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0 Nineteenth-century San Francisco journalists, politicians, and health officials feared an impending epidemic catastrophe festering in the tenements of what was then labeled as Chinatown. In the press coverage of public health inspections , newspaper reporters described the Chinatown labyrinth as hundreds of underground passageways connecting the filthy “cellars” and cramped “garrets ” where Chinese men lived. In their salacious portrayals, journalists related how dozens of Chinese men slept on narrow wooden shelves squeezed into claustrophobic rooms, “which was considered close quarters for a single white man.” Opium fumes, tobacco smoke, and putrefying waste pervaded the atmosphere in these windowless and unventilated rooms, and “each cellar [was] ankle-deep with loathsome slush, with ceilings dripping with percolations of other nastiness above, [and] with walls slimy with the clamminess of Asiatic diseases.”1 Periodic public health investigations—both informal midnight journeys and official fact-finding missions—fed the alarm about the danger Chinese men and women posed to white Americans’ health. Seizing upon the suspected causes of contamination, health officials emphasized the “overcrowded” tenements, “unventilated underground habitations,” and stale “nauseating” air.2 These investigations produced a “knowledge” of Chinese women and men’s seemingly unhygienic habits, the unsanitary conditions in which they lived, and the dangerous diseases they carried. The widespread publicity of the horrors of percolating waste, teeming bodies, and a polluted atmosphere in Chinese habitations underscored the vile and infectious menace of Chinatown spaces. Almost at once the threat of illness became the legitimate grounds for the city government’s intervention and shaped health policy toward Chinatown and Chinese residents. PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE MAPPING OF CHINATOWN Nayan Shah P U B L I C H E A L T H A N D T H E M A P P I N G O F C H I N A T O W N 169 How did these revolting images become the incontestable truth about Chinese residents of San Francisco? How did the descriptions offered by health officers and journalists achieve the stature of scientific knowledge and pervasiveness of common sense? In order to understand how quickly public-health knowledge came to identify a place and its inhabitants as dangerous, it is necessary to examine the process by which description became policy through scientific knowledge. The category of Chinese race and place created the field of study for investigations; strategies of scientific knowing generated the rich descriptive data that were then interpreted by medical reasoning. This formation of scientific knowledge shaped regulatory policy that in turn spurred further investigations, and the process of knowledge creation intensified. The investigations targeted Chinatown, identifying its location and its boundaries and surveying the spaces within it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “Chinatown” ghettos proliferated in both cities and small towns throughout North America. The generic naming of a Chinatown in some locations referred to a handful of buildings and in others to a set of streets. Although the physical boundaries of these “Chinatowns” constantly shifted, the name signaled a potent racial designation of Chinese immigrant inhabitation. The cartography of Chinatown that was developed in government investigations, newspaper reports, and travelogues both established “knowledge” of the Chinese race and aided in the making and remaking of Chinatown. The idea of Chinatown as a self-contained and alien society in turn justified “recurring rounds” of policing, investigation, and statistical surveys that “scientifically” corroborated the racial classification.3 The creation of “knowledge” of Chinatown relied upon three key spatial elements : dens, density, and the labyrinth. The enclosed and inhuman spaces of dens were where the Chinese lived. High density was the condition in which they lived. And the labyrinth was the unnavigable maze that characterized both the subterranean passageways within the buildings and the streets and alleys aboveground. These spatial elements established the basic contours of the representation of Chinatown and provided the canvas for detailed renderings of Chinese living styles, conditions, and behaviors. The investigations and the accompanying publicity not only established the Chinatown spatial elements of dens, density, and the labyrinth but also generated the stereotyped imagery that would be used more intensively over the decades and that illuminates how racial categories in the United States were produced in the late nineteenth century and persisted in the twentieth century. Five government-sponsored investigations were both emblematic and politically pivotal in defining the Chinatown menace: the 1854 inquiry by the San Francisco Common Council (the precursor to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors) that reestablished the municipal Board of Health; the investigation that...

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