The Barbary Plague Page 2
San Francisco papers pandered openly to the fears of white workers, with “Chink” cartoons depicting caricatured immigrants spouting pidgin. In popular parlance, they were “the heathen Chinee”—a phrase coined by Bret Harte in his verse “Plain Language from Truthful James,” telling of a wily gambler, Ah Sin, who hides cards up his sleeve and cheats white men out of their pay.16 Amid rising paranoia over the “yellow peril,” the caricature of the bland but cunning outsider burned its way into the psyche of Victorian San Francisco. Just as the economic depression had strangled tolerance, so disease outbreaks further fanned race resentments. Poised on the threshold of the Pacific Rim, San Francisco had always been open to imported disease. Now, in 1900, it was about to receive the most famous scourge in history.
Bubonic plague had ravaged Europe, from fourteenth-century Florence to seventeenth-century London. It smoldered along the Himalayan borderlands between India and China into the late nineteenth century. As soldiers crisscrossed the borders, they brought plague into China’s interior, where it flared to a ferocious epidemic that erupted in Hong Kong in 1894. From that port, plague embarked aboard ships sailing to many continents. Among its destinations was the city by the Golden Gate.
Plague traveled in stealth. No one yet knew how it spread. Nineteenth-century theories of its transmission focused on dirt, tainted food, and a “miasma,” or cloud of infectious vapors. In the boomtown of San Francisco, the business and political elite believed plague to be an alien scourge that would tarnish their trade and tourism. So from City Hall to the dome of the state capitol, officials dismissed the threat. The little people would die of it while the powerful debated its existence.
In 1900, the city played an active role in courting catastrophe. Like most Victorian cities, San Francisco neglected its aging sewer system, fouled its bay with garbage, and tolerated a burgeoning population of rats. Victorian cities were a petri dish for all manner of epidemics—like diphtheria, tuberculosis, and smallpox—and none more so than San Francisco. Whispers of “pesthouse” sent a stab of fear through families who never knew when their neighbors would be bundled into an ambulance buggy and carted off to an isolation ward of the county hospital. Mysterious germs, which no one but scientists could see, ran rampant until they closed throats with a white membrane, eroded lungs with coughing, or embossed faces with scars.17
With almost a tenth of the city terraced into its twelve tiny blocks, Chinatown was especially vulnerable to disease. But sickness on Dupont Street, unlike sickness elsewhere, was viewed by city officials as a symptom of alien squalor. Whites held their noses at Chinatown’s smoky stew of scents, as if the very air were a cloud of contagion. Even in medical circles, some doctors cleaved to old notions that the poor and sick could infect others through their exhalations. Another local myth held that Chinatown’s haze—mingling temple incense, pork smokehouses, and opium vapors—was noxious to white nostrils but rendered the denizens immune to the diseases they bred. The Chinese were blamed for the crowding and dilapidation of Chinatown, even though bias barred them from living elsewhere.
For the record, City Hall had published its view of Chinatown’s health a generation earlier, in an 1885 report to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:
The Chinese brought here with them and successfully maintained and perpetuated the grossest habits of bestiality practiced by the human race [gambling, opium, and prostitution]….[They] have innoculated our youth not only with the virus of immorality in its most hideous form, but have through the same sources physically poisoned the blood of thousands by the innoculation with diseases the most frightful that the flesh is heir to, and furnishing posterity with a line of scrofulous and leprous victims that might better never have been born than to curse themselves and mankind at large with their contagious presence.18
Against this backdrop of blame, the new threat arrived. At first, it was only dimly perceived. Dispatches from Hong Kong told of a violent outbreak, harrowing people living a continent away. But by 1899, steamers and sailing ships were carrying the infection across the Pacific to Hawaii. Cases of fever and swollen glands, followed by a swift death, occurred in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Recognizing that plague had arrived, the city’s health department ordered that the plague houses be burned. But a freak twist of trade winds whipped the flames out of control, igniting a church steeple and throwing a fountain of sparks beyond the reach of fire hoses. Soon Chinatown was engulfed, the flames touching off explosions in fireworks sheds and reducing shops to ashes. When the smoke cleared, six thousand Chinese were homeless in Honolulu.19
Learning the fate of their countrymen in the islands, San Francisco’s Chinese were terror-stricken. It seemed a double curse: epidemic followed by fire. But white San Franciscans felt tropical pestilence could never trouble their hometown, with its cool and misty climate. Capturing this naive optimism, the San Francisco Examiner ran a story headlined WHY SAN FRANCISCO IS PLAGUE-PROOF.20
Safe inside their red velvet drawing rooms with brocaded curtains and satin-covered spittoons, powerful San Franciscans were certain that this Asian plague could never gain a foothold in a city that had bel canto and porcelain bathtubs. The specter of plague was like a wraith in the fog, impossible to grasp.
But plague scares had seized the city before. A year earlier, the Japanese vessel Nippon Maru reached the city after a Pacific crossing marred by two plague deaths. On entering San Francisco Bay, two Asian stowaways jumped overboard. Their bodies were fished from the cold gray swells, still wearing Nippon Maru life preservers. Doctors who performed an autopsy found suspicious-looking germs.21
But isolating the cause of death is difficult in a decomposing corpse, where all manner of bacteria run wild. Experts disputed the stowaways’ cause of death. And the fate of the Nippon Maru—with two dead at sea and two dead in port—was soon forgotten.
On the eve of 1900, another ship appeared on the horizon: the four-masted steamship Australia, making her regular run from Hawaii to the Golden Gate. Around Christmas 1899, when San Franciscans were trimming their trees, the ship had lain at anchor in the infected port of Honolulu. Then the Australia took on cargo, weighed anchor, and made way for San Francisco.
On New Year’s Day 1900, the San Francisco newspapers noted the imminent arrival of the Australia. Stiff southwesterly winds chased the rain and scoured the skies. On January 2 she appeared, as long as a football field, knifing through the steel blue water and into the Golden Gate. She anchored at the quarantine station off Angel Island, while officers searched her from stateroom to steerage. They failed to find any traces of infection, and under constant pressure from impatient shippers, the quarantine officers had no choice but to grant her permission to land.
So the Australia’s bladelike hull turned away from Angel Island toward the port of San Francisco. With a touch of unease, the quarantine officers watched as the V-shaped spume widened in her wake. Easing into the dock, the Australia delivered the sanitized bags of her sixty-eight passengers and a shipment of fumigated mail, along with some four-legged stowaways that, somehow, escaped detection.22
The Year of the Rat
THE NEW YEAR OF 1900 ushered in dangerous times. In San Francisco, it was, as always, a holiday with two faces. Downtown, white celebrants raised their usual end-of-year ruckus. In the streets of Chinatown, a shadow fell over the Lunar New Year, in an ominous prologue to the year ahead.
Rain spattered the boardwalks on New Year’s Eve. When the skies cleared, the merrymakers came out. A band of maskers gathered on the corner of Market and Kearny streets, just below Union Square and Chinatown. Blowing horns and clanging cowbells, they hurled confetti and thrashed passersby with evergreen boughs left over from Christmas. Then the celebration turned ugly. Charging north up Kearny for five blocks, the carousers reached Chinatown and started grabbing Chinese musical instruments from the shops, banging the gongs, and blasting away on the winds. The din was so loud, it pierced the paneled recesses of the nearby men’s clubs. Bystanders crin
ged to hear the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” mingling with what sounded like the minor wails of a Chinese funeral band.1
But funereal sentiments were very much in order in the year 1900. For death was the uninvited guest at this New Year’s feast although, like the maskers, it came in disguise.
In Chinatown, the approach of the Chinese New Year—the turning over of the lunar calendar in February—usually was heralded by the hiss and bang of firecrackers, warding off demons and trailing smoke that pricked the nostrils with excitement. Sidewalk stands traditionally sold stacks of juicy sugarcane and mounds of crackling melon seeds. To perfume the spring banquet tables, people would buy pots of narcissus bulbs, crowned with stiff green shoots and buds that burst into white trumpets with a center of gold that symbolized good fortune. People wearing silk tunics in peacock hues would call on family and friends with gifts and cakes. Children in embroidered skullcaps and jeweled headdresses would parade hand in hand.
All this would happen in a festive Lunar New Year. But not in this year of 1900. Instead of fireworks, gunfire rang through the streets, and the alleys ran with blood. Gang warfare had struck again. As punishment, the San Francisco Police Department cracked down on the whole district, canceling all holiday celebrations. Sidewalks were barren of flowers, parties were banned, and the streets were still.
So the Chinese New Year crept in, as gray and drab as its namesake on the great wheel of the astrological calendar, for 1900 was the Year of the Rat.
According to Chinese astrology, people born in the Year of the Rat are clever and resourceful. Family loving to the point of being clannish, rats are also frugal, sharp-witted, and good companions in adversity.2
This year, however, rats were to become harbingers of evil. Merchants awoke to find grizzled pelts of dead vermin in their alleyways and courtyards. Dull-eyed, stiff, shaggy cadavers sent a shudder through the neighborhood.
In the old country, they portended epidemics—in any house where rats had died, human deaths were sure to follow. In 1792, the poet Shih Tao-Nan had written:
The coming of the devil of plague
Suddenly makes the lamp dim,
Then it is blown out, Leaving man,
ghost and corpse in the dark room.3
In the old country, households would flee at the sight of a dead rodent. But here, there was nowhere else to go. Discrimination hindered Chinese from living elsewhere in town. Fearing an avalanche of bad luck in the New Year, they filed complaints with the city. As usual, nothing was done. Many people considered rats as the inevitable companions of human settlements, even as natural garbage collectors performing a salutary service. And this was, after all, Chinatown.
March blew in, raw and unsettled. In the late winter mist, a fever stole up from the waterfront. It skulked in on four legs, and invaded the bunks of the working poor who slept layered in dense tenements.
Many kinds of illness, from typhoid to diphtheria, raked the city’s poor. But this disease was different. This was the scourge that for centuries had come in the wake of a rat invasion. When the rats died, the fleas abandoned their corpses, seeking new blood, human blood, in the warrens of the poor. The disease attacked with a violent rush of fever and shuddering chills. A headache seemed to core out the skull. Victims weakened and took to their beds. Penetrating pains raked the back and limbs. Red lumps erupted from the armpits and groin, excruciating to the touch. Hemorrhages would burst beneath the skin, causing black bruises. Senses wandering, the sick would chatter and fidget restlessly, plucking at their bedclothes. Their agitation subsided only as they sank into a coma, ending in death.
Late on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 6, 1900, the phone rang at the police headquarters. A dead man was in the Chinese undertaker’s shop at 814 Clay Street, and the police physician needed to issue a burial certificate. The corpse bore no gross signs of foul play, no bulletholes or knife wounds, but the man had died of a violent disease.
The dead man’s name was Wong Chut King. He was a forty-one-year-old lumber salesman, living the lean life of a bachelor laborer in the Globe Hotel at 1001 Dupont Street on the corner of Jackson. The Globe Hotel, a once fashionable spot turned flophouse, was known as the “Five Stories.” Its cramped cells sheltered hundreds of Chinatown’s workingmen, sharing their life of expansive dreams and narrow bunks in their adopted land.
Now he was middle-aged and sick. When he felt too weak to drag himself to work at the lumberyard, Wong Chut King took to his spartan quarters at the Globe. The gaslight shed a weak gold halo over the bunk where Wong lay, drawing his knees up to cradle a knot of pain that pulsed in his groin. He shifted uneasily on his cot. Local healers offered herbs to ease his aches, ascribed to a cranky middle-aged bladder. A fierce fever made him sweat and shiver by turns. He threw up his last meager meal. He fell into a fiery delirium.
As his fever soared, his mind became unmoored, floating freely in and out of consciousness. Where Wong wandered in his delirium—back to his native village or on to some fever dream of Gold Mountain—only he could see. Perhaps in febrile visions, Wong saw his barren cell pulse with unearthly colors. Perhaps he saw himself as a young man, leaving his village of Pei Hang, in the county of Ling Yup.4 Crossing the Pacific to Gold Mountain, he discovered a town more gray than gold. Perhaps he saw himself in the sea of Chinatown bachelors, growing old an ocean away from their families, easing their bones by visiting “hundred-men’s-wives” in brothels called “green mansions.”5
Now, as Wong sank, the bacteria flourished in his glands and blood. Although it takes few plague bacteria to cause infection, the flea that bit Wong probably injected a lethal dose of fifteen thousand bacteria. Like most victims, he likely would have scratched at the bite, driving the germs deeper. At once they multiplied, spreading from the flea bite on his leg up toward the lymph node in his pelvis. Lymph glands, the sentries of the immune system, struggled to contain the invaders. The lymph node grew swollen, inflamed, and tender to the touch. His fever rose. His tongue turned white and furry, and sores crusted his lips. Eventually the infection spilled over into his bloodstream. Giant germ-eating cells—macrophages—rushed to devour the plague bacteria but were overcome. Some bacteria were killed by antibodies that converged on the scene. But as they died, the bacteria detonated a final weapon—deadly toxins. These poisons ran riot in the blood, vandalizing the tissues of the heart, liver, and spleen. Under this assault, the organs began to hemorrhage and disintegrate. Vessels dilated, and blood pressure plunged. Septic shock set in. Wong Chut King descended into a coma.6
Bad luck was believed to visit any house where a tenant died, so Wong’s inert body was hauled from the Globe’s basement and carried to a nearby coffin shop. The sau pan po was literally a shop for selling “long-life boards.”7 But there, Wong’s life ended. His agonal gasps slowed, their intervals lengthening. His chest contracted. He exhaled his last breath.
When police surgeon F. P. Wilson arrived at the Wing Sang coffin shop, he unwrapped the corpse. His fingers began palpating the contours of Wong’s livid form, where rigor mortis was beginning to set in. His fingers found the swollen lymph glands. Plainly visible on the dead man’s thigh was a small sore, festering where Wong had scratched at some irritation. Perhaps it was an insect bite. The police surgeon sent for city health officer A. P. O’Brien. Together they telephoned a young city bacteriologist named Wilfred Kellogg.
As midnight approached, Wilson, O’Brien, and Kellogg performed a postmortem examination, mining the body for clues. They pierced the lumps and withdrew fluid from the knot of inflamed glands. They extracted blood and straw-colored lymph fluid, with bits of pink pulpy tissue from the body, saving it for analysis. Under the microscope lens, a swarm of bacteria swam into focus—clusters of short, rod-shaped germs with rounded tips that, when stained, turned pink and looked like closed safety pins.
It looked suspiciously like plague.
Plague reports had been trickling out of Hong Kong and Hawaii for some time, putting the city’s h
ealth officers on alert for any sudden death from fever. But the city’s bacteriology laboratory needed to confirm these suspicions. A final diagnosis required a senior expert, someone with a more sophisticated lab outfit and time to corroborate the findings. They knew where to find such an expert, at the quarantine station on Angel Island, but city officials didn’t wait for a definitive diagnosis.
Police officers descended on Chinatown in the darkness, stringing ropes around its dozen square blocks. Whites were ushered out of Chinatown, and the Chinese were sealed inside. Panic exploded among the confined. Some raced the length of the barriers, pacing the perimeter, looking for a way out. But police patrolled the barricades, clubs at the ready. Only police and health officers could cross the cordon sanitaire.
Making his evening rounds, a reporter for Chung Sai Yat Po, the Chinatown daily newspaper, saw the siege unfold. He raced back to the newspaper headquarters to prepare his report:
The Caucasian doctor examining the body was shocked to find that the person died of an epidemic illness. That is why they put the quarantine on Chinatown to prevent spreading of the disease. Alas, the epidemic was caused by the imbalance of Qi, the energy of the four seasons. It cannot be spread from person to person…. By Friday, it is hoped that we will know that this was not the plague. Otherwise what happened in Honolulu might happen to us.8
“Honolulu”—fear clutched the throats of all who whispered the word. Chinatown’s residents knew all about the incineration of Honolulu just a couple of months earlier. As the crowds milled about in increasing alarm, they watched as Wong Chut King’s clothes and bedding were pitched into the street and set alight. Flames crackled and smoke curled up, showering ashes like gray snow. Health officers lugged in sulfur pots and began fumigating the coffin shop. The air smelled of rotten eggs. Wong’s body was wrapped in a linen shroud that had been soaked in an antiseptic solution of bichloride of mercury and sealed in a lead coffin lined with powdery chloride of lime. The coffin was loaded onto a horse cart and driven over cobblestones west of downtown to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. There, the body was given to the flames.