Chinese Jim Crow: "The white power structure delegated Chinatown affairs to the Six Companies, as our own 'separate but equal' city hall."
Photographs by Reagan Louie

Their marriage arranged in advance, my mother left China to meet my father in San Francisco in 1950. Before departing her ancestral village, she made eight promises to her own mother, who was staying behind. The eighth promise was to teach her children the compassionate ways of the Toisanese farming people of the Pearl River delta, a way of life honed from living in one village for a millennium, and to look after her children, however desperate the circumstances. When she bore me in early 1951 and my brother Richard in late 1952, she could not know how severely, some 20 years later, her promise would be put to the test.

The new yellow peril

After the anti-chinese riots of the early 20th century, a group of China- town's business leaders, the so-called Six Companies, struck a deal with the white San Francisco establishment. Chinese could not live outside of Chinatown and would stay out of city politics. Chinese would stop filing legal cases against discriminatory city acts and fighting all the way to the Supreme Court, as they had done throughout the decades, including the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), a precedent-setting case still cited today. In return, the white power structure delegated Chinatown affairs to the Six Companies, as our own "separate but equal" city hall, with its own courts to settle internal disputes.

In the summer of 1968, that Jim Crow deal was as solid as the day it had been forged and as ruthlessly enforced by the Six Companies elders as by white city fathers. But inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s movement, several young Chinese Americans, including my brother and I, felt that Chinatown or no Chinatown, we had our own civil rights struggle to fight. With that realization, I felt connected and complete—that what was missing in Chinatown and in my life were one and the same.

By that time, the same kind of incompetent self-interest groups that had plagued the imperial system and taken control of Dr. Sun's Nationalist Party now reigned in the halls of the ornate Chinese Six Companies headquarters on Stockton Street. Although Asian American veterans in Hawaii had aggressively ended Jim Crow by wresting political offices away from entrenched white politicians, Chinatown's own veterans buckled under to the ironclad Nationalist Party/Six Companies policy of not rocking the boat. Squeezed into the straitjacket of "the model minority," we added patriotic anti-Communism to our avid church-going Christianity and workaholic, quiescent, stay-in-our-place professions and businesses.

And who were the enforcers of this fealty? My newfound activist friends explained: the local tongs were—including ones whose headquarters loomed ominously across the alleyway from the café where we regularly met, Il Piccolo. From the 1850s to the early 1900s, the tongs openly ran Chinatown's slave-girl brothels, gambling parlors, and opium smoke-easies— and regularly paid off cops and politicians. Because of their roots in China's revolutionary underground network, nestling inside each tong was a secret society, now criminal in nature and known as hok seh wui, the dark-side organization or the "shadow society." In the 1950s, the tongs trashed pro-mainland Chinese newspapers and ran their supporters out of town. By 1968, most tong members operated legitimate retail businesses. Still, my Il Piccolo friends portentously warned me not to discount them.

Although committed to Dr. King's nonviolent tactics, the Il Piccolo leaders knew that in the collective DNA of our Chinese philosophy of governance, the Six Companies and the Nationalists had lost the mandate of heaven, that living balance of righteousness and harmony, of duty and reward, between ruler and ruled. Our history taught us that rebel forces inevitably arose to establish a new order under heaven, and the ruling group always responded violently. I felt it coming, the operation of this inexorable Chinese social law of reordering, but couldn't, or wouldn't, accept its inevitability. I only hoped that the sophisticated Il Piccolo liberals could change conditions before the restless youth rebels—both American-born and recent immigrants now thronging our streets, and injected with the virulence of Red Guard righteousness and Black Panther militancy—could trigger the counterattack.

It was against this polarizing backdrop that I finally threw in my lot to organize the first Chinese American civil rights march along Grant Avenue. Perhaps we could keep the lid on, change the community without violence.

A lively group of around forty of us filed onto Grant Avenue, and as others joined along the route, we swelled to around two hundred. Our boldly lettered, bilingual picket signs proclaimed: "Equality for Chinese," "Chinese Representation at City Hall," "We've been here for a hundred years!" "We want unions," "No more sweatshops," "Chinese for Mayor—About Time."

Then I saw the old-timers. They had turned out to watch us, these old men of another generation who had lived under the Six Companies regime. Gathered in clumps of two, three, or five, they idled curiously on street corners and in entryways or hunched over the ornate balconies of association headquarters. They tried to appear nonchalant. As we marched block after block, they seemed to number in the hundreds, watching us in silent amazement, with the neutral body postures they had learned to wear, like the drab suits they put on in the morning, to slip safely through another day. These were not the well-fed leadership, but the bent, wiry, wage earners—the survivors. I had expected them to boycott the march, but at that moment, I felt our connection—they had built this Chinatown for us, their next generation. They knew we were picking up their long-dormant fight for full acceptance in America. Walking tall already, I stretched my spine higher for them and chanted louder for them, as if reimbursing them for their quiet, shuffling dance, their tongues bitten still during a harsher time.

On that warm summer afternoon, Chinese Americans actually outnumbered tourists on Grant Avenue. We felt like one community, one village, and united. Perhaps the Six Companies would embrace my friends and their new vision after all!

Later that summer, we discovered that a contract had been placed with hit men from New York's Chinatown targeting four of our Il Piccolo leaders. By chance, an alert security guard at San Francisco International Airport detained the triggermen after puzzling over their sharply tailored, pinstriped, double-breasted suits, so unlike those of the drably-dressed local Chinese Americans. The guard uncovered guns in their luggage and then alerted the police department to their final destination—San Francisco Chinatown. My reformist friends survived.

We also knew the tongs had been quietly wooing cliques of street youth. The tongs' aggressive recruitment foreshadowed a potentially violent fight for control of the community.

But I was seventeen and I was zapped out. I was ready to ride out of Dodge. I'd been accepted into the 1969 freshman class at Berkeley. Maybe one day I would return with the knowledge and connections that could change conditions. Or not.

page 1	|	4