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in American cities.

      OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

      Chapter 2, “Claiming Right to the City: Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family,” further explores the relationship between the raced, gendered body in American urban space as portrayed in Lin’s 1948 novel about Chinese Americans in New York City and its Chinatown. My reading expands on the predominant interpretations of this novel as a “model minority” narrative of assimilation, which overlooks the social critique and the characters’ resistance to exclusion embedded in the subversive, interventional spatial strategies Lin employs. I argue that Lin’s narrative strategies allow his characters to reinhabit the city through everyday activities that resist racial segregation, claim Chinese immigrants’ right to the city, and facilitate the formations of Chinese American identity and subjectivity. In so doing, Lin, like Sui Sin Far, at once undermines and reinvents the privileged white male flâneur figure of urban exploration and dismantles both the myth of a self-enclosed Chinatown and the myth of an American city capable of assimilating immigrants while remaining intact from the presence of its heterogeneous populations.

      Chapter 3, “‘Our Inside Story’ of Chinatown: Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone,” examines Ng’s strategies for making visible in American urban space the hidden history of racial exclusion and exploitation. I argue that Ng’s narrative leads the reader through Chinatown streets, alleys, stores, restaurants, crammed apartments, and the public square as it traverses the lives of the “paper son” Leon and his family, to reveal the family’s “secrets” entangled with the United States’ national history of racial exclusion and exploitation. By historicizing the public and private spaces of Chinatown lives in San Francisco, Bone at once engages with and departs from representations of Chinatown either by European Americans or by Asian Americans like Sui Sin Far or Lin Yutang. Drawing on theories about the social production of space and the everyday practice of what de Certeau might call “spatial vernacular,” my reading examines Ng’s narrative strategies that highlight not only the “social production of the built environment,” or the ways in which “built environments both represent and condition economies, societies, and cultures” (King 1), but also the psychological effects of spatialized social positions of race, class, and gender.

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