Introduction Under Scrutiny Over the past fifty years, the American government has been particularly interested in surveilling minority subjects. The now infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) illegally and clandestinely pursued scores of activists and organizations associated with the black liberation movement and civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Martin Luther King, Jr., members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Revolutionary Action Movement.1 But even before institutional circumspection of so-called subversive organizations and individuals, the U.S. government has tracked, in broad terms, Asian and Asian North American immigrants and citizens in the interest of Asian immigration control, job distribution, national security, and national health in both its literal and metaphorical terms.2 At the 1949 creation of the People''s Republic of China, Chinese Americans who retained ties with relatives in the communist nation were confronted by the FBI or deported through the use of "deceptive tactics" by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, argues Christina Klein, who documents how federal agents, nearly ten years later, swept through Chinatowns on both U.S.

coasts, tracking "suspected communists" who may have arrived in the nation illegally (34).3 In 1950, North Korea, backed by the strong communist allies of the Soviet Union and China, were seen to threaten international American safety and political harmony abroad. The Korean War, argues Klein, brought about a resurgence of the "yellow peril," in which Orientals were depicted as dehumanized, devious, and mysteriously dangerous, so much so that "Asianness" itself was to be prevented from entering U.S. shores "at all costs" (37). The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act revised the racial regulations of earlier immigration laws across nationalities, but American fears of Asian immigration again were stoked after France''s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the establishment of Vietnam''s communist north and democratic south, whose conflicts escalated into U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Through what is called racial formation, or how national, raced subjects are accepted, assimilated, or vilified by a dominant race, Asian North Americans have found themselves tracked, interned, or discriminated against. Such a historical trajectory of monitoring Asian subjects continues more subtly into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1997, political campaign contributor John Huang made headlines for his hefty but illegal donation to the Clinton campaign. The National Review capitalized on the incident by caricaturing members of the first family in yellow face, embellishing them with Chinese coolie hats, buck teeth, almond-shaped eyes, and yellow skin. Two years later, Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee was accused of fifty-nine counts of spying for China. He was acquitted in 2000 after the federal government failed to prove its case against him. While he was held in solitary confinement for eight months, the face of espionage in the media was decidedly Asian, specifically Chinese and Chinese American, eventually "the medium by which allegations of espionage and corruption were conveyed," argues Neil T. Gotanda (79).

Shortly after 9/11, a wave of Islamophobia swept the nation, targeting those who looked Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim, an attempt at what can only be understood as crude classification through visual (racial) cues, but without any clear definitional guideposts. These hate crimes affected innocent people who happened to look like the so-called enemy. Asian North Americans (those settling in the United States and Canada) have been targets of this sustained national monitoring, which has contributed to the changing meanings appended to Asian North Americans in the public media and the social imaginary.4 Scrutinized! examines the effects of surveillance on Asian North American characters, arguing that surveillance themes are literary responses to continued irrational anxieties over race. Because racialization is a product of self-protection that is created socially and culturally, a dominant population invests its energy honing narratives of racial difference that provide outcomes that favor itself. To the status quo, then, this solution is logical. But in novels discussed here, fears raised by the presence of Asian North Americans (such as Japanese Canadians at the advent of World War II, former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, or those persons hailing from the Middle East after 9/11) are upheld by ignorance or political convenience and eventually re-evaluated, sometimes to national embarrassment, in the absence of damaging evidence to convict assumed criminals. These fears are unsupportable and therefore irrational.

While race is a benign category, it also is a common visual marker by which we categorize ourselves and others as Asian North Americans, African Americans, Jews, white Americans, etc. Such seemingly simplistic racial categorization operates on a complex visual continuum, from the dark skin that renders one subject irrefutably "black" to the ambiguity of the mixed-race subject; from the undetectable "one drop" that facilitates racial passing (the ability of nonwhite subjects to be mistaken for white) to what Leslie Bow deems the "partly colored," exemplified by Asian Americans in the Jim Crow South who skirted the discrimination suffered by blacks but did not receive the privileges enjoyed by white Americans.5 North Americans have been visible for their physical racial differences from white Americans but, paradoxically, invisible subjects politically and legally. That is, at various points since the mid- eighteenth century, Orientals, stereotyped Asians in the American imagination, have been touted for their physical and cultural differences, exemplified in circus acts that showcased oddities such as the bound-footed Chinese woman Afong Moy and the "Siamese Twins" Chang and Eng Bunker. Accompanying this curiosity over their foreignness, they have been ostracized for their supposed moral menace to white welfare, vilified for their willingness to work hard for less pay than non-Asians, and then ironically overlooked for their future contributions to civic and political life (in the figure of the silent, model minority).6 Their inscrutability, or the contradiction between looking at Asian North Americans and overlooking them, drives this book''s thesis. While overtly racist acts such as exhibiting Asian subjects are confined to the past, Scrutinized! argues that current Asian North American novels'' fascination with mystery, detection, spying, tracking, and surveillance is a literary response to contemporary social agitation surrounding race. Surveillance is a calculus of sorts.

It gathers information by which it can read degrees of criminality and abnormal behavior. Institutions surveil not to pinpoint citizens'' good behavior, but to spot deviance among the unsuspecting. Scrutiny of raced subjects privileges a dominant gaze that makes legible a kind of Asian North American subjectivity. Scrutinized! suggests that a history of surveillance has created Asian North American subjects (authors and their characters) who watch themselves being watched. Their categorization as inscrutable ironically reveals a national obsession over their visibility and fear about their perceived illegibility. A History of Asian Surveillance I investigate acts of literary surveillance to gauge how raced subjects perceive, react to, evade, or subvert examination. The origins of Asian surveillance in the United States began in the nineteenth century when few Americans ever had seen Asians. Their initial fascination manifested itself in attendance at middle to late nineteenth-century exhibitions or theatrical acts, mentioned above, or in glimpses of a few "Hindoos" in the Salem, Massachusetts, harbor.

But curiosity turned into animosity when immigrant labor, specifically Chinese, appeared to threaten white employment, prompting a series of laws and legal acts that gave Asians increased negative visibility at the same time as mounting restrictions against their immigration and citizenship, the latter already prohibited by the Naturalization Act of 1790, attempted to render them invisible subjects. The Page Act of 1875 was the first in a series of legislative moves that barred Asians specifically. The race-based Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned most Chinese from immigration. Its subsequent extensions in 1888, 1892 (the Geary Act), and 1893 (the McCreary Amendment, demanding residence certificates) were precursors to the exclusion policies of 1907 and 1917. These later policies extended restrictions to Japanese subjects (including Koreans) and South Asians.7 In Canada, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 imposed a stiff head tax on Chinese immigrants. The fee was raised in 1900 and again in 1903 until it constituted an estimated two years'' worth of a Chinese immigrant laborer''s salary. The act''s strident corollary in 1923 prohibited nearly all Chinese immigration, including ethnic Chinese immigrants from nations other than China (this act was not abolished until 1947) (Roy 73).

In 1908, amid massive immigration from Europe, Canada required immigrants from India to arrive by "continuous journey" from their port of origin. In 1914, Gurdit Singh challenged this law by stopping in both Shanghai and Yokohama after departing from Hong Kong and before arriving in Vancouver. Like other early twentieth-century Asian immigrants who contested Canadian laws, his attempt failed and his entry was denied. Canada passed the 1919 Act t.