Chinatown(s) Neighborhood

Public Health

Against the backdrop of an exponentially growing Chinese population concentrated in old Chinatown, the yellow peril ideology was developing in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The yellow peril ideology, based on nothing at all, made Chinese synonymous with disease-ridden, filthy, and dangerous in a time when the general population was particularly concerned about health, due to the aftermath of the Civil War and crowding in an increasingly urbanized America. At the same time, Los Angeles was trying to market itself as a health resort to white Americans (1). Following the Civil War, from the 1870s through the 1890s, Anglo “health seekers” arrived in swaths, hoping to find the tropical paradise they’d been promised. As both these groups were flocking to LA, city officials became worried that the growing Chinese population in Chinatown would threaten LA’s image as a healing Eden for Anglos out East. It was this mix of conditions that shaped public health in Chinatown for the last few decades of the nineteenth century until the demolition of old Chinatown in the late 1930s.
City officials were not entirely wrong in their assertion that Chinatown residents were not in the best of health. But the rest of the city wasn’t either, and the health problems specific to Chinatown (and other ethnic enclaves) were largely due to a lack of investment in public health infrastructure by the city. It seemed that despite the fact that city officials, and particularly newly appointed city health officer Walter Lindley, were worried about Chinatown (what they called that “rotten spot”) damaging the potential for LA to become an Anglo haven, they made no moves to try and improve health in Chinatown (1). Instead, they decided that the Chinese immigrants that occupied the area were permanently disease-ridden, and so the strategy became to contain the Chinese to this area. Furthermore, health officials seemed to make it their policy to maintain LA’s image by tracing all diseases to Chinatown, where other marginalized groups also resided (1).

This created a sort of feedback loop – city officials refused to invest in the health infrastructure of Chinatown, which only caused more vulnerability to diseases, and further enforced officials’ sense of their own choices. In the following pages, we will demonstrate how this played out in the plague and tuberculosis outbreaks in the early 1900s, the creation of the sewage system in LA in the late 1800s, the continual poor living conditions maintained by white landlords, and the vegetable peddling that sustained many Chinese Angelenos. In the face of all this though, Chinatown residents were still able to provide themselves with healthcare in a number of ways. We will also articulate the ways in which Chinese immigrants especially were able to utilize both traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine to treat their ailments in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles.

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