About a mile and a half from Santa Cruz’s famed beach and boardwalk stands a much less well-known landmark: the Chinatown Memorial Archway. A gorgeous multihued dragon spans its bright yellow summit: teeth bared, golden claws outstretched, its scales a riot of orange, yellow, blue, and green mosaic tiles that gleam in the morning sun. On one side of the archway is downtown Santa Cruz, with its Trader Joe’s and sushi spots and coffeehouses; on the other, San Lorenzo Park, a tree-filled area along the Santa Cruz Riverwalk that’s a popular spot for families and homeless people.
Many Chinatowns across the country sport gates like this, luring in tourists with their eye-catching lucky lions, helpful signage, and, of course, dragons. Dragons are symbols of all sorts of good things—strength, vitality, longevity, luck. If you’re looking for a given city’s Chinatown, a gate like this lets you know you’ve found it. Santa Cruz’s dragon gate is different: It leads to nowhere. At least not to any Chinatown. Santa Cruz doesn’t have one.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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It used to—four successive (and sometimes overlapping) Chinatowns, in fact: bustling places filled with markets, restaurants, temples, and gambling halls. But they’re long gone, their residents displaced by rezoning laws, a mysterious fire, the whims of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and a devastating flood. Throughout much of the area’s history, Chinese immigrants were not welcome here, so the hostile majority found ways, sometimes legal, often violent, to drive them out.
The United States is dotted with towns and cities that decimated their Chinese communities, whose residents were forced to leave, or worse. How did people later remember these places, if at all? Did they even want to remember them? Did the locals feel shame for what had happened, or build anything to memorialize these lost places? Last summer, I embarked on a road trip from Los Angeles to Northern California to find out.
BEYOND THE BOARDWALK
George Ow is standing in front of the Chinatown Memorial Archway, telling me about Ah Fook, an old-timer who lived in the city’s fourth and final Chinatown. “That’s his picture there, on the base of the gate,” he says. He points to a black-and-white photo of a man who looks to be in his 70s, holding the hand of a cute boy in a plaid shirt and overalls. “I’m the kid,” he says. Ow was born in Chinatown in the 1940s, and even after his family moved to Monterey when he was six, they still returned often to visit. “I was one of the few Chinese kids around, so I was a great attraction and prize to him,” he says.
As we head toward the center of town, we pass a small plaque outside a Kumon learning center that reads, “To the Chinese men and women who came to Gold Mountain.” Ow had a big hand in creating and funding this memorial, as well as the dragon gate. When he thought there should be books preserving this history, he formed his own independent press, the Capitola Book Company, and published them himself. Ow has made a mission of remembering the Chinese immigrants who once lived here. “It’s like burning 10,000 sticks of incense,” he says, but instead of incense, he’s using plaques and memorials and books. We walk by a pizza joint. “Where that car was, that was my grandmother’s garden,” he says.
For decades, Santa Cruz was an epicenter for the state’s anti-Chinese movement. Ow and I walk to the corner of Front and Cooper Streets, where Denis Kearney, founder of the Workingmen’s Party of California, in the late 1870s delivered hate-filled speeches that harangued the Chinese as “moon-eyed lepers.” Kearney’s racist slogan, “The Chinese Must Go,” was a popular sentiment here, embraced by politicians and newspaper writers alike. Never mind that many in town wouldn’t have known what to do if the Chinese actually had gone: There weren’t enough white people here to take on the unpleasant, ill-paying, often backbreaking jobs the Chinese did. “The Chinese were like the Mexicans of today,” Ow says. “They did everything.”
Our ultimate destination is Evergreen Cemetery, which is a one-mile, often hilly walk from the dragon gate. At 81, Ow navigates it easily. Created in 1858, Evergreen was the final resting place for gold prospectors and mountain men, prostitutes and horsebreakers, Confederate soldiers, proudly labeled as such on their gravestones, and their Union enemies. But no Chinese. They weren’t allowed interment here, so Chinese mourners bought a plot of land behind the cemetery to bury their loved ones. Later on, the fence between the two properties deteriorated. “It disappeared somehow,” Ow says, “and now the Chinese are inside the gates.”
Ow shows me a poem etched in Chinese on a memorial site. “The Chinese people came,” he begins to translate, haltingly. “The people here came. And they had very hard lives, and they will be remembered forever.”
“That’s just a rough summary of it,” Ow says. “When people come here from China and read this, they start crying. They might not know anything about Chinese American history, and they start crying. Whoever wrote this wrote a beautiful poem. I don’t really do it justice.”
MEMORY WALKS
The next morning, I’m 30 miles but a world away, at San Jose’s Signia by Hilton, a luxury hotel in the heart of downtown with a day spa and a rooftop pool. Out the door are the city’s art museum and performing arts center; across the street, a grand park where kids in swim trunks horse around in a fountain’s water jets. There’s a lot to see, so one might be forgiven for missing the tiny plaque on the hotel’s side that reads, “In Memory of the Burning of San Jose Chinatown.” The inscription describes a “mysterious fire, deliberately set” on this site, which destroyed “the largest Chinatown south of San Francisco.” Similar fires were set in Chinatowns across the West, from Antioch to Sacramento to Pasadena in California, from Tacoma, Washington, to Denver, Colorado.
In the America of the late 1800s, terrorism against Chinese communities was commonplace and not limited to arson. In Los Angeles, 18 Chinese people were massacred in 1871 in what has been called the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, at least 28 Chinese miners (some bodies were never recovered) were killed by white miners in a preplanned, well-organized massacre; over the course of an afternoon, Chinese people were scalped, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive.
San Jose has had five Chinatowns. The Signia has only a plaque, so I jump in my car and head across town to the Chinese American Historical Museum. On the drive over, the skyscrapers of the city center are soon replaced by tire shops, drive-through restaurants, and lavanderías.
The museum holds artifacts that used to be at the hotel’s location, from the beautiful (ornate Chinese opera costumes) to the mundane (children’s toys, medicine vials). On the second floor is a gorgeous re-creation of the altar that once stood within the Temple of the Five Gods in Heinlenville, San Jose’s final Chinatown. A note tells museumgoers that two of the temple’s five gods—Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and the Canton City God—went missing years ago and have since been replaced by replicas.
John Heinlen, a German immigrant who moved to California in 1852, created Heinlenville. A victim of anti-German discrimination in Ohio, he sympathized with the plight of the San Jose Chinese. After three of the city’s Chinatowns were destroyed by fire, Heinlen decided to build his own, leasing his land to Chinese residents. “The whole population was against him, ruined his reputation, and ostracized his family,” says Connie Young Yu, a writer, historian, and activist. White residents threatened Heinlen’s life and derisively gave the settlement its name. To protect the community, he built an eight-foot fence topped with barbed wire around it. “People over the years said that the wall was to keep out gamblers and criminals,” Yu says. “But that’s not true. It was for protection! So they wouldn’t get burned down again.”
We’re talking in Heinlenville Park, which features a stainless steel sculpture called Sheltering Wing, which nods to Chinese and Japanese traditions, and a “historical memory walk” with stone tiles dedicated to the city’s five Chinatowns, labeled in English and Chinese. Yu worked for years to make the park a reality, and she doesn’t mince words when she talks about what occurred in San Jose. “The U.S. should be ashamed,” she says. “People talk about how the Chinese are the model minority. But look at what happened to them. They suffered terrorism.”
“They were not silent people,” she continues. “They were silenced.”
SUNDOWN TOWN
A lifetime ago, my late father and I used to fish for stripers and sturgeon in Suisun Bay, an estuary about 70 miles north of San Jose. We’d anchor our tiny boat alongside the rusting hulks of the World War II–era battleships of the bay’s so-called Mothball Fleet. The closest town is Antioch, a city I’ve never visited (I grew up in nearby Modesto). In the 1800s, Antioch was a sundown town, a place where Chinese residents were banned from walking the streets after dark; they built tunnels to return to their homes at night unmolested. One day in 1876, a white mob went door-to-door telling Chinese residents to leave town by 3 p.m. The next day, Chinatown was set ablaze as neighbors and the local fire brigade looked on. California newspapers reported the news with glee; the San Francisco Chronicle opined that the rousting and arson “will, without doubt, meet with the hearty approval of every man, woman and child on the Pacific coast.”
I drive into Antioch early in the morning, after holing up in nearby Concord. I head down to the waterfront and talk to a couple of folks fishing at the small pier: What sorts of bait are they using? (Sardines.) Is anything biting? (No.) Scores of wood pilings that were once the foundations of houses where Chinese people lived poke above the water. That was before they were chased out of town and fled to places like Stockton and Sacramento. For more than a century after that, few Chinese people moved to Antioch, and who can blame them?
What became known as the Driving Out didn’t occur in a vacuum. In 1879, the California Constitution was amended to give the state legislature “all necessary power…for the removal of Chinese.” Three years later, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. immigration law to exclude a group solely on the basis of race. The legislation, which reduced immigration to a trickle, remained in force until 1943. In many ways, the mobs that burned homes and beat and murdered their Chinese neighbors did so with the encouragement and blessing of the government.
In 2021, Antioch mayor Lamar Thorpe issued a formal apology for the “wrongs committed” in the city, and residents floated plans to create a Chinatown historic district on the site, with murals and exhibits commemorating the area’s history. There was pushback, however, and today there’s nothing indicating that a Chinatown was ever here: no plaque or monument or park, just a tattoo parlor, a taqueria, and a religious bookstore on what was once the settlement’s main street.
POWER CENTER
After reflecting on some of California history’s most ignoble moments, I’m feeling down, so I take a side trip to Locke. It’s a peaceful drive on the 160, which snakes alongside the Sacramento River past cows and grain silos and the occasional boat-storage place. The road runs so close to the river that you feel like you could drive right in if your mind started to drift, which is easy in a place like this.
Locke sits about 30 miles south of Sacramento. A tourist brochure declares it “the only rural Chinese town left in the United States.” There’s lots to see here. Outlets like ABC7 and NPR have done stories on the town, highlighting its quaint shops, unique restaurants, and museums.
Locke is not a Chinatown and never was. At least not in the traditional sense: Locke was an entire community built by and for the Chinese, not a section of a larger city that Chinese people lived in before being unceremoniously shooed away.
Today, Locke has a lot in common with places like Columbia and Sutter Creek and Truckee, California towns that have fought to keep their olden-day histories alive. When I get there, I check out the town’s former gambling hall, with its pai gow tables and iron pipes “for protection against assorted troublemakers,” and the Chinese school, where local kids studied Cantonese. I look at the dual busts of Confucius and Dr. Sun Yat-sen and take a photo of an outdoor tub with a sign that reads, “Baths 5¢, Soap & Towel Extra.”
I head over to the town’s Boarding House Museum, where I meet Angie Eng, an intermedia artist who is doing field recordings of the local wildlife—crickets, birds, motorcycles—and conducting interviews with residents as part of an “audio sound art tour” project she calls Traces of Our Roots. Eng has worked as an artist in New York City and Paris, so practicing in Locke has been an adjustment. “There’s still 80 people living here, but they’re pretty quiet, and they keep to themselves,” she says. “You don’t see a lot of activity on the streets anymore. So I wanted to get people to slow down and experience the town and listen to these different anecdotes and stories that people have to tell.”
Eng tells me about Locke: How her grandfather came here in 1920 as part of the first generation of residents and how her dad was on the committee that established Locke as its own town. How the tong, or family association, that ran the town raised a lot of money, much of it through gambling and prostitution and opium dens, to send home to China to support the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party. “This tiny, quiet town generated a lot of political power,” she says. Locke declined in the 1950s but experienced a resurgence in the 1960s when it became a magnet for hippies and assorted artists. In 1990, 75 years after the city’s founding, the area was declared a national historic landmark.
“All the Chinese bachelors that were here died out,” Eng says. “And then the white hippies that came, they’re aging out; some are dying. But there’s a lot of Mexican families now, so it’s nice to see kids. The kids really bring the community together. So it’s a place in transition.”
IN A LONELY PLACE
Sacramento’s Chinatown, or what’s left of it, is across the street from Golden 1 Center, home of the Kings basketball team. Our family would see the area’s pagoda-topped buildings while driving by on the 5, and I’d wonder, Why are there pagodas in Sacramento? Even when family members moved to the city, or to neighboring Elk Grove, we would go to Old Town or to the K Street Mall, but never here.
I park at the outdoor mall next to the stadium, where kids and families duck into the air-conditioned stores to beat the sweltering Central Valley summer weather. I cross the street to enter Chinatown through the district’s ornate gate and soon spot a beautiful bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen; the Confucius Church, with its enormous auditorium and gymnasium; the Soo Yuen Benevolent Association lounge; and the pagoda-roofed Wong Center, an affordable housing high-rise for seniors. The place is lovely, all reds and golds and greens, with tree canopies and expansive courtyards. It has many of the makings of a Chinatown, including the welcoming gate. What it is lacking, however, is people.
Sacramento’s first Chinatown was located on I Street not far from here. It was a thriving place, with restaurants and grocery stores as well as a theater, a Chinese-language newspaper, and an opera house. Like most Chinatowns, however, it was located in the lousiest part of town, a low-lying section prone to flooding. Floods and “mysterious” fires plagued the first immigrants here. Town elders tried to run them out by creating discriminatory laws that targeted Chinese businesses and residences and by destroying China Slough, a waterway critical to the area’s Chinese fishing industry.
The Chinatown I’m walking through now is a ghost town. Decades ago, many of the residents left for the suburbs. The gate to the once-vibrant Confucius Church is chained shut; the one restaurant is a Thai place, which is closed when I visit. During the hour I’ve spent here, I’ve seen two other people. I finally see a pair of Chinese American teens with a pink bakery bag. Maybe there’s some hopping place around here that I missed, some hidden spot known only to the local youngsters? They head over to the Wong Center and get buzzed in. They’re here, presumably, to visit an aging grandparent.
WHAT THEY CARRIED
Amid all the tales of lost Chinatowns and the Driving Out, I start to see two larger stories emerge. One is about hate and fear, the sort that compelled early California residents—many of them immigrants themselves—to harass and terrorize Chinese immigrants. The other story is about love and duty, the things that drove the first waves of Chinese immigrants to toil under the harshest of conditions and motivated later Chinese Americans, like Ow and Yu and Eng, to work to preserve their memories.
When I’m driving home on the 5, I recall something Ow said about Ah Fook, the old-timer he knew as a young boy. Over the years, Ah Fook became a minor celebrity in the local papers and tourist pamphlets. In a front-page story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, a writer described the “peppery little Chinaman” who loved to fish on the city’s municipal pier; later, Ah Fook appeared on the cover of the book Chinatown Dreams: The Life and Photographs of George Lee and in artist Tessa Hulls’s exhibit Guided by Ghosts at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. To Ow, however, he was just a Chinatown pal, one of the last of a flood of bachelors who had come to Santa Cruz to live and work.
Ow was recalling the photo he took with Ah Fook, the one that appears on the base of Santa Cruz’s dragon gate: “I feel like he was giving me all his aspirations about what he wasn’t going to have and that he wanted me to have. I hear him saying, I didn’t have the opportunity to have a good life, to have a wife, a family, kids and grandkids. I was barely able to live and send money back home. But I’m going to give you the luck to carry out these things for me. I want you to do these things, and I will help you.”
“So that’s why I feel like I’ve been a very lucky guy in my life, because of these spirits helping me,” Ow said. “So I’m burning incense to them with my works and these monuments. And they, in turn, have made my life very good.”•
Robert Ito is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He writes about film, television, and theater for the New York Times.
