In spring 2003, when scientists were scrambling to search for
the causative pathogen and mode of transmission of SARS, the public
was tormented with anxiety and fear which in some cases fermented
xenophobia and created racial and ethnic tension.
On an MIT website, an insidious April fool’s hoax surfaced,
warning of infected employees at a restaurant in Boston’s
Chinatown. The rumor spread quickly by mouth and email that there
was widespread contagion in the area. Meanwhile, in New York City,
a healthy Vietnamese owner of a Chinese restaurant was bombarded
with consolatory phone calls, online postings, and the local newsprint
about his own death caused by SARS. Needless to say, these hoaxes
and rumors swirled and swept like hurricanes; as a result, businesses
in both communities suffered a tremendous blow from the “unfounded
blather” (Schram). Across the nation, anxiety and fear,
generated by the news about the invisible and indeterminate contagion
of the epidemic, were visible on the streets and corners of Chinatown
communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia
as well as in Boston and New York. Restaurants lost their clientele,
and tourists stayed shy of the districts. Wedding banquets were
cancelled, and the crowded Chinatown streets suddenly appeared
deserted (Hopkins). As David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate, commented
in The Wall Street Journal on April 28, “Just as
the media recently gave us a . . . particularly intimate experience
of war, we’re now getting a new and particularly fearsome
experience of a public-health crisis with SARS – in which
a media-transmitted epidemic of concern for personal safety outpaces
the risk to public health of the actual virus” (qtd. in
Pierce 20).
Needless to say, the public soon discovered that the “epidemic”
in those areas had been a hoax, and the businesses slowly resumed
their former momentum. However, the surge of racial and ethnic
discrimination in the community in response to the SARS scare
is worth our close attention.
What Judy Collins of Massachusetts had experienced during the
SARS scare was just this kind of discrimination. Judy and her
husband, Dick, went to Guangzhou, China, in March when the news
about the mysterious disease had just broken out. Having previously
adopted two girls from China – eight-year-old Brittany and
five-year-old Madison – the Collins went there again to
bring back a third child, this time a two-year-old boy, Sean.
When Judy and Dick were there, the American consulate had dismissed
all nonessential personnel in response to SARS, but it remained
open for adoptions. Judy stayed alert. Even though she knew that
the place where Sean came from had no SARS cases, she kept herself
informed by calling epidemiologists, checking the Center for Disease
Control’s website, and monitoring everyone for any SARS
symptoms. When they returned to Massachusetts, however, the local
community panicked. The school requested their children be kept
home for ten days though they had no symptoms at all. Similarly,
Dick developed a rash after sitting in their hot tub; despite
the fact that a rash is not one of the primary symptoms of SARS,
his physician refused to treat him and sent him instead to the
emergency room where he had to enter through a private door. The
neighbors came to visit the new child, but they stopped at the
end of the driveway, inquiring if everyone in the family was all
right. No one in Judy’s family got SARS; nevertheless, people
feared they carried the disease because of their recent trip to
China and their adopted children (Pierce 21-22).
The level of anxiety was nearly tangible. In Great Britain, SARS
was referred to as “the next AIDS” in newspapers,
though the claim was later proven to be unfounded. In fact, the
7,000 probable cases worldwide by early May paled in comparison
to the two million victims of tuberculosis each year. SARS traveled
fast, but fear traveled even faster. The widely-circulated stories
made it seem as if people in the North American Asian communities
were carriers of the disease even though SARS is not a disease
of ethnicity. Fueled by fear, these stories were prejudicial and
discriminatory.
Such widespread fear of an epidemic and its
consequences is not unprecedented in American history. The San
Francisco bubonic plague in 1900 was another such case. On March
6, 1900, the assistant city physician, Dr. Frank P. Wilson, was
called to the basement of the Globe Hotel in San Francisco to
examine the dead body of Wing Chung Ging, a forty-one-year-old
Chinese resident (Shah 120). 1. The doctor
noticed swollen lymph nodes in the groin of the body. After the
smears of the glands was tested, Dr. Wilfred Kellogg, a city bacteriologist,
read the preliminary microscopic study and suspected that Ging
had died of bubonic plague. While the smears were rushed to the
bacteriological laboratory for further examination, the city ordered
an immediate quarantine of Chinatown. Early the next morning,
thirty-two police officers were dispatched to the Chinese quarter,
removing all whites from the affected area and allowing no one
to enter it. The area was sealed off from the rest of the city
by noon on March 7 (Shah 120).
Bubonic plague had a notorious history. In the 1890s, the epidemic
hit major cities in China and India, causing devastating consequences.
The recorded death toll in India alone exceeded twelve million
from 1896 to 1930 (Shah 125). Because of the plague, trade ports
in Hong Kong, Honolulu, Bombay, and Sydney took a beating. Even
though bubonic plague had never attacked North America before
1900, public health authorities, white businessmen, and the Chinese
residents in America all followed the news.
When the story about the Ging case broke out, the San Francisco
municipal and federal health officials believed that they could
contain the epidemic through quarantine, which was an extraordinary
measure. It was based on the “logic of public health measures”
that “routinely conflated deadly disease” with “Chinese
race and residence.” Hence, dividing the contaminated from
the uncontaminated “along racial lines” would be the
most effective way to contain the horrible bubonic plague (Shah
121). In other words, public health management and inadequate
medical knowledge inflamed prevailing prejudices and fears about
the menace of Chinese immigrants and Chinatown. Chinatown was
an easy and natural target since it had long been perceived as
deficient in sanitary measures and thus a hot bed of diseases.
One of the features of the epidemic disease is its transgression
of boundaries, as Nayan Shah and Susan Craddock have observed,
hence the need to draw lines, to quarantine.
In fact, Wing Chung Ging probably did not die of bubonic plaque.
He had been ill for six months before his death. On February 7,
he called for a doctor, complaining of pains in the chest, back,
and bladder. A week later, his fever and pains had subsided, but
he suffered from urethral discharges, swelling in his right groin,
and a lame right leg. The doctor suspected that he had been afflicted
with gonorrhea. His conditions worsened in the subsequent two
weeks, and he collapsed suddenly and died on March 6. Even though
some of his symptoms – the fever, severe headache, extreme
fatigue, painful swelling of lymph glands in the groin –
signaled bubonic plague, some believed that he could have died
of typhoid or venereal disease since bubonic plague patients usually
died more rapidly. Regardless, many expressed their astonishment
at the city’s decision to quarantine the entire Chinatown
community (Shah 132). With all whites being removed from the district
while no one was allowed to enter, Chinatown was blockaded like
“a besieged city” from the rest of San Francisco overnight
(Craddock 128, 133). Some Chinatown business owners protested
because such large-scaled quarantine seriously disrupted Chinese
business. Chinatown, “the conflation of race and place,”
“provided the illusion of impermeable boundaries”
of racial geography which seemed to promise containment. But,
as we can see now, the “blockade of Chinatown” was
an “explicit act of racial discrimination against Chinese
residents” (Shah 129, 132).
In late April, when four suspicious deaths were reported in the
Chinese quarter over three days, the Public Health Service intervened
to recommend a mass inoculation of San Francisco’s Chinese
population. The secretary of the treasury then ordered a restriction
on public travel for “Asiatics or other races particularly
liable to the disease.” With this ordinance, the government
confirmed the putative racial susceptibility to bubonic plague
(Shah 133).
Racial tension was high. Many Chinese gathered protesting against
the mass vaccination campaign. Some noted that, since the vaccination
was different from the smallpox immunization, the inoculation
would be life-threatening to a frail person. Others proposed to
shut down Chinatown businesses in protest, a suggestion that won
overwhelming support from the crowd. Many businesses did indeed
shut down when physicians and health workers went to give inoculations
in Chinatown. Circulars accused the Board of Health of attempting
to “poison the Chinese by injecting drugs under the skin”
(Shah 134-35).
These actions then led to rumors about the source of bubonic plague
and suspicion about the motivation of the public health officials.
When the health officials tried to eliminate rats by nailing dead
fish on wooden boards and placing them in the sewers, they filled
the fishes’ abdominal cavity with arsenic paste. But the
rumor began to circulate that the officials filled the fish with
bacilli of bubonic plague and fed them to the rats so that “these
animals would contract the disease and carry it among the Chinese.”
The fear, mistrust, and suspicion of the Chinese toward the public
health officials came, in turn, from racial tension resulting
from the racially discriminatory policy of the city government
(Shah 135).
On June 15, 1900, Judge William Morrow ordered quarantine to be
lifted. The quarantine of the Chinese, he argued, was “an
act based more on discrimination than on maintaining the public’s
health.” While recognizing that the purpose of quarantine
was to isolate those infected from those who were not, Morrows
believed it wrong to enact the “cordoning of an entire district
composed overwhelmingly of uninfected individuals” (Craddock
136). He “admonished the health authorities for making Chinese
residents more vulnerable by not strenuously isolating the houses
of plague victims within the quarantined district.” The
Board of Health was ordered to stop the general quarantine of
Chinatown and to quarantine only individual buildings where plague
victims or their contacts had resided (Shah 144).
Many recent studies have called our attention to how “race,
place, and culture” could have been fused together into
an essential triangle to explain epidemics (see Anderson, Craddock,
Deverell, Shah, and Stern). For example, Kay Anderson and Susan
Craddock have shown respectively that Chinatown, being in Vancouver,
San Francisco, or elsewhere, was preserved as the headquarters
of disease. In a government report prepared by the City of San
Francisco in 1880, Chinatown was called “a nuisance”
and a “cancer spot” that “endangers” the
otherwise “healthy conditions” of the city (Craddock
69, 80). Such constructions of Chinatown often created an image
of pathologized space and promoted “racialized spatialization
and racial tension. Even scientific research could be tainted
to serve that rhetoric. Physicians in America, attempting to pinpoint
patterns of susceptibility to germ access, ascribed the plague
to Asians. Surgeon General Walter Wyman even called the plague
a ‘rice-eaters’ disease’” (Craddock 130).
Indeed, fear of epidemic is related to the fear of the unknown,
often expressed during our contact with different ethnic groups.
Debbie Liu, a thirteen-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl, sent a
letter to Langley Advance in May 2003, complaining that
she and her sister encountered unexpected racial slurs in May
while taking a walk on street. Two unknown teenagers in a passing
car called them “SARS,” which made the two girls feel
“insulted and angered.” Liu wrote:
We can’t blame Asian people that they started SARS.
It’s totally unfair and rude. SARS doesn’t have
eyes or anything; it can’t see which people it’s
going to.
My sister and I have never left Canada since we arrived here
seven years ago. I’m only 13 years old and I’m being
called, “SARS.” Do you want to be called, “SARS,”
huh? How would you feel if a stupid person came up to your face
and called you “SARS”?
When I first came to Canada, I thought people in Canada were
nice, friendly, and polite people. Then I’ve been called
this.
My thoughts were destroyed, and I’ve begun to think that
they’re rude, unfriendly, and immature. But I don’t
want to think like that. They’re acting like Germans in
World War II, calling Jews “Dirty Jews.” (Liu)
It is important to note the change in the girls resulting from
this incident, the reverse racism they felt toward others. In
addition, the comparison of this racial encounter with fascism
and anti-Semitism during WWII is frighteningly and strikingly
accurate.
In their study of the U.S policy concerning the U.S.-Mexico border
in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Alexandra Stern
and Howard Markel trace the development from several cases of
fever in El Paso in 1916 to the U.S. Public Health Service’s
unilateral decision to implement quarantine on “all persons
coming to El Paso from Mexico” in 1917 (Stern 104). Stern
argues in another essay that “the discourses and practices
of medicine and social control that were critical to inventing
multiple boundaries in the 1910s were folded into eugenic theories
of difference and moved into the national imaginary in the 1920s.”
The exhortations of eugenicists “pathologied the extremities
of the body politic and helped to shape restrictive legislation
as well as justify the establishment of the Border Control in
1924” (81). Because of the dominant view that tended to
stereotype Mexicans as “a class of equally degraded, poverty-stricken
laborers living in rat-infested congregations,” the outbreak
of the plague epidemic in Los Angeles in 1924 became, in William
Deverell’s term, “peculiarly Mexicanized.” To
many whites, the plague “had rendered Mexicans unusually
dangerous” (188, 191). The disease, in other words, had
been associated with ethnicity. Such racial and ethnic discrimination
had happened to Jews, Germans, Haitians, Irish, and other ethnic
groups as well in relatively recent cultural history. In the mid-nineteenth
century, for example, with the arrival of millions of immigrants
from Europe, “vague fears of strangers” coalesced
into specific stigmatization of the Irish. Many Irish immigrants
were in New York, and a large number of sick or disabled newcomers
strained existing medical facilities. Coupled with the preexisting
anti-Catholic sentiments and the large scale of immigration, this
development sent shock waves of apprehension through native-born
Americans. When confronted with the threat of cholera and Irish
Catholics, the officials of the public health chose to go beyond
quarantine to the “exclusion of those foreign-born who menaced
the community’s health and well-being” (Kraut ).
In addition to the recent SARS scare, there have been a number
of other cases in nature which have triggered horror and brought
on racialized rhetoric. For example, Chinese mitten crabs have
been said to be “stealing” anglers’ bait and
constituting “a threat to levees” in the Sacramento
region. Mitten crabs are Chinese natives, and they are inclined
to burrow holes in levees and stream banks. They damage rice crops
and carry a lung fluke that has caused symptoms similar to tuberculosis
in millions of Asians. In 1992, the first Chinese mitten crab
was captured by a South Bay shrimp fisherman; in 1996, it was
said that only forty-five crabs had been found in the Delta; and
then, by 1997, 20,000 were caught. So far, no crab damage has
been observed, and the government is not dealing with this issue.
But the prospect of the spread of crab larvae in currents out
of San Francisco Bay has already triggered alarm and worry in
some who ask, “If these things are multiplying to the levels
they’re estimating, what’s going to happen in two
or three years?” (Vogel).
In November 2002, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission took emergency
action to defend against, as P. J. Perea termed it, the “Asian
Carp Invasion.” According to the news release, three U.S.
federal agencies, the International Joint Commission, and the
Great Lakes Fishery Commission worked jointly to “defend
against an invasive species threat” to the Great Lakes region.
“These fish are extremely prolific, rapidly advancing their
way up the Mississippi River toward the Great Lakes via the canal
and threatening the biological integrity of the Great Lakes”
(Great Lakes) (italics mine). It is said that Asian carp grow
fast – up to 100 pounds and four feet long. Well-adapted
to the climate of the region, they would “compete for food”
with other “valuable” fish and could potentially develop
to become a “dominant species” in the Great Lakes.
Government agencies provided backup power hardware for an electrical
barrier in Chicago to protect against the vicious invaders. The
system uses electricity to repel fish. Officials hope to block
the migration of species between the Mississippi Rivers and the
Great Lakes.
The racialized rhetoric in these reports is alarming. Words such
as “migration,” “threats,” “invade,”
“steal,” and “compete” recur throughout,
and such rhetoric is not entirely unfamiliar; it echoes the language
directed against immigrant aliens. A Canadian politician, for
example, was forced to apologize for her own racist remarks at
the University of Winnipeg in November 2000. In her speech, she
told the audience that she was concerned about the immigration
system of the country. She mentioned problems such as immigrants
in Toronto who supported Tamil terrorists and an influx of Asians
on the West Coast. She then said, “I call it the Asian invasion
. . . the Asian students that have come over to Canada have pressured
the university system” so much so that Canadian students
“could not even get into some of our university programs
in Vancouver and Victoria” (Ditchburn).
It has been two years since the epidemic strain of SARS was last
reported in June of 2003. In Beijing and Guangzhou, “public
hysteria about the disease” is said to have subsided, giving
way to “public nonchalance.” Dr. Kathryn V. Holmes,
a prominent microbiologist, has recently been quoted as declaring
that “SARS no longer existed in the wild and that the virus
no longer presented a serious health threat to the world.”
Very few people, in China and North America alike, talk about
it, and the epidemic seems to have become part of history (Yardley).
Nevertheless, the cultural and racial impact brought on by the
SARS epidemic, and of course the other cases I have cited in this
paper, should never be forgotten. No one knows for sure at this
point if SARS will ever strike again. But it is certain that we
will confront various forms of epidemic and serious disease sometime
in the future. Fear, suspicions, and tension could corrode already
tenuous racial and ethnic relationships. It is crucial for us
to remember the past and understand that encountering the Other
has become an inevitable necessity in our global, cultural environment
today. While this fact has created unprecedented opportunities,
it has also posed formidable new challenges. Being open-minded
and willing to respect and even embrace the Other is the key to
mutual understanding and a racially harmonious relationship, not
to mention our success in fighting epidemics and other unknown
diseases.
Notes
1. The name of the patient has also been
identified as “Chick Gin.” See Craddock, 126-27.
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