China Men, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Question of Citizenship

Bibliographic Data

ID9600614
AuthorsBrook Thomas (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume50
Issue4
Pages689-717
Publication date1998-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.1998.0046
OpenAlexW2032557452
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited13

China Men, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Question of Citizenship Brook Thomas (bio) I The middle chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men is called “The Laws.” Summarizing legislation and court decisions that have affected those of Chinese descent living in the United States, it further complicates the already difficult task of determining the genre of a book that self-consciously resists pre-set categories. Narrated by a Chinese-American woman who succeeds in simultaneously honoring her male ancestors and challenging their patriarchal customs, China Men celebrates their imaginative and physical efforts to establish and transform a new home despite resistance to their presence. Part autobiography, part retelling and alteration of Chinese and European legends and works of fiction, the book also turns out to be a chronicle of legal history. Not knowing quite what to do with Kingston’s second book, the publishers label it “Nonfiction/Literature.” One blurb on the paperback cover calls it “a history,” while another says that it consists of “myths and stories.” This defiance of easy generic classification is appropriate for a book about a narrator’s effort to understand how people from a country whose name evokes the notion of “center” landed “in a country where [they] are eccentric people.” 1 Kingston’s placement of her chapter on the laws at the formal center of her book should also remind [End Page 689] those in the field of literary studies intent on “political” criticism about the need to pay careful attention to legal history. According to Catherine Gallagher, by turning to the “micro-politics of daily life” such criticism has “displaced or supplemented” traditional “important economic and political agents and events” with “people and phenomena that once seemed wholly insignificant, indeed outside of history: women, criminals, the insane, sexual practices, and discourses, fairs, festivals, plays of all kinds.” 2 Kingston’s bizarre story of an “eccentric” people in the United States might seem a literary example of the sort of criticism that Gallagher advocates, since even though she places “The Laws” in the middle of her book, she makes clear from what surrounds the chapter that a summary of the most traditional of political events cannot possibly give an adequate account of the experience of those of Chinese ancestry in the United States. But if Kingston dramatizes the need to “supplement” traditional economic and political analysis with what one of the book’s blurbs calls “the lode of a culture’s deepest realities,” the central location of “The Laws” suggests that to “displace” such analysis is to risk providing inadequate descriptions of the “micro-politics of daily life.” As Kingston makes clear, laws may not completely determine the shape of people’s lives, but they do affect how they can be fashioned. Citizenship laws are a case in point. Unfortunately, however, when those following “the new direction being taken in American literary studies” turn their attention to questions of citizenship, they rarely pay attention to legal determinations, and when they do they almost always emphasize the law’s power to repress. 3 Kingston also calls attention to a history of legal repression by listing various Chinese exclusion acts. But she lists positive examples as well. In doing so she honors the imaginative efforts of Chinese immigrants who learned quickly how to appropriate the American legal system to their advantage. 4 For instance, under the year 1898 she notes: Another victory. The Supreme Court decision in The United States v. Wong Kim Ark stated that a person born in the United States to Chinese parents is an American. The decision has never been reversed or changed, and it is the law on which most Americans of Chinese ancestry base their citizenship today. (CM 155–56) This essay looks at both this 1898 Supreme Court case and Kingston’s 1980 work of the literary imagination. By bringing legal and literary [End Page 690] analysis together, I offer an understanding of a potential within United States citizenship that we would not get if they were kept apart. I start with Wong Kim Ark and end with China Men, since Kingston’s vision of citizenship is in part dependent upon conditions made possible

China · Citizenship · Criticism · Legislation · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Classics · Cuban History and Society · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture

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