San Francisco Chinatown as a Romantic Gateway: Transpacific (Dis)continuity in Bret Harte’s “Wan Lee, the Pagan”

The paper explores San Francisco Chinatown as a transpacific gateway by looking at Bret Harte’s short story “Wan Lee, the Pagan” (1874). His adoption and appropriation of orientalist discourse, written at a time when the “Chinese question” was debated vehemently nationwide, magnifies San Francisco Chinatown as a porous liminal space for transglobal reconfiguration, in which the intersection between the eastern and the western, the premodern and the industrialized, the fictional and the real, is simultaneously emerging and thwarted. The paper examines Harte’s reworking of orientalist imagery in his quasi-journalistic account, rethinking late-nineteenth-century San Francisco Chinatown as a racialized contact zone in terms of its portal (dis)connectivity. While emblematic of the transpacific interconnectedness in the 1870s, Harte’s story amplifies the portal functionality of Chinatown as a multi-layered border space that exposes the internal fractures of modernity through racial confrontation beyond a romanticized, static, and horizontal façade of orientalist projection.