Asia Shorts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 183 pp. (B&W photos.) US$16.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-952636-17-2.
Over recent decades, humanity has faced a variety of illnesses and diseases which have taken lives, closed businesses, and shut down air travel to entire regions: SARS, H1N1, and Ebola among them. But the ongoing novel coronavirus—known to all of us as COVID-19—has had impact well beyond those previous events. COVID-19 has already killed more than 5.6 million people, sickened millions with long-haul symptoms, shortened average lifespans, altered the way many of us work, travel, study, and play, and closed international and national borders. This new edited volume seeks to help us make sense of an ongoing crisis from the vantage point of Asia and Asian Americans.
Through an introduction, 11 chapters, and an afterword, these scholars bring a mix of disciplinary and national perspectives to bear on the issue of how Asians and Asian Americans have responded to and been transformed by COVID-19 in China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, and the United States. Of special note is the speed with which this volume was conceived and published—with authors referencing events of September 2020 in a volume published the same year (a rapid turnaround certainly in contrast to the typical glacial pace of academic publishing).
Four core themes emerge from the chapters: continuity, politics, information, and prejudice. Continuity. While we commonly see shocks as events breaking from standard routines, many of these chapters drive home the point that COVID-19, rather than creating something new, instead accelerated existing trends and revealed overlooked patterns present pre-pandemic. The regularly poor treatment of perhaps 100 million migrant workers in India, for example, as examined in John Harriss’s chapter, continued through the pandemic. The Indian government locked down entire cities and regions and shut down railways without providing any relief for these labourers, forcing many to walk hundreds of miles along highways back to their homes (97–100). Similarly, Indian political parties and leaders have long invoked a “golden age [of] Indian pasts free of Muslims” (157), argues Manan Ahmed Asif, and the pandemic provided more opportunities to marginalize Muslims.
Politics. While we hope that crises would be free of politics, many of the chapters drive home how national interests and domestic interest groups often create suboptimal outcomes during disasters. Ravinder Kaur and Sumathi Ramaswamy, in their chapter on India, point out that for many political groups, the battle against COVID-19 also involved a battle against an external enemy, China, and an internal one, Muslims (85–86). The nasty, brutish, and short world of international politics became exaggerated, not diminished, by the pandemic. What was initially medical diplomacy—with China sending doctors to nearby nations to curry political favour and public goodwill (28–29)—has since become aggressive mask and vaccine diplomacy, with China and India competing to see who can promise the most jabs to its neighbours.
Information. Despite the ubiquity of cell phone and internet access, nations continue to seek to control the flow of information, and deliberately disrupt it through mis- and dis-information. As the volume’s editor Vinayak Chaturvedi underscores in the introduction, China punished front line doctors in Wuhan who sought to alert the world of the rising likelihood of a pandemic. This despite the often ignored fact that China hosted pioneering health monitoring and treatment institutions such as the League of Nations Health Organization in the early and mid-twentieth century, as Mary Augusta Brazelton shows (26–27). Jaeho Kang warns us of the modern dangers of tracing apps in South Korea, where the government has captured and made accessible tremendous amounts of personal information about COVID-19–infected residents. Kate McDonald’s investigation of Japan’s Prime Minister Abe shows how he and other leaders sought to control the framing of the COVID-19–postponed Tokyo Olympics, pointing to the games as a symbol of recovery a decade after its 3/11 calamity, despite ongoing disasters at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Prejudice. While technology continues to push ahead, humanity often falls back on socialized prejudice and bias, and COVID-19 has amplified that as hate. David Arnold’s chapter on India points out that “COVID-19 unleashed a wave of Sinophobia: in India it erupted into Islamophobia” (18). Alexis Dudden shows how anti-foreign prejudice in Japan—visible in the historical tragedy of the post-1923 Tokyo earthquake pogroms that slaughtered thousands of Koreans—continues to shine through responses to multiracial celebrities such as Naomi Osaka. Christine Yano’s chapter, focused on anti-Asian racism in the United States, drives home the point that slurs such as “Kung flu” or “China virus” and physical violence can be countered through the development of critical empathy (132–133). Yong Chen and Clare Gordon Bettencourt reinforce this point with their chapter on Chinese food establishments in China and the United States, which became the targets of anti-Asian sentiments.
As is often a challenge in edited volumes, no single theme, theoretical framework, or set of literature brings the chapters together, nor did individual authors reference each other. Despite this lack of cohesion, I appreciated that the volume provided an afterword summarizing many of the concepts in the chapters, helping to bring out their contributions. While much has happened since this book was published—including the development and distribution of multiple vaccines in developed nations and the rise of more virulent variants such as Delta and Omicron—it would serve as an excellent text for undergraduate courses on Asia, pandemics, and modern history. Well-reproduced images and pictures, jargon-free writing, and an affordable price make this especially appropriate. Given the likelihood that we will all continue to struggle with COVID-19 and its descendents, this book can help us make sense of our past and our future.
Daniel P. Aldrich
Northeastern University, Boston