梅毒、鸦片瘾和男风：殖民时期越南社会病的构建

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 11, No. 4, October 2002 © 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 610 “Syphilis, Opiomania, and Pederasty”: Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases FRANK PROSCHAN Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage INTRODUCTION: “OUR MOST DANGEROUS ADVERSARY” A F R E N C H P H Y S I C I A N and corresponding member of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, Paul Michaut spent the final years of the nine- teenth century studying matters medical, erotic, and scatological in the Far East. In a series of articles over the course of a decade, the intrepid observer dicussed Japanese and Vietnamese physiognomy, traditional phar- macology, hypnotism, massage, hot springs, climatology, musical anuses and “fartomania,” and especially the use of opium.1 Based upon his find- ings, in 1893 he issued a stark warning to his medical colleagues about the 1Little can be discovered about Michaut’s identity or career, which spanned publica- tions in various medical and popular journals from 1890 to 1914. He is listed in the roster of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris as residing in Yokohama (1891–93) and Haiphong (1894–96), then he disappears from the rolls. The title page to his 1890 study of “male hysteria” lists him as “Ancien interne des hôpitaux de Paris (Saint-Antoine, Ricord, Cochin, Lariboisière) et des hospices de la Salpêtrière [where his studies probably coincided with Freud’s] et des Enfants-Assistés” as well as corresponding member of the Société anatomique and Société clinique. His published work includes Contribution a l’étude des manifestations de l’hystérie chez l’homme (Paris, 1890); “Syphilis et pédérastie, fumeurs d’opium et climat,” Bulletin Général de Thérapeutique Médicale et Chirurgicale 124 (1893): 274–79; “Contri- bution à l’étude et au traitement du morphinisme oriental (des paralysies chez les fumeurs d’opium),” Bulletin Général de Thérapeutique Médicale et Chirurgicale 124 (1893): 318– 23; “Note sur l’intoxication morphinique par le fumée d’opium; opiomanie; état mental des fumeurs,” Bulletin Général de Thérapeutique Médicale et Chirurgicale 124 (1893): 462– 68; “Accidents produits par la fumée d’opium (expérimentation, étude clinique),” Bulletin Général de Thérapeutique Médicale et Chirurgicale 125 (1893): 81–88; Michaud [sic], “Les Morphinomanes en Extrême-Orient,” L’Indépendance Médicale 2 (1896): 123–24. Todd Holmberg Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases 611 conjoined dangers of “syphilis, opiomania, and pederasty . . . the three elements of a sort of nosological tripod, which one encounters among different peoples of the Far East.” Michaut drew a frightening alarum for metropolitan readers about these three social plagues: “In all of our colo- nial empire of the Far East—Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia— public hygiene finds itself engaged with the same enemies, this sort of morbid triple alliance that saps the health of our colonists.”2 Michaut’s comparative study of the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese revealed a mutually reinforcing connection among syphilis, opiomania, and pederasty. “In a word, syphilis contracted among those peoples most accustomed to the habit of pederasty shows itself more dangerous than syphilis evolving among less depraved peoples.” In Ja- pan, where, by Michaut’s account, “pederasty is unknown,” syphilis “is very benign among the Japanese” and equally benign among Europe- ans who contracted it there. In Korea, by contrast, “pederasty is gen- eral, it is part of the mores; it is practiced publicly, in the street, without the least reprobation,” and syphilis was likewise general: “[T]he non- contaminated subjects are the exception,” and its effects were “particu- larly grave.” Similarly, in the colonies of Annam and Tonkin, “the prognosis of this malady is always grave, death being only too often the result of syphilis contracted in Indo-China.” High mortality rates were hardly surprising, since in Indochina “pederasty exists on no less a large scale [than in Korea], among the indigenes as well as among the Europeans. The boys, the portes-lanternes, constitute a vast corporation that exoticist novelists have described too well for it to be necessary to emphasize this masculine prostitution here.”3 From his exercise in epidemiology and comparative social medicine, Michaut concluded that there was “an al- most perfect parallelism between the frequency and gravity of syphilis, on the one hand, and the habits of pederasty inherent to different na- tions of the Far East. Syphilis is much more serious when one contracts it in a country where genital relations are most often accomplished be- tween individuals of the same sex. In a word, contagion appears more 2Michaut, “Syphilis et pédérastie,” 275. Contrary to some who seek to distinguish be- tween “pederasty” as referring to transgenerational male-to-male sex and “sodomy” as re- ferring to same-generational male-to-male sex, the words were in fact used interchangeably throughout most of the literature we consider below, and pederasty implies nothing about the age of the participants; see Vernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversion (New York, 1997), 73, 192. The term “sodomy” was occasionally reserved for anal intercourse with either male or female insertees. 3The English word boy was taken over into French and even Vietnamese as the word for male domestic servant regardless of his age (in the same way the term was once applied to African Americans of any age). Most were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five but could be younger or much older. Portes-lanternes refers to colonial-era laws requiring indi- genes to carry lanterns when they went outside at night. 612 F R A N K P R O S C H A N dangerous when it operates between individuals of the same sex; this is true as much for individuals as for collectives.”4 The third leg of Michaut’s nosological tripod, opiomania, steadfastly supported the other two: “[P]ederasty follows opiomania very exactly . . . and the morphinism of smokers has no more faithful companion than pederasty.” This was the inescapable result of the well-known fact that “one of the first effects of opium is the perversion of the genesic instinct, the loss of moral sense and the weakening of the will.”5 Significantly, Michaut’s concerns about opium, syphilis, and pederasty did not extend to the health of the indigenous populations; they rested with the French sojourners: “The moral enfeeblement of our soldiers in a country where the climate is already anemia-inducing must trouble those administrators concerned about the hygiene of our troops in the colonies,” he noted with regard to opium, although, he hastened to add, it was often admin- istrators and officers who provided a bad example for their underlings. “The poison,” he concluded, “seizes the officer first, and the soldiers them- selves, guided by the example of their chief, abandon themselves to this terrible habit.”6 Pederasty could not, however, simply be explained as a side effect of opiomania. Michaut believed that its practice was inevitable for indigene and colonial alike, because “the Annamite woman . . . is generally of a repulsive ugliness and, further, is rendered hideous by certain incorrigible habits (lacquering of teeth in black which transforms the mouth into a horrible cavern that seems toothless, the general habit of chewing betel which stains the tongue and lips with a red juice that the woman spits out at every instant). These different reasons render the indigenous woman repugnant.” Michaut concluded that in Indochina, consequently, “the prostitution of boys is far more dangerous, from the point of view of public health, than feminine prostitution,” requiring a “dispensary for men and a medical surveillance for male prostitutes” and “the regular establishment of a medical service for examining masculine prostitution.”7 It seems that Michaut’s prescriptions went unfilled, and the colonial authorities’ system of réglementation of prostitution was never extended 4Michaut, “Syphilis et pédérastie,” 275–77. 5Ibid., 277; see also “Note sur l’intoxication morphinique,” 464. The “genesic instinct” was first identified by Brillat-Savarin, better known for his philosophy of gastronomy; see Rosario, 6. 6Michaut, “Contribution à l’étude,” 321. On the economic importance of opium to the French colonial effort, see Chantal Descours-Gatin, Quand l’opium finançait la colonisation en Indochine: L’Elaboration de la régie générale de l’opium (1860 à 1914) (Paris, 1992) and Philippe Le Failler, Monopole et prohibition de l’opium en Indochine␣ : Le pilori des chimères (Paris, 2001); on the ambivalent attitudes toward its social consequences, see Philippe Le Failler, “Le ‘Coût social’ de l’opium au Vietnam: La problématique des drogues dans le philtre de l’histoire,” Journal Asiatique 283, no. 1 (1995): 239–64; see below for literary considerations of opium in French Indochina. 7Michaut, “Syphilis et pédérastie,” 277–78. Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases 613 to male prostitutes. Nor did the French government heed his ringing ex- hortations to eliminate the colonists’ use of opium, which he deemed to be “one hundred times more terrible than alcoholism” and, indeed, “our most dangerous adversary in our Indo-Chinese colonies.”8 This is not to say, however, that Michaut would not have found an interested audience of contemporary readers, both in the metropole and in the colonies, among those who shared his horror as well as among others who might have found his condemnations overwrought (and even among those who sim- ply thought the subjects titillating). During the century of French colo- nial domination of Indochina, soldiers and administrators, missionaries and novelists, journalists and politicians all contributed to the construc- tion of complex images of the sexes/genders and sexualities of the “sub- ject peoples” and the social diseases to which they were susceptible (or of which they were more often seen as active agents).9 In another essay, I have examined the French colonial constructions of Vietnamese males as effeminate and Vietnamese females as virile, and the related constructions of sexualities and social diseases discussed in the present article can be understood most fully in the broader context of those images of androgynous gender.10 Here I concentrate on the less subtle— indeed, often sensational—conceptions of social diseases, particularly those three so closely interlinked in Michaut’s essays. Through what curious logic were Vietnamese women, endemic syphilis, or the anaphrodisiac opium to blame for pervasive pederasty? And through what inverted rationalization were the French colonials merely the innocent victims of their vicious Viet- namese subjects? An examination of the colonial-era discourse, in its broad- est and most eclectic scope, allows us to begin to answer such questions. Concentrating on the first decades of French colonial administration begin- ning in the late nineteenth century, I have chosen to let the sources speak directly and at some length, because my concern here is with the rhetorical construction of their discourse and its implications. (I am not concerned, then, with the empirical “accuracy” of that discourse vis-à-vis its underlying medical, legal, or scientific details.) The discourse is more or less of a piece, yet it also incorporates widely divergent particulars and often-contradictory images of the conquered Vietnamese; it follows no single chronology, ex- cept in rare cases traces no historical supercession of one viewpoint over 8Ibid., 279; Michaut, “Accidents,” 88. 9I treat “sexes/genders” together here because, as we shall see, the rhetorical practice is always to naturalize gender as corporeally embodied. Our nice academic distinction be- tween natural “sex” and cultural “gender” is historically anachronistic, obscuring the fact that a late-nineteenth-century French colonial would likely have seen them as inseparable. The analytical distinction would also obscure the historical fact that cultural gender was constructed in and through bodily practices and interactions, not merely through rhetoric (see below). 10“Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Manzelles, Effeminate Boys, and Graceless Women: French Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese Genders,” GLQ 8(2002), 435-67. 614 F R A N K P R O S C H A N another, is not limited to any single genre or discipline, and is ultimately not a totalizing discourse. David Spurr makes a similar point: “[W]hat we call colonial discourse is neither a monolithic system nor a finite set of texts; it may more accurately be described as the name for a series of colonizing discourses, each adapted to a specific historical situation, yet having in com- mon certain elements with the others. This series is marked by internal rep- etition but not by all-encompassing totality.”11 I consider first a supposed universal prostitution of Vietnamese women, then an equally ubiquitous pederasty imputed to Vietnamese men, before turning to the social diseases of opiomania and syphilis. A particularly striking feature of the French literature is its portrayal of the colonials as victims of the corrupting influences of their conquered subjects. In con- cluding, I situate these topics within their contemporary metropolitan context and its debates and preoccupations.12 FEMALE PROSTITUTION AND SOCIAL DISEASE The prostitute was, for the French colonials, an ever-encompassing cat- egory that finally included all Vietnamese women, as revealed by the chang- ing meanings of the Vietnamese word for “woman” as it was taken up into colonial French. In Vietnamese, con gai simply means “young woman, girl, female child,” but its semantics in the French discourse shifted over time from “woman” to “wife” to “mistress” to “whore,” ultimately ac- complishing linguistically the degradation of all womanhood to whore- dom.13 The comprehension of all women as prostitutes is also evident in the classifications of public health officials and advocates such as H. Coppin, who noted, “We must leave aside the word ‘prostitute’ and say: there is danger in every woman who gives herself, for money or not, to a number of men too large for all of them to be intact from the venereal viewpoint.”14 Within this (imagined) context of prostitution as a universal female condition, special interest from scientists and novelists alike centered on 11David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C., 1993), 1–2. 12My scope in this essay is restricted to what is now the nation of Vietnam, in the colonial period (c. 1859–1954) the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin. I use “Vietnamese” as an ethnonym to refer to the majority Viet inhabitants; the term came into widespread usage after the colonial period discussed here, when its antecedent was variously “Annamite” or “Indochinese.” Within cited sources I preserve the original designa- tions; when “Indochinese” is used here it refers specifically in the cited sources to the ethnic Vietnamese and not to their Laotian or Cambodian neighbors within the jointly administered French Indochina or to ethnic minorities, whether Chinese or highlanders. 13I cover this issue at length in my article, “Eunuch Mandarins.” 14H. Coppin, “La Prostitution, la police des moeurs et le dispensaire municipal à Hanoi,” in B. Joyeux, ed., Le Péril vénérien et la prostitution à Hanoi: état actuel, bibliographie, réglementation (Hanoi, 1930), 130. See also B. Joyeux, 8–15. Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases 615 those who “fit the classical definition, those who give their bodies to all comers for money on which to live.”15 Exoticist novelists rhapsodized over the Japanese mousmé transplanted to Saigon or Hanoi or recalled the in- digenous flower-boat singers: “There were, before our arrival, in certain large centers, principally at Hue, young ladies of easy virtue, cultivating poetry and music, and called on this account, or under this pretext, to perform at the festivals given by the young people of the aristocratic class, or for passing Chinese merchants. The women lived by choice on the water rather than land, in elegant flower-boats.”16 The custom was, to the nostalgists’ regret, “democratized” until “true singers have become in- creasingly rare. They have been replaced, bit by bit, by girls without tal- ent, on order of the owners who are nothing but madams. Little by little these singers are thus lowered to the rank of common prostitutes, with very few exceptions. In certain houses, one can still find a few degenerate specimens of yesterday’s artists, stumbling through poems they don’t un- derstand and striking clumsily and gracelessly on the Chinese lutes.”17 Physician and syphilologist B. Joyeux complained that “today’s singers, having lost all artistic character, are nothing more than hetaera.”18 With the decline in artistic standards also came a change in clientele: “[T]he so- called singing houses are . . . more and more frequented by Europeans and especially the military, who find women there who are better pre- sented than in the vulgar ‘bordellos.’”19 Most often, however, discussions of prostitution focused not on these quasi-artistic institutions but instead on the prostituées soumises (those reg- istered with authorities and employed in licensed maisons de tolerance) and the prostituées insoumises or prostituées clandestines who worked in illicit brothels or opium dens or on street corners. The prevalent French approach to prostitution, both in the metropole and in the colonies, was that of réglementation, or regulation, which began from the proposition that “only ‘the fear of the police is the beginning of wisdom.’ . . . Only a system of regulation that is well designed and well applied is capable of controlling the evil.” Opposed to this position were the abolitionists, who “demand the abolition of all regulation and all coercive measures against 15Coppin. 16Charles Gosselin, L’Empire d’Annam (Paris, 1904), 23–24. 17H. Virgitti and B. Joyeux, “Les Maisons de chanteuses à Hanoi,” Revue du Paludisme et de Médicine Tropicale 5 (1947): 81. 18Joyeux, ed., 12; see also Laurent Gaide and Campunaud, Le Péril vénérien en Indochine (Hanoi, 1930), 8. The recent revival of the musical repertoire once performed by the flower- boat singers is marked by a similar nostalgia in which the sexualized context of perfor- mances—the reason in fact that the tradition was suppressed in revolutionary Vietnam—goes unmentioned. 19Virgitti and Joyeux, 82. 616 F R A N K P R O S C H A N prostitutes,” relying instead on education and social welfare programs to ameliorate conditions deemed to contribute to prostitution.20 The policies in effect in Indochina, as in France itself, were solidly grounded in regulationism but intermittently compromised in the direc- tion of abolitionism. There was, however, a crucial difference between French policy in the metropole and in the colony: at home, antiprostitu- tion efforts were typically framed in terms of protecting the French race, a population that encompassed both female prostitutes and male clients, from disease. These efforts often included at least nominal concern for the women involved and for their health or at least for their “innocent” chil- dren (although of course that attitude did not necessarily preclude demonization or scapegoating). In the colony the primary rationale was also race protection, but policies were much more exclusively self-cen- tered (and male-centered). French colonial policies on prostitution were only very rarely motivated by concern