Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 23

Orientation via Orientalism: Chinatown in Detective Narratives

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define an imagined Orient has vastly different ramifications if that (little) “orient”
is only a cab ride away.
In the twentieth century context, it becomes apparent that the portrayal of a
western Chinatown as secretive, separate, “other”, mysterious, criminal, has become
stock standard in many detective narratives: I would like to look at this persistent
Orientalism in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Marele Day’s The Case o f the Chinese
Boxes, and an X-Files episode entitled “Hell Money.” Mirroring the earlier
paradoxical separation of an urban enclave from the logic of a larger urban scene,
these narratives use Chinatown as a marginal zone which is nevertheless central to
their narrative logic. These texts also reveal the acceptance of an ongoing form of
internal colonialism — in that the narratives entail a prima facie understanding/
acceptance of what Kay Anderson (1987) has called the “idea” of Chinatown.
Both Min Zhou and Kay Anderson have argued in their discussions of New
York and Vancouver Chinatowns respectively that the “idea” of Chinatown is a
distinctively western phenomenon. In a reading that parallels Said’s study on
“Orientalism” as a series of organizing discourses that “has less to do with the
Orient than it does with ‘our’ world” ( Said 12), both Zhou and Anderson are
interested in characterising “Chinatown” as both ethnic enclave and unique
American/westem urban creation. For Anderson, it is important to locate Chinatown
as an historically specific idea, “a social space that has been rooted in the language
and ethos of its representers and conferred upon the likes of Vancouver’s Dupont
Street settlement” (Anderson 1988, 583). This construct, and a variety of forces
ranging from exploitation and racism, to economic survival, creates a Chinatown
that can signify and deploy the encounter of “East” and “West.” “As such,” Anderson
argues, “Chinatown was not a benign cultural abstraction but a political projection,
through which a divisive system of racial classification was being structured and
institutionalized”(Anderson 1988, 589). The paradigmatic encounter of east/west
occurs in all three narratives that I will discuss and, in each case, this encounter
functions as a kind of pivot in which the mystery of the narrative, its concealment
and its revelation, turns.
The Chinatowns portrayed in the texts under discussion are from three different
cities: Chinatown and Hell Money are set in the U.S.’s major west coast cities, Los
Angeles and San Francisco respectively; The Case o f the Chinese Boxes is set in
Sydney, Australia. While the differences between these contexts are in some ways
crucial, I will mainly focus on these narratives’ use o f “Chinatown” as an
uncontextualized symbol; the Chinatowns of these narratives could almost be located
in any large western city. Chinatown as a symbol functions in contradictory ways;
displaced, it lies at the “centre” of these narratives, just as Chinatown is an historically
marginalized site which lies towards the heart of an urban scene. As narrative
centre and cultural margin, “chinatown” works within and for these narratives,