Chinatown

“ Down there is Pell Street—Chinatown. The reek and maze of it, despised, gently pitied by our American friends. But there are women in Chinatown. Women and girls of our own race, Yat! Scented buds, black-eyed, black-haired. Buds of rose and jessamine and precious purple orchid spotted with tawny orange. And I shall go there. I shall pick the prettiest bud and wear it in my cap in sign of triumph and conquest! ”

“ There are more things in San Francisco's Chinatown than are dreamed of in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatown—the part the guides show you, the part the guides don't show you, and the part that no one ever hears of. ”

“ Walking through the maze of Chinatown, with a night of glowing violet vaulting above the sad drab of roof top and the crude palette of impromptu, bird's-nest balcony and a nostalgic, Western moon growing fainter and fainter and slowly fading into the vast cosmos of dawn as if trying to escape the reek of sewer and opium and sweat that rose from the packed, greasy wilderness of Pell Street, with Miss Rutter's hectic, guileless, silk-gloved hand pointing out the sluttish sights, he felt his heart muscles contract with a certain nameless dread. ”

“ A half turn from the clattering hubbub of Chatham Square and you are in Chinatown, slipping, within ten feet, through an invisible wall, from the glitter of the gin palace and the pawn-shop to the sinister shadows of irregular streets and blind alleys, where yellow men pad swiftly along greasy asphalt beneath windows glinting with ivory, bronze and lacquer ”

“ The joss house that most visitors see in Chinatown is the little one up under the roof at the meeting of Doyers and Pell streets—at the toe of the twisted horseshoe made by these tiny thoroughfares of black fame, where, in spite of all the modern magic of "reform," men still die silently in the hush of secluded corridors and women vanish into the darkness that is worse than death. ”

“ Chinatown, at the foot of Nob Hill, covers some twelve city blocks, and with its temples, rich bazaars, strange life and show of picturesque colours and customs, it is to strangers one of the most interesting portions of the city. ”

“ Skirting the edge of Chinatown, beyond the boundaries of the big bazaars, they touched the poorer fringe of the Latin quarter, where dirty black-eyed babies tumbled in dark doorways, and tired women with bundles of food under their shawls hurried by, dragging hungry, screaming children by the hand. ”

“ Trust not him who trusts no one, is as safe a rule in Chinatown as out of it. Were not Mott Street overawed in its isolation, it would not be safe to descend this open cellar-way, through which come the pungent odor of burning opium and the clink of copper coins on the table. As it is, though safe, it is not profitable to intrude. ”

“ A Trip to Chinatown, San Francisco--A House with a History--Narrow Alleys and Secret Doors--Opium Smoking and its Effects--The Highbinders--Celestial Theatricals--Chinese Festivals--The Brighter Side of a Great City--A Mammoth Hotel and Beautiful Park.
Chinatown, San Francisco, is such a remarkable place, and contrasts so strangely with the wealth and civilization of the great city on the Pacific Coast, of which it is a part, that its peculiarities cannot be ignored in a sketch of the most remarkable features of our native land. ”

“ The severest official scrutiny, the harshest repressive measures are justifiable in Chinatown, orderly as it appears on the surface, even more than in the Bend, and the case is infinitely more urgent. To the peril that threatens there all the senses are alert, whereas the poison that proceeds from Mott Street puts mind and body to sleep, to work out its deadly purpose in the corruption of the soul. ”

“ No where else are to be seen such gray and wind-swept streets, where houses stand sidewise, as if mounting flights of stairs, the parlor windows of one house looking through the chimney-pots of its neighbor. Nowhere else are perched palaces like those of San Francisco, or a growth, as huge and strange in its exotic coloring, as Chinatown. ”

“ Shopkeepers who for the moment did no business stood in their doorways. Down a side street Boyd looked into Chinatown—a collection of battered old frame and adobe buildings that mysteriously had been lifted sheer from squalor to splendid romance by no other means than red paper, varnished ducks, rattan baskets, calico partitions, exotic smells and a brooding, spiritual atmosphere of the orient. They passed the San Antonio hotel which the Colonel casually mentioned as his own.
"There are always a number of people no gentleman would want to entertain in his home," he told the astonished Boyd. ”

“ There is a night life in Limehouse, as he had learned, but it is a mole life, a subterranean life, of which no sign appears above ground after a certain hour. Nevertheless, as he entered the area which harbours those strange, hidden resorts the rumour of which has served to create the glamour of Chinatown, he found himself to be thinking of the great influence said to be wielded by Huang Chow, and wondering if unseen spies watched his movements.
Lala was Oriental, and now, alone in the night, distrust leapt into being within him. ”

“ So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanished from San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism and developed literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of the Forty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those who mourned for the fire-blasted past may have been right, in a measure. Certainly the old-time Chinatown isn't there any more—or, at any rate, isn't there in its physical aspects. The rebuilt Chinatown of San Francisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or so Chinesey looking as New York's Chinatown. ”

“ Yet at times I blamed myself for thus misusing my days, and memories of Glengyle and Mother and Garry loomed up with reproachful vividness.
I was, too, a seeker of curious experience, and this was to prove my undoing. The night-side of the city was unveiled to me. With the assurance of innocence I wandered everywhere. I penetrated the warrens of underground Chinatown, wondering why white women lived there, and why they hid at sight of me. Alone I poked my way into the opium joints and the gambling dens. Vice, amazingly unabashed, flaunted itself in my face. ”

“ Most of the opium dens were underground.
The majority of the people of Chinatown lived in what were little better than rat holes, dark, poorly ventilated little cells on the side of narrow passages in basements. The rich merchants and importers lived well, but the middle and poorer classes lived in the basements where rent was cheap. Of the 24,000 Chinese population only about 900 were women so Chinatown was a bachelor’s town by a large majority, though some of the residents had [Pg 249] wives in China to whom they expected to return some day. ”

“ To some the ivories will always be but crudely carven bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal philosophies. Hearken then to the story of the avenging of Wah Sing. ”

“ You see them in all the downtown quarters of San Francisco—the men with that inscrutable gravity and sagacity that long centuries of civilization seem to have given them, the women and the little girls, of high caste or low, invariably hatless and wearing loose coat and trousers—in many cases of brilliant colors and rare Oriental silks. And when you come to their own city within a city—San Francisco's famous Chinatown—they are the dominant folk upon the street. ”

“ This great treasure-house of old Huang Chow was one of Chinatown's secrets—a secret shared only by those whose commercial interests were identical with the interests of Huang Chow.
The place was artificially lighted by lamps which themselves were beautiful objects of art, and which swung from the massive beams of the ceiling. The floor of the warehouse, which was partly of stone, was covered with thick matting, and spread upon it were rugs and carpets of Karadagh, Kermanshah, Sultanabad, and Khorassan, with lesser-known loomings of almost equal beauty. Skins of rare beasts overlay the divans. ”

“ Washington’s Chinatown is neither as large as Frisco’s, as colorful as New York’s, nor as odoriferous as Boston’s. You will see no ancient, pajama-clad women on its streets, and only a few young slant-eyed Sadies.
Chinatown is a mere three or four blocks on H Street, beginning in a block about 8th and extending barely to 5th. It’s almost all neon-lighted restaurants, with the shops of a few wholesale merchants and traders sandwiched in between. H is a typical wide Washington street with set-back buildings. ”

“ In Chinatown the other day a peddler was selling spectacles and somehow the old men trying them on and squinting for “near” and for “far,” seemed so quaint and countrified and like a lot of old Yankees around a country store trying to get a “new pair of eyes, by Heck.” In Chinatown the tong men do not seem at all real and the hair raising movie serial with its Chinatown terrors, Buddhist idols that open and swallow the movie actors and floors that drop into dungeons, seem very remote. ”

“ There is indeed a plague spot in Chinatown, the social fester, which can and ought to be removed. But this is true of American San Francisco as well as of Chinatown. What, we may ask, are the men and women of as beautiful a city as ever sat on Bay or Lake or Sea-Shore or River, doing for its purgation, for its release from moral defilement and "garments spotted with the flesh?" This indeed is one of the searching questions to be asked of any other City, such as New York, Chicago, St. Louis, London, Paris, Cairo, Constantinople, as well as San Francisco. ”

“ There is a church in Mott Street, at the entrance to Chinatown, that stands as a barrier between it and the tenements beyond. Its young men have waged unceasing war upon the monstrous wickedness for years, but with very little real result. ”

“ Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing. Next-door neighbor to the Bend, it has little of its outdoor stir and life, none of its gayly-colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty. Mott Street is clean to distraction: the laundry stamp is on it, though the houses are chiefly of the conventional tenement-house type, with nothing to rescue them from the everyday dismal dreariness of their kind save here and there a splash of dull red or yellow, a sign, hung endways and with streamers of red flannel tacked on, that announces in Chinese characters that Dr. ”

“ As for the people of Chinatown, however, no one knows or will ever know the extent of the dread fate that overcame them, for no one knows the secrets of that dark abode of infamy and crime, whose inhabitants burrowed underground like so many ants ”

“ All these Fu Chen heeded not. He slipped quietly up the Bowery for two or three blocks. His wrinkled face was expressionless; his back bent from the toil of the laundry; his hands hidden in his sleeves. Only a slight widening of the faded, slant eyes showed that Fu Chen sought something of unusual interest near the narrow streets which are the entrance to Chinatown.
At a corner saloon he looked up quickly at the windows of the second floor. A dingy sign proclaimed a pool-parlor. He entered a hallway, but did not seek the pool-room. ”

“ Chinatown Between the tabernacles of Jewry and the shrines of the Bend, Joss has cheekily planted his pagan worship of idols, chief among which are the celestial worshipper's own gain and lusts. Whatever may be, said about the Chinaman being a thousand years behind the age on his own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successful scheming to "make it pay." It is doubtful if there is anything he does not turn to a paying account, from his religion down, or up, as one prefers. ”

“ Nobody troubles very much about Chinatown, except the authorities, and their interference is but perfunctory. The yellow men, after all, are, as Prologue to "Pagliacci" observes, but men like you, for joy or sorrow, the same broad heaven above them, the same wide world before them. ”

“ It is the solitary looker-on who sees more than the actors in the great drama of every-day life. Above all, it is most curious to observe how the lines of barbarism and civilization intersect along these teeming avenues.
There is a district of the city near its very centre, known [Pg 10] as Chinatown, which is at total variance with the general surroundings. ”

“ Temple were on their way by auto to the unique city within a city which constitutes San Francisco’s Chinatown, a quarter housing more than 30,000 Chinese. Oriental in every characteristic, with narrow alleys and courts, cellars, sub-cellars and sub-sub-cellars, the dragon roofs of Chinatown lie just below Nob Hill, the old aristocratic quarter of San Francisco with its veritable palaces of stone. ”

“ About fifteen young Chinamen are seated at the tables, all reading and studying aloud in true Chinese fashion. Just as you enter the teacher, touches the bell. Books are closed and all take seats on the benches in front of the organ. A Chinese evangelist is present, and while he makes an impassioned address, accompanied by most expressive gestures, you are free to study the faces upturned to listen. What a contrast to the faces you have just left in Chinatown, idly staring at the passer-by, or, vacant of all interest, staring at nothing! ”