The “Glorious National Problem”: Frontierism and Citizenship in Frank Chin's Donald Duk

All honor to you, to Durant, to Jack and Dan casement, to Reed, and thousands of brave fellows who have fought this glorious national problem in spite of deserts, storms, Indians, and the doubts of the incredulous. -William T. Sherman to Granville Dodge, Telegram to congratulate Dodge on the completion of the railroad (1869) Only in America was there enough space to utilize the locomotive fully. . . . Only in America was there enough labor or enough energy and imagination. -Stephen Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World (2000) John Chinaman, with his patient toil, directed by American energy and backed by American capital, has broken down the great barrier at last and opened over it the greatest highway yet created for the march of commerce and civilization around the globe. - "The Territorial Experience," PBS Website for their series on the West (2000) In the late nineteenth century, American railroad companies thought of the railroad as "a pool of capital designed to make more capital" (Cronon 81). Indeed, the railroad, William Cronon has explained, quickly became "the chief device for introducing a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West" (81). Perhaps most significantly, however, because this capitalismfacilitating technology was bookended by a call for the participation of inexpensive, skilled Chinese laborers and by an almost immediate restriction of their emigration to the United States once the railroad was completed, the historical narrative of the building of the transcontinental railroad foregrounds a basic contradiction of liberal democracy1: economic inclusion in vs. sociopolitical exclusion. Indeed, the exploitation of Chinese labor in the mid-nineteenth century and the exclusion of the Chinese from the United States shortly after2 are evidence of the ways in which the history of building the American transcontinental railroad is symbolic of a "glorious national problem" with the myth of American exceptionalism in which our national identity is grounded. Furthermore, because narratives about the railroad's construction are also narratives about the key role of a powerful technology in settling an "American" frontier environment, they are useful sites for considering the role of an American cultural logic of "the frontier" and frontier technology in constituting the boundaries of American citizenship. In spite of the fact that involvement with frontier technologies is not a guarantee of socioeconomic and civic power, some contemporary narratives attempt to transcend the contradictions of American exceptionahsm by invoking the frontier as a means to validate and strengthen individual and minority group identity. Frank Chin's novel Donald Duk (1991) revisits the history of the Chinese participation in the building of the transcontinental railroad-and, thus, to the settling of the originary frontier West-to argue against the virtual omission of the Chinese from American history books and what he frames as the emasculating exclusion of the Chinese from citizenship rights until the middle of the twentieth century. In response to the Chinese-American history of alternating enfranchisement and disenfranchisement, Frank Chin advocates a revision of cultural nationalist narratives about the significance of Chinese Americans in the history of this nation. His novel, Donald Duk, revisits and recontextualizes Chinese-American participation in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, representing an American national re-education through the story of a twelve-year-old ChineseAmerican boy, Donald Duk. As a novel that participates in a "politics of positioning" (226), which Stuart Hall claims is the foundation for cultural identity, Donald Duk argues that the Chinese in America do count and have counted in the formation of an "American" socioeconomic identity. The way to reposition Chinese Americans and reorient American readers, Chin suggests, involves challenging Western notions of history and teaching us how to become more discerning readers of them. …