Disappearing Moon Cafe
Page 27
These issues appear throughout Disappearing Moon Cafe, which needs to be read in relation to Lee’s reflections on the challenges of intersectional activism. In this regard, her work as a co-editor of Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures (1990), a collection of dialogues and writings based on an important 1988 feminist conference that included “women writers and performers from the Native Indian, Asian-Canadian and lesbian communities in B.C.” (12), offers a vivid illustration of how she negotiated these tensions. In her own contributions, Lee deploys two contrasting metaphors, the “pain of glass” and the “garden.” The former describes how racism, sexism, and homophobia create “intricate” and “internalized” divisions between and among women of colour and white women (181). Lee writes:
Now if only this “pain of glass” weren’t in the way.
It is glass, isn’t it? It feels cold, impenetrable, smooth, hard. I can see you, but I can’t feel you.
When I reach out for the feel of another human being, I hit a barrier which is sometimes invisible, sometimes just hard to describe. Its density is impossible to gauge, because when I first encountered it (about ten lifetimes ago), I was very young, had no tools with which to describe it. By now, I have a fairly accurate and intuitive way of comparing its various forms and thicknesses . . . (178)
Glass promises transparency and access but remains impassable; it brings up “bleeding wounds” and “shards of pain” and engenders feelings of hurt, confusion, longing and, perhaps most important, anger (181). For Lee, the pain of glass is an apt metaphor for feminism’s own struggles with barriers of race and sexuality.
The possibility of overcoming these barriers comes across in the image of the garden. Grappling with what it means “to speak on the writer’s role in the community” (106), Lee invokes the garden as a space of cultivation and nourishment where writers can “hopefully [move] towards an emotional stability that will sustain them” (105). In this intimate space, “I can only invite anyone who wants to come, into my garden. And we can talk about living in a garden, within or without the context of that world out there. We can talk about the garden as home, a room of her own, a guerrilla base, or the garden as her identity, her inner well-being, her taking back of her own sexuality” (107). For Lee, the garden signifies how speaking and writing can create new relationships that can overcome the pain of glass: “I don’t need to define you, you know who you are. It’s real important to me that beauty like ours survive, not only survive, but get free, and grow” (108).
These contrasting images offer a poetics of activism that conveys the experience of oppression while imagining alternative futures. Towards the end of Disappearing Moon Cafe, which was written around the same time as The Telling It Book Collective’s conference and reflected similar concerns, Lee includes a memorable scene entitled “Feeding the Dead.” There, she conjures the main characters for a cross-generational conversation in which each woman is given space to speak and allowed to speak directly to the others. They express their anger and pain while reflecting on the power structures that have constrained their lives. When Kae’s maternal grandmother Fong Mei finally speaks, she expresses bitterness at her treatment, but also admits her cowardice, her unwillingness to give up the comforts and security of domesticity in order to regain her freedom: “‘Imagine, I could have run away with any one of those lonely Gold Mountain men, all without mothers-in-law. This was a land of fresh starts; I could have lived in the mountains like an indian woman legend. If men didn’t make me happy enough, then I could have moved on’” (188). But even as she speaks, her youngest daughter, Suzie, whose “spirit is the most restless, most at risk,” cries out: “Knot after knot after knot! . . . All this bondage we volunteer on ourselves! Untie them! Untie me! Don’t tie any more!” (189). Re-reading this scene with the pain of glass and the garden in mind, we can see how Lee turns the novel into a space in which she translates her activist commitments into the idiom of fiction. What made Disappearing Moon Cafe particularly powerful was its ability to bring the activist conversations in which she participated to the attention of mainstream readers. In doing so, however, it became enmeshed in a different set of cultural politics about race and literary culture in Canada.
Political or ideological constructions are devices used to inspire the belief in common ethnicity. It is this understanding that enabled me as a writer to play with and shift the subject position and thus the power relations of the characters in my novel.
(Lee, “Cultural Politics” 10)
Since the 1970s, Canada has imagined itself as a multicultural nation in which cultural and ethnic differences are accorded a high degree of recognition and respect. Multiculturalism has become a key sign of its democratic aspirations as well as a break from its racist pasts. But as Smaro Kamboureli has argued, multiculturalism has resulted in a widespread “sedative politics” in which ethnic, racial, and cultural differences are contained and managed without addressing ongoing forms of racism, inequality, and exclusion. Under such circumstances, minority writers in Canada are often expected to write about their socio-cultural identity, history, and experience in narrowly defined terms, and their texts are often assumed to be autobiographical and auto-ethnographic even when they are not working in these modes. Rey Chow calls this predicament “coercive mimeticism,” a process “in which those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected . . . to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them, a process in which they are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imagings of them as ethnics” (107). Put differently, minority writers are expected to mimic what are essentially stereotypes of their own cultures, expectations that consolidate standards of authenticity that are then wielded against those who deviate from them.
Disappearing Moon Cafe was published only three years after the federal government passed the Multiculturalism Act in 1988. In this context, its success could easily be read as yet another affirmation of multiculturalism’s ability to integrate previously excluded groups. Indeed, Lee is well aware that works by authors such as herself can be co-opted and depoliticized. In an interview with C. Allyson Lee, she expresses suspicion at how the novel was embraced by “mainstream and dominant Canadian literary culture” (399): “I think it was a very angry novel when I think back now. That was kind of, I guess, offensive, but in the end all those points worked for the book in terms of dominant literary culture” (400). Lee’s oppositional critique involves a deep engagement with the historical conditions in which Chinese migrants settled in Canada and interacted with its diverse cultures. However, unlike texts that seek to put forth a sanitized and progressive narrative, Disappearing Moon Cafe persistently questions conventional understandings of history and identity. In doing so, it cultivates what Kamboureli calls a “mastery of discomfort,” a refusal to abide by multiculturalism’s propensity to turn minority cultures into passive objects (130). To read Disappearing Moon Cafe closely and carefully is not to master its contents in terms of conventional ethnic histories and identities but to pay attention to how it questions these very boundaries.
As a starting point, it is important to note how Disappearing Moon Cafe consistently conveys differences within Chinese communities, a point exemplified by Lee’s decision to spell the word “chinese” with a lower-case “c” throughout. Reflecting the demographics of migration to the West Coast, many characters belong to families that originate in Southern China’s Guangdong Province, particularly Hoy Saan (also known as Toisan or Taishan) county. But Lee also includes characters that signal the diversity of Chinese diasporas. For example, Song Ang, Kae’s paternal grandmother, is Hakka, a group with a unique language and cultural traditions that are distinguished by not being identified with a particular home region (Hakka, literally “guest people,” have migrated throughout Southern China and the diaspora). Seto Chi, Kae’s nanny, is an ethnic Chinese from Malaya who was adopted and raised by
a South Asian family who brought her to Canada. Disappearing Moon Cafe repeatedly shows how biological descent and cultural identity do not neatly coincide: Kelora, Kae’s maternal great-grandmother, is an Indigenous woman of possible part-European descent who was raised to be bi-cultural by her Chinese step-father. Her son Ting An, whom Gwei Chang takes in after Kelora’s death but never directly acknowledges as his biological offspring, grows up in Chinatown with scant memories of his early childhood. While the instability of identities has long been a key tenet of postmodern culture, Lee bases her characters on the particular history of migration and inter-racial intimacies that flourished in the contact zone of the West Coast.
Because this context is crucial for understanding the novel, I have found it necessary to provide an overview of Chinese Canadian history in my classes, in part because this information is unevenly taught in Canadian schools. A brief conventional account would go something like this: In 1788, a small number of Chinese arrived on the West Coast with Captain John Meares and some eventually married into Indigenous communities. In 1858, the first group of Chinese settlers arrived in Victoria from San Francisco for the Gold Rush and Chinese soon found work in mining, fisheries, forestry, and other industries. (As I have already mentioned, most of these arrivals originated in a small area in Southern China with a long history of emigration to Southeast Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere.) The Canadian Pacific Railroad, which was built from 1881 to 1885 and connected British Columbia to the rest of Canada, would not have been completed without the deadly exploitation of Chinese workers. Afterwards, the Canadian government imposed a Head Tax on all Chinese arrivals and would incrementally increase this tax until 1923, when it halted almost all further immigration. Chinese exclusion only ended in 1947, after Chinese Canadians had fought in the Second World War for a country that still considered them aliens. Post-1947 changes such as the granting of citizenship, relaxation of immigration laws, and increasing economic prosperity would ameliorate some of the overt racism that characterized the so-called “white Canada” period.
This kind of information is indispensable if we are to grasp the significance of details such as patriarch Wong Gwei Chang’s quest for the bones of deceased Chinese CPR workers, the “shortage” of Chinese women during the exclusion period, and the characterization of Kae’s father as a returning veteran. But Disappearing Moon Cafe is not simply a fictionalized historical timeline. In a lecture delivered in Korea in 1996, Lee, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, explains that a critical approach to history is “attentive to the problematics of its production and the interests it serves” (“Cultural Politics” 11). “Compartmentalized”—and we might add neatly linear—understandings of the past leave “too many unanswered questions,” and Lee goes on to pose some lines of inquiry:
if the white nation builders of the last century needed cheap labour for railroad-building, then why did they not exploit the indigenous populations, already in the Americas? What suddenly made the Chinese so much more exploitable than the natives?
What made them go against traditional teachings and leave their homeland when the countless generations of Chinese had not ever been inclined to leave before? The first Chinese emigrants left during a chaotic period of civil wars of which the Taiping Rebellion [1850 –1864] was one. How much of the social and economic disruptions were due to aggressive western colonization in China? And how does this relate to the history of colonization in the New World? (“Cultural Politics” 10)
Unlike sociological or historiographic approaches, Disappearing Moon Cafe grapples with these questions through the medium of narrative, generating different insights into the legacies of the past.
Most notably, the novel maps the Wong family story onto the contours of Chinese Canadian history. The text begins with a family tree that lays out the plot in a compact manner. In doing so, it aligns our perspective with that of Kae, whose retelling of her family history loosely frames the novel. As I noted earlier, our identification with Kae makes us aware of the risks of exploring dark pasts, let alone sharing them with others. Not surprisingly, her mother cautions “It’s best that what I tell you does not go beyond these four walls” when she reveals their family history upon the birth of Kae’s son (23). But of course, the transgression of this prohibition is the novel’s raison d’être. As a storyteller, Lee is at her best when generating suspense through plot devices such as the incest taboo as well as the betrayals and mis-recognitions that recur throughout. By making the passing of generations—and therefore the operations of sexuality and reproduction—its centerpiece, Disappearing Moon Cafe emphasizes how the Wong family genealogy repeatedly departs from the hetero-normative and ethno-centric assumptions that have long governed diasporic kinship. By showing how these norms rely on the systemic oppression of women through the reduction of their bodies to the patriarchal demands of reproduction, Lee traces the ways in which the violent underpinnings of Chinese Canadian communities are perpetrated by one generation onto the next, often by women themselves. By creating characters that possess a degree of agency and choice despite constricting social and personal situations, the novel also calls for a kind of accountability, a self-critique that is at the same time a systemic interrogation of race, gender, and sexuality.
I wanted to trace a trajectory that was not only genealogical or chronological, but also a process of self-discovery as one moves away from a place of ignorance to a place of awareness. This was an understanding that could only be arrived at through a sense of history and place which I had to find or reinvent because it was not always readily available to me. (Lee, “Cultural Politics” 13)
Disappearing Moon Cafe takes up these theoretical, indeed metaphysical, issues by grounding them not only in the experiences of a particular cultural group but also, and just as importantly, in a specific set of places. One of the advantages of teaching Disappearing Moon Cafe in Vancouver is that the landscapes and settings of the novel are familiar, or at least accessible. But many of my students, even those who come from ethnic Chinese backgrounds, have spent very little, if any, time in Chinatown, which is no longer the primary cultural and commercial hub of the sprawling community. Often depicted as seedy and unsafe, recent gentrification has drastically altered the area as new condominium towers dwarf historical buildings, long-standing shops and businesses close down, and long-time residents are displaced by more affluent newcomers. Responding to these changes, a new generation of activists, including a number of my students, have dedicated tremendous time and effort to revitalizing the community in collaboration with elders and established activists.
Reading Disappearing Moon Cafe with my students in this context makes it possible to trace connections between present-day struggles and those of earlier times—including the activist movements that informed Lee’s own life and career. To a certain degree, the novel was also searching for similar precedents. The main historical event around which it is based is the 1924 death of Janet Smith, a nursemaid from Scotland whose murder was blamed on Wong Foon Sing, a Chinese houseboy. In Lee’s retelling, Gwei Chang, motivated by memories of earlier racial violence, immediately recognizes the possibility for a dangerous backlash against the Chinese and brings other Chinatown leaders together to plot strategy. The story soon turns into a power struggle between older and younger leaders who disagree with each other over the best way to deal with the impending threat. Wong makes a calculated decision to side with the younger leaders, who subsequently mount a successful campaign against proposed retaliatory laws. The Smith case, we are told, was “Chinatown’s first real success story,” a turning point in the longer struggle for equality across successive generations (227). Elsewhere, the novel mentions how young men who enlisted in the armed forces during World War II would embody Chinatown’s hopes for the future, and Lee, as we have seen, herself belongs to a generation of activists who were crucial in struggles to preserve Chinatown in the 1970s and 1980s.
But my sense is that Disappearing Moon Cafe’s ultimate conce
rn is not to create a heroic narrative of resistance but rather to convey the localized effects of racial, class, and gender oppression, the thick personal and communal histories that come together in the space of Chinatown. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon uses the figure of haunting to conceptualize how “abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts
felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied” (xvi). Gordon urges us to see ghosts “not simply [as] a dead or a missing person, but a social figure” that leads to “that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course” (8). Haunting produces the “transformative recognition” (8) that “when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done” (xvi). It is this ethical dimension of haunting in the novel, often couched in culturally specific practices of ancestral veneration and other engagements with the ghostly, that makes the political imagination of Disappearing Moon Cafe relevant today.
In recent years, I have devised an assignment that asks students to choose a location in Chinatown that appears in the novel, conduct research on its history, and analyze how Lee uses it as a setting. They visit the site in person to observe what stands there now as well as attend to their embodied, sensual experience of the place. The assignment has a double goal: to encourage students to reflect on how our understanding of, and relationship to, space and place is conditioned by different discourses and social structures, and to prompt them to confront the ongoing erasure of spatial memory taking place right before their eyes. Many of the buildings mentioned in Disappearing Moon Cafe, such as those of the Chinese Benevolent Association and the Wong Association, still stand today but others have been torn down or significantly re-purposed.