In-depth tour of San Francisco’s Chinatown

San Francisco — IT’S Chinatown. You’ve been there and done that, strolling vaguely under the dragon gate at Grant Avenue, dawdling past the kitschy gift shops, then strolling out again, maybe not much wiser, maybe not much merrier. Me too.

But this, it turns out, was our own fault. Early this month, for reasons that will become clear and for the first time in 30 years of visits to San Francisco, I gave this Chinatown some serious time and attention. In 48 hours, I left only once, for a 10-minute cable-car ride. In return, Chinatown delivered joy, intrigue, retail temptation, good cheap food and a bracing glimpse into harsh history and contemporary poverty, all in the space of about 24 blocks.

Yes, the storefronts along the first few blocks of the main drag were peddling enough T-shirts, key chains and tchotchkes to bury again the terra-cotta warriors of Xian. But here’s the solution: You walk a little farther. You sip some premium tea, browse the kite shop, gorge on dim sum. Or swallow a little Californian pride and sign on for a tour with somebody who knows the neighborhood, preferably somebody who speaks Cantonese, the area’s dominant dialect.

You’re apt to learn where to buy live frogs for $2.99 a pound (Luen Fat Market, 1135 Stockton St.) or discover what waits at the top of the fragrant four-story stairwell at 125 Waverly Place. (It’s the Tien Hau Temple, one of the oldest Chinese temples in North America. Its tiny space is cloudy with incense, its balcony altar eerily aligned with the spire of the Transamerica pyramid.)

There is, however, a risk to this approach: Much of what you thought you knew about Chinatown may be destroyed.

That atmospheric entrance gate above Grant Avenue, for instance. That always looked to me like a handsome relic from years gone by. Turns out it went up in 1970, about 120 years after the community began taking shape. Most of the 900 buildings in Chinatown are older than that gate.

Then there’s Grant Avenue itself, which may be the oldest street in San Francisco and certainly looks to a newcomer like the commercial hub of the neighborhood. But for 20 years, increasing rents have been pushing the community’s produce shops, fish merchants, butchers and other workaday businesses a block away to Stockton Street, which runs parallel to Grant. Now the move is nearly complete: one main street for tourists, another for locals.

This is a great annoyance for locals, I’m sure. But in the context of Chinatown history, it’s barely worth mentioning. In leaving behind the violence and hunger of China’s Guangdong Province in the 1850s to join in the California Gold Rush, the first Chinese immigrants here found themselves deterred from mining because of steep taxes on foreigners and barred from many other businesses by less formal means. So those who didn’t end up working on the railroad often took on the other jobs that California’s white men weren’t interested in: running laundries, for instance, and restaurants.

By 1870, the streets around Portsmouth Square were full of Chinese businesses. And by 1905, despite widespread anti-Asian prejudice and federal laws forbidding the arrival of new Chinese laborers and blocking these immigrants from naturalized citizenship, a strange but lively community had bloomed. Its population was mostly male, its margins occupied by opium dens, gambling parlors and brothels whose customers often were from outside the neighborhood.

Then came the quake and fires of 1906, which leveled the place, and a proposal by San Francisco’s movers and shakers to take over the valuable real estate of Chinatown and move the Chinese elsewhere.

This is more or less what would happen 30 years later in downtown L.A., where Chinatown was leveled to make room for Union Station and then rebuilt a few blocks away. But in San Francisco, it didn’t happen that way. Instead, the Chinese family associations that ran the community — you can still see their fancy balconies overlooking Waverly Place — raced to design and rebuild the district to double as a tourist attraction. Up went tile roofs and street lanterns, curving eaves and stylized facades.

So a destination was born, then sustained for decades, often with minimal help from local government.

Thus, by the time I showed up a few Fridays ago with my wife, Mary Frances, and our daughter, Grace Li Qi, the neighborhood had spent two-thirds of its history living a double life as a crash pad for immigrants and a stage set for tourists.

Maybe that all amounts to more background — and more strife — than some tourists need. But in my house, we’re in the early stages of learning how to be an Asian American family. Grace Li Qi, who will be 3 in May, was born in the Sichuan province and came home with us in July 2005. The more Chinese history we can find and touch in California, the better.

We wandered amid the 21-string guzhengs and two-string erhus of the Clarion Music Center on Sacramento Street, where the clerk stepped up to tutor Grace in drum technique. We dined at the House of Nanking, where the waitress demanded a kiss from the kid. We checked out the bricks of Old St. Mary’s on California Street, the first cathedral in California, and browsed a contemporary art show at the Chinese Culture Center on the third floor of our hotel, the Hilton on Kearny Street.

“What we have in Chinatown is the beginnings of the Chinese presence in America. So we have all the ‘oldests,’ ” said the Rev. Norman Fong, deputy director of the nonprofit Chinatown Community Development Center. “The oldest Chinese Christian church. The oldest Buddhist temples. The oldest family associations. The oldest alleyways and streets.”

Looking to promote straight talk about history, create a few jobs and tidy up the neighborhood’s 31 alleys, Fong’s agency in 2002 created Chinatown Alleyway Tours, in which teens and twentysomethings from Chinatown give visitors an insider’s perspective. And other agencies, too, are eager to take visitors deeper into the community.

At 965 Clay St., in an old YWCA building designed in 1932 by Julia Morgan, of Hearst Castle fame, the Chinese Historical Society of America has opened a museum and learning center. (Through June 30, a temporary exhibition traces the history of the Miss Chinatown USA Pageant.)

We signed on for a three-hour neighborhood tour by Wok Wiz Chinatown Walking Tours, a side venture of celebrity chef Shirley Fong-Torres, who handed us over to guide Lola Hom, who grew up in the area.

Soon, Hom was leading us from site to site, remembering when she used to roller-skate down these same alarmingly steep hills.

“This was my father’s keno shop,” said Hom, pausing at a Vietnamese noodle restaurant.

The most striking building was the United Commercial Bank Building at 743 Washington St., built in about 1909 to house the multilingual operators of the Chinese Telephone Exchange. The triple-tiered confection of red columns, green roof of tiles and curving eaves served as the community’s communications hub, and its main link to the old country, for four decades.

We also stopped at the last fortune-cookie factory in Chinatown, a dim, cluttered space at 56 Ross Alley in which a pair of weary women stamped and stuffed cookies next to a sign that urged a 50-cent tip from anyone planning to use a camera.

The business carries the grand name of Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory and dates back to 1962, but it seemed to me that it exists only because, hey, tourists in Chinatown want to see a fortune-cookie factory. (But don’t overlook the rest of Ross Alley; some say it’s the oldest side street in the city.)

Of course we also walked Grant Avenue, where a new generation has taken control of many old family businesses. Next to the souvenir shops, these retail spaces have been made over as East-West boutiques, festooned with colorful lampshades, silk pajamas and stylish tea sets, boasting such names as Asian Renaissance and Old Shanghai. Hom led us inside 831 Grant, the longtime home of an apothecary and tea shop formerly known as Yau Hing Co.

For years, this family business’ display area featured ‘70s paneling, linoleum floors and tea canisters labeled only in Chinese. Then about five years ago, siblings Peter and Alice Luong stepped up and decided to focus the storefront on one specialty — tea — with a contemporary presentation. Now the sign in front says Red Blossom Tea Co., and the space is all blond wood, muted hues and sleek teapots.

Peter Luong told me he still gets a lot of business from longtime neighborhood customers. But with so many retailers wooing tourists, with tens of thousands of Chinese moving across town to the Richmond and Inner Sunset neighborhoods, with ambitious Asian families supplying UC Berkeley with 40% of its undergraduates, it’s reasonable for an outsider to wonder: How many Chinese still live in Chinatown?

The answer is a lot, because this remains a first stop for new immigrants and a haven for holdovers. In the roughly 24 square blocks that make up Chinatown’s core, 22,000 to 30,000 people reside (depending on who’s estimating), most of them Cantonese-speaking Chinese, many in one-room apartments or government-subsidized public housing.

Chinatown remains among the poorest and least-educated neighborhoods in San Francisco — a “gilded ghetto,” in one author’s phrase.

“Most of our people here, in the core of Chinatown, live below the poverty line,” said Rose Pak, general consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco since 1983. “One wave in, one wave out. One wave in, one wave out. This will always be a haven and orientation point for newcomers, because of the language and the availability of social services.”

Is there another neighborhood in North America that’s as impoverished and as beloved by tourists? In a 2004 survey of San Francisco hotel guests, 51% said they’d been to Chinatown.

Certainly, the neighborhood’s celebrations are more spectacular than its troubles. First there’s the two-week spring festival that culminates with the lunar new year parade, an epic night of marching and fireworks that typically takes place under cold, rainy skies in late February or early March. (This year’s parade coincided with our stay.) And in September comes the Autumn Moon Festival, which features hourly lion dances, drummers, martial arts demonstrations and moon cakes with bean-paste fillings.

Still, once you’ve been briefed, it’s certainly easy enough to see workaday Chinatown.

You can walk along Stockton near Broadway and Columbus any day — though locals say Saturdays are the best — and see the food fly. Amid throngs of shoppers, some of whom buy food every day because they have no refrigerators, you’ll see and smell all manner of fruits and vegetables. The inventory has multiplied since the introduction of more Southeast Asian produce in recent years. Oranges, apples, pears and durians. Fish, frogs, ducks and chickens, living and dead.

At 753 Jackson St., you can duck into First Incense Corp. and check out the symbolic paper models that mourners burn as a gesture to provide comforts for loved ones in the next life. Would the departed enjoy a Mercedes? Fifty-five dollars. A pair of servants in red and green outfits? Sixty-eight dollars. (And if you come upon a creeping hearse and marching brass band here, you’re not having a New Orleans hallucination. It’s a Chinatown funeral tradition that goes back a century.)

The second-best public place to see unvarnished Chinatown may be Portsmouth Square. This was the center of San Francisco immigrant civilization when the first Chinese arrived, and it remains busy. But unless you have a toddler to set loose in the playground, you probably won’t want to linger. In fact, you may not be able to find a seat.

“This is their living room,” Hom told us, and she wasn’t just speaking in that idealized argot favored by architects and city planners. Those thousands of Chinatown residents of single-room abodes that share bathrooms and kitchens come here by day to chat, smoke and play cards or Chinese chess. Especially the seniors. And I have to say, they made me feel about as welcome as I’d make them feel if they showed up uninvited in my living room.

We felt far more comfortable — and found seats — a few blocks away in the Willie “Woo Woo” Wong Playground on Sacramento Street near Grant, a public space that dates to the 1920s. For decades, it was known simply as the Chinese playground, and it incubated neighborhood legends like that of Willie Wong, a basketball star in high school and college despite standing just 5 feet, 5 inches. He died at age 79 in 2005. Soon afterward, Chinatown leaders persuaded the city to rename the park for him.

We spent a restorative half an hour here, watching Grace scramble around the toddler zone and listening to the slap of mah-jongg tiles in a private club on adjacent Pagoda Place. A spell of calm and a hint of atmosphere — very good.

But the highlight of the visit came on the sidewalk outside the Hilton on Kearny Street.

This was the second night of our stay, an unusually warm and dry Saturday night, and as luck would have it, the night of the Chinese New Year Parade. Welcome, Year of the Boar.

All day long, the three of us had pounded Chinatown’s pavement, looking, sniffing and listening. Now, as we stood on the curb, Chinese San Francisco washed over us, the dancers and drummers fortified by marching bands, the bands followed by beauty queens, the beauty queens chased by Board of Equalization officials, the Board of Equalization officials trailed by dragons.

And these were not small dragons. The longest measured 201 feet, with about 100 feet of men and women inside from Leung’s White Crane dance and martial arts school. Drawing upon more than two millenniums of tradition, it writhed wildly enough to fill every lane of Kearny Street, its many-colored flanks lighted from within like the granddaddy of all glow worms. When it lurched our way, as immense and wonderful as anything Grace had ever seen, she had to reach out and touch it, and we were happy to help.

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chris.reynolds@latimes.com

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Planning this trip

THE BEST WAY

From LAX, fly nonstop to San Francisco on Alaska, American, Frontier or United; connecting service (change of plane) is on US Airways. Round-trip restricted fares begin at $98.

WHERE TO STAY

Chinatown is an easy walk from many hotels, including those within the neighborhood and around Union Square and the Financial District.

Hilton Hotel, 750 Kearny St.; (415) 433-6600 or (800) 445-8667, https://www.hilton.com . This hotel, in the Financial District, was a Holiday Inn until early 2006. Now, about $40 million later, its interior gleams with Asian-inflected minimalist design. It’s not cheap — continental breakfast runs $11 in the restaurant (Seven Fifty, it’s called) — but views from its higher-up rooms can be tremendous. Doubles from $179.

Grant Plaza Hotel, 465 Grant Ave.; (415) 434-3883 and (800) 472-6899, https://www.grantplaza.com . The Grant Plaza is a solid budget option: a little short on personality perhaps but long on value. 72 rooms. Doubles from $55.

Hotel Triton, 342 Grant Ave.; (415) 394-0500 and (800) 800-1299, https://www.hoteltriton.com . It aims to be hip, with colorful design flourishes plus a tarot card reader who sometimes turns up in the lobby during Friday-night happy hour. Some rooms are small and service can be uneven, but the location is excellent. And the casual restaurant, Caf– de la Presse, is a great place to meet a friend or linger over a

Sunday paper. 140 rooms. Doubles from $149.

TO LEARN MORE

San Francisco Visitor Information Center, 900 Market St.; (415) 391-2000, https://www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com .

Chinese Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco, 730 Sacramento St.; (415) 982-3071, chineseparade.com.

sanfranciscochinatown.com

On travel.latimes.com

Cultural plunge

See more photographs of street scenes and activities in Chinatown.

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Events that shaped their story

1848

In January, gold is discovered at Sutter’s Mill in Colona. In February, the West’s first Chinese immigrants arrive in San Francisco aboard the American ship Eagle.

1850

California Legislature imposes a $20-a-month tax on foreign miners, later repealed.

1864

Eager to build a transcontinental rail route, the Central Pacific Railroad starts recruiting Chinese workers.

1882

U.S. Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning most Chinese laborers from immigrating and barring Chinese from becoming naturalized citizens. The detail at right is from a political cartoon of the time criticizing the act and showing Uncle Sam’s boot on an immigrant’s neck.

1906

Earthquake and fires level Chinatown and much of San Francisco, destroying immigration records and giving immigrants a chance to declare that they’re already citizens and to bring family members from China to California.

1910

Angel Island begins a 30-year stint as an immigrant detention and processing center for arriving Asians.

1943

The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed, giving more Chinese Americans a chance at U.S. citizenship.

— Christopher Reynolds

Sources: Angel Island Assn., the Center for Educational Telecommunications, Virtual Museum of the city of San Francisco.