The topic of multiculturalism and animal rights is underexplored, but certainly interesting. Claire Jean Kim raises the lens of multiculturalism early in the book but dismisses it as not being particularly useful because it is essentialist (an old accusation that is by now misleading), and because it ignores the issue of animals. We do not learn much about how thinking about animals would alter theories of multiculturalism, but the issues the book treats are nonetheless fascinating. Kim urges us think through the issues with her through different optics: the optic of cruelty, the optic of racism, and the optic of ecological harm. When political actors look at each issue through their particular lens, the world clarifies and simplifies, but each side refuses to really understand the other. The largest part of the book covers the political fights between animal rights activists and the live animal merchants of Chinatown; there is also one short chapter on whaling and the Makah tribe and another one on Michael Vick, the NFL quarterback who was convicted and jailed for dogfighting.
The Chinatown saga begins in a simple way: a walk to work in San Francisco through Chinatown by Patt Briggs, a part-time animal activist who worked on a litany of animal issues: spay and neuter, the circus, fur farming and rodeos. Looking around in Chinatown she sees a big tank filled with crabs who can barely move and who would be killed by being thrown in a vat of boiling water. As Briggs and other agitate for change in how these animals are treated, a report by the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SFSPCA) notes the deplorable treatment of animals in the live animal market in Chinatown: fish packed so tightly in tanks that those that remained alive were pinned upside and sideways, unable to move; a turtle having its shell sliced from its body while alive, which the report suggests is like skinning or scalping a person alive; frogs piled one on top of each other, with those on the bottom crushed, in plastic bins smeared with black slime (pp. 80–81).
The initial animal activists were careful to note that their arguments were not that Chinese culture was particularly cruel; indeed, all of these activists worked on a variety of animal issues. To them, the issues of raised by the live animal markets in Chinatown was just another battle to protect animals. Early on in their fight they had to decide if they were to include the restaurants on Fisherman’s Wharf as a target—largely white owned restaurants that routinely killed lobsters and crab on site to serve to their well to do clientele. A strategic decision was made to drop Fisherman’s Wharf as a target—both because public sympathy with crustaceans was not nearly as large as it was for many animals in Chinatown (turtles, chickens, geese frogs), but also because of the political power of the Fisherman’s Wharf restaurants.
Excluding Fisherman’s Wharf unsurprisingly led to charges of racism against the activists. The strength of Kim’s book is that she shows both how these charges were both unfounded and completely understandable. The optic of cruelty is compelling: many animals in the live animal market lived under horrendous conditions. The optic of racism is compelling: from the point of view of many Chinatown merchants it seemed like they were singled out because of their ethnicity. While many of the activists were careful in how they framed their concerns, others who joined the campaign sometimes did use explicitly racist language.
Kim argues that both sides of this political campaign suffered from single-optic vision, and would do better to embrace what she calls multi-optic vision. The animal activists should have educated themselves better on the history of racism toward Chinese Americans and they have spent time “exploring their connection with it and at the same time understanding the ways that their own racial situatedness (more precisely, their whiteness) complicates their intervention” (p. 199). The Chinese American who defended the live animal markets, for their part, should “engage the issue of cruelty to animals … in good faith,” without reducing everything to racism (p. 199).
This all sounds like a reasonable way to proceed, but given Kim’s exhaustive and lengthy account of the political battles that ensued over the live animal markets for years, it is hard to see how it could have come about. While one organization of Chinatown merchants did seek a compromise with the activists, the other organization was led by Rose Pak, who was known for her “pugilistic and confrontational personality, her fight-to-the-death mindset” (127). It is hard to see how she could be convinced to see that the animal rights activists had a reasonable point: “Pak took an uncompromising stance of the live animal market conflict” (128), and called the concerns of the animal activists “ludicrous” (189).
Some of the animal activists did pursue an obvious compromise: that the animals in the live markets be treated humanely but that they allowed to be killed. Some of the activists opposed this compromise: they wanted the importation of frogs and turtles to be banned, since they claimed they harmed the ecological balance. (In a different chapter, Kim questions that idea of ecological harm in interesting ways.) In the end, the informal compromise between the SFSPCA and one of the Chinatown business organizations quickly collapsed. When part of that compromise actually became California law, it was a pyrrhic victory: with a near toothless enforcement mechanism, the law had no effect on live animal markets. Indeed, while animal activists won some political battles on the local levels, ultimately the political clout of the Chinese American community ensured these victories were short-lived.
A complication to this story is the passing of a law banning the sale of shark fins, a law that many Chinese Americans supported (and many opposed). But this begs a question: why did so many Chinese Americans support the shark fin, a key ingredient in a traditional Chinese soup, but not reformation of the live animal markets? Devoting considerable space to the debates about the live animal markets, Kim says little to answer this question.
The briefer chapters on whaling and Michael Vick have a similar structure to the one on Chinatown: animal rights activists ignoring the specter of racism, which is always present. And once again, Kim’s call for multi-optic vision seems of limited help, particularly in the whaling case, where compromise is impossible. From the point of some Makah Indians, whaling activists are another set of white people trying to oppress them, and tell them what to do. From the point of view of the activists, whaling is always wrong, whether it is done by Norwegians, Japanese or Makah Indians. Sometimes when the battle is about life and death, it is hard to see the other side very sympathetically.
