Black Death at the Golden Gate Read online

  He had arrived in California—known in his native Cantonese as Gum Shan, or the Gold Mountain—in the mid-1880s, most likely having been recruited from his village by a labor broker who covered the cost of the long trip across the Pacific to Canada. Once there, he made his way across the unguarded border and headed south toward San Francisco. He traveled by foot and wagon along the coast, unnerved by the towering redwoods—taller than any structure he had ever seen—rising above him, and felt the chill of the Pacific seep into his bones as he lay alone at night, trying to remember the warm, humid air flowing off the rivers at home. He expected a hard life once he reached the city, and he soon found it.

  The first known Chinese immigrants had reached California during the frenzy of the Gold Rush in 1849, and within five years there were forty thousand Chinese living in the state. The influx of newcomers, with foreign habits and their foreign tongues, prompted lawmakers in some of the first sessions of the new state legislature to pass a series of discriminatory acts targeting Asians. The Chinese Exclusion Act—the first major law to restrict immigration into the United States—passed in 1882, prompted by fears among white Americans that an influx of Chinese laborers was pushing wages down. Ten years later, California congressman Thomas Geary introduced the Geary Act, which when passed extended the Chinese Exclusion Act by ten years and required all Chinese residents to carry a certificate of residence at all times or face deportation or a year of hard labor.

  With even those who had once entered the country legally banned from becoming citizens or owning property, Chinese residents of San Francisco crammed into twelve blocks surrounding Portsmouth Square, a plaza which stood at the center of the original Spanish settlement of Yerba Buena. There, within yards of the site where the first American flag in the city was raised, Chinese immigrants created a self-contained neighborhood that seemed transported from the other side of the world. Chinese characters painted in black and gold hung from buildings, sharing space with lanterns dangling from slanting wooden balconies. Gates decorated with dragons or lions designed to ward off ghosts and other evil spirits enclosed makeshift courtyards. Second-floor brothels and opium dens run by tongs—secret societies that often overlapped with the underworld—catered to the weaknesses of a population that was almost entirely male, and became a draw for white tourists and sailors. Largely ignored by white politicians, the neighborhood fell under the power of what became known as the Chinese Six Companies, an umbrella organization run by wealthier and better-educated immigrants who banded together for mutual aid and protection.

  For many, their adventure to California was meant to be short-lived, a chance to strike it rich and then return to their villages wealthy men. Wong, like many of these men, walked the streets of San Francisco with the top of his head shaved and a long, braided ponytail known as a queue trailing down his back, a symbol of loyalty to the emperor and a necessity for any man wishing to return to China. With only enough money to survive, he faced most days clad in a long, flowing black shirt and black pants, the darkness of the cloth hiding its grime. Like most men in Chinatown, he could neither read nor write, leaving him reliant on his imagination to keep up with the daily life of his family as it unspooled back at home. On days when his loneliness seemed more than he could bear, Wong spent hours in cramped theaters watching long-winded reenactments of traditional Chinese dramas, aching for anything that offered a sense of familiarity while he was exiled on the other side of the world.

  He lived in the Globe Hotel, located at the corner of Dupont and Jackson, a ramshackle building known throughout the city for the illegal gambling which took place within its narrow rooms. Nearly three hundred people packed into the four-story structure, creating a notorious tenement that, upon a tour of the establishment, left the San Francisco Chronicle to report, “like rats in a barrel, poor, unwashed heathens crowd together in little cubby-holes.” With nowhere else to go, residents throughout Chinatown built wooden additions onto the sides of buildings, on rooftops, and in hand-dug basements that in some cases burrowed into the foundation of the structure next door. White property owners cared little about the modifications to their tumble-down buildings, happy to collect the exorbitant monthly rents they were able to charge and buoyed by leases that put all responsibility for upkeep on the residents’ shoulders. “Property leased to Chinamen in San Francisco is among the most productive in the city, and 30,000 Chinese pay annually one million dollars in rents alone,” noted the San Francisco Chronicle. The few white faces that could be seen in the neighborhood belonged to either tourists or policemen, all of whom were drawn to the district’s reputation for lawlessness.

  Even in a place known for its filth, Wong’s quarters were repellent. His room was located beneath the sidewalk in a space dug out from the original cellar. Liquid from an underground cesspool leaked through the wooden boards lining the room, creating a smell so pungent as to make visitors gag upon entry. A small open pit functioned as his only toilet. He shared his bed with two or three roommates, each man sleeping on the hard wooden mattress in turn. A solid wooden block served as his pillow. Sticks of burning incense and an untouched glass of wine—meant to curry favor with the gods of health and medicine—sat on a dirty crate in the middle of the room. Above it ran the pipe of an unused sewer line, home to a nest of rats that scampered in the shadows cast by a flickering oil lamp. Dreams, when they did come, allowed him to gaze upon the face of his wife and family as they praised him for his sacrifices, a thought that broke the misery of his life.

  Wong continued to work and send remittances to his village until late February of 1900, when he noticed a lump in his right groin that was painful to the touch. It soon became difficult to move his leg or urinate without agony. Fearful that he had contracted a venereal disease that would bring him shame, he consulted a prominent physician, Wong Woo, in his office at 766 Clay Street. The doctor confirmed his suspicions and recommended salty foods and cooling herbs to drain the lump, following the traditional Chinese medical approach that regarded illness as a sign of disharmony in the body. Wong returned to his subterranean room and prayed, hoping that his indiscretions would be forgiven by the god Zhao Shen, who ruled over family life and recommended punishment to the magistrates in charge of the underworld.

  Over the next few days, his temperature climbed and he began to lose control of his body, spending his few waking moments alternating between vomiting, diarrhea and delusions. As it became clear that Wong was nearing death, the men sharing his living quarters took action. Cantonese tradition carried a marked aversion to death, lest one become tainted by so-called killing airs that led to bad luck. The practice dated back to the biblical-era Han dynasty and confounded native-born Americans. “Nearly every week the police discover some wretched unfortunate that has been left to die in an underground den by unnatural relatives or friends,” wrote Cosmopolitan magazine. “Medical attention or proper care he will get none. Slow starvation in a noisome cellar, in the hour of thick darkness, with vermin swarming over the helpless sufferer—such is the fate that has befallen many a poor creature in Chinatown.”

  Wong’s roommates carried his still-breathing body to a coffin shop two blocks away. There, he was placed in one of the “halls of tranquility” that Chinese funeral homes maintained for the gravely ill, pungent rooms in which the dying were often placed next to open coffins and the bodies of unburied dead as they waited for the inevitable. There he lay until he died on the afternoon of March 6, 1900, a passing altogether unremarkable in a city that had never noticed his existence.

  The shop’s owner, Wing Sun, wrapped the body in canvas and prepared a simple pine coffin for burial and eventual retrieval. Funeral home directors were responsible for maintaining the custom of shipping the bones of Chinese immigrants back to their native villages following total decomposition of the flesh. Once back in China, their remains would be reburied in a family plot, allowing the dead to take their place among their ancestors and be worshiped by the living. Those whose bodi
es were mutilated or whose bones did not return to their homeland were believed to roam the earth as ghosts, haunting those who had prevented their journey into the afterlife. As a result, family members or friends routinely refused to consent to autopsies or other medical procedures that violated the body, bound by the fear that in doing so they would bring upon themselves the wrath of their departed loved ones.

  An assistant city health officer by the name of Frank Wilson arrived at the coffin shop later that evening as part of his normal rounds, in which he issued burial permits for a fee of three dollars each. Wilson had recently drawn the ire of the acting police chief for issuing death certificates that even he admitted were mostly guesswork, and with the help of an interpreter examined Wong’s body with a thoroughness that was unusual for a man who routinely chalked up benign deaths to nonexistent bullet and knife wounds. He soon discovered an egg-shaped black lump on the right groin that he would have never found if he had not been afraid of losing his job. Alarmed by what he saw, Wilson called in his supervisor, Aloysius O’Brien. O’Brien was a surgeon and graduate of the University of California who had been recently reinstated to his position and, like Wilson, was eager to prove his worth. He inspected the body and instinctively stepped back in fear. There, on the dead man’s groin, was what appeared to be an infected lymph node swollen with blood—a textbook example of a bubo, which gives bubonic plague its name.

  Despite the late hour, the men summoned William Kellogg, who had become the city’s first bacteriologist just two months before. Kellogg rushed to the coffin shop and took samples from the dead man’s lymph nodes, taking care to disinfect every instrument that touched the body. Everything before him suggested that the disease had slipped into the city, yet he was hesitant to act. Mindful of the Nippon Maru incident six months before, he resisted making an official diagnosis that, if proven wrong, would turn the city against him and surely lead to his firing. He instead readied tissue samples to take across the bay to Angel Island, where Kinyoun would have the responsibility of announcing to the world that plague had reached American shores.

  At an emergency Board of Health meeting late that night, spooked health officials took the unprecedented step of imposing what they called a “precautionary” quarantine of Chinatown, essentially sealing a neighborhood that contained nearly 20 percent of the city’s residents. The best they could hope for was that Wong’s death was just a fluke—one diseased man who had somehow bypassed Kinyoun’s watchful officers, not a harbinger of worse things to come.

  As Kellogg raced toward the dock, the still of the night was broken by dozens of policemen assembling around the borders of Chinatown. There, lit by moonlight and gas lamps, they unspooled rope and strung it around the district, hoping that it would help curtail the spread of a disease that no one knew how to defeat. San Francisco had long known that plague was a possibility; now it faced an outbreak that could mean the city’s end.

  CHAPTER 4

  CRIMINAL IDIOCY

  By sunrise twenty thousand men and women were trapped.

  Residents of Chinatown awoke to find ropes and policemen lining the perimeter of the twelve-block district, sealing nearly all of the city’s Asian population inside a boundary drawn by Broadway, Kearny, California and Stockton streets. Angry crowds made up of cooks, launderers and porters trying to reach their jobs crammed against the police lines at dawn. Their protests echoed through the neighborhood, stirring others from their beds. The most desperate for work attempted to duck under the rope and make a break for it, only to be stopped by batons. Small teams of police officers periodically rushed deep into Chinatown and returned escorting white people who had found themselves on the wrong side of the blockade when the sun came up.

  Rumors raced through the district that health officials planned to burn all of Chinatown to the ground with its residents trapped inside, just as had been narrowly avoided in Honolulu. Men clambered across rooftops and down into the sewer system, seeking any path to freedom. Those who escaped the quarantine found that their lot had hardly improved. Barred from boarding steamers leaving the city, Chinese residents hid in private homes or jumped into small boats and rowed into the fog of the bay, desperate to evade health officers.

  Policemen accompanied Board of Health inspectors into Chinatown, where they attempted to reconstruct the last days of Wong’s life. Little information was known about the man, leaving doctors with the feeling that they were chasing a ghost. As he had no known associates or friends, health officials canvassed the neighborhood, treating every person and building as suspect. At the Globe Hotel, workers sprayed formaldehyde in all of its rooms until the smell seeped into the floors, while the coffin shop where Wong’s body had been discovered was fumigated and closed.

  White physicians went door to door, searching for anyone who showed signs of infection. The noxious chemical smell wafting through the neighborhood further disoriented residents of Chinatown, many of whom had fled outbreaks in their villages and had more experience with plague than the white authorities who now encircled them. In their homeland, the disease was often seen as a divine punishment that required raucous processions to frighten away evil spirits with the sounds of drums and fireworks. Instead, they found themselves isolated, unable to escape either the disease or the white men they did not trust or understand.

  With the Chinese imprisoned, the rhythms of San Francisco fell into chaos. Every cable car line running through Chinatown was suspended, creating a twelve-block obstacle to anyone traveling near downtown. Officials at the Customs House on Battery Street refused to issue clean bills of health to ships leaving the city for other ports, bringing the normal pandemonium of the piers to a standstill. Even routine shipping paperwork at the office stalled, with all the federal government’s Chinese translators stuck in Chinatown. The same story played out across the paralyzed city, as if San Francisco was an animal trapped in tar. The chef at the Palace Hotel waited in vain for more than a dozen Chinese cooks, leaving the restaurant unable to serve its guests. In well-to-do private homes, breakfast tables went empty and soiled laundry piled up. Angry white employers overwhelmed the telephone switchboard in Chinatown, trying to track down the men and women they had come to rely on.

  Few white San Franciscans feared that they were in any danger themselves, trusting instead in misguided notions that plague could only flourish in hot climates, and even then only among those who ate rice instead of a more muscular European diet centered on meat. This racist belief reached the highest stations, with W. K. Reypen, the Surgeon General of the Navy, telling a reporter that “The climatic conditions of the United States preclude the possibility of the plague ever getting within this country. It is a disease peculiar to the Orient, and seldom, if ever attacks Europeans . . . There is absolutely no danger of the plague ever getting here.” Even those who could admit that plague might appear in Chinatown were adamant that it did not pose a threat to the city at large. “When these diseases appear they prove to be largely racial, as this plague is, and experience with it proves that Occidental races are but little subject to it. They have their own racial diseases to admonish them that they are mortal and must not crowd together too closely,” noted the San Francisco Call in an editorial.

  The city’s newspapers immediately called the scare nothing but a ploy by the Board of Health to receive more funding, with the San Francisco Chronicle leading the charge. “In its desire to tighten the city into giving it the desired appropriation, with increased patronage, the board had caused the entire Chinese quarter to be blockaded,” the paper announced, under the headline, “Nothing But a Suspicion: Criminal Idiocy of the Phelan Health Board.” The Call, meanwhile, warned that the quarantine could derail the city’s economy and accused Mayor Phelan of conjuring up the disease as a feint to grab more power. “There is no bubonic plague in San Francisco,” the paper argued. “The most dangerous plague which threatens San Francisco is not of the bubonic type. A plague of politics brought to the city by a Mayor whose chief
characteristic is to bargain and barter in the powers given him by the new charter and by him transmitted to a Board of Health which has scandalized the community by its extravagance and inefficiency, is the malady which not only menaces the commercial interests, the prosperity and future of the city, but is striking at the very foundation of its government.”

  In another time, in another city, charging an elected mayor with inventing an outbreak of bubonic plague in order to secure more tax dollars would seem preposterous. But in San Francisco, a town largely created and populated by men and women driven to abandon their previous lives in hopes of becoming rich, nothing seemed too low to contemplate. Corruption drifted through the city as easily as the afternoon fog, touching every office in its wake. To live in San Francisco required training oneself to keep an eye out for the next potential swindle, to learn how to spot a fake before anyone else. Once city officials began allowing cable cars—empty but for a few policemen charged with keeping anyone in the quarantine zone from boarding—to run through Chinatown the day after the blockade went up, the most cynical in the city saw an admission that the fear of spreading the germs of the so-called infected district was just for show.

  And after all, the papers argued, if this was truly an outbreak, why hadn’t health authorities found more victims? “All I wish to say is that if this Chinese had died of the plague every physician in the city would have all he could do in the infected quarter. The germs of the plague multiply by millions of millions in a very few hours,” said Dr. E. O. Jellinek, whom the Chronicle called an expert in bacteriology and the plague, though his exact qualifications were left unspecified. “However, days have passed and there are no more cases reported. Besides, the body of this man bore none of the plague’s characteristic features and I would feel safe in saying that the fear would be foolish as this quarantine is now unnecessary.”