This Palgrave Pivot combines anthropological, biographical and
autoethnographic perspectives onto imperial intimacies, the
transgenerational transmission of colonial and familial trauma, and
violence in two kinds of household: the Chinese family in British Hong
Kong and wider imperial Asia, and the Anglo-Chinese family in England.
Conjoining approaches from literary anthropology, the historiography of
Anglo-Chinese relations, and perspectives on colonial trauma, it
highlights the relative neglect of women's stories in customary Chinese
readings, colonial accounts, and an ancestral family record from 1800 to
the present. Offering an alternative view of family history, this book
links the body as a dwelling for assaults on the ability to
breathe--through tuberculosis, opium smoking, asthma, and panic--with
the physical home that is assaulted in turn by bombs, killing, intimate
betrayals, and fatal respiratory illness. The COVID-19 "pandemic of
breathlessness" serves as mnemonic both for state repression, and for
the reprisal of historical fears of suffocation and dying. These
phenomena converge under an analytic concept the author calls
respiratory politics.