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opium to lure white women. Representations of white women’s victimization by Chinese men not only perpetuate the “yellow peril” myth, but they also reinforce raced and gendered hierarchy. Sui Sin Far’s re-representation of white women in her stories, then, undermines both racism against Chinese men and sexism against white women. However, while undermining the stereotypes of white women as the weaker vessel of morality and in critiquing Chinese patriarchy, Sui Sin Far contrasts progressive American women with conventional backward Chinese women, thus reinforcing another gendered and raced stereotype.

      Below the balconies, the Chinatown street scenes seem to mock the Chinese women’s parochialism. In fact, the balcony provides Pau Lin with a bird’s-eye view of Chinatown’s streets, whose scenes simultaneously serve as evidence of what she deplores about things American and offer a point of view that challenges the Chinese women’s bemoaning of the “contamination” of Chinese values by American culture. As she gazes “below her curiously,” Pau Lin is fascinated by what she sees:

      The American Chinatown held a strange fascination for the girl from the seacoast village. Streaming along the street was a motley throng made up of all nationalities. . . . There went by a stalwart Chief of the Six Companies engaged in earnest confab with a yellow-robed priest from the joss house. A Chinese dressed in the latest American style and a very blonde woman, laughing immoderately, were entering a Chinese restaurant together. Above all the hubbub of voices was heard the clang of electric cars and the jarring of heavy wheels over cobblestones. (49)

      The visual details and their implications of this motley “American Chinatown” made up of diverse racially and ethnically marked bodies, however, suggest an inevitable, irresistible cultural hybridization in process that counters the reification of either Chinese or Western culture. The presence of electric cars running through Chinatown renders it resolutely part of the American city.

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