Abstract: In this article, I analyze Lisa See's novel China Dolls (2014) as Asian American war literature, defying conventions that would typically exclude narratives representing civilian women "on the homefront" during wartime from the "war literature" genre. I argue that China Dolls , which is set at the Forbidden City, the most famous of the Chinatown nightclubs in World War II–era San Francisco, illuminates the "double duty" expected of Asian American women performers for the war effort. Like all unmarried young women, rhetoric of "national duty" encouraged them to deploy their femininity to boost servicemen's morale; as Asian women, they were also treated as "cultural ambassadors" who could prepare servicemen for the war in the Pacific Theater. I read the Chinatown nightclub as an Asian American space where performers could demonstrate cultural citizenship as Americans by fulfilling these demands for their gendered and racialized labor, especially in the interracial intimacies brokered there. I also discuss how this space was viewed as extraterritorial, as "Chinese" space within but not of the United States, which crucially shaped the American transpacific imagination. Thus, servicemen's fantasies at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, enacted in the nightclub, were projected onto Asian civilians during the war and beyond it––many of which endure, shaping US imaginations about and geopolitical relations in the world today.
Nicolyn Woodcock (Wed,) studied this question.