American Images of China, 1931-1949 Review

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American Images of China, 1931-1949 ReviewHenry Luce, publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines was the son of a China missionary and he used his special expertise and prejudices to influence American attitudes and policy toward China. Americans have long had an affinity for China that they do not, for example, have for India or Japan. The author demonstrates that American attitudes toward China were often mistaken, idealizing Generalisimo and Madame Chiang -- good-solid Methodists and with a Golden Retriever at their feet as they sat companionably on a Western couch. China, the author maintains, was an extension of the Western frontier in the eyes of the missionaries and a country ripe for Americanization and Christianity. Truth had difficulty breaking through.
Well, this is pretty well-plowed ground and American misconceptions of foreign countries have been pretty common. Whatever the mistakes of Luce and others in looking at China through rosy glasses they were not as far off base as those who extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union and Stalin during these same years.
The author does a good job making his point but this is a book of a type: academic, over-priced, 200 pages long, and well-researched and documented with extensive footnotes and a good bibliography. Why can't the many books of this type -- with limited sales potential -- simply be published on the web and be available to everyone free? It's not as if the author is going to lose a fortune in royalties. This book ranks around number two million on the Amazon list of best sellers.
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New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 Review

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New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 ReviewIn New York Before Chinatown John Kuo Wei Tchen explores the dramatic shift in representations of Chinese people throughout the 19th century that, he argues, are essential to the development of modern "white" identity. Tchen expands the late Arab/American critic Edward Said's theoretical framework "orientalism", which famously illuminated the fear, loathing and desire of the West for the East, to include cultural phenomena intrinsic to US American life. In doing so he argues that orientalism has been instrumental in forming US American cultural identity. Writing in 1999 Tchen modestly offers this study as an attempt to tease out "subtle patterns" in U.S. history. The academic discretion he employs in so framing his argument belies its power and, in a post 9/11 world seems almost quaint. There can be no question that orientalist scenarios are shaping our contemporary historical moment.
Beginning in the colonial period Tchen describes the struggle to establish a distinct American identity in orientalist terms. He writes, "The beginnings of US modernity in (the) decades after the revolution...were characterized by the rise of self-made men and radical changes in everyday economic, political and social life." The flux of this period was mediated through Chinese consumable goods as US American identities, caught between the modes of patrician Europe and the needs of the new nation, cohered. Tchen emphasizes the passion for collecting Chinese porcelain, which became known as "china" and the merchants who sold it "Chinamen and women." In this way oriental objects came to represent Asian people, a conflation that persists.
While the "tasteful display" of oriental objects was a signifier of wealth and class in Europe and colonial America such "luxury and profuseness" was viewed by some as cause for alarm. British novelist Tobias Smollet warned against oriental luxuries as harbingers of "Indigence and Effeminacy: which prepared the Minds of the People for Corruption (and) Subjugation." Smollet and his contemporaries read a threat into the absence of actual Chinese people that their luxury items represented. His use of feminine terms as a frame for moral degeneracy that prefigures a "fall" is a sexist tactic not exclusive to orientalist scenarios but nonetheless often finds its expression there. The eastern other often vacillates between a degenerate effeminacy and a robust, sexually threatening vitality: an iteration that Tchen describes later as the "Chinese devil man."
Tchen notes that despite such warnings the fashion for oriental objects ran unabated in colonial America. He writes, "Average Americans chafed at any sumptuary limits on consumables deemed foreign and therefore taboo." I'd argue that this early American exercise in white privilege is a scenario that plays itself out in our current moment not over Chinese tea, but Middle Eastern oil. Even as racialized representations of Arabs--which echo the effeminate/hyper-masculine representations of the 19th century Chinese--abound in our culture the hunger for Middle Eastern oil only grows. As in the "American century" our "desire for `oriental' goods (is) stronger than the threat of `oriental despotism.'"
This pattern of orientalist imagining of eastern others from paternalistic delight, to sexual fear (characterized by moral outrage) to demonization (characterized by physical and or mental abjection) plays itself out in the past via Tchen's study and the present through the ethno-racist tropes applied by the Bush presidency in its foreign policy. The arguments John Kuo Wei Tchen makes in New York Before Chinatown have, through the events of the past several years, become overt expressions of the material culture of the United States.New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 Overview

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Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San FranciscoÕs Chinatown (American Crossroads) Review

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Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San FranciscoÕs Chinatown (American Crossroads) ReviewEven though the United States was still a young country during the nineteenth century - where Shah begins his interweaving of public health, race, and citizenship - a strong enough sense of identity had been established to create a milieu of xenophobia with regard to non-Western cultures. In setting up the perspective of the alien as Other and tracing its influences throughout the health crises of San Francisco into the twentieth century, Shah establishes viral contamination as metaphor for cultural contamination. The threat from invaders comes not merely from their different cultural practices but also from their very biology, conflating a social threat with a physical one. White culture became the normative body by which Chinese difference was articulated.
As viruses and other contagious diseases were just beginning to be studied scientifically, some of the advancements were applied for the improvement of individuals while other advancements were used for the improvement of the society around those individuals through suppression or quarantine. A study of the maps of San Francisco that Shah provides read almost like an anatomy diagram, showing the growing cell of the foreign invader in the body politic. Maintenance of a spatial boundary, in order to control disease, transformed into maintenance of a racial boundary.
Throughout the text, Shah presents a considerable amount of evidence from many disparate sources, showing the collusion - often conscious, but sometimes not - of scientific, economic, legal, and other forces. Initially, one of the most important of the media shaped the city's perception of its Chinese foreign nationals through its articles, particularly through its use of pseudo-scientific jargon and its likening of the Chinese to vermin, another icon of plague; this also dehumanized the Chinese population by relegating them to the border spaces of civilized (white, Western) society.
Shah engages in critical debate about dominant versus subordinate social class, using his sources to illuminate developments within both Chinatown and the rest of San Francisco. By the end of Shah's text, the processes of governance transform the alien into the citizen much like the medication that can control and cure a disease, and he wonders if the ways of cultural assimilation are so strong that, in many ways, they eradicate something essential in the original individual. The patient has been saved, but at what cost?Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San FranciscoÕs Chinatown (American Crossroads) Overview

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