Like many others who have grown increasingly adverse to the emasculated mainstream press, I hardly buy The Star. So huge thanks to Nat, whose recent posting alerted me to a highly xenophobic piece penned by Wong Chun Wai, the group chief editor of the best selling English daily in Malaysia.

Last week, a Myanmar worker succumbed to leptospirosis at a Penang hospital. Given the current climate of fear over Influenza A (H1N1), Wong perhaps felt compelled to write that ‘migrants workers are bringing in infectious diseases’, and that ‘it would not be wrong to say that Malaysia is facing the emergence and re-emergence of diseases because of these foreigners’.

In what must have looked like an ominous coincidence, Lim Sue Goan, a senior columnist at Sin Chew Daily, wrote on the same day that ‘I would sometimes hold my breath when a migrant worker passes me by’ simply because they might ‘bring in a disease that has long been extinct’.

Throughout human history, weak minorities in anywhere of the world have been subjected to prejudice and unjustified scrutiny, even made to bear the brunt whenever a pandemic takes place. Discrimination seems like an age-old habit that is hard to kick.

London’s East End has been a place where migrant workers gathered and departed since the Industrial Revolution. Even today, some street names in the once depressed and crime-infested district of the British capital still reflect 19th century exoticism.

Pekin Street, Nankin Street, Canton Street and Ming Street are just a short walk away from one another and together they stand as a testimony to the erstwhile presence of the Chinese coolies who sailed thousands of miles to the great metropolis for greener pastures.

In her seminal book ‘Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The Story of the Overseas Chinese’, Lynn Pan records that the Chinese in England at the time congregated according to where they originated, and took up professions accordingly: the Cantonese were mostly firemen, boatswains or seamen; the Hainanese largely worked in the kitchens while most of the stewards were from Ningbo in the Zhejiang province.

‘Church of St. Confucius’

The arrival of the relatively small but significant number of Chinese in England inevitably aroused fear among the local communities. Unaccustomed to seeing ‘yellow’ faces and concerned about the various diseases that these new migrants – having spent months at sea in extremely overcrowded and unhygienic conditions – might bring in, the right wing London Gazette once ran a ‘sensational’ headline that read ‘Hold Your Breath When You See A Chink!‘.

The Morning Chronicle, where Charles Dickens once worked, sometimes ran stories of sporadic brawls or racist incidents involving the Chinese at East End. In any case, the ‘Sons of the Yellow Emperor’ now found themselves nothing more than an undesirable element or, worse, disease transmitters at the power centre of the British Empire.

Across the Atlantic in the US, stories of Chinese coolies being exploited and discriminated against were equally, if not more, heartrending. When the Pacific Railroad was completed, Harper’s Weekly published a lithograph showing a Chinese man dressed in a baggy Chinese tunic and trousers standing with a Western lady in Victorian costume celebrating their marriage in front of the ‘Church of St. Confucius’.

The message could not have been plainer: Should the Chinese be given the right to citizenship now that the railroad is completed? And would the union between the East and the West, and the cultural fusion that may ensue, represent a threat to the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant foundations of the US?

Chinese coolies contributed tremendously to the economic development of California and the American West, but their presence created festering resentment among other immigrant communities leading to series of anti-Chinese riots between 1871 and 1885 for which the stereotyping of the Chinese by the mainstream media at the time must be held responsible.

For instance, The Illustrated Wasp once published a lithograph, entitled ‘The Consequences of Cooliesm’, calling for the White working classes to put aside their differences and unite against the Chinese coolies who were seen as encroaching on the rights of others.

It was also common for the American general public to shun the Chinese and the Japanese because they were perceived to be special carriers of virulent and deadly strains of venereal disease.

Infested with venereal disease

The 19th century mainstream media and publications relished in playing up these issues, but a rational discussion on the lack of public health facilities for the newly arrived migrant workers was conspicuously absent.

All this negative and discriminatory coverage successfully generated more animosities among the races, and led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that disqualified Chinese coolies from citizenship.

Closer to home in the Malay Peninsula, Chinese coolies from Fujian and Guangdong were brought in by the colonial administration to work in the booming mining industry. Many of the labourers were cheated by unscrupulous middlemen and found, to their horror, the inhabitable conditions during the journey.

The ‘piglets’, as the Chinese coolies were popularly known, were shipped in overcrowded boats without sanitation, with many dropping dead of cholera and other tropical diseases. Those who made it to the Peninsula only saw their health deteriorate further in the following years.

In those days, the health system was established specifically for the Whire rulers and the social elite – Europeans and non-Europeans alike. As John Farley once wrote, colonial medicine existed primarily ‘to make the tropics fit for the White man to inhabit’. Public health provision was beyond those who could barely afford it.

Even the now squeaky clean and excessively hygienic Singapore used to be infested with venereal disease in the early 20th century. A report by the Straits Settlements authorities revealed that as many as 683 out of 1,000 mental patients – most of whom coolies and maids – did not survive in 1900. For the poor and the downtrodden, hospital was akin to a place where death awaited.

Medical anthropologist Lenore Manderson writes in her book ‘Sickness and the State’ that coolies from India and China tended to live in appalling conditions devoid of even decent health care facilities, and years of living next to excrement of their own resulted in malaria and dysentery.

Meanwhile, other historical documents prove that these migrant workers were not necessarily natural virus carriers. Tuberculosis, common among the working classes at the time, was predominantly caused by overcrowded living conditions and the lack of ventilation. When the colonial government came to its senses and began to improve the health care system accordingly, the health of the coolies dramatically improved.

Descendants of the coolies

The colonialists may have departed, but post-independence Malaysia has inherited the exploitative model of development nonetheless. Pretty much the colonial master, we want cost- effectiveness and economic expansion minus workers’ rights to public health.

Is it not ironic that the inequalities in health status that were prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are still alive and kicking in Malaysia today, affecting the poor and the marginalised communities such as migrant workers?

As Andrew Khoo of the Bar Council has excellently rebutted, it was the fact that ‘the government is incarcerating foreign nationals in places and under conditions which are totally unhygienic’ that is partly responsible for the recent outbreak of leptospirosis.

Another dilemma confronting the migrant workers, documented or otherwise, is that their access to health facilities in this country is often hampered by bureaucratic hurdles.

There is nothing new under the sun. One may fear their presence in our midst or even seek to exclude them socially but, the fact remains that migrant workers, like our forefathers and foremothers, have toiled and tilled to make Malaysia what it is today. In short, they are the ‘Sin Keh’ (new guests) of our time.

While our ancestors went through hardship and xenophobic experience, the mainstream media today is doing the same to these new ‘others’. Most ironically, many of those who write disparagingly about the migrant communities happen to be the descendants of the coolies.

Or perhaps Wong of The Star and Lim of Sin Chew think they are from one of the prominent families in British Malaya just like Lee Kuan Yew and Tan Cheng Lock, who most probably were spared the plight of being denied proper health care in British Malaya?

Originally published in Malaysiakini on 22 May 2009. Republished with permission from the author.

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