Most all the visual images of the Chinatowns in California before 1920 were produced by and for white artists and audiences. The works in this exhibition seek to visualize the white outsider perspective of San Francisco’s Chinatown. In an attempt to understand how the white population characterized Chinatown, it is important to note that tour guides and literature about the Chinese emerged as a popular trend at the time. Circulation of tourist literature was commonly used to construct an outsider perspective of Chinatown and its people as exotic “others.” Indeed, Chinatown attracted many visitors who sought to satisfy their curiosities stimulated through these written literary works. However, the interactions between the Chinese and whites did not result in the assimilation of Chinatown with the larger city of San Francisco. In the minds of many people within the larger population of San Francisco, Chinatown represented an otherworldly place at odds with the modernizing world. A teenage girl by the name of E.G.H. reflected upon her trip to Chinatown in 1886, and stated, “As you walk through the streets of Chinatown you hardly realize yourself in America.” The white population in San Francisco were attracted to Chinatown as a tourist destination and and desired to experience the exotic culture of the Orient at a safe distance with the use of tour guides.
Such removed observation of the Chinese is evident in the composition and perspectives of many works in the exhibition, especially those by Theodore Wores and Henry Nappenbach. The white local tour guides were well-versed in tourist literature that promoted racist ideas of the Chinese, regarding their culture as premodern, inferior, and unassimilated to the larger society of 19th century America. Tourist literature was usually written by white male spectators and embodied detached, voyeuristic observations of a typical observer. Police tour guides often disrespected the residences of the Chinese population, forcing their way into private abodes in a violent, invasive manner. They aggressively woke people from their sleep, and encouraged tourists to scrutinize and look down upon the Chinese as their inferiors. Such invasion of private spaces has been well-documented by photographers like Henry R. Knapp who compiled and sold souvenir albums of various Chinese individuals at leisure within their domestic spaces. Such photographs added to the idea of Chinatown as a local place of amusement for its city’s visitors who were intrigued by the everyday lifestyles of an “exotic” population.
The perception of the Chinese population as “others” was only exacerbated by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which essentially sought to protect domestic laborers from foreign competition posed by Chinese immigrant workers. Thus, Chinatown remained a largely segregated space where political and social discourses often worked to position whites and Chinese as racial opposites. The underlying message of each work within the exhibition reveals these racial tensions, as well as an effort to deem the Chinese population and culture as inferior in comparison with larger society in America.
Curated by: Careese Quon
