To these last it is only due to say that San Francisco is also a city of magnificent churches, and that it sends every month or so many missionaries, male and female, travelling in palace-cars and the saloons of steamers, to enlighten the heathen. Many of the good citizens aforesaid subscribe tens of thousands of dollars both to the churches and missions, and so, somehow, I suppose, they get the account squared.
During my stroll through this quarter of Chinatown, I must admit that I saw very few Chinamen. Of Japs, Tonkinese, Sandwich Islanders, niggers, half castes, and the lower-down sort of American, there were plenty, and business appeared to be fairly brisk.
The better-class San Franciscan doesn’t go to Chinatown simply because he doesn’t need to. In fact, as a distinguished and experienced resident said to me after I had been through Chinatown:
“My dear Mr. Griffith, Chinatown may be pretty bad, but anyhow it’s run open and above board, as anybody can go and see that likes to take the trouble. If you were stopping here a month instead of two or three days, I could show you things that Chinatown isn’t a circumstance to. You just roof all San Francisco in, and you’ll have the biggest, dandiest, high-toned, up-to-date——”
“Yes,” I interrupted, “I see what you mean. I heard about that in the train. Sorry I’m not stopping.”
This of course only referred to decent, Christian vice, the sort which some of the most respectable of us practice without compunction as long as we’re not found out. But when you have eastern and western vice mixed, as you do in Chinatown and San Francisco, you get a compound calculated to raise the gorge of a graven image. There are certain crimes which have no names, and of such is the wickedness of Chinatown.
Some one once said that the exterior of a house was a pretty good criterion of the character of the people who lived in it.
This is certainly true of Chinatown. The streets are narrow, ill-paved, and dirty. They also smell, as the other streets in San Francisco don’t. Those who have travelled know that the Purple East has a smell entirely its own, just as a London lodging-house has.
Moreover, wherever a piece of the East like Chinatown is transplanted into the West, you get that smell, full-bodied and entire. Wherefore, when I dived into Chinatown, San Francisco, I remarked: