East and West Embracing Diversity & Discrimination Addressing Analysis Word requirement: 300+ words (1 page) Choose from one of the following prompts, the

East and West Embracing Diversity & Discrimination Addressing Analysis Word requirement: 300+ words (1 page)

Choose from one of the following prompts, then create your own title, hone your own insight, and compose a well-argued analysis. Remember critical analysis thrives on individual insights rather than parroting, regurgitating what has already been said, let alone plot summary.

A. Compare the outlaws and/or criminals in these texts: Robin Hood, specific Chinese outlaws, Jonathan Small and the Tonga. Imagine an overarching motif that binds some or all of these Eastern and Western outlaws, heroes, or villains.

B. Compare the lawmen, righteous or evil, in these texts: the Sheriff of Nottingham, dynastic China’s, Holmes and Watson. Imagine an overarching motif that binds some or all of these Eastern and Western lawmen.

C. Imagine a thesis to combine outlaws and lawmen. Is there a covert conduit between the two, or are they mutually exclusive?

D. Imagine a thesis that bridges the divide between East and West. Why is there a shared creative urge for outlaw narratives.

E. Closely read one particular detail from any of the above texts, so long as it does not repeat previous assignments. Use that close reading to bind together multiple texts.

F. Explore outlawry as a game, if deadly. Outlaws are all “game,” or dare to take the vow at Gallows Oak as well as the Chinese blood oath of brotherhood. Although the nemesis of outlaws, Sherlock also treats his cases as a string of challenging games. His favorite phrase: “The game is on!” This game is thrilling exactly because it may gamble away one’s life. What is to be gained by such game? For instance, imagine a title that plays gamingly on the key word “game”: “F. Gaming the Law and the Game of the Law.” The first half riffs on “gaming” or abusing the system; the second half refers to game animals or sacrificial lambs unjustly condemned in the name of the law.

G. Given Bret Harte’s Sinophobia, analyze his representation of the Chinese. Harte’s need to grasp the unknown stranger seems to mix fear, confusion, and fascination. Analyze this mix in his works. Could you tease out Sinophilia embedded within Sinophobia? Could you see both love and hate, fascination and fear, with the Chinese in Harte?

H. The near total erasure of women in Conan Doyle and Harte is glaring. Write an analysis of this gender imbalance in these male texts of detection and colonization.

I. Create an overarching thesis that encompasses an analysis of all the Oriental extras in white dramas: the native Tonga in The Sign of the Four; the lascar in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”; Ah Sin in “The Heathen Chinee”; See Yup in the eponymous story.

see attachment for materials. Sinophobia/Sinophilia, circa 1870-2020, Harte-Trump
Bret Harte’s popular poem “The Heathen Chinee” (1870) is the tip of the spear of
nineteenth century Sinophobia that culminates in the West Coast’s “The Chinese Must Go!”
movement and the US Congress’s passage of The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Harte
takes point for Frank Norris and Jack London’s turn-of-the-last-century literary naturalist battle
with the Chinese Other, among other enemies. Never had the three “musketeers” been given to a
career of total, crazed racism, though. Rather, Sinophobia appears an expedient trope, even a
whim, for storytelling. Such is the power white men wield over the yellow peril. They will it into
existence to justify their own paranoia and then shoo(t) it away. The integrity of the white body
and his white body of works remains un-breached; the white corporeality and corpus unyellowed. Each of the musketeers expends a few strokes of his pen on Orientals, so their poem,
story, and novel offer mere cameos of the Other that are entirely negligible, readily dismissed.
The naturalists’ penchant for the half rise and quick fall of the Sinitic parallels their conjuring of
the Semitic. Racial Others present and past, Chinese and Jewish, are similarly evoked to
silhouette fear and summarily discharged.
Sinophobic fearmongering, however, is “shadowed,” or lightened, by its opposite
Sinophilia. The warring horde from China(town), for example, is predictably comical,
sabotaging itself. Alternately, the Fu Manchus against white heroes are thwarted from within by
Charlie Chans or Fu’s mixed-race daughters. Quite natural, even for naturalists, to play the
child’s game of Freudian fort/da, real nightmare/fake sweet dream, all for the purpose of the
incontrovertible centrality of white masculinity! So human is this balancing act that Sinophiles
nearly half a century later embrace it as well. John Steinbeck and the sixties counterculture
writers splice their beloved Orient with stereotypical linguistic turns and images inherited from
the fathers they have nominally disowned. What better proof of the complementarity of
Sinophobia and Sinophilia than the Swedish yellowface Warner Oland cast as both Dr. Fu
Manchu and Detective Charlie Chan, the bad and the good Chinese, in the 1930s Hollywood.1
Bret Harte
Born in Albany, New York, in 1839, Harte moved with his widowed mother to California
in 1854. He became the first editor of The Overland Monthly, established in 1868 in San
Francisco to rival East Coast literary magazines. Originally published in The Overland under the
title “Plain Language from Truthful James,” the poem was reprinted as “The Heathen Chinee”
across the land. Far from plain and truthful, the public discourse filtered, distilled the title to its
bare essence of American prejudice caricaturing a representative non-Christian. Supposedly
hoodwinked by a Chinese cardsharp at a Euchre game, the narrator James and his “pardner” Bill
Nye manifest a number of slippages in logic that are taken for granted. The overarching slippage,
however, remains the title switch from us to them. As catering to the reader’s sympathy as the
original title may sound, it is not as titillating as “The Heathen Chinee” that intimates a twin fall
from Christianity and the English language. Revolting paganism, doubled by atrocious pidgin,
becomes the catchy titular “cover design” for the wildfire of a poem raging across the Promised
Land, gaining in republications multiple illustrations that in effect “fill in the blank” of the
cardsharp’s stereotypical facial and physical features never specified in the poem. A Chinese
Whisper indeed, the image grows with republications, particularly the slant eyes, long hair
queue, and traditional Chinese garb.
The shortening of Chinese by one letter “s” is attributed by the narrator and his
sympathetic readers to the Chinese themselves, namely, their Cantonese-inflected elongation of
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the suffix “e.” Thus goes the usual tactic of blaming the victim. The alleged provenance of
“Chinee” matches the illustrations’ stock images: both their speech act and their physical
characteristics are truthfully copied, not fabricated, by whites from the original Chinese. But the
real cause points away from the Sino to the Anglo, the latter’s incomprehension of the former’s
speech and mannerism. Unfamiliar phrasing and behavior posing too much of a burden on the
psyche, the American mind familiarizes them by subconsciously reading into the unknown,
seizing upon and decoding surface traits identifiable to American eyes and ears. Even when the
traits are absent, such as Ah Sin’s slant eyes nowhere to be found in Harte, the American heart
supplies them aplenty, makes them up with an upward tilt, as Harte does in “See Yup.” Thus, Ah
Sin’s actions and words externalize inner sin.
The poem switches from the first stanza’s “The heathen Chinee” to the second stanza’s
“Ah Sin.” Subliminally, that disemboweled “s” hollows the Chinee, only to reemerge as a
revenant to head his true identity of “Sin.” The cloaked would in time be unmasked, assures the
narrator James. The prefix “Ah” reprises chronic Anglo attribution of stereotypes to the other in
the name of objective documenting. In this case, it arises from the Cantonese habit of attaching
“Ah” to one’s name for familiarity and bonding. Failing to capture the drift of a foreign tongue,
American ears fixate on the most distinctive features to generate, generalize meaning. The
greatest logical leap lies in the seventh stanza’s conspiracy theory. The indisputable proof of foul
play comes from two “right bower[s]” (l. 47), or when the Chinese plays what he believes to be
the winning hand, the trump card of the right bower, which exposes his cheating because it
duplicates the Jack of the trump suit that the narrator has just dealt to Bill Nye. The aggrieved
engages in a “team effort,” a communal uncovering of Chinese intrigue and the subsequent
ousting under the subterfuge of self-defense. In terms of the crime, the Chinese are said to excel
in cloning without Anglo originality, exposed in a card game where he plays duplicate cards.
The white reaction constitutes a fundamental flaw in logic that is the bedrock of
Sinophobia. Bill Nye sighs before concluding: “Can this be? / We are ruined by Chinese cheap
labor,” (ll. 52-53). From Ah Sin the gamblin’ man caught red-handed, Nye contextualizes it
within multiple Ah Sins the laborers flooding the US job market, both involving cheap, dirty
tricks rigging the card table or the US immigration system. From singular to plural, Chinese
laborers are implied to look alike and act alike. All slick under unreadable demeanor, their tricks
originate from the said Chinese proclivity to multiply, to replicate bowers or laborers. Bill Nye’s
switch from cards to labor, from a game of Euchre to the job market, triggers the sudden outburst
of what lies deep in the narrator’s and his readers’ collective unconscious. Barely veiled under
the rules of a game, white paranoia erupts on the slightest provocation. Violence is justified on
grounds of personal and collective survival against encroachment, against what white
supremacists have termed “replacement” by peoples of color, or the hyperbolic “white
genocide.” Instead of being “cleaned out” and “kicked out,” Bill and the like-minded launch
preemptive strikes against Ah Sins.2
Such racial pogroms come to pass, however, when Bill Nye, one of “us,” also hides cards
up his sleeve: “Nye’s sleeve, / Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers” (ll. 30-31). The
implication is white treachery is human, understandable, whereas Chinese duplicity is sinful,
calling for robust retaliation. Put another way, Chinese offense is taken to be greater, more
devious based on the Anglo strategy of reading (into) Chinese surfaces for intent. Ah Sin’s long
sleeves of Chinese tunics hide “twenty-four packs” (l. 62), and his “taper[ing]” (l. 65) long
fingernails are coated with “wax” (l. 66) to mark the cards. Both stock images of long sleeves
and fingernails are stereotypes easily called forth and thus resonate effortlessly with the
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American public. Yet long fingernails are sported by the leisure class of Mandarins or the
business class rather than laborers working with their hands, the group dreaded by Bill Nye.
Sleeves and fingernails that are overly long signal excessive, ornamental accessories without any
practical function other than play, foul play, to be exact. In reverse, should Ah Sins play dumb,
disavowing any knowledge of the card game with expressions of “pensive and childlike,”
“childlike and bland,” such absence and innocence denote conspiracies. Sinophobia thrives on
seeing what is not there, since it sees not what is there.
Can Harte be simply critiquing white racism like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”
(1729)? Many critics, some Harte apologists, have come to the author’s defense in claiming that
Harte satirizes white racism of his time. The poet Harte and the narrator James are, after all, two
different people, differed yet again from the cheating and violence-prone Bill Nye. James
appears to be a mere observer rather than participant of violence against Ah Sin. In addition to
racial divide, a class distinction develops, as the narrator distances himself from working class
xenophobia. The poem, nonetheless, never calls out racist rhetoric. On the contrary, it
perpetuates it, as Harte remains blithely unconcerned with the retitling of his poem in
republications, a retitling based on, of course, his own coinage of “The Heathen Chinee.” Harte
seems quite content to ride the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment, which has in turn made his name.
Harte’s ambiguous relationship with things Chinese manifests itself whenever he deigns
to take on Chinese subjects in his otherwise lily-white corpus. In “John Chinaman,” a short essay
from The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1929), Harte professes incomprehension
and apprehension of “Chinaman,” following his poem’s shuttle between the individual and the
collective. He opens with “the Chinese face,” which Harte cannot read. The face becomes a site
for speculation, validating the stereotype of perennial aliens. The most heart-felt, spontaneous
expression of smile is said to never appear on a Chinese face. Given the persecution against the
Chinese around the turn of the last century, only an idiot would give forth grins, which is yet
another stereotype against Chinese deemed insensate to pain.
The long opening paragraph segues from the Chinese face to the Chinese theater
performance Harte obviously frequents. The failure of reading the face morphs into the failure of
following the stage performance. Instead of the play on stage, Harte tries to read the audience’s
reaction to the play in terms of their facial expressions and body language, only to be thwarted
once again. Harte apparently laughs at the wrong moments, eliciting Chinese audience’s stare.
Harte’s own response to the play differ from those of the Chinese audience, to the extent that
Harte could not even decide “whether the performance was a tragedy or farce” (242), which
imposes a Western distinction onto the action on stage. Unable to decipher the words, Harte
proffers fragments of impression on action sequences, including somersaults, the “run[ning] amuck behind the scene,” audience applause and “facial spasms” (243). The two quotes indicate
the depth of Harte’s confusion: How do actors “run a-muck behind the scene”? What are “facial
spasms”? Bursts of laughter? Cries of bravo accompanying standing ovation? Harte concludes by
acknowledging “the impossibility of deciding upon the outward and superficial expression of
Chinese mirth” (243). Thus, Harte bases his essay on his limited encounter with one Chinese
laundryman, who is a clown in and of himself, the model for his short story “See Yup” in all
likelihood. The second half of the essay elaborates on his dealing with the laundryman
nicknamed John Chinaman, a type rather than an individual. Blocked in his attempt to penetrate
the other, Harte resorts to strategic Sinophobia-cum-Sinophilia: the unknown Chinese is
conjoined twins of ludicrous funnyman and lurid foe.
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The story “See Yup” displays Harte’s signature jumps of imagination, from the
individual laundryman, as child-like as Ah Sin, to the Chinese race of Ah Sins conning American
miners and authorities. America’s obsessive-compulsive disorder whenever it comes to the
Oriental Other leads Harte to parse See Yup’s exterior of physical and linguistic traits for the
interior of intention. From the perspective of a white schoolteacher one rung above workingclass miners, no different from truthful James one rung above Bill Nye, Harte opens with the
question of the Chinese name: “See UP—it meant that lifting of the outer angle of the eye
common to the Mongolian” (93). The Chinese, both the person and the language lumped into
one, is a sign to be decoded however the West sees fit, even if it entails omitting the “y” in Yup
and misstressing the second word of the name, reminiscent of dropping the “s” from Chinese.
The sound of the Chinese name is made to match the slant eyes, indeed a Christian miracle of the
word made flesh. A child’s game of defacing and de-naming catapulted Harte to the Heart of
America. Truth be told, the name See Yup is but a regional reference, alluding to “Four
Counties” in Cantonese for the four counties west of Guangzhou or Canton, from which the
majority of turn-of-the-last-century Chinese migrants hailed.3
The schoolteacher narrator’s perception of the laundryman is one of bemusement. See
Yup’s abuse in the hands of schoolboys, stuck with his pigtail jammed into the classroom
window, and the threat of his debtees turn ridiculous, given his paralysis and infelicity with
English. Pidgin and malapropism alchemize his pain into the reader’s pleasure and fun. See
Yup’s power of imitation renders him suspect, though, evoking Ah Sin’s ruse of duplicate cards.
The narrator’s “washing-bill” comes with a bouquet of camellia where only the flower at the
very top is real, wired together with other blossoms cut from potato. The digital dexterity and the
mental patience work in cahoots to produce fake flowers. Such “patience,” exhibited in the
suffering of abuse, appears a commendable racial characteristic, but one with a dark undertone.
Great patience implies a long wait. Like the Heathen Chinee’s long sleeves and tapering
fingernails, See Yup and his associates play the “long game” of conspiracy, waiting out their
Caucasian counterpart and beating Americans at their own game.
Faced with a seemingly harmless See Yup, Harte evinces discomfort out of an abundance
of caution:
In our confidential intercourse, I never seemed to really get nearer to him. His
sympathy and simplicity appeared like his flowers—to be a good-humored imitation of
my own. I am satisfied that his particularly soulless laugh was not derived from any
amusement he actually felt, yet I could not say it was forced. In his accurate imitations, I
fancied he was only trying to evade any responsibility of his own. THAT devolved upon
his taskmaster! In the attention he displayed when new ideas were presented to him, there
was a slight condescension, as if he were looking down upon them from his three
thousand years of history. (99)
The inscrutable perennial alien arises, inclined to copying without ingenuity. Whereas imitation
of the West elevates the West, that power dynamics is undercut by See Yup’s instinctive
“condescension” from “three thousand years of history.” The narrator projects onto See Yup not
only his inability to penetrate the interlocutor but also his self-doubt over a young America’s
lack of history and culture.
The story proceeds on two parallel lines of how Americans got beat in their own game,
both the American body politic and the American male body. On the collective level, laws
governing West Coast gold mining industry practice Foreign Miners’ Tax, a form of systemic
injustice of heavy taxes designed to disenfranchise foreign miners working on white miners’
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tailings, or mine dumps. The outrage of injustice is lightened by See Yup’s revenge exploiting
the stereotype of “all Chinese look alike,” or the perception of Chinese propensity for cloning.
Even remining abandoned white-owned mines smacks of mindless simulation. By passing
around his receipt for taxes rendered, See Yup helps Chinese miners evade taxes since the
authorities could not tell apart See Yup and his cohorts presenting the same receipt. “The wornout ‘tailings,’” already exhausted by “Christian fellow miners” (101) who sell the “lemon,” so to
speak, to unaware buyers, turn out to generate five-hundred-dollar worth of gold dust regularly.
In See Yup’s pidgin, the money order at Wells, Fargo & Co.’s Express office “No leplesent
washee shirts at all! Catchee gold-dust when washee tailings. Shabbee?” (114). Hearing of this,
American miners rush to buy back tailings, and the Chinese make off with the profits. Instead of
laundering shirts, See Yup launders money, as the same amount of gold dust cycles between the
destination of the Chinese Association of San Francisco and See Yup to dupe American miners
and banks regarding the putative bonanza left in the mine dumps. Both ethnic groups engage in
communal chicanery, one to oppress Chinese workers under the pretense of the law, the other to
outsmart white lies by coordinated deception of the Chinese in diaspora.
Beyond the collective level or on the individual level of the body, average American
miners suffer from indigestion, except See Yup. After a miner Cy Parker reveals that See Yup’s
“punk” or incense has cured him of dyspepsy, all secretly seek relief in See Yup’s pink powder,
despite openly lambasting the heathen medicine. “Smell[ing] and taste[ing] like ginger,” the
powder is suspected to be ginger, half of the alleged “Chinese smell” of “half opium, half
ginger” (94). The coal mining camp doctor avers that the Chinese incense consists of “sawdust
mixed with a little gum and formic acid,” or ant secretion. A placebo turns out to contain
ingredients of insect saliva, debunking the mysterious Oriental panacea. An offense either to the
American palate or to humanity in general, Chineseness inhabits the inedible ginger or the
subhuman ant. Conspiracy theories, however, have a way of boomeranging against themselves.
Coal miners suspect the doctor of “hoax[ing]” them, which suggests the working-class suspicion
of intellectuals or the elite class. Harte’s strategy harks back to the proverbial having the cake
and eating it, too. From the moral high ground of a professional writer, Harte criticizes the racial
discrimination of the working class, while reconfirming, even perpetuating, the stereotype of
double-crossing “heathen Chinee” at the card table and the gold mine, spreading across the land
like an invasive species of ants. The ants are but self-delusion, self-projection of American
Sinophobia, accompanied by its familiar Sinophilia.
Kung Flu
CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang tweeted on March 18, 2020: “This morning a White House
official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face.” The virus of racist Sinophobia has
long lain dormant in America’s bloodstream, now jolted awake by President Donald Trump’s
repeated tweets of covid-19 as “the Chinese Virus” and his ensuing defense of the term in press
conferences. The Washington Post published on March 19 a close-up photograph by Jabin Botsford,
capturing Trump’s brie…
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