Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1890-08-11
Picturesque Chinatown

meTcial .hjrpfft~cr. Except that TIL
house. are American in design anl
structure. Chinatown is in all way
a little China, a bit taken bodily on
of the FIowcry Kingdom and Sc
down ON these shores. The house
alc those built by American resident:
"a score Of years ago, when the region
now occupied by the Chinese was the
fashionable district Of the city. The
Chinese have taken complete posses
sion Of it, and have converted it into
an oriental city. The population is
exclusively Chinese; the stree
scenes the shops, the manners anG
the merchandise Of every kind, even
to the edibles in the market, are
those Of far Cathay. The fresh fish
one sees exposed for sale on stands
in the middle of the streets are
caught in American waters, but the
queer dried fish, and dried ducks and
other desiccated meats, the nuts, the
confections, the conserves, and, in a
word, all but the most perishabIe of
food products sold here, are imported
from the land of the yellow mems
nativity.
The first impression made upon the
mind of the visitor to Chinatown is
that he has suddenly stepped into
some oriental city. The next is that
there has been very great eXaggera-
ton in the published accounts Of the
squalor, the filth and the vice of the
Chinese quarter. There is, in fact,
no squalor at all, as we understand
the word in New York. These peo-
pie are well fed and we'll clothed, land
comparatively we'll housed. The
population of the quarter is dense,
but not nearly so dense as that Of the
tenement house districts of New
York, and there are nowhere any in
dications of that poverty which
prompts men and women to wear
rags and feed upon unwholesome
things. The commonest Iaborer
among these people has whole gar
ments, and good ones,upon his back.
/ have sought diligently, even in the
cellars inhabited by the rag-picllers
the show places Of the guides
for tatters and patches, but have
found none. These Chinese are all
well kept and well cared for, and
they have an abundance of perfectly
/ wholesome food. Their markets are
Iavishly and variedly supplied with
/ food products of the best quality and
perfect freshness, and any New
/ Yorker might do his marketing there
with comfort and confidence. 1t is
perfectly safe to say that there are
100, 900 people in New York who are
worse fed every day in the year than
! the poorest of these Chinese are on
any day in the year. 1t is a crowd
ed quarter, but hardly over crowded,
and not by any means a squalid one.
That which observation thus re-
veals to the sight is confirmed by the
sanitary record, for it is fact Of
/ statistics that the mortality is small
er and the number of cases of dis
ease less in Chinatown than in any
other quarter of San Francisco. 1t
is not a filthy quarter. 1t is cleaner
in every way, in the houses and in
the streets, than many parts Of New
York ever are, and that in spite Of
the fact that the city authorities do
nothing for cleanliness in Chinatown.
Col. Bee, the Chinese consul, assures
me that the city has not spent a dol
lar in street cleaning in Chinatown
for IA years, and yet the streets are
very fairly clean. The work is paid
for by voluntary contributions from
the Chinese themselves, and it is
much better done by our New York
contractors in the poorer streets of
the metropolis.
As to vice, there is Enthusiastically
a good deal of it in Chinatown, and
it is peculiarly unblushing. That
which carefully hides itself from sight
in American communities calmly pre-
sents itself to observation here and
makes its open appeal for custom. l
can not see that it is much worse
than American vice, or even that it
is more abundant than vice is in the
bad streets of every American city.
1t is only less reticent and less dis
guised.
Chinatown is much more pictur-
esque and interesting than published
accounts would lead one to suspect;
it is much less squalid and dirty, and
much less repulsive in every way.
Indeed it is not repulsive or squalId
at all, except in a few of the very
worst alleys where vice has its par
ticular haunts. At the same time
one has only to study Chinatown a
little in order to understand the ear
nest and sincere conviction of all
San Franciscans that some measure
of exclusion was necessary to prevent
the overrunning of the coast by these
people. The ease with which they
took possession of the best quarter
of the city, making it absolutely their
own and compelling the, whites to
build anew upon the sand lots, is IL
Illustrative of their capacity to swarm
wherever they desire and to make
themselves complete masters of what
ever region they coyet. Their hab-