AS205: Inbetween Peoples

In the first four chapters of Contagious Divides, Shah weaves the narrative of Chinese life in San Francisco from a public health viewpoint. Shah writes that the Chinese were discriminated against by health officials–turned away at hospitals (Shah, 70) and spied on during routine fumigation (Shah, 60). She suggests that that underlying cause was basic racism against Asiatic, especially Chinese, people. One could assume a myriad of reasons for this racism–Shah proposes that it may have been the Chinese’ unusual family life or well-known prostitution or overcrowding and filthy quarters. After the reading the chapters, I have come to the conclusion that the REAL underlying cause of the anti-Chinese sentiment was the whites’ discomfort with the economic influence the Chinese were beginning to establish in San Fransisco, in the form of both entrepreneurial business ventures as well as the negative impact on white professionals that were spun off of Opium use and prostitution.

In his inaugural address, Mayor Kalloch of San Francisco linked the Chinese presence in the city to white unemployment rates. In his speech he “outlined a WPC mandate to use the powers of city government to remedy the Chinese problem and provide for unemployed white workers.” (Shah, 34). Anti-Chinese sentiment was a key issue for the WPC, Working Party of California.  Shah writes, the “white labor party was fixated on the medical monstrosity” that the Chinese posed and went so far as to try and remove the Chinese from the city altogether and level chinatown (Shah, 36). The reason for the ill-will towards the Chinese, on the part of the WPC and whites in general, was economically motivated. The Chinese had jobs and “imperiled the white race by undercutting wages” (Shah, 107). The chinese not only were employed in unskilled labor vocations, they also had businesses which the whites used to city ordinances to zone into the same toxic industrial region of the city as “businesses that harmed the public health and comfort” (Shah, 71). 

U.S. circuit court Judge Lorenzo Sawyer perhaps put it best when he ruled illegal a city ordinance that attempted to regulate and impinge on the Chinese laundry business. The ”Ordinance’s ‘necessary tendency’ was to ’drive out of business’ all small Chinese laundries and give monopolistic power to large laundries established by “Caucasian capital” (66).

In deed, it was a concern for this “Caucasian capital” that drove whites to such great concern over the Chinese opium dens and prostitution. Shah writes, “For aspriing bourgeois men, the requirements of earning a living were achieved only by constant vigilence against multiple temptations” (Shah, 97). Though opium and hookers alone may have been cause for concern, the real reason they caused such a stir was their physical location: strategically positioned between the homes and work places of professional white men, the drugs and women distracted the everyday white worker and posed the threat of “vitiating the life of the youth and compromising the vigor of the users who productivity, biological and economic, would be lost to the nation” (Shah, 97).   

In conclusion, while it is clear that there was prevelent racism against the Chinese in 19th century San Francisco, it is also clear that there was economic motivation for these feelings of ill will.