by Ciji Ware
Not unlike the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the quake in Haiti, and the BP oil disaster, the “official” numbers surrounding the event continue to change. As of this writing, the confirmed death toll of the San Francisco catastrophe has passed five thousand and continues to rise. Numbers of Chinese killed were noted at about a dozen in the official reports of the day. Five hundred Chinese dead is the more likely number. The fires lasted three full days and destroyed 2,831 acres of the city. Thirty schools, eighty churches, and four hundred city blocks were consumed, leaving more than 250,000 of the city’s 400,000 people homeless.
Thus it is that I wish to extend my profound thanks to Gladys Hansen and others who have produced some of these statistics by searching coroner’s, medical, and Army records, church journals, city directories, old maps, and letters from mourning relatives about family members who were never heard from again after April 18, 1906. Each year on the anniversary of the shaker that hit at 5:12 that cloudless spring morning, we are given a more accurate assessment of the extent of this watershed event in American history.
On a personal note, many friends and members of my family supported what turned out to be my decade-long effort to research, write, and bring this book to publication. Local historian Daniel Bacon, his book Walking San Francisco on the Barbary Coast Trail (www.barbarycoasttrail.org), and his fabulous “live” walking tours of areas devastated in 1906 were invaluable resources. I deeply appreciate his encouragement and friendship to a relative newcomer to the City by the Bay. Authors Diana Dempsey, Michael Llewellyn, Mary Jo Putney, Gloria Dale Skinner, Bardet Wardell, and newsletter editor Diane Barr, along with cookbook author Diane Worthington and edible landscape expert (and my niece), Alison Harris, read various drafts and/or maintained over a long period both their enthusiasm and belief that this book would find a happy publishing home—and it did.
Part of the credit for this goes to editorial specialist Jennifer Jahner, who took pity on me at one difficult point in the writing of the manuscript and helped me find the correct spine of the story. My agent Celeste Fine of Folio Literary Management guided the project to CEO Dominique Raccah’s Sourcebooks and all three women have my deepest gratitude.
A special debt of thanksgiving goes to my revered editor at Sourcebooks and its Landmark division, Deb Werksmen, and her fabulous colleagues, Dawn Pope, Greg Avila, Susie Benton, Sarah Ryan, Skye Agnew, and others on the Sourcebooks team. Deb’s astute editorial judgment, her suggestions on the final draft, along with her inborn courtesy and kindness, make her the treasure she is, both as an acquiring editor and the person responsible for inspiring this author across the finish line.
Joy McCullough Ware not only merits one of the dedications in this book, but also a hearty sisterly hug for serving as a second set of eyes, scanning the typeset manuscript for “nonsensicals” and typos. Any remaining errors or omissions are clearly the author’s.
Tony Cook, my husband of more than three decades—and a “recovering” journalist himself—extended his keen editorial sensibilities and sound judgment when it came navigating the publishing world.
My son, Jamie, and his wonderful new bride Teal, as well as friends on Facebook, were great sounding boards about cover design and “test marketing” among a younger generation of readers. A vintage photograph of the post quake, burnt-out hulk of the Fairmont Hotel, given me by Jamie one Christmas, sat by my computer for years as inspiration to tell this story.
As with every historical novel I’ve written, I keep asking the question: “What were the women doing in history?”
The person I must thank for originally posing this key query is a celebrated academic I once heard give a lecture at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where I’ve held a Readership in Eighteenth c. British-American History.
At one point in Professor Gerda Lerner’s presentation, the author of The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History suddenly pounded the podium and—I’m paraphrasing some twenty years later—passionately declared to an audience of visiting and resident scholars, “Half of human history has yet to be written because the lives of women weren’t properly chronicled by historians; and the half of human history that has been written is woefully inaccurate because the lives of women weren’t properly chronicled…[she paused, and then added] …by (mostly) male historians.”
I emerged from that lecture with my hair on fire! From that moment to this, tracking down “What were the women doing?” in any age became my quest.
In my six works of historical fiction—and certainly in A Race to Splendor—I have chosen to do some “chronicling” of my own.
So thank you, dear Dr. Lerner. And thanks to Michael Llewellyn and Tom Rotella for brainstorming with me to come up with the perfect title…
Ciji Ware
Sausalito, California
Ciji Ware enjoys hearing from readers at www.cijiware.com
Reading Group Guide
1. A number of recent natural disasters have taken place on or near America’s shores: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the massive earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Are these “regional” events, or do they impact the United States as a whole? In what ways did the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and firestorm impact the nation? What lessons did the country as a whole learn? What aspects were shunted aside?
2. How did California change as a result of the devastation of four hundred city blocks and some 250,000 people being made homeless in the space of less than forty-five seconds? What building practices and safety codes eventually resulted from this catastrophe? How prepared do you think your locality is in the event of a natural disaster?
3. What effects do such natural disasters as San Francisco’s 1906 quake or events like the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001 have on the national psyche? Was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake a “first” for such a major event rattling the confidence of the entire nation?
4. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 8, 1882. The measure allowed Congress subsequently to prevent any more Chinese immigrating to the United States. This ban against a specific nationality was intended to last ten years and wasn’t repealed until 1943. In what ways was the treatment of the Chinese in the United States—and in San Francisco, particularly—similar to the Jim Crow laws and treatment of African-Americans in the South? In what ways was it different?
5. Chinese women were bought and sold in San Francisco as late as the early twentieth century. In the novel, Loy Chen has rescued Shou Shou from the “highbinders” who have forced her into prostitution in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As a young girl, Amelia was forbidden to go near the district, and she later admits to her own prejudices against that race. How does the natural disaster affect her and other characters’ perception of her Chinese neighbors? How aware were you that such Chinese slavery existed in the United States into the last century?
6. What does the novel reveal about the role played by some supposedly esteemed “city fathers” in the practices of gambling and prostitution? What conflicts and challenges face entrepreneurs, even today, who do not subscribe to such corrupt and illegal practices, yet, like J.D. Thayer, must operate within the stranglehold of local “power players?”
For additional reading group discussion questions, please visit www. sourcebooks.com/readingguides.
About the Author
Ciji Ware has been an Emmy-award winning television producer, reporter, writer, and radio host. A Harvard graduate, she has written numerous fiction and non-fiction books, including the award-winning Island of the Swans. When she’s not writing, Ciji is a Scottish history and dancing aficionado. She and her husband live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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