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I like to energize for the journey
I was so interested by Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far's "The Smuggling of Tie Co" (1900) that I couldn't fit it into the previous post on Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) without feeling that I was doing it a disservice, so it wound up getting its own.
Handsome Jack Fabian works as a turn-of-the-century snakehead in Canada, "said to have 'rushed over' to 'Uncle Sam' himself some five hundred Celestials" and much admired in the trade for his daring, his efficiency, and his personal charm. His business has sagged recently, however, thanks to the initiative of the Chinese themselves in the matter of paper sons, and he is complaining about his hard luck to a laundryman of his professional acquaintance when the "nice-looking young Chinaman" abruptly asks if Fabian would smuggle him: "I want go to New York and I will pay you fifty dollars and all expense if you take me, and not say you take me to my partners." The request surprises Fabian, especially since Tie Co is proposing to leave a successful business to start over in a new country where he doesn't even seem to have a sponsor, but he's never been a man to turn down ready money. His clients' motives are of no importance to him. "It is a merely a matter of dollars and cents." They make the necessary arrangements; they leave on the appointed night. "They had a merry drive, for Fabian's liking for Tie Co was very real; he had known him for several years, and the lad's quick intelligence interested him." The second night finds them approaching the border in a slog of mud and rain, in the course of which the conversation turns personal. Fabian catches himself observing his companion "protectingly, wondering in a careless way why this Chinaman seemed to him so different from the others." As Tie Co insists he has no desire to return to China—
Fabian laughed.
"Haven't you got a nice little wife at home?" he continued. "I hear you people marry very young."
"No, I no wife," asserted his companion with a choky little laugh. "I never have no wife."
"Nonsense," joked Fabian. "Why, Tie Co, think how nice it would be to have a little woman cook your rice and to love you."
"I not have wife," repeated Tie Co seriously. "I not like woman, I like man."
"You confirmed old bachelor!" ejaculated Fabian.
"I like you," said Tie Co, his boyish voice sounding clear and sweet in the wet woods. "I like you so much that I want go to New York, so you make fifty dollars."
Which is rather a bombshell to drop on a friend with whom you are now illegally a mile into New York State as the night and the threat of the border police close in, but then again, Fabian took his companion's disclosure of interest in men surprisingly in stride. His response to his companion's disclosure of interest in the particular man that is Jack Fabian is even more surprising: he calls off the deal. He won't take the fifty dollars from Tie Co, who needs the money more than he does. When they get to the railway station on the other side of the river, he won't put the other man on the prearranged train to New York City. He'll go back with him on the train to Toronto instead. I suppose if you care about spoilers for a five-page story published a hundred and twenty years ago, you should look away now.
Whatever possibility has just opened up between "the smuggler and the would-be-smuggled," between a man who is used to thinking of other human beings in terms of strict transaction and a man who is selflessly risking his safety (and his savings) for love, it is almost immediately foreclosed by the arrival of the border police, registered by both men in the same moment as a threat not only to the Chinese immigrant but to his snakehead, who after all broke out of an American jail not long before the events of the story. If they are not caught together, however, nothing can be proved. "Man come for you, I not here, man no hurt you." Tie Co makes this statement standing in the middle of the bridge with Fabian, looking intently into the other man's eyes. He's gone over the rail before Fabian can stop him. Trying to strike out after him and save his companion's life, Fabian is instead apprehended by the officers who have indeed been tracking them since the border: "So your Chinaman threw himself into the river. What was that for?" A bewildered, dripping Fabian can only answer, "I think he was out of his head."
Tie Co's body was picked up the next day. Tie Co's body, and yet not Tie Co, for Tie Co was a youth, and the body found with Tie Co's face and dressed in Tie Co's clothes was the body of a girl—a woman.
There's a lot to unpack here, or perhaps there isn't. The conventional explanation is the heterosexual one: Tie Co was a cross-dressing woman who fell in love with Jack Fabian and sacrificed herself for him, as so many Asian women are wont to do for white men, at least in fiction. I would accept this reading more easily if the text referred once to Tie Co as a woman. It never does. The character does not protest his femininity when Fabian identifies him—I thought the phrase was an invention of mid-century obituaries, but apparently it's older than dirt—as a queer man. Even after his death and the ostensible reveal of a physically indisputable female identity, we continue to read of a male Tie Co who came over to Canada "with a number of other youths," a quiet hard worker who kept to himself but was noted as "very smart . . . and a great favorite with the Mission ladies." The reveal itself distinguishes with curious care between "Tie Co" who was "a youth" and "Tie Co's body" which is "the body of a girl," as if suggesting that the body is not the only defining factor. I recognize that my reading protocols almost certainly differ from those of the general audience of The Land of Sunshine in July 1900, but it is extremely difficult for me not to read at least the possibility of transmasculinity in this presentation. Moreover, because the text never once hints that Fabian perceives his companion as anything other than the "nice-looking young Chinaman" of their introductory scene, it is absolutely impossible for me not to read the moment where Tie Co declares his love ("I not like woman, I like man . . . I like you") and Fabian seems to respond at least partially in kind ("I won't have you do this for my sake . . . I shall take train with you for Toronto") as anything other than queer. Trans man, non-binary person, gender-non-conforming woman, some other identity not so readily catalogued in contemporary Western terms, Tie Co looks to Fabian like a man in love with him and Fabian who has never said no to money all of a sudden cares more about the well-being of Tie Co. Why not? We are in a transgressive story already, a story of illegal meetings and crossings—if geographical borders are so permeable, why not the lines between genders and sexualities, between races? Negative space matters so much to the history of queerness and there's such potential in what the ruggedly, almost parodically masculine Fabian does not do on finding himself the apparent object of same-sex, cross-racial desire, such as offer the kind of straight white male violence seen elsewhere in the collection. Of course all possibilities collapse with the arrival of the "Government officers," the enforcers of binaries and boundaries. Two people who shouldn't be caught together could be doing so many things. Then as now, fuck the police.
I recognize that either way this story climaxes with the self-sacrifice of a marginalized character for the sake of a more dominant one and that may be a dealbreaker even when it predates Puccini's trope-crystallizing Madama Butterfly, but I like that something ambivalent lingers beyond the tragedy:
Fabian is now very busy; there are lots of boys taking his helping hand over the border, but none of them are like Tie Co; and sometimes, between whiles, Fabian finds himself pondering long and earnestly over the mystery of Tie Co's life—and death.
Even in death, Tie Co eludes definition; he cannot be contained by those borders he was already crossing long before he met Jack Fabian. Even his "mystery" is ambiguous, because the text never specifies the mystery of what—his identity, his history, his feelings for Jack Fabian? Fabian's feelings for him? That suicide? Nothing settles, nothing stabilizes, not even Fabian, always reminded of Tie Co. It's a bittersweet consolation if it is one, but maybe the border police didn't totally win after all. I mentioned earlier how important it was for Eaton herself not to be pinned down to one side of her racial identity or the other, to insist on her both-ness in the face of people who wanted a simple, binary answer to the question of what she was. (To answer the same question about me and my brother, my mother called us both-ways children.) Tie Co gets away with an even wider field of possibilities. Keep as many of them open as you can.
As I keep saying, I value these reminders that the past was never as clear-cut as the present would like to make it out to be; they may be partial or imperfect, but that doesn't erase their evidence. The pendulum swings, I hope not only toward justice but toward border-crossing, both-ness, fluidity. It was always here anyway.
Handsome Jack Fabian works as a turn-of-the-century snakehead in Canada, "said to have 'rushed over' to 'Uncle Sam' himself some five hundred Celestials" and much admired in the trade for his daring, his efficiency, and his personal charm. His business has sagged recently, however, thanks to the initiative of the Chinese themselves in the matter of paper sons, and he is complaining about his hard luck to a laundryman of his professional acquaintance when the "nice-looking young Chinaman" abruptly asks if Fabian would smuggle him: "I want go to New York and I will pay you fifty dollars and all expense if you take me, and not say you take me to my partners." The request surprises Fabian, especially since Tie Co is proposing to leave a successful business to start over in a new country where he doesn't even seem to have a sponsor, but he's never been a man to turn down ready money. His clients' motives are of no importance to him. "It is a merely a matter of dollars and cents." They make the necessary arrangements; they leave on the appointed night. "They had a merry drive, for Fabian's liking for Tie Co was very real; he had known him for several years, and the lad's quick intelligence interested him." The second night finds them approaching the border in a slog of mud and rain, in the course of which the conversation turns personal. Fabian catches himself observing his companion "protectingly, wondering in a careless way why this Chinaman seemed to him so different from the others." As Tie Co insists he has no desire to return to China—
Fabian laughed.
"Haven't you got a nice little wife at home?" he continued. "I hear you people marry very young."
"No, I no wife," asserted his companion with a choky little laugh. "I never have no wife."
"Nonsense," joked Fabian. "Why, Tie Co, think how nice it would be to have a little woman cook your rice and to love you."
"I not have wife," repeated Tie Co seriously. "I not like woman, I like man."
"You confirmed old bachelor!" ejaculated Fabian.
"I like you," said Tie Co, his boyish voice sounding clear and sweet in the wet woods. "I like you so much that I want go to New York, so you make fifty dollars."
Which is rather a bombshell to drop on a friend with whom you are now illegally a mile into New York State as the night and the threat of the border police close in, but then again, Fabian took his companion's disclosure of interest in men surprisingly in stride. His response to his companion's disclosure of interest in the particular man that is Jack Fabian is even more surprising: he calls off the deal. He won't take the fifty dollars from Tie Co, who needs the money more than he does. When they get to the railway station on the other side of the river, he won't put the other man on the prearranged train to New York City. He'll go back with him on the train to Toronto instead. I suppose if you care about spoilers for a five-page story published a hundred and twenty years ago, you should look away now.
Whatever possibility has just opened up between "the smuggler and the would-be-smuggled," between a man who is used to thinking of other human beings in terms of strict transaction and a man who is selflessly risking his safety (and his savings) for love, it is almost immediately foreclosed by the arrival of the border police, registered by both men in the same moment as a threat not only to the Chinese immigrant but to his snakehead, who after all broke out of an American jail not long before the events of the story. If they are not caught together, however, nothing can be proved. "Man come for you, I not here, man no hurt you." Tie Co makes this statement standing in the middle of the bridge with Fabian, looking intently into the other man's eyes. He's gone over the rail before Fabian can stop him. Trying to strike out after him and save his companion's life, Fabian is instead apprehended by the officers who have indeed been tracking them since the border: "So your Chinaman threw himself into the river. What was that for?" A bewildered, dripping Fabian can only answer, "I think he was out of his head."
Tie Co's body was picked up the next day. Tie Co's body, and yet not Tie Co, for Tie Co was a youth, and the body found with Tie Co's face and dressed in Tie Co's clothes was the body of a girl—a woman.
There's a lot to unpack here, or perhaps there isn't. The conventional explanation is the heterosexual one: Tie Co was a cross-dressing woman who fell in love with Jack Fabian and sacrificed herself for him, as so many Asian women are wont to do for white men, at least in fiction. I would accept this reading more easily if the text referred once to Tie Co as a woman. It never does. The character does not protest his femininity when Fabian identifies him—I thought the phrase was an invention of mid-century obituaries, but apparently it's older than dirt—as a queer man. Even after his death and the ostensible reveal of a physically indisputable female identity, we continue to read of a male Tie Co who came over to Canada "with a number of other youths," a quiet hard worker who kept to himself but was noted as "very smart . . . and a great favorite with the Mission ladies." The reveal itself distinguishes with curious care between "Tie Co" who was "a youth" and "Tie Co's body" which is "the body of a girl," as if suggesting that the body is not the only defining factor. I recognize that my reading protocols almost certainly differ from those of the general audience of The Land of Sunshine in July 1900, but it is extremely difficult for me not to read at least the possibility of transmasculinity in this presentation. Moreover, because the text never once hints that Fabian perceives his companion as anything other than the "nice-looking young Chinaman" of their introductory scene, it is absolutely impossible for me not to read the moment where Tie Co declares his love ("I not like woman, I like man . . . I like you") and Fabian seems to respond at least partially in kind ("I won't have you do this for my sake . . . I shall take train with you for Toronto") as anything other than queer. Trans man, non-binary person, gender-non-conforming woman, some other identity not so readily catalogued in contemporary Western terms, Tie Co looks to Fabian like a man in love with him and Fabian who has never said no to money all of a sudden cares more about the well-being of Tie Co. Why not? We are in a transgressive story already, a story of illegal meetings and crossings—if geographical borders are so permeable, why not the lines between genders and sexualities, between races? Negative space matters so much to the history of queerness and there's such potential in what the ruggedly, almost parodically masculine Fabian does not do on finding himself the apparent object of same-sex, cross-racial desire, such as offer the kind of straight white male violence seen elsewhere in the collection. Of course all possibilities collapse with the arrival of the "Government officers," the enforcers of binaries and boundaries. Two people who shouldn't be caught together could be doing so many things. Then as now, fuck the police.
I recognize that either way this story climaxes with the self-sacrifice of a marginalized character for the sake of a more dominant one and that may be a dealbreaker even when it predates Puccini's trope-crystallizing Madama Butterfly, but I like that something ambivalent lingers beyond the tragedy:
Fabian is now very busy; there are lots of boys taking his helping hand over the border, but none of them are like Tie Co; and sometimes, between whiles, Fabian finds himself pondering long and earnestly over the mystery of Tie Co's life—and death.
Even in death, Tie Co eludes definition; he cannot be contained by those borders he was already crossing long before he met Jack Fabian. Even his "mystery" is ambiguous, because the text never specifies the mystery of what—his identity, his history, his feelings for Jack Fabian? Fabian's feelings for him? That suicide? Nothing settles, nothing stabilizes, not even Fabian, always reminded of Tie Co. It's a bittersweet consolation if it is one, but maybe the border police didn't totally win after all. I mentioned earlier how important it was for Eaton herself not to be pinned down to one side of her racial identity or the other, to insist on her both-ness in the face of people who wanted a simple, binary answer to the question of what she was. (To answer the same question about me and my brother, my mother called us both-ways children.) Tie Co gets away with an even wider field of possibilities. Keep as many of them open as you can.
As I keep saying, I value these reminders that the past was never as clear-cut as the present would like to make it out to be; they may be partial or imperfect, but that doesn't erase their evidence. The pendulum swings, I hope not only toward justice but toward border-crossing, both-ness, fluidity. It was always here anyway.
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My local independent bookstore was able to order it for me!
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It was not an aspect of the collection I was expecting and I am really glad of it.
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both-ways children is very nice.
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There are two other stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance which play with/destabilize constructions of gender, "A Chinese Boy-Girl" (1904) and "Tian Shan's Kindred Spirit" (1912), and "The Smuggling of Tie Co" feels different from both of them to me. One is a tragedy narrowly averted showing the danger of even well-intentioned white ignorance of other cultures; the other is another border-crossing story, this time ending happily in a heterosexual union of two tricksterish characters, one of whom is passing for male at the time. The people in them use cross-dressing as a disguise, a ruse, to fool bad luck and unjust authority. That doesn't seem to be the case with Tie Co.
both-ways children is very nice.
I still like it as a term.
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I think the fact that Fabian doesn't reject--in fact, warms to--Tie Co when he's still alive and makes the declaration says a *lot* about how we're supposed to see Tie Co and also--obviously--about how Fabian feels about the Tie Co he knows.
I was talking to the ninja girl about the story and she offered a third possibility for what the author might have been doing/intending with the ending: maybe it was intended to be some kind of magic--magic that both within the story and in a meta way gives "cover" to the truth of Tie Co's gender and Fabian's attraction.
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I think so, too.
maybe it was intended to be some kind of magic--magic that both within the story and in a meta way gives "cover" to the truth of Tie Co's gender and Fabian's attraction.
Like a reverse sort of Iphis and Ianthe?
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Thank you! It made such an impression on me.
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Wonderful!