Connecting Links: The Anti-Progressivism of Sui Sin Far Sean McCann (bio) Surveying the impoverished neighborhoods of turn-of-the-century lower Manhattan, the journalist Jacob Riis excluded only one group from his characteristic mixture of sympathy and condescension. The various ethnic communities described by his famed reformist document, How the Other Half Lives—Jewish, Irish, German, Bohemian, Italian, African-American—were often slovenly, careless, and ignorant, Riis acknowledged. But if they worked hard to adopt the bourgeois virtues, striving toward “the ideal plane of the home,” and if city officials addressed the squalid and oppressive circumstances in which they were forced to live, those immigrants might become, as the recently naturalized Riis himself had, good American citizens. “The poorest immigrant comes here with the purpose and ambition to better himself,” Riis pointed out to his readers among the “American community,” and given training and direction, the members of the other half could be expected to make the most of their opportunities. Although his audience might see only poverty and degradation, moral “corruption” and “brutality” in the slums of the Lower East Side, Riis recognized that beneath that impression another story existed—one “of heroic men and women striving patiently against fearful odds and by their very courage coming off victors in their battle with the tenement.” 1 Yet, inclusive as he sought to be, Riis could not extend his vision of heroic embourgeoisement to the Chinese. Other immigrant communities seemed unpalatable to “the native stock,” but in fact shared the natural yearning for a “decent, honest” life that characterized the “distinctively American community” (27, xv, 19). Only the Chinese were in “no sense a desirable element of the population.” What’s more, by Riis’s account, the Chinese merited “the harshest repressive measures” precisely because they fulfilled just those demands that he made of other immigrants. Riis asked the victims of the tenements to uplift themselves by adopting the “neatness, order, [and] cleanliness” of the “decent” home (5). The “real boundary line of the Other Half,” he asserted, was the “locked door”—the first sign that an immigrant family had embraced middle-class “privacy” and removed itself from “the common herd” of the urban poor (121). But, although the Chinese seemed to live exactly the life he admired, “their scrupulous neatness” only made them suspicious to Riis, and “their very exclusiveness and reserve” served merely to remind him that they were “a constant and terrible menace to society” (80, 83). Apparently self-sufficient and self-contained, the Chinese in America appeared to leave little work for Riis’s reformism to do. They thus marked the racial boundary by which he could register the inclusion of all other groups. The Chinese, he asserted, lacked “the essential qualities” that would enable other immigrants to become American (77). 2 [End Page 73] In her short story, “Its Wavering Image,” Riis’s contemporary Sui Sin Far answered that attack on the Chinese. The first writer of Asian descent to publish fiction in the United States, Far personally encountered the harsh reality of Progressive Era American nativism, and in the handful of short stories and essays she published during the first two decades of the century, she attempted, in a self-consciously small way (as we will see below), to defend the Chinese immigrant community from xenophobic slander. As Riis’s example suggests, the wellsprings of that racism could be found at the time not only in cruel institutions and an intolerant society, but in the high-minded rhetoric of social reformers, who saw little conflict between their determination to remake society for the better and their intolerance for the ways of certain ethnic groups. Against their influence, Sui Sin Far sought both to justify the traditions of Chinese-American society and to portray the cruel underside of Progressive reform. “Its Wavering Image” undertook that task with a nasty portrait of a crusading reporter, a callow figure named Mark Carson who offers an acute parody of the moralizing aims of journalists like Riis. Far’s story turns on the unsuccessful love affair between Carson and Pan, a woman of Chinese and white parentage, and it tellingly combines two plot lines. In the predominant one...