It was a gorgeous April day in San Francisco, so I took BART into the city and walked all the way up Grant Avenue, through Chinatown, to Live Worms Gallery in North Beach, where my brother-in-law Paul was having a show.
Although I’ve spent most of my life in San Francisco and the East Bay, I hadn’t walked through Chinatown in decades.
In a way, it was like being a tourist.
Except that tourists would not have memories of sitting in their dad’s car, waiting for him to make deliveries to shops on Grant Avenue. Even back in the late 1950s, parking was bad.
They would not have had friends who invited them to Cameron House, a kind of Chinese Y(M/W)CA.
Tourists also would not have had a grandfather who owned a store on the east side of Grant Avenue, just inside the Bush St. Gate, before World War II. Their grandfather would not have had to sell off the inventory in a fire sale for a fraction of its worth when Executive Order 9066 ordered all West-Coast Japanese-Americans to be removed from their homes and relocated to inland prison camps in 1942.
Tourists probably would not have an older sister whose wedding reception was upstairs at the Kuo Wah Restaurant in 1968.
And they probably did not attend summer school at Lowell High School in 1969. Our Civics teacher (a nice Caucasian fellow) took the class on a field trip – to Chinatown – despite the fact that most of the class had grown up there.
If they were fortunate, they did not have a high school friend who was one of the innocent bystanders murdered in the Golden Dragon Massacre in 1977.
I had avoided Chinatown ever since.
But it was a beautiful day, and it was good to be reminded of how my history is interwoven with this street, this city.
An old gentleman sat on the sidewalk playing a small stringed instrument. From a recent e-learning project on China that I had created, I knew it was an erhu. I approached him, dropped a dollar into his cup, and asked, “Is that an erhu?” Yes, yes, he said, correcting my pronunciation. I listened for a minute and then continued on my way, feeling at peace with the world.
On the next block, and the block after that, there were more elderly gentlemen playing erhus and passing the hat. I guess I was kind of like a tourist after all.
“Grant Avenue, Chinatown” courtesy of Kārlis Dambrāns. Licensed under CC by 2.0.
“Bush Street Gate.” Courtesy of Ernest von Rosen. Licensed under CC by-NC-ND 2.0.
“Erhu player.” Courtesy of Ed Schipul. Licensed under CC by-SA 2.0.
We are only a few months apart in age, but our experiences of Chinatown, are, as would be expected, very different. 50s and 60s Chinatown for me is a vague impression of a neighborhood bustling with Asian looking people talking loudly in Cantonese and elbowing their way through the crowds as they hustled along to their favorite shop or restaurant. I remember my dad zigzagging down Lombard Street and then driving along Grant Avenue on our way from the Monterey Peninsula to Marin, where my grandparents lived. I don’t remember ever parking and walking about, but we must have gone into some of the larger shops on Grant Avenue because when I visited them again years later, they seemed familiar. My dad had grown up in China (as a missionary kid), and I can feel his excitement and pleasure each time we’d head up Grant Ave. I suppose the sidewalks teaming with Chinese faces, the shop and restaurant signs in Chinese characters, and the shouts of merchants calling to customers in Cantonese, and parents corraling their children brought back memories of his childhood in Suzhou – happy years in the bosom of a loving family, using his street Suzhou dialect to trade half hearted insults with the local boys and sitting in church on Sunday, and valiantly suppressing their giggles, along with the rest of the congregation, when his father, leading the Sunday service, would mangle the local dialect’s tones and proclaim “Lend me your tails!” when he’d meant to say ears.
Then in the 80s, after I married Ed and had lived in Hong Kong for a year and a half, I took my parents for dim sum at the cavernous Asia Garden on Washington (later New Asia, now gone) and introduced them to ngau bat yip (tripe with chili peppers), loh mai gai (sticky rice stuffed with chicken and sausage and wrapped in fragrant lotus leaves), and of course cha siu bau, steamed buns filled with sweet chunks of pork in a thick sauce). My dad had never had dim sum (I guess it was not part of Suzhou cuisine) and dove in with relish. My mom was a bit non- plussed by the plate of chicken feet steamed with fermented black beans plunked down in front of her by the harried waitress and wondered aloud if we’d be served anything she could actually eat.
When we ventured up to Stockton Street, I really did feel as though I was back in Hong Kong. Unlike touristy Grant Avenue, with its shops of enticing curios, bright silk Chinese jackets and form fitting cheung saam, Stockton Street is the people’s Chinatown, a real community where people live and work and shop and gossip and gather for noisy Sunday brunches. Every other store seems to be a produce market, with bins of fruits and vegetables almost blocking the narrow sidewalks, housewives shoving their way through the throngs to scoop up the best Chinese long beans or the freshest tangerines. Chinatown now feels almost completely “home,” the sights and sounds those of every day life, and I will sometimes, just for a moment, forget that I do not look (or sound) at all like the other housewives elbowing their way inside the cramped stores and thrusting their bags of carefully selected vegetables into an outstretched cashier hand. The sights, sounds, smells remind me so much of our working class neighborhood in Yaumadei (Kowloon, HK) it is almost as though I’ve been transported back across the Pacific to relive those heady, strange years when the Queen and Beijing agreed at last to transfer the colony back to China. Stockton Street reminds me of the first year and a half of our marriage, when Ed was reunited with his quintessentially grandmotherly Ah Poh with her plump hugs and warm smile, and we explored Ed’s childhood together; Tiger Balm Garden, The Peak. Wong Tai Sin Temple, and ate and ate and ate an amazing variety of seafood, organ meats, fresh stir fried vegetables, vegetarian curried beef and roast pork made from wheat gluten, midnight dai pai dong noodle soups served in alleyway pop ups and fresh rambutan and mangosteen flown in from Thailand.
I do not have your gift for words but this was fun to write. Thank you for the impetus to put these thoughts and memories down!
Piper