Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 30

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Popular Culture Review

demonstrates, the detective narrative always falls back into a “touristic” encounter,
with the pleasure of the tourists’ gaze — a gaze which reifies “chinatown” and
“chineseness” for popular consumption — inevitably ensnared within the work of
detection. As Urry notes, the tourist gaze is “directed to features of landscape and
townscape which separate them off from everyday and routine experiences” (Urry
1990, 26). The “chinatown” of the “Hell Money” episode attempts to enact this
separation, performing the distinction that “helps the mind to intensify its own
sense o f itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close
and what is far away” (Said, quoted in Anderson, 1987, 583). Again this process
ensures that “chinatown”, “The Little Comer of the Far East” (Anderson, 1990,
140), is suitably separated, marked, and always available to the detective’s gaze,
even if its mystery is ultimately indecipherable. To “know” chinatown is to know
that real mysteries do exist. Just like Mulder’s pursuit of UFO’s, or his poster
which reads “I Want To Believe”, Chinatown’s failure to disclose both perpetuates
and frustrates the detective narrative.

Chinese Boxes: Sydney and The Occidental Tourist
Marele Day’s The Case o f the Chinese Boxes features Claudia Valentine, a tough,
independent, wisecracking and female PI who belongs to the feminist detective
school of the revised hard-boiled. Like Chandler’s L.A., Day chooses to unfold
her narratives upon familiar urban scenes in Sydney, and like her predecessors,
Valentine knows her city well. But her knowledge has its limits. In Chinese Boxes
these limits are constructed as the urban “orient”; Valentine’s “occidental tourism”
takes the read er to “o th er” urban places w ith Chinese or otherw ise
“asian”associations: the Lantern Festival at Darling Harbour, the nearby classical
Chinese Gardens and a Temple in Glebe. In particular, Sydney’s suburb of
Cabramatta, a suburb which holds a number of Vietnamese merchants and residents,
is here presented as an alternative “chinatown”:
Cabramatta was as close as I’ve been to Asia without actually leaving
the country. But I felt foreign long before I got to Cabramatta; I felt
foreign at Five Dock. From there on it was red bricks and fibro. I had
entered the western suburbs. The city I knew like the back of my hand
dropped away and I needed the Gregory’s.
We drove through Bankstown...Bankstown was the end of the earth.
Cabramatta was even further out. We drove for miles and everything
looked the same. Finally the highway passed over Cabramatta railway
station.
“How do we get in there?” I asked Lucy.
“Do a loop.”