinese prostitution as an exploitative enterprise and a

racial discourse.

The majority of the accounts of “yellow slavery” in San Francisco’s

newspapers sensationalize the “immoral act” of the trafficking of Chinese

women and children (mostly girls) without providing explanations for the

causes, thus implicitly encouraging essentialist associations of this “evil”

with cultural and racial differences. Some set up a sharp contrast between

the despotic Chinese patriarchy, epitomized by fathers who sell their

daughters, and the benevolent U.S. missionary matriarchy, embodied by

white matrons who selflessly brave the danger of Chinese brothels to rescue

Chinese “slave girls.”27 The frequent coverage of “tong wars” (the conflicts

among Chinese “gangs” or “clans”), where Chinese girls are figured as both

causes of conflicts and “objects” transferred between different owners,

further reinforces the stereotype of despotic Chinese patriarchy.28 While

individual actions are often portrayed as determined exclusively by one’s

free will without institutional mediation, “facts” about Chinese despotism

and U.S. benevolence are presented without explanations, reinforcing the

perception that the trafficking of Chinese women and children occurred

primarily as a result of individual actions and cultural differences while

downplaying transnational systematic factors and power struggles that

shaped the practice and discourse of “yellow slavery.” “Strange Adventures

of a Woman Missionary in China,” published in the San Francisco Call in

February 1898, best illustrates these tendencies.29 Highlighting the “sale of

babies” in China, this article uses the testimony of woman missionaries to

detail the “uncivilized” practices associated with the Chinese: infanticides,

44 • JaaS • 12:1

arranged marriages at a young age, Chinese men’s violent attacks against

Chinese and white women, and the trafficking of humans. Its illustration

particularly sensationalizes the sale of babies by picturing a woman with

a suffering baby on her back and an old man carrying babies in vegetable

baskets (see Figure 2 and Figure 3).

Inundated with sensational depictions of brutal treatment of Chinese

women and children,30 journalistic accounts featuring faceless victims

criminalize Chinese men while obliterating the other participants and fac-

tors that contributed to the national obsession with Chinese prostitution.

“Slavery” thus automatically serves as a shorthand of the circumstances

of all Chinese women: rich or poor, married or single, “enslaved” or free.

As illustrated by “Well Up on Chinese Subjects,” this trope collapses the

three categories of Chinese women in late nineteenth-century public

discourse—prostitutes, slave girls, and wives—into one sensational image

of the helpless “slave,” thereby reinforcing the assumption that all Chinese

women seeking admissions to the United States were prostitutes by default

and reducing all heterosexual relations of the Chinese to ruthless abuse

and scandalous exploitation epitomized by prostitution. Many newspaper

accounts sensationalize the sale of Chinese women under the guise of mar-

riage; others explicitly equate Chinese marriages with slavery, as a headline

in the San Francisco Chronicle illustrates: “Worse than Slaves. Servitude of

All Chinese Wives. Small-Foot Women Kept As Prisoners. Widows Must

Serve No. 1—A White Woman’s Hard Lesson in Eastern Ways.”31 Sixteen

years later, another headline in the San Francisco Daily News testifies to

the persistence of this rhetorical construction: “Chinaman’s Wife Only His

Slave.”32 Propagating the perception that exploitation of women is both

uniquely and intrinsically Chinese, such journalistic accounts of “yellow

slavery” mobilized the ideologies shaping black/white relations to natu-

ralize racial difference; to rationalize the capitalist economy by positing

exploitation as an exception of cultural practice; to legitimize exclusion

based on the ideology of American exceptionalism; and to justify the use

of force in the name of benevolent rescue.

45“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

figure 2: Babies are carried about in Baskets. San Francisco Call, februar y 6, 1898.

senTimenTAl benevolence And The limiTs of AgencY: nArrATives of rescUe And sUi sin fAr/ediTh mAUde eATon’s “lin John”

Authenticated by testimonies of “slave girls,” journalistic accounts

of “yellow slavery” set the stage for narratives that glorify white matrons’

rescue of Chinese women, such as “San Francisco Has the Bravest Women

in the World,” which appeared in the San Francisco Call in July 1897

(Figure 4). This article begins with testimony from a male witness: “She

[Mrs. Ida B. Hull] is one of the bravest women I ever heard of . . . . She

does things that we men couldn’t do and would be afraid to do.” 33 This

46 • JaaS • 12:1

description of her exceptional bravery that “surpass[es] the police,” con-

sidered “unlady-like” and “improper” by many, is immediately qualified

by another statement affirming her ordinary femininity so as to delineate

proper maternal heroism: “She didn’t look it! Just a simple, middle-aged,

motherly woman, with a face that shone with kindliness and eyes that

bespoke a soul of strength.”34 Mrs. Hull’s testimony, however, contradicts

the narrator’s perception of rescue efforts as selfless benevolent acts simply

to “take them [the slave girls] by the hand and show them a bit of love

and kindliness and make their poor minds happy”:

“I go about my work in a thousand ways,” she said, “but I don’t use

much tact—tact isn’t useful among the Chinese. A hatchet is much

more effective.”

figure 3: Sells Babies as He would vegetables. San Francisco Call, februar y 6, 1898.

47“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

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“It would certainly seem so, but—“

“Oh, I only use it to break down doors with.” She laughed, “not on their

heads, although sometimes if I were a man I should like to.”

“I always go at nighttime,” she went on: “that is to say, when I am intent

on rescuing a girl. Oftentimes I have to go to a number of places, and

if they will not let me in after pleading or coaxing—and they don’t like

to—why, I take my hatchet and let myself in. One cannot always stop

for courtesy when one is trying to save a soul.”35

Perhaps implicitly mocking the popular stereotype of missionary women

as pretentious, self-righteous, and “unlady-like,” this portrayal reveals the

symbiotic relationship between coercive heroism and benevolent mater-

nalism. While in the testimony Hull describes the use of force as the last

resort, it is rationalized with an essentialist characterization of the Chinese:

nonviolent measures are by default ineffective because the Chinese “don’t

like to” let her in when she is simply “pleading and coaxing.”

Hull’s elaboration on the process of rescue furthers this logic, thus

racializing the Chinese by displacing the coercion of benevolent rescue

with the menace of “evil Chinese men”:

“Then when I once get in it is not all easy. They will not let me get near

the girls if they can help it. It is an awful crowd, talking as hard and as

fast as they can, and all at once they will crowd up between the one that

I want to reach and myself. They are all angry always, excepting those

that are too far gone with opium to know or care about what is going

on. And, looking from the prostrate figures to the evil, menacing faces

and narrow eyes of the highbinders near to my face, I have oftentimes

been seized with such a panic of disgust and fear that I would become

weak and my knees would tremble.”36

While the dramatic contrast between the benevolent lone missionary

heroine and the malicious masses of Chinese men highlights Hull’s cour-

age and moral superiority, the characterization of her femininity—her

visceral reactions triggered by intense emotions—further distinguishes

her extraordinary heroism while marking her proper femininity. As the

narrator comments, “it is almost impossible to imagine her—sweet and

gentle as she looks—standing in the midst of a pack of wolves,” a situation

that makes “[t]o brave the depths of the ocean . . . a trifle.”37

As this account of heroic rescue unfolds, its emphasis shifts an attempt

to reconcile the missionary woman’s transgression of proper femininity to

49“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

a full-blown glorification of her power, authority, and moral superiority

that is premised on the demonization of Chinese men and the infantiliza-

tion of Chinese women, that is, racialized constructions that legitimize

the use of force to combat Chinese slavery in the name of benevolent

rescue.38 Hull, as representative, speaks on behalf of her fellow mission-

ary women:

“We have to lock the girls up and keep a watch on them as though they

were prisoners. The wily Chinese wander all through the house [Mission

Home] and glide about and are out again before you can touch them.

It is really aggravating to see them stroll about apparently absolutely

uninterested, where every one who knows the Chinese can always tell

the extent of their ill-doing by the degree of innocence they assume—the

most innocent-looking always being the most villainous. [ . . . ]

And yet . . . they are so faithful when you win their friendship. They can’t

do enough for you nor care enough for you, and they are as simple as

children. I have been working among them this way for years, and I have

grown to love them and to love to help them. What risk there is is nothing

compared with what is gained, and really it is nothing, anyway.”39

The shift in Hull’s perception of the “slave girls” from deceivingly inno-

cent and villainous to “faithful” and “as simple as children” is contingent

on her control over them: only when she achieves complete domination

through the use of force does a rhetoric of coercion by necessity make

way for a rhetoric of compassion by choice. The illustration highlights the

racial and gender dynamics in this account of heroic rescue: positioned

in the center, the missionary woman is holding a Chinese girl’s hand, sur-

rounded by malicious Chinese men ready to attack.40 The stereotype of

the brutality and immorality of Chinese prostitution in this account thus

legitimates the use of force in the name of benevolent reform and rescue:

it underscores white missionary women’s authority all the while hinting

at its pretenses, violence, and transgression of gender norms.

Many literary scholars argue that sympathetic representations of the

Chinese in the fictional works of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton challenge

nineteenth-century popular stereotypes of the Chinese as disease-carrying

aliens, malicious animals, or immoral heathens, including the aforemen-

tioned examples from San Francisco newspapers, often attributing this

departure from stereotypes to her cultural affinities stemming from her

50 • JaaS • 12:1

partial Chinese heritage.41 Read in relation to San Francisco’s newspaper

accounts of “yellow slavery” that provide a crucial reading context for

her fictional works published in California’s magazines, however, the

sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese prostitute in “Lin John” manifests

an ambivalent negotiation with the discursive construction of racialized

female labor and sexuality. This negotiation, parlayed through the story’s

narration of the Chinese prostitute’s agency, is informed not just by the

author’s cultural affinities but also by the conventions of nineteenth-cen-

tury sentimental culture and the missionary ethos common in sensational

journalistic accounts of “yellow slavery.” The importance of the missionary

ethos, albeit often underexplored by much literary scholarship on Sui Sin

Far/Edith Maude Eaton, was first noted in the literary biography by An-

nette White-Parks and later further explored in Dominika Ferens’s study

of the Eaton sisters’ literary careers.42 White-Parks points out that Sui

Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s major audience was “the white, Protestant

middle class in which she was socially rooted,” the backbone of the mission

movement that she was involved in as a teacher.43 Ferens’s study, on the

other hand, analyzes the influences of the conventions of ethnographic

and missionary writings in Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s works.44 In

the remainder of this article, I examine how these important discursive

contexts shape the complex meanings of “Lin John.”

“Lin John” was published in the Los Angeles-based Land of Sunshine,

an important late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century California

magazine which aimed to attract immigration from the U.S. eastern sea-

board by presenting the American West as an ideal place for investments

and the cultivation of a predominantly white regional identity.45 This story

portrays a Chinese prostitute who defies the moral logic of benevolent

rescue undergirding both Chinese patriarchy and U.S. missionary matri-

archy. The female protagonist, the sister of Chinese coolie, Lin John, is

nameless and appears passive in the very beginning of the story. As the

story unfolds, however, she becomes a self-determined character who

defies the moral mandates of Chinese patriarchy: she chooses prostitu-

tion over the “respectable” life of a housewife in China. Representing the

“benevolent” anomaly of the notoriously abusive Chinese patriarchy, her

brother, Lin John, works hard to save enough money to ransom her, that

51“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

is, to “rescue” her from moral degeneracy so that he could “send his sister

to their parents in China, to live like an honest woman.”46 But, on the New

Year’s Eve, while he is asleep, she takes the money that totals just enough

to ransom her. Later, she reveals to her handmaid her sense of entitlement:

“it was my money, for years he has been working to make it for me.” She

also confesses that she has no desire to be “rescued”: “What do I want to

be free for? To be poor; to have no one to buy me good dinners and pretty

things—to be gay no more?”47

Appearing to lack compassion, gratitude, and a “proper” sense of

morality, the female protagonist is portrayed as fully aware of the capitalist

logic that one’s decisions should not be driven by moral sentiments but

by economic considerations. The statement, “What do I want to be free

for,” exposes the contradictions at the heart of nineteenth-century U.S.

capitalism: for the economically underprivileged, socially marginalized,

and politically disenfranchised, so-called “freedom,” despite its intangible

moral value in the eyes of the reader, often translates into poverty and

disempowerment. From her perspective, freedom is only meaningful

when one has buying power. Rather than seizing the opportunity to “rise

above” moral degeneracy, she therefore uses the money to purchase “a

sealskin sacque like the fine American ladies” as well as to access other

material comforts.48 Such skepticism about the ideology of freedom within

capitalism underlines both her agency and her awareness of her limited

options: poverty, prostitution, and the sequestered life of a housewife.

Mocking Lin John’s obsession with her respectability and highlighting

her predicament, her refusal to be ransomed calls attention to the price

of her defiance: physical brutality, exploitation, diseases, and death, the

common pitfalls of Chinese prostitution that were made familiar to the

period’s readers by sensational journalistic accounts.49

The female protagonist’s decision against a “respectable” life and

her knowledge about capitalism set her apart from the stereotype of

the Chinese prostitute as a passive, powerless, innocent, and childlike

figure. However, the story does not necessarily endorse prostitution as a

viable option for working women; nor does the portrayal of the female

protagonist’s self-determination necessarily indicate any recognition of

racialized women as the equals of “respectable” white middle- and up-

52 • JaaS • 12:1

per-class women. The depiction of the Chinese prostitute’s awareness of

both capitalist exploitation and patriarchal moral control may suggest the

narrator’s sympathy based on and informed by a Christian ethos of uni-

versal woman’s rights and humanity, which was common in what literary

critic Shirley Samuels calls “culture of sentiment”:50 a disciplinary regime

that facilitates sympathy or empathy and identification across differences

by extending humanity to lesser beings while simultaneously reinstating

social hierarchies.51 The description of the protagonist’s heartlessness

and her obsession with material comfort could be seen as indicting the

dehumanizing effects of capitalism, which reduce matters of morality to

economic deliberation, thus underscoring the urgency of moral reform,

especially read in the context of the sensational representation of “yellow

slavery.” Even though this character, as White-Parks argues, challenges “the

assumption that women exist only to serve men or to conform to the moral

categories men have assigned them” and disrupts common stereotypes of

the Chinese, the portrayal also conveys an implicit moralizing view.52 In

other words, while the representation of the nameless Chinese prostitute’s

defiance implicitly critiques Chinese patriarchy—the epitome of patri-

archal despotism in nineteenth-century European American women’s

rights discourses—her refusal to “return” to China and her decision to

embrace an “immoral” business for material comfort (regardless of the

irony and the emphasis on her agency) reinforce the perception of the

Chinese as relentless “gold diggers” and perpetual foreigners even when

this portrayal works against the “sojourner myth.” Despite the fact that

“Lin John” implicitly critiques the economic structural factors rendering

Chinese prostitution inevitable through the female protagonist’s skepti-

cism about freedom within capitalism, the story ultimately seems to

foreground matters of morality. Taken together, the female protagonist’s

limited options; her refusal to be rescued by “benevolent Chinese patriar-

chy” in the person of Lin John; her lack of feelings and questionable sense

of morality (or lack thereof ); and her likely permanent “enslavement” in

prostitution implicitly point to the urgency and necessity of “more effec-

tive” interventions: among others, the efforts of U.S. missionaries that were

readily legitimized by sensational journalistic accounts of “yellow slavery.”

Here, the point is not to argue whether or not Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude

53“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

Eaton takes an “imperialist missionary” position in relation to the Chinese

prostitute at a personal and individual level; indeed, the obvious irony in

this story, as literary critics Amy Ling and White-Parks would argue, may

be seen as evidence of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s awareness of the

effects of racism and exclusionary laws.53 Rather, my analysis highlights

the potential discursive effects of the sympathetic characterization of this

criminalized figure that relies on nineteenth-century universal tropes of

women’s rights and freedom premised on a Christian ethos: these tropes,

when read within the broader discursive contexts of “yellow slavery,”

simultaneously enable and delimit the emancipatory potential of sym-

pathetic characterization.

In Amy Dru Stanley’s analysis of postbellum debates over prostitu-

tion, she argues that the prostitute stands outside of the matrix of the

legitimate contracts of labor and marriage yet at the same time fuses

aspects of both by exchanging sex as a form of commodity. That is, on the

one hand, the prostitute “negated the law of marriage, which restricted

exchanging sex for subsistence to husband and wife and entitled men

to women’s bodies.”54 The prostitute, or more precisely sex-workers (as

scholars would call them in contemporary contexts), also negated the law

of the labor market by selling what could not be sold even on the “free

market”—her sex—for monetary gain. On the other hand, the prostitute

applied the logic of exchange within marriage, i.e., the exchange of sex for

subsistence, to the labor market. In this sense, the prostitute broke down

the boundaries between the domestic sphere and a market predicated

upon the demarcation of the ideology of free labor and the doctrine of

coverture along gender lines. Thus, prostitution appeared to “embody all

the forces threatening the legitimacy of contract as a model of freedom”

by exposing the consequences of what might be called the triumph of

“female free labor”: the penetration of the market into the most intimate

sexual bonds, the corrosive aspects of free-market relations, and the fra-

gility of home life as their institutional and emotional counter-weight.55

Stanley further argues that “prostitution” (a racially unspecified term in

her analysis) embodied for slave-owners the extremity of free labor and

the “Yankee free market,” while for abolitionists it represented the traffic

in slaves. Therefore, after emancipation, the prostitute was a disturbing,

54 • JaaS • 12:1

ambiguous figure who conspicuously blurred the difference between free

and unfree commodity relations and who could be seen as embodying the

essence of both contract freedom and the vestiges of slavery.56

The figuration of Chinese prostitutes in late nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century cultural representations, however, does not fall squarely

within Stanley’s analytical framework. Rather than being an ambiguous

figure that simultaneously embodies freedom and unfreedom, the Chinese

prostitute, figured strictly as a “slave,” is the site where the moral obsession

with racial and labor conflicts collapses: she is a literal embodiment of

the feminist metaphor, “prostitutes as slaves.”57 “Lin John” portrays the

female protagonist’s agency only to reveal its limits within the contexts of

abusive Chinese patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, and violent “benevo-

lent rescue.” The Chinese prostitute, therefore, is rhetorically constructed

as fundamentally unfree: she does not own herself, her labor, or her sex,

regardless of her claim of the fruit of the Chinese man’s labor in “Lin John.”

The metaphor of “white slavery” in nineteenth-century public debates

about prostitution registers the moral panic about “too much” freedom

with the sale of sex, where white working women were “racialized” and

slavery as a term was “deracialized,” thus devoid of specific historical refer-

ences to the emergence of racial categories in the contexts of trans-Atlantic

slave trade and trans-Pacific trafficking of exploitable immigrant labor.

The metaphor of “yellow slavery,” embodied by the female protagonist

in “Lin John,” signifies unfreedom and a lack of ownership of self, labor,

and sex—the conditions that racially mark “Chinese” as antithetical to

the terms of humanity and U.S. citizenship. The “Americanization” of

the female protagonist is mediated not through obtaining the owner-

ship of one’s self, labor, and sex that the period’s advocates of woman’s

rights demanded, but through exchanging herself for the ownership of

“objects” (i.e., becoming both a commodity and a consumer). Unlike

racially unmarked prostitutes in Stanley’s analysis, the female protagonist

cannot “sell” her sex for her own monetary gain—it is already being sold.

Moreover, since her survival in the capitalist economy is always at others’

mercy, she can never fully become a “real person,” let alone an “American”:

even her fleeting “freedom” enabled by material possessions is owed to

her benefactors and her brother. The portrayal of her access to “freedom”

55“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

through consumerism and commodification—predicated on the denial

of her brother’s entitlement to the reward of his labor—lays bare the

limits of freedom within capitalism: the rhetoric of freedom, in this case,

obscures the actual beneficiaries of Chinese men’s labor in a transnational

racialized economy, in which missionaries played an active role in laying

its foundation both within the United States and beyond through their

work with immigrants at home and benevolent projects overseas.58 This

portrayal also risks displacing the accountability of the beneficiaries of

Chinese prostitution—including employers who discouraged Chinese

laborers from bringing their families—onto moral indictments of “the

evil Chinese.”

The universal tropes of individual freedom and the sentimental and

missionary ethnographic conventions enable Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude

Eaton’s “Lin John” to elaborate on the moral predicament concerning ra-

cialized female labor, to expose the limits of freedom within capitalism, and

to make accessible to the white reader glimpses into so-called “authentic”

immigrant life, or what cultural critic Laura Wexler would call a “domestic

vision of imperialism” that displaces imperial social relations originating in

a transnational political economy onto problems of immigration situated

in a national frame.59 The projection of this vision, also seen in photos of

Chinese Christian weddings arranged or/and authorized by missionary

women (Figure 5), elides the structural connections between immigration

and imperialism, thus contributing to the amnesia about the signs of the

U.S. empire in sensational and sentimental accounts of “yellow slavery.” As

illustrated by “Lin John,” when the Chinese “slave girl” does rebel against

the period’s prevailing stereotype, or what cultural critic Robert G. Lee

calls “an almost invisible and absolutely voiceless figure” in nineteenth-

century popular entertainment,60 she simultaneously enunciates the limits

of her agency and obscures the reproduction of hierarchy and difference in

the benevolent reform and rescue of racialized, immigrant, and working

women who fall outside of white middle-class norms of respectability and

the restrictive terms of U.S. citizenship. The logic of benevolent rescue is

premised upon a simultaneous individuation of its potential subjects and

collective racialization of stigmatized groups as antithetical to the religious,

political, and economic underpinnings of the U.S. nation: Christian mo-

nogamy, self-ownership, independence, and free labor.

56 • JAAS • 12:1

Rather than adjudicating whether or not the authors of the various

narratives that I have discussed in this article and the people whom they

portray are either resistant to or complicit in dominant ideologies at an

individual level, in this article I examine the narratives as sites where

negotiation of broader contradictory ideologies takes place, in an effort

to delineate the processes of racialization set in motion by narratives of

benevolent rescue. To better understand the implications of the themati-

cally complex stories by Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, one would want

to take into account the various (and varying) specific discursive contexts

that shaped each of these stories in addition to the biographical infor-

mation of the author and the historical “reality” of Chinese exclusion.

My approach highlights the need to resist and to analyze more critically

a repetitive recourse to the “individual” and the “real” in emancipatory

discourses couched in universal tropes as well as in scholarly accounts

of unequal power relations. By putting into productive dialogue literary

scholarship, racial and gender politics of late nineteenth- and early twen-

tieth-century California’s print culture, post-emancipation discourses of

figure 5: Photograph by Ber tha e. Magness (1892–1976), a missionar y teacher in Yuhsien, Hunan, china from 1916 to 1921. courtesy of Missionaries Manuscript collections, university of oregon, eugene.

57“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

prostitution, race, and sentimental benevolence, my reading of “Lin John”

in this article offers one interpretive strategy through which to problema-

tize the interpellation of the metanarratives of the U.S. nation and empire.

Through investigating the complex and contradictory ramifications

of universal tropes such as individual freedom, agency, and sympathy

within emancipatory narratives, I illuminate how these tropes reinscribe

racial hierarchy as they attempt to transcend it, thereby echoing the call

for new ways of imagining oppositional politics in recent scholarship on

comparative racialization.61

Notes

I thank Lisa Lowe, Shelley Streeby, Nayan Shah, Michael Davidson, Rosaura Sánchez, Lisa Yoneyama, Katie Johnson, the anonymous readers for the Journal of Asian American Studies, and the editor, George Anthony Peffer, for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I also thank the staff at the Special collections at Knight Library at the University of Oregon, Eugene as well as the Asian American Studies Library and the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, particularly Theresa Salazar, for their generous assistance.

1. Here, I evoke literary scholar Amy Kaplan’s term in the context of nineteenth- century Chinese immigration to highlight the productive dialogue between transnational Asian American Studies and the study of the U.S. empire. See Kaplan, “’Left Alone with America’: the Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–21.

2. The 1892 Geary Act extended the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned entry of Chinese skilled and unskilled laborers to the U.S. and disallowed them to become U.S. citizens through naturalization, for another ten years. See Philip P. Choy, Lorraine Dong, and Marlon K. Hom, Coming Man: Nineteenth-Century American Perceptions of the Chinese (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1994), 169.

3. Roger Daniels, “American Historians and East Asian Immigrants,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974): 449–72; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994).

4. The 1875 Page Law prohibited entry of Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian felons, contract laborers, and women for the purpose of prostitution. See

58 • JAAS • 12:1

Choy, Dong, and Hom, 168. For discussions of nineteenth-century Chinese female immigration, see George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Chicago: Uni- versity of Illinois Press, 1999); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

5. By using the phrase, “cultures of benevolence,” I wish to call attention to the production of affect and its disciplinary effects in the U.S. domestic “culture of sentiment” as elaborated by Shirley Samuels and Lauren Berlant. See

Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–8; and Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature, 70.3 (1998): 635–668. While I find insightful Susan Ryan’s study of antebellum culture of benevolence, my analysis does not focus on locating the implications of the “good intentions” for the benevolent agents’ moral identities and the dynamics between the agent and the recipient, or what Ryan refers to as a “relational” understanding of citizenship. See Susan Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 20–21. Rather, my analysis highlights how the pro- duction of affect is mediated by the ideologies buttressing the reproduction of social, political, and economic hierarchies within the United States and beyond.

6. The existing literary scholarship on Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton is too extensive to enumerate here. For a summary, see Wenxin Li, “Sui Sin Far and the Chinese American Canon: Toward a Post-Gender-Wars Discourse,” MELUS 29.3/4 (Autumn–Winter 2004): 121–131. For early Asian American cultural history, see Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa, eds., Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (Philadel- phia: Temple University Press, 2002).

7. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s other publications appeared in magazines in California, on the U.S. East Coast, and in Canada. For discussions of her works, see Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995); and Dominika Fe- rens, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2002).

8. John Kuo Wei Tchen’s study of the early Chinese presence in the United States indicates that as early as 1785 Chinese sailors appeared at eastern seaports, such as Baltimore and New York. His study also shows how the fascination with oriental objects played an important role in shaping U.S. identity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). For other examples, see Mary Ting Yi Liu, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century

59“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

New York City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Helen H. Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship,” American Quarterly 58.4 (Dec. 2006): 1047–1066; Lisa Lowe, “The Intima- cies of Four Continents,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 191–212.

9. See Choy, Dong, and Hom, 20, 169; and Yung, 22. 10. Jules Becker, The Course of Exclusion, 1882–1924: San Francisco Newspaper

Coverage of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States (San Francisco: Mel- len Research University Press, 1991), 1. As anti-Chinese sentiments continued to gain momentum throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, not only did the 1882 Exclusion Act suspend the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States for ten years, but it was also broadened in 1888 to include “all persons of the Chinese race.” See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 111. The 1882 Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 for another ten years and extended indefinitely in 1904, climaxing with the 1924 Immigration Act that extended exclusion to all Asians and was strictly enforced until it was repealed in 1943, after which strict quotas still existed. See Choy, Dong, and Hom, 20; and Yung, 22. The exclusionist legislation provided exemptions for Chinese officials, students, teachers, merchants, clergymen, and tourists in the inter- est of diplomatic and trade relations between China and the United States. See Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 97; Takaki, 111; and Yung, 22.

11. George Anthony Peffer, “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women Under the Page Law, 1875–1882,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 6.1 (Fall 1986): 28–46.

12. Chan, 97. 13. Choy, Dong, and Hom, 168; and Peffer, “Forbidden Families,” 29. 14. Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American

Women and Their Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 29; Peffer, “Forbidden Families,” 42; and Yung, 23–24.

15. Yung, 31–32. 16. For statistics on Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco, where most Chinese

prostitutes were located in the late nineteenth century, see Lucie Cheng Hi- rata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs, 5.1 (Autumn 1979), 3–29. For a recent re-evaluation of scholarly interpretations of the presence and composition of Chinese female immigrants before the Exclusion Era, see George Anthony Peffer, “Forgotten Families: The Development of the Chinese American Community in San Francisco, 1860–1880,” in Remapping Asian American History, ed. Sucheng Chan (New York: AltaMira Press, 2003), 49–67.

60 • JAAS • 12:1

17. Peffer, “Forbidden Families,” 28. 18. According to Yung, although half of Chinese men on the West Coast during

this period were married, they did not bring their families with them due to anti-Chinese legislation, financial concerns, the harsh living conditions in California, a lack of employment opportunities for women, and discourage- ment from their employers. Meanwhile, they found it difficult to establish conjugal relations or to find female companionship due to the anti-miscege- nation law, and therefore sought sexual release in brothels (19–30). According to Peffer, in the past decade scholarly interpretations of the period’s Chinese bachelor society have shifted from cultural constraints to an emphasis on practical, autonomous choices made by families. See Peffer, “Forgotten Families,” 49.

19. By the turn of the century, married women made up 62 % of the Chinese female population in San Francisco. See Yung, 41.

20. Some scholars point out that the defense of U.S. family values relied on the discursive constructions of Chinese immigrants’ “non-normative” sexual arrangements as well, including the male-dominated homosocial bachelor society of Chinese laborers and the female-dominated households of Chinese prostitutes. These constructions reveal that the defense of normative white U.S. family was not only constitutive of the formation of white working-class identity, but it also helped to consolidate white middle-class heterosexual norms that defined the terms of liberal citizenship. See Nayan Shah, Conta- gious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: California University Press, 2001). For a discussion of homosociality in nineteenth-century California’s gold mines, see Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 141–184.

21. For historical accounts of the changes in marital law, see Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1985); and Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). For a discussion of journalistic representation of Chinese women in the 1870s and its relationship to the 1875 Page Law, see George Anthony Peffer, “The San Francisco Press: Catalyst and Mirror,” in If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here, 73–86.

22. “Chinese Slavery,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1892. 23. Ibid. 24. For a journalistic report on mixed patronage, see Washington M. Ryer, The

Conflict of Races, The Migration of the Manufacturing Industries of the United States and Europe to the Eastern Shores of Asia. The Spread of Opium Smoking, Leprosy, and Other Imported Evils (San Francisco: P.J. Thomas, Printer and Publisher, 1886), 34.

25. For examples, see Ivan Light, “From Vice District to Tourist Attraction: The Moral Career of American Chinatowns, 1880–1940,” Pacific Historical

61“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

Review 43.3 (1974): 367–94; and Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

26. “Chinese Slavery,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1892. 27. For a discussion of violence at mission homes and arranged Christian mar-

riages, see Peggy Pascoe, “Gender Systems in Conflict: The Marriages of Mis- sion-Educated Chinese American Women, 1874–1939,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd ed., ed. Vicki L Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1994), 139–156; and her Rela- tions of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Examples of headlines include “Little Chinese Girl Who Was Rescued From Slavery. Saved From Her Father. Twelve-Year-Old Chinese Girl Was to Have Been Sold By Parent. Forcibly Rescued by Mission Workers. She Was One of Five Slaves Offered at Auction Last Week. Presbyterian Ministers Criticise the City Authorities for Permitting Sale of Women in Chinatown” (San Francisco Chronicle, Janu- ary 22, 1901); and “Sold His Two Daughters into Slavery. Nailed Them Up in Boxes and Shipped Them Like So Much Freight to Distant Purchasers. How the Crime Was Accidentally Discovered” (San Francisco Call, June 11, 1899).

28. “Quarrel Over Girl Renews Tong War,” San Francisco Examiner, December 20, 1908.

29. “Strange Adventures of a Woman Missionary in China,” San Francisco Call, February 6, 1898.

30. Examples include “A Chinatown Murder. Qee Sing, A Female Chattel, Shot Through the Head by a Highbinder—As Usual, the Assassin Escapes” (San Francisco Evening Bulletin, May 15, 1894); “Dragged Shrieking to Death. Terrible Fate of a Chinese Slave Girl Who Tried to Escape. Doomed in Sight of Freedom. The Rescue Party Hesitated and the Unfortunate Girl was Lost. Concealed in a Labyrinth. Only an Empty House With Many Avenues of Escape Left the Searchers” (San Francisco Call, July 21, 1897); “Her Back Was Burnt With Irons. Terrible Punishment Inflicted Upon a Chinese Slave Girl. Tortured into Imbecility. She Was Bruised and Beaten Until Almost Bereft of Her Reason. Stories of Rescued Slaves. Seventeen Now Cared for at the Methodist Mission House” (San Francisco Call, July 23, 1897); and “Alone in a Chamber of Death. Terrible Experience of a Crippled Chinese Child. Left Alone to Starve and Die. Rescued From a Most Horrible Date After a Night of Terror” (San Francisco Call, July 18, 1897).

31. “Worse than Slaves,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 1, 1893. 32. “Chinaman’s Wife Only His Slave,” San Francisco Daily News, June 29, 1909.

Several newspaper accounts also portrayed Chinese men’s manipulation of missionary women in marriage arrangements, which, read in relation to stigmatized sexual arrangements often associated with the Chinese such as bachelor society and polygamy, obscure the violent coercion at the mission

62 • JAAS • 12:1

home that recent scholarship has begun to uncover while reinforcing the ste- reotype of the Chinese as “unfit” for normative heterosexual domesticity—a construct that turns the effects of capitalism and exclusionary legislation into naturalized racial stigma.

33. “San Francisco Has the Bravest Women in the World.” 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Other than a few accounts of slave girls who escaped by themselves, most of

them were assisted by police and missionaries. 39. “San Francisco Has the Bravest Women in the World.” 40. Other examples of the headlines include “How A Chinese Slave Girl Is

Rescued” (San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1901); “A Real Missionary” (San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1901); and “Chinese Girl Is Rescued. Kow Seen Taken From Chinatown Brothel by Miss Wheeler of Presbyterian Mission. May Have Gone to the Orient on the China. Wealthy Chinese Make De- termined Efforts at Recapture—Secure Warrant for Her Arrest and Search Steamer” (San Francisco Chronicle, January 11, 1905).

41. For example, see Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks, introduction to Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, ed. Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 11–16.

42. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton; and Ferens. 43. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 15. 44. Ferens, 5–11, 30–33, 50–68. 45. For discussions of the relationship between the emergence of western re-

gionalism and the construction of middle- and upper-class white identity, see Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); and Michael Davidson, “The Lady from Shanghai: California Orientalism and ‘Guys Like Us,’” Western American Literature, 35.4 (2001), 347–371. For specific information about the emphasis on “local color” in the Land of Sunshine and a discussion of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s negotiation with this particular aspect of the literary market place, see White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 87.

46. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, “Lin John,” Land of Sunshine, 10.2 (1899): 76.

47. Ibid., 77. 48. Ibid. 49. For a discussion of white missionary women’s agitation against the exploi-

tation of women in Chinese society, see Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, 51–56.

50. Samuels, 6.

63“Yellow SlaverY,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho •

51. For a discussion of the ways in which sentimentality extends full humanity to the less human, see Laura Wexler’s summary of Philip Fisher’s argument in Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2000), 104–105.

52. White-Parks, 119. 53. See note 41. 54. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the

Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218.

55. Ibid., 219. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 262. 58. See Joan Jacobs Brumerg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology

of American Evangelical Women, 1870–1910,” Journal of American History, 69.2 (1982): 347–371; Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Vincent Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule,” American Literature 67.4 (Dec. 95): 639–666; and Mathew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: the United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

59. See Wexler. 60. According to Robert G. Lee, “[w]hile highly visible as a symbol in the popu-

lar discourse of urban social crisis [sensationalized in newspaper accounts, magazine articles, and official inquiries into the social hygiene of the new cities of the West], the Chinese woman is an almost invisible and absolutely voiceless figure in nineteenth-century popular entertainment . . . [a]part from a handful of short stories in the Overland Monthly and the Californian.” See Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 90.

61. See, for example, Gary Okihiro, Common Ground: Reimagining American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); James Kyung-Jin Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 2004); Curtis Marez, “Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World Revolution and the History of Hollywood Cinema,” American Literary History 17.3 (Fall 2005): 486–505; Nicholas De Genova, ed., Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York : New York University Press, 2006); Leslie Bow, “Racial Interstitiality and the Anxieties of the ‘Partly Colored,’” Journal of Asian American Studies 10.1 (2007): 1–30; and Jung, Jun, and Lowe in note 8.