Chinese Suicide: Political Desire and Queer Exogamy in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone

Abstract

Last summer, as I was having dinner in Washington, DC's Chi- natown, two tourists hesitantly stepped into the restaurant. A waiter summoned them to a table, but they were disoriented and cautious, mumbling briefly together before asking: Is this Chinatown? I laughed, not because they were standing in the shadow of a sixty- foot gate, all gilt and dragons and pagoda-like peaks, the unmistak- able sign that they were smack in the middle of Chinatown. Rather, I laughed because the tourists' skepticism bespoke an observant irony: not much about this Chinatown is very Chinese. Beyond the gate, one block north and barely two blocks to its east and west, is the entirety of DC's Chinatown, its thin arrangement of restaurants, a few souvenir shops, and not many Chinese people on the streets. The most eye-catching sights are hardly Chinese at all: the blaz- ing marquee of the Verizon Center and the gleaming storefronts of mega-retail stores and chain restaurants that were built in the 1980s ostensibly to renew the neighborhood. The bilingual signs of these shops are ornamental contrivances, shallow significations of an ethnic aura: Starbucks and Subway translated into phonetic but semantically nonsensical Chinese. But all was not lost for the disappointed tourists, because the waiter reassured them, settling them at a table as he chatted them up with a history of the better days, when there were more Chinese people, more dragon dances, flapping fish in sidewalk buckets, and venerated elders officiating over the urban village in high