San Francisco : Chinatown



Chinatown is densely packed and colourful. There are some tacky curio shops, but the 30,000 Chinese, most of whom speak Cantonese, live in a tightly knit, distinctly un-Western community. It's a great place for casual wandering through narrow alleys, where on quiet afternoons you can hear the clack of mah-jong tiles from behind screen doors. The majority of Chinese immigrants flooded into California during the 1849 gold rush, and more came with the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1870s. These immigrants often were not very popular (as proved by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) and in San Francisco anti-Chinese feelings contributed to Chinatown's almost fortress-like feel. In the 19th century, Chinese people rarely crossed Broadway, the traditional line between Chinatown and North Beach, or Powell St, which divided Chinatown from Nob Hill. Meanwhile, people from other parts of the city freely roamed the streets of Chinatown, where they could gawk at its residents and their 'unusual' ways, much as tourists still do today. Nowadays the neighbourhood remains somewhat cut off from adjacent parts of the city, and its residents still sometimes quietly refer to outsiders as low faan, meaning 'barbarians.' Its entrance arches, at Grant Ave and Bush St, separate it from Union Square, as does the Stockton Tunnel, a block over. But Chinatown has grown to the north, nudging beyond Broadway along Stockton and Powell Sts, and to the west, up and over the slope of Nob Hill all the way to Larkin St.

 

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