Chinatown, San Francisco, is a city within a city. Go through it by night as I did with one who knows its inmost secrets, and you will find that it is also a cancer in the body corporate of a fair city (which is itself one of the most politely and delightfully wicked on earth), a foul blot on a fair land, a smudge of old-world filth across a page written by the most nervous hands and the keenest brains that modern civilisation has produced.
Geographically, as San Francisco is bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, etc., Chinatown is bounded by “California” and “Pacific,” “Kearny” and “Stockton.” It has a population of ten thousand Mongolians, and an unknown number of Americans and Europeans, men and women, who have lost caste so hopelessly that they can no longer live among their own kind. The men certainly would not be considered fit society even for an American politician.
As for the women—well you see most of them painted and powdered and tricked out in scanty, tawdry finery, sitting in little rooms behind lattices open on to the street, and opposite these the wayfarer, western or eastern, European or American, Jap or Chinaman, may stand and peer in. There are whole streets of these latticed rooms, and the women are of all nationalities. The leaseholders pay enormous rents for the houses, and their owners are amongst the most respected citizens of San Francisco.
To these last it is only due to say that San Francisco is also a city of magnificent churches, and that it sends every month or so many missionaries, male and female, travelling in palace-cars and the saloons of steamers, to enlighten the heathen. Many of the good citizens aforesaid subscribe tens of thousands of dollars both to the churches and missions, and so, somehow, I suppose, they get the account squared.
During my stroll through this quarter of Chinatown, I must admit that I saw very few Chinamen. Of Japs, Tonkinese, Sandwich Islanders, niggers, half castes, and the lower-down sort of American, there were plenty, and business appeared to be fairly brisk.
The better-class San Franciscan doesn’t go to Chinatown simply because he doesn’t need to. In fact, as a distinguished and experienced resident said to me after I had been through Chinatown: