Contagious Divides Summary

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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 …show more content…

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

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