A Race So Different. Joshua Chambers-Letson
them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.”40 In both Chae Chan Ping and Nishimura Ekiu, the act of exclusion produces, defines, and protects the identity of the sovereign nation through the law’s control of the immigrant’s movement across borders. But acts of legal choreography were not enough to manifest and police these borders. Aesthetic practices supported and, in the case of the theater, manifested flesh-and-blood figurations of Asian difference that would confirm and justify these actions in the minds of national audiences.
As we saw in the New York Times reportage on the Chae Chan Ping case, Congress and the courts were described as loving patriarchs, doing away with the villainous threat of Asian invaders with a protective decisiveness. This figuration is not at all dissimilar from the characterization of Pinkerton’s own management of his domestic sphere. Pinkerton’s will to “keep out those who are out” and the “American locks” both reflect the dominant consensus that Asian bodies should be excluded from the nation. At the same time, the United States was grappling with Asian bodies already within national borders. So if Cho-Cho-San’s family can be understood as representative of the “yellow hordes” that had to be excluded, the sanctioned presence of Cho-Cho-San’s “one small maid” (Suzuki) in Pinkerton’s home is significant of this other political dilemma.
Exclusion was often too late because the vacuum of both capitalism and imperialism had already drawn large numbers of Asians into the United States. In a concession to industries and employers who wanted to continue to exploit the labor of Chinese immigrants already within the country, the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese immigrants who entered before 1882 to leave the country and return, so long as they received a certificate of identification. Shortly before Chae Chan Ping, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Jung Ah Lung.41 The case involved a Chinese laborer who left the country with just such a certificate but lost it (reportedly stolen by pirates) before reentry. The justices ruled that this certificate was not the only piece of identification necessary for reentry.42
Not unlike Jung Ah Lung, as a domestic laborer, Suzuki moves in and out of Pinkerton’s house at ease, but this movement should not be confused with absolute inclusion. Her presence is emblematic of a long and ongoing history of the racialization of certain bodies whose status as exploitable labor sources allows them to pass through spaces that are otherwise explicitly closed to them, so long as they carry out the dances of domestic servitude and un(der)compensated labor. But such figures were and often are not to be understood as proper citizens or even subjects of the nation. While the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese laborers who entered the country prior to 1892 to exit and reenter the country, their presence was juridically figured as illegal. Justice Louis Brandeis observed this fact in Ng Fung Ho v. White, a 1922 case involving Chinese petitioners subject to the mandates of the Chinese Exclusion Act: “One who has entered lawfully may remain unlawfully.”43 In other words, some Chinese laborers were paradoxically tolerated because the state would not always remove them, but their presence was always already illegal in theory of the law. As I discuss in chapter 5, this is a status that continues to attach itself to Asian immigrants in the present. As we shall now see, Cho-Cho-San’s own sanctioned presence in the Pinkerton home explodes into a legal problem of tragic proportions.
Act II. Madame Butterfly and the Problem of Law
Scene 1. Between Interior and Exterior in Long and Belasco’s 1900 Play
If Long’s novella manifests the juridical unconscious of the dominant culture in narrative form, Belasco’s 1900 theatrical adaptation embodied it, giving audiences the rare chance for a flesh-and-blood, theatrical encounter with the exotic and mysterious body of the Asian Other. Turning now to the dramatic adaptation, Long and Belasco’s onstage representation of Cho-Cho-San as a character that blurs clear national and racial distinctions was of particular interest and consternation for audiences and reviewers alike. With white women such as Blanche Bates and later Valerie Bergere and Evelyn Millard playing the role of Cho-Cho-San in yellowface, spectators demonstrated significant angst over whether what they were seeing on the stage was an authentic representation of Japanese femininity.44 The Times complained, for example, “Bates’ portrayal is human and its imitations of Japanese manners and characteristics is facile.”45 Despite the Times’s complaint, it seems the actresses were relatively successful in convincing audiences of their character’s authenticity.
In 1904, Bergere gave an interview in which she described her decision to remain in costume after a performance of the play. A pair of tourists caught view of her and declared, “I tell you it can’t be. She must be a Jap. No white woman could ever play such a role.”46 Bergere kept up the façade, as the tourists followed her through the streets of Times Square, before eventually disclosing her whiteness, to their great disappointment. There is little doubt that Bergere looked completely ludicrous shuffling down Broadway near midnight in what she described as the “short, quick steps of the Japanese,” dressed in a kimono while speaking in “broken English.”47 The spectacle onstage was probably no less stupid. However, the audience’s refusal to acknowledge what was no doubt a clear act of racial mimicry evidences a regulation of the color line so staunch that audiences believed that “no white woman could ever play such a role.”
Belasco’s dramatic adaptation eliminates the debate over the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s family. It begins after Pinkerton has already abandoned Cho-Cho-San, as she earnestly awaits his return. Again, the importance of the locks are highlighted as in the opening scene, in which Cho-Cho-San explains to Suzuki why her husband put the locks on the door: “to keep out those which are out, and in, those which are in. Tha’s me.”48 “Tha’s me” identifies Cho-Cho-San’s confused status between interior and exterior, Japan and the United States, linking the regulation of Asian female sexuality to the practice of constituting proper national and racial borders. This form of racial and national confusion between interior and exterior is lifted from Long’s novella and brought to life before the audience’s eyes in the form of the set, described in the script thus: “Everything in the room is Japanese save the American locks and bolts on the doors and windows and an American flag fastened to a tobacco jar. Cherry blossoms are abloom outside, and inside.”49 The symbolic blend between interior and exterior is represented by potent symbols of US and Japanese nationalism (the US flag and the sakura) cohabiting the home. This confusion of cultural and national distinction is embodied in a less harmonious form by the character of Cho-Cho-San. This is specifically realized through her spoken dialogue.
Linguistic utterance becomes a primary method by which Cho-Cho-San’s confused status between the United States and Japan is performed. It is the medium through which the audience can identify her inability to properly perceive her exclusion from both spaces at the very moment she attempts to perform her inclusion in them. The structure of the dialogue signifies the peculiar place of the gendered Asian-immigrant and Asian American subject as always, somehow, located outside the United States. In the opening scene, for example, Cho-Cho-San insists that Suzuki speak English only:
Madame Butterfly: (Reprovingly) Suzuki, how many time I tellin’ you—no one shall speak anythin’ but those Unite’ State’ languages in these Lef-ten-ant Pik-ker-ton’s house? (She pronounces his name with much difficulty.)50
She speaks in a pidgin that draws on and embellishes the dialect spoken by the heroine in Long’s novella. Her insistence on English is at once significant of a desire to enter the United States and indicative of her cultural inability to properly perform ideal US subjectivity. In the novella, she explains that Pinkerton has insisted that she speak “United States’ languages” in his absence.51 If she does this, upon his return, she claims, “he go’n’ take us at those United States America.”52 Cho-Cho-San’s failed attempt to speak in “Unite’ State’ languages” reinforced dominant arguments in support of exclusion: namely, no matter how much Asians in America may attempt to perform ideal US subjectivity through the guiles of cunning and artifice, their innate racial, national, and cultural difference marks them as incapable of fully assimilating into the dominant white culture.
Popular media in the nineteenth century, from