A Historically Constructed Space: San Francisco’s Chinatown and Boundaries of Prostitution

Through exclusionary laws that marked Chinese women in the U.S. as “lewd and immoral,” the perpetuation of “Chinese-women-as-prostitutes” kept them within the physical confines of Chinatowns in the 19th and 20th century. As such, San Francisco’s Chinatown was configured as a boundaried space that segregated “deviant” Chinese women from “pure” white women in the rest of the city. However, records show there were several white brothels operating within Chinatown’s boundaries. Nonetheless, historical and contemporary discussions surrounding prostitution in Chinatown focused solely on the prevalence of Chinese prostitutes, marking Chinatown as a space that housed a problem that was specifically Chinese - it was important that Chinese prostitutes be discerned from white prostitutes. Chinese prostitutes “felt no shame” in sex work and was not worthy of “saving,” while white prostitutes were “fallen women” or victims of deception. However, the same rhetoric was not found when discussing white prostitutes who worked within Chinatown; in fact, they were largely not discussed at all. The racialized spatial location of Chinatown obscured the presence of white prostitution and amplified the presence of Chinese prostitution.

In this paper, I interrogate the archive as a space that continues to perpetuate gendered notion of established historical “truths,” where gender, sexuality, and race collide in the creation of marginalized identities. I consider how the notion of “Chinese-women-as-prostitutes” was recorded as hyper-visible in the historical moment, and how that obscured other racial identities to create the notion of a secured boundary. I argue that the constructed invisibility of white prostitution in Chinatown, as well as other forms of Chinese women’s labor and companionship, reveal how snapshots of imperial ideologies in the historical moment continue to be replicated. By reterritorializing Chinatown as an imperial space, I show how effects of imperial harm were rendered illegible by US empire.