"ChinaTown" by Cathy Song

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 t

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ese culture through its cuisine. The visitor is only interested in the belief that by going to Chinatown and eating "authentic Chinese cuisine" they have somehow demonstrated their worldliness and their willingness and ability to explore and understand other cultures. Thus, the visit to Chinatown has actually very little to do with the Chinese people who may live there. The Chinatown is viewed from the outside as a large restaurant with all its inhabitants working for the sole purpose of providing to the visitor a truly authentic Chinese experience. Song is very aware of this outsider's view of Chinatowns. She uses food imagery to describe the Chinatown: bamboo chopstick tenements pile up like noodles. Fungus mushrooming, hoarding sunlight from the neighbors as if it were rice (lines 22-27). Song's verbal structure is intended to represent the external aspect of Chinatown. However, her description of the town serves to connect Chinatown with Chinese cuisine, the connection most often made. She has taken the image most often formed in the mind of the reader when he or she thinks of Chinatown and essentially painted it over the town so that, in her description, the town looks externally the way we think of it interna

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