Pagodas and Dragon Gates

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
If you’re walking in San Francisco, you might not know when you’re crossing from the Western Addition neighborhood into Hayes Valley, or if you’re in Portola or Excelsior, but you could be aimlessly wandering around any Western city of significant size including San Francisco or Oakland, and you’ll know exactly when you’re in Chinatown. Those visual cues may be simple to pick up on, but it turns out the origin stories of Chinatown and the architecture and food that come from it are far more complex and interesting than you can imagine. We did a couple of stories on this a few years ago and we’ve compiled them together into this episode. I hope you like it.

Roman Mars:
In 1968 George Tsui stepped off a plane from Hong Kong and into the San Francisco International Airport. It was his first time on American soil. At 22 years old, he had left his homeland of China and traveled across the ocean to build a new life for himself and his young wife in this land of opportunity.

Bonnie Tsui:
When immigrants first come to the U.S., and this is such an old trope and an old story that you expect, you know the streets are paved with gold.

Roman Mars:
This is Bonnie Tsui, George’s daughter. She’s also the author of a book about American Chinatowns.

Bonnie Tsui:
Even today, like Chinese people still call San Francisco, Gam Saan.

Roman Mars:
Meaning “gold mountain”.

Bonnie Tsui:
This is where you find your fortune in San Francisco.

Roman Mars:
George Tsui’s very first stop in San Francisco, his very first stop in America, like generation upon generation of Chinese immigrants before him, was San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Bonnie Tsui:
And he was not impressed.

Roman Mars:
To George San Francisco’s Chinatown felt out of date.

Bonnie Tsui:
All the things he saw in Chinatown, these pagoda roofs, these dragon gates, these flourishes that to us signal China and Chinese-ness, there were things that he actually hadn’t seen in back in China for years and years and years, and they were not used in that architectural vernacular back there. And so he wondered how Chinatown in this really supposedly modern America was… why did it feel older than the oldest parts of Hong Kong where he’d grown up?

Chelsea Davis:
Because it was designed that way.

Roman Mars:
That’s producer Chelsea Davis.

Chelsea Davis:
For George Tsui and many other Chinese immigrants, San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Chinatowns in a lot of American cities, they don’t look much like the China they know.

Felicia Lowe:
It looks like a bit of a movie set actually. It’s so out of context to anything else next to it on either side.

Chelsea Davis:
That’s filmmaker Felicia Lowe. She made a documentary about San Francisco’s Chinatown. Walking around Chinatown together, we passed Bank of America ATMs guarded by gold dragons, shops with neon-lit names like “Heart of Shanghai”, selling paper fans and plastic Buddhas, and towering four-story bazaars crowned with little pagodas.

Roman Mars:
But Chinatown hasn’t always looked this way. In fact, before the massive earthquake that leveled San Francisco in 1906, Chinatown looked like most of the other neighborhoods in San Francisco. Rows of brick homes done up with Victorian Italianate facades.

Philip Choy:
The only thing you recognize as Chinatown are the people in it and the Chinese signs instead of American signs.

Chelsea Davis:
That’s Phil Choy, a retired architect and historian of Chinese American culture. He grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and still lives there today. He says it’s not like Chinese immigrants in SF had strong opinions either way about their neighborhood’s Victorian flourishes – the columns, the porches.

Roman Mars:
They just didn’t have much choice when it came to where they lived. After arriving in America, they moved into the old homes that white people had abandoned for greener pastures. And after that …

Philip Choy:
Basically, the Chinese didn’t have time to really pay attention to the architecture of creating Chinese architecture. The basic desire was to make a living.

Chelsea Davis:
And making a living was easier said than done if you were Chinese in early 20th century San Francisco. Since the 1860s, Chinese immigrants had been a convenient scapegoat for nationwide job shortages. The result was federal legislation like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the vast majority of Chinese people from entering the States and made it impossible for Chinese already in the U.S. to become new American citizens.

Roman Mars:
In San Francisco, racist housing policies made it almost impossible for people of Chinese heritage to live outside of Chinatown. And when they did set foot outside the 15-square blocks of the Chinese enclave, it was at the risk of physical violence.

Chelsea Davis:
So the self-contained world of Chinatown served as a desperately needed refuge for Chinese San Franciscans.

Roman Mars:
But in 1906, that refuge would be eviscerated by a double whammy of a disaster.

Roman Mars:
Early in the morning of April 18th of that year, San Franciscans woke up to a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. It was the biggest quake in the city’s recorded history, still is, but those violent tremors were just the beginning.

Chelsea Davis:
Because the earthquake shattered the city’s gas mains. And the gas that leaked out, somewhere, it connected with a spark.

Roman Mars:
The massive fires that resulted lasted for three days and destroyed about 500 city blocks. Chinatown was one of the first neighborhoods to go up in smoke

Andrea Davies:
The safe space for Chinese really is that 15-block radius of the neighborhood and without it, it becomes a very dangerous situation.

Chelsea Davis:
Andrea Davies is a historian at the Stanford Humanities Center, but before her career in academia, she was in a slightly different line of work.

Andrea Davies:
I was a San Francisco firefighter for about five years. And so my first assignment was Chinatown.

Chelsea Davis:
Fighting fires in that neighborhood later led Davies to write a social history of the 1906 catastrophe. She says that in the wake of the disaster, newspapers peddled this feel-goodie story that the SF quake and fire were social equalizers, that the shared experience of suffering united San Franciscans of all colors and creeds, man helping man, and so on.

Roman Mars:
But while white man may have helped white man, no one was helping the Chinese. And in fact, the racism against them only intensified.

Andrea Davies:
I call it heightened post-disaster racism.

Chelsea Davis:
You could see this heightened racism happening on at least two levels. First with individual white San Franciscans.

Andrea Davies:
The built environment keeps everyone in their place. And that’s what gets erased on April 18th, 1906. So if you’re an elite, white San Francisco, you don’t have to see the residents of Chinatown unless you go there. As the Chinese are leaving their homes in desperation, they’re being yelled at to get out and don’t turn back.

Chelsea Davis:
And according to Davies, it wasn’t just private citizens who were guilty of that heightened racism because the second place that the fire spurred a flare-up and racism wasn’t how the recovery efforts were managed.

Andrea Davies:
The fire department did very little to stop it in Chinatown and in fact, made it worse. And the water mains are broken, so there is not enough water to fight the fires. If you look at Chinatown, which is nestled right against Nob Hill, where all the elite mansions are, all the water goes, directed by the mayor, to save Nob Hill and all the dynamite goes into Chinatown.

Roman Mars:
At the time, fire departments would dynamite buildings to keep fire from spreading. But the fire department used the wrong kind of dynamite and Chinatown burned all the faster.

Chelsea Davis:
In the following days, as the embers of Chinatown cooled, the Chinese found themselves homeless and newly vulnerable in hostile streets, but things were about to get worse.

Andrea Davies:
So many of the city’s political and business leaders were actually excited about this social equalizing disaster because it eliminated Chinatown and they thought, “We’ll never rebuild it.”

Chelsea Davis:
Before the quake, many whites had seen the Chinese neighborhood as a Gomorrah of opium dens, prostitution, and disease.

Roman Mars:
In 1885, City Hall had prepared a municipal report on Chinatown, and in that report …

Philip Choy:
Pages of documentation listing all the houses of prostitution and the number of gambling houses and opium dens throughout Chinatown.

Chelsea Davis:
This reputation for vice had actually created a minor industry of slum tourism in Chinatown. Thrill-seeking white people could hire a guide to lead them through scenes of alleged depravity. They would be taken through dimly lit buildings and shown opium smokers and prostitutes and gambling.

Roman Mars:
Evidence suggests that some of these scenes may have actually been staged by the guides themselves. And one thing that was definitely fake was a widespread rumor that San Francisco’s Chinese residents lived in underground tunnels.

Philip Choy:
This is what they really believe, that the Chinese lived underground. And even today, people want to see Chinatown’s underground.

Chelsea Davis:
On top of all this, Chinatown was right in the middle of choice downtown real estate. Real estate that San Franciscan elites had long wanted for white businesses. In fact, two years before the fire, then-mayor James Phelan had hired an architect to drive sketches for a new downtown.

Roman Mars:
The architect they hired, you may have heard of him, Daniel Burnham.

Andrea Davies:
And in his plan, there is no Chinatown.

Roman Mars:
Burnham was a proponent of the City Beautiful movement, an urban planning philosophy popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Andrea Davies:
And this idea of City Beautiful, it’s very racialized, this view. And the idea is a more beautiful urban environment creates a more beautiful citizen. Like we want a beautiful city of well-educated citizens and everyone is white and productive.

Chelsea Davis:
And with Chinatown burned to the ground, city leaders see the chance to make that white dream a reality. Within a week of the fire, city hall created a committee dedicated solely to relocating Chinatown. The group included former mayor James Phelan, the one who had hired Burnham to draw up those revised drafts of San Francisco.

Andrea Davies:
And so the minute the city goes up in flames, I’m not kidding, I don’t think the city is finished burning, and James Phelan is telegraphing Daniel Burnham, “Send more reports immediately, get them to the hands of the city leaders. And business leaders. Here’s our plan. We can rebuild. Here’s the perfect city.”.

Chelsea Davis:
The plan for that perfect city booted the Chinese all the way to Hunter’s Point, a region on the edge of town. It’s where the city’s slaughterhouses were, but it wasn’t long before the Chinese residents found out about the plan.

Andrea Davies:
And they fought back and I think they fought back very intelligently.

Roman Mars:
They got China’s Empress Dowager Cixi involved. She sent her cultural general from Washington to meet with San Francisco officials.

Chelsea Davis:
But the coup de gras was financial. For decades, San Francisco had been a key hub for trade with China. So a group of the city’s top Chinese business owners wrote to the current mayor in a language San Francisco officials could easily understand.

Andrea Davies:
And so, on the business level of the negotiation was, “Okay, you don’t want us to come back? We’re not going to Hunter’s Point. We can go to Tacoma, we can go to Portland.” So there’s a panic of a loss of revenue for the city.

Chelsea Davis:
And that was a loss that city leaders couldn’t take. Less than a month after the quake, the mayor dissolved his committee to relocate Chinatown.

Roman Mars:
For Chinese-Americans at this time, this was an unprecedented political victory, but they didn’t stop there.

Chelsea Davis:
The fire had left Chinatown a blank slate. And for the first time, the Chinese were holding the chalk.

Roman Mars:
They were sick of Chinatown getting this bad rep for vice, sick of city hall harassing them, sick of visitors asking them if they lived in tunnels.

Chelsea Davis:
The Chinese wanted a makeover for their neighborhood. And an American born Chinese businessman named Look Tin Eli knew just how to go about it.

Felicia Lowe:
The word was, “Build me a pagoda.”.

Chelsea Davis:
That’s Felicia Lowe again. She says that Look Tin Eli figured, “Hey, if tourists are always going to come to Chinatown seeking a taste of some imaginary East, let’s give them what they want.”.

Felicia Lowe:
And so he was able to hire white architects to create a Chinatown that looked the way white people imagined Chinatown to look. Even though he knew in his own mind that the buildings in China didn’t all look like this.

Roman Mars:
Now, Look’s plan might seem a bit counterintuitive at first. For decades, the Chinese of San Francisco had been harassed precisely because they looked and dressed differently from mainstream white America. And he was the guy saying, “Let’s rebuild our neighborhood in a way that emphasizes our foreignness, that carves our difference from the rest of the city into the very face of our buildings”.

Chelsea Davis:
But Bonnie Tsui, whose father had been flummoxed by the look of Chinatown when he arrived in San Francisco, she says that the Chinese community of 1907 saw a positive side to that foreignness.

Bonnie Tsui:
And they also were pretty savvy with the fact that people were interested in them, and they were interested in this exotic element. And if they could build that in a way that was attractive instead of repellent, that that would be protective for them.

Chelsea Davis:
Look hired an architect named T. Patterson Ross and an engineer named A.W. Burgren. These two men had never been to China

Philip Choy:
At the time, the architects were not trained into tradition or anything about oriental architecture because also at the time the orient was considered way behind the West. So culturally, everything was looked down upon, let’s say, it’s nothing to study about.

Chelsea Davis:
Ross and Burgren’s knowledge of China was limited to a few images they’d seen of ancient palaces from the Song dynasty, an architectural style that was already hundreds of years old by the early 20th century.

Roman Mars:
But that didn’t stop Ross and Burgren from using their imaginations and oh, how they used their imaginations.

Philip Choy:
They created this sort of a Disneyland effect.

Roman Mars:
For instance, the Sing Chong Building was topped with a small structure that sort of looked like a pagoda.

Chelsea Davis:
But Tsui says that in China, you typically wouldn’t see a pagoda on top of another building. Pagodas there are freestanding structures, not a decorative flourish. And secondly …

Philip Choy:
In China, these were monuments for religious purposes, the religion of Buddhism.

Chelsea Davis:
Here, in its San Franciscan form, the pagoda instead houses a monument to consumerism. Sing Chong became a bustling department store, hawking Asian art, which it still is to this day.

Roman Mars:
But nonetheless, the designers that Look Tin Eli hired, created a striking building. And other merchants rebuilding in Chinatown couldn’t help but notice.

Chelsea Davis:
Soon, Sing Chong’s bombastic chinoiserie look had become the style for most new structures going up in Chinatown.

Roman Mars:
The architects who are trying to reproduce Beijing in San Francisco may have gotten a lot of the details wrong.

Chelsea Davis:
But for the tourists, they were wrong in all the right ways. Tourists loved the new Chinatown. This was exactly the Westerner friendly version of China they wanted. Vaguely exotic, but safe enough for a middle-class white America. The visitors began to flow into Chinatown and so did their cash.

Roman Mars:
And Chinatown’s pleasant new appearance was beginning to change popular sentiment towards the Chinese people. American newspapers made it explicit that the neighborhood makeover was causing them to rethink their contempt for the Chinese. As one newspaper, The Bulletin put it in 1909, “Chinatown is one of the most noted places on the American continent. We have held up to the public gaze for too long the racial grief that separates the yellow and white people of the earth.”.

Chelsea Davis:
Look Tin Eli’s plan had worked and Chinese communities elsewhere in the U.S. were taking note.

Bonnie Tsui:
All of the success of Chinatowns that have come in America, take a cue from this, take a page from this playbook. New York, San Francisco, L.A., Honolulu. They all sort of have their roots in San Francisco.

Chelsea Davis:
That’s Bonnie Tsui again. She says the visual style and tourist-friendly attitude that San Francisco’s Chinatown had perfected soon began to spread.

Roman Mars:
In fact, the new Chinatown brand was so successful that it’s still influencing Chinatown’s being built in our own time. For instance, take the Chinatown in Las Vegas, which was created in the ’90s.

Bonnie Tsui:
It also had the same pagoda roof lines and dragon gates, like the same language, architectural language, and the same architectural vernacular was being used to create the newest Chinatown that was used to create the oldest Chinatown.

Felicia Lowe:
You know, you outsmarted the devil. Basically, there is a phrase that they called white people, Bak Gwei, which is the “white devil”. I think that it was a victory. Absolutely.

Chelsea Davis:
Of course, this architectural revenge didn’t instantly fix everything for the Chinese in San Francisco. They still faced plenty of legal and popular discrimination.

Chelsea Davis:
For example, they were still required by real estate laws to live in Chinatown and on a federal level, the Chinese Exclusion Act itself wouldn’t even be repealed until 1943, more than 30 years later.

Roman Mars:
And even if the rebranding of Chinatown helped ease negative sentiment towards the Chinese, Philip Choy believes it may also have helped promote certain stereotypes.

Philip Choy:
It continues to promote our foreignness. I remember my daughter coming home one day very annoyed and upset, and said, “These people look, look, look. It’s like they never seen a Chinese person before.”

Chelsea Davis:
By contrast, look at the other traditionally ethnic neighborhoods in San Francisco, Japantown or the Italian neighborhood of North Beach. Tsui says those neighborhoods didn’t self exoticize in the 1900s to nearly the same extent that Chinatown did.

Philip Choy:
They deliberately not embellish and embrace their ethnicity.

Chelsea Davis:
Other immigrant groups at that time didn’t face the same antagonism that the Chinese did. So only the Chinese were forced to cater to white people’s fantasies as a survival mechanism.

Philip Choy:
Well, that’s the irony at that time. We had to promote our foreignness to be accepted.

Roman Mars:
But even if Chinatown’s architecture is a somewhat inauthentic representation of the real thing what a lot of tourists don’t realize is …

Bonnie Tsui:
The fact that real people live there, and that it is a place actually that is for poor people, you know. I mean it is at its essence a place where people come to live when they first get here because they can’t afford to live anywhere else because they need the services that are provided there.

Chelsea Davis:
Bonnie Tsui says this is true of all the Chinatowns she studied.

Bonnie Tsui:
They’re all portals of entry for new immigrants of a particular class. You know, working-class immigrants who don’t speak English.

Chelsea Davis:
In fact, thanks to factors like rent controls, zoning restrictions, and really active tenants rights groups in the community, San Francisco’s Chinatown has managed to remain a relatively affordable neighborhood for low-income immigrants

Roman Mars:
And Bonnie says, yes, Chinatown has been Disney-fied and rebranded to cater to American taste, but there’s still an authentic and important history there.

Bonnie Tsui:
There’s something about it that if you can sort of read the skyline, you can read the story of how this place came to be. And also in that is Chinese-American history, and in that there’s like there’s this power in that, for sure.

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Chelsea Davis and Katie Mingle. A version of the story was originally broadcast in the public radio history program, Backstory.

Roman Mars: 99% invisible was produced this week by Chelsea Davis and Katie Mingle. With Sam Greenspan, Avery Trufelman, Kurt Kohlstedt, and me, Roman Mars. A version of this story was originally broadcast on the public radio history program, Backstory. We are a project of 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arcsine, the beautiful architecture & interiors firm in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California.