China Camp loses ‘historical treasure’
Sometimes, on a summer twilight when the fog rolls over China Camp on the bay shore in Marin, the horizon becomes blurred by the mist, and all you can see from the beach is the broad San Pablo Bay and low hills in the distances. Everything else disappears.
China Camp, just east of San Rafael, is not 20 miles from San Francisco, but it is like another world, a place out of time.
It is a state park, a cove ringed by hills turned a tawny brown by the California summer. In its center is what is left of a Chinese fishing village with a long pier and a collection of ramshackle buildings, “bleak, simple, weatherbeaten,” writer Charles Leong called the village more than 60 years ago.
China Camp was the last in a string of Chinese fishing villages around San Francisco and San Pablo bays that flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries. There were close to 30 of these little towns, from the edge of the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta to Redwood City. One of the largest was at Hunters Point in San Francisco.
They all faded away by the end of World War II — all except China Camp, a bit like a ghost town.
State park status preserved China Camp into the 21st century to be discovered by a new generation of Californians. These days it’s a great place for a picnic, to camp out overnight and watch the stars, or to ride mountain bikes.
But this month, China Camp lost the man who was its soul. Frank Quan was the last man to live in the village. He died Aug. 15, just a few days before his 91st birthday, in the house where he spent most of his life.
Quan was a man who knew everything about his corner of the world: its history, its life and its people. He was no scientist, but he knew the bay — its tides and currents, its birds and fish, and the way it has changed.
“He was a living historical treasure,” said John C. Muir, a boatbuilder at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, who was his friend.
Quan was born in 1925 to a family with deep California roots. His grandfather Quan Hong Quock was one of the founders of China Camp. He was born in China near the Pearl River Delta and came to California as a young man. Like many other Chinese, he had a difficult time in this country. Violent anti-Chinese prejudice persuaded him to move out of San Francisco.
Many Chinese saw opportunity in leaving the city and fishing for bay shrimp on the shores of San Francisco Bay and selling the fresh catch in San Francisco and exporting dried shrimp to markets in Asia and Hawaii. Fresh bay shrimp was a delicacy, served even at the city’s famed Palace Hotel.
It was big business. At its peak, Chinese shrimp fishermen took 3 million pounds of shrimp from the bay every year.
But overfishing, along with industrial waste and chemicals in the water, and more importantly, diversion of freshwater used to irrigate farmlands and supply Southern California cities, changed the mix of fresh and salt water in the bay. That killed commercial fishing. The shrimp vanished, and so did a lot of the other life in the bay.
At its peak, China Camp had a population of 500, nearly all Chinese. By the 1930s, Frank’s father, Henry, his mother, Grace, and his whole family made their living renting boats and running a small store in the village.
“When we were kids, there was so much fish out here you wouldn’t believe it,” Frank Quan told filmmaker Joanna Lin a few years ago. “Now it’s like a desert.”
Quan lived in two worlds. He saw the prejudice against Asians that seemed to be ingrained in California fade away, but he saw the bay dying before his eyes.
He was an uncomplicated man. “He was a fisherman at heart,” Muir said.
Nearly every day of his life, Quan would sail before dawn in a small boat, looking for shrimp, for flounder, for sturgeon, those huge ancient fish that live in the broad San Pablo Bay. Quan had a deep voice and could be gruff, but he loved the bay and he loved explaining China Camp to visitors.
“Frank and his whole family had a welcoming spirit,” Muir said.
Muir became fascinated with China Camp and its history. Quan helped him with a major project at the turn of the 21st century, building a replica of a 19th century Chinese junk, 42 feet long, launched in 2003. It was named Grace Quan for Frank’s mother and sails the bay to this day, an artifact out of another time.
When a budget crunch nearly closed China Camp State Park in 2008, Quan and other volunteers fought to save it.
“He helped to keep China Camp alive and historically accurate,” Muir said. “We are really going to miss him.”