Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
compression facilitated the fast transmission of disease as well as information.
Explicit here is a global scale of interaction that overrides local places. But a
global innovation never lands in empty space. The arrival of SARS in Toronto
was challenged, resisted and eventually overcome by the co-ordination of
medical professionals working for public agencies and three levels of govern-
ment.
16
There were false starts as the disease, difficult to diagnose, was initially
mistaken for flu or tuberculosis; the certified cause of death of the first victim
was misdiagnosed as heart failure. Misrecognized, the disease was also ini-
tially underestimated, with less than adequate precautions drawn up to pro-
tect health workers and the at-risk public. But after a turbulent spring SARS
was vanquished, and the Rolling Stones came to town.
SARS was a global threat, locally resisted, and the terms of engagement
were themselves geographically variable. Two SARS carriers from the infec-
tion at Hong Kong's Metropole Hotel also landed in Vancouver, scarcely
surprising as the city is Canada's principal gateway to Asia, receiving four
times as many air passengers daily from Hong Kong and China as Toronto
(Skowronski et al. 2006). But disease outcomes were very different. A highly
infectious 'super-spreader' did not aggravate Vancouver's outbreak, while
public health professionals, more familiar with contagious diseases from
East Asia, made a faster assessment of the gravity of the outbreak and con-
tained it. There were only five cases, four of them carried directly from
Hong Kong, and no deaths. The uneven geographies of SARS in Toronto
and Vancouver exemplify variable scale effects contributing to quite differ-
ent outcomes. Local contingencies still matter.
Re-directing Orientalism
In contrast to the hypermobility within transnational fields illustrated by the
diffusion of SARS is the seemingly exaggerated stasis of ethnic settlement,
fixed on the map, rooted in the urban landscape. Vancouver's Chinatown is
among the oldest in North America (Lai 1988). Scarcely ever welcome
before 1950, tolerated only at the margins of society, controlled through an
invidious Head Tax from 1885, and excluded altogether by the Chinese
Immigration Act from 1923 to 1947, the story of the Chinese in Canada has
followed a well-told new world genre of racialized outcasts in a white settler
society (Ward 1978; Anderson 1991; Li 1998; Roy 2003). Such a narrative
has provided an almost ideal type for critical race studies, for Chinatown
and the Chinese formed a seamless and mutually constitutive fusion of a
marginalized place and a crudely stigmatized identity. The Vancouver
enclave endured two white riots in 1887 and 1907, the second from a mob
who poured out of a meeting of the Asiatic Exclusion League (
sic
), smash-
ing property and roughing up residents. Chinatown the place consolidated,
