Anxious and Ambivalent Representations: Nineteenth‐Century Images of Chinese American Men

During the nineteenth century, American journalists, cartoonists, novelists, and playwrights represented Chinese American men as both docile pets and nefarious invaders; potential citizens and unassimilable aliens; effeminate, queue-wearing eunuchs and threateningly masculine, minotaur-like lotharios.1 The ways in which Chinese American men were imagined as "not quite" American and "not quite" men indicate much about how Euro-Americans defined "authentic" Americanness and manliness. Moreover, by examining the ambivalent representations of Chinese American men during this period, it is possible to mark the project of defining "authentic" Americanness and manliness as essentially unstable and open to challenge. As Lisa Lowe points out, Asian Americans serve as a "screen" on which Euro-Americans project their anxieties (18).2 This article argues that nineteenth-century figurations of Chinese American men as emasculated often justified Euro-American imperial and capitalistic motives, and figurations of Chinese American men as threateningly masculine often revealed Euro-Americans' concern about their own crises regarding masculinity.3 Both desire and fear marked the end of the nineteenth century for many Americans, as the nation considered becoming an overseas imperial power and dealt with the benefits and problems of large-scale industrialization, increasing immigration, and incipient modernism. Through anxious and ambivalent representations of Chinese American men in popular culture, some Euro-Americans registered and negotiated feelings of desire and fear associated with these changes. Anxiety, Ambivalence, and Class Sometimes, the difference between experiencing desire or fear was a function of class position. When the United States and the Emperor of China signed the Burlingame-Seward Treaty in 1868, recognizing "the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively, from one country to the other," members of the Euro-American upper class generally celebrated while members of the working class almost universally lamented (Malloy 1: 234). Historians Diane Mark and Ginger Chih note that "the Burlingame Treaty received immediate opposition from organized labor, [but] American financial interests were enthralled by the potential expansion of trade and exploitation of Chinese labor" (13). Therefore, Euro-American ambivalence regarding Chinese and Chinese Americans often turned on the class of the concerned party. Generally, employers and financiers found it useful to consider Chinese and Chinese Americans tame and nonthreatening, while laborers and union organizers found it useful to consider them uncontrollable and threatening. Long before the United States was founded as a nation, both kinds of stereotypes of the Chinese existed, but in the late nineteenth century, most members of the Euro-American upper class, especially those concerned with industrial and agricultural development of the West, seized upon the gentler stereotype.4 With the consequences of slavery fresh in their minds, most Euro-Americans wanted to avoid repeating the steps that led to the Civil War. Foremost among these steps was the introduction of an abjectly oppressed and thus potentially disruptive group of laborers like African slaves had proven to be. Critics of Chinese labor claimed that it "has all the disadvantages of African slavery" (Gompers and Gutstadt 15); and they complained that "the copper of the Pacific" could yet pose "as great a subject of discord and dissension as the ebony of the Atlantic" (Helper 96). Euro-Americans who wanted to employ Chinese, then, had to justify their choice by framing them as nearly men but "not quite," to use Homi Bhabha's phrase. Employers stressed that Chinese earned wages and thus were not slaves; however, they accented their laborers' putatively natural passive and servile mien. …