NEW YEAR IN OLD CHINATOWN
The Chinese Lunar New Year is Feb. 12, which will be the Year of the Ox
The Chinese Lunar New Year is Feb. 12, which will be the Year of the Ox. After the emotional roller-coaster of this past trickster Rat year, we certainly could use an Ox year. While horse-power was the 19th Century transportation choice in Old Santa Cruz, the Ox was the tractor or Mack Truck for the heavy jobs. In the Chinese calendar, an Ox year symbolizes hard work, slow, plodding progress, patience and integrity.
Today, a recently constructed Dragon Gate at the pedestrian bridge commemorates our last Santa Cruz Chinatown, where such celebrations were once common.
Front Street used to be called Main Street in the 1850s, but this business district was only a couple blocks, and couldn’t expand south of Mrs. Williams apple orchard, who didn’t want a road cutting her off from river water for irrigation. Unable to expand, downtown merchants shifted to new business addresses on Pacific Avenue around 1866. By 1872, the small Chinese colony moved from Pacific Avenue and Lincoln to the abandoned Front Street buildings overhanging the river, until the block between the Lower Plaza and Cooper Street became known as Chinatown.
With the depression in the 1870s, the Anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party formed in San Francisco in 1877, opening a club in Santa Cruz in 1878, headquartered at “The Workingman’s Saloon” in Chinatown. Some prominent Santa Cruzans joined the local club, saying “The Chinese Must Go” because they’re stealing jobs from “real Americans” born in Europe.
Yet young Ernest Otto always looked forward to celebrating the Chinese New Year. His father
George F. Otto built the first brick building on the flats in 1852, dead-center on the west side of the block. Above Otto’s Store was a meeting hall, popular for banquets, balls and theater. The Ottos not only saw the Chinese every day as neighbors, but supported their church in its 1869 Chinese Sunday School, with a Congregational Chinese Mission opened at the south end of Chinatown in 1881. While only 10% of the Chinese joined the Church, a majority of local Chinese came to Rev. Pon Fang’s classes to learn to speak and read English, and socialize with other Chinese. Rev. Fang’s wife, known as “Little Foot,” walked with two canes due to bound feet.
George Otto became County Treasurer at the Cooper Street Courthouse, while running his store. The Santa Cruz Courier and Penny Press newspapers were published at the Otto Building, with Ernest and his older brother Georgie, delivering them. Many locals, including the Chinese, also paid the boys as letter couriers to-andfrom the train, since there was no postal home delivery at the time. In this way the Otto’s became well acquainted with those on their delivery route. Ernest
would later become a newspaper reporter, recalling this history in his articles.
Lunar New Year
The three days before the Lunar New Year were the only holidays the Chinese took. But this was three days of housecleaning, repairs, refurbishing business signs and cleaning seldomwashed windows. New perforated red paper was hung over interior doors to baffle the devil, who had to pass through each hole if he wanted to enter. Red paper good-luck signs with Chinese inscriptions were placed in stores and household shrines.
Few westerners realized the red paper sign placed by their Chinese cook behind the stove pipe, made their oven a shrine to the Stove God. When last year’s decorations were burned, the Stove God followed the smoke to make his year-end household report in heaven. His three-day absence required much noise-making to chase evil spirits away, then sprucing up to welcome him back with the New Year.
Chinatown’s 10 laundries were the ultimate source of stove shrines, running 24-hoursa-day. A blast of heat hit you on entering the door of Hop Lee’s
Laundry, smelling of charcoal and incense. The incense gave the clothes a distinct perfume, but came from a small shrine alcove each stove had, this one dedicated to the God of Wealth. An octagonal stove in the center of the room had flatirons constantly warming on it. The side walls had a dozen long padded table-like ironing boards, each with a bowl of water.
Holding the cloth with one hand and ironing with the other, the laundryman would bend down, fill his mouth with water, then spray it onto the clothes. Under each ironing board was a man sleeping before the next shift.
Chinese New Year is sometimes called the “Narcissus Festival,” as this is the chief symbol of New Year’s renewal. The Chinese called the local plant “sui sin far” in Cantonese, while Americans called them “China lilies.” The plants grew profusely along the San Lorenzo River near Chinatown, where bulbs were collected weeks before the new year, and tended in rock-filled bowls to make them bloom on New Year’s Day. The flowers were then used to decorate household alters, and as gifts to friends and employers. Such gifts ended up in many nonAsian gardens.
A center of New Year activities was the Joss Temple, in the only brick building on the east side of the street (opposite Otto’s Store). The temple was behind a back gambling room, and managed by Ham Git, called Wong Kee because he was proprietor of the Wong Kee Store. As he sometimes spoke on behalf of the Chinese community, he was one of two people dubbed the Mayor of Chinatown. Those who entered the temple would bow before the shrine, burn incense in a gravel bowl, and sprinkle wine on the floor, where a roast pig sat with red booties.