Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 33

Orientation via Orientalism: Chinatown in Detective Narratives

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Chinatown functions paradoxically in the above texts - it figures as both a
self-contained site of insularity, yet it threatens to engulf the urban landscape; it is
deployed as a marginal zone, an ethnic enclave, yet is central to the narrative’s
own logic. A long history of what Said has termed “Orientalism” ensures that
“Chinatown” functions “easily” as a well worn site or strategy, an almost lazy
abbreviation, of urban mystery and/or depravity. The attempt to locate Chinatown
as urban other employs a simple logic, failing to negotiate the site as a Western
phenomenon. As Anderson and McConville have shown in the Melbourne and
Sydney contexts, the historical separation of Chinese immigrants into urban enclaves
was not always complete; what separatism did exist was the result of “European”
discrimination and economic survival. However, the city councils in the late 70s
and early 80s desire to compete on a world stage of “Chinatowns” — Anderson
quotes one alderman who states that “One must admit to a sense of shame when
one shows a San Franciscan our version of a Chinatown” (Anderson 1990, 149) involved an “orientalising” process that went to considerable lengths to symbolically
and spatially enclose the area.
Previously, I have compared Jameson’s tour of the Bonaventure with the above
deployments of Chinatown; both encounters involve a tour of a (predesignated)
radically other space within an urban scene. The protagonist attempts to negotiate,
narrate or map this other space in order to bring it within western epistemological
limits, but his/her narrative path is inevitably blocked by the site of the other;
ironically, such a blockage is critical for the narrative to occur, hence the spatiality
of “postmodernism” or “chinatown” in this specific instance function as a narrative
catalyst rather than a narrati ٔ