Cultural Colonization in "Its Wavering Image" Sui Sin Far College

Sui Sin Far’s “Its Wavering Image” is a short story depicting a Chinese-American, young woman whom a White journalist beguiles for a story about the American Chinatown in which she lives. His Eurocentric proclivities lead him to impose his social attitude on her, thereby ruining her cohesion of self and fragmenting her identity with the exposure to a non-constructive, discriminatory perspective. Despite the poignant resonance of cultural colonization in Far’s text, the art of the story does detract from the deterministic elements of the double consciousness that results in the protagonist, Pan, in response to Mark Carson’s essentialist universalism regarding race.

The story delineates the harsh reality of Pan’s maturation apropos of the ethnic aspect of her identity, and it begins with a very explicit explanation of her starting point. The short story describes her as being mixed—half White and half Chinese. It establishes that she has lived in Chinatown all her life and, perhaps even more significant, that “if she were different in any sense from those around her, she gave little thought to it” (Belasco & Johnson 308). It specifically proceeds thereafter to hold Mark Carson responsible for Pan’s difficulty reconciling two...