The Color of Fu‐Manchu: Orientalist Method in the Novels of Sax Rohmer
2009; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-5931.2009.00681.x
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
Resumo“My God!” he said, “how can I hope to deal with the author of such a scheme? I see the whole plan.” During and in the aftermath of the Wen Ho Lee episode—in which the Chinese American nuclear scientist was charged with mishandling classified information, jailed for nine months, only to be released after federal prosecutors dropped fifty-eight of fifty-nine felony counts—it was not uncommon to come across comparisons of Dr. Lee, a naturalized US citizen, and Dr. Fu Manchu,1 the enduring fictional creation of British writer Sax Rohmer. In one oft-cited example, an editorial in The Santa Fe New Mexican literally cast Lee as Fu Manchu in an imagined scenario: “Dr. Fu Manchu, that evil-genius character created by author Sax Rohmer, has made fools of the CIA again… .; For 10 years, he had been stealing nuclear bomb secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory” (“So Sorry” A7). Critics of Lee's treatment denounced the government's characterization of the case as being inspired by age-old “Yellow Peril” fictions: because of his race, Lee never could be truly “American” and so must be biologically inclined to serve Asian interests. The ultimate failure of the FBI to build a successful case against Lee can be seen as a narrative failure in that the authorities were unable to “author” what they thought was an accurate picture of Lee and so exert power over him.2 They fell short, in their eyes, of telling the “real story” of Wen Ho Lee to an interested American public—an especially embarrassing failure given their conviction that Lee himself was the deliberate author of a plot that they were unable to discover. This is the way with all modern criminal investigations and prosecutions, but the narrative metaphor has a special resonance here because of the facility with which both critics and supporters of Lee have introduced Fu Manchu as an appropriate discourse through which to think about the case. Despite the existence of many interesting parallels between the two, the comparison is less apt in this regard, for Rohmer's hero in the first three novels of the Fu Manchu series, Nayland Smith, never failed to unpack the designs of his arch-nemesis, and in piecing together his various observations and deductions into a viable narrative, he essentially “created” Fu Manchu for the reader. Although it is usually a specious enterprise to compare the situations of a fictional character and a “real” person, we can say here that the failure of the Justice Department to “get” Dr. Lee speaks to the power of narrative conventions, whether in the novel or in the courtroom, in establishing a coherent reality. Dr. Fu Manchu is one of those rare literary inventions—like Sherlock Holmes or maybe Tarzan—whose connection with its origin has dissolved to the point that it has attained a life of its own within the popular imagination, becoming a text able to generate its own logic and meaning independent of its creator. Today, his name is more likely to draw associations with stock yellow peril images than with the man who first coined it, Sax Rohmer.3 Even Rohmer seemed willing to distance himself somewhat from the creative process, attributing the arrival of Fu Manchu to otherworldly circumstances—namely the play of a ouija board, whose pointer, in response to Rohmer's question of “‘How […] can I best make a living?’” repeatedly spelled out “C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N” (Van Ash and Rohmer 63). But Fu Manchu is clearly a product of his age, and his longevity as an icon testifies to, more than anything, the durability of an imagined divide between Eastern and Western sensibilities. Indeed, British appreciation of the Chinese mind could not have grown any in the years following the Boxer Rebellion, when Westerners continued to struggle to comprehend the motivations of the Manchu Court during the protracted siege of the foreign legations in Peking. Although Rohmer was not the first novelist to speculate about the Yellow Peril, he was certainly the first to put a convincing face on it. Moreover, the Fu Manchu novels are notable for the consistency with which they manage contemporary understandings of the “Oriental” and the conventions of the late Victorian and Edwardian adventure/detective genre toward satisfying specific cultural needs, particularly those related to notions of empire and masculinity. Divorced from this context, Fu Manchu is nothing more than a simulacrum, a racist caricature; were it not for this context, however, it is unclear how popular the series and how pervasive the image of the “devil doctor” would have become, Rohmer being for a time, according to his biographer, the “most highly-paid fiction writer in the world” (Van Ash and Rohmer 183). Because detection ultimately carried with it the power of definition in his milieu, form and content worked together to consolidate understandings of the racial other and to restore a sense of control to a public anxious about national identity vis-à-vis its colonies and colonial subjects. Sax Rohmer, the pen name of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, was not the first or even the most famous writer to introduce the details of empire into the adventure/detective genre. A number of studies have investigated the extent to which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes is indebted to the Victorian culture of imperialism and its concomitant ideologies of empiricism and social Darwinism.4 Unlike earlier writers of adventure fiction such as Stevenson, Haggard, and Kipling, whose tales took place on the high seas, in Africa, and in India, both Doyle and Rohmer imagined the possibilities of high adventure within London and the surrounding countryside.5 The settings, particularly Rohmer's, can be seen as responding to the efficiency of the colonial and “civilizing” missions of Britain and other European nations: there were few to no opportunities or spaces left for adventure at the close of the Victorian era, a period notoriously marked by the European “scramble for Africa.” A character in Doyle's science-fiction novel The Lost World (1911) echoed the sorry state of would-be adventurers everywhere: “The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere” (qtd. in Bratlinger 38). At a loss for suitable proving grounds for white heroism and masculinity in their fiction, especially that in the service of the imperial project, Doyle and Rohmer reversed the direction of exploration so that instead of mapping uncharted territories, their heroes engaged a foreign presence within a besieged—and newly sinister—London. While the threat of the foreign is an important narrative device in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, it is articulated within the context of private intrigue: burglaries, inheritances, etc. For Rohmer, the fear of the foreign—that is, the Yellow Peril—was the raison d'être for and organizing principle of the Fu Manchu titles, not only enlisting the protagonist in service to the white race, but also establishing him as a post-Victorian masculine ideal while tacitly determining “proper” ways of reading and interpreting experience. Like the Holmes stories, the first three Fu Manchu novels feature a recurring character who both narrates and participates in the exploits of the ostensible hero, Nayland Smith. The narrator, Dr. James Petrie, is a civilian. Smith, unlike the amateur consulting detective Holmes, is an unambiguous representative of the state—a colonial commissioner in Burma with a “roving commission.” In 1913's The Insidiuous Dr. Fu-Manchu (Hereafter Insidious), the first book of the series, Smith is recalled to London on important business, “not in the interests of the British Government merely, but in the interests of the entire white race,” whose survival, he explains, depends on the success of his mission (4). He is chasing Dr. Fu Manchu, whom he fears has arrived in London ahead of him with aims of assassinating those with knowledge of his plans for world domination. Smith, “lean, agile, bronzed with the suns of Burma, was symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to combat the insidious enemy” (Rohmer, Insidious 137–38). He is a hero bearing all the marks of traditional masculinity: his skin is tanned from arduous field work in the Burmese colonies, and within minutes of his arrival he has rolled up his sleeve to show Petrie a knife wound suffered in the line of duty (3). Dr. Petrie, on the other hand, is engaged in writing a story, upon sight of which Smith remarks that he can provide his friend with such marketable material as to make him “independent of influenza and broken legs and shattered nerves and all the rest” (2). In this way Smith calls into question the “‘manliness’ of intellectual labor,” a concern of Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Tennyson, and Pater, who in their work sought to legitimate writing as a masculine enterprise (Adams 1–2). Petrie is feminized next to Smith, whose own “work” is dangerous, and never so domesticated as tending to minor (“influenza or broken legs”) or even imaginary (“shattered nerves and all the rest”) ailments as would befit a good mother. Throughout his association with Smith, however, Petrie is gradually masculinized, though never to a level equal to that of his friend.6 It is not until we are introduced to Fu Manchu and his murder group that we come to a more developed understanding of what it means to be a man, particularly a British man in Edwardian society. At the time Rohmer's short story “The Zayat Kiss” (which would become the first part of Insidious) is published in 1912, Britain was only a dozen years removed from the events of the Boxer Rebellion, the nativist uprising of a Chinese sect against foreign missionaries and diplomats which ultimately drew in imperial troops and led to the deaths of hundreds of foreigners and thousands of Chinese Christians, soldiers, and civilians. Cixi, the Empress Dowager, who effectively ruled China for almost four decades, and whom many observers blamed most for escalating the Boxer crisis, had only recently passed away, in 1908. And the last Manchu emperor, three-year-old Puyi, was forced to abdicate the throne of China a mere seven months before the British public was introduced to Rohmer's “Manchu,” whose name cannot help but evoke the memory of the last ruling family of China.7 For Smith to persecute the Chinese in London, whether agents of Fu Manchu or not, is not-so-subtly to reverse the roles of the British and Chinese during the summer of 1900 in Peking. Combined with British frustrations over the ongoing Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion was a startling challenge to British hegemony, coming as it did from a race that had hitherto been regarded as tractable and nonthreatening. The Boxers, so named because of the martial arts rites that they practiced and claimed made them invulnerable to bullets, clearly provided inspiration for the Si-Fan, the secret society bent on world domination to which Fu Manchu belongs, and for a model of British masculinity equivalent to, at the very least, their martial spirit and courage. Even holy men are re-masculinized in the face of the Chinese; the first two books involve the Rev. J.D. Eltham, a.k.a. “Parson Dan,” the “fighting missionary” who “with a garrison of a dozen cripples and a German doctor held the hospital at Nan-Yang against two hundred Boxers” (Rohmer, Insidious 64). At the same time, however, British masculinity depended on the man's ability to maintain his civilized identity while in the midst of the foreign presence. For the British, the dark side of the imperial enterprise was the potential for the colonizer to “regress” to the state of the colonized. One of the most famous literary examples of the white man “going native” appears in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1902), in which a depraved Kurtz comes to symbolize the rapacity of Belgian imperialism in the Congo. A similar case occurs in Insidious, when Fu Manchu wounds a Scotland Yard inspector with a poisoned needle, causing the man to devolve into an animal-like state. Petrie explains that the man “had returned to primitive savagery and some of his food had been that of the lower animals, though he had not scrupled to steal, as we learned when his lair was discovered” (373). Beyond this fear of individual regression was the greater anxiety that whole civilizations—the British Empire, namely—could lapse into barbarism as the forces of degeneration, decay, and decadence penetrated into British culture and even British racial “stock.” So while Nayland Smith vigorously pursues Dr. Fu Manchu, muscularly dispatching “Oriental” henchmen with no remorse, he also quite carefully abides by the rules of fair play, lest he precipitate a moral decline in his own character. Thus, on more than one occasion, Smith allows Fu Manchu or his underlings to escape out of an ingrained sense of obligation or duty, even though doing so means abetting the Yellow Movement itself. In one instance, he strikes a deal with Fu Manchu for Petrie's life, and when given the opportunity to capture or kill the Chinese doctor, he is restrained by his word: “I curse myself for an honorable fool … No one could dispute my right to shoot you dead where you stand.” Later, when Petrie encourages him to stray from the letter of his promise, Smith refuses “through clenched teeth,” explaining that a “servant of the Crown in the East makes his motto: ‘Keep your word, though it break your neck!’” (Rohmer, Insidious 228). To do any less would be to subvert his own cause—that of white supremacy and the moral obligation of the British to rule over its darker-skinned colonial subjects—and in effect perpetrate the same kind of work as his adversary. In his book Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Robert G. Lee suggests that part of Nayland Smith's authority resides in his ability to resist the trappings of an eroticized East (117). Indeed, it would seem that it is Dr. Petrie who consistently imagines romantic possibilities while on the course of his duty, being particularly seduced by those women of “Oriental” lineage—the Arabian Karamenah, the Eurasian Zarmi, or a Tibetan princess. Petrie's relationship with Karamenah, who is at first a slave of Fu Manchu, provides the substance for many of the subplots of the first three books, as she regularly is shuttled back and forth like personal property between Fu Manchu and Petrie. Few moments of real tension exist between Smith and Petrie, but those that do arise because of the latter putting his personal interests—that is, Karamenah—ahead of their common mission. At one point in The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916), Smith is utterly disgusted by what he perceives as Petrie's weakness: “‘You know that she is utterly false, yet a glance or two from those dark eyes of hers can make a fool of you! A woman made a fool of me, once; but I learned my lesson; you have failed to learn yours. If you are determined to go to pieces on the rock that broke up Adam, do so! But don't involve me in the wreck, Petrie—for that might mean a yellow emperor of the world, and you know it!’” (57). Rather than place Smith in a long line of traditional Victorian gentlemen, whose failures and triumphs played out in the mind or parlor, Rohmer simply elected to eliminate women from his hero's life altogether. To be sure, any type of romantic relationship between Smith and the women in the first three books is precluded by his singular attention to Fu Manchu. Although Petrie's infatuations are intended to satisfy expectations of romantic love in Rohmer's quasi-historical romances, Smith's pursuit of Fu Manchu yields an erotic quality of its own. That Fu Manchu is a sexually ambiguous character owes in part to the ways in which the West has defined itself against the East over the centuries. Rohmer's biographers speak of his ambition at one time to write “a romance of Ancient Egypt which should place him at one bound beside Rider Haggard, or perhaps Flaubert” (Van Ash and Rohmer 27). The comparison with Flaubert is apt in the regard that both writers were superior Orientalists, particularly in the ways in which they experienced and represented the East through an eroticized lens. “Woven through all of Flaubert's Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing,” writes Edward Said, “is an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex. … Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could explore” (188). The Orient, as the eroticized counterpart to the West, is to be understood, dominated, and domesticated, a process that would necessitate a degree of feminization.8 We can see this Orientalist attitude in Nayland Smith, who advises Dr. Petrie of the proper way to deal with the slave girl Karamenah: You don't know the Oriental mind as I do; but I quite understand the girl's position. She fears the English authorities, but would submit to capture by you! If you would only seize her by the hair, drag her to some cellar, hurl her down and stand over her with a whip, she would tell you everything she knows, and salve her strange Eastern conscience with the reflection that speech was forced from her. I am not joking; it is so, I assure you. And she would adore you for your savagery, deeming you forceful and strong! An inability to dominate Fu Manchu in a like manner leads to a growing sense of frustration in Smith, the extent of which one can apprehend given that Fu Manchu would seem to be able to be dominated based on his appearance and demeanor. Petrie's initial description of the Chinese doctor suggests an ambiguous, if not feminine, sexuality: “He wore a plain yellow robe, of a hue almost identical to that of his smooth, hairless countenance. His hands were large, long and bony, and he held them knuckles upward, and rested his pointed chin upon their thinness. He had a great, high brow, crowned with sparse, neutral-colored hair” (Rohmer, Insidious 71–2 55). Often discovered while reclining or in repose—once in an opium stupor—amid luxurious carpets, plush cushions, and perfumed incense, Fu Manchu regularly completes an eroticized tableau as its centerpiece. If Petrie's manhood is suspect because of his infatuation with Karamenah, then Smith escapes such a charge only to the extent that he can control his desire to himself “stand over” Fu Manchu. Because the lucrative Fu Manchu franchise precluded Nayland Smith from ever getting his man, Smith's achievement is measured by how well he can disrupt his enemy's plans and how often he can repulse him from England's shores. In this regard, Smith succeeds only insofar as he is able to anticipate the moves of his nemesis, to out think him, a skill no doubt honed by his long acquaintance with the Oriental mind.9 The “rational” mind has long been understood as a necessary component of Victorian manliness, and Smith proves himself up to the task in part because of how his manhood functions within imperialist ideology vis-à-vis the Oriental “other.” He is what Lee calls “the archetypal area studies expert,” a profession borne out of the imperial enterprise to know and better manage the colonized subject (116). Fluent in the “jargons of the East, Far and Near,” Smith relies upon such knowledge to meet the challenge of Fu Manchu, whose assassination methods—the Zayat Kiss, the Call of Siva, the Flower of Silence—involve Oriental agents and exotic flora and fauna imported from the East (Rohmer, Insidious 237). So capable is Smith that he frequently demonstrates his intimate knowledge of the Oriental by passing as one, whether it is as a fez-adorned Arab or a bearded Hindu. Every plot of Fu Manchu's he foils by dint of his superior knowledge of the motivations and behaviors of Oriental people cumulatively reinforces a racist logic that justifies the right and the wisdom of the British imperial project as a “civilizing” mission. The state itself, according to Petrie, is an agent of God's will: “The mere thought that our trifling error of judgment tonight in tarrying a moment too long might mean the victory of Fu-Manchu, might mean the turning of the balance which a wise providence had adjusted between the white and yellow races, was appalling” (Rohmer, Insidious 242). Any mental lapse on the part of its representatives jeopardizes not only their lives but also the legitimacy of its governance over its darker-skinned colonial subjects. In the Fu Manchu series, the West's struggle with the Yellow Peril is figured as a struggle over discourse: who gets to define whom, in other words. Whether imagined as Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes, cheap Chinese labor, a Japanese American fifth-column, or Communist North Vietnam, the Yellow Peril throughout history has been nothing if not a plot to interrupt the grand narrative of Western “progress.” Thus the greatest threat posed by Fu Manchu is his potential to usurp narrative power from the West, dramatized by his repeated attempts to assassinate those authorized to discursively define the East: scholars, colonial officers, missionaries, et al. Beginning with their first assignment, Smith and Petrie continually find themselves on a desperate mission to protect a Westerner who has learned some secret of an Oriental conspiracy and is set to publicize his findings. Fu Manchu's criminal act, then, might be understood not as murder so much as digression, his disruption of the flow of a coherent Orientalist narrative—the Yellow Peril. Justice is the restoration of official narrative power, symbolized by Smith's unraveling of Fu Manchu's intricate plots. Peter Thoms observes that the detective defines the contours of his power partly in “conquering the ostensible criminal by absorbing him and his deviant plot within his own controlling story” (3). As a “royally empowered” state official and detective, Smith exercises extraordinary license over the course of his investigations, but it is specifically his entitlement to “absorb” alternate plots into his own—sanctioning his narrative with the authority of the Crown—that demonstrates the full range of his power. Called upon to “solve” a case, Smith is asked, in effect, to fashion a story out of disparate pieces of evidence, to create something out of almost nothing. Fu Manchu has no power to define himself within a narrative logic that dictates his role as digressive, withholding the nature of his designs for as long as possible in order to build suspense. (Despite the titles of the novels, Fu Manchu makes conspicuously few appearances in the first three.) On the other hand, Smith's narrative function is inherently progressive, requiring him to discover that information and to interpret it for others, including the reader. Within the double discourses of the Yellow Peril and the detective story, it is impossible for Fu Manchu to be a Chinese patriot or nationalist because his attempts at self-definition—assassinations and the like—are, surprisingly, defensive maneuvers, responding as they do to the defining Orientalist claims of others. We can only know Fu Manchu as Smith and Petrie do because their interpretation is, in fact, all that we need to know about him given how much the detective genre scripts our expectation and reception of narrative. Because two of the main questions traditionally attending detective stories, that is, who committed the crime and why, are self-evident in the Fu Manchu tales, the elements of mystery and suspense in Rohmer's narratives inhere in the questions of who else did it and how. As for how, the Fu Manchu novels follow the successful model of Doyle's popular Sherlock Holmes stories. Petrie and Smith arrive at a crime scene, collect evidence, and begin their investigation. However, the clues provided by Petrie's observation rarely are enough for the reader to independently determine how Fu Manchu carried out his assassination plots, successful or unsuccessful. The reader becomes like Petrie, who must stay his need to know until Smith is ready to introduce the one clue that will make the narrative cohere. In the case of the Zayat Kiss, for instance, Smith deduces from a mark on a corpse's hand and a perfumed envelope that the man was killed by the introduction of a deadly creature attracted to the perfume—a scenario nearly impossible to deduce until Smith produces the silk string used to lower the creature down a chimney. How the reader can participate in the mystery, and so derive the sense of pleasure expected from engaging with the detective genre, is in the detection of other criminals. The narratives encourage the reader to suspect those characters who are in any way involved with the scene of the crime. Again, following Doyle and Poe before him, Rohmer has Smith explicate the designs of Fu Manchu to an often-incredulous Petrie and reader at the same time, thus initiating the reader into the process of observation, deduction, and, most important, passing judgment. How one is led to observe and deduce, however, proves to have no scientific rationale at all. In his reading of the Fu Manchu novels, William F. Wu states that Fu Manchu's regular association with characters of other Asian nationalities reinforces his “status as a leader specifically of Asian people,” so that “crime by Asian people or objects means the presence of Fu Manchu behind the scenes” (166–67). This specious association of criminality with race recalls nineteenth-century pseudoscience, but here its logic is naturalized by the authority of the detective as an impartial interpreter of a past reality. Smith's own deductive methods in this regard often amount to no more than simple racism, such as when he explains the participation of a Chinese servant, Kwee, in the attempted murder of a famous Orientalist: “‘Can you doubt it? The presence of a concealed Chinaman surely is sufficient. Kwee, I feel assured, was one of the murder group, though probably he had only recently entered that mysterious service’” (Rohmer, Insidious 141). Kwee, dead from the circumstances of the crime, cannot defend himself against the tautological argument that implicates him simply because he was a “Chinaman” and not in plain sight. As it turns out, Fu Manchu is not just a leader of “Asian” people but of all non-white people, including Chinese, Burmese, and Indians, and also Turks, Greeks, Jews, blacks, and mulattos; each of them, to some degree, is suspect in the eyes of Smith by virtue of race and inevitably in the service of Fu Manchu. So uncritically is the reader supposed to enter into this logic, that, at times, the mystery at hand is not to discover if a person is guilty but if a person is an Oriental, his or her guilt a given if the latter is true. In The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Smith and Petrie visit Kegan Van Roon, an American Orientalist set to publish a book of “sensational revelations” on China, and who had barely escaped with his life from the Ho-Nan province. Petrie remarks that Van Roon “wore smoked glasses, and had a clean-shaven, olive face, with a profusion of jet black hair,” and later he observes him gesture with “one thin yellow hand” (Rohmer, Return 212, 219). Not long after, Petrie discovers that though “highly educated, and possibly an American citizen, Van Roon was a Chinaman!” and an imposter of the real Van Roon, who had been murdered in Ho-Nan (233). The clear challenge put before the reader is to arrive at the same conclusion, which, in light of the established processes of detection, is not a difficult proposition. The real surprise is not the revelation of the murder of the real Van Roon, of course, but the possibility that a “Chinaman” could seem so much like an American, maybe even be a citizen. In 1932, just as MGM was to begin work on a film adaptation of The Mask of Fu Manchu, Chinese diplomats in Washington protested the film on the grounds that it hurt China's “image.” The protests were successful in holding up production of future films, leading Rohmer's financial advisers to suggest bringing “an injunction against the Chinese government for ‘loss of revenue’” (Van Ash and Rohmer 214–15). Rohmer, to his credit, refused, considering the complaint understandable. Given how much his career depended on the demonization of the Chinese, even Rohmer must have sensed that such an act would be perceived as the height of hubris. However, almost seventy years later, Notra Trulock, a former Energy Department official, filed a defamation of character lawsuit against Wen Ho Lee, alleging that Lee authorized his supporters to publicize that racism had much to do with his jailing. It is somehow fitting that the only lawsuit brought against the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Energy Department by Wen Ho Lee himself is for invasion of privacy—for the government's leaking of Dr. Lee's name to the press during the course of the investigation and so taking a measure of control over his identity away from him. More fitting, perhaps, is the dispute between Lee and the government over his autobiography, whose publication censors sought to block. Lee's efforts toward self-determination are laudable, if not definitive. In August 2001, former federal prosecutor Randy I. Bellows released an 800-page Justice Department report that, while highly critical of the FBI and the Energy Department in their investigation of the Chinese espionage case, concluded that racism played no part in the probe that singled out Wen Ho Lee as the prime suspect. Afterward, some former Justice Department officials continued to assert that Dr. Lee was, indeed, a spy for China (Gertz A1). Such talk, if nothing else, augers that there will be no shortage of theories about the history and motivations of Dr. Lee, who, like Fu Manchu, never seemed to speak on his own behalf as much as those who pledged to be on his trail. David Shih is Associate Professor of English and the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusiveness Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He teaches courses in Asian American literature and has published on the writers Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton, and Louis Chu. He is currently co-editing an anthology of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing about Asians and Asian Americans.
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