Introduction: Debt: The Cultural Logics of Owing/Owning

Abstract

Introduction: DebtThe Cultural Logics of Owing/Owning Cynthia Wu (bio) and Kritika Agarwal (bio) Fae Myenne Ng’s novel, Bone, revolves around the aftermath of a young woman’s suicide in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Ona, the middle child of the Leong family, left few clues that would have allowed her loved ones to make sense of her death, with the result that each family member would be left to assign his or her own explanation and blame. The nonteleological plot is beset with stasis and flashbacks, mirroring the working-class characters’ economic inertia and backsliding. At the center of these ineffectual attempts to narrativize Ona’s death is her father Leon’s self-professed failure to live up to the expectations leveled upon him by his own father. In Leon’s case, this father is one generated by the workings of U.S. immigration law. Readers of this journal will be familiar with the “paper children” who emerged in response to the barring of Chinese immigration from 1882 up until restrictions were relaxed during World War II. Men already in the United States who traveled back to China during the time of exclusion could claim to have fathered a child for each return visit, and the slot could be sold once the paper son or (in some cases) daughter reached the age of majority. The paper child would then undergo interrogation by U.S. immigration officials to determine the validity of his or her paternity. If the prospective immigrant passed, he or she would be released from the detention center at Angel Island and permitted to enter the United States. Although Leon’s monetary fee had long been settled, Ng’s novel suggests that the economic transaction between paper sons and fathers is accompanied by nonmaterial debts that are more nebulously defined and, thus, more difficult to pay off. The lingering guilt Leon experiences over not being able to send his father’s bones back to China after his death weighs [End Page 1] on him, and this breach in his promise comes to stand in as an explanation for the structural forces that make the class hierarchy so difficult for the Leong family to climb. “[F]or years, when something went wrong—losing a job, losing the bid for the takeout joint, losing the Ong and Leong Laundry—Leon blamed the bones. Then Ona jumped, and it was too late.”1 Rather than a fictional and isolated incident of one figure’s melancholic attachment to the past, Leon’s bond with his paper father is hardly unique in the context of Chinese American kinship. As Estelle T. Lau claims, the maneuverings required of participants in a paper family transaction that would convey credibility to immigration officers generated relationships that were every bit as involved as those maintained by biological families: “Adoption of these techniques was not without long-term consequences for the Chinese—they were forced to change their names, adopt fictitious family histories, and maintain these deceptions over time until these fictions themselves became inescapable elements of the stories the Chinese told about themselves.”2 Although these familial bonds were enabling in certain ways, providing immigrants first with entry and next with a network of coethnics as they settled into their new home, they were also constricting in others, because they came with obligations—sometimes insurmountable—that resembled those in biological families. As Ng puts it, “[Leon] was … caught in his own lie; the laws that excluded him now held him captive.”3 The conundrum that Ng lays out in Bone, the impossibility of untangling economic from affective repayments, lies at the heart of this special issue on debt. All of the articles we have assembled for this issue address the interplay of the material and the nonmaterial in Asian American dynamics of owing. Whether the relationship between debtor and creditor is that of child and parent, a population and a country, or one nation-state and another, the terms for settlement are never as straightforward as hard numbers on a ledger sheet. As Ng’s character demonstrates, even when the monetary debt is paid, the affective ones remain, and it may be that their terms...