There is a lot to digest with this week’s reading: the racialization of labor, industrialization, Irish vs. Chinese immigrants, miscegenation, desire, minstrel shows, and so much more. Avoiding my temptation to summarize the reading, I’d instead like to focus on pieces that were particularly interesting to me. I was intrigued by what Lee had to say about pastoral narratives of California, and aliens.

“God’s Free Soil did not have space for the Chinese, whose presence disrupted the mission into the wilderness…his very body polluted the Eden that California represented” (Lee 50) Lee uses the lyrics of popular music to explore the historical, social, and cultural circumstances for the immigration of Chinese to California in the 1800s.  Many white people fled to California to escape encroaching industrialization, hoping to establish a state built on the artisan labor of free whites. For white people California represented a pastoral paradise where a man could make his own fortune, invoking Edenic narratives of untouched open spaces. The construction of nature and wilderness is inherently white supremacist, often involving the erasure or displacement of people of color. Nature is anything “untouched” by (white) man.

Connecting this back to my Rock research is the parallel idea put forth by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun that techno-Orientalism in science fiction resurrects the great frontier in virtual form. “Open spaces” are embodied by the internet and cyberspace. Western characters are typically savvy survivors, and resistance fighters, they are able to open closed spaces. Techno-Orientalism allows the West to rely on nostalgia to recover frontier imagery of cyberspace and cement the West as a challenger to Eastern economic growth, just as the old pop songs presented in Orientals recall a nostalgic image of pre-industrial California.

Lee repeatedly describes the portrayal of the Oriental as an “alien body”, or “racialized alien”.  Asians are seen as aliens interloping in Western society. Always set apart, and never completely assimilable into whiteness. The alien is a powerful and convenient metaphor for the experiences of Asian/Americans, both for their alienation in the United States and the alien-nation of their homelands.