Emasculation and Chinese American Diaspora

Abstract

By comparing Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) and Gus Lee's novel China Boy (1991), this article configures diasporic sensibilities as emasculated and compensatory responses to national homelessness and racialization during disparate periods of Chinese exclusion. My analysis of these texts demonstrates that, rather than “claiming America” and carving out a cultural national space within American politics, the protagonists in Sui Sin Far's short stories and Lee's novel disavow the nation while demanding the United States to make good on the universalist promises that it empirically fails to deliver. Excluded from the national belonging, they articulate their diasporic positions through their sexual and linguistic emasculation as subjects that exist in translation.