On the past, the
present, and a way to bridge the two.
San Francisco’s Chinatown is
often referred to as the oldest Chinatown in North America; it is that,
but its history is also more multi-part and more multi-national than that
designation implies. The neighborhood includes, for example, the Clay Street
spot where English
sailor William Richardson set up his tent in 1835, considered the first
site of Anglo settlement in California. Even further back, the neighborhood’s Portsmouth
Square was the site of the area’s first Spanish township, known as Yerba
Buena until it was renamed San Francisco in 1847—and was also where Captain John Montgomery
raised the area’s first American flag a year before that renaming. If we
combine that century of multi-national history with the subsequent century
and a half of Chinese American life, the neighborhood becomes one of the
most culturally and historically rich in all of the US.
That rich and
evolving history of Chinese
American life continues into the 21st century, as my visit to
and talk at the Him Mark Lai
(Chinatown) branch of the San Francisco Public Library helped me
understand. The neighborhood has also become one of the city’s—as well as the
state’s, and perhaps even the nation’s—premier tourist attractions,
however, and it’s fair to ask whether that tourist industry has any interest in
(or even any ability to engage with) the neighborhood’s complex present
identity and community, much less the
multiple stages and sides to its history. Much like the French Quarter in
New Orleans or the North End in Boston (among other such heavily touristed historical
and cultural neighborhoods), that is, there are ways in which San Francisco’s
Chinatown has become a cultural performance, a simulacrum
(to get all theoretical for a moment) of realities that of course also continue
to exist alongside the images.
So how to bring
those 21st century visitors into conversation with the neighborhood’s,
community’s, and city’s histories? One very easy and productive way would be to
have them visit the Chinese Historical Society
of America, about which I blogged in the post linked at “my book talk visit”
above. The CHSA is a wonderful combination of museum, cultural site, and community
center, connected to both the histories and the present identities of
Chinatown, the Chinese American community, and the immigrant experience more
broadly. A visitor to the CHSA—and I speak from personal experience here—comes
away with both a far richer understanding of the contemporary neighborhood into
which they’re emerging and a much better sense of all that has come before in
this space, as well as all the other places and histories to which it connects.
Like San Fran itself, that is, the CHSA has much to teach us about who we’ve
been and who we are.
Special guest
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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