The chop suey letterform in historical Los Angeles Chinatowns

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the sociosemiotic practices of the chop suey letterform in three historical Chinatowns of Los Angeles. Created to index Chineseness in the 1880s America, the chop suey letterform has been controversial in use yet remains highly visible in today’s global linguistic landscape. This study examines visual data to capture the diachronic changes and synchronic variations in typographic ideologies over temporal space. It analyzes the dynamic meaning-making processes involved to construct ethnocultural identities, sustain power relations, and negotiate social re-positionings. In doing so, it proposes a new constitutive frame analytical approach to reveal the changeability and interconnectedness of discursive frames in political-economic transformations. On one hand, it critiques the chop suey letterform as symbolic capital utilized to create and sustain hegemonic regimes of racialization, domestication, and commodification. On the other hand, it highlights the progressive role the letterform plays through semiotic negotiation in social re-positionings and identity transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• Chop suey letterform
• typographic ideologies
• regimes of representation
• frame analysis
• linguistic landscape
• Chinatown

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Johan Järlehed (University of Gothenburg) and Li Wei Yang (The Huntington Library) for reading a draft of this paper. This project received support from a StudyLA Faculty Research Fellowship (2020), The Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, and a John Brockway Huntington Foundation Fellowship (2023–2024), The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I thank Stephen Coles of Letterform Archive (San Francisco) for this reference.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yu Li

Yu Li is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola Marymount University. A linguist by training, she conducts interdisciplinary research centering on the Chinese writing system. Her work has focused on visual representations of Chineseness in linguistic landscapes, typographic ideologies of Chinese-mimicking lettering styles, and East Asian calligraphy education. Her first book, The Chinese writing system in Asia: An interdisciplinary perspective, was published by Routledge in 2020 and offers a culturally rich study of how the Chinese writing system shapes personal and social identities in and beyond Asia.