Daily Los Angeles herald., 1879-11-15
EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE.
How the Chinaman Looks in His Own Haunts
Is Filth Conducive to Longsvity7-An Old
Angeleno in Luck.

Angelen0 IN LUCK.
DEAR HERALD: 1t is of course
impossible in the span of a single
letter to give hint even of the i'm
pressions made upon an observant
man by a detailed inspection of the
Chinese quarter of this city. To
begin with, the Chinaman himself
is an object of great interest. If 1
were compelled to classify him, af-
ter what saw and smelled during
my recent trip, 1 should assign him
to the genus scavenger. There are
great numbers of creatures of both
earth, air and water that seem to
thrive upon filth and whose olfac-
tories are so nicely adjusted by
that Providence which tempers
the wind to the shorn lamb that
the smell of carrion and decaying
matter is positively aromatic to
them. Such must be the case with
the Chinaman. He lives surround
ed by a squalor such as the pen of
Dickens never painted. The odors
which may be caught by the sensi-
tive nose at the point where the
Los Angeles main sewer discharges
its contents are nothing to the
gross, tainted and tainting smells
that pervade Chinatown.
AS TO JOHN HIMSELF,
Suuounded as he is by all imag-
ined and unimagined nastiness, he
seems happy. Many a cadaverous
face, during our visit, poked its
way up from amongst noisome bed
clothes which had never known
what it was to be aired, and its
owner greeted us cordially and with
. contented smile. Hundreds of
these people looked like galvanized
corpses and yet, whenever address
ed, they showed a personal good
humor which would have been i'm
possible in very sick man. The
other offensive smells were gener-
ally spiced and intensified by a
pervading odor of opium. L bave
known OF persons who started to
make the same round that I did
and who were compelled to sus-
pend midway, yielding to irresist-
BILE attacks of vomiting. I had for
titled myself with tobacco and got
through tolerably well, although l
should have cheerfully parted with
my nose for some hours thereafter.
An interesting physiological ques-
ton arises here. We are told by
writers on the human organization
that man was provided with a nose
in order to enable him to
detect, by his sense of smell,
what things are wholesome for him.
II this be the case, the China
man is an exception which proves
the rule. AS the race includes
nearly the half of mankind, how
ever, methinks it is proved too
much. One thing is certain, many
of these Chinese are quite healthy
ami robust and they frequently
live to green old age.
AS TO THE MORALS
OF these people the visitor to China
town is not long left in doubt. The
female who sat in the gate and
whose steps led down to hell is
very fully represented there.
While there is an astonishing dis
parity between the sexes, all China
women in San Francisco, with ex-
ceptions that are really immaterial,
are prostitutes. 1t was Edmund
Burke, think, who said that vice
lost half its evil by losing all its
grossness. On the same principle
the sins of the Chinese must be
multiplied many fold by the dis
gusting lack of delicacy and the
glaring publicity which attend
their commission. Privacy, it
would seem, after a visit to one of
these hives, is of itself akin to vir-
tue, as much so as cleanliness is to
Godliness. Surrounded by vice on
every side, with an atmosphere of
Seldom and Gommorah everywhere,
II the aspiration to lead a virtuous
lite ever enters the mind of the
Chinaman it is stifled in its birth.
But don't think any such a COM
plex notion ever vexes his noddle.
1T Is AGAINST SUCH wRETCHES,
Hardened to an iron and grinding
poverty by sixty centuries or more
of deprivation, that the Caucasian
laboring man is obliged to struggle
in the hard game of life. The
school-building, church-building
citizen, whose highest ambition is
to rear a family in decency and
modest comfort, finds the bread
taken out of his own mouth and
out OF those Of his children by be-
ings to whom even a stink seems a
perfume. I confess that the won
der grows upon me that no riot has
ever taken place in San Francisco
whose avowed object was the ex-
termination of the Celestials. 1t is
. fine tribute to the self.restraint
and containment of the working
classes OF this city that they have
always confined themselves to a