To sightseers tramping its cluttered avenues, San Francisco's Chinatown has always displayed a pungent blend of yang and yin. Those intertwined opposites—good and evil, sweet and sour, light and dark—describe not only Chinese philosophy but also the inner contradictions of a district whose neon signs and tourist bustle mask a swarming, sweatshop world of long hours, low pay, hard work and fear. For all its outward ambiance, the largest Chinese enclave outside Asia is one of America's most wretched slums.
Over forty thousand Chinese are jammed into the 42 blocks of Chinatown proper between Bush Street and Broadway, Kearny and Powell. About 30,000 have spilled north and west into adjacent residential districts; 10,000 more live throughout the Bay Area.
They first came by the thousands to California—Gum San, land of the Golden Mountains—when the gold fields and railroads beckoned, and in smaller streams when the U.S. set up immigration quotas and California passed its racial exclusion laws in 1892. Despite the restrictions, so many Chinese have entered the U.S. in the past seven decades that perhaps as many as half the people of Chinatown are there in violation of the immigration laws.
Way Station. Since Mao Tse-tung took over the Chinese mainland, immigration via Hong Kong has swelled incrementally: more than 4,000 Chinese a year now settle in the Bay Area, creating a job shortage so severe that exploitation is the order of the day—and night. The traditional Chinese family fabric has visibly frayed. With mothers working, delinquency climbs. Tenement squalor sustains a tuberculosis rate double that of San Francisco as a whole.
Working conditions are no better. The major sources of jobs are restaurants, curio stores and the sewing shops, comprising 151 small, family-oriented contract clothing factories employing about 20 seamstresses apiece. Paid on a piecework basis, the women often labor from 8:30 a.m. until after midnight, seven days a week, fingers darting frenetically to make ends meet. Asked why she would work at least twelve hours a day for a net income of $26 a week, one mother of five said succinctly: "You have to in Chinatown."
Ever since one Chum Ming sailed east from his native Kwangtung in 1847 to grow up with the country, California's Chinese have been victimized by their language problems (even today, no more than 40% speak fluent English), their fear of deportation, and traditional kowtowing to fate and station. San Francisco's youngest, brightest Chinese-Americans leave for the suburbs at a rate of up to 15,000 a year, and Chinatown has become a way station for immigrants and a ghetto of the old and unemployed poor.