town houses huddled on the narrow streets, the exotic jury-rigged rooftops. A pall hangs before the intersection at Dupont and Post like an invisible curtain. Invisible, but very real. The boundaries of the neighborhood are so well marked—California Street to Broadway, Kearney Street to Powell—that when a tong war rages or bubonic plague breaks out, the police simply barricade all those intersections. The street sweepers never venture here with their Studebaker wagons. The shadowed cobblestones are always slick with mud, butcher shop blood, fish juice, and spittle.
Zhu steps across that intersection into Chinatown. What people call the “City of the People of Tan”--Tangrenbu.
She enters a peculiar silence. The sounds of downtown—horses trotting, bootheels clattering—are suddenly hushed. Somber men stride by in denim sahms, straw slippers, queues wrapped tightly around their heads or trailing down their backs. They wear felt fedoras like Zhu’s, brimless embroidered caps, or the peasant’s broad-brimmed straw cone.
She is overwhelmed by a distinctive stench: raw sewage infused with the scent of sandalwood, the spice of ginger, cloying incense. A sickly sweet smell mingles with scents of roast pork and frying peanut oil—the odor of opium. Opium is legally imported by those willing to pay the tariff and illegally smuggled by those who would rather keep the extra twelve dollars a pound for themselves. Nowhere else and nowhen else has Zhu ever smelled such a unique blend of olfactory stimulation. The essence of Tangrenbu.
Zhu steels herself. She knows the history—Muse has filled her in on many a long sleepless night.
Chinatowns are scattered through the West, but only San Francisco’s Chinatown is known as Tangrenbu. For decades, Tangrenbu has been the primary port of entry for immigrants from the Far East. The bachelors who fled the war-torn, drought-ridden homeland in the 1850s came to California—Gum Saan or Gold Mountain—seeking their fortunes. They panned streams in the Sierras, seeking out rich veins hidden behind shafts deserted by less patient Forty-niners, only to be terrorized, robbed of their findings, or murdered by gangs of mountain men. They planted vegetables, coaxing lettuce, onions, and celery from soil abandoned by less diligent farmers. They set up small factories—dubbed sweatshops because they worked long hours for little pay—producing boots, trousers, or cigars. They willingly performed women’s work---cooking and cleaning—and opened restaurants or laundries of such skill that the fine gentlemen of the West Coast no longer sent their shirts to Hong Kong by steamship for proper washing, starching, and ironing, but patronized the local laundries. The bachelors toiled sixteen hours a day laying track for Mr. Huntington’s transcontinental railroad, taking half the wage—a dollar-fifty a day—other workmen demanded. And when the Golden Spike was driven and the great task completed, opening up the West to the rest of America, they returned to their port of entry, to their home away from the homeland, to the only place they could go. They returned to Tangrenbu.
To those with a poetic bent, the enigmatic industrious aliens—young men who came without their families, wives, or children—were called the Celestials. To American politicians and American laborers--fearful of the possible immigration of half a billion workers in a stuttering economy—they were called the Yellow Peril.
Few Americans were feeling poetic in 1873 when Jay Cooke, who financed the Union army, squandered $15 million on five hundred miles of Northern Pacific track and failed to float a bond issue of $100 million to complete the job. Mr. Cooke announced that his bank could not pay depositors on demand. The subsequent bank panic caused a stock market crash. Debtors defaulted on loans, business owners slashed payrolls. Bankruptcy and unemployment ran rampant. The ensuing depression lasted a grueling five years and, in its wake, arose militant sandlot movements, angry mobs, and violent gangs who roamed the cities seeking loot and revenge. There were riots, hangings, stonings, burnings. British and Irish and German and Italian immigrants seeking a better life in America welcomed no one new in an increasingly competitive job market.
How much the world has changed, Zhu thinks, striding down Dupont Street into Chinatown. And how much the world has stayed the same. Now she joins the throng of silent men. Men everywhere, but no Chinese women or children.
During the past three months when Zhu wandered through Chinatown in her Western lady’s clothes, a shopping basket on her arm, she was a barely tolerated intruder in Tangrenbu. Yet, veil drawn over her face, passing for Caucasian, she never feared for her safety, either. Neither whore nor slave, she was untouchable, and the bachelors gave