San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
IN CHINATOWN OF THE DELTA, THE WEST IS STILL WILD — AND WEIRD.
When I walked onto Main Street of the tiny Delta town of Locke, there was a showdown in progress.
The covered sidewalks were empty. A tumbleweed wouldn’t have looked out of place. In the narrow one-way street sat a solitary gray cat, steadfastly ignoring a silver Buick sedan trying to advance down the block. The driver inched the car forward, waved her arms, yelled at the cat, inched forward again.
The cat didn’t flick a whisker. I walked up to the cat and shooed it off the road. The driver, a woman from Sacramento taking the scenic route to the Bay Area, rolled down her window.
“I’ve never been here before,” she said. “I feel like I just drove onto the movie set from ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ”
The town will conjure up different films for different visitors, but she was onto something: Locke, with its ramshackle Western frontierstyle buildings leaning every which way but plumb, has the feeling of a Hollywood back lot. This feeling is especially keen on a weekday, when the visitors are few and the street is quiet. Signs kindly ask that you don’t park your motorcycle on the sidewalks, a tell that the weekends look a bit different.
Many rural towns in California once had small Chinatowns; Locke is unique in that it’s nothing but Chinatown. It’s the only town in the United States built by Chinese laborers for Chinese residents. When the Chinese section and part of the Japanese section of neighboring Walnut Grove burned in October 1915, the residents
opted to rebuild just up the Sacramento River, joining a handful of existing businesses in the shadow of the levee to found a new town.
The telling of the history of Chinese immigration in the U.S. is nearly always paired with the building of the railroads in the West, but in the Delta, another large-scale infrastructure project was happening around the same time: levee building. Chinese laborers, many of whom had come from the Pearl River Delta area, arrived at the right time with the right experience, and helped drain over 80,000 acres of SacramentoSan Joaquin Delta land for agriculture between 1861 and 1880. Many stayed on to work the farms, including the pear orchards and asparagus fields around Locke.
Locke hasn’t changed much in the past century. On one side of Main Street, the two-story buildings rest against the levee, some with upstairs back entrances on the levee road. One abandoned building bows ominously out over the sidewalk. Storefronts bear washed-out fragments of old business names: Kee Sing Beer & Wine, Wah Lee and Company
Boots and Dry Goods. Narrow paths stalked by collarless cats run among centuryold tumbledown cottages in the small residential area behind Main Street.
Locke’s Chinese population has dwindled, but the Chinese heritage of the town has been nothing but reinforced in recent years. On street signs, Chinese characters dwarf the English names. The Locke Boarding House, the Dai Loy Gambling House, the Locke Chinese School and the Jan Ying Benevolent Society have all been preserved and reopened as museums. An acupuncturist’s office sits on Main Street, branches of purple-fruited pokeweed spilling out from the narrow garden between buildings.
I first saw Clarence Chu as he was opening the Locke Chinese School Museum, standing on the porch flanked by oversize bronze busts of Confucius and Sun Yat-sen. He walked across the street to open the Chinese Cultural Shop. At one point, I saw him down the street emerging from the Locke Art Center. Later, I found him sitting behind the desk at the Locke Boarding House, where he volunteers during
the week. I had to confirm that there was only one of him.
Chu, whose family purchased all of Locke in the late 1970s and sold the historic district to the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency in 2002, gave me a quick history of the town name. Previously, the spot had been called Lockeport, after the Locke family, who owned the land and leased it to the new residents, who later shortened it to Locke. One reason: When transcribed into Chinese, “Locke” is spelled using characters for “fun” and “living” (lè ju ). The town took the name to heart, and then some. During Prohibition, Locke was home to five brothels and multiple speakeasies and opium dens. The original owner of Al’s Place, nicknamed with an ethnic slur, was the first Italian businessman in town and a colorful character whose sources of income are still the subject of much speculation. The long arm of the law was never long enough to reach out to Locke.
“It’s a real wild West up here, always has been. The delta is about relaxation and getting away from the rules,” said Lisa Kirk, owner of Strange Cargo, a shop offering California history books, collectibles, tiki shirts, tourism info and, at least on my visit, kittens.
Locke doesn’t even like to abide by its own rules. Posted hours on businesses are best treated as rough guesses. Who comes to Locke and why has changed over time, but there always seems to be a reason that people seek it out. Motorcycle and classic car clubs rumble in on weekends. Al’s pulls in steak-hungry diners and lovers of eccentric dive bars. Each May, the Locke Foundation closes down Main Street for the Locke Asian Pacific Spring Festival, with lion dances, taiko drumming and a celebration of Asian food and arts. Recently, the ghost hunting fad has brought visitors in hunting for a good haunting.
“I tell people, if there are ghosts here, they’re pretty happy ghosts,” said Martha Esch, owner of the Lockeport Grill & Fountain, which posts open hours like “Friday: Most Likely to Whenever.”
Esch has recently found an unexpected new source of visitors: mobile phones. When traffic backs up on Interstate 80 between Sacramento and the Bay Area, Google Maps suggests an alternative through the delta.
“In the past, people wouldn’t have ventured off the main routes, but people trust their phones,” said Esch. “Now people come in all the time and say, ‘Gosh, we never knew this weird little place was here.’ ”