“Ocean People”: Maritime (Im)Mobilities in the Chinese American Imaginary

Abstract

Understanding the ocean in both metaphorical and material terms, this essay approaches Chinese American texts from the intersection of oceanic, mobility, and Chinese American studies. While mobility has often been perceived in highly romanticized terms, in Chinese American literature the ocean is characterized by ambiguity as it becomes a site of negotiation for the role of immigrants during the era of Chinese exclusion. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s auto/biographical text China Men, Pam Chun’s family narrative The Money Dragon, poetry from Ellis Island and Angel Island, and Genny Lim’s play Paper Angels, the complex relationships between time and space, sea and land, inform the immigrants’ journey across the ocean. Their American beginnings are defined by a liberating, though often disorienting, mobility and at the same time a longed for, but mostly paralyzing immobility on and off ships and islands. To use Maxine Hong Kingston words, these circumstances of migration turn Chinese Americans into “ocean people.” Ultimately, a focus on the ship voyage and the island as oceanic tropes in Chinese American texts reveals the Chinese American experience as shaped by maritime (im)mobilities.