Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight

PETER: In the spring of 1906, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake set off a fire that engulfed San Francisco, and reduced much of it to ashes. As that inferno bore down on the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, there was no question what Lee Yoke Suey had to save. It was the one position that proved his US citizenship, his birth certificate.

CONNIE YOUNG YU: That birth certificate was so important to the Chinese. You always save everything, you have to save everything, or else the immigration authorities will always question why you’re here. Why you, as a Chinese person, are here.

PETER: This is Connie Young Yu, Lee Yoke Suey’s granddaughter. At the time that Lee and hundreds of thousands of others fled their homes, the City by the Bay was deeply divided. It’s steep hills and sand dunes marked the boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity. Everyone knew their place. And for around 25,000 residents of Chinese origin, stepping out of bounds was especially dangerous.

ED: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 placed Chinese immigrants on the margins. Acts of racial terror were a daily threat. While Chinatown was a segregated ghetto, it provided its residents with 15 blocks of desperately needed refuge. The devastation the great fire of 1906 brought to Chinatown would change that reality in surprising ways. Producer Chelsea Davis takes the story from here.

CHELSEA DAVIS: It was around 5:00 in the morning on April 18 when the ground begin to shake under Lee Yoke Suey, a shop owner in Chinatown. He glanced out his kitchen window to see houses collapsing, and terrified people rushing through the streets. So Lee gathered his wife and newborn daughter, and together they fled the house. Calls of, the earth dragon is stirring, echoed around them as rumors spread of a fire heading for the neighborhood. Here’s Lee’s granddaughter again, Connie Young Yu.

CONNIE YOUNG YU: It was chaotic. Probably he felt like he was in a war.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Yu says her grandfather put his family onto a wagon headed for the bay. Then he went back for that birth certificate. Lee quickly ducked into his store and rustled up what he needed. But as he emerged into the street again, Yu says, a white soldier caught sight of him, and assumed he was a looter.

CONNIE YOUNG YU: And the soldier stabs him with his bayonet. And my grandfather, he crumpled to the ground, and he played dead. He just lay there.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Lee escaped with a flesh wound. But as his run-in with a soldier suggests, the fires engulfing the city that day left Chinese residents exposed to all kinds of social dangers as they fled through unfamiliar neighborhoods.

ANDREA DAVIES: The built environment keeps everyone in their place. So if you’re an elite leak white synthesis can you don’t have to see the presence of Trento as you go there.

CHELSEA DAVIS: This is Andrea Davies, a historian at the Stanford Humanities Center, and herself a former firefighter in San Francisco.

ANDREA DAVIES: And so with everything gone, they’re watching all these people rush through the city. As the Chinese are leaving their homes in desperation, they’re being yelled at to get out, and don’t turn back. I call it heightened post-disaster racism.

CHELSEA DAVIS: And according to Davies, it wasn’t just private citizens. She says increased racism during a catastrophe can influence city officials’ responses, too. Think of the soldier who mistook Lee Yoke Suey for a looter, or the responders tasked with extinguishing the flames.

ANDREA DAVIES: The fire department did very little to stop the fires in Chinatown. And, in fact, made it worse. 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.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Yeah, dynamite. It was a last ditch effort to stop the fire from reaching the richest, whitest district. The effort failed. And thanks to the explosives, Chinatown burned all the faster. In the following days, as the embers of Chinatown cooled, the Chinese residents 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: Many whites had seen the neighborhood as a Gamorrah of opium dens, prostitution, and disease. But Chinatown also occupied prime downtown real estate. Real estate that the city’s power brokers had long been eyeing. In 1904, two years before the fire, then mayor James Phelan had asked architect Daniel Burnham to draw some sketches of a new downtown. And in those sketches, there simply is no Chinatown.

ANDREA DAVIES: And so the minute the city goes up in flames, I’m not kidding, I don’t think the city’s finished burning. And James Phelan is telegraphing Daniel Burnham, send a more reports immediately. Get them in the hands of the city leaders and business leaders. Here’s the perfect city.

CHELSEA DAVIS: In the days after the fire, the current mayor, Eugene Schmitz, worked fast to make that perfect city a reality. He appointed James Phelan and other powerful leaders to a committee entirely dedicated to relocating Chinatown. The leading proposal punted Chinese residents to the outskirts of town, among the city’s slaughterhouses. Davies says the beleaguered Chinese community soon caught wind of the plan.

ANDREA DAVIES: And they fought back, and I think they fought back very intelligently.

CHELSEA DAVIS: The Chinese launched their self defense on multiple fronts. First, they simply started rebuilding in Chinatown before others got there. One Chinese language newspaper, the Chung Sai Yat Po, made sure Chinese refugees knew their land rights.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

MALE SPEAKER: According to US laws, if the land belongs to the building owner, the landlord has the right to build on his land. Local officials have no right to stop him.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Even China’s Empress Dowager, Tzu-hsi, got involved, sending consul general from Washington to meet with San Francisco officials. But the most significant move was economic. For decades, San Francisco had been a key hub for lucrative trade with China. So a group of the city’s top Chinese merchants wrote to Mayor Schmitz in a language city officials easily understood.

ANDREA DAVIES: And so the negotiation was, OK, you don’t want us to come back? 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: By May 10, less than a month after the fire, the mayor dissolved his committee to relocate Chinatown. Filmmaker Felicia Lowe says it was a political victory on an unprecedented scale.

FELICIA LOWE: They outsmarted, and they outplayed the city fathers to fight fire with fire.

CHELSEA DAVIS: But the Chinese community took their victory one step further. San Francisco was a blank slate after the fire. So instead of letting the city draw up new architecture, an American-born Chinese merchant named Look Tin Eli had a plan.

FELICIA LOWE: The word was build me a pagoda.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Before the fire, Chinatown’s architecture had blended in with the rest of San Francisco’s Italian buildings. But Look Tin Eli’s blueprint would make the rebuilt Chinatown into what he described as a new oriental city.

FELICIA LOWE: He was able to pull together the resources and a committee of like-minded Chinese merchants 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 look like this.

CHELSEA DAVIS: The result was a Chinatown that Lo calls a Disneyland vision of China. Pagoda-topped buildings, bright reds and golds, and dragon symbols everywhere. It used Western stereotypes to rake in tourist dollars, and to give the district a new reputation for cleanliness and safety. Consider it a sort of architectural revenge. Today, Chinatown remains one of San Francisco’s most visited neighborhoods.

Of course, this makeover didn’t change everything. Sinophobia persisted for decades, and Chinese immigrants couldn’t even become naturalized citizens until 1943. But even the 1882 nationalization ban had a lot less bite after the fire, because there was one final ironic boon from the 1906 catastrophe that created an influx of immigrants.

FELICIA LOWE: The fire destroyed the City Hall, which maintained all the vital records. Births, deaths, marriages. So what happened was that some of the Chinese went to City Hall claiming that they were, in fact, citizens. And there was no way to disprove it.

CHELSEA DAVIS: On one level many see Chinatown’s story as grim. It took a natural disaster, a devastating fire, to give the Chinese a political voice in the city where they’d lived for more than 50 years. But Lee Yoke Suey, the merchant stabbed as he fled, refused to be bitter. If anything, his granddaughter says, the great fire and the fierce fight for Chinatown, gave the Lee family a greater sense of belonging in their country, the United States.

FELICIA LOWE: And they felt that somehow being in the earthquake and coming back made them part of the city, that they felt they had a stake in, look, we were here, and we survived.

PETER: Reporter Chelsea Davis brought us that story. We’ll have a link on our website to Felicia Lowe’s films about Chinatown, and to Andrea Davies’ book, Saving San Francisco, Relief and Recovery After the 1906 Disaster. Just head to backstoryradio.org.

ED: It’s time for us to take another break. When we return, a battle between fire’s timeless mystique and the science behind the flames.

BRIAN: More BackStory coming up in a minute.