Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 29

Orientation via Orientalism: Chinatown in Detective Narratives

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loyalties to apparently irreconcilable identities.
The “game,” only played in Chinatown and only by “new arrivals” is organized
by a powerful, established, older resident, a situation which clearly distorts and
exploits the existence of some levels of abuse within actual American Chinese
communities (See Zhou, 112-118; Kuo 40-75). The “game” involves the gambling
of players’ body parts (corneas, portions of liver, kidneys, bone marrow) for the
hope o f winning a large amount of money. Dr Wu, mastermind of the game and
black market organ seller, is precisely the cast of “oriental” villain Rhomer embodied
in the sinister Fu-Manchu. As with the Rhomer novels, the anxiety of a Chinese
invasion also clearly underlines the plot; the series is prefaced with Detective
Neary’s speculation that the recent spate of killings is connected to the big flux of
immigrants from Hong Kong “trying to get out before 1997.”
I would like to return to the term “alien” that describes a resident who is not a
citizen of the country in which he or she resides, and The X-Files as a highly
popular series that has largely gained its popularity in its search for an encounter
with the exotic. Taking these together, I suggest that the dynamic of tourism —
and more specifically, tourism as internal colonialism (Crick, 1989) best describes
this particular manifestation of detection. The narrative itself invites obvious
parallels. Chao is assigned to assist Scully and Mulder pick their way through
Chinatown, and much of the narrative unfolds with Chao acting as a kind of tourist
guide: deciphering symbols, translating interviews, explaining aspects of myth
and custom. Tourism, as Crick notes, is a term used as a “derisive label for someone
who seems content with his (sic) obviously inauthentic experiences” (McCannell
quoted in Crick, 1989, 307). The X-Files by-line, “The truth is out there,” on the
other hand, plays with the popular humanist assumption that genuine experiences
are possible. While The X-Files episode often performs a parody of these genuine
experiences, playfully reiterating the “shlock horror” movies and other genres well
known to film and television audiences, the series itself o