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“As If They Thought She Were Deaf or Dumb” The Reproduction of Dominant Discourses in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter Karsten H. Piep First published in 1945 and reissued with a new introduction in 1989, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter is an autobiographical account of a young girl’s twofold struggle to free herself from the patriarchal binds of her ancestral Chinese culture while claiming her place within Anglo American mainstream society.
Fifth Chinese Daughter’s enduring popularity, most notably among European Americans, rests primarily on its picturesque rendering of ghettoized Chinese immigrant life ??? “a guided Chinatown tour,” according to Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong ??? and its valorization of the liberating aspects of Western thought, emphasizing individualism and self-reliance. Wong’s “success story,” then, caters to the tastes of a white readership by perpetuating myths about the “inevitable progress” of the immigrant family and “the Asian model minority. 1 Unlike Asian American writers such as John Okada and Louis Chu, Wong’s selfprofessed attempt “to contribute in bringing better understanding of the Chinese people, so that in the Western world they would be recognized for their achievements,” consciously refrains from overtly attacking racism or interrogating the exploitive capitalistic foundations of the United States. 2 Instead, like Monica Sone in Nisei Daughter (1953), Wong emphasizes the possibility of cross-cultural understanding and gradual assimilation in Fifth Chinese Daughter.
The frequently polarised critical reception of Wong’s book since the 1950s provides a telling case study in the changing thrusts of socio-political discourse within the United States. Whereas early reviewers praised Wong’s “notable intelligence” and commended Fifth Chinese Daughter for trying to find a “middle ground” that reconciles “two modes of living,” critics of the late 1960s and 1970s charged her with presenting a distorted, stereotyped view of Chinese American life.
In the early 1980s, the critical pendulum swung once again, as feminists began to exonerate Wong, claiming that her autobiography presented a valuable “document of Asian American social history” which paved the way for more “complex” explorations of “a racial and gendered consciousness. ” 3 Following the postmodern turn in literary criticism, younger scholars such as Karen Su and Leslie Bow have recently begun to explore the book’s “repressed histories that hreaten to rupture the surface narrative and force the text to reveal its ideological contradictions. ” 4 Until recently, a discussion of the ideologically constrained U. S. literary market that pressured Asian American authors into reproducing the dominant discourse on Americanization while avoiding open criticism of racial discrimination has been conspicuously absent from most readings of Fifth Chinese Daughter ??? arguably under the impression of the patronizing praise white reviewers had bestowed upon it during the Cold War period.
As Jinqi Ling has shown, the social and political marginalization of Asian Americans during the 1950s not only denied them aesthetic expression, but also frequently limited them to producing biographical narratives of cultural integration. “Reduced to making sociological documentation of immigrants’ struggles and their children’s accommodation and assimilation,” Ling notes, “Asian American writers found that autobiography was almost the only commercially publishable form available to them. 5 This meant that those Asian American writers of the late 1940s and early 1950s who felt the need to make their voices heard usually had to do so in relative compliance with the reigning discourse. Hence, it is hardly astonishing that Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter was among the first commercially successful books ever published by a Chinese American. By 1975, over a quarter of a million copies had been sold and Fifth Chinese Daughter was regularly used in American junior high and high school literature classes “as the best example of Chinese American literature. 6 Equally unremarkable is that the book’s popular success primarily hinged upon its ostensibly conformist message. 7 Aside from explicating the “strange customs and manners” of the “Oriental” in a fashion that abstains from openly challenging white mainstream assumptions, Wong’s autobiography appears to corroborate the popular assimilation myth, according to which “the best of the old world and the new world” can be smoothly aligned to forge a Chinese American composite identity. 8 Long ignored, however, among appreciative and contemptuous critics alike, are the disparities and contradictions within Fifth Chinese Daughter that subtly ndermine the dominant discourse it assays to replicate. Fifth Chinese Daughter’s decidedly white frame of reference often compels Jade Snow to project her experiences of race and gender discrimination squarely onto her own familial and cultural backgrounds. When her traditionalist father refuses to pay for her college education on the grounds that she has already “been given an above-average Chinese education for an American-born Chinese girl,” Jade Snow reflects bitterly: “Why should Older Brother be alone in enjoying the major benefits of Daddy’s toil? Perhaps, even being a girl, I don’t want to marry, just to raise sons! …I am a person, besides being a female! Don’t the Chinese admit that women also have feelings and minds”? (109-10) In this scene, notes Wendy Motooka, “Jade Snow specifically associates her gendered oppression with her Chinese heritage. ” 9 And the “blow for justice,” Leslie Bow concludes, “is struck against a sexist family rather than a racially stratified society. ” 10 Still, this does not mean that Fifth Chinese Daughter is mute concerning the racial, economic, and gender inequities that marked American society throughout the 1950s.
For example, when Jade Snow discusses her plans for career advancement with her (white) boss, he gives “it to her straight: ‘Don’t you know by now that as long as you are a woman you can’t compete for an equal salary in a man’s world? ‘” (234) Jade Snow accepts this blunt reply as a “practical lesson in economics,” but it becomes clear that the American gospel of meritocracy is severely curtailed by the same patriarchal logic to which her Chinese-born father subscribes. (234) In fact, as Jade Snow is soon to find out, the American promise of equal opportunity is even further delimited by the continued enforcement of strict racial hierarchies.
Thus, despite being lauded for aiding her country’s war effort on the homefront, the young protagonist is unable to secure a position at the shipyard’s administrative office. Following the Japanese warlords’ surrender aboard the battleship Missouri, any distinction between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ Asian Americans is annulled and Jade Snow once again finds herself unemployable outside of Chinatown. In a similar vein, as Wendy Hesford and Theresa Kulbaga have shown, Wong’s casual depictions of the harsh realities of sweatshop labor offer up images that contradict “the text’s narrative of (im)migrant success” by revealing “the exclusion and xploitation of Asian laboring bodies. ” 11 Last but not least, the book’s final scene suggests that the dual pattern of existence pursued by Wong is by no means a harmonious resolution to the struggle for Chinese American self-determination. Rather, it emerges as a site of irresolvable conflicts that dissociate the protagonist from both Chinese and Anglo American cultures. In this sense, Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter may perhaps be more akin to John Okada’s nonconformist No-No Boy than has been commonly recognized.
Although Wong does not reach Okada’s insight that the strict dichotomy between Asian and Anglo American cultures constitutes a mere rhetorical proposition advanced by white America in order to legitimize and justify the continued exclusion of minorities, her final estrangement from both Chinese and American cultures evidently thwarts the dominant discourse at this point. Contrary to popular contention, Wong’s endeavor to achieve duality shows that Chinese American identity cannot be constructed by adding one half Chinese to one half American, as though these two linguistic attributes were fixed, stable, and unified cultural entities.
Unwittingly or not, even Wong’s more florid descriptions of her actual living conditions tend to undercut domineering acculturation myths. For at the same time that Wong consciously adopts predominant ideological propositions (for example, that an end to discrimination and marginalization hinges upon an embrace of white norms and values), she is also compelled to at least touch upon the existing historical contradictions of her time (for example, that even converted Chinese Americans continue to be barred from economic and educational opportunities). 2 Attention to sporadic inconsistencies in Fifth Chinese Daughter discloses that Wong’s ideological project begins to falter in the face of history. As Michel Foucault reminds us, “[d]iscourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it but it also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. ” 13 Discursive power (such as the power to render Asian Americans torn between two antagonistic cultures), Foucault argues, eludes the total control of the political and cultural institutions that initiate and transport it.
But rather than allowing influential counter-discourses to evolve, the dominant discourse itself tends to become the scene of internal conflicts: There is not, on one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can run different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strateg y. 4 In other words, the long-term interests that a particular discourse serves may be quite different form those it appears to represent at first glance. Thus a more fruitful reading of Fifth Chinese Daughter, I suggest, may start from the premise that Wong betrays the contradictions inherent in the dominant discourse at the moment she tries to accommodate or duplicate the latter in her own writing.
Expanding upon recent scholarly works that have reread Wong’s autoethnography vis-a-vis Homi Bhabba’s concept of “colonial mimicry,” I attempt to shed additional light on questions concerning the material and ideological constraints of Asian American literary production in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Moreover, in moving beyond the dismissal of Fifth Chinese Daughter as “pathetic” and “distorting,” I argue that the mid-twentieth-century ideology of racial advancement through assimilation repeatedly invalidates itself as Wong assays to reproduce it within her literary autobiograph y. 5 After all, as Louis Althusser has pointed out in “Ideology and State,” it is precisely in the act of representation that the conflicting claims or “ritualistic practices” of a prevailing ideology begin to surface. 16 “The literary work,” Pierre Macherey contends in his discussion of Tolstoy, “must be studied in a double perspective: in relation to history, and in relation to an ideological version of that history. ” Applied to Wong’s work, Macherey’s “double perspective” enables us to discern “both the contradictions of [her] age and the deficiencies involved in [her] partial view of those contradictions. 17 In light of this theoretical approach that places the writer within both the particular ideological and historical contexts of his or her time, the following discussion has two interrelated aims: to explore the changing cultural currents that have informed the book’s critical reception and to examine the potentially subversive contradictions that surface in Wong’s attempt to reproduce dominant discourses on Americanization in her third-person autobiograph y. Predictably, early reviewers praised Fifth Chinese Daughter for “contrasting frigidly regimented Chinese tradition” with her liberal “American Education. 18 In accordance with the dominant discourse on assimilation into the white mainstream, critics of the 1950s read Wong’s autobiography as an endorsement of Western values. “Jade Snow’s story,” E. V. R. Wyatt appraised, “is a study of the conflict between the weight of Chinese tradition and the freedom of American ways. ” Stressing that the author has “graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa” from Mills College, Wyatt finds confirmation in Wong’s “fine” autobiography that personal determination and responsibility presents the key to incremental Americanization. 9 In a similar vein, Joyce Geary lauded the “nice impartiality” Wong achieves “about her very unusual environment” and claims that “her gradual acquaintance with the Occidentals and their customs and her reactions to them make a wonderful reading. ” 20 Enamored with Wong’s Orientalized images of gilded ghetto life, unsettling themes of race and gender looming in the background of Fifth Chinese Daughter were either overlooked or couched in essentialist terms by white critics of the 1950s.
Wyatt therefore ascribes the putative absence of humor in the work to Wong’s “Cantonese heritage” and Geary explains that “her writing exudes the delicate femininity only the Asiatic women possess. ” Fifty years after Frank Norris’s anti-Chinese polemics, racist distinctions between “secretive Mongolians” and the “frank Anglo-Saxons” still haunted the minds of white critics. 21 Ideologically, all of these early readings stayed within the old paradigms of an American Orientalist discourse that justified Asian exclusion on the grounds of insurmountable cultural differences.
Wong undoubtedly invited Orientalist interpretations of her work by aiming to dispel white “classification of the Chinese as characters of evil or amusement” through her uncritical acceptance of the tenets of rugged individualism and the concept of a “split” Chinese American identity. 22 As Patricia Lin Blinde notes, Wong’s efforts to assert her identity through the “totalizing” eyes of white America entails an affirmation of her own “place in society as designated by others. ” 23 More than anything else, it was this internalization of the outside gaze in Wong’s autobiography that outraged oung Asian American critics of 1960s and 1970s. Frank Chin, co-editor of the controversial Aiiieeeee! anthology (1974), leveled the harshest criticism against Fifth Chinese Daughter. In their polemical preface to the latter compendium of works by Asian Americans, Chin and his collaborators charged that Jade Snow Wong’s “Chinese-according-to-white point of view” perpetuates the “goofy concept of the dual personality” and thus contributes to the feeling of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration” in the Asian American community. 4 In the eyes of the editorial collective, Fifth Chinese Daughter continued the tradition of “Chinatown books” by “insiders” such as Leong Gor Yun, Pardee Lowe, and Lin Yutang, who distort and disfigure the Asian American character in their acceptance of white Orientalist notions. Noting that Fifth Chinese Daughter was substantially revised by a “benevolent” white editor, Chin and his associates not only dismiss Wong as a serious author, but, partially due to its anti-Japanese undertones, also assert that it “fits the propaganda-as-autobiography mold perfectly. 25 In his “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” Chin reflects that “[w]ith Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston, the autobiography completely escaped the real China and Chinese America into pure white fantasy where nothing is Chinese, nothing is real, everything is born of pure imagination. ” 26 The Aiiieeee! group’s political understanding of what constitutes ‘authentic’ and socially responsible writing by Asian Americans has remained influential to this date. 7 Hong Liu, for example, has recently argued that the rediscovery of Wong’s works threatens to revive some of the very Orientalist notions that Chin and other progressive activists had so successfully combated throughout the 1970s. 28 Given the current diversification of the Asian American literary scene, however, such fears seem difficult to sustain, none the least because the Aiiieeeee! group’s call for a return to models of ancient Chinese heroism and masculinity has come to be seen as restrictive. 9 Understandable as it may seem through the prism glass of the 1970s, Chin’s categorical rejection of Wong’s work tends to obscure the incipient historical and ideological struggles that lie at the heart of her autobiography and foreshadow the trajectory of subsequent Chinese American works. For placed within their historical contexts, Motooka underscores, works such as Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Wilshire Bus” (1945) and Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter have much to say about both the limitations and the possibilities of the strategic embrace of subject positions in Asian American literature. 0 With the rise of feminist scholarship during the late 1970s and early 1980s, criticism of Fifth Chinese Daughter focused on Wong’s depiction of gender relations within the broad realm of race relations. Two major positions emerged: one charging Wong with trivializing racial and gender conflicts by offering a delusive dual identity as the solution, the other claiming that Wong “effectively renders the divided consciousness of dual-heritage. 31 Thus, while hailing Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) as “a tribute to women who have taken the extra step which enables the placement of the individual beyond the oppression of externally determined definitions,” Patricia Lin Blinde judges that Jade Snow Wong possesses a “view of life as self-determined totalities” so that she “proceeds to live in accordance with the terms which denigrate the female sex. ” 32 On the other end, accusing Blinde of being biased by “her feminist values of the 1970s,” Kathleen Loh Swee Yin and Kristoffer F.
Paulson have asserted that Fifth Chinese Daughter illustrates “Jade Snow’s successful search for balance within the fragmented world of Chinese-American women. ” 33 More recent criticism by Elaine Kim, Sau-Ling Wong, and Evelyn Tseng tends to regard Fifth Chinese Daughter as a problematical yet valuable document of Asian American social history. Though critical of Wong’s portrait of Chinese American life, Sau-Ling Wong concedes that Fifth Chinese Daughter shows that “growing up Chinese American meant vastly different things for the male child than for the female. 34 And noting that Wong’s “self-definition” largely revolves around Chinese food as well as the yearning “to be acceptably Chinese,” Kim concludes that her “desire for personal success through acquiescence is understandable, although, in light of today’s changing attitudes, rather pathetic. ” 35 Despite their apparent differences, all of the readings discussed above seem to assume that Fifth Chinese Daughter presents an unequivocal answer to the problem it poses itself (or that has been superimposed upon it by the dominant discourse).
Amidst efforts to either renounce or vindicate the author’s ideological project of establishing a dual pattern of existence, Wong’s eventual disassociation from both mainstream and Chinatown societies seems to have escaped critical notice. As Bow observes in her 2001 study of “prefeminist Chinese Women,” critics have long tended “to misread the tone and tenor of the work,” which “is an essentially bleak story of one who substitutes ambition for affection and…who accepts recognition garnered from small achievements in lieu of real understanding and connections with others. 36 Another legacy of the scholarly debates of the 1980s is the emergence of two polarized views concerning the classification of Fifth Chinese Daughter as either a factual or a fictional account. For Blinde, Wong’s work is simply “the meticulous transcription of events and the documentation of facts” directed by “a single imperative” to produce the “singular thrust” of a unified and coherent autobiograph y. 7 Yin and Paulson, on the other hand, see Fifth Chinese Daughter largely “as a work of the imagination… more a work of creative fiction than a simple transcription of events and facts. Jade Snow is a fully rendered, fictional character whom Wong develops within a structured thematic purpose,” Yin and Paulson maintain. 38 These two stances are not quite as irreconcilable as it may at first appear. For Fifth Chinese Daughter, one may argue, imbues a selective documentation of facts with the fictional thrust of creating an identity that concurs with the reining ideology of Americanization.
As a result, the discords and tensions Yin and Paulson detect throughout Wong’s autobiography tend to arise at precisely those moments where the author’s recordings of her experiences seem no longer reconcilable with the assimilation ideology of the day. When, upon promotion to the shipyard’s main administrative office, Jade Snow’s benevolent boss “regretfully” informs her that “he could no longer transfer her,” Wong has her protagonist diffidently accept his hollow explanation that she “won’t be happy” there. 233) Tellingly, though, the narrative’s abrupt transition to the next paragraph ??? stating matter-of-factly that “[i]nstead she was assigned to another superintendent in charge of installing fixtures” ??? only serves to highlight the gulf that exists between Wong’s actual experience of racial discrimination at the workplace and her muted fictional rendition thereof. (233) Thirty-nine years later, Wong’s second introduction to Fifth Chinese Daughter would state plainly what her fictionalized autobiography strives hard to conceal. Yes, being Chinese in America, I have had problems, but they have not stopped me,” Wong concedes with a forwardlooking air of defiance. “Now Asian faces are commonplace in the corporate world or in professional offices; sometimes Asians are sought out for their special attributes. There has been a quite evolution. Asian Americans, however, know that the battle against race prejudice is not finished. ” (xi) “Consciousness,” Teresa de Laurentis writes, “is never fixed, never attained once and for all because discursive boundaries change with historical conditions. 39 Obviously, the changing historical conditions of the 1960s, which lead to the emergence of a distinctively Asian American discourse, did not radically alter Wong’s consciousness. As the general tenor of her 1989 introduction indicates, she persists in pleading for cross-cultural understanding and seeks to explain Asian American culture to white audiences in more or less essentialist terms (note her reference to the “special attributes” of Asians above).
Likewise, Wong’s concept of a “quiet evolution” bares recognizable traces of the ideological and material conditions of the 1940s that engendered her consciousness in the first place. Blinde comments that the “problems of identity, alienation, ethnic pride, and commitment were not in the common currency of human consciousness in the years before World War II, and from her Chinese environment in San Francisco with its shared community of experiences and old Chinese values, Wong developed a sense of a totalized and thus stable world. 40 However, to dismiss Fifth Chinese Daughter as a “feeble” text of “racial uplift” that fails to challenge “hegemonic appropriation” seems beside the mark. 41 For even though Jade Snow Wong may have been cultivating the very ideology of racial uplift that kept her out of Berkele y, Fifth Chinese Daughter, nevertheless, helped prepare the path toward a new, self-assertive Asian American consciousness by hinting at discrepancies and incongruities within the dominant discourses of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Points of potential or as of yet unrealized resistance against dominant discourses, Foucault insists, present themselves everywhere in the power network. And “while great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions” do occur now and then in history (as, for instance, during the 1960s), “more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and gradually effecting regroupings. 42 Fenced in by the material and ideological boundaries of the Cold War period, Wong’s own resistance against the double bind of white prejudices and patriarchic power remains curiously subdued. Yet, her autobiograph y, although no visionary work, already hints those “cleavages” and “fractures” within society that would give rise to pointed dissent and socio-political protest. The simple fact that Fifth Chinese Daughter was, as novelist Maxine Hong Kingston remembers, “the only available” book by a Chinese American, inspired a younger generation to look closer at the elusive mechanism of oppression. 3 Accordingly, critics such as Shirley Geok-Lim can claim that Fifth Chinese Daughter expanded the scope of Chinese American women’s life stories by introducing themes of race and gender, while contemporary literati such as Kingston see themselves as writing in the tradition of Jade Snow Wong. As noted earlier, considerable critical attention has been focused on Jade Snow Wong’s choice of literary form.
Echoing indictments by Frank Chin, Patricia Blinde asserts that in opting to write an “autobiography (that uniquely Western European genre that emerged from the Christian confessional),” Wong not only accepts “the limitations and expectations of literary genres of the dominant culture,” but also makes herself a “willing collaborator with the American will to effect a sense that life is constituted of separate and totalized unities and perhaps such should be maintained as such. “Self assertion in relation to a certain social order,” Blinde continues her theoretical discussion, “amounts to an acceptance of both the order and the place and function of the individual. ” In its aim to produce a coherent representation of a life, autobiography “imposes a pattern of life and constructs out of it a coherent story. ” 44 And indeed, as Walter Benjamin has demonstrated on several occasions, the content of a particular literary work (that is, its political tendency) hinges to a large part upon the specific literary form or technique applied by the author. 5 The question remains, however, if an autobiographer can ever fully succeed in affirming prevailing ideological claims through a representation of his or her life in a formalized, seemingly coherent and unified fashion. In the case of minority writers such as Wong this question becomes especially pertinent, for the formal demands of autobiographical writing to duplicate the dominant ideology tend to clash with actual, material living conditions. 46 Critical assessments in which Fifth Chinese Daughter is seen to fit the mold of “autobiography-as-propaganda perfectly” tend to overlook the work’s ambiguities towards its own ends.
In essence, such an aborted reading tacitly confirms what it aims to renounce; namely, that ideology is unified, void of antonyms. To understand how the claims of the dominant discourse announce themselves as untenable, specious, and precarious, it appears necessary to punctuate the external and internal motives of a text. According to Machere y, once the ideological thrust of a work has been recognized, a second critical question poses itself: “What begs to be explained in the work is… he presence of a relation, or an opposition, between the elements of the exposition or levels of the composition, those disparities which point to a conflict of meaning. ” By way of this extended inquiry, both formal and substantial incongruities come into focus, because, as Macherey explains, at the same time as it establishes an ideological content the book presents the contradiction of that content: this content only exists enveloped in the form of a contestation. Thus we perceive that there can be both a contradiction in ‘the ideas’ and the contradiction between the ideas and the book which presents them. 7 On the level of exposition, one formal aberration has already been alluded to: Wong’s unusual choice of third person autobiograph y. Wong herself explains this choice as derived from her distinctly Chinese heritage: “Even written in English an ‘I’ book by a Chinese would seem outrageously immodest to anyone raised in the spirit of Chinese propriety. ” (xiii) As Yin and Paulson suggest, “her narrative voice breaks the form apart. The division, contradiction, tension, paradox and ‘bursting’ are right there in the form itself. The initial tension that results from her choice of a third person autobiograph y, however, does not so much bespeak “her bi-cultural identity” as her struggle to re-articulate and affirm white assumption about what it means to be Chinese American. 48 The third person singular account seemingly resolves this problem: it allows Wong to contemplate herself as a mere object. Not, however, because Wong is unable “to see herself as a subject,” but because the third person pronoun allows her to partially disconnect her own experiences from those of the fictionalized Jade Snow. 9 Only by rhetorically separating the writer’s consciousness from the character’s consciousness can Wong begin to apply the white gaze upon herself. Henceforth, Wong the author is free to instill Jade Snow the character with those selective experiences and views that confirm dominant notions of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Americaness’ respectively. Interestingly enough, even such strict separation between the author’s and the character’s fields of vision, does not guard the text against narrative slippages that hint at the impossibility of achieving a stable composite identity.
While taking her classmates on a guided tour through her father’s sweatshop, Jade Snow ??? “positing herself as ‘spectator’ to her family, Chinatown, and the racialized and gendered bodies that constitute (im)migrant labor” ??? is momentarily struck by the unsettling feeling of utter alienation: Although everyone felt more or less at home, the parents as well as the guests, Jade Snow suddenly felt estranged, for while she was translating conversation between instructors and parents, she was observing the scene with two pairs of eyes???Fifth Chinese Daughter’s, and those of a college junior. 165) Neither able to fully identify with the “Chinese women workers,” whom she outwardly resembles, nor with the “young, healthy Caucasian girls,” whose outlooks she has internalized, Jade Snow briefly senses what the book’s closing chapters confirm; namely, that her relentless efforts to become the embodiment of cross-racial understanding will ultimately result in self-alienation and selfisolation. But Wong’s choice of a third person narrator serves another, more immediately subversive function as well.
Inasmuch as Wong deliberately fictionalizes her autobiograph y, she weakens and undercuts its claim to verisimilitude or authenticity from the start. It becomes clear that only the imaginative distance of fiction enables Wong to refashion her real living conditions and personal experiences in accordance with mainstream preconceptions. Consequently, the predominant discourse on assimilation, though outwardly upheld in Fifth Chinese Daughter, debunks itself as fictitious. Already, the introduction of a detached, extraneous voice shatters the unity of the represented ideolog y.
In the act of reproduction, to recall Althusser, ideology becomes visible for what it is: “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. ” 50 The contradictions between Jade Snow’s “imaginary” and Wong’s “real conditions of existence” are purposefully cloaked throughout Fifth Chinese Daughter, but become transparent nonetheless. Early on in the book, for instance, Wong establishes that Jade Snow’s family life in San Francisco’s Chinatown was modest, uneventful, and severely restricted by paternal control. Order, in the most uncompromising Chinese sense, was enforced strictly,” and affection was restricted to a minimum. (62) The experience of Confucian austerity is contrasted negatively with the warmth and affection Jade Snow receives at the American school she attends. Having been hurt while watching a baseball game, she receives solace form Mrs. Mullohand. “It was a very strange feeling,” she recalls, “to be held to a grown-up foreign lady’s bosom. She could not remember when Mama had held her to give comfort. Daddy occasionally picked her up as a atter of necessity, but he never embraced her impulsively when she required consolation. ” (20) Stifled and misunderstood by her overbearing Chinese environment, among the “foreigners” Jade Snow “for the first time” feels accepted as an individual. (21) Only forty pages later, however, the acceptance and tenderness of the American ways abruptly give way to open racism and abuse. During recess, little Richard, a white classmate, hurls erasers at a dumb-founded Jade Snow and subjects her to the often-heard, derogatory chant: “Chink y, Chink y, no tickee, no washee, no shirtee! (68) It is symptomatic rather than ironic that “Jade Snow was introduced for the first time to racial discrimination” in a chapter euphemistically entitled “The Taste of Independence. ” (68) And in equally symptomatic fashion, Jade Snow quickly decides to forgive the boy for being “unwise in the ways of human nature” and consoles herself by asserting the ancient grandeur of Chinese culture: “Her ancestors had created a great art heritage and had made inventions important to world civilization???the compass, gunpowder, paper, and a host of other essentials. (68, 69) Chin et al. may be correct in contending that her passive “attitude of a noncommunicative cultural superiority” is an ineffectual response to bigotry. But even though both Jade Snow the character and Wong the author are working hard to be “actively inoffensive to white sensibilities,” these two scenes highlight the cunning ambivalence of Orientalist discourse which vacillates between racist love and racist hate, between the elusive promise of individual recognition and the collective rejection of the Asian other. 1 For stigmatized “Orientals” such as Jade Snow and her family, the attractions of Western life are obtainable only through foreign movies, where, “for a few hours,” they “could forgot who they were, how hard they worked, or how pressing were their personal problems. ” (71, italics added) Without acknowledging so forthrightly, Fifth Chinese Daughter betrays that participation within the American Dream is not only ephemeral and illusionary, but also demands complete self-denial on the part of the non-white minority.
As Elaine Kim has pointed out, Jade Snow attributes the negative aspects of her family life and community to sharply defined Chinese family relationships. 52 In marked contrast to the white households she is getting to know, her won family enforces discipline and obedience through constant supervision and hard work. (114) Comparing the ease and comfort of privileged white families with the rigor and deprivation or her won family, Jade Snow never exhibits an awareness that the sharply defined Chinese family relationships may be partially a result of the social and economic constraints inflicted upon the Chinese American community.
Yet, between the lines one finds hints that the economic conflicts of the depression era severely strained relationships within Chinatown. Even after the Wongs had settled for a more modest home, Jade Snow relates, “Daddy’s factory continued to be idle most of the year. ” (53) Faced with mounting expenses and unable to obtain employment outside of Chinatown, “he went into debt” and “borrowed from his jobber. ” (54) In order for her mother to solicit odd work, Jade Snow has to learn the “the necessity of thrift and how to keep house. (54) Again, coupled with Jade Snow’s adoration for “liberal” white American households, her bleak description of Chinese American life reveals innate contradictions within U. S. capitalism. Obscured by the internalized dictum of American individualism to work harder in the face of repression, the unequal economic liaison between the exploitive jobber (presumably white) and the struggling Chinese sweatshop owner divulges mounting antagonism along class and racial lines. In like manner, Jade Snow casually mentions, but never examines, the contradictions inherent in her lowly social position as a domestic servant without individual rights.
While attending high school and junior college, Jade Snow earns her living by keeping house for altogether seven Anglo-American families. This, she says, exposed her “to a series of candid views of the private lives of these American families. ” (103) Although repeatedly stressing that her employers “treated her with the utmost kindness,” Jade Snow is stoically aware that in the eyes of white America she is “merely another kitchen fixture. ” (104, 106) Racially marked as a subordinate being, her kind masters frequently forget to acknowledge her very presence.
Cleansing glasses during a boisterous cocktail party at one of her employer’s houses, Jade Snow recalls how a group of men busted into “the kitchen to get away from the women” so that they could exchange “off-color jokes. ” (106) Another time, while scrubbing dirty plates, Jade Snow ponders “what it would be like to be one of them, to have so much time that you would try to spend it playing bridge, and so much money that you could pay someone to come in and wash the dishes while you played. ” (107) Yet, despite considering herself an “intimate member of an American household,” Jade Snow realizes that she will never become “one of them. (113) Her rights and duties are rigidly circumscribed and the humiliating uniform she is forced to wear signifies that her social position is static. Aside from cooking, “she served the meals, washed dishes, kept the house clean, did light laundry and ironing for Mr. and Mrs. Simpson and their career daughter… and always appeared in uniform, which she thoroughly disliked. ” (123). Unlike the privileged “career daughter,” the exhausted Jade Snow scrambles to find time for her studies late at night; and while she toils in the hot kitchen, her family and their guests would lounge leisurely in the garden. 123) At the same time Jade Snow is lauding her new-found freedom and independence, her account establishes that she has merely exchanged the restrictions of Chinese family life for the equally onerous and more demeaning role of an Oriental lackey in a white household. Upon finishing junior college, Jade Snow must experience that the doors to higher education are shut tight for racial minorities. Although acknowledged to be “one of the most outstanding women students of the junior colleges in California,” Jade Snow is not admitted into Berkle y. 134) It is only due to the paternalistic intervention of her employers that Jade Snow receives the opportunity to attend second-rate Mills College. Because the dean of this institution, Dr. Reinhardt, harbors “a lifelong interest in the Oriental people,” Jade Snow is eventually allowed to attend college. But in lieu of a scholarship, she must consent to work as the dean’s personal servant. To Jade Snow, neither her white patron’s curiosity about the Oriental, nor her odd position as a scholar/servant seem to pose any problems. Jade Snow praises Dr. Reinhardt’s “exuberant… ove of humanity,” expresses gratefulness for the dean’s admonishment to “never…forget the fight you [Jade Snow] must make for racial equality,” and enthusiastically relates that “Mills living was democratic living in the truest sense; the emphasis was entirely on how you used what you had within you. ” (148, 153, 157) Without a moment of hesitation, it appears, Jade Snow internalizes the liberalized version of racial subjugation, which acknowledges societal injustices while maintaining them by squarely placing the burden of emancipation upon the oppressed.
As in earlier chapters of Fifth Chinese Daughter, the internal contradictions of liberal paternalism reveal themselves in Jade Snow’s uncritical recordings of her life experiences. Despite her claim that she was accepted as an equal, the reader learns that “Jade Snow could neither participate in residence-hall living” nor in “many of the usual student activities” because of her status as the dean’s maid. 157, 161) And while Wong insists that at Mills College no privileges were accorded based upon social class or mone y, she describes “Mill Hall” as a “large, colonial structure” with a “kitchen staff [that] was entirely Chinese, some of them descendants of the first Chinese kitchen help who worked for the founders of the college. ” (157) Whether or not Wong becomes aware of it, her description of the large, colonial structure at Mills Hall mirrors the organization of American society at large, wherein Chinese Americans have been permanently relegated to the nethermost station.
All high-minded rhetoric on democracy notwithstanding, race and class remain the two chief organizing principles. Hence, while a handful of Asians from wealthy Chinese and Japanese families also attend this Caucasian school, Jade Snow and one other girl from Honolulu are the two sole Asian Americans on campus. Thankful to receive any form of attention from her Caucasian classmates and professors, Jade Snow ignores that this specious interest in her as an individual never advances beyond the point of perpetual curiosity “about her Chinese background and Chinese ideologies. (161) Under the inquisitive gaze of her generous friends, Jade Snow firmly entrenches herself into the familiar role of the exotic other, who delights in preparing Oriental meals and or inviting Western acquaintances into her Oriental abode. Thus typecast, her culinary feats become the gauge by which Jade Snow measures her level of acceptance within white society. During her senior year at Mills, Jade Snow experiences a moment of selfdelusive triumph, which highlights the cunning workings of white liberal Orientalism.
At the request of her mistress and the dean, Jade Snow enlists her entire family to prepare Chinese dishes for an elaborate gathering of “faculty members, administrative officers, head residents, and the quartet members with their wives. ” (172) Even though she and her sister, Jade Precious Stone, labor the entire evening in a steamy kitchen, Jade Snow interprets “everyone’s interest in the kitchen preparations” as genuine concern for herself. (172) She raves There was no talk about music, only about Chinese food. And Jade Snow ceased thinking of famous people as ‘those’ in a world apart.
She had a glimpse of the truth that the great people of any race are unpretentious, genuinely honest, and nonpatronizing in their interest in other human beings. (173) The self-deceptiveness of Jade Snow’s adoring faith in white liberalism comes again to the fore a few pages later. The unpretentious, genuinely honest, and nonpatronizing interest she believes to have received turns out to be short-lived when Jade Snow is barred from attending senior prom and taking “part in the other social activities of the precommencement period. (179) Her last hopes of social acceptance go up in smoke when she is informed that no graduate school scholarships are available for young Asian American women. Instead, her college placement officer laconically advises her to look for a job among Chinese firms. Denied admission to graduate school, Jade Snow resolves to overcome racial barriers by procuring a position with an American rather than a Chinese company. Subsequently, however, it is less her own determination than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that enables her to land a coveted job outside the gates of Chinatown.
While thousands of Japanese Americans are carted off to internment camps, the Chinese American Jade Snow takes advantage of the sudden demand for wartime laborers and happily joins the “trek to the shipyards. ” (189) But before long, “Jade Snow fe[els] lost in a morass of detail and monotonous copy-typing” and grows disillusioned with her “tiring daily twelve-hour struggle. ” (192) Though commended for her study on absenteeism, Jade Snow is never promoted beyond her position as a common typist-clerk.
In spite of her the favorable attention she supposes to have garnered, Jade Snow must find out that racial barriers cannot be overcome through hard work alone. When her boss is promoted to the main administrative offices, Jade Snow receive the tidings that “he [can] no longer transfer her,” because she “won’t be happy” there. (233) To have an Asian face in the front office is apparently unthinkable to her kind boss. Jade Snow’s career at an American firm has reached a dead-end.
Finally, as the end of war draws near, Jade Snow acknowledges to herself that “she could not always do the work she wanted” nor “hope for advancement. ” (234) Seeking out her former boss for counseling, she receives the same advise the blunt college placement officer had given her years earlier. “I am just tipping you off,” she is told by her pragmatic boss. “If you want to make a decent salary or to be recognized for your own work, and not as somebody’s secretary, get a job where you will not be discriminated against. (234) Once again, the beguiling American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness turns out to be a chimera???a mere rhetorical flourish that camouflages institutionalized discrimination and exclusion. Neither able to enter graduate school nor to procure tolerable employment in the racially segregated business world of white America, a noticeably dejected Jade Snow settles for staking out her niche in Chinatown as a potter. Yet Jade Snow’s final plan to create a dual identity for herself that combines the best of the Western and the Chinese worlds appears to be a recipe for failure from the start.
For as it turns out, this “dual pattern, combining the new interests and the old familiar comforts,” not only condemns her to an existence on the fringes of American society, but also irrevocably disconnects Jade Snow from her old community. (202) While her hard-won education and independence makes her “feel more like a spectator than a participant in her own community,” her very Chineseness permanently bars her from entering mainstream society. In the end, Jade Snow’s permanent double vision completes the process of self-alienation that she had first noticed as a sudden feeling of estrangement, while presenting her father’s odest sewing business to her “healthy Caucasian” classmates. And although she finds some companionship among “those who would share the interests that she had found in the Western world,” her friendship with “an attractive Caucasian girl about her own age” remains confined to sharing Chinese meals and occasional visits to the Chinese opera, whose meaning neither girl is capable of grasping. (199) Working alone in the window of her pottery store in Chinatown, Jade Snow becomes a strange curiosity in the eyes of both cultures: “Chinese and Americans alike acted as if they thought she were deaf or dumb or couldn’t understand their language. (245) Disjointed by her own duality, Jade Snow is no longer capable of communicating with members from either her own or the white culture she continues to valorize. People talk about, rather than with, her. Amongst each other, the inhabitants of Chinatown lampoon her as “the mud-stirring maiden” and “two high-ranking Caucasian Army officers” who “wander[] into her store” find their Orientalistic stereotypes confirmed (244, 245).
As the Chinese Americans sternly refuse to purchase any of her “authentically” Chinese ceramics, white America’s “favorable interest” in Jade Snow’s work is unmasked as the unaltered Orientalist desire to consume and appropriate primitive artifacts, while keeping the other in her pre-assigned place on the outer perimeters of society. As this brief reading of Fifth Chinese Daughter indicates, Jade Snow Wong’s stilted and artificial third-person autobiography is riddled with as many contradictions and paradoxes as the dominant discourse on Americanization it attempts to reproduce.
Though cast as a success story, Jade Snow’s youthful life appears not only marked by stifled aspirations, false hopes, forthright rejection, and thinly veiled discrimination, but also by a bitter estrangement from her own people. 53 Having been repeatedly denied well-deserved scholarships, minimal job opportunities, desperately sought social acceptance, and basic human respect, the autobiographical protagonist in Fifth Chinese Daughter provides living proof that hard work, stoic endurance, and an iron will to self-effacement simply plays into the hands of the oppressors.
In the very act of espousing those pseudo-liberal doctrines contrived to legitimize or rationalize continued exclusion and exploitation, Jade Snow, by her own dejected example, reveals their cunning mechanisms and demonstrates their speciousness. Hence, the socio-historical value of Fifth Chinese Daughter is not limited to the extent in which it displays the “psychological vulnerability of second-generation Asian Americans,” as Kim and other sympathetic critics would have it.
Of even greater socio-historical significance is to recognize that Jade Snow Wong’s autobiographical selffashioning falls apart at precisely those junctures where the contradictions between her real and her imaginary conditions of existence are most incisive. For it is at these points that a younger generation of Asian American writers has applied the crowbar which might eventually heave the powerful discourses of subjugation out of their joints. Karsten Piep, Department of English, Miami University, Ohio. 1
Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, Chinese American Literature: An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, King-Kok Cheung, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 46. 2 Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 235. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Following Elaine H. Kim’s definition, the term ‘Asian American writers’ here denotes American authors of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Southeast Asian decent who have published works in English about their American experiences. Elaine H. Kim, “Sacrifice for Success: Second-Generation Self-Portrait,” in Asian American Literature: An Introduction the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 90; Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, “The Tradition of Chinese American Women’s Life Stories: Thematics of Race and Gender in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,” in American Women’s Autobiographies: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 264. 4
Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 79. See also, Leslie Bow, “The Illusion of the Middle Way: Liberal Feminism and Biculturalism,” in Bearing Dream, Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific American Perspectives (Washington State University Press, 1993) and Karen Su, “Jade Snow Wong’s Badge of Distinction in the 1990s,” Critical Mass 2. 1 (1994). 5 Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 36.
Stressing the marketability of the assimilation experience, publishers often pushed Asian American writers to present even their fictionalized works as autobiographies. For example, Carlos Bulosan was persuaded to write America Is in the Heart (1946) as a personal history and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) was classified and marketed as autobiography. 6 Kim, “Asian American Literature,” 814. 7 Publications of more critical works such as Toshio Mori’s Yokohoma, California (1941/49) and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) were frequently delayed or promptly discarded.
Mori’s book, originally scheduled to appear in 1941, was not released until after WWII in 1949. A second edition of Okada’s work, which had been received very unfavorably, did no appear until the mid 1970s. 8 Evelyn Tseng, “Fifth Chinese Daughter,” Amerasia Journal 15. 2 (1989): 226. Faberman and Brandshaw characterize the relationship between author, publisher, and audience as a self-fulfilling prophecy: “if publishers had little interest in Asian American writing, then few Asian Americans would write for publication.
This neglect was also due to the public’s belief that it understood the Oriental, and that he had nothing to write except what would fulfill the stereotype,” quoted in Karin Mei? enburg, “Chinese American Literature,” Amerikanische Ghettoliteratur, Bernd Ostendorf, ed. (Darmstadt: WBG, 1983), 360. 9 Wendy Motooka, “‘Nothing Solid’: Racial Identity and Identification in Fifth Chinese Daughter and “Wilshire Bus,” in Racing & (E)racing Language: Living with the Color of Our Words, eds. Ellen J. Goldner & Safiya Henderson-Holmes (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 210. 0 Bow, 81. 11 Wendy S. Hesford and Theresa A. Kulbaga, “Labored Realisms: Geopolitical Rhetoric and Asian American (Im)Migrant Women’s (Auto)Biography,” JAC 23. 1 (2003): 85. 12 In A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Macherey further illuminates this point by arguing that ideological inconsistencies become most palpable when recast or established within literary works: Between the ideology and the book which expresses it, something has happened; the distance between them is not the product of some abstract decorum.
Even though ideology itself always sounds solid, copious, it begins to speak of its own absences because of its presence in the novel, its visible and determinate form. By means of the text it becomes possible [for the reader or critic] to escape from the domain of spontaneous ideology, to escape from the false consciousness of self, of history, and of time. (132) 13 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Random House, 1988), 101. 14 Foucault, 102 (italics added). 15 Kim, “Sacrifice for Success,” 90. 6 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, Ben Brewster, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 164-65. 17 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, Geoffrey Wall, trans. (London: Routledge, 1978), 15. 18 The New Yorker (7 October 1950): 118. 19 E. V. R. Wyatt, “Review,” Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, The Commonweal 24 Nov. 1950: 182. 20 Joyce Geary, “A Chinese Girl’s World,” Review of Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, The New York Times Book Review (29 October 1950): 27. 1 Frank Norris, “Cosmopolitan San Francisco,” in Stories and Sketches from San Francisco, 1893 1897 (New York: Norwood, 1976), 139. 22 Jade Snow Wong, “Growing Up Between the Old World and the New, ” in Horn Book Magazine 27 (1951): 443. 23 Patricia Lin Blinde, “The Icicle in the Dessert: Perspectives and Forms in the Works of Two Chinese-American Woman Writers,” MELUS 6. 3 (1979): 59. 24 Frank Chin, et al. , “Preface,” to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Washington, D.
C. : Howard University Press, 1983), ix, viii. 25 Chin, et al. , “Preface,” xiv. 26 Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (New York: Meridian Book, 1991) 49. 27 Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, “Chinese American Literature,” in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, King-Kok Cheung, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40. 8 Hong Liu, “Representing the ‘Other’: Images of China and the Chinese in the Works of Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Toledo, 1998). 29 See Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston’s: The Woman Warrior: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); see also Jeff Chang, “Up Identity Creek,” Colorlines 1. 3. (1999): 115-120. More recently, Wendy Mottooka has suggested that Chin’s “rhetoric of uncompromising individuality,” which forges identity by disidentifaction,” is not all that different from Wong’s uncritical embrase of individualism and merely suceeds in pitting a younger generation of Asian Americans against an older generation of “Americanized Asian,” without recognizing “the collaborations and complicities that accompany the identity politics of liberation through self-definition. ” Motooka, 208. 30 Motooka, 208-210; 221. 31 Kathleen Loh Swee Yin and Kristoffer F. Paulson, “The Divided Voice of Chinese-American Narration: Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter,” MELUS 9. 1 (1982): 59. 32 Blinde, 66, 67, 70. 3 Yin and Paulson, 59. 34 Sau Ling Wong, 46. 35 Kim, “Sacrifice for Success,” 84, 90. 36 Bow, 77. 37 Blinde, 66. 38 Yin and Paulson, 59. 39 Quoted in Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” in Feminism & Philosophy, Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong, eds. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 446. 40 Blinde, 57. 41 David Leiwei Li, “The Production of Chinese American Tradition: Displacing American Orientalist Discourse,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed Shirley Geok-Lim & Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 323. 2 Foucault, 95-96. 43 Quoted in Kim, 256. 44 Blinde, 54-59. 45 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Andrew Aruto & Eike Gebhardt, eds. (New York: Continuum, 1990), 254-269. Benjamin calls attention to the specific techniques through which meaning is conveyed in order to show that literary forms or conventions always serve particular political ends or class interests. 6 Karen Su arrives at a similar position by equating Wong’s cultural “‘translation’ practices” with the “principle of ‘colonial mimicry’ defined by Homi Bhabba,” in “Just Translating: The Politics of Translating and Ethnography in Chinese American Women’s Writing,” (Unpublished Dissertation: UC Berkley, 1999), 7. According to Bhabba, “colonial mimicry” is the result of the subaltern’s desire to appear like the master. But this process of mimicking the master is never quite complete and thus gives rise to slippages, excesses, and differences that undermine the colonial discourse at the very time they buttress it.
See Homi Bhabba, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92. 47 Macherey, 79, 129. 48 Yin and Paulson, 58. 49 Bow, 88. 50 Althusser, 162. 51 Chin et al. , “Preface,” xxii. 52 Kim, “Sacrifice for Success,” 79. 53 Even more than two decades after the first appearance of Fifth Chinese Daughter in print, Jade Snow Wong consented in an interview with Frank Chin that she felt “unaccepted in Chinatown. ” See “Jade Snow Wong Interview on Her Career as a Writer,” interviewed by Frank Chin, Combined Asian American Resource Project, (23 June 1969).