The Enclave in Judy Fong Bates’s Midnight at the Dragon Café: From Prison to Creation
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".