Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 31

Orientation via Orientalism: Chinatown in Detective Narratives

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After the railway bridge we turned right and descended into the heart
of Cabramatta. (Day, 34)
Day spatially defines Cabramatta as the end of the earth, beyond Valentine’s knowable
spaces, and as enclosed (how do we get in there) and submerged. Like the
“Chinatowns” in the previous narratives, Cabramatta is spatially separated - and so
entry requires a lengthy signalling of arrival. What Valentine discovers in Cabramatta
are precisely those “exemplary Oriental scenes” that Culler names as an example of
the tourists search for ‘everything as a sign of itself(Culler, 1981, 127):
It was the reversal of westernisation. Here eastemisation had taken
place. The buildings were that make-it-square-and-put-a-fence-aroundit architecture characteristic of fifities-style Australian suburbia. But
the signs were straight from the Orient. Kim Do Electronics, Tan Hung
Meats, the Bing Lee Centre offering the Biggest Bargains This Side of
Hong Kong.. .It wasn’t only the signs, it was the contents of the shops
and the way things were arranged in them. Every second shop seemed
to sell fabric, with rolls o f it stuck into bins making a colourful
disordered display. Disordered to my eye not yet attuned to the
underlying rationale. Everything shouted simultaneously, like a chorus
of five-year-olds all singing a different song. (Day, 34)
As in Polanski’s use of Chinatown, Cabramatta functions as an-other reality that
the westerner cannot fully grasp or control. Moreover, the Cabramatta of Chinese
Boxes functions as a site of authenticity — the fulfilment of the endeavour to
collect signs of true experiences that Urry argues is the function of the tourist gaze,
and that Boorstin has called “travelling”, in the bid to separate the authentic and
the inauthentic encounter. Cabramatta is also mobilized as a site to contain the
cli