Shah,
Nayan Contagious Divides: Epidemics and
Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkley: University of California Press,
2001.
Nayan Shah is a leading expert in Asian American studies
and serves as professor at the University of California. His work, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in
San Francisco’s Chinatown explores how race, citizenship, and public health
combined to illustrate the differences between the culture of Chinese
immigrants and white norms in public-health knowledge and policy in San Francisco.
Shah discusses how this knowledge impacted social lives, politics, and cultural
expression. Contagious Divides
investigates what it meant to be a citizen of Chinese race in nineteenth and
twentieth-century San Francisco.
Shah
begins with the mapping of Chinatown as an immigrant enclave by investigations
of health authorities. These investigations provided descriptions of filthy and
unsanitary living conditions. The results of the health investigations led to descriptions
that would found the body of “knowledge” that Chinese immigrants and their unhygienic
habits were the source of epidemic diseases. Chinese social behavior was
pointed to as the cultural cause of medical menaces. Chinese immigrants were
compared to farm animals and depicted as inhuman and inferior. At the beginning
of Chinese settlement in San Francisco Chinese immigrants were considered more
animalistic than citizens. The health mapping of Chinatown cemented the
relationship between Chinese race and place.
Contagious Divides
next addresses the domestic sphere of Chinese culture. In a chapter entitled “The
Dangers of Queer Domesticity,” Shah brings to life the perception white
Americans had of Chinese homes. Most American domestic relations consisted of a
heterosexual couple and children. However, in Chinatown Chinese men were mostly
bachelors and the few Chinese female immigrants there were all considered syphilitic
prostitutes. Gender roles, household numbers, spatial arrangements, and a lack
of perceived family structure was seen as not only different from American domestic
norms, but also as a threat to the racial order and national power. Another
space credited with being a place of Chinese degradation were opium dens.
Considered by Americans to be semipublic resorts that would seduce white
tourists, opium dens generated an inappropriate sociability with Chinese
immigrants that created an atmosphere responsible for destroying the morals,
manhood, and health of white Americans. Because of their queer domesticity and
morally loose social practices, Chinese immigrants were not considered
citizens.
According to Shah, the struggle for respectable
domesticity and American cultural citizenship rested on the shoulders of Chinese
women. Chinese immigrants were thought to intentionally infect whites with
diseases using their best weapon: Chinese female prostitutes. White Americans
viewed this racial war as being raged by mercenary prostitutes who would infect
young white boys with syphilis. Dr. Mary Sawtelle blamed Chinese women alone
for the syphilis pandemic on the Pacific Coast.[1] To many white Americans
like Dr. Sawtelle, Chinese prostitutes embodied syphilis.
Hygiene was considered to be women’s nature and
responsibility. This gendered asymmetry led white women in San Francisco to
train Chinese women in the tenets of middle-class domesticity and conversion to
Christianity. Americans associated hygiene with civilization and whiteness in
the materiality of furnishings, decorations, and odors. To be considered a
citizen, one would need to be clean, white, and Christian.
Shah
argues that the bubonic plague crisis in Chinatown was a pivotal moment in the
establishment of public health power. Amidst bouts of bubonic plague and other
epidemic diseases, San Francisco employed quarantines on Chinatown. City health
authorities believed contamination could be separated along racial lines. In
Chinatown, whites could come and go, but those of Chinese race were expected to
remain quarantined. The filth and overcrowding associated with Chinatown was
believed to incubate bubonic plague. City health officials responded with the
quarantine, disinfection, treatment, and inoculation of all residents of
Chinatown. Epidemic logic justified the extraordinary invention of mass
quarantine, the mobilization of resources, and the disruption of daily life in
Chinatown.
The Chinese response to the quarantine and the eventual
inoculation campaign is interesting. Shah points out three general Chinese reactions:
refusal to believe there was an epidemic disease, belief in a disease other
than bubonic plague, and the assumption that the cause of the epidemic was from
injections of bubonic plague into Chinese residents of Chinatown. The multiple
quarantines imposed on Chinatown produced Chinese economic repercussions,
protests, and boycotts. Chinese immigrants also exhibited intra-race
discrimination when they would treat violently any fellow Chinatown resident
who sought out the care of white doctors for illnesses. Combined with the
multiple epidemics, quarantines, and the destruction after the 1906 earthquake,
the health response in San Francisco ultimately led to the sanitary
surveillance and management of Chinatown that would later expand throughout the
United States. White property owners and elite Chinese merchants developed
plans to rebuild Chinatown in a sanitary manner as an enclave and tourist
destination. Sanitary management proved that Chinese immigrants could be viewed
as citizen subjects if they abided by prescribed hygiene and sanitary
requirements.
Contagious Divides
also surveys the politics of American/Chinese labor and their respective
standards of living. White Americans felt economically threatened by Chinese
laborers for jobs, health, and the American way of life. Additionally, the
Chinese medical menace was believed to be a threat to white households and
livelihoods. Consumer campaigns began to link the white American security of
workplaces with that of white domestic spaces. For instance, the buy-the-union-label
campaigns in the first decade of the twentieth century discouraged the purchase
and use of Chinese cigars in order to keep Chinese diseases out of American homes
and to enact an economic boycott on Chinese cigar manufacturing. In doing so,
the American standard of living would be upheld, white worker’s families,
livelihoods, homes, and health would be protected.
As San Francisco began to expect epidemic diseases to
enter its city, Chinese immigrant-medical inspections were thought to be more
important than ever. Initial quarantine and rigorous health inspections would
serve as the defense against epidemic diseases. San Francisco turned medical
inspections into a screening process for the fitness of future citizens. For
example, the diagnosis of a bacterial disease in a prospective Chinese
immigrant linked disability with the immigrant’s potential fitness for employment.
Health officials considered the medical inspections to be not just about
stopping the spread of epidemic diseases, but as a way to develop a certain
criteria to determine the long-term consequences of citizenship. The health
inspections answered the question, “What kind of citizen would the immigrant
be?”
One
outstanding aspect of Contagious Divides
is the chronicling of poetry left by detained Chinese immigrants on Angel
Island. The poetry reveals the realities of Chinese detainment and gave the
detainees a platform from which to record their experiences. At the time,
health officials discounted Chinese poetry and satire reports because it was presumed
that the immigrants could know nothing and were in essence not fit for
citizenship.
In
order for Chinese immigrants to fully be integrated into American society,
Chinese conduct and living spaces would need to be standardized according to
American practices. “The imperatives of health cemented the relationship
between conduct and citizenship.”[2] Middle-class domesticity
would be the standard immigrants were held against, including adult male
responsibility, female domestic caretaking, and reproduction that was
legitimized by marriage.
As
the twentieth century wore on, Chinatown residents experienced a dramatic shift
in the way they were perceived by Americans. Shah writes, “They went from being
reviled and demonized at the turn of the century to being considered deserving
and worthy of assistance in the mid-twentieth century.”[3] Finally, the result of
decades of public health reform would signify that Chinese immigrants were to
be considered citizens.
Contagious Divides conclusively
investigates how race, health, and citizenship in nineteenth and twentieth century
America provided a foundation for Chinese Americans to reform social conditions
of the community and become American citizens. Through the efforts of public
health reform and the lens of American domestic norms, Chinese immigrants dispelled
the long-held belief of their supposed inhumanity and animalistic
characteristics.
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