At the turn of the 20th century, San Francisco faced a plague that devastated Europe in centuries past. As sickness began spreading through Chinatown, its most densely populated neighborhood, the city had to confront the deadliness of this disease and its own societal ills.

Episode 5: A Sickness Upon These Shores

AM: Sabrina…

SO: Anne…

AM: We’ve already talked about a lot of things on this podcast. But . Remember when we started this project, there was a very special and very specific topic we agreed to discuss? Today is the day.

SO: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

AM: Evasion tactics will not work.

SO: I really have no idea what you’re talking about.

AM: Today, we finally talk about that ultimate question we get as park guides at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

SO: Do you mean “Hi Ranger! Why did Michel Foucault say that ships are the heterotopia par excellence?”

AM: You know exactly what I mean.

SO: [Sighs] I guess I do.

AM: Today, we face the question: “Where’s the bathroom?”

[music ends]

AM: Alright. So, we’re not actually concerned with where the restrooms in the park are.

SO: Too bad. That wouldn’t have taken much research.

AM: [Laughs] true. But we are going to get a bit into sanitation, hygiene, and public health. The idea of this podcast came to us six months ago as shelter-in-place began in San Francisco and we were trying to figure out what engaging with the public would look like without sharing a physical space. So...we turned to research.

SO: And the books we stuck our noses in taught us so much about parts of San Francisco and Chinatown’s history that we knew very little about. Like David K. Randall’s Black Death at the Golden Gate, where we learned that an ancient disease which wiped out a third of Europe landed on San Francisco’s shores just over a century ago.

AM: Aaaand if not for the courage of a fearless crew, San Francisco would be lost? SO: Mmm, kind of, but let’s leave the fictional ships at bay.

AM: San Francisco Bay?

SO: Oh, my god. Stop. We have to start this episode!

AM : [laughs] Okay, okay. But first, a bathroom break?

SO : This podcast is over. AM: Oh, no. Please no. I’m sorry!

SO: Over.

AM: [laughs] Okay, fine! All teasing aside, we were coping with a pandemic that had no cure, no clear-cut symptoms, and the news and recommendations seemed to change constantly. Personally, it was overwhelming.

SO: And while the COVID-19 outbreak bears many resemblances to the flu epidemic of 1918 to 1919, our attention was drawn to the similarities it also has with the bubonic plague outbreaks in San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century.

AM: In our previous episodes, we’ve talked about the opening of trade with Asia, immigration, exclusion laws, sensationalist newspapers and “yellow journalism”, Chinatown, and Angel Island. And in researching this episode, we saw these various threads converge…are you ready to get started?

SO: Am I ever? [ AM laughs]

[music / audio break]

AM: Before we can really begin to talk about the bubonic plague’s effect on San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century, I think we need to do some traveling. The bubonic plague devastated Europe from 1347 to 1352 under the guise of the Black Death. Entering Europe through trade, the Black Death was carried by rats between ships sailing from the Black Sea.

SO: Was it known as the Black Death because it was associated with the Black Sea?

AM: That’s a good guess, but as far as I can tell, no. It was called the Black Death because if someone had it, the sores that appeared on their skin, and the surrounding area, often turned black.

SO: I was asking because fear of having such a disease come over from the sea was very real and dangerous. [AM: Mhm] And fear of a disease can quickly become fear of the people you associate with that disease. [AM: Mmm] Did you know that Angel Island was originally set up as a quarantine zone before it became the major immigration station?

AM: I did! We talk a lot about the Chinese people who immigrated through Angel Island, but so many different nationalities were processed through the station. Other immigrants came from the Punjab, Russia, the Philippines, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and around Latin America as well.

SO: Not for nothing was Angel Island known as the “Ellis Island of the West” -- referring to the immigration station across the country, in New York Harbor, within sight of our nation’s most well-known monument to liberty and welcome. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886. In 1903, a plaque bearing Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus” was affixed to its pedestal, proclaiming the following words:

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

AM: But fire and fear burned through immigrant and racially diverse neighborhoods throughout the United States, even after the Statue of Liberty raised her torch and lit the way for the huddled masses to seek better lives. The year before she began welcoming immigrants through this golden door, Chinese communities throughout the western United States were targeted brutally and violently. In 1887, arson burned San Jose’s Chinatown. According to Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer,

“with superhuman efforts” the city’s Alert Hose Fire Company “saved the ground on which Chinatown was located and prevented the spread of the fire to surrounding buildings”. The Chinese buildings burned, it said, because the firemen found “poor hose” and “low water pressure.” Even aided by the mayor and some city councilmen, the Chinese fire brigade was unable to check the flames because someone had drained the Chinese water tank. It was not by chance that during the two weeks preceding the blaze prominent white property owners in Chinatown had added heavily to their fire insurance.

SO: And just a few, short years later, in 1899, fire was used to, quote-unquote, cleanse Honolulu’s Chinatown of the bubonic plague. Hawaii had been designated a United States territory the year before. This was the first time in recorded history that bubonic plague had reached the islands.

AM: The first reported person to suffer from bubonic plague in Honolulu was a forty-year-old bookkeeper named Yuk Hoy. In early December 1899, he was brought to Dr. Li Khai Fai and his wife, Dr. Kong Tai Heong, by another man living in the same boarding house. Drs. Li and Kong had graduated from the Canton Medical School and settled in Hawaii just a few years before. They had both cared for victims of the bubonic plague which had just ravaged Hong Kong. When Yuk Hoy was delivered to their office, their worst fears were realized.

SO: They contacted the Honolulu Board of Health, despite the mistrust between the Chinese immigrant population of Honolulu and the newly installed, primarily white American government. Within five days, seven plague victims were found in Honolulu. Six of them were Chinese. The Board of Health ordered a five-day quarantine of Chinatown and enforced it with armed guards.

AM: And just as the quarantine was set to end, more victims began appearing, both inside and around Chinatown. The Board of Health, in desperation and without scientific proof or warning to the residents of Chinatown, turned to fire to stop the outbreak. On the last day of the nineteenth century, the Board of Health used controlled burns to, quote-unquote, “cleanse” two buildings of the plague and unhouse over seventy Chinese residents.

SO: And roughly three weeks later, the controlled burns got out of control. Winds caught the flames and residents of Chinatown were initially barred from breaking the quarantine boundary and fleeing the burning neighborhood. By the time the fire was controlled, commercial, religious, and residential buildings were destroyed, and eight thousand people--mostly Chinese, Japanese, and native Hawaiians-- had lost their homes.

AM: Is it any surprise that the residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown reacted with fear and outrage when they woke up the morning of March 7, 1900, to their own police-enforced quarantine?

SO: Strangely, this public health measure snaked the boundaries of Chinatown to exclude white-owned businesses from the forced quarantine. [AM: Hymn] However, businesses outside Chinatown who employed Chinese residents--mostly hotels, restaurants, and private families--were furious at the loss of their servants. The Chronicle even reported, quote, “The Chinese were not the only people to suffer. The white employers of the Chinese awoke to find that there was nobody on hand to prepare breakfast.”

AM: Do I detect a note of sarcasm in that report?

SO: It does seem a little tongue-in-cheek, but the outrage was real...and misplaced. And with the Bulletin , the Call , and the Chronicle calling the plague “fake”, it was not long before public officials bowed to public pressure and the gerrymandered quarantine was lifted.

AM: I think it’s time to remember the people involved and let’s start by talking about Wong Chut King.

[music / audio break]

AM: Wong Chut King’s life in San Francisco was typical of the Chinese experience at the time. He was a laborer living in a residential hotel in Chinatown. He didn’t have a bed, let alone a room to claim as his own, and the majority of the money he made was sent back to his wife and family in China.

SO: It’s a very familiar story. And, as we discussed last episode, men like him, living in a “bachelor society”, would seek companionship and sex almost exclusively in brothels on the Barbary Coast.

AM: It’s important to remember that, because when Wong Chut King noticed large painful bumps around his groin in early February 1900, his first thought was not that he had contracted a disease that devastated Europe and killed over 25 million people in the fourteenth century -- or even one that, more recently in the 1890s, terrorized port cities around the world, especially Hong Kong. He believed the lumps were probably symptoms of a sexually transmitted infection. So did the Chinese holistic medicine practitioner he went to, who treated him for an STI and sent him home.

SO: Wong Chut King’s life may have been typical, but his death on the afternoon of March 6, 1900 cemented his place in the history books. [AM: Mmm] Later that evening, a city health officer making rounds at a coffin shop discovered the lumps on his body. The Board of Health called an emergency meeting. By morning, Chinatown had been roped off.

AM: As we discussed earlier, this sudden quarantine was contentious -- especially since no one was sure why it was in place. Wong Chut King, so far, was one known victim, but not many knew about him… yet. If the plague had indeed reached the mainland United States, officials from the mayor to the governor preferred to cover it up. The economies and reputations of San Francisco and California depended on it.

SO: There was one person in the city who could have definitively said the plague had arrived, because he had identified it in Wong Chut King’s body. This was the head of the Marine Hospital Service in San Francisco: the bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun.

AM: The Marine Hospital Service was originally founded in 1798 for the care of ill and disabled seamen. By the late 19th century, it was not only overseeing hospitals at ports; it was also monitoring and gatekeeping diseases that might spread through them. Earlier in his career, on Staten Island, Joseph Kinyoun established the laboratory that has since become the National Institute of Health. In 1899, he was put in charge of the quarantine station on Angel Island – and now, he was suddenly in charge of stopping the bubonic plague.

SO: Which was not an easy task, [AM: No] considering how little even scientists knew then about how exactly it spread, much less how to treat it. They knew the bacterium that caused it -- but not, as we now know, that this was spread by fleas that live on small animals, like squirrels or rats. Today, the infection is fairly easy to fight. You just need some antibiotics.

AM: Does that mean, of all the things that could still happen this year, I am prepared for the bubonic plague?

SO: I’d like to think it’s as easy as that! Which it wasn’t, 120 years ago, when there was no such thing as antibiotics. For that moment -- tell me if you’ve heard this in a year that isn’t 1900 -- isolation and quarantine was the closest thing officials could think of as an immediate response.

AM: Huh. Yet, that wasn’t necessarily a response influenced only by hard science. I mean, the mayor at this time was James D. Phelan, the politician who ran with the slogan, “Keep California White.”

SO: Right. Phelan proclaimed that this first quarantine was justified as a defense against, quote, the “Asiatic infection to which San Francisco is constantly exposed.” He further called the Chinese “a menace to public health.”

AM: Kinyoun, with his considerable scientific prowess, was not immune to similar views. As David Randall, the author of Black Death at the Golden Gate , put it: “For all of his achievements in understanding the human body at a cellular level, [Kinyoun] was never quite capable of ignoring the outer shell of race.”

SO: Ultimately, he pushed for further quarantine and house-to-house inspections of Chinatown -- which made him clash again with officials who denied the possibility and gravity of the plague, as well as the people living in Chinatown. Kinyoun told his boss, the Surgeon General Walter Wyman, that he anticipated residents would flee.

AM: Upon the Surgeon General’s recommendation, President McKinley authorized the Marine Hospital Service to implement regulations, already contained within the Act of 1890, which strictly controlled the movement of people to prevent the spread of disease across state lines.

SO: Soon agents had orders to inspect all ships and trains leaving California, “ensure no Asians were on board” and “detain any Chinese or Japanese passengers regardless of their health.” The Marine Hospital Service was also allowed to refuse ticket sales for out-of-state transportation.

AM: And for those who did remain in Chinatown, another of Kinyoun’s measures did not go over well. Remember Ng Poon Chew?

SO: The author, and newspaper editor who was also called the Chinese Mark Twain?

AM: The very same! Pretty soon, Kinyoun and the Marine Hospital Service began offering an inoculation called the Haffkine serum or vaccine. The Haffkine serum was a prophylactic. It couldn’t cure the bubonic plague, but it could help prevent getting it. The inoculation used heat-killed bacteria, so there was basically no risk of contracting the plague from the treatment, but the side effects were terribly unpleasant.

SO: Interesting… but what does this have to do with Ng Poon Chew?

AM: [laughs] I’m getting there! The Haffkine serum wasn’t very popular with any of the public, but especially not with the residents of Chinatown who Kinyoun wanted to give it to, even if by force. In an effort to garner cooperation, public health officials asked the editor of the popular Chung Sai Yat Po, the Chinese Western Daily, to publicly take the inoculation. Ng Poon Chew agreed...and pretty quickly regretted it.

SO: Did he get sick?

AM: Not physically, as far as I can tell. But his office was surrounded by an angry mob, forcing him to hide in his home in Oakland for a few days. His newspaper was also boycotted and he lost roughly fifty percent of his readership. Sensing where his readership’s sentiment lay, Ng Poon Chew did not publicly support the inoculation drive again. He even called the vaccination, quote, “a form of modern torture”, end-quote.

SO: His newspaper, the Chinese Western Daily, published this poem on June 7, 1900:

”Officials, gentlemen, business people, laborers and merchants alike, are all people amidst trial and tribulation, stranded like caged birds, struggling for life like fish out of water. In all matters take care to preserve Chinatown; at all times protect and guard your neighbors.”

AM: The efforts to engage the Chinese community were erratic at best during Kinyoun’s time. He likely saw Ng Poon Chew’s about-face as treasonous, rather than in support of the only community supporting him. Now, Kinyoun’s speedy identification of the plague bacterium and his tenacious debates with city and state health officials likely slowed its spread by continuing to turn people’s attention to it. But his own racial biases were on display in his outreach--or lack thereof--to the community most directly affected by the initial wave of the plague.

SO: When a critic said of Kinyoun, “A real doctor was someone who practiced with patients, not microscopes”, that critic was questioning the legitimacy of bacteriology as a science. But it also hints at Kinyoun’s weakness. The Marine Hospital Service eventually replaced him. Of his successors, it was a surgeon named Rupert Blue who took a warmer, people-centered approach. Blue’s readiness to work with communities signaled a changing of the tides.

AM: For everyone’s sake, I sure hope so. But before we get into this, let’s talk a little bit about the popular racist public health theories and ordinances in place in San Francisco.

[music / audio break]

SO: Asian people were thought to be carriers of the bubonic plague, whether because of their “foreign habits” or their supposedly different biology. There was even this notion that they were more susceptible to it because Asian diets center around rice, unlike European diets around meat.

AM: The Surgeon General of the Navy at the time, W.K. Reypen, said the plague was a “disease peculiar to the Orient.” An editorial for the San Francisco Call said, “Occidental races are but little subject to it.”

SO: But, you know, looking at a disease in such narrow terms –

AM: -- and forgetting that the Black Plague devastated western Europe –

SO: -- informs the way you understand that disease, and how you can solve it or not.

AM: Exactly. And the quarantine of Chinatown was not the first discriminatory public health measure used in San Francisco. The Sanitary Ordinance, or Cubic Air Ordinance, was a local law put in place in 1870 which required a building to have at least 500 cubic feet of air for each adult residing within it. This law was considered discriminatory to Chinese residents who often lived in closer, more cramped quarters than their white counterparts.

SO : If arrested for violating the Sanitary Ordinance, Chinese people would protest by refusing to pay the fine and would be arrested for it. While jailed, they were subject to another discriminatory regulation, the Queue Ordinance. The Queue Ordinance required all men imprisoned at the city jail to have their heads shaved down to an inch of hair.

AM : This was during the several hundred-year period when Chinese men wore their hair in long braids, or queues. Requiring men to cut off their queues was forcing them to commit an “act of disgrace”. The quarantine also wouldn’t be the last discriminatory measure, as the travel restrictions we mentioned earlier suggest.

SO : Thankfully, things got done a bit differently after one of your favorite historical figures, Rupert Blue, entered the picture in 1903.

AM : Rupert Blue! Like Kinyoun, Blue was a gifted medical officer. Blue was not a bacteriologist and some would argue that Kinyoun was a far more gifted physician. However, what Blue lacked in scientific acumen, he made up for community-mindedness. We could even point to the fact that Kinyoun resided on Angel Island and Blue lived in the city.

SO : True. Rupert Blue arrived with two missions: He had to keep tracking cases, and – since the disease was attributed to the conditions Chinese lived in -- he had to launch a sanitation campaign in Chinatown. He set up an office and laboratory off Portsmouth Square, so he worked on the ground within the neighborhood itself. This enabled him to develop more personal connections with residents who had been previously skeptical of white doctors.

AM : Perhaps most importantly, Blue hired full-time an interpreter, Wong Chung, who was a secretary with the Chinese Six Companies. Wong proved to be more than an interpreter: he helped Blue enter doors previously closed to federal doctors, and helped him identify plague cases that would have been hidden from them. Blue was soon praised by the Chinese Six Companies for his, quote-unquote, “pleasant and courteous manner”, sincere in wanting to help, unlike Kinyoun who was seen as a “wolf doctor.”

SO : And Wong also answered Blue’s questions about Chinese culture. This was pretty significant, given that, for example, doctors didn’t understand why the Chinese protested autopsies of people who’d died of plague. That’s because they believe mutilating the body dooms the dead to remain on earth as ghosts, never reaching the afterlife.

AM : And when Blue temporarily left his post at San Francisco, Wong continued to track cases for the Marine Hospital Service. He kept finding proof there was a plague, even when many continued to say there was not.

SO : In a way, doing this was like a double-edged sword for Wong. If he identified more cases, doctors could get information to help control and end the epidemic. At the same time, discovering more cases could spur politicians to just burn Chinatown to the ground. [AM: Mm] I don’t imagine it was easy for him to keep at it, all the while being mistrusted by some Chinese for working so closely with white people, yet still also looked down on for not being white.

AM : I sense Wong Chung is a rabbit hole you want to jump into. [SO: Mmm] I do too, but let’s do some time-hopping here instead. The plague first reached San Francisco in 1900. Joseph Kinyoun dealt with that initial wave, and the initial denials from the city and state. An independent out-of-state commission verified the existence of plague in 1901. Rupert Blue arrived in 1903; and thanks to his sanitation campaign, death rates went down and the city was declared plague-free two years later. And then…

SO : And then?

AM : The Great Earthquake and Fires of 1906 happened.

SO : Well, that’s always a dramatic turning point.

AM : And just when you think things couldn’t get any worse with an event known henceforth in history as The Great Earthquake and Fires , guess what else came in its aftermath?

SO : Oh, 2020 has prepared me for that: a second wave of the bubonic plague.

AM : [AM chuckles] The refugee shacks and ruins throughout San Francisco had provided the perfect nesting place for rats, and the rat population grew across the city. The first 25 new cases in 1907 emerged from seemingly every neighborhood. Among them, only one person was Chinese. Only that person lived in Chinatown. And by the time Rupert Blue returned to fight the plague again, most of the dead were white. And so what is clear now became clear then.

[music / audio break]

SO : Since antiquity, Persian physicians and Byzantine historians had actually noticed a link between the deaths of rats and the arrival of plague. Yet it was only in 1898 when a French researcher in Saigon, Paul-Louis Simond, finally demonstrated that it was fleas that carried bacteria from rat to rat and rat to human. But his findings didn’t immediately take hold -- uncontained urine and feces were still thought to be the vectors of the disease.

AM : Hence Blue’s previous effort to sanitize Chinatown -- which, in a way, helped spare the neighborhood from this second wave. This time, Blue acted on Simond’s findings. Instead of drawing up quarantine zones, he mapped out districts to send teams of ratcatchers to. They brought rats to a lab, tossed them in boiling water to kill the fleas, studied them, systematically numbering each rat they caught and labeling where they caught it.

SO : Blue again embraced outreach, enlisting the whole city’s residents to help. His team distributed a primer called “How to Catch Rats.” He participated in meetings with the public as well as physicians, and -- can you believe this? -- eventually, a Citizen’s Health Committee offered rewards for every male and female rat that could be captured and killed.

AM : 25 cents for every male and 50 cents for every female! Newspapers, which, well, had a spotty record spreading information about the plague, got in on the act by publishing how-tos on keeping the home rat-free.

SO : And, in the end, this all worked. In 1909, Rupert Blue was honored at the Fairmont Hotel for eradicating the plague from San Francisco.

AM : It wasn’t a clean-cut happy ending. Even as San Francisco was rid of rats, fleas that had made their way onto squirrels had begun infecting people in the East Bay and beyond. One difference was, back then these areas then were nowhere near as densely populated and made up mostly of untouched land.

SO : There would also be further outbreaks of the bubonic plague in the U.S., particularly New Orleans in 1913 and Los Angeles from 1924 to 1925. But San Francisco would not face a similar epidemic again.

AM : I sure hope we keep up that record! [SO laughs]

[music / audio break]

AM : Alright. We have been talking a lot about Chinatown. Over the course of this series, we’ve mentioned how it formed around Portsmouth Square as a point of arrival for early gold-seekers; a hub of mining support businesses; and a bachelor society that added to the brothels on the Barbary Coast. But there’s always another lens for understanding why Chinatown is where it is, why it was the way it was at a particular time period, how it came to be.

SO : During this time, the Chinese were literally boxed into Chinatown because officials wanted them to stay there.

AM : And for this episode, we had a chance to speak with Dr. Charlotte Brooks. In addition to being a professor at the City University of New York, she is a recognized scholar of race, immigration, and urban history. Charlotte is also on the committee for the History & Perspectives journal published by the Chinese Historical Society of America, whose museum is right here in Chinatown.

SO : She wrote the book Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California . She begins it by saying that San Francisco’s Chinatown was the first racially segregated neighborhood in the United States. Here are excerpts from our interview, where we asked her why she said that.

CB : You know, that segregation has been most acutely felt by Black Americans. And there was a long-time argument that segregated neighborhoods somehow emerged naturally and historians have really dismantled that and shown that they were a product of policy. They were product of landlords and homeowners, but, you know, white supremacy helped shape local and then federal policy. You know, I grew up in California, California looked very different racially, ethnically than a lot of other parts of the country. That was, you know, that was really where I started with the book, um, to sort of talk about segregation as something that developed differently , reflected a different kind of racial geography depending on, you know, the part of the country. The Chinese, of course, you know they come to San Francisco in the Gold Rush era and they are living in many parts of the city initially. And then these businesses that are clustering around Portsmouth square, and they get pushed in and pushed in by violence. Unlike a lot of the cities to which black Americans go in the...in the 20th century, San Francisco is really pretty early in its development. It's starting to grow and spread. And so as the city becomes also sort of more of a family city and less of a frontier city, the white residents move in and move out of this area, which is billed as part of the city.

And it is astounding that the Chinese and Chinese American population was able--given the kind of racial hatred and the violence they faced--that they were able to hang on so long. And there were a lot of attempts by the local government to evict them. There were ordinances in one of California's constitutions. The constitution has a sec, a section titled Chinese and basically bars them from living in cities, but it was unenforceable, unconstitutional based on the American constitution. And Chinese American leaders, the Chinese merchants and the Chinese Six Companies were kind of at the forefront of fighting these different local attempts to get rid of the Chinese. And a number of the organizations that made up the Six Companies eventually owned some property. So they had some property rights, but yeah, there's this ongoing attempt to remove the Chinese.

AM : The views and measures taken towards this community during the first bubonic plague outbreak could be taken as one more attempt.

SO : Just take the stance of the then-mayor, James Phelan, who had justified the quarantine to guard against, quote, the “Asiatic infection.” Phelan further went on to say, quote, “I desire to say that [the Chinese] are fortunate, with the unclean bits of their coolies and their filthy hovels, to be permitted to remain within the corporate limits of any American city.”

AM : Here’s Charlotte again:

CB : There's a special kind of racial odium attached to the Chinese, um, that reflects this need to find a scapegoat for these issues and problems that you see in ports around the world.

What I mean is that Chinatown becomes this center of prostitution and it's not. Some of it is Chinese prostitution, but a lot of it is not involving Chinese women. It's that, as San Francisco grows into a metropolis and a more of a family community, prostitution remains, but it's pushed into areas that are considered undesirable and reflecting of immorality. And so Chinatown becomes synonymous with it and other sort of vice industries, because that's where essentially law enforcement pushes those industries. Right? You know, if you, if you look at the bubonic plague, and then you look at the epidemic of bubonic plague that broke out after the earthquake in 1907 , most of the people affected by that are white in San Francisco. There was no racialization of it. It just worked so well in 1900.

SO : Given all this, I think we can definitely say race, ethnicity, and disease are intertwined -- just not in the ways people like James Phelan or Joseph Kinyoun perceived it.

AM : And while we talked briefly about how encampments following the great fire and earthquake also provided shelter for rats and fleas, talking with Charlotte helped us see how other diseases--like racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy--were spread or fed by inequality in housing.

CB : If you shove people into a tiny area that dates really to the Gold Rush period, right? This is a neighborhood by 1900 that has been around, old wooden buildings, um, you don't have concrete basements, uh , the drainage isn't good. Uh , it's owned by absentee landlords. Most of them white, most of them who make a lot of money off of these tenants who have nowhere else to live. You're going to get poor living conditions. You see that across the country in urban areas. Other historians have talked a little bit about this as well, that political corruption and police corruption enables poor conditions to flourish. That police took payoffs and Board of Health agents took payoffs not to pay attention to what was happening in Chinatown. And I mean, we know that the Chinese merchants in Chinatown ended up helping to finance security for the district through a kind of a private security force by the 1910s. So Chinatown is not getting public services. And white landlords make a lot of money, um, keeping up these conditions and not responding to their tenants' dissatisfaction. There's is sort of a whole, is the assumption that they don't want good conditions. They don't need good conditions. There's no political benefit to giving them good conditions. And in fact, there's a political benefit to ignoring the conditions under which they live.

SO : The plague outbreak of the early 1900s was not the first public health crisis to showcase how racial and socioeconomic inequalities impact people’s lives and health. Nor would it be the last. Just a few short years later, the influenza epidemic would show it again.

AM: As we’ve talked about in previous episodes, the stereotyping of the Chinese and Chinatown as a people and a place of vice and disease began well before the bubonic plague was discovered on San Francisco’s shores. In the following excerpts, Charlotte talks to us about how useful this scapegoating was to the protection of white supremacy and racist ideals. And also how the community of Chinatown worked against it with the only legal recourse they had available to them--the court system.

CB: I'm writing another book about this Chinese American family and the father of this family arriving in San Francisco in the 1880s in the midst of a smallpox epidemic, um, which was a problem in ports around the world. The coverage in the press of the, of the ship that this man was on--in which I think three or four people had smallpox--was, um, something like “Smallpox Consignment Arrives From Asia.” As if these, these Chinese immigrants were not even human beings, they're just a disease, right? They're just, they just represent the smallpox. That’s the exact kind of language, um, of pestilence and disease that is attached to the Chinese in the 1870s, 1880s. Um, and actually, you know, reflects that a lot of the, um, prevalent ideas about China itself at that time, you know, a lot of Western traders and missionaries--missionaries in particular, who did not actually do very well in terms of trying to proselytize among the Chinese, they did not get many converts. They have to justify why they're in China. So they portrayed the Chinese as depraved and diseased. And you see all this stew of ideas together with this, um, you know, deep-seated white supremacy and with the residential segregation that had already taken hold. It just, it sort of layers one on top of the other, these different ideas.

Under California's first state constitution in 1850, free Blacks and Native Americans are basically given this distinct status where they can't testify against whites in a court. They can't vote. They're basically non-citizens. Chinese aren't named, but that status is extended to them in this, in this 1854 court case. However, the 1868 14th amendment is really crucial, because it guarantees equal protection under the law, right? So it wipes away those kinds of prohibitions.

Chinese can testify against whites in a court after that point. Not that they're going to be believed for example, but you know, they do have those rights. And in fact, one of the things that happens is that, um, the Chinese Six Companies and other Chinese in San Francisco, they use the courts to challenge unfair immigration laws. They use them. You know there are all these writs of habeas corpus to allow people to land after the 1882 Exclusion Act. So the reason they've relied so heavily on the courts is that, beginning in the 1870s and encoded in the 1882 exclusion law was the fact that Chinese could not become naturalized American citizens. So they couldn't follow the route that other immigrants followed when they were harassed and attacked. They could not become American citizens, because of their race. They could not vote, right? So the court was really what they have.

And over time Congress and the federal courts make it really difficult for the Chinese to challenge immigration law, right. That keeps them out. It really makes it difficult for people trying to land by the turn of the century and after to challenge immigration officials' decisions. Those are final. But the Chinese are able to challenge other things that are outside of immigration and the local government, San Francisco, does all these things like you mentioned the cutting off of the queue that would make it really impossible for this man to return to China and not face political persecution. Um, there are the square cubic footage ordinances. Under some of these ordinances, you can't use the shoulder poles to carry bundles--something only the Chinese did. You can't operate a laundry. in a wooden building, it's aimed specifically at the Chinese. And the, you know, the merchants, in particular, challenge all these ordinances, which are found to violate the 14th amendment. So we think about, you know, those California laws, but in fact, the Constitution and the 14th amendment do prove incredibly valuable.

[music break]

SO: Talking with Charlotte was enlightening, to say the least. There’s a big part of me that always wants to find the line--follow the timeline. But -- now it’s my turn with maritime metaphors [AM: Hm]-- I’m learning if you focus on journeys from one port to another, if you only focus on those ports, you miss the waves and storms and trials that turn a sailor into a seafarer.

AM : I get that. When we brought up the transformation we saw of Chinese immigration from primarily sojourners to largely settlers, Charlotte helped us see that it wasn’t a singular, linear journey that brought about this population change. She reiterated how important understanding the complications is to telling the facts and not getting swept up in a pretty fiction.

CB : I think it is partly Chinese over time going from being sojourners to settlers. But I think also it's different groups of people and how they imagine their lives in America: whether they're going to be there permanently, whether they're going to go back and forth or leave.

I think what you see especially is after the turn of the century, the formation of a second generation, that desperately want to stay in the United States, but don't really see their future as being one of many opportunities in the United States. At the same time, this is a time in China where you have this emergence of a new kind of, um...This, uh, attempt to sort of try to modernize--however we define that--to, to challenge the, um, American policies.

I think it's, it's all these different currents. You have, you know, growing number of families, growing number of Chinese Americans born on U.S. soil, who are citizens. Growing number of women in these merchant families, uh, merchants' wives, essentially, who are, you know, they they've come from a China that's changing. And also, people investing in property through Chinese-owned corporations, buying property. This is before that becomes illegal in 1913 for so-called “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” So it's a really complicated, I think, phenomenon.

AM : We’ve said it before and it’s fairly obvious that the bulk of our research has been centered around Chinatown. And through the lens of that neighborhood, we’ve been able to study so many movements and events in San Francisco’s early history.

SO : Yet I wouldn’t limit the relevance of what we’ve been talking about in this episode to San Francisco. Walter Wyman, the third Surgeon General of the United States and both Kinyoun and Blue’s boss, said,

“All the world has become one neighborhood, as far as relates to distances. In no manner has this been better shown than in the warfare against contagion…[which is] bringing the nations together as one family in the struggle against these foes of mankind.”

AM : Do you think we were successful against these foes of humankind?

SO : Well, that depends on how you calculate success. We have a cure for the plague now.

AM : Thanks, science! [SO laughs] The bubonic plague outbreaks certainly made the city and its people think critically about not only disease mitigation, but prevention. The Board of Health was expanded into what is today the Department of Public Health, which strives not only to slow the spread of contagious disease, but prevent large-scale outbreaks and promote physical, mental, and emotional health.

SO : And before the outbreaks, San Francisco had never run a major sanitation campaign. This reflects the relative newness of the idea of sanitation and hygiene -- It was only in the mid to late 1800s when American public health officials began pushing for regular bathing, clean sources of water, and toilets. Remember, uncontained urine and feces were thought to be the cause of plague.

AM : That’s right. Does this mean you’ve made your peace with the question “Where’s the bathroom”?

SO : I’m just glad I can tell you where ours is. [AM laughs]

[outro music]

AM : Over the past few episodes, we’ve focused on the hurdles and hardships that Chinese people faced once they arrived in San Francisco. Plagues, fires, earthquakes, and a legal system bent on excluding them. Faced with even one of those, I don’t know if I’d have it in me to stay.

SO : I get that. But somewhere between the first journeys to Gold Mountain in 1849 to rebuilding their community after the earthquake and fires of 1906, Chinese Americans made a permanent home here. To put it very simply, some sojourners did become settlers. Second generations grew up knowing America as their first country. And I think, when you call a place your home, you make the decision to put in the effort, the fight to make it better.

AM : That fight has continued for generations more -- but, for now, I think we’re wrapping up our episodes that focus on the early Chinese American experience in San Francisco. Essential as it is to Asian American history, it is only one part of it, and it’s time we start exploring more stories.

SO : We definitely will… starting next episode.

AM : Looking forward to it. Till then, as a good park ranger, I ask you: please keep away from the wildlife. Don’t go near the rats.

SO : Or the squirrels! They’re still out there.

[The End]

Episode music: “Pavement Hack”, “Tyrano Theme” and “Stakes and Things” by Blue Dot Sessions. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC.