The Store as a Contested Space in Asian American Writing: Jade Snow’s Storefront in Fifth Chinese Daughter

초록

Exploring the female protagonist’s coming of age as an economic subject in postwar America, this paper examines Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) focusing on Jade Snow’s labor history and its culmination in her pottery shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The child of a small Chinatown business owner who runs a denim garment factory, Jade Snow begins to do housework and earn money at eleven, expanding her workspace beyond the boundary of Chinatown as a live-in domestic in white American households. Her work history is reconfigured based on her spatial experiences, which are represented by a triangle connecting her childhood factory-home, Mills College where she also works as the dean’s houseworker, and her Chinatown storefront. In order to understand the significance of Jade Snow’s storefront, this paper begins with the spatial and economic landscape of San Francisco’s Chinatown and its small business households, delving into the ethnic enclave economy and the labor power of Chinatown women. While issues of economic independence, spatial and social mobility, and ethnic commodification are overlaid, Jade Snow proves herself to be a successful ethnic entrepreneur who can strategically employ the capital of her racial identity. More than a place of business, her storefront stands as a space laden with her gendered and racialized labor history in and outside the ethnic enclave. It is a contested space that contains the struggles, achievements, and negotiations of her lived experience both within and outside of Chinatown as they span race, gender, and labor in postwar America.

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