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By
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CTURES OF OLD CHINATOWN

he:

THE STREET OF THE GAMBLERS.

“Underneath their artistic appreciation of the grace in life, runs a hard,

streak of barbarism.’

mel RES OF

OLD CHINATOWN

BY
ARNOLD GENTHE

WITH TEXT BY
WILL IRWIN

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1909

|
|

—

All Rights Reserve

Published, September, 1908 a
Reprinted, June, 1909 7

cad

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE STREET OF THE GAMBLERS
Tue Fisu PEeppLEeR

A Bootu—FisuH ALLEY

THe ALLEY

WAITING FOR THE Cars .

Tue AIRING .

Loarers YOUNG AND OLD

Tue ButTcHEeR

Tue Lity VENpDor

Tue Toy VENDoR .

Tue MorTuHer

THE SHOEMAKER

REscuED SLAvE GIRLS

A CorNER ON THE HILLSIDE .
Tue Ceitrtar Door

Younc ARISTOCRATS :
A Famity FROM THE CONSULATE
Houipay Dress

New YeEAr’s Day BEFORE THE THEATRE .

Houipay FINery
‘Dress CLOTHES
THe CHINESE SMILE
THe MouNTEBANK

A Vista

Frontispiece

PAGE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS |
““No Faczs!” : ; : : : ai aed
““No Lixen!” =. ; : eta :
Tuer BaLttoon Man : Wagers ‘ .
On Dupont STREET. : : : So
Tue SwEETMEAT STAND ; ; é Re:
Tue Lity-Foor Woman ; : “aie
““ Doorways IN Dim Hatr-ToNeE” . Re «
Try > Hor Vienne eas eee <3 Be:
Tue Leoparp SKIN. ; : : oe ee
Tue Morninc Market : 5 : era
Tue TonG ProciaMATION . 5 ee
Berore THE Bie Joss House . ‘ ; (gee :
“Tur Devin’s Kircnen” spy Nigot . . .
Tue New Toy . : pats ~? ee au.
‘THe CHILDREN’s Hour . ; ; , ey
Tue VEGETABLE PEDDLER . : ati
““He Bione Mu!? : : Mt
Tue TINKERS 3 ¥ ; ‘ Aey; oe
Arter ScHoon . RD aie < oo |
Tue CHINESE SaLvaTION ARMY . Mae oe
Tue Paper CouLector . ; is : B :
Tue Latest Born Sarak: : . ee
Tue Last or Orp CuInatowN . «we

FOREWORD

My Dear Dr. Genthe:

Long before I knew who you were, I used to
mark you in the shadows and recesses of China-
town, your little camera half-hidden under your
coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the
artist alert to take your shy and superstitious mod-
els unawares. Later, it was my privilege to fol-
low you sometimes—to watch you playing your
Germanic patience against their Chinese patience,
to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, work-
ing 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 remains for your work of a
decade is this same picture record of old China-
town at which you worked so lovingly for eight
years.

In the summer of steel and steam drills and
heroic enthusiasm—the summer of rebuilding—you

FOREWORD

and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown.
It 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
hollow, 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 struc-
tures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and des-
olation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees
spirits. And you spoke:

“Rubber boots and copper kettles 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 ruined
tins of St. Mary’s 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

FOREWORD

in Class A buildings.” You, like a true partizan,
fell to defending as soon as you found me agree-
ing 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 little films.

You, the only man who ever had the patience to
photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the
snap-shot—you were 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 writ-
ings, 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 de-
scribe here has survived, and much more will pre-
vail. It is just that your lenses and plates record
only the past; and, I, embroidering your work,
‘have tried to keep in tone.

Wii Irwin.

OLD CHINATOWN

BY WILL IRWIN

ROM the moment when you crossed the
golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the
gamut of beauty, from the moment when 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 tourist asked to see, the first thing which
the guides offered to show. Whenever, in any
channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers
met and talked about the City of Many Adven-
tures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their
reminiscences. Raised on a hillside, it glimpsed at
you from every corner of that older, more pic-
turesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cin-
ders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs
which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a
sombre spot, shot with contrasting patches of green
and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants,
1

2 OLD CHINATOWN

overflowing into the American quarters, | m
bright and quaint the city streets. Its exampl: Ss
of art in common things, always before the: L

in “ane worse order hie our beans woul
kept! In a newer and stronger San ]
rises a newer, Saas more heathful me

ture? ers iS the ue reach se Ros —

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A BOOTH—FISH~ALLEY.

“That horror to the nose, that perfume to the eye.”

OLD CHINATOWN 3

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 Californian 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 ap-
pear in California. The American, the Celt, the
Frenchman came for gold—gold washed out of the
hills—uncounted millions. Gold brought the
Chinaman also; but his ideas were modest. The
prospect 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,

4 OLD CHINATOWN

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. They were an honest people—hon-
est beyond our strictest ideas. ‘They attended to
their own business and did not interfere with ours.
Their immoralities, their peculiar and violent meth-
ods of adjusting social differences, affected only
themselves. Not for thirty years was there reason
for believing them a danger to American working-
men. But the fact remains. Our pioneers cut off
their sacred pig-tails, cast them forth disgraced,
beat them, lynched them. Professional agitators
made them a stock in trade. By the power of re-
iteration, this honest people came to figure in
the public mind as a race of thieves, this cleanly

the

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THE ALLEY

“ Those broken, dingy streets in which the Chinese made art of rubbish.”

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OLD CHINATOWN Si

people—inventors of the daily bath—as “dirty”
and “‘diseased,” this heroic people, possessed of a
passive fortitude beside which our stoicism is cow-
ardice, 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 Wash-
ington. Congress passed the Exclusion Law.
When that happened, there vanished the last log-
ical objection to the Californian Chinese.

A gradual change passed over the spirit of Cali-

6 OLD CHINATOWN

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
glimpsed the real man through our gradual under-
standing 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.

The newer generation of Californians 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 Southener 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 par-
ents that there was a baby in the house, laughed to
see it laugh, hurried like a mother at its ery. A
backyard picture in any of the old Californian

OF mien:
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THE AIRING.

“ With what pride the father—never the mother—used to carry the boy baby down
the street in all his finery.”

~e UDIUNAOfIIDI [DIA IY OF JIDIS Mats Aaaau YyIum ‘sjaaajs ayy fo afy sy

‘GTO CNV ONNOA SYAAVO

OLD CHINATOWN Teoy

mansions included always the Chinese cook, grin-
ning from the doorway on the playing babies.

This Chinese cook was a volunteer nurse; for
him, the nursery was 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
frugal nickels to buy them quaint little gifts; and
as the better 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 ad-
miration.

The older people, and more especially the house-
wives among them, reached understanding and
admiration through a different channel. The
Chinaman was an ideal servant. Now, when the
insolent and altogether less admirable Japanese are
taking their places beside the cook stoves, your
San Francisco housewife will never cease lament-

8 OLD CHINATOWN

ing for the old order. His respect for a contract,
written or spoken, made him observe every article
of the servant’s code. Unobtrusive, comprehend-
ing in all its subleties the feminine mind, part of
the household and still aloof from it, the Chinese
servant did the work of two. American maids and
stirred up no friction in the process. Supreme vir-
tue of all to his mistress, he delighted in “com-
pany,” in all the pomps and parades of a house-
hold. Nothing pleased him more than to take the
responsibility of a dinner or a reception upon him-
self, to plan confections 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 might he dropped his month’s
wages in the gambling houses of Ross Alley, per-
haps he smoked a few pipes of opium, perhaps he
knew more than the police would ever learn of the
highbinder shooting proclaimed all across the first
page of that newspaper which he 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

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OLD CHINATOWN oe

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? Under kind-
ness, he might blossom into a feudal retainer of the
family, lingering on for years in a voluntary
slavery, truced only when, the price of Chinese serv-
ice having gone up, he made his just demand for
a yraise in pay. 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; and I call it a glorious conquest.
Long before this, a whole generation before, and
while they still lived amidst terrors and alarms,
they had laid the foundations of that which became
Chinatown. Like all Spanish towns, San Fran-
cisco clustered first about a plaza—Portsmouth
Square the pioneers renamed it. On its fringes, in
the days when the streets ran gold and the Vigi-
lantes were the whole law, appeared the first mod-
ern buildings. Then, with the unaccountable,
restless drift of American cities, shops and whole-
sale houses passed on down into the hollows and

10 OLD CHINATOWN

“made lands” reclaimed from the Bay marshes.
The Chinese, following in, took possession of those
old buildings about Portsmouth Square. An un-
written city ordinance, strictly observed by succes-
sive Boards of Supervisors, held them to an area
of about eight city blocks. Old St. Mary’s Church,
the first Roman Catholic Cathedral, marked the
southern edge of that area; and to the last day of
the old city any report that the Chinese were moy-
ing south of St. Mary’s drove the newspapers and
the city fathers to arms. The Chinese conquest

of affection never proceeded so far that the Amer-

icans 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 centre 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 white might take the Quarter
back. But the Chinese owned much of the prop-

TOY VENDOR.

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=

Rig SEO LEAT RE RE

Eph EEA RGN GROUT RRR

THE MOTHER.

“ Soberly dressed, keeping close that they might not dishonor their lords through the
glance of forbidden eyes.”

OLD CHINATOWN 11

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 China-
town.

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 under ground 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 forth their little stores and factories,
their lodging houses, their restaurants, with the
Chinese utensils of common life in which they ex-
press their inborn art sense.

12 OLD CHINATOWN

So the quarter grew into a thing like Canton and
still strangely and beautifully unlike. Dirty—the
Chinaman, clean as a whistle about his person, in-
ventor of the daily bath, is still terribly careless
about his surroundings. Unsanitary to the last
degree—Chinatown was the care and vexation of
Boards of Health. But always beautiful—fall-
ing everywhere into pictures.

. This beauty appealed equally to the aTae citi-
zen, 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. It is a_
Rembrandt. Such pictures glimpsed about every
corner. Youlifted youreyes. Perfectly conceived
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; be-
hold 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 SHOEMAKER.

“ Human souls, different but equal, souls softened by forty centuries of high civil-
ization, lay under those yellow skins.”

f RESCUED SLAVE GIRLS.

“A girl four years old, past the delicate stage of infancy, would bring from fifteen
hundred to two thousand dollars as a speculation.”

OLD CHINATOWN 13:

the gold and greens of Chinese sign-boards. Beau-
tiful and always mysterious—a mystery made visual
by that green-gray mist which hangs always above
the Gate and which softens every object exposed to
the caressing winds and gentle rains of the North
Pacific.

In the greatest of his short stories, Frank Norris
said that there were three circles in Chinatown.
The first was this life of the streets, which never
grew stale to the real Californian. The second was
that prepared show which the tourist saw and which
supported those singular persons, the Chinatown
guides. ‘The third was a circle away down below,
into which no white man, at least none who dared
tell about it, ever penetrated—the circle which re-
volved about their trafficking 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-

14 OLD CHINATOWN

ure palace where fish cutters from the northern
salmon canneries, farmers from the Sacramento
deltas, fruit pickers from the hot San J oaquin,
gold washers from the Sierran placers, came to en-
joy themselves and to squander their earnings be-
tween seasons. Although a part of its reputed
viciousness 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 soldiers of ill fortune who haunted that termi-
nus of Caucasian civilization, San Francisco. The
habitation of a darker race has an attraction for
the debased; 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
long. Much of the American tea and silk trade
was controlled from those streets. The Six Com-
panies, virtually the Chinese Chamber of Com-
merce—though bound by an alliance closer than

Sp Sar ee ¢ . 4 . _

A, CORNER‘ON THE HILLSIDE.

“This bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither
Oriental nor yet Occidenal—but just Chinatown.”

THE CELLAR: DOOR.
“Children high and low, rich and poor, they had the run of the streets.’

OLD CHINATOWN 15.

any commercial organization which we know—had
but to assert itself, and the whole Pacific Coast
paid attention. 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. In their toy estab-
lishments, rich often with spoils of the Orient, they
bred children and developed a kind of polite so-
ciety.

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 tight
in her little flat, she bound her hair with sober fil-
lets, she dressed quietly in the dark greens that
uniform respectability, and she went abroad only
on great business or on the occasion of great festi-
vals.

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

16 OLD CHINATOWN

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, otherwise, 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 con-
tented 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, bar-
gaining at the open shop-fronts, used to look after
him and grin and exchange comments in Can-
tonese 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
seminaries 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

YOUNG ARISTOCRATS:

“ How the Chinese, child lovers from the bottom of their hearts, used to pay them
court on the corners!”

y e

.
*
‘
Cre ’
»
hes
-
‘

A FAMILY FROM THE CONSULATE.

“ Hope of heaven and of everlasting worship to their fathers. . . . Nothing was
too bright and beautiful for them.”

OLD CHINATOWN Las:

and Stockton blossomed with racing, tumbling ba-
bies, all bright in silks. The barber, the grocer,
the butcher, the lantern maker, dropped tools and
occupation and came to the doorways to watch
them play. The elder sisters, too many of them,
alas, with the bound feet that showed how high their
mothers expected them to marry, 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
subdued than our own twelve year olds, got out
those feathered shuttlecocks with which the Chi-
nese youth imitates football, and frisked along
Dupont street or over into Portsmouth Square.
A curious game that was, without team work or
rules—nothing to it but dexterity of foot. Some-
thing essentially Oriental in its grotesque grace ap-
peared in the attitudes 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 movement in la savate. Sometimes the
more radical mothers joined their babies after
school, walked down to the Square—a fearful jour-
ney for them—and made a little picnic about the

18 OLD CHINATOWN

football players. That children’s hour of the
Quarter showed Chinatown at its sweetest and most —
gracious.

Once only, in my recollection, came a day when
all the women, high and low, virtuous and lost, had
free run of the streets. This was the Good Lady
Festival, celebrated every seven years in honor of
that illustrious Chinese woman, princess and mar-
tyr, 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 level of man. She was free to
walk the streets, to sacrifice, to bow publicly be-
fore the outdoor altars where priests in white robes
and white fillets tapped their little gongs and sang
incessantly to the joss. The “Prayer store” on Du-
pont Street, where one might buy anything and
everything sacred to Chinese religion, banked its
counter and filled its windows with tiny shoes, from
a thing of gold which one might hang on his tunie
as a souvenir to a valentine thing in pink rice paper,
large enough to clothe a proper lily foot.

On that day, also, might the respectable woman

HOLIDAY DRESS.

““ On that day might the respectable woman wear those parti-colored robes, those trou-

sers of pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments for the hair. . . .”

re eee

ee aes

bd
De
a
‘
%
oR
¥E
bd

NEW YEAR’S DAY BEFORE THE THEATRE.

“ Four or five times a year, some fixed or movable feast brought out everything that
was wonderful in the Quarter.”

OLD CHINATOWN 19

wear those parti-colored robes, those trousers of
pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments
for the hair, publicly appropriate at other times
only to the fallen among women. 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 phenomenon usually by the varying patterns
in the children’s caps. That year, I remember,
light blue was most in vogue. The really modish
tunic, at that festival of the Good Lady, was of a
robin’s egg color, above and below: but about the
centre of the body ran a band of deep blue, edged
with scroll work and embroidered, like as not, in
gold. The black, straight hair, glossy with oint-
ments, was usually bound by a great clasp of flat
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 sacred Chinese characters: to
right and left of them walked stavemen bearing
weapons of the old Empire. Behind followed the

20 OLD CHINATOWN

women, for all the world like a swaying bed of
great, gaudy flowers. Along the sidewalks burned
unnumbered sacrificial candles and lights, sur-
rounded with the roast pig and rice bowls of a
Chinese sacrifice. When the procession was over,
the women, emancipate for the night, went to
feast—those of no caste to the restaurants, the la-
dies to their sombre homes. :

Next morning, when the careful priests of Con-
fucius had picked up the papers on the streets and
burned them, that the sacred name might be sullied
by no 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. Alas, that festival
of the Good Lady came again in a year when no
one knew if there was to be any more Chinatown!

They love a fiesta, those Californian Chinese;
four or five times a year, some fixed or movable
feast brought out everything that was wonderful
in the Quarter. Two or three of these holiday
occasions linger in memory. On Stockton street

HOLIDAY FINERY.

*“So mothers and nurses decked them out in the brightest tunics, the most clev-
erly conceived caps all tinkling with golden devil-chasers, the whitest little
socks and shoes, the most gorgeous ear-tassels, fit, otherwise, only for the
altars of the joss.’

DRESS CLOTHES.

“They wore the long, silk tunic of neutral tint which is dress coat and frock coat
both to the Chinese gentleman.’

OLD CHINATOWN 21

stood the clubhouse of a merchant organization
only one whit less powerful than the Six Compa-
nies. Do not ask me its name;if I could remember,

you would forget. ‘Those Chinese monosyllables
are dreadfully elusive. Once in three years, this

club celebrated 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 in-
numerable paper altars in honor of this immortal
god or that dead hero. Mostly, these altars told,
in flimsy paper statuettes and legends on red rice
paper, some tale of old China. ‘There, life size,
was the great god, sitting in fearful state and cast-
ing insolent eyes upon the priests who sang before
him with many prostrations. About him, stood a
dismounted hero in the tasseled and feathered war
bonnet of old China; the princess his wife; a horse
which was a caricature of an animal in shape and
a wonder of art in blended coloring; the seven god-
desses, gazing indifferently upon rich offerings of
- roast pig, punks and fruit.

Near the entrance, in a recess of his own, sat the

22 OLD CHINATOWN

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, and if you
should but own him, no game from pie-gow to Wall
Street could resist you. So he was much sought
by the thievish; and between festivals the Tong
kept him in a burglar proof vault. _On this public
occasion, 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 shoul-
ders that he might radiate fortune on the unfor-
tunate. I wonder sometimes whether he, bearer of
luck and material salvation, saved himself in the

THE CHINESE SMILE.

“A .backyard picture in any of the old Californian mansions included always the
Chinese cook, grinning from the doorway on the playing babies.”

Lae
4 ¥

heh Bom
Sy PaaS eS

:
=
+

THE MOUNTEBANK.

“Who forgets the Pekin Two Knife Man who used to perform for nickles a sword
dance of the Old Empire?”’

OLD CHINATOWN 23

great disaster; or whether he went down to de-
struction in the downfall of his house.

I remember, too, a certain night in the annual
festival of devils, when the orthodox Chinaman
purifies his house, as the Hebrew sprinkled the
blood of sacrificial lambs on his lintels. The air,
in the Chinese cosmos, is full of these devil people;
a Chinaman 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 su-
perstition yields to convenience! The Chinese of
San. Francisco had adapted to their uses abandoned
American stores and business blocks. It was in-
convenient, almost impossible, to screen against
devils the entrances to American-built stores.
The practical Chinaman, 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.

24 OLD CHINATOWN

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 al-
ready, 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 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

A VISTA.
“Spotted with the golds and greens of Chinese sign-boards.’

S NOSPACE ST’

“ He would notice you no more than a post—unless you pulled a camera on him,”

OLD CHINATOWN 25

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 Chinaman 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 intercourse to the de-
spised race.

But on that night, when the punk-sticks and the
pocket altars burned at every corner and before
every sweet-meat stand, when all the alleys were
canopied over for the use of the priests, when every
window 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 on his slipping, high-soled shoes in a panicky

26 OLD CHINATOWN

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 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.

It seems that there is no Lent, no Thy of Atone-
ment, in the Chinese calendar. All religious fes-
tivals are also feast days. Even on that night,
men turned from fighting the devils to make holi-
day. Every restaurant held its banquet, every
wealthy home its reception.

What is it which makes one picture of life
linger in memory while others, and more marvelous
ones, fade out? As vivid as though its bright im-
pression was still dancing on my retina, I remem-
ber a dinner party which I saw that night. Per-
haps 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
in this rise of memory to a permanent thing; per-

GR MM BB

ONO LIKEE!”

elders; the big brother or sister, caring for little
Ah Wu or tiny Miss Peach Blossom of the lily feet, scattered fearfully from

the foreign touch.”

“The children iniutaited tlreir

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‘NVW NOOTIVd AHL

OLD CHINATOWN 27

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
as 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
one from the other by pictured, scroll-work screens.
Carved woods and painted lanterns decked the
walls; the tables were of black teak, delicately and
minutely inlaid. The guests sat not on chairs, but
upon square stools of the same teak wood. From
the front apartment, you stepped out upon a bal-
cony made into a little Chinese garden. This
looked upon the dark stretch of Dupont street.
At the rear was another balcony, a small, undec-
orated thing; and from that you saw first Ports-
-mouth Square with its gilded caravel set to remem-
ber Robert Louis Stevenson; further on the city
buildings, topped by the masts and spars of Adven-

28 OLD CHINATOWN

ture Ships in from Pacific voyagings; and still fur- .
ther the golden delights of the great bay. One
who came to enjoy the Man Far Low must buy
at least tea and sweetmeats. The tea, poured
from the crack between two bowls, one inverted
over the other, was of a light lemon yellow, and
in taste no more than hot water slightly flavored
by an aromatic herb. Color and taste were de-
ceptive; it would kill sleep for a night. One ate
the sweetmeats—picked ginger, preserved nuts,
plums and citron—from the end of a spindly tin
fork. When the guest had finished, the waiter
stood at the head of the stairs and bawled some-
thing in Cantonese. That was the check; the cash-
ier, 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, costing its tens of dollars
a plate, was proceeding in the front apartment.
At the biggest table sat a dozen Chinese men-
about-town, very dignified as to dress, for they
wore the long, silk tunic of ravishing neutral tint
which is dress coat and a frock coat both to a
Chinese gentleman. With each man sat his woman

ce Mp1 asauiy v fo aruvjquias D oJUut pamsof{supsy asautyD ayy ° * * 4oIaqsip sry ,,

‘OS]D a4ayz UO quan Kajsnpur qainb pun samoy fo afi pvas Pp

“LHAaULS LNOdNd NO

THE SWEETMEAT STAND.

. . . Flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish
masters.”

‘e

OLD CHINATOWN 29:

—not at the table, but just behind, so that she
had to reach caressingly over his shoulder to
get at the hundred viands in their toy porcelain
bowls. When her lord’s appetite failed, she fed
him with her plaything hands; when he wanted
a cigarette, she lighted it for him between her own
rouged lips. One of these women, I remember,
had a homely, irregular face, with a broad mouth,
but with an illumination and expression in her
features exceptional among Chinese women—they
tend to the brainless, doll type. A soubrette sauci-
ness showed in her every gesture, but you felt that
it was a measured impudence which knew its con-
venient bounds. Musicians, squatted on a woven
straw couch in the corner, were tormenting a moon
fiddle, a sam yin and a gong. In the rests of that
sound, which I shall not call music, she would Jean
forward and throw out a remark; and the company,
already a little gone with rice brandy, would laugh
mightily.

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.

30 OLD CHINATOWN

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 num-
ber after you. But at last you call out, craft-
ily, any one number, and throw out a different
number of fingers. And if, by calling that num-
ber 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. “Sam!” “Sam!”
“See!” > ““Seel". ~- “Weel: 222 F Gri. seen
“Sam!? Then a howl of Oriental laughter, more

crackling and subdued than ours; for the propo-
nent, 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. |

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

THE LILY-FOOT WOMAN.

“ Swaying with that gentle motion which marks the Chinese
lady from her common sister.’

eae

FORMAL DRESS.

A woman in softly gaudy

robes.’

Hae

OLD CHINATOWN 31

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
Caucusus was set as a boundary between the dark
race and the light; the hordes of Ghengis Khan;
the looters of Atilla.

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 un-
seemly or unlovely act in all that debauch of young
bloods and soiled women, not one over-familiar
gesture. Tartar though they had shown them-

32 OLD CHINATOWN

selves, they had remained still Chinese gentlemen
and—may I say it of women in their class/—
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
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 beat-
ing 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 in-
stance; 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 condemned to death by the highbinders,
aware that the stroke may come at any time from

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«ANAUIT dOH, AHL

OLD CHINATOWN 33

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, underneath their
artistic appreciation of the grace in life, 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.

Chinatown, the Tenderloin for all the Western
Chinese, 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 efficient,
quiet houseboy, no more trouble about the place
than a well ordered cat, will go into Chinatown
on Saturday night, have his little whirl at fan-
tan, smoke, perhaps, his one pipe of opium, and

34 OLD CHINATOWN

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 fif-
teen years to go back to China and live on his in-
come, has dropped into a fan-tan house on the eve
of his departure, lost his whole pile in one night,
and returned, with a great surface indifference, to
begin a life of service over again. Fat and power-
ful 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, internicine politics of the ward, those
who lived by blackmail, and especially those gen-
tlemen 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 exposés, 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 himself

KIN.

ARD 5

THE LEOP

“LAMUVW ONINYOW AHL

OLD CHINATOWN 35.

in a business way with those who live by vice. In
this development of civilization we are as children
beside the Chinese; and out of this situation grew
the highbinders, adventurers in crime. [Tor they
were not only criminals; they were formal and rec-
ognized agents of justice. Crime and punishment
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 per-
mit them to gather that rich graft which made a
Chinatown beat a step toward fortune.

Before I go on with the Highbinder Tongs, of
which no white man knows too much, I must ex-
plain that the Chinese have a positive talent for
organization. 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. In the early

36 OLD CHINATOWN

seventies of the last century, certain organizations
known to the whites as “Chinese Masons” began
to attract journalistic attention. So, at about the
same time, did certain mysterious and unavenged
Chinese murders. These Masons and these mur-
ders, closely connected beyond a doubt, were the
first public manifestation of the Highbinders.
Some of these societies, the Chinese say, are off-
shoots from the old Triad Society, responsible for
the Tai-Ping Rebellion and later for the Boxer
trouble; some of them are legitimate social organi-
zations, degenerated and gone wrong. ‘Through
vicissitudes of which the best-informed Chinatown
detective knows only the shadows, they settled down
into five or six unions of toughs and paid thugs,
the hatchets and revolvers of their members always
at disposal of any Chinese who wanted revenge
or sued for justice. Blackest and toughest of all,
perhaps, were—and are—the Bow Ons, who com-

bined blackmail with their murder; but they were
all black enough. For dead and wounded, their

lists must read like the roster of a Civil War regi-
ment.
I wonder if I can convey the process by which,

Saousnl sof pans 40 asuanads pajuvm oy

asaury Kuno fo qyosodsip yw skvnyv saaquam arayz Jo s4aajoaas pun syayoqny ayy ‘sdnyi pwd puv sysnoz fo suo1un x18 40 aang ,,
‘NOILVNV100Ud ONOL FHL

Mey om oe

i etic

BEFORE THE BIG JOSS HOUSE.

“They built in the eternal painted balconies of which the
naman ts as fond as the Spaniard.”

Chi-

OLD CHINATOWN 37

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 system of justice and punishment among
themselves. Of this justice and punishment, the
Highbinders, criminals themselves, are also the ex-
ecutioners.

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;

38 OLD 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—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 revoiver goes off;
the sacrifice to justice crumples up on the pave-
ment. 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 chattering 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

All who have followed a guide through Chinatown will remember this show-place.
The quarters which tourists paid to “ see the hop fiends”’ kept it going for years,

in spite of the Health Board.

OLD CHINATOWN 39

nearly the same thing—and hold an execution on
their own account. This may lead to more re-
prisals 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 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

40 OLD CHINATOWN

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. The police of
the little New York Chinatown had the same
trouble when they tried—and failed—to control the
late war of the On Leongs and the Hip Sings.
This war cost a dozen lives at least; it brought not
a single conviction. A few Chinese have been
hanged in California for highbinder murders. In
every case there remains a dreadful suspicion that
we hanged the wrong man, his life sworn away for
some dark purpose of the Chinese.

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 ap-
proach his marked man with a polite, Oriental trans-
lation of “Dilly, Dilly, come here and be killed.”
When the condemned felon had pleaded enough,
the executioner would promise to let him go upon
payment of a weekly fine. The poor actors in the

THE PALACE HOTEE.”

An angle of “ The Devil’s Kitchen’’--the most dilapidated hole in Chinatown and *
a constant reproach to the Board of Health.

OLD CHINATOWN 41

two theaters, men of no standing whatsoever
among their countrymen, suffered terribly from
this highbinder 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 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 begin to picket and
~ to loosen entertainment committees, one side or the
other called in the highbinders. So wide were the
interests involved, so bitter were both the Sams and

A2 OLD CHINATOWN

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 Gettysburg, its Marengo,
came when the highbinders lined up in opposite
doorways of Ross Alley, the narrow, overhung
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 beginning, he had the golden touch; he made
everything pay. He formed a kind of gambling
trust in the Quarter, and went out after the Cau-
casian racing game. He had played at Chinese
gambling like Riley Grannan—cold, calculating,
without excitement, 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 were
possible to corrupt Californian racing. Only
when a great scandal broke out in the affairs of
the California Jockey Club did the whites discover

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that a system of pulling horses and permitting
“long shots” to win, a system which had been sus-
pected 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. Hs 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, certainly innocent persons found them-

Ad OLD CHINATOWN

selves under arrest. These were the _ relatives,
even to the third degree, of the men respon-
sible 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 highbinder industry. The threat
of arrests in China, shaken at the Tongs, has more
than once been a restorative of order.

The underground passages of Chinatown have
appealed mightily to the imagination of melo-
dramatists, authors of sensational tales, writers of
specials for the Eastern press, and others who
guide and stimulate the popular imagination. A|-
though some declare them a myth, those passage-
ways of the Third Circle really did exist at one
time. Their end antedated the great fire. In the
late nineties, a Board of Health, appointed by the
last honest municipal government which the old
city knew, forestalled epidemics by going through
the Quarter with warrant and deputy. Against

MATGCCAd ATAVLAUOAA AHL

OLD CHINATOWN AS

the diplomacies and concealments of the Chinese,
the inspectors closed up cellar after cellar, filled
in passage after passage. A few, effectually hid-
den from that Board of Health or restored under
the venal Schmitz administration, remained to the
end. Still those who knew old Chinatown mar-
veled, when they looked into the gaping cellars left
by the fire, to see how little of this mole-work re-
mained.: | -

So wide was this maze, in earlier days, that a
Chinese who knew his way might travel by it from
almost any point in Chinatown to almost any other.
A reporter who held the confidence of the Chinese
has told me how he subnavigated the quarter during
the quarantine of 1901. The Federal doctors, sus-
pecting bubonic plague, had drawn a line tight
about Chinatown; and, since Federal and not mu-
nicipal authorities were doing this thing, the pro-
hibition against passing the lines was absolute,
even.to “gentlemen of the press.”

A Chinaman, caught outside himself, said to this
reporter: “I take you.” They entered the little
den of a white cobbler in California street. The
cobbler, after a whispered exchange of words,

46 OLD CHINATOWN

opened a trap door under his counter. The Chinese
guide, crouching in the shadow, lighted a red paper
lantern; and down a ten-foot ladder they went.
The rest was a bewilderment of knife-edge passage-
ways, stopes, ladders; sudden encounters with
closed doors, from behind which came murmers of a |
mysterious life within; glimpses, through the terrific
glooms, of other pedestrians in those underground
streets. Once, they passed through a mouldy lodg-
ing house, its walls dripping with exhalations of the
earth, its day-shift of inmates peering out at them —
in affright; once they came upon a latticed window,
strangely futile in this unlighted world, through
which the reporter saw slatternly women working
with something on the floor—doubtless they were,
rolling, for warmed-over consumption, the scrap-
ings of opium pipes. Once, he thought he heard
the sound of moaning. Rumors of plague were in
the air. It came to him that this might be some one
sick unto death with it. The sense of darkness and
confinement made the thought of contagion by
Black Death doubly terrible; it was as though he
were shut in a dungeon alone with a spectre.

They came at last square up against a rough

“HE B’LONG ME!”

* A Chinese father would soften if you stopped to pay court to the baby in his arms.”

OLD CHINATOWN 47

wooden wall. The guide fumbled and scratched;
a panel slid back as though Mrs. Radcliffe had im-
agined it. A drop of three feet brought them intc
a cellar; from there they walked out of a Chinese
grocery store into the full daylight of the Quarter.
When the reporter had looked about to his satis-
faction, the guide said: “You go back notha’ way.”
Starting from a lodging house next door to the
grocery, they traversed more drops and rises, dark
passages, hidden apartments, and came out in a
cellar of the Latin quarter. They had walked all
the way under Chinatown.

Another man has told me how he rambled
through some of these passages with a Chinese ac-
quaintance—this was a mere visit of curiosity.
When, bewildered and utterly lost, he declared that
he had enough of foul air and suggestion of horri-
ble mystery, his guide mounted a ladder and
scratched at a trap door. It opened; and they were
in the kitchen of the Jackson street Chinese Thea-
tre, with the gongs of a Chinese orchestra clang-
ing on the stage above their heads.

The exchange of opium, smuggled in from
Pacific ships by bay pirates; the heartless slave

48 OLD CHINATOWN

trade; the preparation of bodies for convenient re-
turn to their ancestral grave mounds; the hidden
revenges of the Highbinders—all went on in these
catacombs, twenty feet below the pavement of Du-
pont and Washington. What tragedies their
earthen walls must have witnessed, what comedies,
what horror stories, what melodramas! ‘There it
was, below everything; the Third Circle whose cir-
cumference was darkness and whose centre death.

Doubtless I am following here the newspaper
fashion and dwelling too much upon this criminal
aspect of the Quarter. If so, it is because the crime
was so picturesque, because it expressed so clearly
the difference of this civilization from its parent
Orient and its adopted Occident. I am not quite
done with it, either, for I must speak of the slave
trade.

The world knows from Christian missionaries
how little the careless and criminal, among the
Chinese at home, value a girl baby. The sale of
such children is an established custom—born of the
low esteem in which women are held and of the ter-
rible Chinese famines. Those Californian Chi-
nese, who were degraded enough to stoop to such

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OLD CHINATOWN 49

things, sold these babies into pure shame and the
ruin of souls. So small was the supply, owing to
the difficulty of smuggling women past Federal in-
spection, that prices were high; it paid a coolie
woman to bear female children. <A girl four years
old, past the delicate stage of infancy, would bring
from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars as a
speculation. At thirteen or fourteen, when she was
of age to begin making returns to her owner, her
price was three thousand. Slavery it was, literal
and hopeless; and that in face of the Fourteenth
Amendment. The federal authorities tried to
break it up. Pretty generally, they failed. The
trouble lay in the Chinese contempt for our courts.
Snatch a girl from a brothel, and what happened?
A slave from babyhood, kept in ignorance of any
other world than that of her brothel, she believed
the word of her keeper when he said that white men
want girls only to pickle their eyes. and eat their
brains. First, one must win her from that idea.
Then, the master would always bring action in the
courts through certain white attorneys unscrupu-
lous enough to take such cases. Chinese witnesses
would be found to go upon the stand and swear that

50 OLD CHINATOWN

this girl was a daughter or niece of the master;
and the poor girl, the moment she faced her master
in court, would fall into the cowed custom of a
lifetime, quail before his eye, and swear falsely
that these witnesses told the truth—that she wanted
to go back to her “uncle.” This system, shameful
in our eyes—though indeed there are institutions
just as cold-blooded and evil in our own social —
structure—existed from the first day of Chinatown;
exists, I make no doubt, to-day. .
From a woman, and she a pretty, fair-spoken
Scotch maiden, this slave trade took its hardest
blow. Donaldine Cameron was a girl stripling of
twenty when she came to take charge of the Pres-
byterian Mission, which concerns itself especially
with the lives and souls of Chinese women. She
says herself that she inherited her tastes and talents
from a line of Scotch parsons grafted on a line of
sheep-stealing Camerons. ‘The spirit in her led
her straight to the slave trade. First, as all her
predecessors had done, she tried the police and the
courts. She found the police inefficient or venal,
the courts ineffective. She saw girl after girl, who
had welcomed rescue in the beginning, crumple up

APTER SCHOOL.

‘Tiny yellow flowers of the world.

OLD CHINATOWN 51

on the witness stand and swear herself back into
Hell.

Nevertheless, Miss Cameron kept on, raiding and
fighting in the courts. In a warfare of ten years,
she won a kind of Fabian victory. She usually
lost her girl in the end, but before that end she had
cost the owner dear in smashed doors, valuable
property kept idle, disturbance of business, and the
heavy fees which cheap white attorneys used to
exact from the Chinese. Playing her desperate
lone hand, she reduced the traffic by about one-half.

Our lives in old San Francisco were all tinged a
little with romance; but I can think of no life
among us which so quivered with adventure as
hers. Would that I could convey the quaint,
workaday style in which this soncy Scotch gen-
tlewoman related her adventures—the material of
a dime novel, the manner of a housewife telling
about her marketing. During one raid, she met at
the door of the brothel some unforeseen barrier

which delayed the attack. As she waited for the
~axman, she looked through the latticed window
upon a confusion of painted, flowered, Chinese
women, all squalling together. From this group,

52 OLD CHINATOWN

a girl disentangled herself and came running, her
arms outstretched, toward the raiders. It was the
girl they had come to rescue; and by this fatal slip,
born of over-eagerness, she revealed that she was
first cause of the raid. The slave master perceived
it, too; before Miss Cameron’s eyes he knocked her
down and dragged her by the hair through a slid-
ing panel, which opened at his touch. When at
last Miss Cameron gained entrance, she found a ~
dozen passages leading confusingly from this secret
door; the inmates had lost themselves in the Third
Circle. She never saw that girl again; but months
later the underground gossip of Chinatown brought
Miss Cameron the end of the tale. The master,
down there in the bowels of the earth, had beaten
her to death in presence of his other cowering
women.

This piece of artistic detail from another of her
raids which failed: The inmates had rolled into a
trap door under a bed, and escaped into the under-
world. So orderly and so deserted was the place
that she wondered, at first glance, whether she had
not made a mistake. Then she noticed a samesin in
the corner, and perceived that its strings still quiv-

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OLD CHINATOWN 53

ered and gave forth a dying sound—showing how
recently it had dropped from Une lily hands of the
lily woman.

One of the slave girls in the mission was an or-
phan, sold as a baby; she had never known any life
but that of the brothel. Neither had she any edu-
cation save in certain primitive arts of woman, any
religion except a superstitious fear of her masters.
“If you escape from us down to Heli,” they had
told her, “we will drag you up by the hair. If
you escape to Heaven, we will drag you down by the
eeu

A certain man, a Christianized Chinese as it
turned out later, used to visit that house. He sin=
gled out this girl, talked to her apart of the life
outside, showed her that she was a slave and a pris-
oner, informed her of the white woman who lived
only to rescue such as she.

“When he spoke of a white woman,” said this
girl, “I was much afraid, because they had told me
that the whites were devils who wanted to get me
just to eat my brains. Though I knew nothing
different, I had always been discontented with my
kind of life, and had been wishing for something

54 OLD CHINATOWN

else—I never knew what. After he went away
from me, I thought about all this. I fell into such
a melancholy and longing for the open world that
I was ready to take my chances with the white
woman being a witch. I could think of nothing
but escape.

“When this man visited me again, I told him that
I would trust the white woman. He advised me
then to wear some secret token so that they might
know whom to rescue; because if they failed, and
my master knew that I had brought on the raid,
they might abuse me afterward. We agreed on a
lily-flower over my left ear. He told me also to
fight and cry when they carried me away—”

Well, Miss Cameron smashed that door and
snatched from the arms of her slave master the
girl with the lily over her ear. All the way down
the stairs, she kicked and fought; but when they got
her alone in the carriage, she said: “Why didn’t
you come for me before?’ This was one of the
few girls who ever stood by her guns on the stand.
She kept her freedom; and the last I heard of her
she was getting ready to marry that Chinese who
first told her about Miss Cameron.

THE: PAPER COLLECTOR.

“That withered wisp of a Confucian priest whose task tt was
all the papers on the streets.”

gather day by day

THE LATEST BORN.

“ Usually they were contented and rather stolid babies; only once in a blue moon
did one of them cry.”

OLD CHINATOWN 55

Donaldine Cameron—how her name, after these
years, so few in number, so many in change, bring’s
up the other characters and originals of that curious

little parish! Does the Emperor of the Universe
still parade about Portsmouth Square, I wonder?

He was the mildest, gentlest paranoiac that ever
followed the moon. For years he walked the
streets; a tall old man, with one of the sparse
beards which Heaven grants to but few Chinese.
Always, as he walked, he smoked a long, curved
pipe and turned a look of kindly disdain upon the
populace. He believed that all these whites and
Chinese were his subjects; but he was a benevolent
ruler, well content with his domain. For that rea-
son, and also because everyone liked him, no one
ever took the trouble to lock him up. The Central
Police Station came to inhabit the Hall of Justice
across Portsmouth Square. At four o’clock on fine
days, the downtown squad used to deploy on the
sidewalk. The Emperor was always there. He
would walk down the line with the air of a general
reviewing his troops, salute formally, and march
back to Chinatown. When the captain in command
was good-natured, he let his policemen return the

56 OLD CHINATOWN

salute—which they did with all gravity in the
world. |

Who can ever forget the pipe-bowl mender, the
pipe-bowl mender who sat in the same spot—on
Dupont street a few doors from Jackson—for a
decade long? A picture always, what with his bow-
string bits, his tiny hammers, his leather cases, he
was most a picture on cold days when he got out his.
martin-lined jacket from the family inheritance,
and his fur cap. In the short-lived drama, “The
First Born,” which so enchanted San Francisco
Power the author and Benrimo the actor made
this pipe-bowl mender chorus to all the things
which happened on a certain tragic Chinatown
night. Who forgets the Pekin Two Knife Man
who used to perform for nickles a sword dance of
the Old Empire? Who forgets that withered wisp
of a Confucian priest whose task it was to gather day
by day all the papers on the streets, that the name —
of the god-sage might never be profaned? Who
forgets Ah Chic of the splendid, noble face, the
greatest actor (I verily believe) of all his time in
America—Ah Chic who lived and died in the Jack-
son street theatre, playing seven nights a week for

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OLD CHINATOWN 57

the pure love of playing, to coolies who could never
understand? Who forgets the lantern maker, he
who plaited moons of red and gold delight out of
paper and bamboo strips, betraying the artist in all
those devices by which he made each one a little
different from the other?

Gentle figures, seen bright through the sunset
scarlets of a youth that is past, do you linger yet,
now that your old environment is gone?

GETTY CENTER LIBRARY iat

nthe, Arnold, 1869
Nieves of old siactiems /

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