Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 27

Orientation via Orientalism: Chinatown in Detective Narratives

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about” (Bingham 133). More than this, however, Chinatown is also a distinctive
piece of urban landscape within a narrative that centres on the politics and dynamics
of urban development and expansion (See Davis, 1987). “Chinatown” in this
expansionist context functions as a site of contraction and even obstruction - and
as such remains undecipherable; the words “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”
underlines Gittes passivity as detective, his failure in righting wrongs, and the
story’s sense of textual or filmic paralysis. Because he is unable to read this “other”
urban space, he will return here, again and again, in an act of involuntary repetition
that Freud has named as an example of the uncanny. Toward the very end, a crowd
of silent “Chinese” onlookers merge into the camera’s view; the last gaze is held by
Chinatown workers and residents, perhaps signalling that the power of the detective’s
gaze has been usurped. The defining power of the “west” shifts onto that of the
“east”, in an upside down town of unchecked corruption.
Zhou has positioned the existence of “Chinatown” as a partially autonomous
economic enclave and as a positive alternative to immigrant incorporation, known
as “m ulticulturalism” (Zhou 10-11). However, autonomy and resistance to
assimilation are often viewed negatively as insularity by the western viewer (Kuo
13-16; Anderson, 1987,1988,1990; McConville, 1985). In the Chinatown narrative
then, a story of western expansion is ended in the context of “oriental” interiority
and insularity - doubled over with the theme of incest and inbreeding. Noah Cross,
the patriarch behind the plot of urban expansion, finally meets Evelyn his daughter/
lover in a site that is used to reflect the regressive consequences of failing to
assimilate; the “open”, “outward” nature expansionism then, L.A.’s imagined self,
becomes the preferred and ultimately more readable text.

Alien-Nation: X-filing the other
Chinatown as the failure of assimilation is also lamented in TheX-Files episode
“Hell Money” (written by Jeffrey Vlaming, directed by Tucker Gates). Set in San
Francisco’s Chinatown, one of the oldest of America’s Chinatowns, the episode
opens with an obviously distressed man running through the confusing scenery of
a Chinatown parade. Turning from the main thoroughfare, he enters a series of dark
and sinister looking alleyways, arriving finally at his home. The interior of the
building is drab and dark, (the parallels to Rhomer’s imagined Chinatowns are
disturbing) and here he is confronted by a man and three figures dressed in black
wearing Chinese festival masks.
In the next scene the same man, later identified as “Johnny Lo,” is found
murdered— burnt alive in a crematorium. Scully and Mulder come in to investigate,
beginning with the body. The ethnicity of the dead man is immediately seized
upon as a