Disease, Disability, and the Alien Body in the Literature of Sui Sin Far

She was a cripple. A fall had twisted her legs so that she moved around with difficulty and scarred her face so terribly that none save Lin John cared to look upon it.

—Sui Sin Far (“Chinese Lily,” Mrs. Spring 101)

[C]onsidering that I still limp and bear traces of sickness, I am fortunate to secure any work at all.

—Sui Sin Far (“Leaves” 227)

Scholars in Asian American and feminist studies have heralded Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton [1865–1914]) as one of the founding figures of Asian North American literature, lauding her efforts to combat anti-Chinese racism through her fiction, personal essays, and journalism.¹ In this essay, I draw attention to a neglected theme in Sui Sin Far’s writings, arguing that her representations of illness and disability foreground and resist the biopolitical dimensions of the anti-Chinese movement in North America.² Scientific and medical discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries characterized Chinese and other Asian immigrants as threats to public health, yet Sui Sin Far’s writings counter this characterization by demonstrating that racial inequality rendered the Chinese in North America vulnerable to illness and disability.³ Her writing thus reconfigures illness and disability as signs of imperialist violence rather than as symptoms of racial contamination.

Sui Sin Far further theorizes that Chinese women in North America often experience imperialist violence through or on behalf of the social formation of heterosexual marriage. Congruently, she suggests that disability inspires some women to pursue social formations other than heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Finally, by bringing diseased and disabled female characters to the center of her fiction, Sui Sin Far revises the sentimental literary tradition to accommodate the complex intersection of racism, sexism, and disability prejudice in the lives of Chinese women in North America, thereby imagining possibilities for survival for the “impossible subjects” (Ngai 5) of North American empire.

The Advent of Medicalized Nativism

Operating in confluence with North American trade unionists’ arguments against Chinese laborers in the 1870s, two health-related discourses—biological racism and public health—influenced popular opinion against the Chinese in North America and fostered public support for immigration exclusion.⁴ While the “science” of biological racism characterized Chinese and other racialized peoples as innately inferior in intelligence, ability, and appearance,⁵ Nayan Shah explains that the emerging field of public health characterized them as prone to contagious diseases (Contagious 1) because of their non-Western lifestyles and medical practices (11) and their nonnormative gender and sexual formations (79), including bachelor societies and extended kinship networks (12), which arose in response to the disproportionate exclusion of Chinese women.⁶

In addition to facilitating the passage of the Chinese and other race-based exclusion laws, biological racism and public health discourses inspired several immigration restrictions and exclusions explicitly directed at the disabled and diseased, yet implicitly directed at nonwhite foreigners. California’s 1872 immigration law established a one-thousand-dollar bond for any “lunatic, idiot, deaf, dumb, blind, cripple or infirm person not members of families, or who are likely to become permanently a public charge” (qtd. in Chan 98). This law, passed amid great anti-Chinese fervor in California, provided an opportunity for state officials to turn away Chinese and other Asian immigrants on the pretext of any number of imprecise diagnoses ranging from insanity to suspicion of prostitution.

In August 1882, just three months after the Chinese Exclusion Act (US Cong. Act to Execute) was passed, the US Congress approved An Act to Regulate Immigration, which echoed California’s 1872 immigration law by prohibiting entry to any “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” This second federal exclusion law extended and strengthened the new gatekeeping apparatus established under the Chinese Exclusion Act and provided a flexible mechanism for excluding immigrants believed to be racially inferior and predisposed toward disease. This law authorized immigration officials to profile and physically examine newcomers, an invasive and dehumanizing process Shah refers to as crossing the medical border (Contagious 179...