The “Glorious National Problem”: Frontierism and Citizenship in Frank Chin's Donald Duk
2008; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1542-734x.2008.00675.x
ISSN1542-734X
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoAll honor to you, to Durant, to Jack and Dan Casement, to Reed, and thousands of brave fellows who have fought this glorious national problem in spite of deserts, storms, Indians, and the doubts of the incredulous. Only in America was there enough space to utilize the locomotive fully. … Only in America was there enough labor or enough energy and imagination. John Chinaman, with his patient toil, directed by American energy and backed by American capital, has broken down the great barrier at last and opened over it the greatest highway yet created for the march of commerce and civilization around the globe. In the late nineteenth century, American railroad companies thought of the railroad as “a pool of capital designed to make more capital” (Cronon 81). Indeed, the railroad, William Cronon has explained, quickly became “the chief device for introducing a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West” (81). Perhaps most significantly, however, because this capitalism-facilitating technology was bookended by a call for the participation of inexpensive, skilled Chinese laborers and by an almost immediate restriction of their emigration to the United States once the railroad was completed, the historical narrative of the building of the transcontinental railroad foregrounds a basic contradiction of liberal democracy1 1. I borrow the expression “liberal democracy” from Lisa Lowe's discussion in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996). Lowe uses it to refer to a political system based on the “promise of universal equality” (23). : economic inclusion in vs. sociopolitical exclusion. Indeed, the exploitation of Chinese labor in the mid-nineteenth century and the exclusion of the Chinese from the United States shortly after2 2. See the Treaty Regulating Immigration from China (1980) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). are evidence of the ways in which the history of building the American transcontinental railroad is symbolic of a “glorious national problem” with the myth of American exceptionalism in which our national identity is grounded. Furthermore, because narratives about the railroad's construction are also narratives about the key role of a powerful technology in settling an “American” frontier environment, they are useful sites for considering the role of an American cultural logic of “the frontier” and frontier technology in constituting the boundaries of American citizenship. In spite of the fact that involvement with frontier technologies is not a guarantee of socioeconomic and civic power, some contemporary narratives attempt to transcend the contradictions of American exceptionalism by invoking the frontier as a means to validate and strengthen individual and minority group identity. Frank Chin's novel Donald Duk (1991) revisits the history of the Chinese participation in the building of the transcontinental railroad—and, thus, to the settling of the originary frontier West—to argue against the virtual omission of the Chinese from American history books and what he frames as the emasculating exclusion of the Chinese from citizenship rights until the middle of the twentieth century. In response to the Chinese–American history of alternating enfranchisement and disenfranchisement, Frank Chin advocates a revision of cultural nationalist narratives about the significance of Chinese Americans in the history of this nation. His novel, Donald Duk, revisits and recontextualizes Chinese–American participation in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, representing an American national re-education through the story of a twelve-year-old Chinese–American boy, Donald Duk. As a novel that participates in a “politics of positioning” (226), which Stuart Hall claims is the foundation for cultural identity, Donald Duk argues that the Chinese in America do count and have counted in the formation of an “American” socioeconomic identity. The way to reposition Chinese Americans and re-orient American readers, Chin suggests, involves challenging Western notions of history and teaching us how to become more discerning readers of them. According to Donald Duk, Chinese–American history—or “the truth,” as Donald's father once refers to it—is an amalgam of lessons learned from dreams, cultural mythologies, family, and experience. Drawing explicitly on resources other than those provided by the nation state, Chin suggests that culture, as distinct from the state, is an empowering source for individual identification outside of hegemonic boundaries. This proposition resonates with Lisa Lowe's assertion that “culture is the contemporary repository of memory, or history, (and) it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined” (22). While this libratory gesture toward “culture” promises in Lowe and Chin to be the key to “alternate forms of subjectivity,” problematic ideological contradictions inherent in “American” notions of liberal democracy also work through culture. Knowing history, Donald Duk suggests, nonetheless, is a personal process that involves acknowledging and embracing Donald's Chinese culture as well as developing the ability to decide for oneself what is real and what is fake, an ability that Chin and the other editors of a 1991 collection of Asian–American writing claim stems from a characteristically Chinese economy of value. Confucian philosophy teaches that “Life is war,” they write. “Every human is born a soldier. All behavior is tactics and strategy. … For the soldier, the essential skill in winning the war to maintain personal integrity is in the telling of the difference between the real and the fake” (xv). In Donald Duk, Donald's development in this regard is dependent on the guidance of Donald's Uncle Donald, Donald's father, and Donald's dream life. Donald's development over the course of the novel is also, paradoxically, dependent on a narrative of wholeness and power that is itself predicated on, and therefore reinforces, a frontierist and masculinist symbolic structure of American national identity. Such a dynamic, according to David Palumbo-Liu, posits a sociopolitical unity that “presumes to be enjoyed by ‘America’”(389). We ought to read this alleged unity and wholeness, he argues, “as a set of adjustments and reformations that discloses the fact that America is always in process itself,” and a large part of this process has involved Asian America (389). This process to which Palumbo-Liu refers follows the logic of the frontier. It is, thus, charged with the symbolic value of the frontier and supports the reproduction of a frontierist nationalist fiction. By overlooking those excluded by its promise, this frontierist fiction attempts to resolve the economic and political contradictions of the US state as a liberal democracy, and therefore sutures over the fragmented and otherwise disjointed American national identity. “Reality,”Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek writes, “like truth, is never ‘whole.’ What the spectre (in this case, the spectre of frontierism) conceals is not (the) reality” of the nation state but the antagonisms the state represses (“Spectre” 21). Thus, in spite of claims of American exceptionalism, the US state is not a monolith whose ability to appropriate crises, contradictions, and instability attests to its soundness and stability. Conversely, these aspects of American national identity attest to its inherent instability and should, moreover, direct our attention to the fissures in its symbolic structure. Even so, many Chinese Americans and other marginalized groups have been held apart as the abject “Other” which, through processes of exclusion and racialization, have implicitly defined “America” as a fixed, stable, whole entity. Fredric Jameson uses the designator “schizophrenic nominalism” to describe the psychic “rubble and ruin” that results from a loss of temporal and historical progression, a progression that should provide the individual with a coherence of personal identity (Postmodern Condition 26f). Palumbo-Liu argues that according to this model, a loss of identity “is inseparable from a loss of historical consciousness” (324). If historical consciousness is key to individual coherence, then what does it mean that, while Donald Duk is obviously responding to a history of discrimination that has continued throughout the twentieth century, the novel attempts to re-establish Donald's, and our, historical consciousness by eliding the specific trajectory of “American” discriminatory regimes that have regulated Chinese–American identity since the building of the transcontinental railroad? This brief period of rail construction is called upon to serve Chin's politics of repositioning and, thus, becomes the representative phase for our re-orientation to Chinese–American history. What does it mean that the experience of building the transcontinental railway is the primary historical touchstone of such a re-orientation? Chin's Donald Duk is a prime example of a late-twentieth century re-articulation of the value of the frontier to the concept of American exceptionalism. In the context of the novel, Donald's history, American history, and Chinese–American history are each predicated on a frontierist relationship to the exceptional development of American capitalism, importing many of the economic and sociopolitical contradictions that come with such a frontierist identification and the logic of capital. Asian Americans, Lisa Lowe writes, “with the history of being constituted as ‘aliens,’ have the collective ‘memory’ to be critical of the notion of citizenship and the liberal democracy it upholds” (21); however, Donald Duk does not take advantage of the “alien” position to challenge the symbolic structure of American exceptionalism. It does not, moreover, develop a libratory space from which to critique the contradictions of mainstream American culture. Instead, it challenges Chinese–American men's position and value within that structure. Chinese–American men are not weak, the novel suggests; they are strong. And Chinese Americans should be proud of all that is Chinese (like “American,” positioned as a monolithic, discrete category) because Chinese masculinity was fundamental to the foundation of American exceptionalism. These masculinist and frontierist subtexts in Donald Duk ultimately undermine the novel's attempt to create a space for Chinese history and experience in the United States that is truly alternative to American history and experience. Indeed, the constitutive role of a frontierist myth of American exceptionalism derives from such narratives of settling the American frontier West and the concomitant spread of capitalism across the continent. This frontierist myth purports that our interaction with “new” physical and figurative frontiers can make us, and the spaces, more American and provide us with access to socioeconomic resources and civic power in the same way that our engagement with the originary American frontier West allegedly did. Given that many claims for American exceptionalism are premised on a national drive to pursue frontiers and that the basic contradictions of liberal democracy are embedded in a logic of capital that developed, in part, as a result of the success of rail technology in this country, the transcontinental railroad can be said to have supplied much more to the nation than a “new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West.” Indeed, because the “Great West” has been seized by American culture to provide the foundation for a conceptual frontierist geography on which our national identity is said to be based, the building of the transcontinental railroad can be said to have provided Americans with a national narrative that attempts to naturalize the contradictions of liberal democracy.3 3. As I will discuss further in later parts of this essay, this formulation is based, in part, on Lisa Lowe's critique of Marx's analysis of liberal democracy (23). Nearly twelve hundred Chinese men lost their lives building the railroad; nonetheless, when the railway was completed, the Chinese were forced to sit in third class, “immigrant cars” on trains, a situation that Robert Louis Stevenson noted gave him a “stupid ill feeling” on his tour of America in 1879. Furthermore, while the many photographs taken at the Golden Spike Ceremony failed to capture any Chinese laborers, one oil painting included two Chinese men crouching beside the tracks. This painting was “reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies (and) proudly hung in saloons and brothels throughout the West for years” (Steiner 128); however, the drawing that accompanied the painting and identified each man neglected to acknowledge the presence of two Chinese men. “Once again,” historian Stan Steiner writes, “the Chinese railroad men had been rendered faceless. They had vanished from history” (128). Lisa Lowe identifies two historical phases of economic and political contradictions in the US state that involve Asian Americans: the first starting around 1850 and lasting until World War II, and the second beginning with World War II and continuing to the present. As Karl Marx has noted, the United States in 1860 was in short supply of labor; therefore, US capital needed a large number of enfranchised workers, a number so high that it would come close to growing in excess of the accumulation of capital. By 1865 when Leland Stanford, the President of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, was sure that Chinese labor made better economic sense than “white” or Irish labor,4 4. Chinese labor was not only cheaper; it was, according to most accounts, much more reliable. Many of the white laborers would leave the backbreaking rail work for the promise of mining gold shortly after having their way West paid for by the rail companies. The ones that did stay were thought to be less disciplined than the Chinese workers who bathed daily, ate well, drank tea-water, which had been boiled and therefore kept them from getting ill from parasites in the water, showed up for work on time, and used opium only on their Sunday day off. This image is often offered by histories, like that of Ambrose, in stark contrast to the Irish who were said, among other things, to have drunk so much and often that it often interfered with their ability to work. the first phase was well underway. Following a trial period during which fifty Chinese laborers were hired, Chinese immigrants were employed in such numbers that, within two years, the Central Pacific Railroad salaried twelve thousand Chinese, making up ninety percent of their work force. However, while Marx has argued that capital can be insensitive to the distinctiveness of laborers,5 5. Marx argues that while the capital is sensitive to the distinctiveness of the task being performed, it does not account for the specificity of the laborer. (“Chapter on Capital” 296–97). Lowe writes that contrary to this classical Marxist understanding, “the use of Chinese immigrant labor demonstrates that even in the nineteenth century, US capital profited from the “flexible” racializing of Asian labor” (188). Depending on the need for their labor, the racialized identity of the Chinese laborer was considered more or less significant.6 6. As I will discuss shortly, since their first arrival in the United States, the Chinese had been seen as racially “other”; however, when their labor became “excess” after the construction of the railroad was complete (once their usefulness had dissipated), the proposed racial “otherness” of the Chinese was said to be so significant as to make them undeserving of further access to the opportunities and protections as citizens of the American state. And herein lies the key contradiction of liberal democracy in the first historical phase of the relationship of Asian Americans to liberal democracy: Capital could increase profit and benefit from the presence of a racialized and tractable labor force up until the point at which the Chinese labor force grew large enough that it threatened capital accumulation by whites. At that point, by excluding and disenfranchising the Chinese in 1882, the state could constitute the “whiteness” of the citizenry and granted political concessions to “white” labor groups who were demanding immigration restrictions. (Lowe 13) As a result, the original racial bar established in 1790 was re-inforced by the series of Exclusion Acts as reliable and efficient Chinese labor saturated the market and became a threat to the potential for whites to accumulate capital. Consequently, the economic contradictions of capital and the political contradictions of the nation state found themselves implicated in the history of Chinese immigrant labor in the second half of the nineteenth century. The second phase of economic and political contradiction with regard to Chinese Americans, according to Lowe, involved the perceived external threat of Asian labor, the threat of outsourcing labor for capital. Lowe writes that as production began to shift to Asia and Latin America where export-oriented economies were emerging, the capital imperative came into greater contradiction with the political imperative of the nation-state. The one required economic internationalism to expand labor and capital to secure raw materials and consumer markets, to locate areas in which to invest surplus capital, and to provide a safety valve for domestic tensions; the other required consolidation of a strong, hegemonic nation-state. (15) It is with the second phase, and with Lowe's articulation of it, that we begin to see more clearly why the concept of an American frontier drive has been used to promulgate American exceptionalism. Frontierism in this context transposes the concept of a distinctly American frontier drive onto cultural narratives in an effort to resolve the conflict Lowe (via Marx) articulates as being at the heart of the logic of capital. Structurally parallel in many ways to the logic of capital, frontierism attempts to resolve the contradiction between the political imperatives of the nation state and the economic imperatives of capital by defining the former in terms of the latter. To be “American,” frontierism asserts, is to find safety valves for socioeconomic tensions—to find, in effect, new ways of doing “business,” of increasing socioeconomic security and strength. The logic of frontierism, furthermore, involves a logic of sociopolitical exclusion which, at least in theory, ensures the security of the nation state and its economic expansion.7 7. This logic of exclusion is minimized in narratives of other frontier spaces—Mars, for example—which use national security as an argument for exploring and colonizing. What this boils down to is a national narrative that uses national security as an argument for socioeconomic expansion in an effort to consolidate, or shore-up the political boundaries of, the nation state. Thus, what would otherwise be a conflict or contradiction is naturalized as American exceptionalism—it is simply “American,” according to this logic, to use cheap labor to increase profits. Crises and potential contradictions that challenge American nationalism arise repeatedly throughout history, which is why the re-articulation of frontierism in many narratives is so important. Indeed, frontierism is not a once-and-for-all-event but a logic of successful capitalist expansion; it must be re-enunciated and re-inforced. New frontiers, new safety valves, new sites of crisis and conflict, and new spaces imagined to have unlimited and exploitable socioeconomic resources must be found and named in the service of frontierism. However, the boundaries of frontierism, like the boundaries of American citizenship, are not a historical and fixed; rather, they shape-shift conceptually as the demands of the historical moment dictate. Willing participation by members of a group managed by the promise of the technologies of “the frontier” (in the sense of both the technologies, or mechanism, of the cultural logic as well as the technologies, or mechanism, used in physical frontier environments) does not necessarily change the terms or conditions of the “promise”; that is, while those managed or regulated by the logic of the frontier might choose to participate in frontier ventures, they are not capable of fundamentally altering the expansionist desires at the core of such ventures, desires that ultimately determine the political imperatives of the governing structures of power. At the start of Chin's Donald Duk, Donald's access to history is typically “American.” He knows what he knows about the Chinese primarily from what he has learnt in his American prep school, from American movies, and from what he has seen on American television. He has, quite clearly, been interpellated by American culture that marks “Chinese” as “Other” by stereotyping the people defined by the designator as undesirably passive and effeminate; consequently, he begins the novel ashamed of his Chinese heritage and his father, who represents all that is Chinese to him: “ ‘His own name is driving him crazy!’ Donald thought to himself, ‘Looking Chinese is driving him crazy!’” (2). In fact, “Everything Chinese in his life,” Donald asserts, “seems to be awful. His father is awful” (8). Later, he ponders, “Dad's parents didn't want to be Chinese. Donald Duk doesn't want to be Chinese. Why does Dad like being Chinese? Doesn't he know everybody talks about him funny?” (47). Framed by two episodes in school in which Donald's history teacher lectures about Chinese Americans, the structure of the novel begs a comparison of Donald's initial embarrassment and later appreciation of his Chinese heritage. Both experiences make Donald uncomfortable; however, the first does so not only because the images of the Chinese Donald sees around him are unappealing to him but also because he is trying desperately to repress his Chinese heritage and distance himself from “everything Chinese in his life.” Thus, at the start of the novel, Chinese history is for Donald, as Chin suggests it is for most popular American historical narratives, the return of the repressed. Donald listens in agony in the opening scene of the novel as his teacher of “California History” reads from a book: “The Chinese in America were made passive and nonassertive by centuries of Confucian thought and Zen mysticism. They were totally unprepared for the violently individualistic and democratic Americans. From their first step on American soil to the middle of the twentieth century, the timid, introverted Chinese have been helpless against the relentless victimization by aggressive, highly competitive Americans. One of the Confucian concepts that lends the Chinese vulnerable to the assertive ways of the West is the mandate of heaven. As the European kings of old ruled by divine right, so the emperors of China ruled by the mandate of heaven” (emphasis Chin's; Donald Duk 2) The rest of the novel illustrates, of course, that this representation of the Chinese in America is grossly inaccurate, but Donald's discomfort with what he hears is revealed to be a result of both his inability to recognize such inaccuracies (to tell what is “fake” from what is “real”) and his anxiety that he has no control over his cultural, racial, and national identification. He feels, in short, that he cannot self-identify.8 8. Not until 1960, in fact, did the Census Report allow for individuals to self-identify their race or ethnicity. Interestingly, only the 1890 census forms had a place for individuals to identify as mixed, racially, with the designators “octoroon” or “quadroon.” These terms were removed from the next set of Census forms. “Chinese” intrudes upon his otherwise “American” life, and he feels the anxiety of “hybridization,” which Lowe says “is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violence of the US state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the processes through which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives” (82). Chin suggests through his characterization of Donald's racial self-hatred that we should have some sympathy for Donald because this self-hatred is based on his having internalized white America's racism. Donald's self-hatred, in fact, personifies the material effects of the “violence of the US state,” a state whose exceptionalism supports the illusion of a choice to “freely oscillate between or among chosen identities.” Because he has been educated by an American culture invested in its own exceptionalism (which is founded on the illusion of equal opportunity), Donald believes at the start of the novel that he can choose to be “American” and, thereby, become all that is valued by American culture and history. However, no matter what choice he believes he has the power to make, the novel and American history suggest, he is, essentially, Chinese and others will identify him as such. No matter what his choices, then, he is forced to carry the historical baggage of “forced labor migrations, racial segregation, economic displacement, and internment” (Lowe 82). Donald's engagement with the railroad's history comes early in the novel in a conversation with his Uncle Donald Duk during which young Donald divulges that he has been having “bad dreams” about the building of the transcontinental railroad. The conversation begins with young Donald asking his uncle to explain the significance of the 108 heroes of the Water Margin, heroes his father has painted on little model airplanes in preparation for the Chinese New Year celebration. Much to Uncle Donald's disappointment, young Donald is only able to understand Chinese culture in Anglo terms and, therefore, needs the explanation in cultural translation. Uncle Donald thinks out loud: “How can I tell you about The Water Margin if you don't know nothing? Hmm. Do you know the story of Robin Hood? Maybe you seen the movie with the star Errol Flynn. They show it all the time on the Disney Channel. I know you get cable TV, so you can catch the movie even if you have never seen it before. That movie was made before your daddy was born, and still you can see it, good as new. Shortcut to history.” (21) And indeed, Donald is familiar with the story of Robin Hood because, as he says, “Everybody's talking about Robin Hood these days” (22). Uncle Donald then quickly shifts the terms of the discussion to those that his nephew can understand and an explanation of the 108 heroes becomes a discussion of “those 108 Chinese Robin Hoods.” But reading his nephew's facial expression, Uncle Donald shifts the terms yet again to a discussion of Donald's Chinese name: “I know how that snooty private school you go to has pulled the guts out of you and turned you into some kind of engineer of hate for everything Chinese. … You blame every Chinese who ever lived, everything Chinese you ever heard of for the way white kids act like fools when they hear your name” (23). With this accusation, Uncle Donald taps into the internal conflict Donald had been experiencing (one that the Uncle identifies as the result of having has his Chinese “guts” pulled out of him) and finds that Donald has recently started having “bad dreams” about “the old railroad.”“I like trains,” young Donald quickly adds somewhat defensively, “I have always liked trains” (23). Donald's confession that he “likes trains” is at once a concession and an assertion of his investment in American exceptionalism. The history of “trains,” the transcontinental railroad, is a psychically safe place for his hybridization. On this subject, he can concede that in liking trains he does not hate all that is Chinese, and he can assert that he is appropriately appreciative of the sublime American use of rail technology. Hearing that there is a “fake” and a “real,” and conventional “American” texts are often not true to Chinese-American experiences of history, young Donald finds out from Uncle Donald that his ancestors worked on the railroad and that his “great-great-granddaddy” was close to twelve years old, young Donald's age, when he came to work on the railroad in the United States. Uncle Donald draws his nephew's attention to a book of young Donald's father about the railroad and asks, “Did you ever wonder why there are no Chinese in (the picture of the Golden Spike Ceremony)?” But “Donald has never seen this book before. He has never seen this old photograph before” (24). Even so, “He has been there. His feet say so. He recognizes the snow. … Donald turns to go into his room and continues into the dream he knows is waiting for him” (24). The dreams Donald returns to are “bad,” we are soon told, because “they are all about Chinese and he does not understand” (25). At first, “they come on like a movie” and his access is mediated through his Western orientation to history. But he soon comes to see that his dreams are “real” and that “he wants to stay asleep and dream he is a powderboy, taking to prying iron and spiking rail across Nevada, and never wake up” (29). When he does wake up, he is happy to hear the sounds of the “real world. Even if that real world is Chinatown” (29). From his father, Donald learns an important lesson about responsibility and history. One must accept responsibility for recovering and remembering lost knowledge, Donald's father teaches him: “L
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