The Enclave in Judy Fong Bates’s Midnight at the Dragon Café: From Prison to Creation

Abstract

The enclave is central to Judy Fong Bates’s Chinese Canadian novel Midnight at the Dragon Café (2004) in a geographical, social, psychological and literary sense. This paper analyzes the ambivalence of the enclave: it is linked to diverse forms of imprisonment and seems to be a fundamentally alienating topos at first, and yet gradually proves to be a locus of creativity. We explore the geographical circumscription related to the Chinese restaurant owned by the family of migrant characters in a Canadian small town in the 50s and 60s. We notably focus on the way in which spatial enclosure reflects the alienating situation of these ethnic “Others” in an Anglo-Canadian society that orientalizes them. This is superimposed with a personal, domestic form of alienation that is represented and strengthened by the layout of the restaurant’s private space. The family is thus ridden by unsaid secrets about the past and about the love affair between the mother and her stepson. However, we seek to demonstrate how the enclave also becomes a trigger to reconstruct ethnic and literary dominant norms. We therefore underline three elements: the main character’s in-between position and narrative voice in the Bildungsroman, the hybrid dynamics intrinsically associated with the heterotopic restaurant territory, and the creative enclaved position of the novel itself in the Anglo-Canadian literary landscape.