Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown
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For all its dark alleys, there is nothing sinister about modern 1962 Chinatown. Only on foggy nights when veils of sea mist obscure Spofford Alley and Waverly Place does the Quarter assume something of an air of mystery and an evocation of its turbulent past.
There is overcrowding in Chinatown, TB, and ironically, a tendency toward juvenile delinquency as today’s Chinatown children become so completely Americanized. But little psychological damage appears to have been done by the years of persecution—internal and external. The long suffering, patient community has overcome its legacy of violence in magnificent fashion. Other than the deeply ingrained love of gambling, the almost sole survivor of tong-days traditions is a sort of secretiveness, perhaps a vestigial remnant of the conspiracy of silence of a century ago. Chinatown still keeps its own counsel as a community, perhaps for fear of embarrassing a citizen of Grant Avenue by causing him to be confronted unexpectedly by a tax collector or an immigration inspector.
But Chinatown is no longer the chaotic no man’s land of a ghetto in transition. The quarter is so law-abiding today that sociologists study it in hopes of finding a cure for the increasing lawlessness of other areas of the city, state and nation.
According to the 1960-1961 annual report of Chief of Police Thomas J. Cahill, only one of 26 men arrested during the year for murder or manslaughter was an Oriental. (The statistics do not distinguish between Chinese and others of Oriental descent.) Of 22 rape arrests none was of Chinese, of 243 robbery arrests only 2 were of Orientals. The Quarter which once had a monopoly on street warfare was represented in the fiscal year of 1960 by only 7 cases of assault with a deadly weapon of the city’s total of 177. There were no arrests of Orientals for prostitution and only 30 (out of 652) on narcotics charges. Only in terms of gambling is Chinatown well represented in Chief Cahill’s reports. There were 276 such arrests of Orientals in 1960-61, for the Chinese still love the clatter of pai gow tiles and the clink of silver dollars.
Chinatown today remains the most colorful district of a colorful city. And few if any lament the passing of the lawless city within a city of yesterday. Most of us are content to accept the obituary which Donaldina Cameron pronounced, with no regret for its demise, back in 1906: “The strange, mysterious old Chinatown is gone and never more will be.
Heaps of sand and colored ashes mark the once densely populated, gaily painted, and proverbially wicked haunts of highbinders and slave dealers.”