A Farewell to the “Sick Man of East Asia”: The Irony, Deconstruction, and Reshaping of the Metaphor

Susan Sontag revealed how a disease could be turned into a metaphor in social evolution, from merely a disease of the body to moral judgment or even political oppression. In her article “AIDS and its Metaphors” written in 1989, she offers a plan to do away with the metaphor: “With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up” (Songtag 2003). In Sontag’s terms, “metaphor” mainly refers to the symbolic social oppression of the diseases. For example, cancer is a metaphor for the defect of the sick person in personality. While diseases were a biological phenomenon, the “metaphor” was a social one. What I would like to demonstrate here was none other than the related “political metaphor” started by the “anti-germ warfare.”