asianamlitfans | Oct. 6th, 2008

It's only a month into the semester, and I feel far more frazzled than I should. I tried to relax this weekend by reading a non-teaching, non-research related book: Shawna Yang Ryan's Locke 1928. It was a good read, and far more queer than I expected! I also love how her web site address, http://shawnayangryan.com, looks like it has the word "angry" in it. :D

The novel is set in the Sacramento region of California in the Chinese town of Locke. It is part historical, involving some characters who actually founded the town and lived in it in the 1920s. The novel sketches out some of the broad strokes of Chinese American history of that period--the labor migrations and exclusion laws that lead to gender-imbalanced societies, the brothels with white prostitutes, farm-based communities with merchants as a kind of upper class, and the role of Christianity in some Chinese communities.

I'm still a bit undecided on novels that don't use quotation marks for dialogue.... Locke 1928 is one of these novels. I sort of understand how the effect is to blur the lines between thought, dialogue, and general narration. But sometimes it gets a little confusing, too. The novel is generally told in the present tense, third-person narrative perspective. There are interspersed some flashback chapters (noted with years in the title) that are in the past tense. And then there are a few odd chapters that stand out because they are in the second person perspective:

You noticed her and your stomach went weak the way it never had. She was just a whore, you told yourself, and you scanned her from the gleam of her rayon stockings to her over-rouged cheeks. She was just a whore, and maybe it was this that excited you. She was more exotic than anything else--a white-whore in a Chinese town--the lowest of the low. She was silent and conspicuous, blonde-haired, in the grocery store, her heels clicking down the wood floors. . . .

. . .

But you didn't have these words--only a fait sense of the image and the feeling that arose. You couldn't even really think about your pulse, as you felt it in your chest and neck and wrists and thighs, or what your skin-flush in the spring morning sun meant because this you had never even conceived of: that a girl could love a girl.

(I find this passage particularly intriguing because I'm working on a paper that explores the use of second-person perspective as a kind of queer, dissociative state in Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch...)

Locke 1928 centers on the arrival of three Chinese women in the small town--one is the long-separated wife of Richard Fong, the manager of a gambling house in town; a second is seeking her husband who is somewhere else in California, long separated from her; and the third is a woman who came to America to seek her fortunes. Their mysterious arrival shifts the dynamics of the town's population and the relationship of Richard to the brothel madam Poppy and the white prostitute Chloe that he has been seeing regularly. The men in town line up to court the two unattached women (Richard's wife sets up shop in his house, of course) who are staying with the minister in town. The madam Poppy is a strange figure--a Chinese woman in charge of a number of white prostitutes. She seems to be able to see the future and to know certain things in a supernatural way. Chloe has a friendship/relationship with Sofia, the mixed-race daughter of the local Chinese preacher and his white wife.

I thought the novel was most interesting in its imagining of love reunited, disunited, and reimagined in the relationships between people separated by an ocean and decades. The weaving of Chinese folk stories and superstitions about water, death, and ghosts suggests a kind of haunting quality to the lives of this Chinese community, stranded in the middle of nowhere with broken and long-distance relationships straining the way each individual can imagine a life on the ground, in the present.