ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Edith Maude Eaton’s 1904 serial travelogue, “Wing Sing of Los Angeles on His Travels,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Express under the pen-name Wing Sing. The chapter argues that in this narrative, Eaton uses the merchant to transform the railway from an instrument of colonization and white supremacy to a vehicle for setting Chinese bodies in motion across contested boundaries and fraught cartographies. Through the liminal figure of Wing Sing and her own complex authorial embodiment, Eaton emplots a counternarrative to Exclusion and defies racial fantasies about the American body politic while also charting the outer boundaries of Chinese agency in North America. “Wing Sing of Los Angeles on His Travels” does not only complicate our understanding of Eaton’s literary use of the merchant figure, her advocacy for Chinese communities in the West, and her protean negotiation of gender and print culture. It also exemplifies how her writing in and about California defies the prevailing orientation of an American empire looking west: She foregrounds the perspectives of Chinese subjects who venture eastward to and from California across national frontiers and whose vigorous bodies move freely in anti-imperial transits. Far from a tightly policed space of vulnerability to an infectious “yellow peril,” Eaton’s Chinese California is insistently porous and is generative of transpacific and transcontinental movement by Chinese subjects. Eaton thus advances ways to reorient critical paradigms about California’s place in the national imaginary and the larger Pacific world.
