We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.—Henry David Thoreau

Fungibility

Image

Figure 1.1 is the celebrated telegram sent by Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) president William Van Horne, an American from Chicago tasked with overseeing the construction of the CPR who became, according to Pierre Berton’s famous account, “more Canadian than any native.”[1] His telegram is addressed to Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and announces the completion of the railroad in Craigellachie, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885. Unlike the well-known photograph of the ceremonial driving of the last spike, the focal point of the telegram is time: it is the hour and minutes—9:22 A.M.—that precisely mark the consolidation of the settler nation. The telegram, itself a representation of nineteenth-century advances in communications, symbolizes a new national temporality achieved through technological innovation.

Van Horne was known to frequently draw pictures on the reverse side of these kinds of telegrams. On the back of one of the few that survived is his sketch of a Chinese laborer’s facial profile, complete with a long tapered mustache. Surrounding the man’s face are a busy series of numerical calculations that seem indicative of Van Horne’s financial worries during the railroad’s construction. The CPR, now a multi-billion-dollar corporation, objected to the reproduction of the sketch in this book.[2] What’s interesting is that the grounds for the CPR’s censorship of the image rested on the mere association of Van Horne with the Chinese man, suggesting a perverse content attributed to the sketched figure and its capacity to corrupt Van Horne’s reputation. This chapter probes exactly what constitutes this unnatural, obscene content and why it is out of sync with the settler temporality glorified on the face of Van Horne’s telegram to the prime minister.

Probing the obscene content of Van Horne’s sketch of the Chinese man further, the juxtaposition of the human profile and numerical sums evokes the economic connection between Chinese railroad labor and their low wages. Drawing out the financial significance of the image, Margot Francis explains that Chinese labor was “indispensable to the CPR’s early financial viability as their ‘cheap wages’ saved Andrew Onderdonk, the contractor for the western section of the line, between $3 and $5 million and allowed him to escape bankruptcy.”[3] The Chinese whom Onderdonk contracted to work the western section were recruited from San Francisco. Many of them had worked on the US transcontinental railroad, which had been completed over a decade earlier, in 1869.[4] Although Chinese labor in North America was vital to the completion of the transcontinental railroads, its profound irony, as Henry Yu observes, is “that the very railroads that Chinese laborers built made it easier and cheaper to transport the settlers who arrived afterwards and demanded that ‘the Chinese must go.’”[5] Although railroads were symbols of consolidation for the white nation, they were lines to exclusion for the Chinese laborers who helped build them. In 1885, the same year the CPR was completed, Canada passed its first immigration restriction policy through the Chinese Head Tax, designed to deter laboring classes. Originally set at $50, the tax rose prohibitively, to $100 by 1900 and $500 by 1903. Following completion of the US transcontinental railroad in 1869, the 1875 Page Act was the first federal immigration policy designed to deny entry to prostitutes, overwhelmingly targeting Chinese women on the basis of presumed sexual immorality. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 dramatically expanded this scope by restricting entry to all skilled and unskilled Chinese labor. The outcome of these immigration controls on both sides of the Canada–US border was the formation of “bachelor” communities that, as homosocial, nonreproductive spaces, reinforced fears of contagion and perversion associated with Chinese men. The reproductive restrictions imposed on the bachelor community was, in Foucault’s terms, part of the biopolitics of settler colonialism through its “calculated management of life.”[6]

The very existence of Van Horne’s sketch of the Chinese man also offers a stark contrast to the traditional iconography associated with the building of the transcontinental railroads in Canada and the United States. The now-famous photographs taken at Promontory, Utah, and Craigellachie, British Columbia, respectively, commemorate the technological feat of white labor, erasing the thousands of Chinese men who worked and died building the western sections of these railroads. As David Eng notes, “While more than ten thousand Chinese American male laborers were exploited for the building of the western portion of Central Pacific track, no one appears in the photograph commemorating its completion.”[7] Neither are any of the seventeen thousand Chinese laborers who worked the western section of the Canadian Pacific railroad identified in what Berton calls “the most famous photograph ever taken in Canada,” celebrating the union of eastern and western tracks in Canada.[8] Therefore, in the sense that Van Horne’s illustration retrieves a repressed aspect of Chinese labor in Canada, it offers us an alternative visual example that Francis suggests “troubles the narratives that posit that only white men were sufficiently enterprising to construct the rail that connected the nation.”[9] For the purposes of this chapter, what the missing sketch also brings to the fore is a relationship between the signifiers of race and capital that overshadowed railroad construction. The tension between these signifiers gave rise to the association of Chinese labor efficiency with social perversion and fed into romantic anticapitalism’s dehumanization of Chinese workers as abstract labor.

Probing this visual interplay of race and capital, a less linear vision of Chinese labor emerges from Van Horne’s sketch. In addition to the causal significance of the Chinese face and calculations, insofar as Chinese labor was instrumental for securing the financial viability of the CPR, the juxtaposition of the Chinese profile and numerical figures also projects the sameness of an identity relation. In particular, the vertical lines of the Chinese man’s mustache in the sketch repeat the tally lines surrounding him, accentuating their symbolic resemblance and projecting a quality of mutability and interchangeability. This visual assonance evokes the peculiar fungibility of the Asian alien, a figure whose interchangeability as a value expression dramatizes the properties of money itself, Marx’s “universal equivalent,” against which everything is commensurable and exchangeable. Does such a resemblance between alien labor and the universal equivalence of money suggest that racialized labor takes on the abstract qualities of capital? In light of the 2012 controversy over the Asian scientist on the Canadian hundred-dollar bill discussed in the introductory chapter, Van Horne’s doodle achieves prototypical significance.

By surrounding the Chinese man’s face with a series of financial calculations, what Van Horne’s sketch prompts is a reconsideration of the relation between the concrete and the abstract, the concrete specificity of racialized labor and the abstract, universal equivalence of money, which Marx describes as “a radical leveler [that] extinguishes all distinctions.”[10] Money “extinguishes all distinctions” because it is universally exchangeable with all other commodities, and “all other commodities make [money] the material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value.”[11] Money is the conduit and expression of commensurability. However, Van Horne’s sketch opens a view of racialized labor as money. Rather than an exchange relation—of labor for money—his sketch evokes a substitution relation. Such a relation suggests a process whereby heterogeneous (i.e., racialized) labor takes on the appearance of something entirely different: the homogeneous substance of money, whose qualities are universally commensurable. Unequal labor takes on the appearance of symbolic equivalence. This chapter explores the implications of such a symbolic substitution, particularly in terms of how racialized labor becomes progressively abstract, moving from concrete reality to the spectral domain of capital. Of course, capitalism’s key operational logic is one of abstraction, dissolving difference into homogeneous, equivalent forms so they are commensurable—exchangeable. As Dipesh Chakrabarty summarizes, “The logic of capital sublates into itself the differences of history.”[12] The question, therefore, is why the concrete particularity of Chinese labor comes to express itself culturally as “abstract labor.” Does the cultural abstraction of Chinese labor offer new ways of understanding what Yu calls the “irony” of Chinese labor restrictions introduced after the completion of the transcontinental railroads? In particular, if value is based on “socially necessary” labor time, what factors constitute social necessity?

This chapter draws on two Asian North American texts that shed light on social necessity through gendered and sexual temporalities of race, labor, and capitalism in the construction of the transcontinental railroads in Canada and the United States. Addressing themes of labor exploitation and gendered and sexualized exclusion, Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” from her experimental memoir China Men, and Richard Fung’s experimental video documentary Dirty Laundry: A History of Heroes offer imaginative responses to Van Horne’s symbolic provocation of the identity relation between Chinese labor and money. Magnifying a converging theme of gender and sexual resignification and substitution in their texts, Kingston and Fung demonstrate, to quote Elizabeth Freeman, how “time has, indeed is, a body.”[13] Specifically, in their framing of racialized labor through the interplay of sexuality and temporality, I argue that Kingston and Fung queer the disembodying effects of an accelerating temporal logic of equivalence that constitutes abstract labor. What unites their distinct texts is a recurring theme of substitutions—of ventriloquism for “real” speech, of masturbation for “real” sex, of gay sex for straight sex, of Chinese alien labor for white labor, of maternalism for paternalism, and so on—which function collectively to expose how racial, sexual, and gender difference operates as a degraded substitute within the capitalist logics of white settler colonialism. These substitutions interrupt the accelerating capitalist temporality of railroad labor, which reorganizes the social necessity of a linear, rational, normative time of family, nation, and capital. If time is a body, it is a body subject to relentless disembodiment under capitalism. Yet, for these cultural producers, disembodiment provides an opening for queer resignification that reveals the destabilizing potential of abstract labor. They draw out the potential of Queer Marxism by exposing the tension between concrete labor and abstract labor time, what Petrus Liu identifies as the “incommensurability between the value of a human being and its formal exchangeability.”[14]

As alien substitutes for “real labor,” I suggest that Kingston’s and Fung’s texts allegorize a process whereby alien labor is symbolically aligned with the fluctuating duration embedded in abstract labor, which establishes value, rather than the here-and-now world of concrete labor. As I elaborated in the introductory chapter, abstract labor represents a social average of labor time to produce a commodity in order to express its quantitative value during exchange, whereas concrete labor refers to the actual time and place of a specific laboring activity that expresses its qualitative use-value.

Chakrabarty offers a useful clarification of abstract labor as a “performative, practical category.”[15] He explains that “abstract labor gave Marx a way of explaining how the capitalist mode of production managed to extract, out of peoples and histories that were all different, a homogenous and common unit for measuring human activity.”[16] Abstract labor is therefore an objective force made up of what Marx describes as a spectral, phantomlike substance:

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; there are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values—commodity values.[17]

By aligning Chinese bodies with abstract labor, their labor represents human labor in the abstract. It is this phantomlike objectivity of alien labor that establishes a commodity’s value. White bodies, on the other hand, are symbolically associated with concrete labor, which establishes a commodity’s quality.

Such a racial bifurcation of abstract and concrete labor is the work of the commodity fetish, which disguises the social relations behind the products of human labor. In terms of this book’s overarching claim, I argue that a key anchor of North American settler colonialism is an ideology of romantic anticapitalism that reifies a distinction between concrete and abstract social relations out of a misunderstanding of the dialectical nature of capitalism. Romantic anticapitalism hypostatizes the concrete, rooted, and pure, on one hand, and identifies capitalism solely with the abstract dimension of social relations, on the other. It glorifies what it sees as the concrete realm of social relations: white labor, the family, and the train itself—a machine whose concreteness is biologized as the “iron horse.” Alternatively, Chinese bodies are in nearly exclusive alignment with quasi-mechanized labor temporality, excluded from normative social and domestic temporalities. Once Chinese labor is no longer needed, romantic anticapitalism performs an aesthetic function by giving Chinese shape to the unrepresentable: giving bodily form to the abstract, temporal domination of capitalism.

In this sense, Chinese labor allegorizes the commensurating function of abstract labor that propels capitalism forward. However, as Chakrabarty notes, for Marx the universal category of abstract labor serves two functions: “It is both a description and a critique of capital.”[18] Following a Queer Marxist approach, this chapter will explore how abstract labor can pose such a critique.

The focus on temporality in Kingston’s and Fung’s work also serves to dramatize the impact of industrial technology on conceptions of time in the nineteenth century. In particular, railroad construction was intimately linked to the speed-up and internationalization of uniform time through technological innovation, time-space compression, and the standardization of Greenwich Mean Time. Completing a process of temporal secularization that began in the Middle Ages, time’s progressive detachment from the cosmos and human events was achieved in this period of national expansion and consolidation by rail. No longer did biblical events structure and determine time, as they once did within traditional Jewish and Christian conceptions of history; rather, time became increasingly continuous, homogeneous, and independent of events.[19] Postone refers to this secularized temporality as “abstract time,” “an independent framework within which motion, events, and action occur . . . divisible into equal, constant, nonqualitative units.”[20] Indeed, the progress of abstract time as a dominant form of time parallels the development of capitalism as a socially metabolic totality. In the context of this shift to a more totalizing capitalist temporality, what Kingston’s and Fung’s texts illuminate is how conceptions of time were racialized and sexualized. Indeed, as Petrus Liu specifies, it is a mistake to view socially necessary labor time as solely the mean labor time associated with technological developments but also in terms of its moral dimensions. He clarifies that “the value of a commodity is the amount of human labor embodied in it, but the value of the commodity of human labor is determined by moral and discursive operations outside the capitalist reproduction scheme.”[21] Therefore, on one hand, white labor productivity and its heteronormative reproduction become qualitative expressions of morality and rationality associated with time discipline. As Michael O’Malley explains, there was a need “to protect time’s virtue,” its chastity tied to “scientific discipline requiring years of patient courting to master.”[22] On the other, as I suggest in this chapter, Chinese labor becomes associated with the abstract, quantitative domination of labor time. This is what Postone describes as the “temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterizes the structures of alienated social relations in capitalism.”[23] Exposing the racialized temporalities of the labor process under capitalism, Kingston and Fung return with queer temporal revisions of labor and reproduction.

Time Travel

Midway through Richard Fung’s video Dirty Laundry: A History of Heroes, the camera draws in on a Chinese Canadian train steward scanning a magazine article titled “Canada’s Railway: A Symbol under Threat.” Several scenes later, the steward is engaged in a passionate kiss with Roger Kwong, a Chinese Canadian journalist for the magazine. After a slow-motion montage of hands caressing undressed bodies, the scene of the two men’s sexual encounter gives way to metaphorical expression through a cut to archival film footage taken from the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR); the grainy black-and-white film transports the viewer around a bend and into a dark tunnel. Besides the discontinuous temporality staged by the juxtaposition of these two scenes—one fictional and contemporary, the other culled from a historical archive—their temporal dissonance is further accentuated by their distinct cinematic tempos. The sex scene is slow and methodical, while the train hurtles forward on a predetermined path. The possibility of the gay encounter, Fung suggests, is contingent on but temporally dislocated from the predictable linearity of CPR time. The video pushes temporality and sexuality together in a way that simultaneously emphasizes the temporality of racialized sexuality and the sexuality of time on the transcontinental railway.

Sex on trains is certainly not isolated to experimental Asian Canadian documentaries such as Fung’s. Perhaps more obviously, the rapid sequence of the scenes above presents a queer citation to a film such as Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), in which the train similarly serves as a symbolic phallus. In Hitchcock’s version, the train that disappears into a tunnel also—and comically—references sex between Cary Grant’s and Eva Marie Saint’s characters. This kind of sexual symbolism has a long history in the popular culture of the railway. Since the nineteenth century, popular film and visual art representations have commonly depicted the sexuality of trains, which, as Lynne Kirby describes, is “most often as a double for male sexuality.”[24] As a mirrored projection of male virility over a fertile, feminine body, the train symbolizes either (and often both) the aggressively violent or consummating romance of territorial penetration and domestication. Inside the train, the compression of time and space have disorienting effects, such that chance and illicit encounters are not only possible but probable. Therefore, the railway’s temporal duality of social unpredictability and technological predictability nonetheless converge under a dominant symbolism of heterosexual consummation between technology and nature. In other words, the surprise or taboo sexual encounters between passengers who feel out of time and space are not anomalous to the predetermined, linear path of the railway because, as Hitchcock’s film demonstrates, the two lovers ultimately mirror the overarching theme of spatial consummation with their bodies—white heterosexual bodies are always in sync with the temporality of the railroad. But when we loop back to Fung’s CPR, the two strangers are Asian, and gay sex replaces heterosexual white consummation. Through this substitution, the video suggests that disrupting the train’s symbolism with an Asian “anal” tunnel is one reason that the Canadian railway may be “a symbol under threat.”

Fung’s documentary diverges from the traditional “romance of the rails” by presenting a montage of narrative layers where, as Lisa Lowe observes, “the journey across geography spatializes a temporal exploration of an unknown past.”[25] Interwoven through the documentary are interviews, archival film and photographic images, dramatized historical scenes, and a fictional travelogue that follows Roger Kwong’s journey from Toronto to Vancouver aboard a CPR train. The documentary does not privilege any one narrative or temporal standpoint, emphasizing instead the interplay of power and narrativity—particularly the racial power embedded in the assembly of historical archives. As Margot Francis observes of the video’s back-and-forth movement between historical analysis and fictional travelogue, “The director suggests that he didn’t want viewers of the tape to feel too secure with either fiction or history.”[26] In its approach to race and sexuality, Fung adapts Michel Foucault’s argument in History of Sexuality that the late nineteenth century did not so much repress sexuality as give rise to a cultural “incitement to speak” about it, leading to a proliferation of discourses and disciplinary apparatuses.[27] Subtitled A History of Heroes, the video examines how it was anti-Chinese sentiment in the nineteenth century that was historically linked to the proliferation of discourses about sexual perversion—at the same time that whiteness was coalescing as a normative category of national citizenship. In Foucauldian fashion, Fung demonstrates how conceptions of racial and sexual normativity were secondary to and relied on racial and sexual otherness for definition. Rather than indict the conflation of racial otherness with sexual perversion, the video’s ironic treatment of perversity is exemplified in its title, Dirty Laundry: it seeks to rework the symbolic interplay of racialized sexuality and labor. Through Roger’s discovery of his great-grandfather’s ambiguous sexuality, the video clears a space outside the temporal frame of official history to identify with sexual fluidity. Moreover, Fung’s video playfully channels the eroticism of dirty laundry, which comes into play when an accidental spill initiates the sexual encounter between Roger and the railway steward. The combination of overlapping temporalities, self-conscious narration, and dramatic reversals and substitutions bring to light the queer modalities of racialized labor history.

If we move south to the transcontinental railroad of Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” in China Men, another Chinese railroad worker performs a different kind of queer identity forged out of temporal dislocation. Whether Ah Goong is wandering alone through the Sierra woods or sitting with his family at the dinner table, he has no qualms about baring his penis and subjecting it to worldly questioning. Contrary to the steel certainty of the train’s anthropomorphized virility, he continually wonders “what it was that it was for, what a man was for, what he had to have a penis for.”[28] Scrutinizing the function and reproductive capacity of his body, Ah Goong presents a warped mirror of the train’s phallic symbolism. Far from the pleasures of queer sexuality that Fung’s steward enjoys, Ah Goong’s inward chastisement outwardly questions the relation between male sexuality and gender. His gender and sexual dislocations are reflected in the acute temporal dissonance he experiences as a laboring body. As he works, Ah Goong continually grasps for temporal anchoring while his observations become increasingly unhinged. After he spends three years tunneling through granite with a pickaxe, time becomes a tangible, animate form divorced from a coherent sense of reality:

When he stumbled out, he tried to talk about time. “I felt time,” he said. “I saw time. I saw world.” He tried again, “I saw what’s real. I saw time, and it doesn’t move. If we break through the mountain, hollow it, time won’t have moved anyway. You translators ought to tell the foreigners that.”[29]

The temporality of granite is dissociated from reality and takes on a materiality that Ah Goong feels and sees. The linear, unidirectional pressures of Ah Goong’s labor time confront the seeming immobility of nature, because “it doesn’t move.” Labor time and natural time are presented as frustratingly out of sync with each other, and even if they “break through the mountain, hollow it, time won’t have moved anyway.” These temporal disjunctures have alienating gendered and sexual effects on Ah Goong.

The temporal alienation Ah Goong experiences during labor is reinforced by the waning influence of a cosmic temporality. For instance, his ritual observance of the summer reunion of the Spinning Girl and the Cowboy—the Altair and Vega star constellations—becomes increasingly irrelevant to him in the face of a new labor temporality. Looking up at the night sky, Ah Goong “saw the order in the stars,”[30] an astrological system that brings comfort because he recognizes them from China. He recounts the story of the Spinning Girl and Cowboy, in which two lovers are so enchanted with one another, “too happy,” that they neglect their work and are punished by the Queen of the Sky. She separates the lovers, “scratch[ing] a river between them.” Taking pity on them, the King of the Sky allows them a reunion once a year: “On the seventh day of the seventh month . . . magpies form a bridge for them to cross to each other.”[31] The discovery of the stars gives Ah Goong something to look forward to: “Every night he located Altair and Vega and gauged how much closer they had come since the night before.”[32] But after the first summer, astrological time seems increasingly disconnected from his own temporal existence. Ah Goong “felt less nostalgia at the Spinning Girl and the Cowboy. . . . The Cowboy’s one year away from his lady was no time at all.”[33] For Ah Goong, cosmic time is progressively divorced from the demands of earth-bound labor time, which, he observes, has kept some Chinese men working in the country for decades. 

Dispensing with his yearly celebration of the Spinning Girl and Cowboy’s reunion and, later, casting aside the temptations of a pitiful sex worker brought into the camp, Ah Goong’s gender and sexuality become progressively estranged from the consummating imperatives of the railway. He begins to masturbate on the job while lowered in a basket filled with gunpowder and fuses, declaring, “I am fucking the world!”[34] Later, after the railway is complete, he is filled with longing for his own child, a daughter: “He wished for a happy daughter. . . . She would sing for him and listen to him sing.”[35] He is deemed insane by his family, and is eventually lost after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. His consciousness is shaped by an indefinite temporality, and as I develop further in this chapter, it stands in sharp contrast to the gender and sexual imperatives of a consolidating capitalist temporality of the nineteenth century.

Departing from an ordered, sequential, and linear vision of time, Fung and Kingston employ forms of substitution as openings for processes of resignification that reimagine time’s relation to race, sexuality, and labor. It is from the dislocated position of abject substitution that time’s normalizing function is exposed. Elizabeth Freeman notes how “one of the most obvious ways that sex meets temporality is in the persistent description of queers as temporally backward, though paradoxically dislocated from any specific historical moment.”[36] From the displaced vantage of the historically dislocated position of Chinese labor, therefore, Kingston and Fung’s texts denaturalize capitalist temporality while reimagining “how time makes bodies and subjects.”[37] As capitalism expands and increasingly regulates all aspects of labor and social life in the nineteenth century, we can discern how the morality and character-building activity of concrete labor both structures and reinforces the social and cultural structures of family and leisure. The temporality of the home, which schedules gendered activity, moral education, heterosexual reproduction, progress, and futurity, is thus a crucial regulator of the labor process. As Kingston’s and Fung’s texts elucidate, the temporality of work and family become embodied by whiteness, a category imbued with morality, belonging, and social necessity. In contrast, the Chinese are identified with a perverse domesticity whose homosociality forecloses any sense of reproductive futurity. Excluded from the moral category of concrete labor, Chinese labor is instead associated with processes of valorization associated with productivity and time, an abstract force that injects temporal volatility into the concrete labor process. Personifying the capitalist adage “Time is money,” therefore, the substitutions present in Kingston and Fung’s texts expose the aesthetic function of romantic anticapitalism. That white labor appears more “concrete” than Chinese labor is one of the fetishized tropes of capitalism that, as Marx writes, “conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.”[38] In the following two sections, I explore the way Fung and Kingston respond to the capitalist imperatives of temporal consolidation, one which aligns Chinese labor with the temporal domination of capitalism while simultaneously subverting it. 

As personifications of the “phantom-like objectivity”[39] of abstract labor, the Chinese laborers of Kingston’s and Fung’s texts stage alternative temporalities, inserting a queer temporal vitality that animates Chakrabarty’s conception of History 2, a historical formation that he describes as the “excess that capital . . . always needs but can never quite control or domesticate.”[40] These are the vital forces that form a constant resistance to capital: “the abstract living labor—a sum of muscles, nerves, and consciousness/will—that, according to Marx, capital posits as its contradictory starting point all the time.”[41]

Alien Labor as Dangerous Supplement

During the three years that Ah Goong tunnels through granite mountain in China Men, he undergoes profound psychological disembodiment insofar as he becomes progressively unable to distinguish the tangible from the abstract. As he tunnels, his sensory ability becomes estranged, and his perception of the material world reflects his temporal imprisonment in labor, where “a mountain is the same as permanence and time”[42]

His eyes couldn’t see, his nose couldn’t smell; and now his ears were filled with the noise of hammering. This rock is what is real, he thought. This rock is what real is, not clouds or mist, which make mysterious promises, and when you go through them are nothing.[43]

Ah Goong’s experience of temporal suspension against the impenetrability of rock bankrupts the hope or mystery suggested by “clouds or mist.” History is reduced to rock. Later, after the bosses replace pickaxes with dynamite, which “added more accidents and ways of dying,”[44] he is further disoriented in time. After blasting through a tunnel in winter, he begins to think that “it was the task of the human race to quicken the world, blast the freeze, fire it, redden it with blood.”[45] Experiencing the shift to the quickening pace of industrial time, Ah Goong tries to counteract the disjuncture of labor speed and the delay of the natural world:

He had to change the stupid slowness of one sunrise and one sunset per day. He had to enliven the silent world with sound. “The rock,” he tried to tell the others. “The ice.” “Time.”[46]

Responding to the asynchrony of labor time and natural time, Ah Goong attempts to resignify the natural world using the sound of words, which fail to signify new meaning. As natural time cleaves from the laboring body, the Chinese laborers who die from explosions become increasingly disembodied forms, “like puppets [who] made Ah Goong laugh crazily as if the arms and legs would come together again.” When he is suspended in his dynamite-lined basket, Ah Goong renders human life abstract: “Godlike, he watched men whose faces he could not see and whose screams he did not hear roll and bounce and slide like a handful of sprinkled gravel.”[47] From puppets to sprinkled gravel, human life is progressively stripped of vitality.

As both witness to and subject of the disembodying effects of abstract time, Ah Goong articulates both the inadequacy and potential of the living body. As he lifts his hammer, he tells the men working beside him that “a man ought to be made of tougher material than flesh. . . . Skin is too soft.”[48] The impenetrability of the wall further underscores his corporeal lack: “Nothing happened to that gray wall. . . . It had no softer or weaker spots anywhere, the same hard gray.”[49] He remarks to his friends, “Our bones ought to be filled with iron.”[50] Ah Goong’s recognition of the dehumanizing demands of abstract labor time emphasizes a central contradiction of a capitalist mode of production. Within capitalism’s drive to accumulate by speeding up time and compressing space, its tendency is to replace human labor with machines, or “bones . . . filled with iron.” As Chakrabarty notes, “Capital is thus faced with its own contradiction: it needs abstract and living labor as the starting point in its cycle of self-reproduction, but it also wants to reduce to a minimum the quantum of living labor it needs.”[51] Thus, connecting this contradiction to History 2, we find that the crucial variable embedded within abstract labor—a variable that capitalism requires but continuously tries to eliminate—is human life itself, an innately conscious and willing indeterminate force. It is the capacity of being “living” that makes labor a potential source of resistance to capitalist abstraction. The resistance of vitalism, as Chakrabarty elucidates, is such that “life, in Marx’s analysis of capital, is . . . in a ‘standing fight’ against the process of abstraction that is constitutive of the category labor.”[52]

Expressing a queer vitalism that upsets the reproduction of a capitalist temporality, Ah Goong’s performance of racialized labor as a sexual act queers the value-generating temporality of abstract labor. In the much-discussed scene of Ah Goong’s compulsion to masturbate while lowered in a basket filled with dynamite and declaring, “I am fucking the world,” he taps into the vital excess of abstract labor. In debates over the political registers of the scene, critics identify these acts as expressions of either sexual frustration or resistance. For Donald Goellnicht, his masturbation signals the “loss and frustration caused by emasculation”[53] in the face of sexual deprivations in the railroad labor camps, suggesting that his sexuality is a belated formation, foreclosed until an unknown future. On the other hand, as David Eng suggests, his autoerotic behavior can be interpreted as staging an act of resistance, “us[ing] his penis to make a statement of racial protest . . . to his devalued racial position in America.”[54] Tomo Hattori extends the resistant registers of masturbation, not as a “pathetic substitution for and failure to engage in ‘real’ sex,”[55] but as an expression of Ah Goong’s “critique of the heterosexual and masculinist pretensions of his masters.”[56] In this case, his masturbation represents a suspended challenge to the linear, reproductive frame of heterosexual consummation. Extending these analyses of his act’s resistant potential, I call attention to the notion of masturbation as dangerous supplement. In Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s privileging of speech over writing, nature over culture, and presence over absence, he pays special attention to Rousseau’s discussion of masturbation. In The Confessions, Rousseau expresses guilt over frequently succumbing to the compulsion to masturbate in the absence of his lover, Therese. He calls masturbation a “dangerous supplement,”[57] regarding the act as a secondary, subordinate addition to the primary and original act of sexual intercourse. But Derrida points to the double meaning of the supplement, as both supplying something that is missing and supplying something additional. Derrida’s insight is that the supplement is what sets the terms that make possible the privileged status of the first entity. Supplementarity is the manifestation of the deferral that deconstructs the integrity of the sexual act, which is assumed to be perfect and complete.

Applying this notion of supplementarity to Ah Goong’s masturbatory “fucking” of the world, we can examine how his act ventriloquizes the dynamite’s literal “fucking” of the world. As a mode of writing, Ah Goong’s masturbation gives him discursive presence and embodiment that corrupts the logic of equivalence that capitalism extracts as abstract labor. Moreover, Ah Goong’s masturbation blurs the hierarchical distinction between work and play. Masturbation becomes an expression of queer vitalism that frustrates the homogeneity of abstract labor. Simultaneously, the queer vitalism he stages frustrates the capitalist logics of heterosexual reproduction. In his examination of nationalism and sexuality in the nineteenth century, George Mosse notes that masturbation was likened to “throwing money out the window,”[58] causing impotence and threatening depopulation. And given that masturbation activates, as Tomo Hattori explains, an “autoerotic homosexuality . . . [because] the onanist, as both the subject and object of erotic action, is the same gender as itself,”[59] Ah Goong’s sexual difference defies the logic of equivalence embedded in abstract labor while disidentifying with the capitalist project of national consummation.

The queer vitalism of Ah Goong’s masturbation may also leverage a more dangerous supplementarity to the temporal domination of abstract labor than the labor strike he participates in. Animating the dehumanization of technological speed-up—whereby technology expands the exploitation of human labor—the Chinese workers are presented with a “four-dollar raise per month” that comes with the “‘opportunity to put in more time’ . . . ‘Two more hours per shift.’ Ten-hour shifts inside the tunnels.”[60] The “railroad demons” reason that “‘now that you have dynamite, the work isn’t so hard.’”[61] In response, the Chinese laborers recognize the temporal domination of abstract labor through the inhuman push to mechanize their bodies: “‘A human body can’t work like that.’ ‘The demons don’t believe this is a human body. This is a chinaman’s body.’”[62] Here the racialization of labor translates into a temporal embodiment of abstract labor. 

When the Chinese workers decide to resist by going on strike, the strike serves to halt the capitalist temporality of labor and becomes a supplementary form of leisure time. On strike, the men emerge as nonequivalents:

The ones who were sleeping slept on and rose as late as they pleased. They bathed in streams and shaved their moustaches and wild beards. Some went fishing and hunting. The violinists tuned and played their instruments. The drummers beat theirs at the punchlines of jokes. The gamblers shuffled and played their cards and tiles. The smokers passed their pipes, and the drinkers bet for drinks by making figures with their hands. The cooks made party food.[63]

However, rather than a dangerous supplement that destroys the coherent division of work and labor, the strike also serves as a kind of “obscene supplement,” which Slavoj Žižek defines as less a subversion of capitalism than “an obstacle which is simultaneously the ‘condition of possibility’ of the exercise of Power.”[64] The strike operates as an obscene supplement in the sense that the China Men’s victory is a qualified one. The foremen eventually grant a four-dollar raise without lengthening the working day, but this is far less than the fourteen-dollar increase the Chinese laborers demanded. Because the Irish workers refused to join the strike, rejecting their invitation by calling the Chinese strikers “Cheap John Chinaman,”[65] Chinese labor remains aligned with the temporal domination of abstract labor. The strike ultimately serves to uphold rather than undermine capitalism by safeguarding the vital human limits of abstract labor time. Thus when the strike is over, there is no celebration. The China Men merely resume their work within a capitalist temporality. Kingston writes, “The China Men went back to work quietly. No use singing and shouting over a compromise and losing nine days’ work.”[66] In this case, abstract labor functions less as History 2 than as History 1, which Chakrabarty defines as “the past ‘established’ by capital because History 1 lends itself to the reproduction of capitalist relationships.”[67]

Ultimately, Kingston presents the irony of capitalism’s demand for equivalence and substitution performed by fungible alien labor. When the railroad is complete, race complicates the logic of endless substitution—of alien supplementarity—by projecting the concreteness of white railroad laborers through photographs and commemorative celebration at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. The white workers declare that “only Americans could have done it.”[68] Chinese labor remains abstract and, as such, invisible: “Ah Goong does not appear in railroad photographs.”[69] As Eng clarifies, here “American emphatically does not include Chinese, as the China Men are driven out and their racialized labor is transformed into an abstracted whiteness.”[70] Kingston emphasizes these processes of abstraction and performative substitution at the completion ceremony when a Chinese worker becomes what Eng calls a “body double”[71] for the white man who drives in the commemorative last spike: “A white demon in a top hat tap-tapped on the gold spike, and pulled it back out. Then one China Man held the real spike, the steel one, and another hammered it in.”[72] In this scene Kingston reverses the projections of abstraction and concreteness. Here we see that the steel, as an inferior supplement to gold, is what constitutes the “real.” The Chinese man who hammers it in is as concrete as the steel that consummates the nation, while the golden spike and the white man remain abstract, fetishized symbols of value. As Eng explains, the scene “underscores the splitting of the real from representation, of reality from the ways it is reconfigured in the laminating photograph that memorializes the event.”[73] By dramatizing the role of representation in romanticized projections of concrete white labor, Kingston allegorizes the way racial difference can be sublated into an abstract supplement of white labor while also serving an aesthetic function by giving Chinese form to the abstract domination of a capitalist temporality that is otherwise unrepresentable.

Unlike Kingston’s text, Dirty Laundry’s focus is less on the actual labor process entailed in railroad construction in Canada from 1881 to 1885 than its aftermath. In particular, Fung’s video provides a complementary view of the ideological forces behind Ah Goong’s experience of “The Driving Out”[74] that follows the completion ceremony at Promontory. When Chinese labor is no longer indispensable, Ah Goong realizes, “It was dangerous to stay.”[75] What Fung’s video explores is how abstract labor becomes aligned with racialized perversity and vice that fuels the ideological basis for expulsion, making it “dangerous to stay.” Incorporating themes of substitution, Dirty Laundry further reinforces the concrete attributes of white labor and abstract qualities of Chinese labor. In the video’s dramatization of sections of the 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, we see how concrete white labor is associated with a normativity defined by temporal discipline that sets the parameters of work, leisure, and reproduction. At the same time, Chinese exclusion from normative temporalities of domestic life become manifestations of the destructive attributes of abstract labor. Personifying the abstract domination of a capitalist temporality, the Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration casts Chinese men as a destructive, perverse force that threatens the social order. As historian Dora Nipp, one of the video’s interviewees, explains, the railroad became a historical marker that separated abstract Chinese labor from perverse labor: “Initially when Chinese labor was needed for the labor, nothing bad was said about them. Once their labor was no longer welcome, then you hear about vices; you hear about prostitution, leprosy, all kinds of illnesses. . . . [Writers] dwelled on the exotic, the exaggerated, the evil.” The range of racial, gender, and sexual substitutions that Fung’s video explores offers a different view of the perversity that becomes associated with the abstract qualities of Chinese labor.

Substitution, as repetition with a difference, becomes a visual theme that anchors the video’s fictional, archival, and documentary fragments. In particular, the visual refrain that interposes the entire video begins with a Chinese couple: the woman sitting behind her husband braiding his queue before he departs for Canada. The audio that accompanies the scene is of a woman’s voice that asks, “Who will braid your hair? Who will cook your rice? Who will wash your clothes? Who will warm your bed?” This scene undergoes multiple substitutions throughout the course of the video, establishing a core thematic refrain that frames the video’s other substitutions. In the first metamorphosis, the wife is replaced by a man, and it is a male voice that asks the series of questions that ends with “Who will warm your bed?” And when we fast-forward to the video’s conclusion, the scene depicts a contemporary lesbian couple without audio to accompany the scene. In light of the fungibility of abstract labor, one significance of these substitutions is that they redefine substitution not as interchangeability but as repetition with difference. Rather than the undifferentiated assemblage of muscles and nerves that constitute abstract labor—what Marx describes as “human labour-power in its fluid state”[76]—these substitutions highlight gender and sexual difference. Further, that the scene’s visual refrain occurs in an intimate domestic space where one lover is braiding the other’s hair reinforces the affective dimensions of abstract labor. The repetition of this scene of domesticity counteracts the perverse domesticity to which Chinese labor is consigned. Moreover, working against the fetishism that misrepresents the dual character of commodity-determined labor, one that constitutes a social universe characterized by concrete and abstract dimensions, the substitutions keep the viewer alert to the normative cues and expectations that buffer and conceal the truth of social relations. As I explore below, Fung’s substitutions present an allegory of racial fetishism that emerges around abstract alien labor.

Employing different forms of substitution that emphasize the defensive attributes of whiteness, Fung’s video makes explicit connections between abstract labor and vice by drawing from the Royal Commission Report on Chinese Immigration. This was a report compiled in 1884 to study “objections to the influx of the Chinese People into Canada,” which, as Fung’s video notes, “leads to a Head Tax in 1885, the year the Canadian Pacific Railway is completed and Chinese labor is no longer needed.” The study’s primary methodology is to examine the Chinese restrictions in place in sister settler colonies, the United States and Australia, gathering “evidence” in Queensland and San Francisco by interviewing diverse classes of white male “witnesses” to testify on the subject of Chinese immigration. Among the array of subjects, Fung focuses on testimony that addresses Chinese labor and "sodomy,” a subject heading that appears in the actual report. Unlike the forms of substitution in Kingston’s China Men that align Chinese labor with the technological speed-up of abstract labor, Fung’s video uses substitution ironically to examine the fungibility of whiteness. It is from the position of generic whiteness that negative, perverse content is cast onto the Chinese embodiment of abstract labor.

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A scene depicting a white miner’s metamorphosis into a senator dramatizes the class convergence of whiteness, which Francis describes as a performance of “authorial transvestism,” observing how “the senator’s ventriloquism (transgressing the boundaries of class) functions in the interests of white racial dominance.”[77] The white miner (figure 1.2), clad in a dusty work shirt and suspenders, begins the monologue discussing his heteronormative duties and domestic comforts, which become grounds for him to question the moral citizenship of Chinese men. He explains that in terms of labor, all is equivalent, but the costs of reproducing their respective labors puts the white miner at a distinct disadvantage. By the conclusion of his speech, the white miner has undergone metamorphosis into Senator Jones of Nevada, dressed in a black suit and bowtie (figure 1.3). The content of the testimony reveals the immorality and degraded nature of abstract labor when transposed to the temporal sanctity of the domestic realm:

I have hopes to bring up my daughters to be good wives and faithful mothers, and offer my son better opportunities than I had myself. I cheerfully contribute to the support of schools, churches, charitable institutions, and other objects that enter into our daily life. But after I’ve maintained my family and performed these duties, not much is left of my wages when the week is ended. How is it with the Chinese? The Chinaman can do as much work underground as I can. He has no wife and family. He performs none of these duties. Forty or fifty of his kind can live in a house no larger than mine. He craves no variety of food. He has inherited no taste for comfort or for social enjoyment. Conditions that satisfy him and make him contented would make my life not worth living.

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The white miner and senator align the Chinese body exclusively with a homogenized labor disposition. A Chinese body does not have the capacity for domestic enjoyment, community engagement, or social reproduction, which threatens the temporal stability of “socially necessary labor time.” He continues to exaggerate the subhuman conditions of Chinese existence by commenting on the cramped living conditions, lack of enjoyable food, and lack of social taste, conditions that “would make my life not worth living.” It is precisely the deprivations of Chinese domesticity and civic life that render Chinese labor nonhuman and therefore unfair competition. When the miner transforms into Senator Jones of Nevada, the politician’s more confident voice and political status lend further legitimacy to the miner’s complaint. Adding an air of authority to the miner’s lamentations, Senator Jones makes a strong appeal against the Chinese: “The Chinaman comes in taking advantage of our skill, of our toil, and of our struggles, driving us from fields of industry which we have created and which our race alone can create.” Conveying the unity of whiteness through the substitution of the senator for the miner, their casting of Chinese men as a destructive labor form emphasizes the parasitic effects of abstract labor on a concrete white labor host. What is also significant in the testimony is the senator’s clear glorification of industrialization—the “fields of industry we have created and which our race alone can create”—emphasizes the concrete value of white labor’s “skill . . . toil . . . struggles.” This view of the white industrial laborer becomes the romantic anticapitalist counterpoint to the abstract status of Chinese labor who has no social value except to “take advantage.” Both the miner and the senator thus attribute a destructive power to the Chinese, one that is constituted by his nonsocial, parasitic, and abstract qualities.

Fung’s subsequent dramatizations of testimony from the Royal Commission report incorporate experimental forms of bodily and textual substitution that emphasize processes of signification and resignification. As Roger thumbs through the section on sodomy, the testimonies of a detective, a San Francisco merchant, and a former resident of China come to life to reinforce the perversity attached to Chinese bodies, whose temporal otherness is constituted through figurative alignment with labor duration and social nonreproduction. Their testimony on sodomy is presented in a continuous sequence:

Detective C. C. Cox: Cases of the most revolting crime came before them, for instance of which all details could if necessary be supplied with that of a man who cut out the penis of another who refused to submit to his degrading desires.

San Francisco Merchant Thomas H. King: Sodomy is a habit. Sometimes thirty or forty boys leaving Hong Kong in apparently good health before arriving here will be found to be afflicted about the anus with venereal diseases. And on questioning the Chinese doctors, they admitted that it was a common practice among them.

Six Years Resident of China John T. Tobin: I’ve never seen sodomy committed between men and men but I have seen it with beasts and detected them in the act with hogs, dogs, and ducks. But not in a great number of cases.

A later scene depicting a doctor’s defense of Chinese sexual morality captures the relation of substitution as signification at stake in the Royal Commission testimonies. The scene opens to Roger, who appears in the role of a nineteenth-century Chinese laborer. He is bare-chested and moves slowly into a darkened room. As he moves across the screen, the text of the Royal Commission is projected onto his body, while the edge of the screen is illuminated to showcase the testimony of Mr. E. Stevenson, MD, of Victoria, British Columbia. As Mr. Stevenson speaks, his words are projected onto Roger’s body. Mr. Stevenson offers an impassioned defense of the Chinese on the subject of their sexual morality:

Gentlemen, you have heard several witnesses testify unfavorably on this Chinese question and they have said they infer so-and-so. And from the fact that so many Chinese males are here and so few Chinese females, it has been inferred by certain people that, I hesitate to say it, that sodomy was by them practiced. I stamp it a damnable slander. A man who so acts bears the mark of Cain not only on his forehead but all over him.

The visual effect of character substitution, of redeploying Roger into the role of Chinese laborer, is to clarify Roger’s contemporary relationship to the past, to his sexually ambiguous great-grandfather who worked on the CPR, and to the nation’s history of sexuality. Substitution thus becomes a supplementary modality for Roger’s countermemorial connection to history and sexual identity—bringing forth Derrida’s notion of supplementarity as something that both replaces and adds to. On one level, Stevenson’s testimony defends the honor of the Chinese and draws not on myth but on the demographic realities of the tremendous disparity in the population ratio of Chinese men to Chinese women, which fostered the development of segregated “bachelor” communities in North America. However, on another level, Stevenson’s testimony remains tied to the earlier white witnesses’ condemnation of Chinese perversity in asserting his symbolic power over the sign of race. Whether for or against Chinese immigration, the Chinese body remains an abstract object onto which racial and sexual discourse are literally and figuratively projected. The pages from the Royal Commission report that are projected onto Roger’s body become the textual representation of the Chinese body. He becomes an abstract screen for the projection of textual content. Moreover, Stevenson’s reference to the mark of Cain adds another layer of irony to the system of signification. When he notes how the mark of Cain appears “not only on his forehead but all over him,” Stevenson amplifies the racial meaning of the mark, connecting sexual perversion to racial embodiment. As he speaks, Roger’s body moves slowly out of the darkness; he pauses to highlight Stevenson’s words “mark of . . . ,” which remain projected on his chest until the words disappear as he exits into partial lightness toward Stevenson (figure 1.4). As Roger’s character comes face to face with Stevenson, it becomes clear that Stevenson himself is a holographic projection, underscoring their divergent temporalities. He falls short of reaching Stevenson before becoming shrouded again by dark shadows. The ambiguity surrounding Roger’s disappearance back into darkness is such that it is unclear whether the darkness that envelops his body is itself the “mark of Cain” or is, instead, a form of representative absence—a moment of unsignification. In either case, as the personification of abstract labor, the sexualization of the Chinese racial body is the discursively constituted and ideological effect of the disciplinary apparatus of an intensifying capitalist temporality. Moreover, rather than sanitize the “dirty laundry” of Chinese labor, Fung undercuts the heteronormative recuperation of Chinese sexual otherness by highlighting instead the discursive constitution of racialized sexual perversion and its ideological effects.

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Fung is careful to contextualize the range of substitutions and modes of signification that emerge from these testimonies in a broader international context. Interspersed throughout the Royal Commission testimonies are frames of onscreen text. One indicates that “in 1885, the year Canada institutes the Head Tax, Britain criminalizes all sexual activity between men as ‘gross indecency.’” Several frames later, additional onscreen text reads, “In Germany in 1892, the word homosexuality is first used in public,” which is quickly followed by “Heterosexuality is coined later.” By presenting a larger international frame for the projection of perversity onto the Chinese in Canada, Fung highlights the historical intersection of industrial capitalism and the desire to sexualize labor difference. What the video suggests is that the Royal Commission report represents less a narrative of testimony than a genealogy of settler crisis that turns on shifting social relations brought on by the new temporalities of industrial capitalism.

Queer Temporalities of History 2

In contrast to the jubilant embodiment and incorporation contained in the white settler mythology of the transcontinental railway, China Men and Dirty Laundry incorporate temporal symbols of disembodied abstraction and social exclusion. In particular, the temporality of linear progress associated with railroad technology is suspended, fractured, and defamiliarized. These texts “see” and “feel” time, as Ah Goong proclaims. But though they exemplify the dehumanizing forces of capitalism’s abstraction of labor time, Kingston’s and Fung’s texts nevertheless reject the disciplinary temporality of normative kinship, linear progress, and reproduction. If “time is a body,” their bodies gesture to a temporal embodiment whose relations and modes of belonging unfold as History 2. As Chakrabarty states, “In the reproduction of its own life-process, capital encounters relationships that present it with double possibilities. . . . History 2’s are thus not pasts separate from capital; they are pasts that inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic.”[78] Imagining relations that do not contribute to capital’s self-reproduction, Kingston and Fung present the queer temporalities of History 2.

For Ah Goong, the embodiment of a queer temporality is anchored by maternal longing and matrilineality. In his repeated, self-directed questioning of the meaning or purpose of a man’s life, the literal and symbolic value of his penis leads him to gender resignification. During the Chinese railroad strike, Ah Goong wanders the forests pondering the value of masculinity symbolized by his penis: he “just looked at it, wondering what it was for, what a man was for, what he had to have a penis for.”[79] Within the evolution of his gender resignification, Ah Goong questions not only the norms associated with masculine power but also the symbolic burdens he is forced to contend with. His thoughts turn to the “rumor of an Injun woman called Woman Chief, who led a nomadic fighting tribe from the eastern plains as far as these mountains. She was so powerful that she had four wives and many horses.”[80] The juxtaposition of these seemingly unrelated reflections present to Ah Goong the quandary of settler colonialism. While Ah Goong never sees Woman Chief, the rumor of her existence displaces the gender, sexual, and spatial norms he associates with masculinity. Instead of expressing paternalistic control over a virginal, “empty” landscape, the Woman Chief’s defense of her land becomes an embodiment of matrilineal power.

Having experienced the disembodied passages of alien labor time, Ah Goong’s disillusionment leads him to express a distinctly maternal and matrilineal reproductive desire that reverses the normative paternalism and reproductive logic of white settler colonialism. During the “driving out” of Chinese labor after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Ah Goong’s matrilineal desire conveys itself through an actively resignified gender lens. As he passes a farm, he finds an “imp child”; he stops and the baby crawls into his lap. He tells the child, “I wish you were my baby. . . . ‘My daughter,’ he said. ‘My son.’ He couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or a girl.”[81] Here Ah Goong’s reproductive desire follows a matrilineal arc because it operates outside the norms of blood lineage and paternal inheritance in which strict gender codes are embedded. Not knowing whether the child is a boy or a girl, Ah Goong displaces gender codes altogether. The disembodying temporality of railroad labor here productively disorients the iterative temporality on which gender construction relies.

Ah Goong’s matrilineal desire comes into fullest relief after his return to China, when he attempts to substitute the fourth of his four sons with an unwanted baby girl born to neighbors down the road. Disappointed that he has only sons and jealous of his neighbors’ daughter, Ah Goong is considered insane, a “man who did not know the value of what he had”[82] with four sons. After secretly trading his son for the daughter, he feels that “with his soul he adopted her, full diaper and all.”[83] Later, when he is forced to return the girl, “Ah Goong clung to his baby as if she were holding him up.”[84] Without hope of realizing his reproductive desires, he rejects all sense of masculine propriety. It is this reproductive failure that causes him to begin “taking his penis out at the dinner table, worrying it, wondering at it, asking why it had given him four sons and no daughter, chastising it, asking it whether it were yet capable of producing the daughter of his dreams.”[85] He becomes a figure of parodic masculinity, whose frequent exhibitionism—“yank[ing] open that greatcoat—no pants”[86]—underscores the phallic unfulfillment of normative paternalistic kinship.

But Ah Goong’s story doesn’t end with the pessimism of alien temporality; rather, it emphasizes its continual deferral of linear time. After his return to China, he embarks yet again for Gold Mountain and arrives in San Francisco. But here the linear trajectory of his narrative unravels, divorcing space from temporality. Kingston offers multiple narrative possibilities. In the first, Ah Goong is in an underground arsenal under Chinatown, “inside the earth,”[87] and is presumed to have died during the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906: “Some say he died falling into the cracking earth.”[88] In another version he is brought back to China because “he was not making money; he was a homeless wanderer, a shiftless, dirty, jobless man with matted hair, ragged clothes, and fleas all over his body. He ate out of garbage cans. He was a louse eaten by lice. A fleaman.”[89] The narrator offers a final possibility: “Maybe he hadn’t died in San Francisco, it was just his papers that burned.”[90] In this version he emerges from the “miraculous earthquake and fire,”[91] which burned down the Hall of Records so that “every China Man was reborn out of that fire a citizen.”[92] Ah Goong’s rebirth is accompanied by another birth: “He had been seen carrying a child out of the fire, a child of his own in spite of the laws against marrying.”[93] Each of these versions capture elements of Ah Goong’s temporal and spatial estrangement as an undisciplined subject of capitalist social relations: living underground, as a “homeless wanderer,” and finally as a father. This reorganization of time, space, and identity is further accentuated by the earthquake, a crisis event that will interfere with the discursive constitution of Chinese bodies as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” In the final version, where Ah Goong emerges phoenix-like from the fire, he becomes an agent of resignification. As Eng notes, “Like the elimination of a single term in a sign chain, the burning of the Hall of Records—the literal destruction of these particular documents—demands a subsequent shift in meaning, a shift in the relational terms that attempt to shore up the historical ruins of the archive.”[94] The narrator surmises, “He had built a railroad out of sweat, why not have an American child out of longing?”[95] However, the fulfillment of his “longing” for kinship does not reproduce the temporal discipline of heteronormative reproduction; rather, it expresses a mode of belonging that symbolically fulfills his matrilineal desire. Ah Goong occupies a queer temporality in which alien survival and reproduction arise outside of the temporal discipline of settler capitalism. Countering the symbolic role of the child to reproduce normative logics and values of white life, what Lee Edelman refers to as the “absolute value of reproductive futurism,” Ah Goong’s “child out of longing” represents the potentiality of matrilineal desire and, against settler biopower, expresses an alien mode of survival. In the aftermath of the earthquake and fire, many of those kin relations will be impurely, discursively constituted as “paper sons.” As such, the alien child does not represent the guaranteed futurity of white settler colonialism but a potential deferral of patrilineal reproduction while promoting the fictive, queer kinship of alien longing as one temporality of History 2.

The politics of embodiment are thus expressed in China Men through Ah Goong’s gender resignification, which rejects the paternalistic codes of setter territorialization and temporal discipline. At the same time, by foregrounding a matrilineal identity that values daughters and empowers women, Ah Goong expresses various desires that intersect with transgender embodiment. Expressing gender and sexual difference as modes of embodiment, he interrupts the stability of gender and its assumed correspondence to biological sex. As an articulation of transgender identifications, Ah Goong disrupts what Susan Stryker identifies as the presumed “‘wholeness’ of the body and ‘sameness’ of its sex . . . [as] socially constructed.”[96] Desiring a daughter, “fucking the world,” and berating his penis, Ah Goong confounds the equivalence of sex and gender, highlighting instead how “‘sex’ is a mash-up, a story we mix about how the body means, which parts matter most,and how they register in our consciousness or field of vision.”[97] In the context of nineteenth-century labor, Ah Goong’s transgender expression is significant in its disidentification with a notion of equivalence. In other words, his identity is not an expression of an abstract equivalence that can be substituted under the homogenizing process of labor under capitalism, where equality is an enforced condition of alienation.[98] Indeed, as David Harvey puts it: “There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals; how the equality presupposed in the market exchange of things deludes us into a belief in the equality of persons.”[99] In Ah Goong’s performance of gender and sexual difference, he attaches the logic of equivalence that abstracts labor into homogeneous temporal units of human labor to a profoundly masculine logic. Moreover, in his rejection of the terms of equivalence that counteract the reproduction of capitalist logic, he embodies the potential of History 2.

In Dirty Laundry the themes of embodiment, retrieval, and difference are captured in the idea of “family resemblance” that becomes part of the narrative frame for the video’s historical and fictional sections. The fictional travelogue centered on Roger brings together ideas of queer temporality in order to reanimate and embody Chinese Canadian history. What’s at stake in this history is presented as a mystery surrounding the sexual identity of his great-grandfather, whose framed picture Roger’s father has insisted he take along with him on his business trip. When he accidentally breaks the frame to reveal a hidden photographic portrait of his grandfather touching hands with another man, he is unsure how to interpret the photograph. The broken picture frame becomes a visual metaphor for what Lowe calls an “alternative mode of inquiry” that allows us to move beyond “the singular history that frames a particular image of Chinese immigrant labour . . . that memorializes the static, single artifact.”[100] But in the context of figurative and thematic substitutions that the video foregrounds, the hidden photograph presents a queer opening that works against the fetish to reveal, rather than conceal, the features of an alien labor temporality.

The analysis of the mysterious photograph expands, rather than contracts, the range of historical possibilities that relate to Chinese sexuality and assumed perversion. Although Roger admits to the train steward that he doesn’t “know how to read” the revealed photograph, the Chinese steward responds, “This is normal in China. . . . Men hold hands.” As Francis observes, the steward’s reply raises the “question of how the ‘normal’ is constituted in different cultural contexts and historical eras.”[101] After they have sex, Roger asks the steward, “You know what you were saying about men holding hands. What does it mean?” The steward replies, “That they like each other, they’re brothers. . . . It’s a smart thing. If they’re lovers, no one asks any questions.” This “smart thing” is the illegibility of queer historiography. The video does not impose a teleology of queer becoming. In many ways, the linear direction of identity formation in the traditional bildungsroman is frustrated here. It is the unresolved, illegible queer history that animates Roger’s quest to engage in genealogy. The ambiguity of the great-grandfather’s sexuality is what is given ontological priority in the video as an expression of pre-Stonewall conceptions of sexual difference. As Nayan Shah underscores in one of the video’s interviews, “The whole notion that sexual identity is your identity, that somehow who you desire and who you sleep with and who you have sexual pleasures with somehow says something very revealing about you, is a completely new notion.” Just as Ah Goong’s gender resignification takes on a “perverse” relation to masculinist norms, the ambiguity of Roger’s great-grandfather’s sexual identity frustrates the growing “incitement to speak” that Foucault attributes to the rise of liberal individualism in the late nineteenth century. The point is, his great-grandfather’s sexual ambiguity, its deferral of concrete meaning, stands as the content of his difference. Here again, the emphasis on sexual difference frustrates a logic of equivalence that capitalism abstracts out of human labor. In the video’s final frame, the photograph comes to life as the great-grandfather and friend/lover walk out of the frame, away from the photographer’s studio backdrop. That the photographic subjects are roles played by Roger and the steward creates a correspondence between historical and contemporary notions of same-sex affiliation without collapsing contemporary sexual identities with what Francis describes as the “homosocial ambiguities of history.”[102] Rather, the substitution of Roger and the steward for their historical predecessors highlights the role of sexuality for reanimating abstract conceptions of labor and history. In its focus on family genealogy, the video offers a narrative of literal and figurative family resemblances that traces alternative modes of affiliation and belonging that do not reproduce capitalism’s disciplinary temporalities. As countermemory, Dirty Laundry rejects the iconicity of both the lonely Chinese bachelor and the sexually perverse Chinese body and replaces them with an empty stage that frustrates the reproductive, linear trajectory of History 1.

My argument in this chapter has focused on the way Kingston’s and Fung’s texts illuminate how the fusion of temporal otherness and sexual vice converge into a biological expression of abstract alien labor. Their experimental forms offer a new context for understanding why the first immigration laws in Canada and the United States were passed in the aftermath of railroad construction to prevent the infiltration and proliferation of abstract alien labor. Although a comparatively smaller population, the fact that Chinese students, diplomats, and merchants were exempted from immigration restriction laws in the United States and Canada exemplifies the way perversity was identified with the particular features of industrial labor within a capitalist mode of production.

I have situated Kingston’s and Fung’s texts as responses to the celebrated temporality of the telegram that began this chapter that exposes the censored content of Van Horne’s sketch of the Chinese laborer. This is the literal and figurative (back)side of the normative settler temporality celebrated on the face of the telegram. Against the homogenizing logic of racial equivalence, Kingston and Fung present queer recuperations of the “perverse” temporalities of alien labor within the consolidating logic of settler colonial capitalism. In their countermemories of the history of settler national unification by rail, their texts expose the logics of racialized alignment between alien bodies and abstract labor. Exploring queer temporalities of History 2, they counteract the logics of substitution as equivalence that reproduce a capitalist labor temporality of expanding the working day and speed-up. In the next chapter, I turn to the other side of the antinomical view of capitalist relations: romantic anticapitalism’s hypostatizing of the concrete, natural, thingly side of the antinomy. Drawing on the 1920s and 1930s as the apex of anti-Asian animosity and exclusionary immigration policy in both Canada and the United States, I explore the development of romantic anticapitalism, which expresses its racial animus toward the abstract Asian alien through an identification with the natural landscape and Indigeneity. Within a capitalist logic of settler colonialism, the Native and the land become biologized expressions of the concrete dimension of the social world.

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Notes

[1] Berton, The Last Spike, 1.

[2] In declining my request to reproduce Van Horne’s sketch, which also appears in Margot Francis’s Creative Subversions, the CPR’s manager of corporate communications indicated that the history of Chinese railroad labor would compromise Van Horne’s reputation: “My concern is not your work, but is based on the history of the construction period of the CPR. The image is speaks [sic] to a larger issue of sensitivities around how the CPR was built, the conditions and the realities of the 1880s. The other consideration is that it is a drawing done by the President of the CPR; not some anonymous business figure. My decision on this is final.” 

[3] Francis, Creative Subversions, 77. 

[4] As Richard White notes, neither railroad was, by definition, transcontinental,“for the transcontinentals did not really span the continent.” See White, Railroaded, xxi.

[5] Yu, “Toward a Pacific History of the Americas,” xvi.

[6] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 140.

[7] Eng, Racial Castration, 36.

[8] Berton, The Last Spike, 2.

[9] Francis, Creative Subversions, 77.

[10] Marx, Capital, 1:229.

[11] Ibid., 1:160. 

[12] Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 655. 

[13] Freeman, “Introduction, Special Issue on Queer Temporality,” 159. 

[14] Petrus Liu, “Queer Marxism in Taiwan,” 526. 

[15] Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 658. 

[16] Ibid., 655. 

[17] Marx, Capital, 1:128, my italics. 

[18] Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 662. 

[19] Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 201. 

[20] Ibid., 202. 

[21] Petrus Liu, “Queer Marxism in Taiwan,” 533, my italics. 

[22] O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 59, 60. 

[23] Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 191. 

[24] Kirby, “Steamy Scenes and Dream Machines,” 25. For a more extensive discussion of the railroad’s cultural significance, see Kirby, Parallel Tracks. 

[25] Lowe, “Break the Frame,” 78. 

[26] Francis, Creative Subversions, 80. 

[27] Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 

[28] Kingston, China Men, 144. 

[29] Ibid., 135. 

[30] Ibid., 129. 

[31] Ibid., 130 

[32] Ibid. 

[33] Ibid., 135. 

[34] Ibid., 133. 

[35] Ibid., 18. 

[36] Freeman, “Introduction, Special Issue on Queer Temporality,” 162. 

[37] Ibid., 160. 

[38] Marx, Capital, 1:168–169. 

[39] Ibid., 1:128. 

[40] Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 665. 

[41] Ibid., 665. 

[42] Kingston, China Men, 135. 

[43] Ibid., 134.

[44] Ibid., 136. 

[45] Ibid., 137.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid., 132. 

[48] Ibid., 134. 

[49] Ibid. 

[50] Ibid. 

[51] Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 666.

[52] Ibid., 665.

[53] Goellnicht, “Tang Ao in America,” 204

[54] Eng, Racial Castration, 100. 

[55] Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism,” 230.

[56] Ibid., 233.

[57] Derrida, Of Grammatology.

[58] Mosse, “Nationalism and Respectability,” 227.

[59] Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism,” 232, my italics.

[60] Kingston, China Men, 139. 

[61] Ibid., 139–140.

[62] Ibid., 140.

[63] Ibid., 141.

[64] Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 73.

[65] Kingston, China Men, 141. 

[66] Ibid., 144.

[67] Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 669

[68] Kingston, China Men, 145. 

[69] Ibid.

[70] Eng, Racial Castration, 65. 

[71] Ibid.

[72] Kingston, China Men, 145.

[73] Eng, Racial Castration, 65.

[74] Kingston, China Men, 145.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Marx, Capital, 1:142.

[77] Francis, Creative Subversions, 86.

[78] Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging,” 670. 

[79] Kingston, China Men, 144.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Ibid., 147.

[82] Ibid., 19.

[83] Ibid., 20.

[84] Ibid., 21.

[85] Ibid.

[86] Ibid., 127.

[87] Ibid., 150

[88] Ibid.

[89] Ibid., 151.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Ibid., 150.

[92] Ibid. 

[93] Ibid., 151. 

[94] Eng, Racial Castration, 67. 

[95] Kingston, China Men, 151. 

[96] Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges,” 9. 

[97] Ibid. 

[98] Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 163. 

[99] Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s “Capital,” 305. 

[100] Lowe, “Break the Frame,” 78. 

[101] Francis, Creative Subversions, 88. 

[102] Ibid., 89.