women's history discussion (historical essay)

35 “Yellow Slaver Y,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho • “Yellow Slaver Y,” NarrativeS of reScue, aNd Sui SiN f ar/ edith Maude eatoN’S “liN JohN” (1899) yu-fang cho T h e A b s e n c e o f T h e U.s. e m p i r e A n d Th e “c h i n e s e Q U e s Ti o n ”1 I n 1901 , t h e y e a r b e f o r e 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. j a a s f e b r u a r y 2009 • 35–63 © t h e j o h n s h o p k i n s u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s 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. cour tesy of Bancroft librar y, university of california at Berkeley. 37 “Yellow Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” 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.

“Y ellow slA ver Y ” 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 Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho • figure 2: Babies are carried about in Baskets. San Francisco Call , februar y 6, 1898.

sen Timen TAl b enevolence A nd The l imi Ts of A genc Y : n Arr ATives of r escUe And sUi sin fAr /e diTh m AUde eATon ’s “l in 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 Slaver Y,” NarrativeS of reScue • cho • figure 4: San francisco Has the Bravest w omen in the world.

San Francisco Call , July 11, 1897. 48• JaaS • 12:1 “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 Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” 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. cour tesy of Missionaries Manuscript collections, university of oregon, eugene. 57 “Yellow Slaver Y,” 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 No t e s 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 Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” 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 Slaver Y,” 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.