A visitor to the Bay Area I'd met said that they'd just gone to Chinatown in SF, and commented dispargingly that they found it "very touristy". I really didn't know what to say: yes, Grant Street is certainly touristy, but aren't you a tourist? What did you want to see, Tong Wars? And really, what could be more Chinese than selling any goddamn thing some white assholes want to buy?
But then, there've been times I've walked through Chinatown late at night, long after the tourists had cleared out, and heard the sounds of Chinese drums coming up from a basement, or noted the sounds of thousands of furiously slapped majong tiles coming from covered windows off an alley, and it's been clear that there are people there keeping some of the traditions alive that have made it famous.
Here's a brief tour of Chinatown and the fascination and fear of the exotic in our midst, covering New York, San Francisco, London, Hawaii, and even Oakland, from 1906 to now...
I picked up a copy of a book on impulse over at Bibliomania in Oakland (yes, an actual used bookstore. You've heard of bookstores, right kids?), and it turned out to be a good pick:
Richard Burke, "Chinese Red" (1942)
This copy was a small, cheaply made hardback edition that seems to have been one of the main vehicles for popular fiction back before the advent of the paperback-- though 1942 was concurrent with the pulp magazine craze, which makes me wonder about the publishing decisions involved in releasing this in book form.
But then, as mystery novels go, this one is pretty well constructed, and holds up fairly well. It's a work of it's time that screams out the years it came from-- guys in hats making wisecracks, with some reasonably impressive hugger-mugger, up and down and around a building in New York's Chinatown.
The story takes place in the early years of US entry into World War II-- it's contempt for "Japs" makes it seem likely it was written after the Pearl harbor attack in late 1941. Notably, it shows no similar hostility toward Chinese people-- the white characters on stage are New Yorkers, many of them ignorant, all of them brash and occasionally insulting, but the overall impression you get of the Chinese and of New York's Chinatown is not at all negative:
The sinister, evil and mysterious Chinese of one-time popular imagination doesn't exist in the mind of any New York policeman, who knows these people to be the least troublesome of any element of the huge city. (p. 46)
There's also some commentary on how honest and trustworthy the Chinese are, and much sympathy expressed for their neighborhood getting treated as an attraction for those damn tourists-- the one group consistently treated with contempt by the author. The general attitude here is: "yeah, they may seem weird to us, but we probably seem pretty weird to them".
Though through-out, this acceptance is all combined with a fascination with the exotic (that's the one feature consistently present in any treatment of Chinatown, however positive or negative it may be otherwise). In the case of Burke's novel, there's the "Chinese Red" of the title, which refers to a half-Chinese woman with naturally red hair, who wears a black wig to pass as normal, but uses her own hair when dressed-up for nightclub floor shows.
"An Unsuspecting Victim" by Arnold Genthe, who used a small, partially concealed hand held camera to document the pre-earthquake Chinatown of San Francisco.
Thoughout, I'm using some photos by Arnold Genthe, a man inspired to become a photographer by San Francisco's Chinatown. Quoting Samuel Dickson's "Tales of San Francisco" (1947):
There was on small corner of San Francisco, eight square blocks in all, that was to change the course of Genthe's life. he had been warned not to go through Chinatown without a guide. That was just the kind of warning the adventurous spirit liked. ... he said: The painted balconies were hung with wind bells and flowered lanterns. Brocades and embroideries, bronzes and porcelains, carvings of jade and ivory, of coral and rose crystal, decorated the shop windows. Shuffling along in single file were the dark-clad silent figures of the men, their faces strange, inscrutable. Children in gay silken costume thronged the sidewalks and doorways. From the windows in the "Street of the Sing-song Girls" bright eyes peered out from under brighter headdresses.
Genthe understood that "the Chinese were deeply superstitious about having their pictures taken", and bought a "small pocket camera" and started hanging around Chinatown to get people used to seeing him there. Genthe was thus taking candid shots without his subjects permission, and further he was not shy about modifying the negatives afterwards, e.g. to scratch out someone in the background in Western dress that spoiled the flavor of exoticism he was going for.
But: the only reason we have any photographic record of San Francisco's Chinatown from the pre-Earthquake days is the work of Arnold Genthe.
That "sinister, evil and mysterious Chinese of one-time popular imagination" that Burke refers to has many examples in popular fiction-- I found a relatively early one recently in the novel Blindfolded from 1907, written by Earle Ashley Walcott, and set in pre-Earthquake San Francisco and it's environs. (Actually it must've been written before the 1906 quake and been published just afterwards, making me wonder how Walcott felt about his setting suddenly becoming dated).
At one point in the story, the main characters all go off slumming on a tour of, you guessed it-- Chinatown!
"Children of High Class" by Arnold Genthe
"Oh, isn't it sweet! So charming!" cried Mrs. Bowser, as we came into full view of the scene and crossed the invisible line that carries one from modern San Francisco into the ancient oriental city, instinct with foreign life, that goes by the name of Chinatown. Sordid and foul as it appears by daylight, there was a charm and romance to it under the lantern-lights that softened the darkness. Windows and doors were illuminated. Brown, flat-nosed men in loose clothing gathered in groups and discussed their affairs in a strange singsong tongue and high-pitched voices. Here, was the sound of the picking of the Chinese banjo-fiddle; there, we heard a cracked voice singing a melancholy song in the confusion of minor keys that may pass for music among the brown men; there, again, a gong with tin-pan accompaniment assisted to reconcile the Chinese to the long intervals between holidays. [...] "Why, they're all alike!" exclaimed Mrs. Bowser. "How do they ever tell each other apart?"
Things suddenly turn sinister and hero and heroine find themselves isolated, trapped in the rats-warren of Chinatown, fighting off an evil yellow horde, evidently hired by some mysterious agency:
The rest of his sentence was lost in a suppressed scream from Luella. I turned and darted before her, just in time to face three Chinese ruffians who were hastening down the passage. The nearest of the trio, a tall dark savage with a deep scar across his cheek, was just reaching out his hand to seize Luella when I sprang forward and planted a blow square upon his chin. He fell back heavily, lifted almost off his feet by my impact, and lay like a log on the floor.
The other two ruffians halted irresolute for an instant, and I drew my revolver. In the faint light of the passage I could scarcely see their villainous faces. The countenance of the coolie is not expressive at best, but I could feel, rather than see, the stolid rascality of their appearance. Their wish seemed to be to take me alive if possible. After a moment of hesitation there was a muttered exclamation and one of the desperadoes drew his hand from his blouse.
"Oh!" cried Luella. "He's got a knife!"
Before he could make another movement I fired once, twice, three times. [...]
"Have you killed them?" she asked quietly.
"I hope so," I replied [...]
And five years after this novel,
the first of Sax Rohmer's books about the super-villain Fu Manchu was published in 1913:
" [...] Why was Sir Crichton Davey murdered? Because, had the work he was engaged upon ever seen the light it would have shown him to be the only living Englishman who understood the importance of the Tibetan frontiers. [...] And this is only one phase of the devilish campaign. The others I can merely surmise."
"But, Smith, this is almost incredible! What perverted genius controls this awful secret movement?"
"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
Sax Rohmer dined-out on this Yellow Peril for many years, and of course, he did not neglect Chinatown as a setting, though in his case it was the the British variety, Limehouse. His "Tales of Chinatown" were published circa 1916. Limehouse was described by contrast with other Chinatowns:
Unlike its sister colony in New York, there are no show places in Limehouse. The visitor sees nothing but mean streets and dark doorways. The superficial inquirer comes away convinced that the romance of the Asiatic district has no existence outside the imaginations of writers of fiction. Yet here lies a secret quarter, as secret and as strange, in its smaller way, as its parent in China which is called the Purple Forbidden City.
Sax Rohmer gives some advice for anyone in the audience interested in setting up shop as a Western imperialist:
One Chinaman more or less does not make any very great difference to the authorities responsible for maintaining law and order in Limehouse. Asiatic settlers are at liberty to follow their national propensities, and to knife one another within reason. This is wisdom. Such recreations are allowed, if not encouraged, by all wise rulers of Eastern peoples.
Considered in this light, it was something of a breakthrough for the reputation of the Chinaman in pop fiction when Earl Der Biggers began writing about a chinese detective named Charlie Chan in 1925, beginning with "The House Without a Key" (where Chan is one of the heroes, though he didn't become the central viewpoint character until the following novel in this series of just six books). In this novel, there are characters who make racist remarks -- what, a
chinese police detective? -- but they're immediately corrected by others. Chan is a thoroughly positive character, very intelligent and polite-- to
white people, at any rate. An odd quirk of his character is that he's thoroughly condescending and insulting to Japanese people (an interesting detail, considering the invasion of Manchuria was still 6 years in the future). There's a decided contrast between Chan's style and that of a white detective he works with-- the white guy is inclined to jump to conclusions and to try to brow-beat confessions out of witnesses. In contrast Chan is very cautious and restrained, a much more reasonable figure.
Though in one scene, the viewpoint character is on the run through an area on the border of Honolulu's Chinatown and that old familiar fear and fascination re-emerges:
He passed hurriedly through a cluttered back yard and climbing a fence, found himself in the neighborhood known as the River District. There in crazy alleys that have no names, no sidewalks, no beginning and no end, five races live together in the dark. Some houses were above the walk level, some below, all were out of alignment. John Quincy felt he had wandered into a futurist drawing. As he paused he heard the whine and clatter of Chinese music, the clicking of a typewriter, the rasp of a cheap phonograph playing American jazz, the distant scream of an auto horn, a child wailing Japanese lamentations. Footsteps in the yard beyond the fence roused him, and he fled.
He must get out of this mystic maze of mean alleys, and at once. Odd painted faces loomed in the dusk; pasty-white faces with just a suggestion of queer costumes beneath. [...]
Recently, I read a book about the Charlie Chan phenomena, "Charlie Chan" by Yunte Huang, published in 2010, and I found out that this character was supposedly based on an
actual Chinese police detective in Hawaii, a man named Chang Apana. Supposedly, Earl der Biggers had read about Chang Apana, and decided to include a Chinese detective in the Hawaiian novel he'd been working on; but Huang attempted to locate the newspaper article der Biggers referred to and was unable to find it, so there's something of a minor mystery about how der Biggers had actually heard of Apana (my theory is he read of him somewhere that wasn't that respectable, like a "True Detective" pulp; a friend suggests that it might've been an idea pushed on him by someone like an agent or publicist).
The actual Chang Apana however, turns out to be nothing like a Charlie Chan-- Apana was a much less cerebral figure, known for doing things like raiding illegal gambling parlors, storming in the doorway and cracking a bull-whip to control the room.
It did not take them long to start attempting to make movies using the Charlie Chan character, but the first to really feature him (and the first with any success) did not come out until 1931 after most of the books had been written. This is the series of films that most of us think of when we think "Charlie Chan" (for years they were the most popular mystery movies), where Chan was originally played by Walter Oland and then by Sidney Toler-- notably both white guys (though Oland claimed some Mongolian ancestry). In later years this was one of the factors that led to a revisionist take on the Charlie Chan character as having a less-than positive influence on racial attitudes. My take: this is a case where context means everything-- in 1926 (or 1931) Charlie Chan was a big improvement in American racial attitudes, though later arguably we all got stuck on that image, and really needed to learn to get past it.
The Chinese-American actor Keye Luke, who played Number One Son in the movies was having none of this revisionist take, and Yunte Huang quotes him pointing out the obvious: "They think it demeans the race... Demeans! My God! You've got a Chinese hero!"
One of the things I didn't pick up on until reading this book is that Keye Luke is the man who went on to play "Blind Master Po" in the 70s television series "Kung-Fu". That's just an astoundingly beautiful piece of trivia: Keye Luke played opposite the first and the last of the great yellow-face actors.
Keye Luke (wikimedia commons)
Blind Master Po (wikimedia commons)
But let's move on and return to our Tour of Chinatown.
Peter Kwong's book "The New Chinatown" (written in the mid-80s, and revised in the mid-90s) talks about the conditions in the present-day Chinatown, largely focusing on New York. Kwong is an Asian Studies professor and labor activist, so he primarily talks about labor conditions. He makes the point that there are many problems with the autocratic nature of Chinatown's traditional "informal" leadership-- for example, he discusses one woman who was victimized for speaking out, calling for her rights: she was fired and effectively blacklisted by a published notice which on the surface just politely asked if someone could hire this fine worker.
Kwong also points out that the Tongs are still active, and that they've merely repackaged themselves as social clubs, where the strong-arm division is outsourced to youth gangs run via a single cut-out.
I have a newspaper clipping (from my copious files) that confirms this was also the case in San Francisco: in the March 7, 2000 issue of The Independent, Johnny Brannon wrote about "Massive FBI raids in Chinatown Thursday night targeted leaders of the notorious Jackson Street Boys gang and a private social club they ran extortion and loan-sharking rackets out of ..."
So, one would not confuse the present-day Chinatown for a utopian society, though I often find myself wondering how it is that Chinatown remains Chinatown after all these years... waves of gentrification seem to displace everyone else through the magic of Our Father, The Free Market, but somehow Chinatown abides. That would be a good trick to learn how to imitate...
Update: Though actually, I've seen a number of complaints about how Oakland's Chinatown seems to get its territory nibbled away whenever the city wants to add something to the downtown area... the 880 freeway, the Lake Merrit BART station, and the Oakland Museum were all projects completed at the expense of Chinatown. And there's currently some schemes to stick in some more high-rise condocitis in the area (I gather, around the BART station), which one suspects will do more harm than good...
Some older notes of mine: