Chop suey surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia | Tao Leigh Goffe (30.1)

“We have to admit that a lot of beautiful people have come about from this cross breeding. Just look around at all the beautiful half-Chinese girls and boys. Let’s admit it: chop suey not only eat nice. It looks nice. We have added the creamy complexion, the almond shaped face, reduced the ‘trunk,’ straightened the hair, and brightened those ‘ackee seed’ eyes.”

— Roger Chen (2004)

“Chop suey, chop suey! | Living here is very much like chop suey,” sings Juanita Hall as Madame Liang, a Chinese immigrant who celebrates her naturalization as an American citizen in the musical film Flower Drum Song (1961), adapted from the novel by Chinese American author C.Y. Lee. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway show was lauded as the first all-Asian/Asian American casted Broadway musical (1958), marking a departure from the ugly American theatrical tradition of yellowface performed by white actors.¹ And yet, Juanita Hall, who was personally cast by the producers, was an outlier in the pro-duction as an African American actress. Her career was one of shifting between Asiatic roles, calling into question the bounds of casting and race. The Julliard-trained actress made her career playing feisty stereotyped Asian characters and is also known as the Viet-namese Bloody Mary in South Pacific. There is surprisingly little mention of Hall’s pres-ence in the film and Broadway musical, as an African American woman also of Irish heritage (See Figure 1). Being neither Asian nor Asian American, is Hall’s portrayal one of yellowface? (Cheng 2001, 38).

Figure 1. Juanita Hall (left) playing the role of Madame Liang in Flower Drum Song the Broadway musical, New York Public Library (1958).

The metaphoric uses of the Chinese overseas dish chop suey reflect the dissonance of American multiculturalism and a failure to digest Afro-Asian intimacy because it is in surplus of the Black–white dyad. Chop suey, an amalgam of protein and vegetables stir-fried with a corn starch-thickened sauce, is deployed as a trope to revel in both the slipperi-ness of defining Chinese culture and how it has diasporized across the Americas as and through the Afro-Chinese woman. Conceptual metaphors of food are often used to describe women as objects of desire: honey, sweet thing, sugar. But she is chop suey; she is savory and unctuous. Hall is chop suey, “all mixed up” like Chinese American food. Her body is the nexus of converging scripts of Black and Chinese femininity. Hall died in anonymity in 1965 having invested her life savings in a failed Chinese restaurant called the Fortune Cookie. The actress’s performance as an African American racial understudy for Asian womanhood resonates as a glitch. Her Blackness is surplus to the mise en scène of US theatricality. There are scores and photographs from her career of racial masquerade, but her true legacy is the multiculturalism of chop suey.²

Hall performs Chinese American matronly femininity seamlessly and disorientingly. Lit-erary critic Anne Anlin Cheng uses the term “Chop-sueyness” in her analysis of the screwy song and dance musical number that celebrates American assimilation in “excessive euphoria.” (Cheng 2001, 37) Wearing a lemon-yellow floral qipao, the “Auntie” character has just gradu-ated from her citizenship classes and she breaks into a jubilant song and dance (Figure 1). An elder Chinese American man says, “You are like the Chinese dish the Americans invented. What do they call it?” Her nephew replies, “Chop Suey” as everyone breaks into laughter. The elder says, “That is it. Everything is in it, all mixed up.” Given its history, it is curious that Madame Liang anoints herself chop suey. She says, “I am happy to be both Chinese and American.” In her ode to Cold War American popular culture, she sings of cultural icons, currents affairs, and fads: “Hula hoops and nuclear war. Doctor Salk and Zsa Zsa Gabor.” She revels in the miscellany of random rhyming couplets of ingredients of Americana thrown together, to form a lighthearted song celebrating the democratic freedoms of America in contrast to Communist China. Americanization is presented as a simple process where cultures coexist and mix, like the miscellany of chop suey. In the register of what literary critic Christina Klein points to as Cold War orientalism, Madame Liang performs her fluency in postwar Amer-ican vernacular as a good Asian American patriot (Klein 2003).

Madame Liang’s “Chop Suey” is an ode to hybrid national identities and multiculturalist pluralism. In another famous song from the musical “Grant Avenue,” Linda Low sings about San Francisco Chinatown: “The girl who served you all your food is another tasty dish.” Sex is equated with eating yet again in this performance. Desire is equivalent to hunger. Cheng asks, “What is the fetish object’s relationship to the fetishistic imagin-ation?” (Cheng 2001, 37) She describes the scene as a sign of mutual American and Asian integration where the characters celebrate their “authenticity” and the “real thing.” In the way they simultaneously inform the audience that chop suey is “an American fiction of Asian cuisine,” Cheng reads Hall’s performance as peculiarly self-conscious though she does not note the glaring fact of the actress’s Blackness. Madame Liang rep-resents the longing to be embraced by the nation as a model minority, before the term existed, diligently studying American culture and values.

As a metaphor chop suey gestures to a deeper history of dissonant entanglement of Black and Asian women’s sexuality. It is a process of racial substitution determined as much by political economies of the plantation and metropolis as by the foodways of Chinese and Black diasporic migration. Chop suey is a process of casting. As this essay shows, race and desire form an indigestion through two figures I trace: the Afro-Chinese woman in the U.S. and the Afro-Chinese woman in the Caribbean.³Put another way, indi-gestion is an incommensurability, and the untranslatability of African and Asian identities belonging together. I follow the origins of the Afro-Asian subject to the South exploring the subjectivity of Afro-Chinese identity in the Greater Caribbean to Jamaica. In the second half of this essay, I locate the archival traces of her relative the Jamaican Chinese beauty queen who represents both the Caribbean nation and Chinese diaspora in pageantry.

Put another way, indi-gestion is an incommensurability, and the untranslatability of African and Asian identities belonging together. I follow the origins of the Afro-Asian subject to the South exploring the subjectivity of Afro-Chinese identity in the Greater Caribbean to Jamaica. In the second half of this essay, I locate the archival traces of her relative the Jamaican Chinese beauty queen who represents both the Caribbean nation and Chinese diaspora in pageantry.

The chop sueyness of Juanita Hall’s performance is screwy and peculiar; it gestures to other archival traces of the double articulation of Blackness and Chineseness. Born out of scarcity and legal exclusion, chop suey bears a history of the problem of digesting racial difference with the arrival of those racialized workers, their habits, their diets, their families. The United States continually fails to digest its racialized others; the Caribbean incorporates racial minorities in a different manner.

The Afro-Chinese woman emerges and her chop sueyness resonates with what food studies scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins defines as “racial indigestion” (Tompkins 2012). Tompkins identifies how eating is an intimate connection between subjective interiority and liberal personhood. In her evocative study, Tompkins explores how eating was a fraught political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race, and class inequality in the nine-teenth century. There is a taste and a desire for the Afro-Chinese woman, but she cannot be digested because she does not conform to conventional segregated racialized histories. The undigested subject resists easy racial categorization.

African and Asian are not mutually exclusive categories, and yet Hall was not Afro-Asian. However, her performance gestures to the ways Black women have been the racial substitutes, stand-ins for a Chinese feminine presence across the Americas because of restrictive immigration policies. The chop sueyness of her performance is writ large in the inauthenticity of the dish, because it is comprised of locally available substitutes. This imperfect process of substitution both in the dish and in Hall’s casting produces a diasporic dissonance that draws attention to the sublated Afro-Asian intimacies of the Americas. Performance studies scholars Karen Shimakawa, Brandi Catanese, and Shannon Steen have written compelling investigations on the theatricality and limitations of colorblind casting (Shimakawa 2002; Steen 2010; Catanese 2011). But Hall’s was actu-ally the opposite of colorblind casting. For the white audience of the 1960s U.S., it almost did not matter that a Black actress plays the role of an Asian woman. They would not have cared or noticed the difference, and yet Flower Drum Song represented a new racial economy and career opportunities for Asian/American actors in Hollywood. Yet, scho-lars, critics, and fans alike have not taken notice or note of the strange chop suey casting of Hall.

 Chop suey woman: forgetting Afro-Asian femininity

The resounding echoes of chop suey heard on Broadway led me on a quest for the Afro-Asian woman. I am not interested in the field of inquiry some have called Critical Mixed-Race Studies, but rather in the question of colonial entanglement of the Black dia-sporic condition and the overseas Chinese. I caught eyes with her from across the archive reading room. If I had been looking for her, I’m sure I never would have found her. A subject born of the convergence of Africa and China in the Americas, determined by the racial enclosure of the plantation and metropolis, she found me. Over the years I have seen glimpses of her—a Black woman, also of Chinese heritage—in novels, anthropologi-cal writings, Hollywood musicals, newspaper reportage, and beauty pageantry. Enchanted by her on a trip to Jamaica in 1947, Langston Hughes described her as a new “species of woman-kind.” (Hughes 1947) Zora Neale Hurston too remarked upon her beauty, having seen her with her sister in the 1930s on Jamaica’s North Coast (Hurston 2008, 13). A mention here and there. I have also seen traces of her distant cousin in Latin America and South America—Peru, Panama, and Brazil. In Cuba, she is called la mulata achinada (Tsang’s 2018).⁴ In Suriname, she is known as blaka sneisi (Tjon Sie Fat’s 2009).⁵ The Black Chinese woman appears and reappears in a series of disappearing acts.

She represents the entangled political economies of racial slavery and racial indenture, enacted in spite of the violent order of European coloniality. Feminist critic Hortense Spillers said, “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” (Spillers 1987) So it is with the Black Chinese woman. She serves the nation when she is needed, like chop suey, the mixed-up dish that nourished the nation during the Gold Rush and the Great Depression when it was needed and then seemed to disappear. After the Depression the dish of re-invention chop suey was in surplus.

Chop suey was considered greasy, inexpensive food that was often served in generous portions, which historian Yong Chen traces to assumptions at the time about the inferior status of China as supplier of cheap labor in the U.S. economy (Chen 2014, 3). Chop suey’s invention is complex; it developed in the nineteenth century out of culinary adap-tations of migrant men from South China adjusting to palates and ingredients available across the Americas. These men were substitutes themselves for the labor of Black men and women in the wake of abolition across the hemisphere. This led to Afro-Chinese dia-sporic families emerging out of the mass hemispheric demands during the nineteenth century for Chinese men to labor under exploitative conditions in mines, on plantations, and constructing railroads.⁶ Chinese women rarely migrated; those who did were suspected of being sex workers. And so Chinese men formed conjugal unions and fathered children with local women, especially with Black women in the Caribbean and the U.S. South. Tracing the consumption of chop suey in the popular imagination of the Americas alongside the Afro-Chinese woman evinces the way in which her body has been consumed as suste-nance, an exotic dish, as fodder, for racial, sexual, national, and diasporic fantasies.

As an analytic chop suey illuminates the exclusionary anti-Chinese legislation of nine-teenth century America as well as shedding light on anti-Black and colorist sentiments within Chinese communities. The convergence of sexualized food metaphors celebrate multiculturalism mapped onto the body of the Afro-Asian woman. The Afro-Asian woman’s reproductive potential represents a contradictory sign of Asian futurity in the Western hemisphere. In unexpected ways that have not been studied, the Black womb became a site of Asian futurity during the nineteenth century.

According to historian Madeline Hsu, the term chop suey derives from the Chinese phrase, “zasui,” or the Cantonese dialect phrase “tsaâp suì,” which refers to a miscellany of chicken livers, gizzards, fungi, bamboo shoots, pig tripe, and bean sprouts in a brown sauce. She explains, “Chinese cooks later adapted these ingredients for American tastes by replacing internal organs with the more familiar chicken, pork or shrimp” (Yu 1987; Hsu 2008).⁷ Hsu’s description adds a degree of specificity to the miscellany of chop suey but elides the fact that this culinary adaptation spans transnationally. Chop suey is eaten wherever Chinese men from Guangdong sojourned in the nineteenth century under the extractive conditions of what political theorist Cedric Robinson aptly coined as “racial capitalism” from the Philippines to Cuba. In the Netherlands it is called tjap tjoy, where it is cooked by Surinamese Chinese, Curaçaoan Chinese, and Indonesian Chinese chefs who were shaped by similar political economies of plantation labor in the West and East Indies. Jamaican Chinese restaurants in Miami offer conch chop suey.

There is an even more degenerate New England version called American chop suey, an elbow pasta macaroni goulash cooked with butter, bell peppers, tomato sauce, ground beef, and cheese that has been described as “only a very distant relation to Chinese and American Chinese cuisine” (“American chop suey,” 2007, 15). The opposite of haute cuisine, chop suey is a product of low breeding. Its parentage is uncertain. Chop suey has long been an object of global preoccupation with news reports of the chop suey hoax in the early 1900s, when Americans realized the dish could not exactly be found in the “Orient.” The headlines read, “Chop Suey Exposed: Sold in the United States as China’s National Dish, But Orientals Never Heard of It.”⁸ The vaguely Chinese dish may have been born in the American West, perhaps after the Gold Rush, brought by Taishanese laborers.⁹ No one is certain. Indeed, chop suey is up to interpretation, a dish of improvization.

The Afro-Chinese woman, like her Black mother before her, was a racial substitute, subject to the relational contingency of labor. Conspicuous by her absence, the Afro-Chinese woman has also trained for the role of understudy. Understudied, because her pres-ence is deemed not statistically significant enough to be worthy of mention in the historical record. An understudy, in the absence of Chinese-born women she is poised as a replace-ment sexual mate for the so-called Chinese bachelor, ready to fill in and play the part of the (almost) Chinese lady. A resource, Chinese futures in the Western hemisphere depend on her reproductive potential and yet she is excluded from “full” Chineseness.

Black women’s sexuality and Chinese women’s sexuality have long been disciplined against each other in implicit ways by nineteenth-century nationalist colonial forms of state-craft. Two prime examples are Saartje Baartman, the Venus Hottentot and Afong Moy the Chinese Lady. The relational contingency of Afro-Sino identities in the Americas was determined by the political economies of proximity and exile determined by labor: the plan-tation and the port city. This Afro-Asian bourgeois intimacy has resulted in families that span across continents.¹⁰ Read in tandem, the presence of Black women and the absence of Asian women illuminate the failures of the discriminatory designs of European and American imperial immigration policies in the nineteenth century. The Afro-Chinese woman appears at the intersection of cofounded identities, Black and Chinese absence and co-presence.

Black feminist critic bell hooks has importantly told us what it means for the white subject to eat the other, and I have extended these motivations to decenter the white palate and racial consumption embedded in food (hooks 1992). Instead, I center Black and Asian subjective interiority and eating. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the coeval labors of African diasporic and Chinese diasporic subjects on planta-tions, on railroads, and in metropolises of the Americas, led to the emergence of the Afro-Asian subject alongside the Chinese dish. Afro-Chinese men were not subjected to the same fantasies regarding reproductive futures. Chop suey coheres, thickens, and con-geals as this sexualized history forms through food.¹¹ There is a desire for chop suey, for her, but a failure to digest them both. Not because of the stereotype of Chinese food making Americans sick, but rather because the conditions that created her subjectivity – the political economy of the plantation and port city – challenge the conventional colonial historiography of the Americas.¹²

The Jamaican patwa phrasing, “She was here, but she disappear,” resonates with the sense of epistemic forgetting of Afro-Asia, of her.¹³ Precisely because her traces are not written, because she is not legible in the archive, a decolonial femme methodology is required. Pearl Chang, a character from the Asian American novel And China Has Hands, and Miss Chin, the Jamaican Chinese beauty queen, form a twin transnational Afro-Asian genealogy. The women gesture to the lived realities of the convergence of Black and Chinese diasporas in the Greater Caribbean.¹⁴ Each figure would be deserving of her own study, so here I highlight their historical entanglement, and how it illustrates the way nationalism divides enmeshed colonial histories.

What’s eating Pearl Chang? African American chop suey during the depression era

Dissident Chinese American writer H.T. Tsiang created the Afro-Chinese character Pearl Chang to solve the problem of Chinese “girl scarcity” in And China Has Hands.¹⁵The novel centers on her love affair with a Chinese laundryman. Cultural historian Michael Denning aptly describes Tsiang’s novel as emblematic of the “ghetto pastoral,” a genre of parable centered in an urban ethnic enclave. A prime example of multicultural proletarian literature of the 1930s, it depicts Manhattan’s Chinatown as a space of racial enclosure (Denning 1997, 239). The racial borders of Chinatown have shifted a great deal over the past century, abutted against Little Italy.¹⁶ And China Has Hands depicts Afro-Chinese labor solidarity during the Great Depression.

In a microeconomics of racialized desire, Afro-Chinese sexual intimacy is driven by the low supply of Chinese women. The bachelors of New York’s Chinatown have a veritable hunger for them. Enter the substitute good, Pearl Chang, the Afro-Chinese understudy. She works as a Chinese restaurant waitress, where she serves a hybrid cuisine including one of her favorite dishes, chop suey. The Chinatown landscape was one of racial voyeurism and tourism for middle class white Americans who “slummed it” and went on exotic chop suey dates in the early twentieth century as urban historian Heather Lee writes (Heap 2002; Coe 2009; Chen 2014; Mendelson 2016; Lee forthcoming). Chop suey was served up in the streets in pails for lunch during the 1930s. Chop suey houses and joints littered the metro-politan landscape of the Depression-era United States, from Harlem to St. Louis to San Francisco, sustaining the nation as cheap fare, a greasy balanced meal during a period of economic austerity.¹⁷ There was a voracious African American desire for chop suey too, in part because it came at a very reasonable price point.

There were many quotidian strategies Asian Americans used to circumvent and refuse U.S. exclusionary policy designed to limit sexual and familial life for men. The state intended to deprive Chinese migrants of sociality in hopes of preventing long-term futures, and yet other intimacies thrived such as interracial and non-heteronormative unions (Shah 2001). In New York’s Chinatown interethnic common law unions, for instance between Chinese men and Irish women, were not unusual.¹⁸ Less is known of the conjugal relations between Chinese men in the Americas and Black women. This is how the Afro-Chinese woman became the racial substitute for the Chinese bride.

For many decades, critics misread the anti-imperial, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist novel as a sociological portrait of the desperate lived experiences of Chinese bachelor laundrymen during 1930s New York (Lee 2005).¹⁹ Literary scholars Hua Hsu and Floyd Cheung have restored Tsiang’s legacy, advocating for republication and providing context for his radical politics and aesthetic of critique against the United States. For instance, Tsiang subtitles the book a “coolie odyssey;” he appropriates the racial slur as a global gesture connecting Asian diasporic laborers and the specter of racial indenture. As labor historian Moon-Ho Jung explains what is more important than who was a “coolie” or not, whether in the Caribbean or the U.S., was the racial imaginary of the period that created this shadowy, divisive figure. Jung writes,

“Racial imaginings of ‘coolies’ helped to remake the United States into a ‘free,’ ‘white,’ and ‘modern’ nation, revealing both its intricate ties to a wider world and its dogged pursuit of an exceptionalist self-image. The violent and mythical legacies of those imaginings have gone a long way toward shaping the United States and the world in the twentieth century and beyond. ”

— (Jung 2014)

And China Has Hands is punctuated by the tongue in cheek refrain “Pearl Chang was every Inch Chinese.” The repetition performs the anxiety and uncertainty of Pearl Chang’s Chinese identity which is depicted as unstable throughout the novel. The daughter of a Chinese shopkeeper from the U.S. South and a woman described as a “Negress,” Pearl Chang is a character of contradictions. The palpable sexual tension between her and the pro-tagonist Wong Wan-Lee remains unconsummated. China-born Wong Wan Lee desires the America-born Pearl Chang, but he also cannot help simultaneously read her as Chinese and not Chinese. He clumsily exoticizes her, fetishizes her, wanting to consume her. Pearl Chang claims to be “every inch Chinese,” but Tsiang makes apparent she will only ever approximate Chineseness for Wong Wan-Lee. He calls her the Cantonese phrase Mo No meaning “Half Brain” in reference not only to her being American Born Chinese but also of African ancestry. To him, she is incomplete.

Tsiang deploys chop suey as a metaphor to mediate the frustrated sexual desire between the America-Born Chinese and China-Born Chinese. Pearl Chang is insulted that when Wong Wan-Lee invites her to his home he does not serve her what she believes are the national dishes of China. Pearl Chang accuses him of lacking “Chinese flavor.”

There was almost everything but Chop Suey and Chow Mein. Pearl Chang was sur-prised because the Chinese national dishes had been missing. ‘Do you think that I am not good enough to be treated with your national dishes, Chop Suey and Chow Mein?’ Asked Pearl Chang. ‘With thousands of apologies,’ said Wong Wan-Lee, ‘I am no American. I eat no Chop Suey. I eat no Chow Mein.’ ‘You see how easily Americans get fooled!’ commented Pearl Chang. ‘I am glad I am Chinese.’²⁰

Pearl Chang asserts her Chineseness through Chinese American-fare that is unrecognizable to the new migrant Wong Wan-Lee. Somehow the diasporic condition forms a stronger sense of nationalism in absentia, rather than to challenge it. She revels in chop suey and her chop sueyness.

Afro-Chinese dating, disassociation, and racial becoming

The proletariat heroine Pearl Chang disassociates herself from her African American iden-tity in favor of a diasporic citizenship as one of the hands of China, in reference to the title of the novel, or wombs. In contravention to partus sequitur ventrum, the U.S. legal order since the seventeenth century, that which is brought forth—Pearl Chang—does not follow the womb of her Black mother.²¹ Pearl Chang is invested in the American myth of Chinese authenticity as chop suey. Wong Wan-Lee rejects chop suey, but she is not wrong, and he is not wrong. The refrain of Pearl Chang’s Chinese flavor becomes one of anxiety and her eventual undoing. In a perverse cannibalistic way Pearl Chang desires what literary critic Grégory Pierrot describes as the “fauthenticity” of herself.²² She is consumed by others, but also consumes herself. By birthright Pearl Chang is eligible to citizenship, because of the 14th Amendment and also because of the 1898 Supreme Court case US v. Wong Kim Ark.²³ Yet she is ineligible for full Chineseness because of Chinese notions of purity. She cannot be Chinese because she is Black by virtue of an unspoken one-drop rule of hypodescent in the overseas Chinese context. The U.S. legal formation does not account or have space for the Afro-Asian subject either.

Pearl Chang, has recently moved to New York City from the U.S. South to become a movie star like Rita Hayworth, and it is significant that as well as being a waitress she finds work as a live model for an art school. She poses as a Chinese woman in a nod to the “Chinese Lady,” Afong Moy the girl who was on display for the American public in the late nineteenth century. The teenage girl was exhibited across the United States as a spectacle for consumption of Chinese femininity, billed as an exquisite, exotic curiosity with “monstrous bound feet” (Tchen 2001; Cheng 2019; Davis 2019). Though not men-tioned in the novel, in lieu of an Afong Moy, Pearl Chang is a dutiful understudy fulfilling the stereotyped role, wearing exquisite refined Chinese silk garments for white American art students to draw. She is the closest approximation the art school can hire.

An understudy who has studied the role of the Chinese wife her whole life, Pearl Chang will always be inadequate because she is Black and cannot choose to only identify with her Chinese heritage. While, of course, she is free to self-identify racially, and the white art students do not know the difference, Chinese people like Wong Wan-Lee ultimately determine whether she is Chinese or not by including or excluding her.²⁴ Meanwhile Black identity is capacious and able to encompass Asian heritage because of the histories of racial slavery. To be a Black diasporic subject has inherently meant to negotiate the sexual violence of the plantation as a fraught matter of often of Afro-European genealogy. To be Black one needn’t only be of African ancestry, and yet to be “Chinese” requires so-called purity. Black is an inclusive galaxy of diasporic, political identification. But, in the narrative Pearl Chang has not yet reached this epiphany of racial and political consciousness in spite of the fact that her contingent racialization suggests how race is a verb, a relational category, continually in motion.

Pearl Chang’s Chinese boss scolds her saying, “We Chinese are dark enough.” Yet Pearl Chang attempts to pass as Chinese by wearing a hat to cover her curly hair. She wears makeup to make her skin appear lighter. While Tsiang does not indicate much in the narra-tive about her skin color, Pearl Chang is somewhere between “high yellow” of African American classification and the political designation of “yellow” as it is racialized, politi-cized in the East Asian context. She is never fully successful at passing as Chinese amongst Chinese people. Before long her African ancestry becomes legible and the Chinese masquerade is up. She is discovered as a hoax, an inauthentic mix that cannot pass for the “real thing” but is still consumed, like the affordable and convenient chop suey.

Wong Wan-Lee wants to consume Pearl Chang, to have sex with her. But he cannot because he suffers metaphorical indigestion, unable to comprehend her Chineseness. She does not have enough Chinese flavor. As a woman also of African descent, her desires are not taken into consideration. She becomes subsumed much like her Black mother that she denies. Pearl Chang is erased, forgotten. Wong Wan-Lee has no appetite for chop suey, he prefers fruits and seeds. Furthering the conceptual metaphors of food, when Pearl Chang and Wong Wan-Lee kiss, he opens his eyes watching her. Wong Wan-Lee compares her body parts to seeds and fruit.

Wong Wan-Lee looked at Pearl Chang.

Pearl Chang’s nose was like an almond seed.

Pearl Chang’s eyes were like an autumn stream.

Pearl Chang’s face was like a watermelon seed.

But Pearl Chang’s mouth was not a like a little cherry, and she had curly hair.²⁵

While many poetic traditions use similes that compare human beauty to nature, for instance, in sonnets, the line between personification and objectification is blurry. In the context of this “coolie odyssey,” the metaphors of nature and reproduction speak to Chinese women scarcity and Pearl Chang’s reproductive potential as a woman of childbearing age. She holds the promise of futurity for Chinese Americans, albeit a Black Chinese future, in her body.

Wong Wan-Lee has been read as the stereotyped impotent Chinese bachelor by some critics, but his actions rather indicate his sexual inexperience. He clumsily prods and probes Pearl Chang’s breasts. “Wong Wan-Lee felt one of them and he discovered there was something more beside the ball. Attached to the ball was a Lee-Chee nut”: her nipple. Here, another natural metaphor, and one of Chinese fruit, is used. He says, “What a beautiful tennis ball and what a nice Lee-Chee nut you have, my dear Angel!” making Pearl Chang into a curio. Though she is sexually attracted to Wong Wan-Lee, Pearl Chang does not like the way he touches her. “Suddenly Pearl Chang stood up, put on her coat, grabbed her pocket-book and yelled: This is not a tennis ball; this is my breast! You hurt me!” Tsiang gives Pearl Chang the agency to refuse consumption. In this moment of narrative indigestion, she recognizes and rejects Wong Wan-Lee’s actions as being like those of aggressive white American men in the South who also sexually objectified her when she was growing up.

The hyposexuality of race: A microeconomics of desire for Black women and Chinese men

Cinema studies scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu coined the hypersexuality of race to analyze the hypervisuality of East Asian femininity in U.S. popular culture. In this case, the relationality of Black women and East Asian men the hyposexuality of race describes the rubric of desire (Shimizu 2007). Are the two subjects forgotten in this political economy of race and desirability? East Asian men and Black women formed sexual and familial intimacies that feel impossible and unthinkable on nineteenth-century plantations and metropolises. A form of historical forgetting occurs because Black and Asian relation-ality is generally seen as irrelevant to imperial projects. The hyposexuality of race then the-orizes the desexualization of heterosexual East Asian men and Black women and the ways they have been read as subjects without a capacity for desire.²⁶

Tsiang contrasts urban and rural plantation political economies identifying that families formed in the South because of the financial independence afforded by shopkeeping. In 1971, white U.S. sociologist James Loewen, who taught for many years at the historically Black Mississippi college Tugaloo, wrote about patterns of intermarriage between African Americans and Chinese in his book The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White.

“Social association between some Chinese and Negroes was in fact the critical irritant which whites seized upon to justify their exclusion. As a Chinese businessman told me: ‘Those two or three instances [of Chinese-Negro marriage] brand the whole Chinese community. At least, this is the excuse they use. In Mississippi, it’s thumbs down whenever you do something like that.’”

— (Loewen 1971, 74–75)

Loewen states that at its peak, 20 percent of Mississippi Chinese marriages were to Black women. He says, “Certainly Chinese men had never chosen Negro wives in preference to Chinese.” Like chop suey, the Black Mississippi woman is convenient, a ready-made meal. Therefore, in Loewen’s study Black women are the temporary racial substitutes for Chinese women. Exclusion policed desire but was also determined by it. Chinese proximity to labor-ing Blackness was seen by whites as a form of racial contamination. Addressing the scarcity of Chinese women before World War II, Loewen states,

When legal restrictions were relaxed during World War II, allowing Chinese women to come into the country with much greater ease, many of these men brought their families … and severed relations with their Negro wives and mistresses. Young Chinese bachelors no longer looked for Negro mates but instead anticipated returning to Canton or Hong Kong selecting a Chinese wife. The revision of immigration regulations during World War II was thus a major factor in the abrupt cessation of new Chinese-Negro relationships.²⁷

Again, the contingent arrangement wherein Black women are simply substituting for Chinese women erases Black women’s subjectivity, their capacity for desire, and their capacity to be desired. Tsiang accurately reflects this erasure in his novel by not providing any information about Pearl Chang’s mother except for the detail of her being a “Negress.” By including the American South in this New York Chinatown tale, Tsiang broaches the social and legal constructions of race in the United States during the 1930s. While the Chinese were explicitly excluded through immigration restrictions, there was little pre-cedent for governing Asians in the South.²⁸In the Jim Crow binary of Black and white seg-regation, the Chinese were sometimes granted honorary white status. The narrator remarks,

In the South, Negroes are not allowed to ride in the same street-car with whites, but Chinese are. Black children are not allowed to go to school with white children, but Chinese children are. If a conductor sees a Chinese in the black men’s section, the Chinese is put with the white men. Because of these things, some Chinese think they are better than black men. (Tsiang 1937, 78)

The conductor, who we can assume is white, is the authority representing the state and he sets the segregated racial order in the South.²⁹ Tsiang illustrates the way in which relation-ships between African Americans and Chinese were far from easy coalitions and, rather, were rife with tensions. Wong Wan-Lee’s taste for Pearl Chang as the Chinese bachelor is complicated. Does China have Black hands too? Though it is called And China Has Hands in many ways it could be titled And China Has Wombs, millions of wombs, Chinese or not that will (re)produce Chinese futurity across the world in the face of Japa-nese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This arrangement is contingent on the absence of the transatlantic Chinese woman.

In 1943, the Magnuson Act lifted the ban on Chinese wives migrating to the U.S. due to China’s alliance with the U.S. against Japan in World War II. Studies show a decline in the presence and consumption of chop suey around this time. The dish was in surplus in the microeconomics of national appetites and desire for Chinese fare. Exogamous unions declined as endogamous ones thrived, and Americans no longer needed cheap fare after the economic boom brought by war. Perhaps tastes were changing in the 1940s as the Amer-ican economy began to thrive or it was no longer as necessary to substitute the “inauthentic” for the “authentic”? America loses its taste for chop suey as James Loewen suggests of Chinese men losing a taste for Black women. His claim is that they never had a desire for Black women in the first place. Though chop suey may not be so popular with American palates anymore it will always be a mainstay of Chinese takeaway menus across the globe, as an archive of unconsummated desires.

She was here, but she disappear: the racial amalgamation of Jamaican Chop Suey

The appetite for chop suey endures across the hemisphere where it was being cooked up in Jamaican kitchens before and after World War II. As a trope, chop suey was a performance of Afro-Asian femininity and multiculturalism across the West Indies too. The chop sueyness of Caribbean beauty pageantry has meant the Afro-Chinese woman has played two simultaneous roles: Miss Jamaica and Miss Chin. She mediates racial sexual politics and fantasies of integration between the majority Black and minority white dyad of Jamaican society. The Chinese diaspora in Jamaica formed in 1854 with the first arrival of indentured men to the island colony due to the demand for labor on the plantation following the eman-cipation of racial slavery.³⁰ In Jamaica it is common for anyone read as having Chinese ancestry to be called either Mister or Miss Chin. While it is not precisely derogatory in nature, it is part of the flattening of Chinese ethnicity and stereotyping that regularly takes place in Caribbean societies. It is simply one part of the sociality of Jamaica where people become identified verbally by whatever prominent or defining physical feature dis-tinguishes them from the majority. This nickname is not typically the choice of the subject. Therefore, the racially charged name Miss Chin collides with the appointed title of Miss Jamaica during pivotal moments of Jamaican history when women of Chinese descent have won the beauty pageant crown.

The scarcity of Chinese women is observed by cultural critic Lisa Lowe in Parliamen-tary Papers; colonial fantasies of administrative desire to import Chinese women, though Chinese female emigration was quite rare (Lowe 2006, 196). The absence of the transatlantic Chinese woman in the nineteenth century in the British colonial archive motivates my investigation into designs for developing bourgeois intimacy and the Chinese as a “buffer race,” between white and Black. Racialization in Jamaica is not of the strict one-drop rule variety of the hypodescent that dictated the United States plantation. West Indian plantation society demographics were often the inverse with a large African majority. There was a much smaller proportion of white planters than in the U.S. South. A majority Black nation, from much of the colonial era to the present, the census has numbered the Black or population of African descent in Jamaica around 90 percent or more if Creoles are included. The introduction of indentured labor from Hong Kong and British India after emancipation in 1834 shifted the racial order of the country. At the peak of their popu-lation growth, the Chinese were 1.2 percent of the country in the 1960s. The 1943 Jamaican census was the first to distinguish between the “pure Chinese” and “Chinese Coloureds.” The data shows so-called “concubinage” between Chinese males and “native” Jamaican females produced 5,508 “Chinese Coloureds” by 1943. The number of Afro-Chinese almost equaled the number of “pure Chinese” on the island. The language of purity indi-cates how rigidly and problematically coloniality determined race (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Daphne Hewitt (nee. Chin) crowned Miss Jamaica in 1938. Courtesy of Jean Lowrie-Chin.

1938 was a year of mass social upheaval for Jamaica and redefining of Black identity. Trinidad and Guyana saw similar anticolonial labor uprisings in this year. A century after the full emancipation of enslavement in the British West Indies there was a reckoning with the colonial authority and order across the island. It was a moment for challenging monar-chy, challenging the crown. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes being part of a political generation that was forever altered by the events of 1938 in Jamaica. “ … a world in which Blackness itself came to function as a resource for the future.” (Hall 2017) The year also happened to be the first time that the crown of Miss Jamaica was won by a woman of African descent or Chinese descent, Daphne Chin. Her femininity, but in particular her Blackness, becomes a resource for Chinese futurity in Jamaica. Miss Chin was a symbol of non-white beauty, but Daphne Chin did not take a political stance. In an interview with the Gleaner, she emphasized her use of Pond’s Cream and a hearty diet of vegetables owing to her “clean and clear complexion.” The interview features a photograph of Miss Chin wearing her Miss Jamaica sash (Figure 2). However, Chin confessed to the journalist that she knew of the public dissatisfaction because of her Chinese ancestry.31 She, unlike Pearl Chang, emphasized her mother being Jamaican and the fact that she was born in Jamaica. Chin celebrated her victory at the Chinese Athletic Club; what would’ve been a victory for the entire Jamaican Chinese community for representation and visibility.

Though the island nation has historically been a majority Black country the beauty queens of Jamaica were historically white, a representation of the daughters and wives of ruling planter class and pigmentocracy. The winners and the competitors of Miss Jamaica were all white, often blonde-haired, and blue-eyed women. Outrage in the colonial newspapers was voiced by Black, white, and brown Jamaicans when Chin took the crown.

The second of three historic incidents of violence that have been described as anti-Chinese uprisings in Jamaican history took place in 1938 (Johnson 1982). Jamaican Chinese prop-erties were targeted because of the visibility of Chinese shopkeeper prosperity in contrast to the Black masses. Properties of other merchant ethnic minorities in retail, Syrians and Jews, were targeted too. ³² Ethnic minorities formed a racial and socioeconomic buffer class between the Black majority and white minority in power.

Caribbean Afro-Asian womanhood from U.S. perspectives

In the same year 1938, Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston published her ethnographic account of vernacular culture in Haiti and Jamaica Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. In the book Hurston makes a brief mention of two Afro-Chinese women. While in the parish of St. Mary, Jamaica, she is welcomed to share a curry goat meal typically reserved for men, itself a performance of eating, gender, and Afro-Asian intimacy after the plantation. Hurston notes, “Finally there were about thirty guests in all includ-ing some very pretty half-Chinese girls.” (Hurston 2008, 13) The reference is made in passing, but the anthropologist’s eye found it a noteworthy detail. Describing the girls as “half-Chinese” indicates that what made them exceptional is their Chinese ancestry in the majority Afro-Jamaican context. In a common shorthand of racialization, in this racial arith-metic Hurston does not bother to mention the other “half,” which is assumed to be African.

Another Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes had a bit more to say than Hurston a decade later in 1947, in his field notes of a trip to Jamaica. In the column “Here to Yonder” that he contributed to the historically Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, Hughes described to his largely African American readership how liberating it was to fly just a few hours away from the United States to Jamaica. He found himself trans-ported to a society where the majority population was of African descent. Painting with his prose, Hughes dedicated an entire column to delighting in the various shades of girls of Jamaica. He centers the “coolie girl” and describes her as “famed for her charms.” Hughes compares her to her American counterpart, the tragic mulatto, the temptress of Hol-lywood films. He says that most Jamaican women are probably jealous of the “coolie” girl because of her exotic beauty. As if a Hollywood casting director, he imagines the “coolie girl” as the “beautiful heartbreaker, the luscious [home-wrecker], lovely adventuress, or seductive villainess.” She is a wild, wanton, untamed woman, in contrast to the keen obser-vations of literary critic Donette Francis identifies the “sexual grammar” of Indian and Chinese women in the Caribbean as respectively “policed” and “protected” in European colonial literature (Francis 2010, 17). To Hughes the “coolie girl” of mixed African ancestry is much more like the typology of the Creole woman or the mulata. Hughes says, Jamaican men have “a way of turning around and looking twice at the ‘coolie girls.’”

As much as he uses his literary craft to celebrate the “frequently lovely” Chiney Royal, Hughes understands that this subject which he has not seen in the U.S. is a product of the political economy of desire formed by the racial dynamics of the plantation.

Being a folk term and not a [genealogical] one, as nearly as I could make out ‘coolie girl’ men frequently lovely female off-spring of part-Negro and part-Indian or Chinese parentage. There are many such racial mixtures in the West Indies. Much of the small business in Jamaica is controlled by Chinese. And it seems the British from time to time have imported East Indian workers from India probably to under-cut the local wage scales. At any rate, Negroes, Chinese, and East Indians have intermarried and inter-mingled and the children are often beautiful to behold. [sic] (Hughes 1947)

Hughes understands the function of the minority merchant and shopkeeping class of Chinese men partnering with Black women. The subtext here is that Hughes understands the political economy of the plantation economy that underwrote Afro-Asian Caribbean identity formation. Like chop suey, the “coolie girls” are “delectable” in Hughes’ words. He describes the complexion of Chiney Royal and Coolie Royal, which he places in one category of the “coolie girl,” as rich tan or ivory-yellow, “or some delectable shade in between.” “Her features may verge from delicately Indian” he says, “to broadly Chinese-African.” As Hughes describes her, the “coolie-girl” is a hybrid. Body part by body part, he writes of her “sweet, full and kissably Negro” mouth. Hughes continues saying that the “crowning glory” of the “coolie-girl” is her hair, which he describes as “long, sleek, silky and black, with that heavy Oriental smoothness that ripples through male fingers like nothing ever felt before.” This sexualized description of the beauty of the Afro-Asian Jamaican woman renders the detail missing from Hurston’s suggestion towards the beauty of the “half–Chinese girls.”

Hughes refers to white British colonial authors who write about “magic alchemy” of the chimeric mixture of bloods seen in the beauty of various types of Jamaica women. He notes the “coolie girls” of “popular vernacular” are not the only beautiful women of the island. But he devotes most of the column to Afro-Asian women, then quickly lists the shades of the other delectable Jamaican women as, ranging from “deepest chocolates” to “vanilla ice cream.” Hughes served up a literary feast for his Black American readership on the multicultural paradise of 1940s Jamaica. The Chiney Royal is served up as a tasty dish for an African American readership with a voracious appetite for racial progress and integration.

Non-European Jamaican beauty queens were not seen again until the 1950s when the Star, sister newspaper to the Jamaica Gleaner, organized a beauty contest that was suppo-sedly separate but equal. They arranged ten categories according to the woman’s racial type and was featured in the U.S. magazine Life in 1956 in the article, “Ten Queens for Jamaica: The Island Honors Many Shades of Beauty” (Figure 3). The article celebrates the diversity of beauty in Jamaica much in the way Hughes described Jamaican women in 1947. The two-page photograph spread makes a taxonomy of the color spectrum of race that performs the divisions of the plantation economy. The proximity of Chinese racialization to whiten and Jamaican brown identity becomes clear through the color swatch positioning.

Figure 3. Ten Queens for Jamaica, Life magazine, 1956. Courtesy of the Philippe Halsman Archive.

Adjacency does not however mean inclusion, and often Chinese were excluded and depicted as unassimilable perpetual foreigners. Below each woman is her title (or commod-ity), her name, and her bust, waist, and hip measurements. The categories are as follows: Miss Ebony (Black), Miss Mahogany (cocoa brown), Miss Satinwood (coffee and milk), Miss Allspice (partly East Indian), Miss Sandalwood (pure East Indian), Miss Golden Apple (peaches and cream), Miss Jasmine (partly Chinese), Miss Pomegranate (swarthy white, Mediterranean), Miss Lotus (pure Chinese), and Miss Appleblossom (fair white) (“Ten Queens for Jamaica” 1956). The ten women were photographed by famous American photographer Philippe Halsman on assignment at Port Royal, Jamaica. Two categories were created for women of Chinese background, and four altogether for women of Asian descent, using the word “partly.” The lighter half of the spectrum is named after flowers and fruits; the reproductive parts of plants that are considered beautiful, edible, and nourishing. Jasmine and Lotus feed into familiar Orientalist stereotypes of lotus blossoms and dainty Eastern docility. Meanwhile the darker half is named for hardy parts of the plant, woods: ebony and mahogany. The Afro-Chinese woman disrupts and enforces the epidermal logic of colorism of late colonialism in Jamaica.

The legal grammar of colonial sex work and Chinese identity

This stereotype of comparing Chinese women to delicate flowers aligns with the trope of the delicate China doll, pervasive in the Caribbean. The novel The Pagoda by Afro-Jamaican American novelist Patricia Powell deploys this trope by taking the reader to the limits of the impossibility of the colonial archive with the gender ambiguous character Mr. Lowe / Lau A-yin. As a young woman she arrives as a stowaway from South China to Jamaica. She is raped by a white Jamaican man named Cecil who discovers her hiding below deck on his ship during the transatlantic journey. Upon arrival in the West Indies, he forces her to assume the identity of a male shopkeeper. The character Lowe becomes a stowaway of modernity. The detail of Lau A-Yin stowing away allows Powell full range to imagine the limits and bounds of non-heteronormative intimacy, desire, and identity in post-eman-cipation rural Jamaica.

Cecil the ship captain is able to confine Lowe to working in a small retail grocery shop, because of the threat of sexual violence. So, Lowe works there in a masquerade of identity for thirty years. Cecil suggests the only alternative to shoplife is to choose womanhood, which will mean life in a brothel. The specter of sex work determines Lowe’s gender per-formance. ³³ Cecil says,

You, the only Chinee woman on the island. Is that? What you think they would have with you? Miss China Doll. Miss China Porcelain. You know what them do with the Chinee women in British Guiana. In Cuba. In Trinidad? Bring them to whorehouse. Is that you wanted? (Powell 1999, 59)

In this context, Powell introduces non-binary identification as a position of refuge in the nineteenth century Atlantic world to complicate these strictures. Indeed, the early nineteenth century global juridical landscape was being shaped by a shifting philosophy of personhood in relation to the body and debt. The currents of abolition were determined by the complex transnational negotiations of the specter of what forms of labor were considered “slavery by another name.” The human traffic of slavery, indenture, blackbirding, sharecropping, and forms of debt peonage included sex trafficking continue to haunt the contemporary moment.³⁴ The emergence of debtors’ prisons and colonies exemplified the debt logic by which the body could be leased, if not sold. The transnational currents of prostitution deter-mined how the body could be temporarily leased under sexualizing non-reproductive libidinal economy. Across the Western hemisphere immigration policies sought to police against “lewd” women contaminating the national gene pool, and this was certainly racialized.

The U.S. Page Act of 1875, a precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, made clear how gender was as important as race in barring entry to the United States. Parallel to post-emancipation British West Indian plantation in which Powell sets The Pagoda, the Page Act was enacted against “subjects of China, Japan, or any Oriental country” from entering the United States under coercion or contract labor for what has determined as “lewd and immoral purposes.”³⁵ It states “the importation into the United States of women for the purposes of prostitution is hereby forbidden … ” Furthermore, it legislates by defining undesirable subjects, “illegal importation, to supply to another the labor of any cooly … ” emphasizing the prohibitions of the Anti-Coolie Act of 1862, passed by Pre-sident Lincoln. As Lowe the scholar has aptly pointed to, the figure of the “coolie” was har-binger of freedom in the Caribbean and a relic of slavery in the United States (Lowe 2006). Though in The Pagoda Lowe the character is not an agricultural worker – and therefore not a “coolie” – nor is he a sex worker, his existence as a shopkeeper is disciplined by the bour-geois respectability politics of these two categories of “undesirability.”

The Page Act extends the discourse against human slavery to involve women because lowliness, low breeding and degeneracy were seen to require biopolitical containment. The Page Act is a legal preoccupation with the Chinese woman’s womb. The act attempts to protect the nation’s gene pool from such unsavory elements, thinly veiling the anti-Asian imperatives of the U.S. state by couching this intent in character and consent. The main purpose is to prevent Asian futurity, Asian children from being born on American soil. It is designed to make the birth of the Asian American subject impossible in the way that his-torian Mae Ngai evocatively uses the term (Ngai 2006). The Asian woman is the lynchpin because she is portrayed as wayward and promiscuous.

The “coolie” was hyposexualized, not imagined as having the capacity for desire or as a subject with motive will. Powell’s portrayal of Mr. Lowe as a purveyor of goods lends interiority into the transactional intimacy of the Chinese migrant laborer experience amidst a Black majority of patrons, wage earners who work on the post-emancipation plantation. As a supplier, Lowe communicates intimacy through food. Many Chinese migrants formed shops adjacent to plantations. Shops facilitated financial independence for the Chinese community, beyond the keeping of the British colonial order, and yet shops were spaces of racial enclosure. Chinese shop workers continue to labor, day in and day out, in small retail shops across the Caribbean. Many lived behind or above shops, earning enough money to support a wife and children. The shops were dual spaces of sociality and partition, where the shop counter formed a racial and class divide.

Powell imagines the non-heteronormative intimacies that were also impossible and remain so today in a Jamaica where queer communities live under constant threat of vio-lence. Lowe, who is non-binary, is married to a cis-gender woman Miss Sylvie, who passes for white and would be defined by the divisive plantation order as an “octoroon.” Together they raise a daughter named Elizabeth who was born of Lau A-Yin’s rape by Cecil on the voyage to Jamaica. Outside of their marriage, Lowe also finds solace in a Black customer of his, a woman named Joyce. Powell narrates their sexual intimacy through the exchange of food. In a sex scene, Joyce discovers Lowe’s body and names his bodies parts as fruits and flowers; his nipples become guineps, his calves a turtleberry bush, his vagina a tulip (Powell 1999). This naturalizing of feminine beauty mirrors the 1950s beauty pageantry. It also mirrors the literary appetite of Langston Hughes who devoured and made edible the women of Jamaica with his prose.

Later in The Pagoda Joyce buys groceries from Lowe’s shop and cooks him meals that become more and more exotic.

…croquettes made with codfish and béchamel, which she told him was Spanish; chunks of meats seasoned with Indian spices, pierced with a wooden skewer and left to roast submerged under warm ashes, which she said was kebob; and noodles tossed with fried eggs, golden squares of bean curd, and sprouts (he had no idea where she found those for he was certain they didn’t grow on the island,) garnered with a rich and brown peanut sauce she said was Siamese. (Powell 1999)

Chow mein, another of Pearl Chang’s favorite dishes, appears in Powell’s narrative. Again, Chinese diasporic food of the Americas is deployed to mediate Afro-Chinese sexual encounter. For Powell and Tsiang, the exchange of culinary dishes as metaphor for intimacy traces foodways without replicating the violent routes traveled by Afro-descended and Chinese-descended people to meet in the Americas. The tongue and the palate of global intimacy is one of sexual desire rendered as hopeful liberation in a difficult Afro-Chinese romance.

In this example of one of the first contracts with a Chinese female (Figure 4) in 1884, well after Powell sets her novel, Lim Nee Moy was “allotted” to John Sawers of Constant Spring Estates in Saint Andrew’s parish in accordance with the Jamaica Immigration Law of 1879. Lim was to remain on the property for the “full period of five years” beginning on the twelfth of July 1884. The Constant Spring plantation is now the uptown wealthy King-ston neighborhood of the same name.

What of Miss Chin’s voice and her consent? Looking further at the right bottom corner of the contract Lim Nee Moy’s signature is absent and in its place is “her x mark.” The Chinese woman becomes an underwritten adjunct. She requires a witness to validate her consent. The records of the S.S. Prinz Alexander list women only in relation and kin to men, either as “wife of” or “mother of” male “coolies” aboard the vessel, showing how they were doubly bound as legal property. Thinking of Powell’s character Mr. Lowe, it is clear how complex volition and sexual consent were to define in the nineteenth century political and sexual economy of the plantation. For each documented woman like Lim Nee Moy, we have to imagine how many undocumented managed to steal away in the hulls of ships departing from Hong Kong like Lau A-yin / Mr. Lowe. There are records of such unruly subjects that circumvented immigration policy in the Jamaican archives.

Figure 4. “Contract with Chinese Female from the SS Prinz Alexander,” 1884.

Miss Chin, Miss Jamaica: contesting the beauty pageant crown

Returning to the public sphere of pageantry, after Daphne Chin in 1938 and Miss Jasmine and Miss Lotus of 1956, a woman of African and Chinese descent, Sheila Chong, won the Miss Jamaica competition in 1959. She was described as having a “Polynesian demea-nor.”³⁶Yet again the Afro-Chinese woman’s body came to represent a transition towards racial democracy in Jamaica. As important as Sheila Chong’s Miss Jamaica victory was, many Jamaicans felt a member of an ethnic minority did not accurately represent the nation’s beauty. The white English ideal of beauty was replaced by what Rex Nettleford describes as the problematic “mixed-blood ideal.” He writes,

Indeed it can probably be said that the objective norm in the minds of many Jamai-cans (both black and colored) who choose beauty queens is the hybrid or the misce-genated person. The trouble with this solution to our race differentiation problems is that if the hybrid is the norm, then the vast majority of pure blacks must be the aber-ration. (Nettleford 1970, 25–26)

A number of Black Jamaicans expressed their outrage that another Miss Chin was Miss Jamaica. Letters were mailed to the Jamaica Gleaner to contest the coronation. A Chinese woman should not be Miss Jamaica, because a Jamaican woman would never be crowned Miss China, it was argued in moment of national indigestion of chop suey surplus (Barnes 1994).

The Chinese Benevolent Association of Jamaica, which is still in operation, in conjunc-tion with the Chinese Athletic Club has sporadically hosted their own beauty contests over the years. The Miss Chinese Athletic Club competition and the Miss Chinese Jamaica com-petition were held in the 1950s and ‘60s with rules stipulating Chinese ancestry. Each woman wore a sash representing a sponsoring Jamaican Chinese business (Figure 5).³⁷ The now defunct Jamaican Chinese English-language newspaper the Pagoda featured advertisements calling for Jamaican Chinese women to enter the competition in the 1960s when it was almost canceled because of a lack of participants. Jamaican indepen-dence, which took place in 1962, was a fraught moment for racialized beauty pageantry, because it was considered divisive in nature for the new nation. News of these contests and celebration of non-European beauty had significance to an African American audience. Jet magazine featured a photograph and mention of Miss Chinese Jamaica 1960, Marie Chance, being crowned by Miss Ebony, winner of the Star competition.³⁸

On the global stage, Jamaica has won the Miss World competition, which began in 1951, four times. Most recently an Afro-Indian Jamaican woman Toni-Ann Singh won in 2019.³⁹ Two Jamaican Chinese women, Patricia “Patsy” Yuen Leung and Sandra Kong, were selected to compete in the Miss World competition. In 1973, Patsy Yuen won Miss Jamaica and then won third place at the Miss World competition that year.⁴⁰ Three years later Sandra Kong won the Miss Jamaica World title and was prepared to rep-resent her country at the Miss World competition in 1977. She was also popular for winning bodybuilding competitions and for being romantically associated with Bob Marley. Kong was required to withdraw from the Miss World competition by the Jamaican government in protest of South Africa’s entry of two women in the contest, one Black and one white, signifying the violent segregation of Apartheid. The Jamaican government took this politi-cal stance in the 1970s, but some twenty years earlier they too had a history of segregated beauty competitions as the Star pageant with its ten racial categories evinces.⁴¹

Figure 5. Image of Miss Chinese Jamaica Beauty Queens, 1961, from The Shopkeepers, edited by Ray Chen, 2004.

The gastropoetics of Caribbean chop suey

The epigraph of this essay is drawn from the remarks of Roger Chen as part of an oral history book for the Jamaican Chinese community published in 2004. In Jamaican patwa Chen says, “Chop Suey not only eat nice, it look nice too.” Chen was born in Jamaica and is Chinese, not of mixed ancestry. He celebrates people of mixed Chinese, African, and European heritage. Chen revels in the hybridity of what he considers “racial mixing” that has formed a subject he calls chop suey with brightened ackee seed eyes. Ackee, the national fruit of Jamaica, is endemic to West Africa and was transplanted in the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. The metaphor is a conglomeration of national gestures to the global foodways of West Africa and South China converging in the Caribbean. Chen delights in chop sueyness of beautiful “hybrids.”

“We have to admit that a lot of beautiful people have come about from this cross breeding. Just look around at all the beautiful half-Chinese girls and boys. Let’s admit it: chop suey not only eat nice. It looks nice. We have added the creamy com-plexion, the almond shaped face, reduced the ‘trunk’, straightened the hair, and brightened those ‘ackee seed’ eyes. On the other hand, the other races have given them some waves and curls, a tint in the hair and, in the girls a ‘toosh’ and ‘heavy weights’ upstairs. No doubt the beau-tiful blend of colour, texture and shape, in both men and women from the co-min-gling of the Chinese is true to Jamaica’s motto Out of Many One People. ”

— (Shopkeepers 2004)

What are we to make of Chen’s craving to eat chop suey with ackee seed eyes? The Afro-Chinese Pearl Chang with her watermelon seed face and lychee nut nipples resists this sort of objectification by walking away from Chinese Wong Wan-Lee’s clumsy sexual advances.

Chen’s use of chop suey is similar to its usage in Flower Drum Song. The trope trans-lates across national borders and time periods. The Chinese meal is a superficial multicul-turalist gesture celebrating diversity mapped onto the female body. Chen flattens the history of converging imperial projects in the West Indies by objectifying and sexualizing the body of the mixed heritage subject as a chimeric blend of racialized features. He cele-brates the racial “amalgamation” of chop suey. Failing to see how both the logic of “hybrid vigor,” or heterosis and “hybrid degeneracy” denigrate the subject, Chen valorizes people of mixed ancestry as more beautiful than others (Bhabha 1983).⁴² What he may perceive as positive stereotyping in fact celebrates the dilution of Blackness and African traits that fits into the Eurocentric plantation order (Sexton 2008). It is no accident that both the U.S. and Jamaica tout the same motto E Pluribus Unum or Out of Many, One People and thus recruit chop suey as a metaphor in the service of racial democracy and nationalism.

Ultimately the impossibility of the Chinese woman in the nineteenth-century Americas opened up a number of vacancies filled by Black and Afro-Chinese women at the nexus of abolition. The chop suey aesthetic, which I have presented here, is an assembly of mixed media sourced from unsanctioned archives. The figures explored here, living women and fictional characters, gesture to the oscillation in the intimate sphere between the positioning of Black women and Chinese women. Patricia Powell’s character Mr. Lowe does and does not identify as a woman or a man and is tortured in the ungendering space of the Atlantic as Spillers might describe it (Spillers 1987). Lowe represents the horizon of the abolition of gender. In surplus of the archive and gender as a normative category, Mr. Lowe comes to the realization that he has spent a life living for the desire of others, from her father, to his captor, and his lovers. The Pagoda traces a psychic awakening and process of becom-ing. By the end of the novel, his gender performance, though it does not conform to nine-teenth century categories or binaries of sexuality, is not something that needs to be “resolved.”

Pearl Chang of H.T. Tsiang’s Depression era tale undergoes a similar coming to con-sciousness by the end of And China Has Hands, but hers is political. She becomes involved in proletariat struggle with other wage earners in a unionized movement of global discon-tent against the rising tide of fascism just before World War II. The novel’s rallying cry is to “the ones between yellow and black.” This was similar to the swell of social discontent against imperial injustice in Jamaica seen during the same interwar moment when Daphne Chin was crowned in 1938. Post-World War II, Juanita Hall carved out a career for herself as an African American woman playing Asian/Asian American before seeing her investment in a Chinese American restaurant go sour. Afro-Asian beauty queens in Jamaica continue to trouble and affirm the multiculturalism of the “Out of Many, One People” rhetoric of the post-independence nation.

The Chinese woman is substituted by the Black woman, who is eventually erased to uphold Chinese purity. The Black grandmother is forgotten and erased, a familiar story across the hemisphere. Substitution, the culinary principle of chop suey, a savory dish of reinvention and improvization, is not without its racialized hierarchy. The Black woman and Chinese woman are contingent and asymmetrically tethered in a relationship that must be understood in the subjects’ uneven proximity to power and dominant struc-tures of coloniality. The history of Chinese and Black intimacy remains undigested, but not an indigestible chapter of the historiography of the Americas. Black and Chinese inti-macy can still be heard it in the dissonant echoes and traces of Afro-Asian solidarity, mis-cellany, and tension of the naturalization of Juanita Hall’s refrain “Chop Suey, Chop Suey.” Chop suey is Afro-Asian sexuality, the surplus value of coloniality. One can just faintly make out the Cantonese vernacular of Miss Chin singing to herself, “zasui, tsaâp suì.”

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Liner Notes

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue Summer Lee Kim and Vivian Huang for their direction and vision. Many thanks to Gaia Goffe and Romil Chouhan for accompanying me on my global gastropoetic chop suey quest. My gratitude to Grégory Pierrot for being a careful reader who provided invaluable feedback into the faux authenticity of Juanita Hall’s chop suey. The anon-ymous reviewers also gave wonderfully insightful and generous critiques and references that were much appreciated. The concept of surplus value is one I am taking up in my forthcoming manuscript in conversation with, but distinct from, the evocative way art theorist Rizvana Bradley describes lyrical surplus. Many thanks to Jean Lowrie-Chin and Oliver Halsman Rosenberg for being gracious with their photographic archives.

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Notes on contributor

Tao Leigh Goffe is assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University. She specializes in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, abolition, and globalization. Her recent publications include: “Albums of Inclusion: The Photographic Poetics of Caribbean Chinese Visual Kinship” in Small Axe, “Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Planta-tion” in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and “‘Guano in their destiny’: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture” in Amerasia Journal.

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Notes

1. As a street carved out of the wilderness of the Wickquasgeck trail in Mannahatta in the early Americas, Broadway was a literal juncture of ecological destruction. So, it should perhaps not be surprising that Broadway as a metonym for the theatre district in New York is part of the violent theatricality of Americanisation, the initiation that each ethnic group has to go through in order to become American(i.e. Porgy and Bess, West Side Story, Flower Drum Song, South Pacific, the King and I, Hamilton). Like Wall Street for Black people, Broadway for the Lenape people signifies the site of violent transaction, dispossession, and extraction. ↩

2. Juanita Hall Papers, Chicago Public Library. ↩

3. This concept of America’s failure to digest its racial others is derived from a lecture by Anne Anlin Cheng in 2008 at Princeton University. ↩

4. See Martin Tsang’s extensive research on la mulata achinada. ↩

5. See Paul Brendan Tjon Sie Fat’s extensive research on the tension between heterogenous com-munities of Chinese migrants in Suriname and its diaspora (2009). ↩

6. Tao Leigh Goffe, “‘Guano in their destiny’: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture,” Amerasia Journal. ↩

7. Hsu (2008). Hsu cites Yu (1987), 89. It is indicative of the migration of Taishanese migrants from Southern China and the specificity of their cuisines and Taishanese and Cantonese dialects. ↩

8. “Chop Suey Hoax,” The Mixer and Server, 1912. Here, a reporter for the New York Telegraph personifies and denounces Chop Suey as an imposter. He says, the nation has been duped by the Chop Suey Hoax because the dish cannot be found in China. ↩

9. The dish is thought to be derived from Sze Yap in the Pearl River Delta. ↩

10. Lisa Lowe evocative frame of the “Intimacies of Four Continents” draws on Ann Laura Stoler’s conceptual “haunting of empire” to describe the obscured connections between European liberal-ism, the transatlantic African slave trade, settler colonialism, and the China and East India trade. ↩

11. Goffe (2019). The politics and poetics of taste and digestion are in the register of what I have elsewhere defined as gastropoetics, the making and unmaking traced through female genealo-gies performed through metaphors of food and sexuality in national belonging. ↩

12. Chinese Restaurant Syndrome and the process of its debunking speak to the coeval fears and desire surrounding Chinese food and myths about monosodium glutamate in the United States. See Ebert (1984), 1626. ↩

13. I invoke this phrase in a renegade sense from Perry Henzell’s classic Jamaican film The Harder They Come, 1976. ↩

14. In Jung (2006) emphasizes the geopolitical framework of the plantation order that prevailed in the West Indies, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta. ↩

15. Considering H.T. Tsiang’s racial casting, it is curious that his fate ended up as a character actor limited by Hollywood’s stereotypical portrayals of quirky Asian characters until he died in 1971. ↩

16. What was originally four-square blocks in the 1930s and 1940s is now 20-square blocks and growing with more recent migrations from Fujian Province. ↩

17. Chop Suey was popular in Harlem and amongst African Americans across the country. Louis Armstrong named a song “Cornet Chop Suey” as an ode to one of his favorite cuisines in 1926. Chop Suey also captured the popular imagination of 1930s cartoons with a Terrytoon by Paul Terry called “Chop Suey,” full of stereotypes about Chinese laundries and food. ↩

18. See Lui (2005) for a history of these turn-of-the-century European, Chinese interracial intimacies. ↩

19. Julia Lee points to these misguided critiques in her essay (2005), 80. ↩

20. See note 1 above. ↩

21. Latin phrase for “that which is brought forth follows the belly (womb)” that designated slave status in the Americas being born from the womb of an enslaved woman. Notable studies that center on this phrasing include Eve Alyse Weinbaum and Jennifer Morgan’s write writings about this legacy and the reproductive labors that shaped the early United States. ↩

22. Many thanks to Grégory Pierrot for suggesting this term to describe the faux authenticity of both chop suey and Pearl Chang. ↩

23. Lee and Ngai (2006). Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens. ↩

24. I posit the term Afro-Chinese as a signifier that offers a critique of multiracial categories such as “biracial” that reify race and conceptions of blood quantum. Afro-Chinese as a descriptor fits into the rubric of the plurality of the political and socio-historical formation of black identities across the hemisphere. As I argue, Chinese as a category, racially or in terms of nationality, does not function in the way Black does. It does not inherently have a clear way to accommodate or digest mixed identity. ↩

25. Tsiang, 77. ↩

26. See David Eng, Racial Castration and Richard Fung, “Looking for my Penis.” ↩

27. Loewen’s use of the term “Negro mates” belies his detached ethnographic lens. ↩

28. See Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem for more on the rich and lost histories South Asian and African American relations in the U.S. South. ↩

29. Lee (2011). In the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, John Marshall Harlan writes, “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few excep-tions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But by the statute in question, a China man can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union.” ↩

30. Early Chinese indentured laborers also arrived via harsh conditions in Panama where they were demanded for plantation work and later the construction of the canal. See Siu (2005a). Siu also writes about Chinese diasporic pageantry in Panama and Nicaragua in the article (2005b). In addition, on studies of diasporic Chinese beauty pageantry see Chow (2011). ↩

31. Kingston Gleaner, March 19, 1938. ↩

32. Anne-Marie Lee Loy and Howard Johnson write poignantly on this topic as does Victor Chang. See also Andrew Lind discusses the inclusion of the category “Chinese Coloureds” in the 1943 Jamaican census in his article (1958). ↩

33. While it is perhaps deliberately unclear on Powell’s part, I describe Lowe’s gender identification as possibly being argued as non-binary. I use the male pronoun to describe the character after arrival in Jamaica following Powell’s usage. ↩

34. “Debtor’s Prisons and Debt Peonage,” Columbia University Global Debt Syllabus, Tao Leigh Goffe and Gustav Peebles, forthcoming. ↩

35. The Page Act, 1875. For more on the use of lewd in the U.S. legal sphere in relation to Chinese migrant women see Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism for the chapter “Borders and Embroi-dery.” She details the “Case of the Twenty-Two Lewd Chinese Women” who were detained in 1874. ↩

36. Sheila Chong is described in the colonial newspaper of record the Jamaica Gleaner as having a Polynesian demeanor though she is not of Polynesian descent. ↩

37. Business leaders in the Jamaican Chinese community organized the Miss Chinese Jamaica contest. ↩

38. “A Winning Chance,” Jet, December 15, 1960, 62. ↩

39. While related in Afro-Asian identity and also fitting what Nettleford describes as the “mixed blood idea” the connotation and scripts of “dougla,” or mixed black Indian identity and fem-ininity are different than Afro-Chinese. Caribbean literature scholar Donnette Francis describes in Feminine Citizenship Indian women as “policed” and Chinese women as “pro-tected.” See also Bahadur (2014) for more context on Indian woman’s sexuality in the West Indies. ↩

40. As the result of technicalities, she was crowned the unofficial Miss World, because the winner, American Marjorie Wallace, was fired, and the first runner up Filipina Evangeline Pascual refused the crown. ↩

41. In more contemporary Jamaican beauty pageantry, there is a small but notable Jamaican Chinese presence. Women with Chinese surnames like Yapp, Chin, and Hue, for example, are read as African in spite of Chinese names. After forty years, the Chinese Benevolent Association in Kingston revived the Miss Jamaica Chinese Jamaica in 2003. ↩

42. See Homi Bhabha “The Other Question” on positive stereotyping and essentializing epidermal difference Bhabha (1983). ↩

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