Francisco's Chinatown Research Articles

Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown (review)

Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown (review)

Review: Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown, by Chiou-Ling Yeh

Review: <i>Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown</i>, by Chiou-Ling Yeh

Using community‐based participatory research to design and initiate a study on immigrant worker health and safety in San Francisco's Chinatown restaurants

Restaurant workers have among the highest rates of work-related illness and injury in the US, but little is known about the working conditions and occupational health status of Chinese immigrant restaurant workers. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) was employed to study restaurant working conditions and worker health in San Francisco's Chinatown. A community/academic/health department collaborative was formed and 23 restaurant workers trained on research techniques and worker health and safety. A worker survey instrument and a restaurant observational checklist were collaboratively developed. The checklist was piloted in 71 Chinatown restaurants, and the questionnaire administered to 433 restaurant workers. Restaurant workers, together with other partners, made substantial contributions to construction of the survey and checklist tools and improved their cultural appropriateness. The utility of the checklist tool for restaurant-level data collection was demonstrated. CBPR holds promise for both studying worker health and safety among immigrant Chinese restaurant workers and developing culturally appropriate research tools. A new observational checklist also has potential for restaurant-level data collection on worker health and safety conditions.

Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown

Journal Article Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown Get access Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown. By Yeh Chiou-Ling. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xiv + 315 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95, paper.) Sarah M. Griffith Sarah M. Griffith University of California, Santa Barbara Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 40, Issue 4, Winter 2009, Pages 521–522, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/40.4.521 Published: 01 November 2009

Silk Soy Milk (a)

The Silk soy milk brand evolves from a single homemade product to a regional and then national brand, facing challenges along the way such as investment influx, acquisition, and competition from new entrants into the very market it created. Silk's marketing angles at various growth stages are discussed, and students consider whether the company should expand its presence or develop new categories, as well as how its efforts could best realize growth targets. Which option carries the biggest risks, and which would best enhance Silk's position as a market leader? Excerpt UVA-M-0771 Rev. Jun. 12, 2012 SILK SOY MILK (A) Soy Milk Background Traditional soy milk, believed to have originated in China during the Han Dynasty, was a mixture of oil, water, and protein, produced by soaking dry soybeans and grinding them with water. The soybean has been a staple of the Asian diet for thousands of years and contains many nutrients, including protein, complex carbohydrates, omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, folate, and iron. In 1979, Hong Kong-based soy milk maker Vitasoy introduced its soy milk to the United States. Initially, the company sold its product store to store in San Francisco's Chinatown. In time, however, soy milk became a popular milk substitute for the lactose-intolerant. Additionally, it garnered a following from vegans and from health-conscious consumers, who were attracted to its health benefits, perceived as preferable to cow's milk. “Shifts in perceptions tend to occur ‘on the fringes'—and that is precisely what we saw with soy,” said Kristin Heimerl, health food and technologies marketing manager for Cargill. “In the 1960s and 1970s, soy won the interest of the counterculture and became the darling of the health food industry.” . . .

Myron Echenberg, Plague ports: the global urban impact of bubonic plague, 1894–1901, New York University Press, 2007, pp. xvi, 347, $48.00 (hardback 978-0-8147-2232-9).

Chinese astrology marked 1900 as the year of the rat. The irony of this was not apparent until six years later, when the rat's role in the transmission of bubonic plague finally gained public and scientific acceptance. The third bubonic plague pandemic raged from 1894 into the first quarter of the twentieth century, taking more than 15 million lives. Echenberg has followed its chronological path from its Asian beginnings in Hong Kong and Bombay, to Europe (Alexandria and Porto), South America (Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro), America (Honolulu and San Francisco) and finally to what he classifies as the British imperial examples (Sydney and Cape Town). The accumulation of air miles is the smaller part of the reward for his scholarly travels. For each of the ten cities, Echenberg has addressed key questions: how did the disease arrive? How many did it infect and kill? What were the popular and institutional responses? What impact did the changing understanding of plague transmission have on the control strategies? Some of these questions have not been asked of the third plague pandemic before, and certainly not in such a systematic fashion. Echenberg recognizes the enormity of his task, and potential limitations. He seeks to analyse the tension between western cultural imperialism and older indigenous medical responses to disease, but language barriers force him to rely heavily on western interpretations of Confucian, Buddhist, Ayurvedic and Islamic approaches. His second key aim, to analyse the interplay between older sanitarian and newer bacteriological disease strategies, is more attainable, and aided by the book's chronological structure. He is able to follow the contested knowledge on the roles of the rat and the flea, and to analyse why some of his case study cities resisted the new bacteriological construction of disease. Considering the speed with which Echenberg moves between these cities, he successfully contextualizes each plague outbreak in 25 to 30 pages. He allows the human factor in the plague responses to shine through the scant statistical information. The cumulative effect of the ten city studies is to impress on the reader some universal themes: fear and victim-blaming; the political economy of infectious disease; that class has more clout than race when fudging sanitary reform strategies; the vastness of the cultural gaps within some cities, and the smallness of the scientific world. Where this book is slightly lacking is in the connections between these fascinating accounts. There are short summaries on each pair of cities, but little sustained comparative analysis. For example, why do the British authorities not learn from the Hong Kong outbreak—a “study in cultural misunderstanding and rumour-mongering”—and apply such lessons in Bombay? Why do the Americans consider a plan to raze San Francisco's Chinatown, when they have already seen the devastating and unproductive results of a similar exercise in Honolulu? The imperial theme, adopted briefly at the beginning and used to order the pairings, is not followed through. Yet the Whitehall gaze must have impacted on how some of these cities reacted to the plague. The fact that Echenberg has travelled in the footsteps of Bruce Low, a British government medical officer sent out in the immediate aftermath of the plague pandemic to report on how it was handled, appears lost on him. The other area that would have benefited from a clearer focus is the “port” aspect of these cities. Echenberg exploits this unifying feature to gain a catchy title for his book, but the explicit maritime aspect subsequently remains undeveloped, apart from a few passing references, for example, to Sydney's role in improving rat-guarding measures on ships, or the tension in Alexandria between the urban and port authorities. Yet one has to admire the sheer range of information packed into this volume, and its accomplished narrative style. In 1996 the World Health Organisation re-classified plague as a “re-emerging” disease. This is an important book that, through its ten city repetition of the threat and reality of epidemic disease, provides inspiration for historians and health authorities alike.

MULTICULTURALISM GOES IMPERIAL

AbstractAs Latino and Asian immigrant populations in the United States continue to grow, controversies are cropping up over immigrant animal practices such as horse tripping in Mexicancharreadas(rodeos) and the slaughter of animals in the live-animal markets of San Francisco's Chinatown. Immigrant advocates read these controversies through a multiculturalist interpretive framework that constructs animal advocates as agents of an ethnocentric and racist majority. In this article, I argue that this multiculturalist interpretation tends to “go imperial” by mischaracterizing the position(s) of animal advocates and invalidating and suppressing the other, potentially competitive, moral discourse at play: the discourse about cruelty toward animals. I explicate this suppressed discourse and then propose the development of a mutually challenging and potentially edifying moral dialogue in which majority and minority animal practices are simultaneously open to scrutiny and criticism. Clashes over customary practices can aggravate intergroup tensions, but they also have the potential to lead to meaningful moral dialogue between the majority and immigrant minorities.

Transnational Criticism and Asian Immigrant Literature in the U.S.: Reading Yan Geling's Fusang and Its English Translation

Ithough the name Yan Geling may mean very little to U.S.-based academics, Yan is often commended by scholars in mainland China and Taiwan as one of the most important Chinese-language authors in the United States.' Before she came to the U.S. as a student in 1989, Yan had published three novels in mainland China, where she was born in the late 1950s. During and after her study at Columbia College in Chicago for an MFA in fiction writing, she continued to write in Chinese, publishing award-winning short stories, novellas, and novels in the U.S., Taiwan, and mainland China.2 In 1995, she won a United Daily News Best Novel award for Fusang, a historical novel set in nineteenth-century San Francisco's Chinatown.3 The titular figure, Fusang, is abducted from a village in Guangzhou

Melancholic Remains: Domestic and National Secrets in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone

At first glance, it would appear that we could read Fae Myenne Ng's novel Bone as a sequel of sorts to Louis Chu's novel Eat a Bowl of Tea. If Eat a Bowl of Tea charts the tumultuous transformation of New York Chinatown from bachelor society to family community in the middle of the twentieth century, Bone would seem to represent the late-twentieth-century result of that transformation. Eat a Bowl of Tea portrays the waning years of Wang Wah Gay and his fellow Chinatown "bachelors,"1 men whose labor was recruited by the United States and who ended up unable to establish families in the US. The homosociality of this bachelor society, whose members are past their productive years, is marked in Chu's novel by acts of gambling, gossiping, joking, and cursing. The settling of Wang's son Ben Loy with his new bride in Chinatown represents the hope of renewal for a community previously unable to reproduce itself through conventional family formation: the old men wait anxiously and collectively for a grandchild to signify a sense of future they have otherwise been denied. Bone features Leila Fu, just such a grandchild of an old "bachelor," as its narrator.2 Moreover, Ng's novel is set in San Francisco, the city where the newly married couple of Eat a Bowl of Tea must relocate to start anew. Rather than a site of regeneration, how [End Page 110] ever, San Francisco's Chinatown proves to be the site of loss and melancholia. In Eat a Bowl of Tea, family represents the potential for moving forward into the future; in Bone, family and narrative remain haunted by, and move back into, the past. Therefore, rather than reading Chu's and Ng's texts according to a logic of sequential, historical time, in which the present naturally follows and fully replaces the past, I propose instead a temporal paradigm based on the notion of text as palimpsest, as multilayered surface. Bone's narrative is structured palimpsestically, in a chronology that moves back in time to reveal what lies underneath the events that Leila narrates in the novel's beginning. This palimpsestic structure is characteristic of melancholia, a condition in which an object that should be relegated to the past is instead psychically kept alive in the present. By comprehending how time is layered such that the past is not erased but remains in the present, a palimpsestic reading practice offers an alternative to modern conceptions of time as horizontal and continuous. Benedict Anderson, quoting Walter Benjamin, observes that this "homogeneous, empty" (Benjamin 262) time of modernity is also the time of the nation and that subjects of the nation are constituted within the horizontal simultaneity of this national time. In this essay, I show how Ng's melancholic temporality critiques modern notions of subjectivity and history, especially as formulated by the nation-state.3 Ng's novel reveals what is in excess of the national symbolic, what remains after national history and national subjectivity are narrated through modern trajectories of development and progress. The subject of modernity and nation is defined by a certain kind of relationship to time: she participates in recalling the collective memory that has been narrated as national history. This memory is selective, consisting of that which provides ideological support for the nation, so that, as Ernest Renan suggests, she is also obligated to forget.4 Remembering—that is, "remembering to forget" (Khanna 12)—is a process of incorporating the past into the symbolic of national history. Psychoanalytic theory teaches us, however, that the process of symbolization always produces its remainder or surplus—in this case, the forgotten. Unassimilated and unresolved, the remainder always returns to haunt the symbolic. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok build upon Freud's theory of melancholia to elaborate on this haunting of the remainder. According to Freud, melancholia is the condition...

"Forty Percent Is Luck": An Interview with C. Y. (Chin Yang) Lee

Andrew Shin California State University, Los Angeles On October 2, 2001, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles premiered David Henry Hwang's adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song to glowing reviews. Its initial run was extended, and after several months, the production moved to Broadway. Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, which opened at the St. James Theater in December 1958, is itself adapted from C. Y. Lee's novel The Flower Drum Song published in 1957. Rodgers and Hammerstein's original production was the first Broadway show to feature Asian American players, and the film version, released in 1961, inaugurated the careers of the first generation of Asian American actors, including Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, and Jack Soo. C. Y. Lee's work and career, however, have been largely overlooked because of the reception of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song, which many observers felt perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of Asians. Although Lee's novel was a New York Times bestseller, it quickly went out of print and rarely appeared on university reading lists. Ironically, the inception of the nation's first ethnic studies programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which aimed to overhaul a curriculum focusing on a received canon of predominantly white, European, and EuroAmerican writers, proved inimical to Lee's playful vision of the mixing of Chinese and American traditions in Chinese American life. The very identity politics and cultural nationalism that fueled ethnic consciousness-raising refused Lee's evocation of the Chinese experience in America. Hwang's musical, Flower Drum Song, meditates on its own process of artistic renewal, restaging, in a contemporary idiom, Lee 'S analyses of cultural and generational conflict as a struggle between Old Master Wang's desire to sustain Chinese traditions in the form of a run-down Chinese opera house and the Americanborn son Wang Ta's desire to transform the opera house into a Western-style nightclub. Significantly, Hwang's adaptation draws attention to Lee's modernity: the novel's representation of cultural conflict and the invention of new traditions in immigrant life is timeless and remains as relevant for contemporary audiences as it was in 1957. Indeed, Lee's depiction of life in San Francisco's Chinatown is undergoing a renaissance due in large part to Hwang's intervention: the musical, reinterpreted by Hwang, is once again on Broadway; in 2002, forty-five years after its initial publication, Penguin Books reissued Lee s novel. Also in 2002, the Enlightening Noah Publishing Company of Santa Clara, CA published four of Lee's works in Chinese: The Flower Drum Song. Lover's Point, Corner of Heaven, and a collection of short stories, Changsan Girl. Traditional Magazine of Taiwan is currently publishing Lee's memoirs in Chinese, with the English version forthcoming. C. Y. Lee's life offers a window to the historical and political upheavals of the time. He was born on December 23, 1917, in Hunan Province, China, and his family moved to Beijing when he was ten. Shortly after Lee enrolled at Jinan's Shandong University, Japan invaded China, forcing him to flee to Yunnan where he completed his bachelor's degree at Southwest Associated University in Kunming, Yunnan Province, in 1942. That same year, driven by the continued turbulence in China, he traveled to the United States and enrolled in a graduate comparative literature program at Columbia University. After less than a year, he transferred to Yale University to study drama with Walter Pritchard Eaton, Eugene 0 'Neill's mentor, graduating with an M.F.A. in 1947. After completing his studies, Lee worked as a journalist, editing a Chinese-language newspaper, and wrote a daily column for Chinese World, a newspaper published in San Francisco's Chinatown; he also taught Chinese at the Monterey Army Language School. Lee is fond of telling the story of how he managed to stay in the United States and continue his writing career: in 1949 he won a Reader's Digest-sponsored contest for Forbidden Dollar, a short story anthologized in Best Original Short Stories later that year. …

Deconstructing a Narrative Hierarchy: Leila Leong's "I" in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone

Bone (1993) is Fae Myenne Ng's first novel, set largely in San Francisco's Chinatown. Its central plot concerns how the members of the Leong family, Mah, Leon, Nina, the narrator Leila, and her boyfriend Mason Louie, seek to understand why Ona, the Leong's middle daughter, is driven to commit suicide. We are informed of the suicide from the first page, then the oldest sister, Leila, recounts events leading to and following the family's tragedy. The framework is circular. The novel ends at a point in time close to where it begins as Leila explores each distinct possibility, no matter how small, that might have caused the loss of her sister. What wish to argue, however, is not a single reason for Ona's suicide, or how the characters do or do not reach an understanding of it, but how Leila's central character, as the I narrator creates a distinguishable hierarchy based on her attempt to find a center that is neither too Chinese nor too American, thus informing us of the complexity of her Chinese American consciousness. This narrative process can be examined using Jacques Derrida's criticism, in particular by applying his fundamental poststructuralist essay, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Ng's narrator, Leila's I, can therefore be viewed as the central personality that governs how particular characters and events appear, consequently establishing the hierarchy. Characters and events are linked to one another through this same organizing principle.

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Nayan Shah,Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001

Nayan Shah,<i>Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown</i>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001

Reviews of Books:Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown Nayan Shah

Reviews of Books:Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown Nayan Shah

History Book Prize Awardee

The selection committee would like to award the 2002 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award to Nayan Shah for Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. There were many worthy nominations for this award, testifying to the strength and breadth of the field of Asian American history. However, our committee believes that Shah's work stands out from the rest.

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (review)

This informative book illuminates an important chapter in the history of American culture. As the author explains, a society on the path to modernity engages in a process of standardization and the setting of norms that guide its governance and policies—including the adjudication of what constitutes true citizenship. To illuminate this process, Nayan Shah analyzes in great detail the construction of racism toward the Chinese in San Francisco from the Gold Rush to the middle of the twentieth century. In an extensive introduction, he explains his thesis: after being branded aberrant because of their deplorable housing conditions, lifestyles, and domestic arrangements, the inhabitants of Chinatown became gradually educated and socialized in American values. From its earlier nineteenth-century characterization as a threat to the Caucasian majority in the city, Chinatown was eventually incorporated into American society following World War I thanks to the efforts of a second generation of acculturated Chinese Americans. In Shah's view, the Chinese community—having improved their homes, changed their living conditions, and adopted the prevailing forms of domesticity—finally achieved access to the privileges and opportunities of "civilized" citizenship previously denied to them. Since then, and in spite of lingering racism, they have become a model minority engaged in all aspects of American society.

The Health of a Nation: Race, Place, and the Paradoxes of Public Health Reform

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. By Nayan Shah. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001. 384 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Critiquing the benefits of Western medicine is difficult work. Although historical studies in the field of science, medicine, and imperialism have revised the heroic and benevolent depictions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century western medical practices in primarily colonized areas by linking these practices to racialized violence, subjugation, and control, the pervasive cultural association of western medical reforms with universal humanitarianism continues to make even questioning such reforms a risky endeavor. 1 As Reynaldo Ileto observes, "even nationalist writers in the Philippines find it impossible to interrogate the established notion that among the blessings of American colonial rule was a sanitary regime which saved countless Filipino lives." 2 Such "gratitude," Ileto points out, is most often expressed in the context of public health reform, and specifically its focus on the control and prevention of disease. How dare one critique these efforts using the analytical category of race when disease sees no color and threatens us all? National Geographic's new series on "challenges for humanity," which debuted in its February 2002 issue and featured the "war on disease" as humanity's first challenge, powerfully illustrates the persistent [End Page 141] hold that medicine, and specifically public health, has on mainstream conceptualizations of what counts as universal and humanitarian in more recent times. World maps that chart the frequency of outbreaks of influenza, HIV/AIDS, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, and measles emphasize that infectious diseases are our global enemies. Graphic images of a Guatemalan farmer's lesions and a Nigerien man's blind eye remind us of the casualties of this world-wide war. Photographs of a woman in the United States testing the amount of chlorine in a swimming-pool water sample and a woman in Bangladesh folding clean and dry sari material that will be placed over a jug before collecting water convey the international importance of employing specific sanitary measures to prevent disease. While these striking images effectively communicate that all of humanity has a stake in the battles against disease, Nayan Shah's study of epidemics and race in San Francisco's Chinatown poignantly reminds us that before we engage in this seemingly universal war in the new millennium, history has much to teach us. Within the span of almost a century, beginning in the 1850s, discourses of public health and hygiene informed the changing popular images of San Francisco's Chinese Americans, transforming them from medical menace into deserving citizens. While this dramatic and seemingly inclusive change might be employed as evidence of the progressive nature of public health over time, Shah rejects such triumphalist historical narratives. His exploration of the analytical category of race through the prism of public health reveals the ways in which public health discourses constructed hygienic norms, which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racialized Chinese and other Asian Americans as aberrant and inferior, and racialized white Americans as normal and superior. Although a contrasting image of Chinese Americans as deserving citizens became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, Shah observes that this transformation did not encompass the entire Chinese American community in San Francisco. Rather it was dependent on the performance of hygienic norms by primarily second generation Chinese American activists and achieved at the expense of an older generation of Chinese American bachelors whose lifestyles did not meet these normative standards. Thus, Shah's book exposes the limits as well as possibilities of a national citizenship based on hygienic and other related norms. By asking "Whose public?" and "Whose health?" we [End Page 142] have been referring to when we have formulated public health knowledge and engaged in public health reform in the not too distant past, Shah deftly critiques the seemingly inextricable link between public health...

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. By Nayan Shah. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. 384 pp. $19.95 (paper); $50.00 (cloth).

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.