ABSTRACT
During the 1800s and 1900s, outsiders’ perceptions of Asian immigrant families and communities generally started and ended with deviance. A San Francisco health officer around the turn of the twentieth century described the city’s Chinatown as a “laboratory of infection,” explained and exacerbated by the preponderance of “bachelors” and prostitutes and the absence of Christian nuclear families.1 Several decades later, the predominantly young and male Filipino American population in the West became targets of moral panics that cast them as predators who lusted after white women. Finally, in the 1910s, as Japanese established nuclear family-based communities, nativists decried the “immorality” of the picture bride system that had made possible this development. One complained, “In their pursuit of their intent to colonize this country … they seek to secure land and to found large families.”2
