In the poem "Chinatown," Cathy Song attempts to explore the representation of Chinese heritage and culture in the American landscape. Specifically, she draws upon our internal ideas and stereotypes of Chinese culture and significance to create external "word pictures." These word pictures, therefore, do not so much represent any actual object, but rather reflect what we expect to see. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, argues that whenever we read any form of literature, our attention moves in two directions at once (Frye 73). One direction is outward--that is, we go outside our reading from the individual words to the things they mean or, rather, to our memory of their meaning. The other direction is inward; we try to develop from the words "a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make" (Frye 73). In reading "Chinatown," Cathy Song forces the reader to first go outside by describing external things. However, she forces you to go back "inside" and question your understanding of what you have just seen by placing on this external thing the internal vision you may never have known existed.
Frye argues that, in both outward and inward reading we deal with symbols. When we attach an external meaning to a word we have (in addition to the verbal symbol) the thing represented or symbolized by it. He believes that as such verbal symbols words actually serves as signs, verbal units that conventionally and arbitrarily stand for and point to things outside the place where they occur (Frye 73). In Song's poem, the word "China" may well operate as one of Frye's verbal symbols. In the poem "The White Porch," Song is playing with the image of China that has been constructed by the Western European tradition. Basically, this tradition has historically viewed Asia (the Orient) as a highly-sexualized, inscrutable, feminine area on the map. Song situates her narrator on a white porch, signifying that the narrator's viewpoint is ...