Book Review - Contagious Divides
Nayan Shah's 2001 book Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown provides a unique portrait of the different representations of Chinese immigrants in the twentieth century, particularly in San Francisco, and how they have changed in the intervening years. The book itself takes a dramatically close look at public health issues surrounding Chinese immigration as well, as the portrayal of Chinese immigrants at first was extremely negative. The urban landscape of San Francisco was dramatically changed by the large influx of Chinese emigrating to the US, and the public health concerns that followed were dramatic and stifling to racial expression and formation. Shah's book provides unique perspectives and deep research into the subject, offering an unflinching portrait of just how badly Chinese immigrants were treated from both a societal and a public health perspective from the 19th century on.
Shah's book is incredibly insightful in its portrayal of the complexities that played into the perception of public health and race in San Francisco, focusing on the period between the 19th century and post-World War II.
Shah relies on a number of concepts that he explores throughout the length of the book to explain his arguments. First, he explores the idea of space as it relates to racialization in the Chinatown of San Francisco through the details of how Chinatown was mapped and marked in the early twentieth century. In essence, Chinatown as a concept was itself an abstract one, its borders delineated through spurious and weak statistical surveys. It was at once the same kind of stereotypical tourist trap that out-of-state visitors would go to in order to enjoy its opium dens and restaurants, and something unique amongst all those towns in its meticulous categorizing and cataloguing. Chinatown shaped itself resident by resident, and white denizens of San Francisco defined it in their own ways - primarily, this was through derision and labeling of Chinese as dirty and disease-ridden. Shah argues that these images created of the Chinese "created nightmares of proximity between the diseased and the healthy"1. By stereotyping the Chinese as being literally sick, it created lines of spatial division that made it harder for these portrayals to be debunked.
Secondly, Shah explores the differences in behavior between the Chinese and Americans, and how that largely determined the negative portrayals of Chinese immigrants that were coming into San Francisco. Right away, natives started to look at them like animals, incapable of disciplining themselves. The perception of Chinese as filthy came from stories of varying truth regarding the hygiene of Chinese; furthermore, there was an institutionalized racism that cropped up among Americans that also prevented them from finding common ground with the Chinese. The perceived lack of proper medical care in China, plus the lower-class nature of many immigrants who came there, meant that their lower hygiene and higher likelihood disease were images that were soon attributed to most Chinese immigrants who came to the country. Cartoons of opium-dazed Chinese bachelors living in filth and squalor were commonplace in Californian publications, furthering the portrayal of the Chinese as sub-human creatures who literally could not take care of themselves. Chinese men were not the only ones subjected to these caricatures; Chinese women were also seen to be sexually promiscuous prostitutes who did not know how to properly act like women. Given these racially driven images, the Chinese had to actively combat them by appropriating American ideas of hygiene and Americanize themselves to great extents - "Chinese American social workers took up the discourses of hygiene, domesticity, and gender and reworked them in their advocacy for access to municipal social services and for improved housing"2. By educating themselves in this way, Chinese Americans could better incorporate into the political and social spheres of the rest of San Francisco.
Another aspect of Chinese socialization that is explored in Shah's book is the concept of the unique living arrangements that Chinese Americans had at the time in Chinatown. Instead of adapting to a nuclear-family situation, many Chinese bachelors lived together homosocially, and groups of women and children would also live together. This served as further ammo for groups to rail against the apparent lasciviousness and immorality of Chinese families by other American groups. However, this model started to change come the 1910s and 1920s, as Chinese women started to produce American-born children and form into their own nuclear family structures. After this happened, Americans began to look more sympathetically on Chinese Americans, seeing them as worthy of agency and needing their "help" to fit further into the American social structure. The Ping Yuen housing project in Chinatown started in 1951, and was one of the biggest initiatives toward Americanizing Chinese immigrants through rewarding traditionally organized families with a feeling of true citizenship; the project "symbolized a recognition of full citizenship, equality, and a pledge of civic inclusion"3. Usually, successful applicants for these projects included WWII veterans with proud American families who adhered to American traditions, making Ping Yuen a monument to the "ambivalent process by which ghettos created through racial segregation became valorized as ethnic cultural enclaves. During the middle of the twentieth century, descriptions of Chinatown as a site of danger, deviance, and epidemic disease were eclipsed by visions of sanitized exoticism"4. In essence, Ping Yuen was the safe part of Chinatown, where Chinese were seen as accessible by normal Americans, whereas "real" Chinese culture was still seen as alien and dangerous. It also did not bode well for Chinese bachelors living in Chinatown, as without a nuclear family structure they were still seen as undesirable, exposing a feminization of these men while soldiers and/or fathers were masculinized and seen as the ideal.
Furthermore, the many epidemics that were seen in Chinatown throughout the early twentieth century and beyond are covered by Shah's work. The 1900 bubonic plague epidemic, as well as the thirty-year incarceration of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island are particular subjects for Shah's study. In essence, there was a "nightmare of proximity" happening on the part of Chinese workers, as they did not trust the public health organizations that sought to quarantine them from the rest of the population5. Many working Chinese had the impression that public health officials were actually spreading disease, thinking that their vaccines were poisonous and often refusing them. At the same time, changing medical practices regarding the detection of bubonic plague led to uncertain changes in immigrant-centered medical procedures regarding plague. At Angel Island, increasingly invasive medical procedures, including microscopy, stool samples and everting eyelids, were commonplace, and were more often performed on lower-class Chinese immigrants who came to America in the steerage sections of various ships.
Shah's book, overall, offers a creative and well-balanced portrayal of the way Chinese immigrants were treated in San Francisco during their first major wave of immigration. His thesis is to demonstrate just how important public health, space and race issues were to understanding the fear of Asians that Americans felt at the time. The difference in social structures was of particular interest to Shah, portraying the Americanization of the Chinese as a necessary evil in order to receive support from whites, while the phenomenon of Chinese bachelors was seen as undesirable. Racial hierarchies developed in the early 20th century even between classes of Asians to determine who was more desired; this created substantial and interesting conflicts in the way that Chinese were forced to self-identify or assimilate. The vast differences between the Chinese and American discourse in the Chinatown of San Francisco is explored in great depth by Shah. In short, the book is primarily meant for scholars of Sino-American history, and those interested in the effects WWII-era racialization had on immigrant groups in America, offering an incredibly rewarding read on these subjects.
References
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
(University of California Press, 2001).
