At some point in the later nineteenth century, educated citizens of the western world became conscious of the fact that the world they lived in was genuinely global. The blank spaces that had existed on maps had been more or less accurately filled, and the journeys of explorations still undertaken in the last decades of the century were often influenced by issues of national and personal competition (the races to reach the earth's poles for example). Within the rapidly industrializing nations of the western world, more and more people were able to use their newly acquired wealth to travel to far and exotic destinations, using new technologies in transportation such as the steamship and the railway to penetrate previously closed areas of the globe. A result -- but also a cause for further penetration and colonization -- of this new globalization was an increasing popular interest in the cultures and mores of foreign peoples, as is evidenced by the series of international expositions that included Turkish belly-dancers, Filipino farmers, and Chinese Mandarins, by the articles in popular journals and newspapers on colonial and colonized people, and by exhibitions in museums presenting African and Asian artifacts.
The exploration of "the other" and "the foreign" was thus not necessarily limited to journeys to the far reaches of the globe. Many travelled within their own physical environment to see and experience new and strange cultures. Sometimes, this form of travel could also be vertical such as the one Jane Addams undertook when she left her secure middle-class existence and travelled to the slums of Chicago's South-East side. At other times, travel could be both vertical and horizontal, that is breach class barriers and place the traveller in a strange and foreign environment that resembled foreign and exotic places from other areas of the globe. It is the latter kind of travel that we find depicted in the 1883 account by New York journalist Allen S. Williams, who moved across the physical boundary dividing white from Chinese New York and across the psychological boundary separating an economically secure middle-class New Yorker from the poverty and misery of the Chinese immigrant experience in America.
"On a dark and stormy night" that year, Williams "braved the elements," and undertook a guided tour of New York's Chinatown. Later that year he published the account of his travels under the startling title THE DEMON OF THE ORIENT AND HIS SATELLITE FIENDS OF THE JOINTS: OUR OPIUM SMOKERS AS THEY ARE IN TARTAR HELLS AND AMERICAN PARADISES. New York's Chinatown, in 1883, covered about three city blocks, and the Chinese population living within this area was relatively small as most Chinese preferred the cheaper rents in other parts of the city and in New Jersey. Instead, what was known as Chinatown served both as the commercial center for New York's Chinese population and as the transit center for the estimated fifty thousand Chinese in Cuba, who on their journey home would take the transcontinental trains from New York to San Francisco.
It is fair to assume that most white New Yorkers were for the most part oblivious to, or unaware of, the inner workings of the Chinese community. Williams was thus an explorer, a traveller, who physically entered an environment unknown to most of his peers. And although his book reads in parts like a forerunner to the pulp mysteries of the1930s and 1940s, he clearly reported as accurately as possible on the physical environment of New York's Chinese. He could not, however (like other travellers), be completely detached from his own notions, and those of his society, about Chinese culture and society. Thus one can find in the book an interesting friction between his descriptions of laundries, restaurants, street scenes, and gambling and opium dens, and his analysis of Chinese culture that highlights perceived dangers to white America: opium addiction and miscegenation.
Williams' narrative places him in a cohort group of writers and journalists who in the late 19th century explored the "frontiers" of "civilization." One usually thinks of these "frontiers" as places in the heart of Africa, or the valleys of the Himalaya. But one of the side effects of the new global world was that these same "frontiers" became, in the industrializing world, neighborhoods in the growing urban centers. If travel is defined as the crossing of physical boundaries, which implies the transgression of psychological boundaries as well, then in the western world of the later nineteenth century physical distance travelled became increasingly less important. When Williams's narrative is defined as travel literature in this broader sense, we can also see how domestic and international productions of stereotypes, and of biological and cultural hierarchies between western citizens and non-western peoples, reflect and foreshadow the changing attitudes within segments of western society regarding issues of social deviance (such as the use of opium).
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