3 - Ecogothic Chinatown

Summary

Reminiscing upon his stay in San Francisco in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson described the Chinese quarter as ‘the most romantic’ among ‘all the romantic places to loiter in’. Stevenson's gothic representations of Chinatown have more in common, however, with what Catherine Cook calls the spectacle of ethnic slumming, than with the rural landscapes evoked by Wordsworth and other British Romantic poets. As ‘an actual foreign land’ just ‘three doors from home’, the Chinese quarter in Stevenson's imagination is a multi-layered urban space with ‘cellars … alive with mystery; opium dens, where the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf, close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor; the seats of unknown vices and cruelties, the prisons of unacknowledged slaves and the secret lazarettos of disease’. Such a mysterious vision of Chinatown ties in with what Stevenson claims to be the nature of romances in ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882): that they ‘may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the name-less longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow.’ Stevenson's ‘romance’ of the Chinese quarter as an underground world brimming with filth, disease and ille-gality is entirely in tandem with the default mode of nineteenth-century orientalism (‘the nameless longings of the reader’, ‘the ideal law of the day-dream’), where the portrayal of the racial other, while ‘nourished with the realities of life’, exists in spatial and epistemological obscurity with its real-life consequence in threatening moral and physiological corruption as well as environmental contamination.

In the 1870s and the 1880s, Chinatowns in California were depicted as overpopulated, deprived and impure places. Nayan Shah has commented on the association of Chinatown in the late nineteenth century with a ‘subterranean world’ that was ‘noxious and degraded’. As Shah elaborates, ‘the public-health knowledge of dens, density, and the labyrinth cast Chinatown as a deviant transplantation of the traditional East in the modern Western city[.] Chinatown was impervious to progress and was instead liable to rot and regress like the enervated Chinese empire across the Pacific.’