Kung Flu

CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang tweeted on March 18, 2020: “This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the 'Kung-Flu' to my face.” The virus of racist Sinophobia has long lain dormant in America’s bloodstream, now jolted awake by President Donald Trump’s repeated tweets of Covid-19 as “the Chinese Virus” and his ensuing defense of the term in press conferences. The Washington Post published on March 19 a close-up photograph by Jabin Botsford, capturing Trump’s briefing notes, where “corona” in coronavirus was crossed out and replaced by “CHINESE” in caps with a sharpie. 

Since the virus is named after the crown-like spikes on its surface, Trump apparently coronates the Chinese as the arch villain, forgetting that the vast majority of Chinese save one are victims of this alien invasion, that one being the patient zero who most likely helped himself or herself to pangolin or other exotic meats around Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in the dead of winter, 2019. 

Déjà vu, all over again: In the wake of the Japanese Imperial Navy attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were interned, since they—Japanese versus Americans of Japanese descent—are all alike to white Anglo-Americans. Trump’s enthroning of the Chinese en masse is a deliberate strategy to shift responsibility of the Commander in Chief in the fight against the pandemic. Rather than a miniscule, invisible virus, Trump erects a straw man of good standing, from the medieval yellow peril to the millennial “Real Sick Man of Asia,” in Walter Russell Mead’s controversial phrase.

Covid-19 has mutated from Trump’s usual tactic of fake news and democratic “hoax” to a real pandemic that Trump claims to have predicted all along. The fact that between forty to fifty percent of Americans continue to buy into Trump’s demagoguery is symptomatic of what truly ails America. The fear of losing power, real or imagined, drives die-hard Trump supporters to invest in their Great White Hope of MAGA, because Trump promises to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, evidently one of the haves, “the coastal elites,” shopping at Saks, museum-hopping, sipping cappuccino. Why does Trump not set the figure of speech at Main Street of the Rust Belt? Tribal jealousy, ressentiment, even self-loathing externalized as violence in words and/or deeds: all these mixed emotions converge in our reaction to Covid-19 raging across the globe.

Covid-19 appears to have originated in Wuhan, China. Researchers have critiqued China’s own cultural practices that may have engendered recent epidemics. Out of China’s long history and tradition, Yi-Zheng Lian in The New York Times pinpoints two contributing factors. Lian blames China’s “long history of punishing the messenger,” such as Li Wenliang the whistleblower doctor who was disciplined and later died. Moreover, Lian identifies the direct culprit as the traditional custom of “jinbu,” restoring the body’s holistic balance by consuming exotic foods. 

Although scientists are yet to determine how the coronavirus made its way from bats to humans, they suspect pangolins or other exotic wildlife consumed in Wuhan to be the intermediary. China has apparently failed to implement strictures against exotic foods in the wake of SARS, which jumped species from civet cats to Guangdong eaters in 2002-2003. China has a daunting task to clean up its international image after having cleaned up its act in environment, national priorities, even personal hygiene. 

Evidence suggests that China’s soft power apparatus has already begun to turn the image of poisonous, viral dragon to one of dragon-slayer, dispatching doctors and equipment to Italy and elsewhere. Furthermore, Zhao Lijian, deputy director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department, tweeted without any proof that US military personnel brought the coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019, a deflection of responsibility no different from Trump’s. In turn, Trump supporters have intimated accidental infections from Wuhan Institute of Virology doing research on bat viruses, with such scientists as the 2008 Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier backing the speculation. Ultimately, the quest for the unholy grail—Covid-19’s patient zero—may be futile, given China’s possible cover-up and Trump’s strategic China-bashing.

Indeed, the Janus-faced America is split between the Sinophiliac Kung Fu Panda franchise from Hollywood and the Sinophobic Kung Flu Panda-mic spread from the index patient in the White House, from, to borrow The New York Times columnist David Brooks’s words, the “megalomaniac” “sociopath” with comb-over hair dyed golden blond, Golem bound. Instead of focusing on the task at hand, which necessitates self-scrutiny of failed leadership, Trump and his henchmen deflect the blame. So facile and expedient is the finger-pointing that it intimates Sinophobia lurking just below Sinophilia, to be called forth by a mere wordplay over “fu” and “flu,” “pandemic” and “panda-mic,” “corona” and “CHINESE.” The verbal game stems from the mind game of flipping loving and hating China. 

In terms of chronic Sinophobia, American pop culture is crawling with examples. Against which, Sinophilia overcorrects, as in Kung Fu Panda (2008, 2011, 2016). All three animations cast the iconic animal as the bumbling, adorable protagonist Po. The children’s family fun comprises fragments of Orientalist mystique and buffoonery over kung fu, filial piety, sacrifice, yin-yang, qi, and a host of stereotypes awaiting the repo man from Hollywood. The amorphous non sequitur “fu” lends itself to doublespeak from the White House to academia. By means of the contrapuntal “fu,” Naomi Greene shrewdly yokes attraction and repulsion in her scholarly monograph From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda( 2014), from the bad to the good China. David Shambaugh cites one Chinese researcher’s lament: “We have gongfu [martial arts] and we have pandas, but we could not make a film like Kung-fu Panda!” Hollywood’s fine kitsch is idolized by the Chinese themselves! Shambaugh’s native informant engages in a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand as well: splitting apart gongfu and panda before putting them together. The animations play the role of asymptomatic carriers, spreading laughter and entertainment, which darken into paranoia at the right time, which is now. 

Arguably, Kung Fu Panda lapses into Kung Flu Panda-mic as the White House turns to the dark side, which is the House of Fu, the House of Fool within itself. “Fu” means both fortune/blessing and bat in Chinese, among other homophones. Owing to their identical sounds, images of bat symbolize good fortune, part of interior décor and fabric design in Chinese culture. Unlike its Western association with Dracula and blood-sucking, fu as bat is dear to the Chinese heart, but it and its intermediary should stay as far away as possible from the Chinese mouth. Fu or bat ought to remain on Chinese walls and furniture, keeping its virus off the Chinese tongue and the American mind. 

So whence does “the Chinese virus” come? Epidemiologists’ search for the species-jumping culprit would be deemed an academic exercise too dangerous for Beijing Politburo’s huyou (bamboozle or deceive) and the White House’s white lies. Without knowing whence, there is no whither.

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, specializing in Asian Diaspora and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of Off-White: Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture (Bloomsbury, 2019).