San Francisco Chinatown

by Philip P Choy

  Dehumanizing carcatures of the Chinese compounded Sinophobic hysteria.

  San Francisco was outraged at Chinese labor competition and took circuitous routes to outlaw or tax Chinese businesses. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, for example, passed ordinances that impacted only the Chinese. One ordinance forbade merchants from carrying laundry, vegetable baskets, and other wares on shoulder poles. Laundries that operated with a one-horse vehicle were taxed one dollar, while Chinese laundries that carried laundry by hand were taxed $15.00. Another ordinance, aimed at the practice of bunk-bed lodging in Chinatown, outlawed sleeping in any room with less than 500 cubic feet per person. When the Chinese packed the jails instead of paying their fine for these violations, another ordinance was passed to cut off their queues, in an attempt to humiliate the dissenters.

  Far from being a fringe viewpoint, Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party had a powerful influence on mainstream society. The new State Constitution, for example, drafted with the Party’s input and enacted in 1879, gave cities and towns “all necessary power … of this State for the removal of Chinese… . ” This section of the Constitution would not be removed until November 4, 1952. But there was a major federal obstacle to the execution of this state power, and the anti-Chinese movement more generally: the Burlingame Treaty between China and the United States. Earlier treaties between the two nations in 1844 and 1858 gave the United States and its citizens unilateral privileges of trade and commerce with China. In the interest of continuing trade and missionary activities, the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 pledged reciprocal immigration between the two countries. The passage of this treaty was opposed bitterly by California as opening the gates to the “hordes” of Chinese who would drive out white labor.

  Protests from the Pacific Coast poured into Congress, seeking action to prevent Chinese immigration. In response, Congress amended the Burlingame Treaty with the Treaty of 1880 to give the United States the right to regulate the immigration or residence of Chinese laborers; in return, Chinese residing in the United States would be given special protection. This arrangement paved the way for the passage of the Exclusion Act of 1882, which for ten years prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers. On paper, the Exclusion Act exempted merchants and their families, teachers, diplomats, students, and travelers, but in practice, the law attempted to thwart all Chinese immigration. Over the following decade, residence requirements were stiffened. Under the Geary Act of 1882, the Chinese laborers had to go through a process of registration, and deportations were relentlessly pursued. San Francisco was not satisfied even when all Chinese exclusion acts were extended in 1902 and made “permanent” in 1904.

  Mass anti-Chinese meetings incited riots.

  Equally persistent, the Chinese attempted to immigrate by circumventing the exclusion laws through extralegal means. Inclusion of merchants in the exempt classification was necessary to honor the trade and commercial provisions in the treaties between the United States and China. Through purchasing or claiming partnership in a business firm, a person established himself as a merchant. A merchant’s wife and minor children could also immigrate. Because all children of American citizens are citizens by birth, even if born in a foreign country, purchasing the birthright and adopting the identity of a son or daughter of a merchant or a United States citizen became a popular means of immigration. These fraudulent bureaucratic practices became known as the “paper son” racket. Many Chinese also took advantage of the 1906 Earthquake to claim their birth certificates were burned in the fire.

  Under the Exclusion Acts, merchants were allowed to immigrate.

  In order to deny admission to the immigrants, immigration officials devised an interrogation system to entrap and expose fraudulent attempts. From 1910 to 1941, the center for housing and processing the new arrivals was located at the Immigration Station on Angel Island. Detainment took anywhere from a few days to a record of two years! Poems carved on the barracks wall by detainees are testaments to their anxiety, fears, frustrations, and disillusionment.

  Before the 1906 Earthquake, various proposals were made to reclaim Chinatown. In February 1905, spokesman John Partridge for the United States Improvement and Investment Company boasted, “the City would be relieved of the continual menace… . ” However, such plans would soon be thwarted by the Earthquake.

  Earthquake

  On Wednesday, April 18, 1906, at 5:12 a.m., a massive temblor, 8.3 by today’s Richter scale, shocked San Francisco, sending thousands of panic-stricken people stumbling into the streets half-dazed and half-dressed. The 48 seconds that shook the earth seemed an eternity. But the worst was yet to come, as fires raged over parts of the city. The City’s 585 firemen raced their teams of horses to the sites, hooked up hoses, and started pumping, only to realize—no water! The tremor had ruptured water lines from reservoirs that supplied the City; the underground water mains from cisterns were sheared apart. Assistant Fire Chief Dougherty concluded the only way to check the raging flames and save the City was to dynamite the buildings. Barrels of black powder came from the Presidio military base and dynamite came from Fort McDowell on Angel Island. Inexperienced soldiers began blowing up buildings under the supervision of a handful of military explosive experts. But the strategy of blowing up buildings ahead of the firestorm in order to create firebreaks instead sent flaming debris into neighboring blocks, starting new fires. Thousands of residents assisting policemen and firemen rescued the trapped and injured and searched for the missing, while hundreds of criminals and greedy civilians looted stores and buildings.

  The Great Earthquake and Fire, San Francisco, 1906. Looking down California Street from Nob Hill.

  Mayor Eugene Schmitz, heretofore facing criminal and corruption charges with mentor Abe Ruef and the complete Board of Supervisors, rose to the occasion and gallantly took command, as a decent mayor should. He immediately drafted a proclamation authorizing federal troops and the police to shoot and kill all looters. Unfortunately, greed overcame “duty to protect,” as some soldiers were among the looters. Ignoring his corrupt political partners, he summoned the leading citizens and organized the “Committee of Fifty” to govern the chaotic city; the committee included two subcommittees, one to designate a location for a segregated relief camp, the other to designate a site for the relocation of Chinatown.

  Chinese in segregated relief camp.

  Another major figure who took charge of the City was General Frederick Funston, Deputy Commander of the Presidio; he deployed 1700 of his troops into the City, supporting firemen and police wherever help was most urgently needed. Soldiers with fixed bayonets were posted everywhere to discourage looting. Under his orders blocks of buildings were dynamited ahead of flaming buildings. In effect, martial law was unofficially declared.

  After four days of firefighting and dynamiting, an area east of Van Ness to the waterfront and south of Market to north of the Bay was a ruin of smoldering ashes. Within the burnt area, old Chinatown was gone forever.

  Architect Clarence R. Ward’s proposal for the southwest corner of Wahsington and Grant Streets.

  Chinatown Post-Quake

  On April 23rd, the subcommittee to relocate Chinatown proposed to move Chinatown to Hunters Point. However, the Chinese had plans of their own. Even before the 1906 Earthquake, while San Francisco was entertaining David Burnham’s master plan for a new city, Look Tin Eli, secretary of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and other prominent merchants including Tong Bong and Lew Hing conjured visions of a new “Oriental City” to give greater San Francisco “veritable fairy palaces filled with the choicest treasures of the Orient… .” While the City was occupied with earthquake reconstruction, the Chinese merchants wasted no time in executing their plans. Two imposing structures on Grant Street, Sing Fat on the southwest corner and Sing Chong on the northwest corner, demonstrate the pseudo-Oriental style with the curved eaves of a pagoda tower. Today’s Chinatown skyline was thus a direct response to half a century of the City’s hostility.


  This new attitude deliberately promoted Chinatown as a tourist mecca, in the hopes that its improved image would help ameliorate the relationship with the community at large. And to some extent, the plan was a success. The rebuilding of Chinatown into an Oriental City was heartily endorsed by the San Francisco Real Estate Board, which passed the following resolution: “… whereas … the Chinese style of architecture will make it picturesque … and attractive to tourists … the San Francisco Real Estate Board does hereby recommend to all property owners, to have their buildings re-built with fronts of Oriental and artistic appearance.” Architect Clarence R. Ward was requested by leading merchants in San Francisco to set an architectural example. Ward was concerned that the way the current architectural “aberrations” were being built would be a disaster. But Ward’s proposal for the Southwest corner of Washington Street and Grant was not executed and the firm Ross & Burgren was credited with setting the “Oriental” style of construction with Sing Fat at the southwest corner and Sing Chong at the northwest corner of Dupont and California.

  American architects at the turn of the 20th century were trained in the Beaux Arts tradition; they knew little and cared less about the architecture of Asia. Their exposure to Chinese architecture was limited to images of pagodas and temples with massive curved roofs with eaves curled at corners, forms and expressions already centuries old. Their challenge was to transform these ancient forms into a new Sino-architectural vocabulary using Western methods of construction and local building materials in conformance with local building codes.

  The size of the lots and their location were determining factors in the outcome of the design. Corner lots lent themselves to the adaptation of the multi-tiered eaves to simulate the multi-storied pagoda. Since the building code allowed 100% coverage of the lots, the middle lots left only the street façade for design. The ground floor was maximized for storefront usage, leaving minimal room for a front entry to the upper stories. Therefore fire escapes were necessary as secondary exits. These wrought-iron fire escapes were turned into balconies decorated with Chinese design motifs, such as the stylized “double happiness” character. The top-floor balcony was recessed, with the roof extended to create the illusion of the massive roof prevalent in Chinese architecture. Columns, indiscriminately surmounted by capitals, supported the roof, creating an “exotic” appearance. The eclectic use of standard classical building elements—brackets, cornices, parapets, Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian capitals, antefix, and acanthus—combined with an oriental roofline, furthered the exotic image. But only the use of the colors red, yellow, and green was authentically Chinese. Where buildings abutted each other, the contiguous pattern gave the illusion of an “Oriental” streetscape. Waverly Place, with its concentration of buildings, demonstrates this deception best. The illusion created is a masterful design solution, unique and indigenous, for it is neither East nor West but decidedly San Francisco.

  Not every property owner and tenant accepted the spirit of transforming post-quake Chinatown into an “Oriental City.” Perhaps because of financial considerations, many of the buildings were basic austere brick commercial structures completely without Oriental or Western ornamentation. But the new “Oriental” spirit apparently met with success, not only in the imagery of its physical environment but in the social image of the population, as the Bulletin’s “Pacific Progress” issue (May 1, 1909) lauded Chinatown as “one of the most noted places on the American Continent” and apologetically wrote: “we have … held up to the public gaze for too long the racial grief that separates the yellow and white people of the earth… . “

  Such social gains, however, were limited. The passage of the Exclusion Act declared the Chinese could not became citizens, the Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1923 ensured Chinese could not own property, and local real estate covenants confined the Chinese to Chinatown and restricted labor competition. Denied participation in mainstream America for over four decades, the Chinese embraced the politics of homeland China, while focusing on the domestic affairs of the community and earning the goodwill of San Francisco.

  Politics of China in Chinatown

  For over half a century, the politics of China profoundly impacted Chinese America. By the end of the 19th century, China under the Manchu rulers (1644-1911) was near collapse, incapable of repelling the onslaught of Western nations and Japan. Kang Yu-wei and Liang Chi-chao advocated saving the backward, archaic dynasty by reforms to bring China into the 20th century and keep pace with the industrial West. Emperor Kang Hsü supported the movement over the objection of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Ts’u Hsi. The Empress Dowager engineered a coup d’état and Kang Hsü was arrested while both Kang Yu-wei and Liang Chi-chao escaped overseas with a price on their heads. In opposition to this reform movement was Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who plotted to overthrow the Dynasty and establish a republic. He also escaped with a price on his head. Both opposing parties sought support for their cause from the overseas Chinese community.

  Kang Yu-wei.

  When Ch’en Lan-pin, an envoy who headed the Legation sent by the Chinese government to the U.S., landed in San Francisco in 1878, he witnessed the prevailing anti-Chinese environment in the U.S. and suggested a Chinese consulate be established to oversee the welfare of the Chinese. Titled scholars were sent from China to preside over the hui kuan. These officials were, in effect, extensions of the diplomatic services. While these Ching Dynasty representatives were concerned with diffusing the hostilities with the community at large, the two opposing parties of Kung Yu-wei and Sun Yat-sen were actively recruiting sympathizers to overthrow the very government that accorded them protection in the U.S. Each faction had the support of newspapers to propagandize their cause. The future of China was plotted right here in Chinatown.

  Sun Yat-sen.

  In the struggle, Sun’s revolutionary ideology, to drive out the Manchu rulers and restore China back to the Chinese, prevailed. On October 10, 1911, while Sun Yat-sen was still in the U.S., a rebellion broke out at Wuchan, Hankow, and the Manchu government was overthrown. On November 5, 1911, all of Chinatown came out to celebrate the momentous occasion with a grand parade, followed by a huge banquet. Chinese men cut off their queues, symbolically removing the Manchu’s shackles. Fortuitously, the act was also a symbol of Americanization, as the last vestige of Chinese dress was removed. The yellow flag with blue Imperial dragon flew for the last time. Every flagpole in Chinatown flew the flag of the new Republic of China.

  But the euphoria was short lived, for the problems of the new Republic had only just begun. Feudal warlords controlled various parts of the country and fought each other for sovereignty. From the East, Japan determined that she should be the power in Asia. After Commodore Matthew Perry opened its doors to Western trade in 1858, Japan took only a short span of less than 50 years to emerge as a military power. She began her aggression, conducting military forays into China. For three decades Chinatown was embroiled in activities to raise funds for the salvation of China.

  Following the 1911 Revolution, Dr. Sun consolidated his political activities under the party name Kuomintang (KMT) and strengthened his military forces with the establishment of the Whampoa Military Academy, under a young officer named Chiang Kai Shek. With Sun’s death on March 12, 1915, Chiang took command of the KMT and led the fight against Japan. For the next three decades, the overseas Chinese continued to be embroiled in the politics of China and established chapters of the KMT throughout the United States. Since 1915, the KMT headquarters in San Francisco has been at 830-48 Stockton Street. The local press covered the news of the war daily. Orchestrated by the Chinese Six Companies, the Chinese throughout the United States were unified in effort to defeat Japan.

  Born American of Chinese Descent

  Whether native-born or alien, Chinese Americans were always considered foreigners. As Charles Caldwell Dobie wrote in his 1936 book San Francisco’s Chinatown, “Here no matter how much they adopt our traditions, they can never hope to enter fully into a birthri
ght.” Set apart from Eurocentric America, the first generation of Chinese Americans embraced the politics and culture of the homeland and imparted those values to their offspring, lest their heritage be forgotten. Chinese-language schools were a prominent necessity in the community. This attempt at cultural maintenance began sporadically under the Ching government, but after the 1911 revolution, the hui kuan took up the responsibility and established language schools for youths belonging to their association. The Christian missions, recognizing the advantage of enrolling youths into their membership, likewise established Chinese classes.

  By 1934, there were 1,708 students, ages six to seventeen, attending ten schools weekdays from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. after public school and from 9 a.m. to 12 noon on Saturdays. Tuition was $1.00 to $1.50 a month. The degree of success in cultural maintenance was minimal, but the benefit of “babysitting” was universal. Perhaps this contributed to the absence of major juvenile delinquency within the community at the time. Teaching followed the old traditions of China. In the non-missionary schools, teachers admonished and berated the American-born as mo no (“no brain”) and jook sing (“knots of the bamboo”). Corporal punishment was administered without regard to injury. Today we would consider it child abuse.