ABSTRACT
Allow me to translate the Chinese graffiti in the subtitle: Poetic Out from Angel Island, Chinatown, and America. Muk Lau is the two-storied wooden barracks on San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island that detained for interrogation approximately 175,000 Cantonese arrivals between 1910 and 1940. Detainees’ poems left on the barrack walls are published in Island (1980, 1991) (8). Tongyan Gaai is Cantonese for San Francisco Chinatown, the site where Cantonese rhymes were collected and published in 1911 and 1915 (Hom 1987). The House of English refers to the monolingual universe in which the majority of Chinese American writers find themselves nearly a century later. Both the Island-Chinatown dwellers, on the one hand, and contemporary ethnic writers, on the other, seek to contest their confinement, literal and affective, through poetic graffiti: poetic because their clipped, largely misunderstood voices are dense with associations with the Chinese poetry tradition and style in the former and with the stylization of Chineseness in the latter; graffiti because the poetic out constitutes unintelligible gibberish outside the ethnic community. While heart-wrenching Chinese testimonials are inscribed on Angel Island’s barrack walls or within the heart of Chinatown, they must be filtered through English translation to reach the mainstream community. By themselves, they are Chinese graffiti, nonsensical scribbling to Western eyes. With the subsequent generations assimilated, culminating in the native-born and their descendants, the heritage language is graffiti, deployed by writers in transl(iter)ation for emotional attachment, psychological compensation, ethnic solidarity, identity politics, stylistic flair, and other reasons. The tension implicit in the existence of an ethnic minority drives Chinese Americans to display ethnic markers by means of Romanization of Chinese words and phrases and, by extension, Chineseness, in their fictions. Edited and translated by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung,
Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 bears witness to Chinese suffering under racist laws during the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Carved on the detention center walls, these Chinese poems resemble today’s urban graffiti to immigration officials and the then xenophobic American culture. Such graffiti inscribe, however, a
“poetic and affective out” from imprisonment, deftly drawing from Chinese literary tradition. Not only do allusions to “barbarians” in biansaishi (the genre of Frontier Poetry prominent during the Tang dynasty) vent the rage against American authorities but the elegiac poetic convention serves to articulate the detainee’s sorrow. In the vein of traditional calligraphic and carving practices on wood and stone, these Chinese graffiti are cathartic, leaving relatively lasting testimonials in a space not their own for a time of indefinite suspension. That such graffiti are entirely in Chinese suggests the detainee’s total captivity: even their cry of rage and grief fails to reach their captors. Edited and translated by Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain:
Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (1987) continues the Foucauldian archeology of ethnic history and expands from, to American eyes, nonsensical graffiti on the walls of muk lau to Cantonese rhymes, equally inexplicable to the mainstream culture and equally walled-in within Chinatown. Both Island and Songs share the characteristic that the poems are contained by the community. Just as the carved poems face in or the internees themselves rather than face out or the outside world, Cantonese rhymes are circulated within Chinatown and not in the American society at large. The ethnic specificity or community-oriented discourse is the pressure valve to release the tension over incarceration inside the detention center or Chinatown. Such inward, centripetal movement gradually turns outward, centrifugal with House of English. From the childhood trauma on Angel Island and Chinatown to the rebel-
lious 1960s and 1970s and to the maturing of the 1980s and 1990s and beyond, Chinese America turns increasingly acculturated, retaining less and less Chinese, composing its narratives in the English language. The poetic valve to vent frustration on an actual island or the island of Chinatown is no longer feasible, since it is but gobbledygook to American ears and lost to English-speaking American-born Chinese writers anyway. Nonetheless, phonetic transcription of key words in various Chinese dialects-Cantonese in Maxine Hong Kingston, Shanghainese at times in Amy Tan, Mandarin in Gish Jen, and others-decorate Chinese American writers’ houses of English, veiled peepholes on the wall for American readers to gawk at the immigrant drama, a tragicomedy with a touch of exhibitionist freak show. In early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese sojourners are comforted by the mother tongue gazing down at them from their prison walls. Nearly a century later, Chinese American writers erect houses of English with Chinese words strategically placed for English speakers to look in on the ethnic experience. Granted no longer in poetic form, spotty Chinese graffiti in Kingston et al. keep the poetic spirit of suggestiveness of something beyond the confines of the present discourse. Given the minority’s assimilation, the poetic exit turns less urgent and more blurred, serving as a racial, ethnic, and even exotic marker in a multicultural and capitalist market. Not only has the heritage language quantitatively diminished from Chinese American discourse, but also its oppositional characteristic has qualitatively dissipated. Yet the
underground, subversive potential of the poetic out continues due to its fundamental unintelligibility to mainstream English speakers. Once America is perceived by the minority writer as a prison larger than Angel Island, the poetic out flares up again. This “centennial” of Chinese graffiti on the American landscape celebrates
texts somewhat different from Western graffiti, wall writings or, as Abel and Buckley (1977: 3) put it, “little scratchings,” from the Italian graffiare, “to scratch”. Georges Bataille (1961) in The Tears of Eros traces the yoking of sensuality and death, aestheticism and violence, in Western consciousness to prehistoric archaeological finds. Drawing from a particular petroglyph in France’s Lascaux cave, Bataille hypothesizes the birth of eroticism in the clash of eros and thanatos:
a man with a bird’s face, who asserts his being with an erect penis, but who is falling down. This man is lying in front of a wounded bison. The bison is about to die, but, facing the man, it spills its entrails horrifically.
