Strolling Stockton Street, the busy heart of Chinatown
Sometimes the stars line up perfectly. The sun shines, the traffic lights all turn green and a pretty girl on the streetcar gives you a dazzling smile. It’s like that now: Sunday is Valentine’s Day, this is the second week of Chinese New Year, and the street trees have just started to bloom.
So it’s an auspicious time for a walk along San Francisco’s most interesting street. That would be the five blocks of Stockton Street, between Sacramento Street and Broadway, right through the heart of Chinatown. It’s the main street of a city within a city, combining some old San Francisco traditions with a new immigrant experience.
S.F.’s ethnic pioneer
We walked it the other morning with Philip Choy, a third-generation San Franciscan and the dean of Asian American historians.
“Chinatown has been here since the very beginning of San Francisco, and this area here is the cradle of San Francisco,’’ he says. “It is the oldest ethnic community in the city.”
Choy, a small man with white hair and a wisp of a mustache, was born in Chinatown 89 years ago. He had a long career as an architect, a teacher and historian. He sees things along Stockton that others miss. There are cultural landmarks everywhere along the street, none of them marked very well. You have to know where to look.
One of the most notable is the headquarters of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association — the Chinese Six Companies — at 843 Stockton, near Clay. It is an imposing building in the Chinese style, guarded on the street level by two stone lions. The Six Companies, founded just after the Gold Rush, includes seven family associations and is the center of oldline political power in Chinatown.
There are other centers of tradition on Stockton: the Kong Chow Temple just down the street and the Chinese Methodist Church, not far away. They are examples of opposites in Chinatown — one the Asian tradition, the other the role of white missionaries years ago in the assimilation of Chinese into American life.
‘We are Americans’
It was never easy. Choy points to the national headquarters of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, a nondescript building at 1044 Stockton near Jackson Street.
“Its identity — its name — speaks for itself,’’ Choy says. “It says we are Americans.” It is the oldest Asian civil rights group in the country, organized to oppose the widespread antiChinese prejudice that stained much of California history.
Though Stockton Street is full of history, it is no museum — instead, it is a thriving commercial street.
“The main shopping street, the heart of Chinatown,’’ Choy says.
There are close to 50 shops along Stockton’s commercial strip, each is unique. Not a single chain, not a Starbucks in sight. The shops offer fresh fruit, groceries, fish — dried and fresh — vegetables, meat and herbal medicine.
Choy stops in a shop near Clay, points to dried ginseng offered for sale in bins.
“You know,” he says, “that was the only thing the United States had to trade with China. The Americans sent ginseng from New England, where it grew wild, and traded for porcelain and tea.” He points. “And here it is again.” Ginseng is used in Chinese herbal medicine, and American ginseng is prized for its special powers.
He stopped in another shop. “Here,” he says, “is sea cucumber. The French call it beche de
mer. It is a delicacy” — usually used in soup, important this time of year during the new year celebrations.
Chinatown bustle
Stockton Street is packed with people old and young, shopping.
“When I was younger,” Choy says, “housewives shopped all over Chinatown. They knew where the best quality was, the best prices. They went from one end of China- town to another.”
Concentrating most of the shops on Stockton is a fairly new development, which happened after immigration laws were relaxed in the mid-1960s. New people poured into Chinatown and old Stockton Street took on a new look. “Open front stores,’’ he says, “like Hong Kong. It wasn’t like this before.”
Though Stockton Street is fascinating, it is not beautiful. It’s crowded, untidy, dirty, usually noisy. People live above the stores, sometimes a whole family in a single room. “It is still a ghetto,” Choy says.
Stockton, not touristy Grant Avenue, is the main street. “I would say this is the real Chinatown — the real McCoy,” he says.