Containment and Interdependence: Epidemic Logics in Asian American Racialization

In 1899, when a few cases of bubonic plague appeared in Honolulu, the US military invaded Chinatown. Ten thousand residents—primarily Chinese and Japanese—were quarantined and barred from leaving as the Honolulu Board of Health fumigated all houses within 14 blocks. Though health officials already had evidence that the plague was carried by rats, they instead blamed "filthy" and "exceedingly unclean" Asian inhabitants.¹ After more cases emerged, the Public Health Service relocated 4,500 Chinese residents to a quarantine camp and ordered a controlled burn of buildings where victims had died.² The blaze was picked up by a strong wind and spread over 38 acres. It destroyed 4,000 homes while the district's rats fled, carrying the plague to other neighborhoods and ports.³

The razing of Honolulu's Chinatown exemplifies the destructiveness of "epidemic logic," which philosopher Linda Singer likens to advertising. Whereas advertisers pose problems they promise to solve through consumer goods, governing officials stoke anxieties they propose to contain through increasingly forceful interventions; both rely on producing the very needs they promise to fulfill. This is the paradox of epidemic logic: even as viral proliferation exposes our vulnerability to the bodies and decisions of others, prevailing responses treat bodies and communities as self-containing and isolatable. Although epidemic logic pursues containment in part through physical measures such as quarantines and deportations, it is primarily a rhetorical project that must first confine diseases to particular bodies before excising them from the body politic. This brief article considers the limitations of confinement logic as well as its foil in epidemic reasoning: interdependence. I survey the use of epidemic rhetorics to contain and control Asian Americans before exploring how rhetorics of interdependence can connect Asian American racialization with other racial histories and exigencies. Building from these connections, I argue that any pursuit of justice for Asian Americans must respond to and take responsibility for the imbrications of our stories with anti-Blackness, colonization, and heteronormativity—that this difficult work of relating is necessary for breaking cycles of containment and devastation.

Rhetorics of Containment

Throughout North American history, Chinese people appear frequently as "medical scapegoats,"⁴ whose pathologization collapses suspected disease with the supposed depravity of sexual and gender deviance. In 1899, Honolulu's officials drew from rhetorical precedents in San Francisco, where Chinatown's homosocial "bachelor societies" were regarded as sites of both physical filth and sexual perversion. Preceding decades had witnessed a sharp escalation of anti-Chinese sentiment, after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad released 10,000 Chinese workers back into a diminished labor market. Scapegoating Chinese people was more easily achieved by equating them with disease and degeneracy than by accusing them of job theft. Though San Francisco's first and deadliest smallpox outbreak in 1868 had not been connected to Chinese communities, subsequent outbreaks in 1876, 1881, and 1887 were all pinned on Chinese residents. Every home in Chinatown was fumigated and placed under surveillance. Homes and businesses were condemned or demolished. And still—likely because the cases were actually arriving with migrants from the eastern United States⁵—smallpox continued to rage through white households.

Although rhetorical containment is a poor tactic for controlling actual diseases, it is devastatingly effective in curtailing the rights of "undesirable" citizens. The association of Chinese bodies with destitution was more directive than description, making Chinese communities more vulnerable to poverty and illness. Chinese immigrants were sequestered into cramped neighborhoods with rampant police extortion and denied regular city services like waste removal, ensuring that Chinatown would actually resemble the squalid living conditions for which it had become notorious. When epidemics appeared in the city—even though Chinatown experienced fewer smallpox cases per capita than the rest of San Francisco⁶—Chinese patients were barred from public hospitals for fear of contamination.⁷ Rhetorical containment did not actually prevent the spread of disease, but it did render Chinese populations disproportionately vulnerable to illness and death. The discursive attachment of the virus to their bodies also designated them as physical containers through which the city sought to protect its...