A short guide to the art of dining, slumming, touring, wildlife, and women for hire in New York's Chinatown and Chinese restaurants

Oxford Art Journal

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2003, Pages

  Christ, John X ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62649096340     PISSN: 01426540     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/oxartj/26.2.71     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. Robert W. Snyder and Rebecca Zurier use a similar model in investigating the work of the Ashcan School artists by placing their art in the context of contemporary magazine articles, guidebooks, and other popular forms of entertainment. Their work serves as a valuable model for this essay. See 'Picturing the City', in Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (National Museum of American Art in Association with W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1995).
2. In contrast, Anthony Lee's discussion of the representation of San Francisco's Chinatown in Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2001), despite its historical rigour and sensitivity to urban development, fails to draw out the connections between popular media, urban culture, and elite artistic production.
3. I first began research on a comparison of these paintings in a course given by Michael Leja on turn-of-the-century New York City at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His insights, along with class discussions, have been of tremendous value in working through my thoughts on this essay.
4. Slumming was a form of entertainment in which usually middle-class, white tourists would visit tenements and other economically impoverished neighbourhoods and ethnic ghettos, in a word 'slums', to experience what seemed another world.
5. It should be noted that although the Chinatown tourist trade was growing rapidly at this time, this was not a moment in US history of great Chinese immigration. It was preceded by a large influx from the 1860s until the 1880s (ended by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) and was proceeded by the immigration boom starting in the 1960s. For a good discussion of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its relation to Chinese-American labour and the formation of New York's Chinatown, see the first chapter of Peter Kwong, Chinatown, N. Y. : Labor and Politics, 1930-1950 (New Press: New York, 1979).
6. Arthur Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?: The Chinese in New York, 1800-1950 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: Madison, 1997), p. 97.
7. Gwen Kinkead, Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society (Harper Collins: New York, 1992), p. 47, suggests a similar pattern of development. The Chinese could not break out of their ghettoed existence, he suggests, so they instead brought outside capital in.
8. James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, 1993), offers a similar argument, explaining how a stereotyped Asian-American identity was constructed by white Americans, but also how the Chinese in the United States came to be complicit with this process through their own cultural presentation to outsiders. Moy, however, does not fall into the trap of seeking to establish a more authentic Asian identity, a quest that he sees among many Asian-Americans and of which he is strongly critical.
9. Bonner, What Brought Thee Hither?, p. 107. While I agree with Bonner, as is clear, I would emphasise that Chinatown's dangerous image was not wholly constructed. Pre-existing tendencies toward crime, often violent, were also being played upon by the growing tourist industry.
10. For a compelling history of Coney Island, see John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (Hill and Wang: New York, 1978).
11. William Brown Meloney, Munsey's Magazine, 1909, pp. 231-2;
12. as reprinted in Frank Oppel, Tales of Gaslight New York (Castle Books: Edison, NJ, 1985), pp. 229-41.
13. Part of the perceived danger of Chinatown was the result of the local tongs, associations that controlled much of the activities in Chinatown. Killings and wars between tongs were not uncommon in contesting territorial rule. Tong wars remained common at least until the early 1930s, when the US Attorney in Manhattan stepped in. Tongs were part of the danger, but also, and for that reason, part of the attraction. Sightseers would hire guides to see, among other things such as opium dens and slave girls, sites of tong murders. See, for example, Kinkead, Portrait of a Closed Society, p. 47.
14. Meloney, 'Slumming in New York's Chinatown', p. 233.
15. Konrad Bercovici, Around the World in New York (The Century Co. : New York, 1924), pp. 107-8, also describes the 'numerous places especially conducted for the benefit of a sight-seer'.
16. An interesting depiction of the staging of an image of Chinatown, one not unlike Fig. 6, is A. B. Shults, 'A Strolling Photographer in Chinatown, New York', Harper's Weekly, vol. 27, no. 1392, 25 August 1883, p. 532. A photographer is shown taking a staged photograph of a police officer standing in front of a number of Chinese. The non-Chinese depicted in this image are clearly out of the camera's frame.
17. Rupert Hughes, The Real New York (The Smart Set Publishing Company: London and New York, 1904), pp. 156-7.
18. For example, see Grace M. Mayer, Once Upon a City: New York from 1890 to 1910 as Photographed by Byron and Described by Grace M. Mayor (Macmillan Company in association with the Museum of the City of New York: New York, 1958), p. 418.
19. For more information on the invention of chop suey and chow mein as well as a good general history of the Chinese in the United States see B. L. Sung, The Story of the Chinese in America: Their struggle for survival, acceptance, and full participation in American life - from the Gold Rush to the Present (Collier Books: New York, 1967).
20. Coburn quoted in Percy North, Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910-1920 (High Museum of Art: Atlanta, 1991), pp. 36-7.
21. Weber quoted in North, Max Weber, p. 40.
22. Weber's interest in synesthesia further complicates his relationship to the visual realm - 'To hear is to see, to see is to touch, . . . ' as he once remarked (Weber quoted in North, Max Weber, p. 28).
23. Eric Rosenberg, 'In Place of Hand and Eye and Drooping Head: Max Weber's Pictures of New York, 1913-1916', chapter in All Within Reach of Human Sense: Moments in a History of Art in America, 1492-1942 (University of California Press: forthcoming), makes similar claims for Weber's relationship to visual experience, that vision 'must be fabricated . . . rather than trusted to material encounter'. Rosenberg's essay stands as one of the few critical assessments of Weber's artistic production that I have encountered. Although he approaches his subject matter from a different perspective, many of the interpretations of Weber's Chinese Restaurant that I offer parallel the account of the representational instabilities, the slippages of identity, and the 'evisceration' of the body that Rosenberg finds in Weber's artistic production.
24. Rosenberg's essay, 'In Place of Hand and Eye and Drooping Head', has been of particular help to me in puzzling through Coburn's retention of the picturesque through the evasion of 'the politics of vision'.
25. Bonner, What Brought Thee Hither?, p. 105, quotes a period guidebook in which the author describes Chinatown as follows: 'At all times the streets are kaleidoscopic'
26. Incidentally, one of the other paintings he did on glass is Prestidigitator, 1916. The trickery and sleight of hand of a prestidigitator might be tellingly related to the urban spectacles such as Coney Island, the White Way, and Chinatown that Stella also painted.
27. These postings erroneously came to be known as the 'Chinese newspaper'.
28. The inference that the curved form may be a reference to a dragon is Francis Naumann's, New York Dada: 1915-23 (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1994), p. 145. Although I think this may slightly overliteralise the image, I think it is a good assumption nonetheless.
29. John Sloan's New York Scene: From the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence, 1906-1913 (Harper and Row: New York, 1965), pp. 292, 299, 300, and 305.
30. One can assert this claim on the basis of Sloan's diary entries.
31. For a discussion of this neighbourhood see Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1992). A section on the Tenderloin begins on page 203.
32. See also Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Vintage Books: New York, 1991), p. 17. He states that as opposed to the Bowery, which was frequented by the poor, in the Tenderloin could be found many slummers partaking of all sorts of 'vice'.
33. For a discussion more specifically of the importance of this neighbourhood in Sloan's artistic production see Suzanne L. Kinser, 'Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan', Prospects, vol. 9, 1984, p. 234.
34. Kinser, 'Prostitutes', pp. 242-3. Although it is a Massachusetts-based study, I agree with Kinser that it sheds light on the kind of relationship that could develop between prostitutes and Chinese restaurants in a broader context.
35. See Kinser, 'Prostitutes', for a relatively convincing and thorough argument for a reading of the women in these paintings as prostitutes. Gilfoyle too, in City of Eros, offers a good account of prostitution in the paintings and prints of the Ashcan School.
36. Rebecca Zurier and Robert Snyder, Metropolitan Lives, p. 187, have already made a step in this direction: 'The titles of some of Sloan's pictures identify prostitutes with particular locales (Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street; Chinese Restaurant), but such activity could not be isolated geographically; the fear was that prostitutes could no longer be differentiated from respectable people'.
37. This possibility of her being a modern woman playing with class and sexual codes is quite conceivable. The redefinition of gender roles, the questioning of sexual boundaries, the calling into question of monogamy and other of what seemed to be bourgeois ideals, and the attempted shifting of women's status in relation to that of their male peers were issues that Sloan was surely aware of, as they were among those being discussed by Sloan's circle of friends, including the staff of The Masses and his wife, Dolly Sloan.
38. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 62-3.
39. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, pp. 65-6.
40. For more information on the specific working-class origins of prostitutes and a discussion of wages, see Gilfoyle, City of Eros, p. 290.
41. This assertion is made in contradistinction to the discussion of the Ashcan School offered by H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915 (Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1994). These authors, for the most part, view the paintings of the Ashcan School as 'euphemistic' and not in any significant way distinctive from the paintings of the American impressionists.
42. Mayer, Once Upon a City, p. 417.
43. This illustration is reproduced in Bonner, What Brought Thee Hither? Unfortunately, due to an incorrect reference, I have not been able to locate the original site of publication.
44. A colleague, Emily Gephart, first suggested this reading to me as a remote possibility during a visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where the painting now hangs.
45. Hughes, Real New York, pp. 147-8.
46. According to Bonner, What Brought Thee Hither?, p. 91, tourists were not welcome to the theatres in the beginning. He describes one instance in which the actors left the stage and the orchestra continued to play alone as the audience shouted. A guide told the tourists that the audience was simply applauding the 'musical solo', although the truth was that the audience was angry; a notice was posted that the rest of the scene would be performed offstage because of the presence of tourists. One solution to this problem that theatres came up with was to have the orchestra hammer gongs and cymbals until the tourists were seated and then proceed to stage a violent and loud fight as actors 'emitted squeals of hate and whirled and fenced', until finally one character would die. I mention this description of events in order to suggest the character of the experience that may have been had by tourists and the extent to which it may have been staged particularly for - or, in this case, against - them.
47. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890; Dover Publications; New York, 1971), p. 78.
48. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, p. 80.
49. Lending further support to this thesis is Konrad Bercovici's description in Around the World in New York, p. 109, of the way that the Chinese walk on felt slippers. Instead of comparing their walk to feline prowling, as did the authors cited above, he refers to it as an 'effeminate gait'.
50. James Moy, Marginal Sights, p. 36, describes the roles open to Chinese Americans as 'the sexually available Asian woman and the sexually neutralized male'. He notes that Asian men had been erased from the photographic history of heroic male activities such as the completion of the transcontinental railroad, something he understands as related to their perceived threat to white labour (p. 49). Furthermore, their androgyny was played upon in popular culture. Chinese men were still being used at the turn of the century to play female theatre parts. Westerners picked up on this tradition as an easy target, using it to illustrate what they perceived as a lack of differentiation between the sexes (p. 59).