ete, THEGETTY CENTER LIBRARY ‘ d . es SS ‘ ; ; AD t 5 f , a | 2 . P : , 4 ‘3 Vy ~ ‘ 4 : CED CHINATOWN . aa a) & OLD CHINATOWN A BOOK OF PICTURES BY ARNOLD GENTHE Er TEXT BY WILL IRWIN <> ui NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY MCMXIII PHOTOG. NH jhe Lik G33] ag Re COPYRIGHT, 1908 BY ARNOLD GENTHE om COPYRIGHT, 1972). e7 8 MITCHELL KENNERLEY = A FEW OF THE PICTURES IN ‘THIS MAY BE RECOGNIZED AS HAVING f THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE IN AN VOLUME PUBLISHED IN 1908 DeMAS: OLD CHINATOWN PICTURES New Year’s Day in Chinatown Frontispiece PAGE Little Plum Blossom 2 On the Ruins (April 1906) 3 On Dupont Street 7 Two Little Maids from School 7 Marketing II The Alley. 13 The Grocery Store ts Waiting for the Car 17 In Holiday Dress 1g Their First Photograph a1 At the Corner of Dupont and Jackson Streets 23 Carrying New Year’s Presents pts A Proud Father a7 The Chinese Cook 31 The New Toy 33 The Street of the Gamblers (by night) a6 The Lily Vendor 277 An Afternoon Siesta 39 The Airing AI The Street of the Slave Girls 43 The Street of Painted Balconies 47 The Tinkers AQ The Morning Market SI Fish Alley x Dressed for a Formal Visit 55 Doorways in Dim Shadows i, Passers-by 59 Friends 61 [ vat | OLD ‘CHINATOWN: Pl C i pi aee PAGE On Portsmouth Square 66 A Corner Crowd 69 Children were the Pride, Joy, Beauty, and Chief Delight of the Quarter 71 In Holiday Finery ae Tiny Yellow Flowers of the World vA A Native Son v7 Brothers and Sisters 79 A Picnic on Portsmouth Square SI The Children’s Hour 83 The Day of the Good Lady Festival 85 Fleeing from the Camera ; 87 An Afternoon Airing gI A Holiday Visit 93 Paying New Year’s Calls 95 In Front of the Joss House 97 No Likee 99 He Belong Me IOI The First Born 103 A Holiday 105 Little Ah Wu 107 A Goldsmith’s Shop 109 Dressed for the Feast 115 The Butcher 117 The Vegetable Peddler 11g The Fish Peddler 121 A Slave Girl in Holiday Attire 123 A Merchant 125 Young Aristocrats 127 Pipe Dreams 129 The Street of the Gamblers 139 The Opium Fiend 141 The Wild Cat 143 Dressed for a Visit 145 Reading the Tong Proclamation 147 A Family from the Consulate ? 149 [ viii | Preeti’ NATOWN PICTURES PAGE Children of High Class ISI A Corner on the Hillside 153 The Devil’s Kitchen 157 New Year’s Day before the Theatre 159 The Cellar Door 161 The Devil’s Kitchen (by night) 163 Boys Playing Shuttlecock 165 The Crossing 168 Rescued Slave Girls 171 Little Tea Rose 173 Returning Home 175 The Chinese Salvation Army 177 The Balloon-Man 179 A Stroll on the Plaza 181 Buying New Year’s Gifts 183 In Softly Gaudy Colors PASE Loafers kako ye The Pipe-Bowl Mender 189 The Sword Dancer 19I The Paper Gatherer 193 The Sign of the Pawn Shop 7 195 The Shoe Maker 197 The Toy Peddler 199 The Fortune Teller 201 After the Fire 1906 203 An Unsuspecting Victim 205 The Little Mandarin 209 CHINATOWN FOREWORD My Dear Dr. GeNTHE: — Long before I knew who you were, I used to mark you in the shadows and recesses of Chinatown, your little camera half- hidden under your coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the artist alert to take your shy and superstitious models unawares. Later, it was my privilege to follow you sometimes — to watch you playing your Germanic patience against their Chinese patience, to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, working with those mysterious processes by which you— more than any other man alive — have made art out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, after the great disaster, all that you have saved of your work of a decade is this same picture record of old Chinatown at which you worked so lovingly. In the summer of steel and steam drills and heroic enthusiasm — the summer of rebuilding — you and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. It [3] OL DC EL TINASsT OWN. was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and very late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old St. Mary’s. The new-rising city, like the old one in dim, suggestive contour— as an adult face is like its childish counterpart — stretched out at our feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black hol- low, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken Hell’s Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a wall of steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless towers. The scattered lights, placed where never lights would be in finished and inhabited structures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and desolation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees spirits. And you spoke: “Rubber boots and kettles, overalls and blankets in the shop windows — and we have still to call it Chinatown!”’ You had been looking backward, I perceived, as I had been looking forward. So, with the skeleton of St. Mary’s roof creaking above us in the night wind, we talked about that little city of our love, Chinatown. “No, it’s gone,” said I; “‘and beauty, or at least such beauty as they know, cannot live in.Class A buildings.”’ You, like a true partizan, fell to defending as soon as you found me agreeing with your criticisms. “ They won’t remain Class A for long,” you said. “‘ The Chinese will make them over somehow. They can no more live in inappropriate ugliness than we in dirt.” Yet we both sighed for the Chinatown which we knew, and which is not any more except in the shadowing of your films. You, the only man who ever had the patience to [4] Pani On DlG EF NoT TE photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the snap-shot — you had been making yourself uncon- sciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old Chinatown. I[ but write as a frame for your pic- tures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writings, I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply that our Californian Chinese have changed their natures or their manners. Much of what I describe here has survived, and much more will prevail. It is just that your lenses and plates record only the past; and, I, embroidering your work, have tried to keep in tone. WILL IRwIN. 1908. CHAPTER ONE /ROM the moment when you crossed the golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the gamut of beauty, from themomentwhen you sailed between those brown-and- green headlands which guarded the Gate to San Francisco, you heard always of Chinatown. It was the first thing which the guides offered to show. When- ever, in any channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers met =4 and talked about the City of ven Adventures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their reminiscences. Raised on a hill- side, it glimpsed at you from every corner of that older, more picturesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cinders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a somber spot, shot with contrasting [7] OLD CHINATOWN patches of green and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants, overflowing into the American quar- ters, made bright and quaint the city streets. Its exemplars of art in common things, always before the unillumined American, worked to make San Francisco the city of artists that she was. For him who came but to look and to enjoy, this was the real heart of San Francisco, this bit of the mys- tic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidental — but just Chinatown. It is gone now — this Old Chinatown — but in a newer and stronger San Francisco rises a newer, cleaner, more healthful Chinatown. Better for the city —O yes—and better for the Chinese, who must come to modern ways of life and health, if they are to survive among us. But where is St. Louis Alley, that tangle of sheds, doorways, irregular arcades and flaming signs which fell into the com- position of such a marvelous picture? Where is the dim reach of Ross Alley, that romantically mysterious cleft in the city’s walls? Where is Fish Alley, that horror to the nose, that perfume to the eye? Where are those broken, dingy streets, in which the Chinese made art of rubbish? I hope that some one will arise, before this gen- eration is passed, to record that conquest of affec- tion by which the California Chinese transformed themselves from our race-adversaries to our dear, subject people. Theirs will be all the glory of that tale, ours all the shame. In the dawn of the min- ing rush, the little, trading Cantonese began to appear in California. The American, the Celt, the [8] ARNOLD GENTHE Frenchman came for gold — gold washed out of the hills —uncounted millions. Gold brought the Chi- naman also; but his ideas were modest. ‘The pro- spect of two, four, five dollars a day was enough for him, who had made only ten cents a day at home. He asked simply to do menial work at a menial’s wage. Beside our white pioneers, he took his part in the glorious episode of the Pacific con- quest. He, with them, starved on the desert, died on the trails, faced Indian bullets and arrows. Wherever the report of gold called into being a new camp, he struggled in behind the whites, built his laundry, his cook-house or his gold rocker, girded up his pig-tail, and went to work. In his own spirit of quiet heroism, he shared all the hard- ships of our giant men — shared in everything they held except their dissipations and their reward of glory. For glory, he had to wait half a century. That curious, black episode of early Western civilization, the Chinese persecution, followed hard upon their first arrival. Why this thing began, what quality in the Chinese nature irritated our pioneers beyond all justice and sense of decency, remains a little dim and uncomprehended to this generation. [hey were an honest people — honest beyond our strictest ideas. [hey attended to their own business and did not interfere with ours. ‘Their immoralities, their peculiar and violent methods of adjusting social differences, affected only them- selves. Not for thirty years was there reason for believing them a danger to American workingmen. But the fact remains. Our pioneers cast them forth disgraced, beat them, lynched them. Professional [9] OLD CHILNASO Mya agitators made them a stock in trade. By the power of reiteration, this honest people came to figure in the public mind as a race of thieves, this cleanly people — inventors of the daily bath — as “dirty”? and “diseased,”’ this heroic people, possessed of a passive fortitude beside which our stoicism is cowardice, as poltroons. With a dignity all their own, they suffered and went about their business, though death lay at the end. The day came when the Chinese themselves nearly justified the professional labor agitator. The romantic, unsettled period of the gold rush passed into history; the age of bonanza farming followed; the state buckled down to stable industry. But two and three and five dollars a day was still a lure to the Canton man. ‘Their number increased with every Pacific steamer. Even yet they were no real menace to American labor — the state at any time might have swallowed up fifty thousand more without harming a single white workingman —but that menace lifted itself in the immediate future. Ripples from the black Dennis Kearney outrages, the shameful Montana massacres, reached Washington. Congress passed the Exclusion Law. When that happened, there vanished the last logical objection to the Californian Chinese. A gradual change passed over the spirit of Cali- fornia. We were a long time learning that human souls, different but equal, souls softened by forty centuries of highly moral civilization, lay under those yellow skins, under those bizarre customs and beliefs. “The Chinaman, being a gentleman, gives himself forth but charily. I think that we first [ 10 | Poe OED GEN THE glimpsed the real man through our gradual un- derstanding of his honesty. American merchants learned that none need ever ask a note of a China- man in any commercial transaction. His word is his bond. Precedent, as well as race characteristic, makes it so. , ‘ 4 Sl - » PHE ALL EY “THAT TANGLE OF SHEDS, IRREGULAR ARCADES AND FLAMING SIGNS” ~ Pee he OC ERY *S:T.O R-E * ~ Mee eb iNneG FOR: THE CAR - A IN HOLIDAY DRESS ict ke Fol RS To PCH OPO GRA PH LG a Wil Seon OS lod QNV LNOdNd 20 VAN W008 8 ey CARRYING NEW YEAR’ S PRESENTS CHAPTER TWO \/HE newer generation of Cali- | fornians grew up with baby- loving, devoted Chinese servants about them. The Sons and Daughters of the Golden West did not, indeed, draw their first sustenance from yellow breasts, as the Southerner has drawn it from black ones. That mystic bond was lacking. But a _ Chinese man-servant had » watched at the cradle above most of them, rejoiced with the parents that there was a baby in the house, laughed to see it laugh, hurried like a mother at its cry. A backyard picture in any of the old Californian mansions included always the Chinese cook, grinning from the doorway on the playing babies. This Chinese cook was a volunteer nurse; for him, the nursery was the heart of the house. He was the consoler and fairy-teller of childhood. He passed on to the babies his own wonder tales of flowered princesses and golden dragons, he taught them to patter in sing-song Cantonese, he saved his [27] OLD (CHINATO Wat frugal nickels to buy them quaint little gifts; and as the Southerner, despising the race, loves the individual negro through this very association of childhood, so the Californian came to love the Chinaman that he knew. In his ultimate belief, indeed, he outstripped the Southerner; for he came first to a tolerance of the race and then to an admiration. The older people, and more especially the house- wives among them, reached understanding and admiration through a different channel. The China- man was an ideal servant. Now, when the insolent and altogether less admirable Japanese are taking their places beside the cook stoves, your San Fran- cisco housewife will never cease lamenting for the old order. His respect for a contract, written or spoken, made him observe every article of the servant's code. Unobtrusive, comprehending in all its subleties the feminine mind, part of the house- hold and still aloof from it, the Chinese servant did the work of two American maids and stirred up no friction in the process. Supreme virtue of all to his mistress, he delighted in “‘company,” in all the pomps and parades of a household. Nothing pleased him more than to take the responsibility of a dinner or a reception upon himself, to plan con- fections for it, to have a hand in the decorations. The other side of his life, which might be frescoed with fan-tan and highbinder troubles, he kept for Chinatown and his night off. Perhaps on that night he dropped his month’s wages in the gam- bling houses of Ross Alley, perhaps he smoked a few pipes of opium, perhaps he knew more than the [ 28 ] Poe OE DG EIN EE police would ever learn of the highbinder shooting proclaimed all across the first page of that news- paper which he calmly handed you at breakfast. He never troubled you with these things. To you, he was first the perfect servant, and, if his term lasted long enough, the shy, and gentle familiar, versed in the arts of friendship. Who more gracious than your Chinese cook or laundryman calling on Chinese New Years, his hands full of lilies for the women of the family, his pockets of nuts for the children? So, out of family life, both child and parent learned to appreciate and love the race. The Chinese had conquered our foolish hatred by patient service. [29] a Mrmr CHINESE COOK, GRINNING FROM THE DOORWAY’ Ul - * + P j ¥ > : ‘ , i ‘ ' t % ? ? ’ t a 7 ‘ . 1 : ‘ . P ‘ ‘ * : t rY : I r J 5 brs we ~ - a . ; ' } be eo) H 3 ea) Z ea) en) a BRR OR a aR bts RIN a, bi 9, Z, by jaa) DM pe (eal —] jaa) = < c ea ss = fey ° KH (ea eal pe BH op) isa) ce KH "eae ROR os a3S0 ition bean NOs 8! pbrnianeanii Sains 7 oA \ - aera . : A ~*~ t = . * ° % o aed ES Gk Ra es Dare & . ~ s 1 . . Vib bed TS tN-O ON ada aay NIV. oh CER se ’ 2a wa ee RRS RRC ARURNNR RE RRS RE iE ERE IN SS DUN Tet Vv oa AE CHAPTER THREE OMMENCING like all Span- ish towns, San Francisco clus- tered first about a plaza — Portsmouth Square the pioneers renamed it. On its fringes, in the days when the streets ran gold and _ the Vigilantes were the whole aa \aw, appeared the first modern f buildings. Then, with the unaccountable, restless drift sl of American cities, shops and wholesale Feiss passed on down into the hollows and “‘made lands’’ reclaimed from the Bay marshes. The Chinese, following in, took posses- sion of those old buildings about Portsmouth Square. An unwritten city ordinance, strictly ob- served by successive Boards of Supervisors, held them to an area of about eight city blocks. Old St. Mary’s Church, the first Roman Catholic Cathe- dral, marked the southern edge of that area; and to the last day of the old city any report that the Chinese were moving south of St. Mary’s drove the newspapers and the city fathers to arms. The Chi- [ 43 ] OLD CHINATOWN nese conquest of affection never proceeded so far that the Americans wanted them for neighbors. These eight blocks, supporting a population which varied between ten thousand and thirty thousand according to the season of the year, lay close to the very center of San Francisco, between the business district and the old palaces of Nob Hill. Wealthy citizens, walking down to their offices from the citadel of the town, used to envy the Chinese their site; the city authorities were forever starting a movement to get “dirty Chinatown” out into the suburbs, that the whites might take the Quarter back. But the Chinese owned much of the prop- erty, and paid a high rental for the rest. With their conservatism and their persistence, they stuck. They stuck even after the fire, when San Francisco, starting a dozen projects in the heroic rebound of its spirit, tried to seize the occasion to move Chinatown. This district of old-fashioned business blocks, laid out on fine lines by the French architects who wrought before the newly-rich miners began to buy atrocities, the Chinese transformed into a sem- blance of a Chinese city. They added sheds, lean-tos, out-door booths, a thousand devices to extend space; they built in the eternal painted balconies of which the Chinaman is as fond as a Spaniard. Close livers by custom, they lodged twenty coolies in one abandoned law office; they even burrowed three stories underground that they might make space for winter-idle laborers, overflow of the northern canning factories. Clinging always to their native customs and dress and manners, they furnished [ 44] meNOLD GENT HE their little stores and factories, their lodging houses, their restaurants, with the Chinese utensils of com- mon life which were never without their touch of beauty. So the Quarter grew into a thing like Canton and still strangely and beautifully unlike. Dirty — the Chinaman, clean about his person, inventor of the daily bath, is still terribly careless about his sur- roundings. Unsanitary to the last degree — China- town was the care and vexation of Boards of Health. But always beautiful — falling everywhere into pictures. This beauty appealed equally to the plain citizen, who can appreciate only the picturesque, and to the artist, with his eye for composition, subtle coloring, shadowy suggestion. From every door- way flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish masters. Consider that panel of a shop front in Fish Alley which is to me the height of Dr. Genthe’s collection. Such pic- tures glimpsed about every corner. You lifted your eyes. Perfectly arranged in coloring and line, you saw a balcony, a woman in softly gaudy robes, a window whose blackness suggested mystery. You turned to right or left; behold a pipe-bowl mender or a cobbler working with his strange Oriental tools, and behind him a vista of sheds and doorways in dim half tone, spotted with the gold and red of Chinese sign-boards. Beautiful and always myste- rious — a mystery enhanced by that green-gray mist which hangs always above the Golden Gate and which softens every object exposed to the caressing winds and gentle rains of the North Pacific. [45] : Loe ate bor. REP BeTs- O-F PAT Nae BALCONIES wi Silo OL Ne PSL Selo bir LHaU Vv WOON EN won ees eee Lge” ; Pel Si vASL LE Y: ““THAT HORROR TO THE NOSE, THAT PERFUME TO THE EYE” Dike oO s.6 DD oF OR A FORM AL VISIT DOORWAYS IN DIM SHADOWS PrA) S75 BRS = BY: P CHAPTER FOUR N the greatest of his short stories, Frank Norris said that there were three circles in Chinatown. ‘The first was the life of the streets, which never grew stale to the real Californian. The second was that prepared show which the tourist saw and which sup- ported those singular persons, the Chinatown guides. The . third was a circle away down “= i below, into which no white man, at least none who dared tell about it, ever pen- etrated — the circle which revolved about their trafhcking in justice, as they conceived of justice, about their trade in contra-band goods, such as opium and slave girls. Rather, I think, were there four circles, for in between the circle of Show Places and that of Hid- den Things came the family life and industrial activity of the Quarter. This Chinatown was a Tenderloin for the whole Chinese population of the Pacific Coast, the pleas- [ 67 | OL DD CHIEN Adon ure palace where fish cutters from the northern salmon canneries, farmers from the Sacramento deltas, fruit pickers from the hot San Joaquin, gold washers from the mountains, came to enjoy them- selves and to squander their earnings between seasons. Although a part of its reputed vicious- ness was the exaggeration of race hatred, no man could deny that it was tough. Also, it had gathered about it the lowest of those white tramps and sol- diers of ill fortune who haunted that terminus of Caucasian civilization, San Francisco. ‘The habita- tion of a darker race has an attraction for the de- based; witness the environs of negro streets in the South. Because “‘sin is news and news is sin,” this side of Chinatown was always before the public. Nevertheless, a real life of homes and quiet in- dustry went on there also. The Chinese overall, cigar and shoe factories were important enough to draw the hatred of labor unions for a generation. Much of the American tea and silk trade was con- trolled from those streets. The Six Companies, virtually the Chinese Chamber of Commerce — though bound by an alliance closer than any com- mercial organization which we know — had but to assert itself, and the whole Pacific Coast paid atten- tion. The merchants, as they grew rich, sent to China for their old wives, married new ones by proxy, slipped brides past the inspectors, bought them from the slave dealers. To a degree which we cannot comprehend, the place of the respectable Chinese woman is in the home. So the foreign American seldom saw the true lady of the Chinese Quarter. She lived [ 62 ] ARNOLD GENTHE close to her home, she bound her hair with sober fillets, she dressed quietly, and she went abroad only on great business or on the occasion of great festivals. But children, — high and low, rich and poor, they had the run of the streets. And they were the pride, joy, beauty and chief delight of the Quarter. Hope of heaven and everlasting worship to their fathers, nothing was too bright and beautiful for them. So mothers and nurses decked them out in the brightest tunics, the most cleverly conceived caps, all tinkling with golden devil-chasers, the whitest little socks and shoes, the most gorgeous ear-tassels, fit, other- wise, only for the altars of the joss. ‘Tiny, yellow flowers of the world — how the American women, native and tourist, used to crane their necks and smile and coo at them as they passed! With what pride the father— never the mother — used to carry the boy baby down the streets in all his finery! How the Chinese, child lovers from the bottoms of their hearts, used to pay them court on the corners! Usually, they were contented and rather stolid babies; only once in a blue moon did one of them cry. And when it happened that a baby cried on the streets, the Chinese, bargaining at the open shop fronts, used to look after him and grin and exchange comments in Cantonese sing-song as though it was the greatest joke in the world. School, whether in the Oriental schoolhouse which the city maintained or in the private Chinese semi- naries of the rich and conservative, was out by four o'clock. That was the brightest hour of all the day in those streets. Dupont and Washington and [ 63 ] OLD CHINATOWN Stockton blossomed with racing, tumbling babies, all bright in silks. The barber, the grocer, the butcher, the lantern maker, dropped tools and oc- cupation and came to the doorways to watch them play. The elder sisters walked arm on waist like school-girls the world over, swaying with that gentle motion which marks the Chinese lady from her common sister. The big boys, much more sub- dued than our own twelve year olds, got out those feathered shuttlecocks with which the Chinese youth imitates football, and frisked along Dupont Street or over into Portsmouth Square. A curious game that was, without team work or rules — noth- ing to it but dexterity of foot. Something essentially Oriental in its grotesque grace appeared in the atti- tudes of these boys as they kicked the ball, first forward like the punt of a Rugby player, and then backward over their shoulders like a French move- ment in Ja savate. Sometimes the more radical. mothers joined their babies after school, walked down to the Square — a fearful journey for them — and made a little picnic about the football players. That children’s hour of the Quarter showed China- town at its sweetest and most gracious. Once only, in my recollection, came a day when all the women, high and low, had free run of the streets. This was the Good Lady Festival, cele- brated every seven years in honor of that illustrious Chinese woman, princess and martyr, who was raised for her virtues to godhood. Her symbol is the little shoe, the tapering shoe of the lily feet, which she threw into the river before she died. And on the day of her festival, woman was raised to the [ 64 ] mesNOULD GENTHE level of man. She was free to walk the streets, to sacrifice, to bow publicly before the outdoor altars where priests tapped their little gongs and sang incessantly to the joss. The ‘Prayer store” on Dupont Street, where one might buy anything and everything sacred to Chinese religion, banked its counter and filled its windows with shoes of all sizes and colors. On that day, also, did the respectable woman wear those multi-colored robes, those trousers of pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments for the hair, publicly appropriate at other times only to the women of no caste. From the brass and cedar treasure chests kept carefully under the beds in their tiny flats, they took these festival clothes, saved, perhaps, since the wedding; and Chinatown became one blaze of color. Here, as everywhere else, fashions changed; one marked that phenome- non usually by the variations in the children’s caps and the colors and decorations of the tunics worn by the women. The black, straight hair, glossy with ointments, was usually bound by a great clasp of hammered gold which amounted — almost to a cap. Down the street, that night, walked a procession of priests in white robes. They carried a great banner inscribed with decorative Chinese charac- ters; to right and left of them walked stavemen bearing weapons of the old Empire. Behind fol- lowed the women, for all the world like a swaying bed of great, gaudy flowers. Along the sidewalks burned unnumbered sacrificial candles and lights, surrounding the roast pig and rice bowls of a 7 [ 65] OLD CHINATOWN Chinese sacrifice. When the procession was over, the women, emancipate for the night, went to feast — those of no caste to the restaurants, the ladies to their somber homes. Next morning, when the careful priests of Con- fucius had picked up the papers on the streets and burned them, that the sacred characters might not be sullied by base uses, the women were back in their nests again, soberly dressed, keeping close that they might not dishonor their lords through the glance of forbidden eyes; and only the harlot and the very young maiden walked freely and frequently abroad until their next holiday. [ 66 ] UTM ORD AaN WO De yy fp a aL a OS a eae LHOTTS@ da) h Oo ONY okey dee ‘A0!l “a q14d a He MeN et oe bear ec Dae ye OM ERY: “MOTHERS DECKED THEM OUT IN BRIGHTEST SILKS AND CAPS ALL TINKLING WITH GOLDEN DEVIL-CHASERS” SATIN Y, YEERLOW FLOWERS OF 22 THE WORLD a Ate ATL Ee BS ON r aa = ey Sa LS 1S) ONAV So Modal © erlos & AUV 108 Hal A OW sO d NO) Dw ee THE CHILDREN SS HOUR feo Ac = OFS Paes GOOD LADY PoE Stel VAL “THERE CAME A DAY WHEN ALL THE WOMEN, HIGH AND LOW, HAD FREE RUN OF THE STREETS” CHAPTER FIVE HEY love a fiesta, those Californian Chinese; four or five times a year, some fixed or movable feast brought out everything that was won- derful in the Quarter. Two or three of these holiday occasions linger in memory. On Stockton Street stood the clubhouse of a merchant organization only one whit : rai less powerful than the Six Companies. One in three years, this club cel- ebrated the glories of its joss and kept open house. The reception was for white and Chinese alike; in this time of peace and good will, they drew no color line. All races mixed in the crowd which packed their rooms to drink tea and scan the innumerable paper altars in honor of this immortal god or that dead hero. Mostly, these altars told, in flimsy paper statuettes and legends on red paper, some tale of old China. There, life size, was the great god, sitting in fearful state and casting forbidding eyes upon the priests [ 87 ] OLD CHINATOWN who sang before him with many _ prostrations. About him, stood a dismounted hero in the tasseled and feathered war bonnet of other days; the prin- cess his wife; a horse which was a caricature of an animal in shape and a wonder of art in blended coloring; the seven goddesses, gazing indifferently upon rich offerings of roast pig, incense and fruit. Near the entrance, in a recess of his own, sat the terrible and luck-bringing joss of the Tong. He is a devil as well as a god; he is beatifically kind and terribly cruel. His image is all white in face and clothing, but his eyes are weeping tears of blood. He is so lucky that just to touch him will make you win at lottery or fan-tan. He was much sought by the thievish; and between festivals the Tong kept him in a burglar proof vault. On this public oc- casion, when his owners brought him out to bless and help their guests, two white watchmen guarded him with club and gun. No Chinese watchman could be trusted, in face of that awful temptation to win everlasting prosperity at one stroke. Once, in this week of festivity, they brought him out on the streets. That was on the last night, when the elders of the Tong, in caps and long dress tunics, publicly distributed bread and meat to all the poor of Chinatown, whether white or yellow. Then, priests bore him high in air on their shoulders that he might radiate fortune on the unfortunate. I remember, too, a certain night in the annual fes- tival of devils, when the orthodox Chinaman purifies his house by a cannonade of firecrackers to keep away the evil spirits for another year. The air, in the Chinese cosmos, is full of devil people; a China- [ 88 ] ARNOLD GENTHE man wastes a deal of his time and energy worrying about them. At home, I believe, the very orthodox never make a straight entrance to any building — for devils cannot turn a corner, and a crooked entrance is a safeguard. Behold how superstition yields to convenience! The Chinese of San Francisco had adapted to their uses abandoned American stores ‘and business blocks. It was inconvenient, almost impossible, to screen against devils the entrances of American-built stores. The practical China- man, therefore, gave up the doctrine of his creed, and took the more ardently to propitiatory sacrifices and offerings and devil-scaring firecrackers. And at the great devil feast, he fairly outdid himself in casting out all the works of evil, that his house might be clean for another year. On the night which I am recalling, a certain ob- servation upon the Chinese crystallized in my mind. Out of his mental difference from us, his oblique thinking as contrasted with our straight reason- ing, his subtlety as contrasted with our directness, his commercial honesty as contrasted with our com- parative commercial dishonor, his gentility as con- trasted with our rudeness; further, out of our wholly unnecessary persecution and race hatred, he has come to a superior contempt of us and our ways. Certain broad spirits among them look across the race line and regard us as human beings; certain humble personages among them, such as the old family retainers whom I have mentioned already, develop a curious, dog-like affection. But in the main, they feel a passive contempt. We were to them a medium of commerce when we stopped at [ 89 | OLD CHINATOWN the stores to buy; meddlers when we interfered with lotteries, fan-tan games, plague, highbinder wars and other affairs which were none of our business; plain pests when we swept down upon them with uniforms and patrol wagons, but always Things — never persons. You passed them on the streets; they turned out for you; but they glanced at you no more than they glanced at the innumerable sleek cats sunning themselves in the doorways. You might pick a specially beautiful or interesting China- man and stare at him all day; he would notice you no more than a post — unless you pulled a camera on him. A Chinese father would, indeed, soften if you stopped to pay court to the baby in his arms; it was too much to expect that he would refuse tribute from anything in the earth below or the air above to the pride of his heart and the hope of his immortal salvation. That, it seemed to me, was the only point at which your Chinese willingly granted inter- course to the despised race. But on that night, when the punk-sticks and the pocket altars burned at every corner and before every sweetmeat stand, when alleys were canopied over for the use of the priests, when windows glowed soft from the sacrificial lights within; on that night, when horror and mystery held the air — then you paid court to no Chinese baby. Approach him, and his father drew him sharply away; persist, and his bearer would hurry off in a panicky run. Pidgin English brought no answer to your most polite inquiries. The children imitated their elders; the big brother or sister, caring for little Ah Wu or tiny Miss Peach Blossom of the lily feet, scattered [90 | Pare OD GEN THE fearfully from the foreign touch. We, inferior, uncomprehending, were brothers to the powers of the air. Only this I noticed — your money was still welcome at the stores. Perhaps it was right to take devil tribute. [or] on — id 9) Lael > > < = < — 4 o) ee) < * STL V9. $$ -a VAM WN Oe Ay ¢ a «210 GNV ONNOA AM CaAddIHSUOM AYAM SAGOD AONVULS qS nN Of 68:9 Off Wale 4 Oe te wh; € et nics % $ a # Fd BORER RE RR, & ‘* Seinen Po 22 9 4 ee ee PIE, Se CAMERA ON HIM SPR eR sae ea hahaa al ti. ca) ca) n — _ e) Z ‘“HE WOULD NOTICE YOU NO MORE THAN A POST — UNLESS YOU PULLED A i ae , , f ‘ dt 2 r; : , s - Pe : ‘ a ‘ \ ‘ ' F ’ ‘ t v ' . ; 2 ‘ t . i . 4 ¥ 4 i oe F ‘ Se) ‘““HE BELONG ME . Lpeeevse » ad EBHE FIRST BORN ‘Weak = 8 0S ek BAY, eg Db ir EB Ac. WU CHAP LER: SLX HAT is it which makes one picture of life linger in mem- ory while others, and more marvelous ones, fade out? Vividly I remember a dinner party which I saw that night. Perhaps I had with me a friend, whose identity is the one thing which has gone from me, but whose strong and stimulating pull on my mind lingers on this rise of memory to a permanent thing; per- haps that was one of those nights of youth when the world is right and life dances down before you, and all your powers are multiplied by some golden number of the gods. At any rate this picture re- mains, while greater and brighter things linger only in blurred outlines. It was on the top floor of the old Man Far Low Restaurant on Dupont Street, a show place it is true, but also the great café of the rich and disso- lute. That floor, running clear through the block, was a succession of private dining rooms, divided [ 109 |] OLD CHINATOWN one from the other by carved screens. The guests sat not on chairs, but upon square stools of teak wood. From the front apartment, you stepped out upon a balcony made into a little Chinese garden. This looked upon the dark stretch of Dupont Street. At the rear was another balcony, a small, undeco- rated thing; and from that you saw Portsmouth Square with its gilded caravel set in memory of Robert Louis Stevenson, and still further the golden delights of the great bay. One who came to enjoy the Man Far Low must buy at least tea and sweetmeats. [he tea, poured from the crack be- tween two bowls, one inverted over the other, was of a light lemon yellow, and fascinating to the taste. One ate the sweetmeats — picked ginger, preserved nuts, plums and citron — from the end of a spindly tin fork after failing in the effort to manipulate the ivory chop-sticks. When the guest had finished, the waiter stood at the head of the stairs and bawled something in Cantonese. ‘hat was the check; the cashier, sitting in round cap and horn spectacles at the desk below, knew by it how much to collect. That night, however, the Chinese occupied it; a great, expensive dinner was proceeding in the front apartment. At the biggest table sat a dozen Chinese men, very dignified as to dress, for they wore the long, silk tunic of ravishing neutral tint which is dress coat and frock coat both to a Chinese gentle- man. With each man sat his woman — not at the table, but just behind, so that she had to reach modestly over his shoulder to get at the viands in their toy porcelain bowls. When her lord’s appetite failed, she fed him with her plaything hands; when [ rzo | ARNOLD GENTHE he wanted a cigarette, she lighted it for him between her own painted lips. One of these women, I re- member, had a homely, irregular face, with a broad mouth, but with an illumination and expression in her features exceptional among Chinese women. A soubrette sauciness showed in her every gesture, but you felt that it was a measured impudence which knew its convenient bounds. Musicians, squatted on a woven straw couch in the corner, were playing a moon fiddle, a sam yin and a gong. Presently, the feast having reached the stage when food is less to the feaster than drink, they began to play “one-two.” I must explain that game, so simple and so appealing to the convivial. You challenge a partner. If he accepts, you throw out from your closed hand any number of fingers from one to four and call off in a loud tone of voice the proper number of fingers. He throws out the same number of fingers and calls the number after you. But at last you call out, craftily, any one number, and throw out a different number of fingers. And if, by calling that number after you, he shows that he has failed to watch your hand, he has lost; and he must drink a cup of rice brandy as a forfeit. He who first becomes drunk is “‘it.”” It goes faster and faster, until all the table is playing it in pairs. ° Seam = Sam!” “See!” “See!” “Yee!” “Yee!” “pam! “Sam!” Then a chorus of Oriental laughter, more crackling and subdued than ours; for the proponent, on “Sam” (three) has thrown forward only two fingers, and the opponent, falling into the trap has thrown out three. So he is caught, and down his throat goes the forfeit. Reed OLD CHINATOWN And as they drank and played, and played and drank, something deep below the surface came out in them. Their shouts became squalls; lips drew back from teeth, beady little eyes blazed; _ their very cheek bones seemed to rise higher on their faces. I thought, as I watched, of wars of the past; these were not refined Cantonese, with a surface gentility and grace in life greater than anything that our masses know; they were those old yellow people with whom our fathers fought before the Caucasus was set as a boundary between the dark race and the light; the hordes of Genghis Khan; the looters of Attila. The ‘‘its” fell out one by one, retired with some dignity to the straw couch and to sleep. She of the saucy, illuminated face crept close to her lord and whispered in his ear — she, like all her kind, was taking the moment of intoxication to ply her business; and the debauch was nearly over. Only when I was out on the street, and purged somewhat from the impression of Tartar fierceness which that game of “one-two” had given me, did this come into my mind: there had been not one unseemly or unlovely act in all that debauch of young bloods and soiled women, not one over-familiar gesture. Tartar though they had shown themselves, they had remained still Chinese gentlemen and Chinese ladies. These pretty and painted playthings of men furnished a glimpse into Frank Norris’s Third Circle, the underworld. We shall never quite un- derstand the Chinese, I suppose; and not the least comprehensible thing about them is the paradox of [ 112 | MeReNOLD GEN THE their ideas and emotions. On the anomalies of Chinese courage, for example, one might write a whole treatise. A Chinese pursued by a mob never fights back. He lies down and takes his beating with his lips closed. If he is able to walk when it is done, he moves away with a fine, gentlemanly scorn for his tormentors. To take another instance; at Steveston, in the mouth of the Frazer River, the white and Indian fisherman struck. The owners, supported by the Canadian militia, decided to man the boats with Oriental cannery laborers. The Japanese jumped at the chance. The Chinese, to a man, refused to go out on the river. They were afraid of it. Yet a Chinese merchant con- demned to death by the highbinders, aware that the stroke may come at any time from any alley, walks his accustomed way through the streets without looking to right or left. So it goes, all through their characters. Nothing fits our rules. By the same token, underneath their essential courtesy, fruit of an old civilization, underneath their absolute commercial honor, runs a hard, wild streak of barbarism, an insensibility in cruelty, which, when roused, is as cold-blooded and unlovely a thing as we know. [ 113 | ; ; : i F ‘ > ae < ao re F 3 e k y y ; na * ; Deer oe ek OR SLR oF EB AST ad HO baa aes — coe eet iii sg AIDE prrencoatonie Se, atte ee fa ea) 4 (an) A ea] Ay ea | 6 < eH eal ©) eal > ea] a8) i at 4 ‘ i : \ : \- 4 + WaT G8 do Sa ea Perey Fb GIRL IN HOLIDAY ATTIRE “~ o ASM ER CH AN T - B® Reo INAS A Rey Or CAR Ay TS - % CHAPTER SEVEN HINATOWN, the Tender- loin for all the Western Chi- nese, lived not only by tea and rice and overalls and cigars and tourists, but also by the ministry to dissipation. It had gathered to itself the tough citizens, and especially the gamblers. Gambling is a darling sin to all the race; take his fan-tan counters and his pie-gow blocks away, and he will bet on the number of seeds in an uncut orange. With most, it is a mere diversion. Your efhcient, quiet houseboy will go into Chinatown on Saturday night, have his little whirl at fan-tan, smoke, perhaps, his one pipe of opium, and return in the morning none the worse for his social diversion. Others get the passion of it into their blood. One hears continually of this or that Chinese laborer, who, having saved for fifteen years to go back to China and live on his income, has dropped into a fan-tan house on the eve of his departure, lost his whole pile in one night, and returned, with [ 129 ] OLD CHINATOWN a great surface indifference, to begin a life of service over again. Fat and powerful waxed the keepers of gambling houses. They came to be controlling factors in the vicious side of Chinatown; and they gathered under them all the priests of vice into one alliance of crime and graft. Those who traded in slave girls, those who ran the cheap, internecine politics of the ward, those who lived by blackmail, and especially those gentlemen of fortune known as highbinders, whose reason for being was paid murder, lived and moved in the shadow of the gambling game. In the age of public exposures, we have discovered that the powers which we pay to keep order and virtue among us and the powers which minister to our dissipation have a mysterious affinity — that the policeman is constitutionally apt to unite him- self in a business way with those who live by vice. In this development of civilization we are as chil- dren beside the Chinese; and out of this situation grew the highbinders, adventurers in crime. For they were not only criminals; they were formal and recognized agents of justice. Crime and punish- ment had become tangled and involved beyond any power of ours to separate them and straighten them out. The constituted police of San Francisco struggled with this paradox for a generation long; and, finally, perceiving that the Chinese would settle their own affairs in their own way, gave it up and let the thing go. They kept only such interest in the Quarter — these Caucasian police — as would permit them to gather that rich graft which made a Chinatown beat a step toward fortune. [ 130 | ARNOLD GENTHE The Chinese have a positive talent for organiza- tion. They do everything, from running a store to keeping up public worship, by companies. Your insignificant Chinese shop-keeper may belong to a half dozen tight, oath-bound organizations — social, religious, financial, protective. I wonder if I can convey the process by which, in this transplanted Orient, assassins combined with justice to keep social order? Be it known that the Chinese has the most haughty contempt for our law. He seldom appeals to it; when he does, look out for some deeper plot. Perhaps he is not wholly in error; he has perceived how easily a clever lawyer can beat American courts. Aloof from our laws, then, and still apart from the laws of the Orient, these perpetual foreigners had to create some sys- tem of justice and punishment among themselves. Of this justice and punishment, the highbinders, criminals themselves, are also the executioners. Suppose, then, that you are Wong Kip, Chinese merchant, and that one steals from you, or commits the fearful crime of repudiating a just debt. You do not bother with the American courts. If the thing is bad enough to warrant the trouble, you or your Tong-man negotiate with a Bow On or Suey Sing highbinder. For a sum varying according to your needs and resources, the hired assassin gets out his gun. One night, the man who has injured you walks fair and straight through the streets of Chinatown; and a shadow falls in behind him. The shadow glances right and left to make sure that no white person is watching. The Chinese spectators — [137] OLD CHINATOWN they do not matter. The shadow walks with his hands tucked, muff fashion, in his long sleeves. They two, avenger and victim paired, reach a dark spot by awning or alley. The shadow creeps up close; his hands fly suddenly apart; a revolver goes off; the sacrifice to justice crumples up on the pavement. The murderer, with the motion of a quarter-back passing the ball, tosses the revolver to another Chinese; it goes on from hand to hand. When the police come at last, the murderer is chat- tering with the crowd about the body, and that revolver lies in an entrance a half a block away. Twenty Chinese saw it done and know who did it. Will they testify to it in court? Not as they value their lives — not even if they are brothers of the dead. Only — and here comes the imperfection in jus- tice of this kind — the brothers and Tong comrades of the executed felon often question the verdict and take an appeal. Hiring a highbinder from another Tong, they mark the man who put the wheels of justice into motion — or one of his Tong; it is nearly the same thing — and hold an execution on their own account. This may lead to more reprisals and still more, an endless chain. Such is the highbinder situation in one of its simplicities. But the further you follow it the more complex it becomes. In the first place, these Chi- nese toughs, like white toughs, grow restive under peace. When no employment offers, they start trouble among themselves. The Bow Ons and the Suey Sings were eternally straining each at the other. An insult, a quarrel over fan-tan or the price [ 132 ] ARNOLD GENTHE of a slave girl, might set off the mine. There might, too, be a real grievance. It might be a mis- tress that had deserted her Bow On lover and taken up with a Suey Sing. Here, as elsewhere, women played ducks and drakes with the affairs of men. The offended Suey Sing man would slaughter a Bow On. Not of necessity the offending Bow On; anyone would do who wore the hated badge. The Bow Ons, touched in their soldier pride, would even up the score; the Suey Sings would dispute that the score was even and pick off another Bow On; and the war would begin. Where were our police all this time? “‘Baffled.”” The Chinese took care of that. The blue devils who jumped from the noisy wagon would arrest the “‘suspicious loiterers” whom they found about the corpse, keep them awhile, and let them go for lack of evidence. Further to complicate the mess, these highbinders had a way of playing foul with their own clients. Constitutional blackmailers, they lived, between wars, on the terror which their name inspired. An order for an assassination might always be turned into blackmail money. The executioner would approach his marked man with a polite, Oriental translation of ‘‘ Dilly, Dilly, come here and be killed.” When the condemned felon had pleaded enough, the executioner would promise to let him go upon pay- ment of a weekly fine. The poor actors in the two theaters, men of no standing whatsoever among their countrymen, suffered terribly from this high- binder game. ‘The slave girls were always falling in love with actors and finding ways to meet them. ‘This offense, in the law of custom, meant death for | [ 133] OLD CHINATOWN the actor. The highbinders watched these little games, got evidence, and, by threats of reporting to the legitimate owners of the girls, kept the actors penniless. : : A highbinder war tended to go on and ever on. It ended, usually, in a general adjustment brought about by intervention of the Six Companies. Once, a war got beyond all power of this supreme Chinese tribunal in the Occident, and came to trouble the Imperial Master in Peking. The See Yups represent - the laboring class, the “unions,’”’ in Chinatown, and the Sam Yups the capitalists. In the early nineties, disputes about the price of labor grew into a general strike of all the shoe, overall and cigar operatives. When the strike reached that stage when Occidental strikers began to picket and to loosen entertainment committees, one side or the other called in the high- binders. So wide were the interests involved, so bitter were both the Sams and Sees, that this became a general war, with weekly murders in sheaves of twos and threes. It lasted a year, it sent Chinese merchants into bankruptcy by the score, and it paralyzed all industries except the tourist trade. Its climax came when the highbinders lined up in opposite doorways of Ross Alley, the narrow, over- hung street of the gamblers, and fought until the police reserves charged in between. At about the same critical period in this war, the See Yups bagged a general. “Little Pete,” Chinese millionaire, gambler and man of affairs, had been lord of that little parish. A mere coolie in the begin- ning, he had the golden touch; he made everything pay. He formed a kind of gambling trust in the [ 134] Pero Ol) iGE- NP HE Quarter, and went out after the Caucasian racing game. He had played at Chinese gambling like Riley Grannan — cold, calculating, without excite- ment, making the real gambler pay. Just so he played the races, until he had mastered that game and was ready to corrupt it —if it had been possible to corrupt Californian racing. Only when a great scandal broke out in the affairs of the California Jockey Club did the whites discover that a system of pulling horses and permitting “‘long shots’ to win, a system which had been suspected for some time, was conceived and conducted solely by “Little Pete.” Little Pete was a Sam Yup. The See Yups, whose paid highbinders were running behind the score, put a heavy price on the head of this promi- nent citizen. He sat one afternoon in a barber’s chair, having his ears scraped. ‘Two bullets, fired through the open door, caught him in the back and finished him. His funeral was the greatest public ceremonial that Chinatown ever saw. Echoes from its gongs reached the Chinese Empire. The Consul General got orders to make this foolishness stop. He failed; the war, the state of bankruptcy, went on. The Minister removed him. His successor had no more luck. Finally, the Minister put in Ho Yow, Ox- ford graduate, brother-in-law of Wu Ting Fang, member of a progressive family, a man who under- stood the whites and the Chinese alike. Ho Yow studied the situation and sent represen- tations to China. Suddenly, in scattered districts of Canton, certain innocent persons found them- [ 135] OLD CHANA TOW selves under arrest. These were the relatives, even to the third degree, of the men responsible for this war in San Francisco. He served notice on See Yups and Sam Yups alike that any more murders in Chinatown would be avenged upon the persons of these Cantonese relatives. This ended the war with a bang; before the Consul General and the Six Companies, capital and labor made peace. This heroic measure discouraged, temporarily, the high- binder industry. The threat of arrests in China, shaken at the Tongs, has more than once been a restorative of order. [ 136 ] o ; oe ; % , Ce. re S ape é “s i + i 4 ms 4 ‘ i ‘ ; : : é tine ee ane > < a SS aa