San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sparkling celebration of Year of the Rat
The San Francisco Police Department’s Lion Dance Team heads up Market Street brightly lit by firecrackers along the route in Saturday’s Chinese New Year Parade. The colorful, noisy Year of the Rat celebration attracted scores of spectators and dozens of elected officials.
San Francisco’s Chinese New Year’s Parade, complete with lion dancers, dragons and firecrackers, took place without disruptions Saturday, despite worries about the coronavirus, which have canceled similar celebrations around the country.
To commemorate the start of the Year of the Rat, rodent statues of all sizes adorned litup floats and students marched with rat ears and more elaborate costumes. The red silhouette of a rat even scampered alongside a full moon atop Salesforce Tower’s light display.
About two dozen elected officials, including Mayor London Breed, rode alongside corporate floats, school marching bands and dance troupes from around the Bay Area. State Assemblyman David Chiu appeared in a lowrider car that bounced enthusiastically as it made its way past Union Square.
Some parade participants combined local elements with Chinese culture. BART decked out a miniaturized train car with red lanterns, and TMobile had a small Golden Gate Bridge on its float. Members of San Francisco’s Central Police Station rode a cable car and tossed gifts like Year of the Rat mouse pads to the crowd.
Southwest Airlines and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce organize the parade, which began in the 1860s as a way for Chinese immigrants to share their culture. The parade started at Second and Market streets and ran up to Union Square before ending at Columbus Avenue. It lasted nearly three hours. The event draws 3 million viewers in person and on television, according to the organizers.
The parade takes place a week after the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. pageant, and winner Lauren Yang of Sugar Land, Texas, sat on a gold and red throne as she rode in the parade. The noisy celebration ended with the traditional 288footlong golden dragon and a final burst of fireworks on the street along to Union Square.
Parade officials said there was no threat to public health from the coronavirus, and only a handful of attendees wore protective masks.
The coronavirus has sickened more than 37,500 people and killed 811 in China, including the first American citizen Thursday in Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic.
A dozen coronavirus cases have been diagnosed in the U.S., including four that are being treated in the Bay Area.
SFO canceled all flights to mainland China for nearly six weeks, and local businesses in Chinatown have suffered.
Five people who had been under quarantine after being evacuated from China to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield were hospitalized with symptoms of fever. An additional 229 people have been quarantined at Travis and will remain there for two weeks, which is believed to be the maximum incubation period for the virus.
Attendees were largely unconcerned. Husband and wife Doug and Cindy Webenbauer from Morgan Hill brought along masks but decided not to wear them after seeing almost no one else was. Cindy Webenbauer said they weren’t concerned and were excited to see their daughter, who plays French horn, play with the Cal Poly Mustang Marching Band in the parade.
“It’s really exciting,” she said.
Summer Miguel of Vallejo said she isn’t concerned about the virus. She said her favorite part of the parade is the marching bands. But the presence of tech companies such as Twitter — whose employees carried a batch of blue balloons with its logo — was “not very Chinese New Year,” she said.
Navi Vargess was wearing a mask to be “super cautious” after reading about the coronavirus in the news. He said he had some difficulty in obtaining a mask amid a global shortage. Boniface Law had a good reason to wear the mask, after recently flying back from Hong Kong, where one person has died from the virus. He said the city there was quieter than usual but people were “cautiously optimistic” that the situation would improve, having endured a similar epidemic of SARS in 2003. Law said he was wearing a mask partly out of habit and wasn’t seriously concerned about coronavirus.
“The flu is frankly scarier here,” he said.