Scrutinized!

Introduction

Under Scrutiny

Over the past fifty years, the American government has been particularly interested in surveilling minority subjects. The now infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) illegally and clandestinely pursued scores of activists and organizations associated with the black liberation movement and civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Martin Luther King, Jr., members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Revolutionary Action Movement.1

But even before institutional circumspection of so-called subversive organizations and individuals, the U.S. government has tracked, in broad terms, Asian and Asian North American immigrants and citizens in the interest of Asian immigration control, job distribution, national security, and national health in both its literal and metaphorical terms.2 At the 1949 creation of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese Americans who retained ties with relatives in the communist nation were confronted by the FBI or deported through the use of “deceptive tactics” by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, argues Christina Klein, who documents how federal agents, nearly ten years later, swept through Chinatowns on both U.S. coasts, tracking “suspected communists” who may have arrived in the nation illegally (34).3 In 1950, North Korea, backed by the strong communist allies of the Soviet Union and China, were seen to threaten international American safety and political harmony abroad. The Korean War, argues Klein, brought about a resurgence of the “yellow peril,” in which Orientals were depicted as dehumanized, devious, and mysteriously dangerous, so much so that “Asianness” itself was to be prevented from entering U.S. shores “at all costs” (37). The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act revised the racial regulations of earlier immigration laws across nationalities, but American fears of Asian immigration again were stoked after France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the establishment of Vietnam’s communist north and democratic south, whose conflicts escalated into U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Through what is called racial formation, or how national, raced subjects are accepted, assimilated, or vilified by a dominant race, Asian North Americans have found themselves tracked, interned, or discriminated against.

Such a historical trajectory of monitoring Asian subjects continues more subtly into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1997, political campaign contributor John Huang made headlines for his hefty but illegal donation to the Clinton campaign. The National Review capitalized on the incident by caricaturing members of the first family in yellow face, embellishing them with Chinese coolie hats, buck teeth, almond-shaped eyes, and yellow skin. Two years later, Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee was accused of fifty-nine counts of spying for China. He was acquitted in 2000 after the federal government failed to prove its case against him. While he was held in solitary confinement for eight months, the face of espionage in the media was decidedly Asian, specifically Chinese and Chinese American, eventually “the medium by which allegations of espionage and corruption were conveyed,” argues Neil T. Gotanda (79). Shortly after 9/11, a wave of Islamophobia swept the nation, targeting those who looked Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim, an attempt at what can only be understood as crude classification through visual (racial) cues, but without any clear definitional guideposts. These hate crimes affected innocent people who happened to look like the so-called enemy. Asian North Americans (those settling in the United States and Canada) have been targets of this sustained national monitoring, which has contributed to the changing meanings appended to Asian North Americans in the public media and the social imaginary.4

Scrutinized! examines the effects of surveillance on Asian North American characters, arguing that surveillance themes are literary responses to continued irrational anxieties over race. Because racialization is a product of self-protection that is created socially and culturally, a dominant population invests its energy honing narratives of racial difference that provide outcomes that favor itself. To the status quo, then, this solution is logical. But in novels discussed here, fears raised by the presence of Asian North Americans (such as Japanese Canadians at the advent of World War II, former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, or those persons hailing from the Middle East after 9/11) are upheld by ignorance or political convenience and eventually re-evaluated, sometimes to national embarrassment, in the absence of damaging evidence to convict assumed criminals. These fears are unsupportable and therefore irrational.

While race is a benign category, it also is a common visual marker by which we categorize ourselves and others as Asian North Americans, African Americans, Jews, white Americans, etc. Such seemingly simplistic racial categorization operates on a complex visual continuum, from the dark skin that renders one subject irrefutably “black” to the ambiguity of the mixed-race subject; from the undetectable “one drop” that facilitates racial passing (the ability of nonwhite subjects to be mistaken for white) to what Leslie Bow deems the “partly colored,” exemplified by Asian Americans in the Jim Crow South who skirted the discrimination suffered by blacks but did not receive the privileges enjoyed by white Americans.5

North Americans have been visible for their physical racial differences from white Americans but, paradoxically, invisible subjects politically and legally. That is, at various points since the mid-

eighteenth century, Orientals, stereotyped Asians in the American imagination, have been touted for their physical and cultural differences, exemplified in circus acts that showcased oddities such

as the bound-footed Chinese woman Afong Moy and the “Siamese Twins” Chang and Eng Bunker. Accompanying this curiosity over their foreignness, they have been ostracized for their supposed moral menace to white welfare, vilified for their willingness to work hard for less pay than non-Asians, and then ironically overlooked for their future contributions to civic and political life (in the figure of the silent, model minority).6 Their inscrutability, or the contradiction between looking at Asian North Americans and overlooking them, drives this book’s thesis.

While overtly racist acts such as exhibiting Asian subjects are confined to the past, Scrutinized! argues that current Asian North American novels’ fascination with mystery, detection, spying, tracking, and surveillance is a literary response to contemporary social agitation surrounding race. Surveillance is a calculus of sorts. It gathers information by which it can read degrees of criminality and abnormal behavior. Institutions surveil not to pinpoint citizens’ good behavior, but to spot deviance among the unsuspecting. Scrutiny of raced subjects privileges a dominant gaze that makes legible a kind of Asian North American subjectivity. Scrutinized! suggests that a history of surveillance has created Asian North American subjects (authors and their characters) who watch themselves being watched. Their categorization as inscrutable ironically reveals a national obsession over their visibility and fear about their perceived illegibility.

A History of Asian Surveillance

I investigate acts of literary surveillance to gauge how raced subjects perceive, react to, evade, or subvert examination. The origins of Asian surveillance in the United States began in the nineteenth century when few Americans ever had seen Asians. Their initial fascination manifested itself in attendance at middle to late nineteenth-century exhibitions or theatrical acts, mentioned above, or in glimpses of a few “Hindoos” in the Salem, Massachusetts, harbor. But curiosity turned into animosity when immigrant labor, specifically Chinese, appeared to threaten white employment, prompting a series of laws and legal acts that gave Asians increased negative visibility at the same time as mounting restrictions against their immigration and citizenship, the latter already prohibited by the Naturalization Act of 1790, attempted to render them invisible

subjects. The Page Act of 1875 was the first in a series of legislative moves that barred Asians specifically. The race-based Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned most Chinese from immigration. Its subsequent extensions in 1888, 1892 (the Geary Act), and 1893 (the McCreary Amendment, demanding residence certificates) were precursors to the exclusion policies of 1907 and 1917. These later policies extended restrictions to Japanese subjects (including Koreans) and South Asians.7

In Canada, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 imposed a stiff head tax on Chinese immigrants. The fee was raised in 1900 and again in 1903 until it constituted an estimated two years’ worth of a Chinese immigrant laborer’s salary. The act’s strident corollary in 1923 prohibited nearly all Chinese immigration, including ethnic Chinese immigrants from nations other than China (this act

was not abolished until 1947) (Roy 73). In 1908, amid massive immigration from Europe, Canada required immigrants from India to arrive by “continuous journey” from their port of origin. In 1914, Gurdit Singh challenged this law by stopping in both Shanghai and Yokohama after departing from Hong Kong and before arriving in Vancouver. Like other early twentieth-century Asian immigrants who contested Canadian laws, his attempt failed and his entry was denied. Canada passed the 1919 Act to Amend the Immigration Act, intended to protect the white Canadian population by banning immigration by Asians into British Columbia, their point of entry into the nation, and thus into the rest of Canada. Four years later, the Canadian government passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which effectively barred most Chinese from Canada; it was not overturned until the immigration reform of the 1960s. Not until the mid-1970s did Canada finally permit provinces more autonomy in crafting immigration regulations by opening its doors to refugees, immigrant family members of Canadian citizens, and independent immigrants.

While Asians were thus tracked and managed through their physical differences, they themselves tested the cultural definitions of what the United States considered “white” or “Caucasian.” These

definitions often were based on hypocritical constructions of race and cultural understandings of whiteness. In a well-known 1922 U.S. Supreme Court case, for example, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese, argued that because his skin color was visibly as white as that of most non-Japanese, he should be considered Caucasian and thus eligible for naturalization. The court disagreed. The following year, Bhagat Singh Thind, a South Asian Hindu, claimed that his Caucasian origins, as defined anthropologically, guaranteed his citizenship. The Supreme Court, however, decreed that “Caucasian” must be defined as “white, as the common person on the street understands it.”8 The United States thus legalized distinctions between “true” white Americans and others who relied on anthropological definitions of Caucasianness or who claimed their skin color was the same as that of white Americans. Meanwhile, the non-Asian inability to distinguish one Asian nationality from another—as when Chinese Americans during World War II wore buttons declaring “I am Chinese” to differentiate themselves from Japanese Americans—increased racial tensions among and between Asian North Americans.

Media representations of Asians in North America at these junctures were tied to the degree of admiration or the level of threat incited by politics between North America and the Far East. For example, after 1853, when Japan became newly accessible to the West, the Japanese were respected for rapidly Westernizing, but vilification of the Chinese reached a new height. Anti-Chinese feelings waned during that nation’s pre-Revolutionary years, but hysteria mounted again as China turned to communism. When China sided with the United States during World War II, turning America to its favor, Japanese Americans became “enemy aliens,” interned along the Pacific coast from California to British Columbia. In Canada as well as in the United States, tensions continue to play out between those who look different from citizens of Anglo-

European descent even while, ironically, physical visibility creates Asian North Americans’ political invisibility. Surveillance therefore enables the production of certain narratives: Chinese female im-

migrants as prostitutes, Asian immigrants as unclean, or political agitation by minorities as inevitably damaging to national welfare. Acts of surveillance in history gird the relationship between contemporary race politics and Asian North American self-scrutiny.

Policing Fictions, Perceiving Race

A history of managing race by looking, or surveilling, has created the relationship between contemporary race politics and Asian North American self-scrutiny. Surveillance themes are aesthetic responses to a recrudescence of policing race and race relations and thus express continued irrational social agitation over race. Overt racism and racial controls no longer exist. Instead, new, clandestine racist practices demand new articulations of their effects.9 Contemporary Asian North American fiction responds to policing practices in its obsession with vision, perception, and racial control, which are embedded in themes inherent in detective and crime fiction, spy novels, and mysteries.

The results of persistent scrutiny are a contemporary suppression of raced subjects accompanied by an intense examination of each individual’s merits and values. These are explored in Don Lee’s Country of Origin (2004), Nina Revoyr’s Southland (2003), Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest (2008), Suki Kim’s The Interpreter (2003), Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1998), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Addressed in the introduction is Chang-rae Lee’s oft-discussed Native Speaker (1995), and cursory examinations of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars (1995), Andrew Xia Fukuda’s Crossing (2010), Ed Lin’s This Is a Bust (2007), and John Layman and Rob Guillory’s graphic narrative Chew (2009) appear in the conclusion and invite further scholarly inquiry. Their publication dates coincide with a spate of Asian North American detective and mystery series, those for example by Dale Furutani, Leonard Chang, Naomi Hirahara, Sujata Massey, S. J. Rozan, Henry Chang, and others. The featured novels, however, are less concerned with solving the crimes than they are with creating literary responses to more than a decade of ongoing contemporary Asian North American monitoring. Their sustained engagement with intense social anxieties over crimes attributed to raced subjects, such as terrorism, identity theft, illegal immigration, and spying, is therefore a response to the contemporary extension of a history of Asian surveillance in modern forms.

Asian North American authors examine this social agitation through strategies found in the broad category of crime fiction. Allegiance to a genre that takes the interruption of social norms as its foundation speaks to a state of unease in our contemporary moment. The novels exploit detective fiction’s genre-based techniques to highlight not a postracial society, but a pervasive vigilance of (raced) Asian North American subjects. Betsy Huang in her Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction explores how Asian American authors manipulate and subvert the familiar tropes and formulas of “highly conventionalized popular fiction genres” such as crime narratives and science fiction (5). “Working within the established boundaries of popular fiction genres and the known quantities of audience tastes and expectations, Asian American writers of immigrant, crime, and science fiction can confirm, contest, and, most importantly, rewrite the genericized narratives about Asian American history, culture, and identity,” she writes, subverting the genres’ conventions themselves (7). Huang’s work contributes to a host of recent calls for aesthetic approaches to Asian North American literature instead of ideological ones, and her critical readings remind us of the regulatory power genres hold over readers while she simultaneously reveals how the narratives she examines undermine that disciplinary gesture. The detective

form employed by contemporary Asian North American authors takes a different approach, focusing on how the genre’s necessary and expected acts of scrutiny, performed by agents of surveillance, reveal new ways of seeing and interpreting (5).10 The process of assessing visual clues—what evidence exists, how is it interpreted, by whom, and who is doing the interpretation and why—revises accepted definitions of criminal and crime. Because of its familiarity among readers, the detective genre presents itself as an accessible form through which to question scrutiny and the scrutinized.

The act of seeing and interpreting, key elements in detective work, are freighted with cultural meaning captured by the verb “to perceive.” To perceive is to focus on some aspects while screening out others; to see is to merely acknowledge objects, a value-neutral gesture. We do not need a brief history of race-related laws to remind us that we perceive race, an ideologically inflected gesture. The “visual has always had primacy in our understandings of race,” argues Lisa Nakamura (75, emphasis in original). Eleanor Ty adds that the politics of the visible, the title of her book, is about the “hieroglyphs of race,” which are “imprinted” in the color and shape of one’s eyes, the contours of the nose, hair, skin, and bodies, creating the Asian (Politics of the Visible, 3, 4). Scrutinized! engages with current Asian North American scholarship that focuses on how bodies’ racial inscriptions are envisioned11 and how they strongly influence what we mean by individuality, nationality, and citizenship.12 Yet race is a benign category; it is neither biological nor intrinsic. There exists no true Asian, no pure black, no authentic white. As the novels under investigation prove, we continue to haphazardly deploy visually defined categories of race as social realities, a regulatory mechanism under which Asian North Americans live the paradox of being inscrutable—looked at and overlooked—the contradiction driving this study’s thesis.

Powers of Detection and Detective Fiction

That vision is never neutral and that ideology both can assist or prohibit perception ground good detective, mystery, and spy fiction. The novels in this study that feature elements of surveillance are, arguably, loosely defined contemporary detective fiction in which some protagonists are thrust into pseudo-detective roles to make sense of mysteries in their past that adversely impact

the present. In other cases, a reader is thrust unexpectedly into a role of one who surveils but is unable to effect change. In traditional detective fiction, readers are pleasantly surprised by what they have overlooked or how cultural constructions have blinded them to seemingly obvious conclusions. Edgar Allan Poe illustrates the power of the obvious in “The Purloined Letter” when the suspect—Minister D—“hides” a piece of evidence in full view. Agatha Christie shocked her readers with the 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd when she revealed the narrator as the criminal, a suspect in full view (in fact, he assists Detective Hercule Poirot in solving the case) but never suspected by readers themselves. As their powers of observation grow keener, readers of detective fiction are driven to solve each book’s mystery themselves. They delight when reality and perception are pleasantly addled, befuddling their literary sleuthing abilities until the author logically unravels former inconsistencies and conundrums to form a now obvious conclusion. The strategy of revealing readers’ blind spots—or deferring understanding of their own ideologies—makes the genre extremely useful as a literary device to discuss the complex dance between race and perception. What do readers overlook about the crime, about race? What is crime? What is race? Is race criminal? Is crime racial? These are some of the questions posed by contemporary Asian North American fiction.

If at one time the detective’s ratiocination restored gendered, racial, sexual, religious, or class order from the chaos of crime, conclusions to contemporary detective fiction often elude the accepted social order because agents cannot accept the logic of the order itself. Ratiocination, for example, drives early British and American detective fiction in which armchair detectives languidly

solve crimes from their living rooms, thinking out loud to readers who puzzle along with them about possible suspects, motives, and the meanings and relevance of clues found at crime scenes. Such stories and novels are grounded in “shared community values,” says Heta Pyrhönen, referencing Dennis Porter’s argument that “detective fiction. . . cannot—by definition—offend the tastes and values of its readers” (Murder from an Academic Angle, 102). Their resolutions restore the reigning order of social relations and cultural values within the genre, specifically among upper-middle-class and upper-class characters, much to the relief of their readers. Asian North American literature on surveillance, however, responds to extratextual shared community values that couple race with irresolution and struggles within the novels to define a common community ideal. Moreover, the literature’s emplotment occurs not in the fine country estates typical of Agatha Christie’s work, but in contemporary cityscapes of mixed-race populations, in overseas locations, and amid the clash of cultures. The seemingly common national and cultural values held by, say, Korean American characters in Asian North American surveillance fiction are shattered when Korean immigrants themselves turn against their peer ethnics, disrupting the notion of ethnic enclaves as safe spaces for recent arrivals. Asian America’s most famous detective, Charlie Chan, assists the predominantly white police force on the mixed-race island of Hawai‘i with his so-called Orientalist methodology that grates against the knowledge of the seemingly more savvy agents who speak fluent English.13 Chan’s visible differences cast him as alien, and it is such visual, Asian features that even now render some of the protagonists of contemporary Asian North American fiction immediate suspects. Furthermore, while hard-boiled detectives in American fiction—Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins—represent free agents devoid of encumbering relationships and family ties, the protagonists of contemporary Asian North American surveillance fiction cannot survive without these relationships. Community girds ethnicity, and those outside its parameters drift, disconnected from the wider social fabric. The rise of ethnic detectives in mass-market fiction provides ample opportunities to discuss the political and social implications of ethnic crime-fighting agents. According to Adrienne Johnson Gosselin, they refuse the role of cultural mediator, or what Elaine Kim would name cultural ambassadorship, in which they are expected to educate readers about their culture through the genre; rather, argues

Gosselin, detectives who hail from traditionally excluded communities test and modify the genre’s conventions (3, xi–xii). Indeed, at several key points, crimes at the featured novels’ center recede

in importance when juxtaposed against the crime of, for example, Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment in which national law conflicted with the constitutional rights of its citizens. The novels I investigate seek to redefine the term “crime” itself. They confirm that re-establishing a precrime environment recreates many of the racist practices that may have led to the original crimes.14

Technologies of Seeing and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker

Just as detective fiction tests our own powers of perception, technologies of surveillance such as cameras, spy planes, and the electronic gathering of personal information reveal how little we recognize our own susceptibility to being fooled by what we are allowed to see and how we are allowed to see it. Information gathered by surveillance technology, for example, is limited by fallible human interpretation. More than merely observing the faces and actions of those it records, surveillance can reify, not eradicate, intractable ideologies. Katherine Biber argues that evidence collected through technology like photography is read through the “socio-political practices that are associated with class and race prerogatives” (16). Similarly, Judith Butler argues that video evidence presented to jurors in the case against the police who beat Rodney King in 1992 was read “within a racially saturated field of visibility. If racism pervades white perception, structuring what can and cannot appear within the horizon of white perception, then to what extent does it interpret in advance ‘visual evidence’?” (15–16). Yoonmee Chang similarly charges surveillance technology with “underwriting culturalizations” in her discussion of the murder of African American

Latasha Harlins by Korean shop owner Soon Ja Du in Los Angeles in 1991. While the camera’s surveillance record “might be taken as a truly dispassionate, documenting eye,” it is interpreted as a record of “a mercenary Korean American shopkeeper and a thieving African American in their ostensibly natural states” (167). It is impossible to envision any technology that can adequately capture social interpretations of concepts such as race, gender, sexuality, faith, and economic class, concepts that consistently shape our humanity. They are obscured not only by what we desire to see (perception), but also by how culture, and the tools by which we attempt to understand culture, shapes that vision (ideology).

Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker assists in illustrating how these abstract concepts inflect the literary texts and how this spy novel, as a precursor to the others discussed here, uses the

trope of surveillance to read complex race relations. Much scholarship already exists on the novel’s explicit use of spying, but at the expense of other Asian North American novels implicitly referencing the larger arena of the crime fiction genre. Given this body of scholarship, Native Speaker is a valuable introductory springboard for my own approach to an exciting collection of other texts whose more subtle uses of detection become conspicuous entries into the perpetual surveillance of Asian North Americans.

The novel’s title, Native Speaker, refers to its adherence to a linguistic ethnic imperative coupling fluency in English with national acceptance. Indeed, it is a text obsessed with language. Korean American protagonist Henry Park, who speaks English with a slight accent, is married to Lelia, a speech therapist with impeccable articulation working in an ESL classroom. Henry’s father’s accented pidgin English is contrasted with that of other seemingly more successful Korean American immigrants whose English is more fluent, such as mayoral candidate John Kwang. Henry is a spy in the mixed-race New York borough of his working territory. His racial similarity to those in the city of his mission contributes to his spying success. As a Korean American, he goes unnoticed as he inserts himself into conversations and situations with Kwang and his supporters. Because Henry is a man in search of an identity, his profession lends itself well to providing him with one identity while he clandestinely tries on others. For Tim Engles, the genre mimics how an immigrant who is neither a white American nor fluent in English becomes a “watchful outsider” of the American society in which he circulates (n.p.). Like Engles, Tina Chen (in Double Agency) and Yoonmee Chang also map the close relationship between language and spying. Chen dismantles the authority of the “native speaker,” on the one hand an element of prestige for non-native speakers, on the other a kind of false identity rendering the native speaker akin to that of a spy. Chang couples writing with spying and treason, arguing that Henry’s written reports based on

observations of his coethnics are a form of entrepreneurship; he profits by exploiting his Korean American peers.

Despite Lee’s strategic use of spy fiction to enable double identity, such bifurcation is unsustainable. By novel’s end, Henry must choose either assimilation or immigrant differentiation, each with its own psychological consequences. All three scholars note how Henry eventually trades in his “racial-cultural difference,” one that positively assists his employment as a spy, for the assimilatory project of becoming a native speaker (Chang, Writing the Ghetto, 169). He walks away from the “ethnographic surveillance” demanded of his employer Glimmer & Co. and into his wife’s classroom, where she teaches immigrant students English, indicating that Henry’s goal is toward assimilation by linguistic means (168). Or he succumbs to the lure of what Engles calls “doxic whiteness” (in Engles’ argument, that which is not arbitrary or taken for granted), embracing the white gaze that demands his rejection of Korean culture (n.p.). Chen argues that Henry’s “ventriloquization” (171) is a kind of “complicity in voicing himself in the ways that others would have him speak,” an imposter defeated by “his own double agency” (173, 176). These scholars focus on Henry’s entrance into the white fold, impossible without relinquishing the “stink” of cultural difference (Chang, Writing the Ghetto, 175). “For Henry,” argues Crystal Parikh, “the truest ‘burden’ that links him to his father and to Kwang is not in their ability to represent through

sameness but to betray through distance and difference their own kind,” only one betrayal of many that the “spy carries out. . .one instance of the perfidious character of representation within the

multicultural terrain” (“Ethnic America,” 278). Henry’s ability to look like the Other but speak as an assimilated immigrant assist in his spying activities as he betrays the Korean community in which

he performs his work.15

Henry’s success as a spy rests not only upon his native speech and naturalized gestures—or his assimilation—but also upon circumspection, vigilance, and witnessing, all actions dependent upon

technologies of seeing and concomitant abilities of perception. The novel asks difficult questions about what happens to community, solidarity, immigration, and introspection under a policing eye,

one eye clandestine (a spy agency) and several overt (the INS, the wider non-Asian community invested in themes of immigration control).16 Henry is both a member of and separate from the frequently alluded to mobs and masses of New York City’s immigrant population. As a coethnic in a Korean American neighborhood, however, he visually blends into its melee. This girds his success as a spy for Glimmer & Co., by which he is charged with furtively surveilling and exposing the enclave’s seamy underbelly, particularly the activities of New York City’s Korean American mayoral hopeful Kwang. Henry’s Korean American identity smoothes his entrance into Kwang’s intimate political coterie. Such a reading presupposes that two men of similar Korean nationality understand and sympathize with each other in a seemingly hostile world of non-Koreans and non-immigrants. The reading massages a literary imperative, defined by Chang as expected but reductive portraits of Asian Americans, that two men of the same nationality in an alien environment naturally gravitate toward an alliance. Such imperatives are encouraged by non-Asian Americans and Asian North Americans alike. Contrary to such expectations, however, Lee’s novel pits Henry against Kwang when the former discovers the secrets of Kwang’s political success and his politically damaging ties with Korean gang members. The novel fruitfully undermines and exposes our race ideology (race imperatives) or our culturally groomed perceptions of coethnic cooperation and notions of the model minority.

On a prose level, Lee’s visual narrative panning complements a socially constructed multicultural perspective (imperative) that envisions immigrants working side by side, but not necessarily together, to achieve the American dream. The following excerpt showcases the vibrancy of Flushing’s international labor force, a diverse population whose collective variety triggers the celebratory definitions of multiculturalism: “There were all kinds, these streaming and working and dealing, these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians” (77). But this image tells another immigrant story, in which subjects’ national affiliations—“Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians”—are demoted to racial typing by color and finally reduced to “nobodies” associated only with the exotic products they deliver to the marketplace:

. . .these brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers, countless unheard nobodies, each offering to the marketplace their gross of kimchee, lichee, plantain, black bean, soy milk, coconut milk, ginger, grouper, ahi, yellow curry, cuchifrito, jalapeño, their everything, selling anything to each other and to themselves, every day of the year, and every minute. (77)

On the one hand, Lee’s lengthy depictions of “colorful” nationalities, exotic, Oriental foods and spices, and unflagging movement evoke difference, variety, and continuous motion, rendering the paragraphs lively and fluid. On the other, the subjects’ perpetual motion emphasizes the necessity for endless work, as many educated immigrants are reduced to selling vegetables in corner

stores. “They were always loading and unloading the light trucks and cube vans of stapled wooden crates and burlap sacks,” writes Lee, “the bulging bags of produce like turnips or jicama as heavy on their sloping shoulders as the bodies of their children still asleep at home” (77). His subtle personification of inanimate objects reveals the hardened, emotionally deadened immigrant subjects, in contrast to the lively, colorful image non-ethnics create about Koreatown or Chinatown. The “storefronts and garages and warehouses” in which laboring immigrants spend most of their waking hours open their “cluttered maws” as if to masticate the immigrants, who are reduced to “ghostly forms” (76). Their steaming cigarettes, serving merely as tokens of potential illness, take visual precedence over human breath, signals of life in the early morning chill; cigarette smoke described as “other fires” endow the immigrants with a false animation, their human desire and determination already attenuated. When “bulging bags” are like the “bodies of their children,” Lee illustrates the toll that labor takes on all members of the immigrant family: the long hours of heavy and poorly paid labor that limits immigrants from self-improvement through education and either prevents active parenting or, more often than not, fashions the work site into de facto day care.

When “John Kwang’s people” discover that many of his financial supporters are undocumented immigrants, Lee again uses a visual narrative pan to emphasize first their racial variety, but eventually their solidarity in rage by all those who accuse “John Kwang’s money club members” of stealing their jobs (77, 307). The angry members of the mob “march to his house down the middle of the street, impromptu parades of them, husbands and wives and crying toddlers on shoulders, angry white people and brown people and black people, and now even some yellow. . . yelling together for his ouster” (307). Lee’s incensed subjects work together as a democratic crowd rather than as individual subjects of capitalism to verbally incite Kwang to emerge from his home, where he has been in hiding for the previous thirty-six hours. Soon after, Kwang is indicted; Henry assumes that most of his illegal immigrant supporters will be tried and deported. Shattered by this unexpected and devastating result of his spy work, Henry quits Glimmer & Co., wiser to the tenuous position of the Korean immigrant in America whose “wide immigrant face” invites the surveillance of his Asian and non-Asian peers (318).

Scrutinized! explores how Asian North American authors like Lee both use and examine the tenuous position of being watched and practice watchfulness themselves. The novels exploit detective fiction’s genre-based techniques as they highlight a pervasive vigilance of Asian North American subjects, exposing the fallacy of a so-called postracialism.

Scrutinized! is broadly about oversight and insight. The race policing of the past (overseeing and managing race) has been subsumed under postracism, an oversight (race blindness) that is still based on a persistent visual construction of race. Michel Foucault’s work on disciplining bodies might seem a necessary theoretical argument. No project that takes surveillance as its premise can ignore his arguments about subjects who unknowingly obey passive, invisible, and authoritative oversight that pervades and confines their daily movements. They discipline themselves within narrow boundaries through a physically absent but self-consciously present threat of being seen and disciplined by a vigilant institution or authority. The institution of policing, as Foucault argues, consistently affects the behavior of those subjected to voyeuristic practices. Institutional monitoring shapes individual subject’s self-surveillance. Surveillance in my project is a form of self-accounting, but one inseparable from a national “accounting for,” the latter deriving its impulse from the socially constructed threat of racial subjects and creating its policing practices through avenues like the law and the U.S. Census. But I do not discuss law, protective state apparatuses, and policing institutions, obviating a more focused Foucauldian approach beyond the brief discussion above. Furthermore, the primary texts of this study show scant evidence of the staples of detective fiction, such as the detective’s perspective or the restitution of the precrime social environment, as outlined earlier.17 Rather, in the new globality, it is not detectives but American expatriates, for example, or those heavily influenced by popular culture who provide mobile race vigilance, targeting subjects of national suspicion. I argue first that the state of being raced as a minority subject is a state of being under persistent surveillance. Second, I argue that surveilled (criminalized) raced subjects question a nation that requires their self-vigilance, in many cases demanding that they perform their own detective work as self-protection.

Overt and Covert Racism: New Paradigms in Racial Surveillance

Our modern civil rights and legislative configurations of race and racism, so different from that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pave the way for the decline of overt racism

and the unfortunate rise of covert racism. Explanations of current race relations require some history, for which I rely upon Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of the ethnicity paradigm, which represents “the modern sociology of race,” opposed dominant views of race as biologistic, as “part of a natural order of humankind,” views that served white proponents of the definition well during slavery (14–15). Scholars in the Chicago School regarded race as only one element among many aspects of “culture” in the ethnicity paradigm that included language, religion, culture, political affiliation. The paradigm theorized the ideal states of immigrant descent, consent, and eventual assimilation into white, American culture, a theory that assisted European immigrants—the Irish, for example, who were able to become white after their initial designation as a darker race—but remained unavailable to racial minorities, for the theory “could not appreciate the extent to which racial inequality differed from ethnic inequality” (15–16). Variations of the ethnicity paradigm persisted throughout World War II, emphasizing group or community formation as individuals “melted” into the American pot.

We now live in a new state of race relations that has been influenced by watershed moments. First, the implementation of legal restrictions against overt racism generated clandestine racist practices that demanded new articulations of their effects. Second, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) opened the doors to a flood of Asian immigrants and refugees, ushering in globalization and its effects. And third, in the 1960s and 1970s, minorities fought for and won much civic inclusion. Their collective actions chafed against residual institutional racism—separate but equal schools and segregated busing—that encouraged “affirmative” actions by proponents of the ethnicity school (19). Minorities relied on community work (protests, sit-ins, force) to advocate for the rights denied to particular groups

of people, and many such rights were realized legally through civil rights laws. In spite of minority successes against racism in the 1960s, those in the 1970s and the Reagan years who opposed

“antidemocratic” affirmative action and “dangerous radicalism” elevated individuals over group or race-based equality (20). According to Omi and Winant, former radical movements opposing

racial oppression were too fractured to be effective in the 1980s, paving the way for the right-wing politics of our present moment (139). The political agendas of minorities, women, and those in-

volved in peace movements, conservatives argued, were at odds with “traditional cultural and social values” (140). The right’s emphasis on “equality of opportunity” expressed a reaction against a “racial agenda” and a return to the ethnicity paradigm, the belief that the appropriate route for immigrants is consent to American ideology followed by assimilation into the dominant culture. This was evident in, for example, the rising popularity of an institutionalized multicultural curriculum in the 1980s in which required readings about Natives, Asian Americans, and African Americans supposedly worked to recognize and “celebrate” everybody’s cultural differences.

In the 1970s, Canada acknowledged its long overdue debt to immigrants and their children by passing multicultural policies that have been increasingly criticized by a nonminority popula-

tion. In 1988, the nation passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act to recognize, preserve, and foster the rights and cultures of First Peoples as well as those deemed visible minorities, or non-indigenous Canadians who are not members of a “national majority” (Day 212). The term itself accentuates the physical, visible aspects of its subjects to compensate for their cultural invisibility. Ty argues that the category “racializes Asian Canadians” because it groups together all non-Caucasians, such as “Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, South Asians, Nigerians, Jamaicans, and Ethiopians, as other” (Unfastened, xxiii). Eva Mackey’s ethnographic research conducted in 1992 on dominant beliefs in Canadian towns—small enclaves and not Canada’s global cities—finds a qualified approval of multiculturalism. According to her interviews, multiculturalism is deemed wholly desirable as long as “some form of unified core Canadian culture,” ironically understood as nonmulticultural, is of primary national importance (144). Multiculturalism problematized the sentiment “Canada first,” according to many of Mackey’s subjects (145). Such a pervasive Canadian attitude of the 1980s and 1990s escalated tensions between the dominant population and the so-named visible minorities. The latter began to publicize, in print and through vocal resistance, their own history of colonization and racism, bringing about, for example, the 1988 Japanese Canadian redress. The frisson also assisted in the 1987 Meech Lake Accord, which, had it succeeded by 1990, would have recognized Quebec’s political autonomy. And it provoked the 1990 Oka Crises, a land dispute between First Nations people (the Mohawk) and officials in the Quebec town of Oka, and the 1995 Quebec referendum on independence, another failed attempt at Quebec’s secession from Canada.18 As majority resentment of this increasing minority resistance grew, the sentiments recorded by Mackey suggest that the dominant population closely scrutinized its national diversity and found it lacking in (white) Canadian unity. Thus, Richard Day argues, the Canadian Act of Multiculturalism manages diversity by legally recognizing the existence of a diverse Canada. But it subsequently frames the diversity rhetorically as a problem that “requires immediate and ongoing rational-bureaucratic response” (26). The need for such mid-twentieth-century legislation does little to deter many Canadians from believing in the largely fictional notion of the nation’s harmonious existence among and with aboriginals and past immigrants. In Canada as well as in the United States, tensions continue to exist between the dominant population and those who look different from it.19

After the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and Canada’s immigration reforms of 1975 and 1976, globality significantly changed immigrant demographics. While Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants predominated, both nations saw the arrival of middle-class persons associated with transnational corporations from “Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia,” not the more financially bereft Asian immigrants and refugees of an earlier era (Ty, Unfastened, xxiv). Their higher socioeconomic status and educational achievements, as well as their diversity of faiths and their noted self-confidence instead of deference, make discussions about racial formation and racial perception dependent on factors outside race itself, predominantly religious affiliation and economic class.

I understand race not merely as a historical process concluding in racial formation, but also as a persistent presence that has been subjected to constant monitoring in the neoliberal state. While leading scholars in the field ground my understanding of the creation and maintenance of race in America—including Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation, David Theo Goldberg’s Racist Culture and The Racial State, Ruth Frankenburg’s White Women, Race Matters—I rely heavily on those like Paul Gilroy who place race, once again, at the center of academic debates over social relations. He reminds us to consider the resonances of colonialism and imperialism on current immigrant, raced, and postcolonial subjects. In the novels addressed here, racist ideology of the West travels in transatlantic, transglobal, and transpacific streams; it is a racial Pacific. Its traces are detectable but its personal devastations are often unstoppable, even by official state policing institutions, which often participate in racism by overlooking it. Racist formation is complicated by the movement across the globe of peoples whose behaviors with and against peer ethnics redefine terms such as oppression or marginality, according to Kandice Chuh (referenced in Ty, Unfastened, xxiv).

Chapters are arranged so that readers first revisit Oriental visions, or Asian stereotypes, and then encounter official documentation recording major events such as the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internments. The former visions, which endure, and the latter documents, diplomatically forgotten, shape how Asian subjects were and are scrutinized and to what effects. They determine which surveilling images remain emblazoned in the nations’ collective memory and which face political burial. The first and last chapters are set in Tokyo and Lahore, examining Americans abroad and foreigners in America, respectively. The change in location intensifies rather than abates racial scrutiny. The book’s central chapters on American and Canadian domestic surveillance of Asian North Americans examine how scrutiny produces embattled raced spaces and melancholic subjects who are haunted by marginalization. The final chapter takes up what I call the liberal democratic reader’s self-scrutiny in a post-9/11 moment, exposing assumptions that contribute to, and do not deflect, racial scrutiny. Each chapter argues how the novels revise common tools of surveillance (investigations, photographs, camera monitoring, or archives) into aesthetic ones to fathom and critique what we mean by race. The book simultaneously builds and dismantles: chapters move from surveilling Asian North American

characters toward challenging readers to self-scrutinize. The first chapter discusses a more traditional detective novel featuring a crime, a detective, suspects, and a clear resolution. The second and third chapters make creative use of the genre when Asian North American civilians solve crimes to save themselves or exonerate their relatives. The third chapter guides its readers toward a radical reading of evidence related to internment surveillance, while the final chapter investigates how a text turns its damning eye upon the reader, an acute reversal of who constitutes the observed subject. These reversals underscore the book’s project of re-viewing

the act of scrutiny.

Chapter 2 explores Don Lee’s Country of Origin through enduring geographical iterations of what I call Asian playgrounds, spaces where the illusions that accompany the act of play reside simultaneously with the enticing dangers attributed to the cultural practices of nonwhite races. Using past and present representations of such playgrounds—from Frank Norris’ 1908 San Francisco Chinatown to photographs of the enclave by his contemporary Arnold Genthe to the current, twenty-first-century Japanese hostess clubs of Don Lee’s Country of Origin—I argue that Asian playgrounds provide imperiling titillation for outsiders who enter their premises. Their hazards, however, are not inherent features of the raced characters who inhabit them, as many such representations would have us believe, but are manifestations of the dangerous fantasies projected onto Asian subjects. Asian playgrounds rely on necessary themes of illusion to entertain their clients. In Lee’s novel, I dismantle the socially expected fantasies of one such playground, hostess clubs, to assist in unpacking the illusions by which race is defined and socially sedimented in other playgrounds. That women, especially white women, are jeopardized far more frequently in these spaces while others, especially Asians themselves, circulate within them unscathed speaks to how adverse constructions of the Asian race are fantasies by which we live. Country of Origin is a detective novel featuring inept Japanese officials and foreign service agents based in Tokyo. Their failures, manifested in numerous unexpected or mistaken identities, unsettle the visual

authority of the police and government upon which definitions of race often rest. Take, for example, protagonist Lisa Countryman’s proximity to and distance from social acceptance as a visually ambiguous foreigner in Tokyo, as a Korean ethnic in Japan, and as a half-black, half-Korean subject straddling the Pacific. Japan’s and the United States’ refusal to see race as a fiction devastates this novel’s mixed-race character, who is prohibited from playing with her identities, from performing against others’ expectations of the assumed legibility of her race in the fantasies of an Asian playground.

In chapter 3, Nina Revoyr’s Southland maps the twin themes of love and hate in the multiracial Los Angeles neighborhood of Crenshaw, a territory that evolved from the racial cooperation of

the 1930s to the racial strife and segregation of the 1960s. During the 1965 Watts uprising, a horrific crime occurs in the novel: four black boys are locked into a walk-in industrial freezer of a Crenshaw corner grocery and left to die. The unsolved and now forgotten murders come to light in the 1990s’ timeframe during protagonist Jackie Ishida’s search for the beneficiary of a bundle of cash found in her grandfather Frank Sakai’s bedroom. My exploration of the novel’s sedimented racial history benefits from David Palumbo-Liu’s arguments about the “slipperiness” of Asian/American identity—both “minority” and “majority,” yellow peril and model citizen—vis-à-vis the more inflexible, negative attributes by which African Americans are defined (50). What happens in Revoyr’s novel when Japanese American characters circulate in the same

physical space as African Americans, the latter freighted with a predominantly negative representation? That character Frank Sakai’s corner grocery store in Crenshaw’s multiracial community is the novel’s focal point elevates the importance of economics: the Japanese American ability to relocate away from Crenshaw is a financial impossibility for most African Americans at the time. The multiracial neighborhood of Revoyr’s novel, part ethnic enclave (Little Tokyo) and part (black) ghetto—each definition itself bearing particular cultural meanings—exhibits the effects of late capitalism on this combined Japanese American and African American community. Their cleaving—read as both a holding tight and a wresting from—results in conflict and eventual wounding.20

The fourth chapter reads Choi’s Person of Interest and Kim’s The Interpreter, in which their reserved and unobtrusive protagonists unravel the crimes circumscribing their lives in the racial melancholy of the nation.21 Choi’s Person of Interest traces the life of Lee, an Asian man of no specified national origins who is a mathematics professor at a small midwestern college. He is targeted as a potential suspect in a letter bomb that kills his colleague in the office next door, a plot alluding to both Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski (at large from 1978 to 1995) and to the 1999 Los Alamos National Lab espionage suspect Wen Ho Lee, with whom protagonist Lee shares a surname. Told from a first-person perspective, the novel reveals Lee’s interior life of regret surrounding intimate family relations as he solves the case of the bomber to protect his innocence. Suzy Park of Kim’s The Interpreter is the novel’s melancholy Korean American protagonist, seemingly abandoned in New York City. Her older sister Grace refuses any contact with her after the murder of their parents. Suzy wrestles, alone and lonely, with the mystery behind their deaths. Kim reveals the difficult life of first-generation immigrants and the choices they make to survive, some resulting in achingly painful consequences for their second-generation children. I first establish the protagonists’ depressed condition as racial melancholy, assisted by Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. I then address the representational idiom of the inscrutable Asian—the paradoxical position of being looked at and overlooked—through a critique of Kandice Chuh’s “subjectless” Asian American. The difficulty (for law enforcement officers following Lee or for Suzy tracking her parents’ killers) of exposing the novels’ suspects is tied to the inscrutable Asian, whose features are regarded as implacable and impenetrable, dangerously unreadable. I contrast the figure of the inscrutable Asian against its so-called benign counterpart, the model minority, who is assimilated into invisibility, pacified into harmlessness. The protagonists wrestle with the stigma of their given public face while they seek to be absolved of a crime (Lee) or to solve one that affects them grievously (Suzy). Their private self-revelations are entangled in unrequited yearning. But the causes of longing itself, like the novels’ featured murders, cannot be accessed without deep probing, without stirring the waters of assimilative fictions to pronounce once again the crimes of racial cataloguing.

The murders embedded in Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field,

addressed in chapter 5, present a distraction from the real crime at the novel’s center, the Japanese Canadian internment. The relocation and internment of approximately 23,000 Japanese Canadians during World War II haunts the daily life of protagonist Asako Saito. Her psychological revisitations of particular insistent internment images are both a problem and a solution. While traumatizing flashbacks serve as impediments to Asako’s daily routine, they also work to frustrate the reader’s comprehension of the text.

Sakamoto’s suppression of descriptions of internment locations, the vagaries of daily life in camp, and internees’ thoughts and emotions, which are liberally sketched in other Asian North American

internment literature, require readers to seek information about camps elsewhere. I turn to photographs given my interest in visual idioms of race. But like Sakamoto’s deliberate concealment of camp life as a politically aesthetic move, official government-commissioned internment photos purporting to record camp life projected a series of similar concealing images for political reasons.

In this chapter, I construct a dialogue between the absence of narrativized camp images in Sakamoto’s fiction with the profound absence of human suffering and emotion in government-dispatched camp photographs. That the Canadian government ordered specific photographic views of camp, particularly aerial views, suggests the British Columbia Security Commission’s surveillance and control over the visual materials circulating outside the camps. Repetitious photographs of internment avoid any illustration of internees’ degradation or the monotony of camp. They are not credible witnesses but haunt a novel that aims to plumb the depths of a local murder where witnessing and truth telling are impeded by Asako’s unreliable judgment. Pictorial, historical cataloguing of racial subjects is at the heart of this chapter,

which discusses how photographs shape experience, memory, and citizenship, themes elucidated in Elena Creef’s Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body and Kyo Maclear’s Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness. Furthermore, the novel is told in disjointed prose that allows form to fit function: Asako’s internment memories interrupt the narrative without literary cues, confusing the reader in ways that mimic Asako’s own psychological trauma. Something useful and extraordinarily powerful exists not only beyond staid government photographs, but also beyond the traumatic repetitions of Asako’s daily existence. Sakamoto finds an efficacy in narrative confusion and evasion, the unexpected return of memories of camp, and the absence of internment descriptions. What is missing, namely the devastating effects of evacuation, takes precedence over the novel’s crime of murder; ultimately, the novel’s central crime is internment, not murder.

In the final chapter, I discuss self-reflexive scrutiny in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel about America’s post-9/11 scrutiny of those who look Arab or Middle Eastern and those who practice Islam. This novel is an appropriate conclusion to a book about the surveillance of others because Hamid encourages readers to surveil themselves. The results are quite different than the Foucauldian-based disciplinary ones proposed by D. A. Miller in his well-known study The Novel and the Police, in which the Victorian novel regenerates institutions (of delinquency, for example) whose prior existence is the means by which they can be revived. According to Miller, the novel polices itself to adhere to institutions already in place. Hamid’s novel generates the suspicion that readers themselves are policed by Hamid, shocked to discover their own ideological contributions to institutions of surveillance, racial typing, perhaps even global terror. In Hamid’s dramatic monologue, the Pakistani protagonist Changez captivates his unnamed American guest by narrating an engaging tale of immigrant success punctuated by allusions to, but never confirmations of, his potential terrorist inclinations. The fall of the Twin Towers occurs mid-novel, subjecting Changez, a bearded, South Asian man, to increased scrutiny. The equally captivated reader, whom I call the liberal democratic narratee, has identified with the protagonist early on and acknowledges the racism of fearful Americans after 9/11. She initially sympathizes with Changez. Surprisingly, however, the narratee discovers that she herself has been coerced by the book, groomed into seeing Changez in a particular way. For at its conclusion, she must scrutinize her condemnation of racial profiling as her skepticism about Changez’ innocence grows.

Detective fiction’s focus on scrutiny as a means to get at a truth makes it an appropriate genre for revealing contemporary failures of a so-called postracialism, in which racial markers (predominantly skin color) become seemingly invisible; they are signifiers without value attributes. Who hasn’t heard the phrase, “[I] don’t see any color, just people” (Bonilla-Silva 1)? Insisting that we live in a postracial or color-blind society suggests that inclusivity need not be founded on racial distinction, or that race is no longer a necessary marker of identification in our more egalitarian society. Yet to suggest that one is blind to color or that we are beyond race depends ironically on seeing visual racial difference and thus perceiving its cultural absence in order to argue its so-called insignificance. David Eng argues,

. . .our historical moment is defined precisely by new combinations of racial, sexual, and economic disparities—both nationally and globally—which are disavowed, denied, and exacerbated. . . .Contrary to liberal aspiration, the formal legal institution of colorblindness has not led to a U.S. society free of racial conflict, discrimination, and contradiction, as millions of people continue to be affected by race and afflicted by racism. (5)

In his Racial Paranoia, John L. Jackson argues that we need not look for racism where it does not exist; rather we need to craft “new ways of seeing altogether” (22). In these novels, we look and look again to discover that how we see defines what we see and whom we overlook.