In the Grip of Colonialism
By: Vincent Labarca
Tags: History, Medicine, Covid 19, Trump, Coronavirus

In the Grip of Colonialism

As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, President Trump and his allies are calling plays from an old playbook

A report from the 1866 International Sanitary Conference regarding “Asiatic Cholera,” also known as regular old “cholera.” Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University

Wong Chut King couldn’t have known why he felt so warm. His billowing black shirt and pant stuck to him like tar, and he was grateful for the damp coolness that trickled into his room from the sidewalk above.

Dreams didn’t come easy that night. Burning incense mixed with the scent of his vomit and feces, creating a putrid miasma that made it even harder for his fluid-filled lungs to breathe. His body ached to the bone, every inch of skin prickling with heat. The wooden slab he used as a bed was slick with sweat and grime, and his desperate cries for help went unheard.

Wong moved to America sometime in the 1880s, sending the bulk of what paltry income he earned in San Francisco’s lumber yards to his wife and family in China. He lived in a building crammed with nearly three hundred other Chinese immigrants. Turn of the century California was a hostile place for Asian immigrants. The mayor of San Francisco pledged to “Keep California White,” and the state’s Sinophobic legislature nudged Congress toward passing the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Wong spent his last hours in a dizzying frenzy of fever, delirium, and pain. It’s impossible to know what he felt before slipping into a coma. Perhaps shame or guilt (he initially sought treatment for a sexually transmitted disease). Maybe relief that his suffering was at an end. Or was he proud of the sacrifices he made to give his family a better life?

On March 6th, 1900, Wong Chut King died, becoming the first-ever case of plague in the United States.

A not-so-subtle magazine cover targeting Chinatown as the source of three ghastly diseases. Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Once alerted to a potential case of plague, city officials forcefully responded. Residents of Chinatown awoke to ropes and police officers. Nearly twenty thousand people, confined to a space of less than one square mile, trapped. If any attempted to flee, police beat them with a baton. After two terrifying days, the city lifted the quarantine, but the Asian community became lepers in a city that hardly knew they existed.

White residents had a very different experience. In its March 9th edition, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

The general public, having nothing at stake but its health, laughed and demonstrated its lack of fear for the Health Board’s bubonic bogy by crowding every avenue into Chinatown.

Plague? What plague? It’s nothing more than a ruse to drain the city’s coffers! Even the U.S. Surgeon General says the disease is “peculiar to the Orient, and seldom, if ever, attacks Europeans.”

One would be hard-pressed to spot the differences between those who paraded around Chinatown amid an outbreak of plague and the anti-lockdown protesters who cry tyranny when asked to go without a haircut for a month or two. Both are examples of white privilege and America’s obsession with individual liberty. Acting in one’s self-interest is as American as apple pie, but San Francisco’s racially motivated quarantine and the simmering Sinophobia we see today have their roots in something deeper and more immutable.