Reddit reviews Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

This is neat, but it's the Eaton sister switch. A Hapa Japanese woman in cheongsam. The switch of race, ethnicity and sometimes gender. It's not inherently malicious (intentional in this case), but it's playing musical chairs. The Eaton sisters did this, the protesters for the Monet kimono exhibit were primarily Chinese, post WW2 many Japanese pretended to be Chinese. And I'm sure you all remember the Celeste Ng switcharoo she Never Bothered To Tell Anyone About. A Korean academic tried the same thing regarding Sui Sin Far, and was critiqued by another academic (for once). There's mention of strategy on the motivations Sui Sin Far (and mention of shenanigans in this thread), but this manoeuvre has been repeating on loop for 200 years. The real question is when the music stops, do you have a chair to sit in? (Mitski seem to be driving on a road to nowhere in the ending)

Situating the Essential Alien: Sui Sin Far’s Depiction of Chinese-White Marriage and the Exclusionary Logic of Citizenship, Jane Hwang Degenhardt

>In other words, Sui Sin Far strategically orients her stories against Progressive gender roles in order to situate the Chinaman's national difference in opposition to the racial threat created by Progressivism's perceived endangerment of white female sexuality. Invoking patriarchal values as a vestige of authentic Americanness that is being eroded by social Progressivism, her stories fantasize the Chinese immigrant as a recuperative agent and protector of the debilitated white family.

...

>In effect, Chinese difference is explicitly recast in terms of gender. Minnie continues to return, throughout her narration, to the realization that her Chinese husband is so much more of a man than her white husband. Even in acknowledging Liu Kanghi's faults, Minnie reiterates the refrain of his enduring manhood: "My Chinese husband has his faults. He is hot-tempered and, at times, arbitrary; but he is always a man, and has never sought to take away from me the privilege of being but a woman. I can lean upon and trust in him. I feel him behind me, protecting and caring for me, and that, to an ordinary woman like myself, means more than anything else"

“Virtues do not all belong to the whites”: The Portrayals of Americanization and Miscegenation in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Jennifer Bradley

>Minnie is burdened by assumptions that she does not love her husband because of her superior racial status, and Kanghi is troubled by an inherent inferiority that he believes is predetermined by his race. The couple clearly must face constricting and pervasive racial norms in their own relationship and constant offensive remarks, especially, as Minnie mentions, from white men who appear much like James with regards to their arrogance and ignorant assumptions. Jane Hwang Degenhardt, a scholar who engages extensively with miscegenation in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, interestingly posits Liu Kanghi and “the Chinese immigrant as a recuperative agent and protector of the debilitated white family” and “against anxieties about white emasculation,” white female liberated sexuality, and black male hypersexuality because of Kanghi’s dedication to patriarchal values and gentleness (656, 658). In this way, Degenhardt believes that Sui Sin Far attempts to demonstrate that the white woman/Chinese man couple does not threaten but perpetuates the dominance of white marriage values, however problematic these values may be, and cultivates a kind of conservative nostalgia. Degenhardt holds that Sui Sin Far strategically characterizes the Asian male “as an inappropriate target of racism” because “the Chinese-white union constitutes a beacon of progress, offering a vision of a future America that transcends national boundaries, yet simultaneously elicits nostalgia for a patriarchal past” (665, 666). While certainly provocative, Degenhardt’s argument seems to misinterpret Sui Sin Far’s intentions as conservative and defensive and does not account for the explicit disapproval of white society in the “Chinese Husband” stories mentioned above. Minnie’s and Kanghi’s perpetuation of patriarchy in their marriage does not in fact overcome racism. Feelings of emasculation and racism are still overtly manifested by James and other white male characters in the stories. Degenhardt too readily conflates gender and racial implications. Appearing conservative or sympathetic to white ideals in the sphere of gender does not necessarily translate into the scope of race. Ultimately Kanghi’s assimilation might in fact be condoned like it was for the Spring Fragrances, but his pursuit of a white woman is certainly not accepted by James or by the white society James represents.

>Prejudice does not stop with the couple but is even transmitted to their mixed race children as well. Minnie reveals that only when the son of Kanghi and her "lays his little head upon my bosom do I question whether I have done wisely. For my boy, the son of a Chinese man, is possessed of childish wisdom which brings the tears to my eyes; and as he stands between his father and myself, like yet unlike both of us, so will he stand in after years between his father’s and his mother’s people. And if there is no kindliness nor understanding between them, what will my boy’s fate be? " (Sin Far 77)

>Minnie seems to recognize that she has a choice to subvert societal expectations, but her son will not have that choice.

...

>It is noteworthy that “One White Woman” ends with this question of kindliness and understanding between races and “Her Chinese Husband” concludes with an act of racial violence confirming Minnie’s apprehensions.

This paper reiterates a lot of what is written on r/hapas (without all the naughty words).

Viet Thanh Nguyen's (The Sympathizer) academic work Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America dedicates a whole 1st chapter to this utilization of race and gender to traverse the hierarchy, specifically about Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna.

>Asian American intellectuals have yet to confront this problem of commodification, which is a feature of the unstable equilibrium that Omi and Winant argue characterizes race relations today; rather, Asian American intellectuals implicitly disavow that they are implicated in the problem of commodification, and the theoretical consequences are manifest in their reliance upon a discourse of the bad subject (a discourse that I shall treat in my conclusion).

…

>For Asian American intellectuals, the various forms taken by the body politic that this book has explored can in the end be interpreted as collectively reinforcing the discourse of a bad subject created by both enforced condition and voluntary choice.