← New Books Network
New Books Network
Dafeng Xu, "Chinatown: San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy" (JHU Press, 2026)
00:53:53
Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:00]
A
New Year, new Me. Cute, but how about New Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're gonna crush start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on fico's great model, offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.
- [00:28]
B
Experian welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:36]
C
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Dafeng Shu about his book titled Chinatown, San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2026. Now, this book, as the title suggests, takes us to San Francisco, but not just 1906 earthquake. We're going to be looking at Chinatown beforehand, to some extent, Chinatown during, and crucially as well, Chinatown after, because anyone who goes to San Francisco now, it's pretty hard to miss Chinatown. It is the largest, the oldest Chinatown in North America. It's massive still. And yet, as this book suggests, that was not inevitable. It did not fare particularly well during the earthquake and it could have been, well, not rebuilt at all, or rebuilt very differently. So there's a really interesting history to understand here. Dafang, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
- [01:37]
B
Thank you for having me. Thanks.
- [01:39]
C
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions are you asking? How did this project develop?
- [01:49]
B
So I'm Dafeng Xu. I was trained as an urban planner and urban planning scholar. And in our field, a very big topic is about studying immigrants, neighborhoods and communities. And in the US it is a big topic. I think in the UK and in many, many countries, it is a big topic. So for many Chinese immigrants in the 19th century and even today, San Francisco is their gateway city. And actually many of them stay there forever. So anything that happens in San Francisco would be interesting for the history of Chinese immigration to the US and this 1906 earthquake was one of the most influential events in history because it was massive and also because it was during a time when discrimination against Chinese immigration and actually all immigration, but definitely Chinese immigration in particular was on a sharp rise at the turn of the 20th century. But then, as we can see today, San Francisco's Chinatown seemed to be a symbol of cultural diversity and cultural inclusion. So there was a striking conflict between the anti immigration politics and people's positive attitude towards this ethnic neighborhood. So I wanted to know what exactly happened, like what the earthquake changed the Chinatown and the Chinese people and also the non Chinese people and what it actually didn't change. So this book was developed based on my postdoctoral training at a population center where we study a lot of census statistics. So, you know, the old census statistics were written by hand, but we had a lot of tools today to. To digitize those statistics. And we'll also have new development of digitizing the newspapers, memoirs and diaries. And so with these new materials, I would like to go to this kind of old topic that has been studied in a few books, but there are new materials that I would like to go through this question again. But it is not only because it is a classical question. And I was just thinking that maybe I can bring my own perspectives as well. Because I am originally from China, but in the early years of my academic career I was more interested in European immigration at the same period of time because there are just more European immigrants than the Asian immigrants at a time. And back then there were actually not so many Asians. Today we already have so many good Asian American historians and many of them were born in America. And they tell very, very good stories about how Asians become Americans as a process of the so called assimilation or Americanization. But ultimately it was still difficult to become Americans with all the challenges faced by the Chinese and the whole Chinese San Francisco communities inevitably present, presented some kinds of Chineseness for several decades. And those African, I'm sorry, Asian American historians have their roots here and they tell their stories very, very well for their ancestors. But my background also helps understand this history from a new perspective. So from the Chinese perspective from Asia. So I think that's also something that I can contribute to this Odes question. That's why I kind of wanted to develop this book in the very beginning.
- [05:52]
C
That's a very helpful introduction on a number of different facets. So thank you for starting us off with that. We also of course need to introduce Chinatown in San Francisco in the sort of later 1800s, early 1900s, before we get to the earthquake. So what is Chinatown like at this point? What kinds of jobs, for instance, are Chinese people in San Francisco doing at this point?
- [06:13]
B
San Francisco was a pretty new city at the time. It was not comparable to, for Example New York or Philadelphia or definitely not London or UK cities. And it started in the mid 19th century as a place where people went there to find gold. And after several decades there was no gold, but it became an industrial city. So it was, it was very good. And people found jobs in manufacturing and some very, very early financial sectors. And before the earthquake, Chinatown had become not only a place for the Chinese immigrants to find gold, but also found jobs in factories, for example. And before the earthquake it was very, very crowded and it was a fairly big neighborhoods, but it was still over overcrowded and it hosted at least 30,000 people in a fairly large neighborhood, but it was not large enough. So the buildings were not always male maintained. And if you look at the census statistics, you can also find very striking pattern called occupational co residence. So like we often talk about travel from home to work and this is actually a big issue in modern days. But at the time the Chinese immigrants didn't need to worry about this and in a bad way, kind of because they worked and live in the same place. Like they worked in the dormitories and live in the dormitories. And so the living conditions were pretty bad. So if now today, if you look at San Francisco or in London, you can see a lot of Chinese style buildings. And back in the 19th century these buildings definitely existed, but they were just high end restaurants. And most of the buildings were totally just functional without any Chinese style decoration. So finally this aligned with the job pattern that was, that was not very high end. And definitely these jobs had room for improvement, for example, laundry workers, restaurants workers, manual labors in the manufacturing sectors. And looking at the wage data, these are all the lower wage jobs for Chinese immigrants for any people in the United States at a time. So there were business people for sure, but because the trade back then was already very important and those business people were doing okay. But overall the majority of the Chinatown's residents were of low occupational standings. And people kind of pictured the Chinatown as a poor neighborhood. And picture, of course, the neighborhood residents were poor as well.
- [09:19]
C
Okay, that's helpful to establish in a baseline as it were. But you cover obviously a lot of change in this period over multiple decades. And it is, as you've mentioned, kind of already a pretty big neighbourhood. And of course it gets bigger later on. So that's a lot to tackle. Can you sort of take us through briefly the key themes that you've identified to sort of help group together the things you found in all of these records?
- [09:44]
B
So I just thought about the themes, you know, Perhaps as a neighborhood resident myself. So I don't live in central Chinatown, but I live there and interviewed people, people for a couple of months for this and other projects. So I just look at the themes that were kind of related to myself. So, for example, I look at family. I look at language, housing and occupations, and economic status and culture. So these are the themes that I study, and that's. And to study them just because they are the things that Chinese immigrants care most and American people, non Chinese people, care most as well.
- [10:35]
C
Yeah, this caring a lot about some of these themes definitely comes up. So if we look at, for instance, ideas around kind of what was happening and what people thought should be happening around gender, marriage, and housing, this seems to have been something that Chinese immigrants to San Francisco in the 19th century were really focused on. But also non Chinese immigrants. Right. The people already in San Francisco were also really interested in what these Chinese immigrants were doing in these ways. So what was happening in these aspects? And why was it such a big deal to kind of everyone?
- [11:06]
B
First of all, we need to go back to the previous question a little bit if we kind of want to link them together. So if you think about gender or marriage, they were important because they were part of people's lives, but they were probably not the main driver of immigration that made so many Chinese immigrants and other immigrants from Europe came to the United States. So the key topic is probably economic status and earnings because people wanted to move to the United States to. To get some money. But, you know, you come to the United States, but you still need to lead a life. So you are still interested in gender and marriage because you want to have a family to support you. So that's where the gender and marriage kick in. Because normally, at least in the experiences of Chinese, what I find is that if people are here with the family, the family members can better support the breadwinner. And so even if it's a marriage, it's not the key reason why they came to the United States. It was a big driver for improving their earnings. And also marriage is kind of a sustainable path to accumulate wealth generation by generation, and especially compared to the earnings back in China. So back then, people used the term bachelor society as a depiction of the Chinese neighborhood and Chinese residents. And I will discuss this in a few minutes. But it was true for actually for all the immigrants, including European ones. But European immigrants generally do not need to worry about it too much because they had a path of marriage assimilation. So at the time, it was actually slower than people's perception in terms of European immigrants, marital assimilation, which means that they could marry native born American more often American white residents. And especially for some populations like Jews and Italians, it was actually more difficult than expected. But it did happen steadily. It is not possible for Chinese and it is not only about culture, it is actually not legal. So that's the reason why if a Chinese immigrant wants to start a family, then this person and normally this husband need to bring their own wife. So that's the reason why marriage is kind of a big deal in, in San Francisco, Chinatown and in the entire Asian American community. And for the non Chinese people, there were different reasons why they cared about gender marriage and housing. So when it comes to the gender marriage, it is more about family value. And it is also which is not very good about allegation of prostitution that happens in, in San Francisco's Chinatown. And for the housing was a totally different issue. It was just that as I said before, Chinatown was overcrowded, it was not well maintained. And the non Chinese residents thought that it was more about the idea that San Francisco is a modern city and in San Francisco we shouldn't have such a bad neighborhood. So. But their worries about the gender marriage were pretty different from what we see the gender and the marriage pattern today. They had an old time believing that having a family and a few kids is a good thing for American society. And this is what we are. And you should be like that as well. But I would say that these were more like the excuse of excluding the Chinese. Because if you look at the policy text, there were many, many contradictory arguments inside this question. And this is also the reason why the Chinese immigrants were so furious about those attacks on their family values. So because back in the 1870s there was a policy formally forbidding female immigration. And it was mainly because they thought that Chinese San Franciscans in Chinatown were doing prostitution, which was largely exaggerated. It definitely existed, but it was very rare. And then after forbidding marry female immigration, the American people accused Chinese immigrants that, you know, you don't have marriage, all of you are having a bachelor society. So it is against American values. So this is very self contradictory. So basically it looks like that the American people wanted Chinese immigrants to assimilate into the US society by starting a family. But then there was a policy actually banning Chinese immigrants to do so.
- [16:56]
C
Yeah, I can imagine how that would create all sorts of conflicting tensions and incentives as well. So does that change at all in the kind of post earthquake San Francisco? Does that influence family and gender dynamics once Chinatown is built, is rebuilt?
- [17:15]
B
Sorry yeah, so actually, it changed in a very, very dramatic way. So after the 1906 earthquake, there was a concept called paper songs. And why is that? It is because the documents were all burned during the San Francisco earthquake. So it was not only a seismic wave. So if you think about old buildings, they were all burned. And this happened in Chinatown. This happened across San Francisco. So the City hall was burned, and the materials, the documents were burned, and all of the files disappeared. So this gave Chinese San Franciscans a kind of loophole. And the adults just claimed that they were citizens, but the citizenship papers were lost. And then the American government could only, you know, say that, well, it seems that you are your legit resident here, and probably you're just citizen, so I will just give you a new citizenship paper. And eventually they shut it down, but it lasted for a few years. And so this helped those Chinese San Franciscans to bring their. Their. Their family members to the United States because these family members could automatically get citizenship as well. And even if they were born in China, even if they had nothing to do with the United States. But most of the immigrants were paper songs. And it is the historical terms that were used by scholars. And if you look at census statistics, the newly released ones, actually, the proportion of those paper songs was probably exaggerated. And you can see wives, you can see daughters, for sure. But definitely the majority of them were paper sons, because they made most economic sense, because the sons would become adult men and they would become the workers in San Francisco. So this is a new pattern. There were new Chinese immigrants coming to San Francisco, and there was a time when Chinese immigration was largely banned. And in the future years, the entire immigration ideal of immigration was almost burned as well. So this is definitely a big change. And in a rare case, Chinatown still could accommodate a little bit more people, and they did find the source of the new commerce. But in general, I wouldn't say that the earthquake changed much or changed the overall demographic pattern. And it changed a little bit because the average age became younger, and there were paper songs, and there were definitely some women. But the essential policy didn't change at all. So eventually it was not a sustainable process where you can start a family, either just bringing your kid, bringing your daughter or wives, or more commonly, bringing your Parisans. So it is not very sustainable. And it lasted only a few years. And it's a very good comparison. If we look at Japanese immigration, that happened at the same time. So Japanese immigration was also adapted, but at the time, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a gentleman's agreement with Japanese Government which allowed Japanese immigrants to bring wives in a more formal way. And you could see that Japanese immigrants did bring their wives to the United States rather than having a song. And if you compare the two types of things, in the case of Chinese immigrants, it was more like people just secretly transported some songs. And many of them were actually not their biological songs. It was just that they wanted to send some Chinese people in China, wanted to send some of their young men to the United States to earn some money and send the money back to China. In the case of Japanese, immigration was really a policy that tried to build the Japanese community, and they did it. So at the time bringing wives, which are much more solid and safer policy for Japanese immigrants. And you can see that this is a striking difference. But in sum, I wouldn't say that the earthquake changed much about the gender and family pattern.
- [22:13]
C
Still interesting to hear about the short lived loophole and the effect that things like that, like City hall burning down, can really have on people. So that's interesting. Even if in the long run that kind of loophole was closed. Thinking then about the people that came in maybe during that period or through sort of other methods, newcomers to San Francisco, it's still obviously politically a trope for people already in the US today to make demands that anyone coming in needs to learn English. You also talk about in the book though, that while that was true then also the Chinese immigrants themselves often considered it important to learn English, but not always for the same reasons that the Americans were demanding it. So why was English important and what were the kind of different reasons for the different groups to prioritize it?
- [23:02]
B
So to start, I think they did share some common reasons, and these are the economic reasons. But of course, inside economic reasons, the rationales were perfectly different. So for Chinese immigrants and for all the immigrants, speaking English is kind of a big step towards getting more money. So if you can speak the local language, you can earn more because you can get better jobs and better earnings. And some of the poorest jobs were, for example, inside the kitchen and people just cook and there was little interaction with the customers. And also the same thing about manual labors in the factory. But if you can speak English, you can move to the so called the big bazaars, the big markets that could accommodate a lot of so called Western customers and American customers. And that's a good thing because this is better job and many people are interested in Chinese goods. And this is especially true after the San Francisco earthquake because Chinatown became more commercial, featuring international trade that had better buildings for the market and speaking two languages definitely helped talking with people who buy their things. And for the local American or non Chinese people, you know, I don't really think that they care too much about whether the Chinese immigrants were poor or not. They were probably happy to see that these people earned not as much as we do, but. But they also want to interact with the Chinese. And because they wanted to do the economy with the Chinese people, they wanted to buy things from the east, from East Asia, so they wanted to. To speak English with the Chinese. But I think non Chinese people, American people, also saw this as a cultural thing, because if most Chinese people were segregated and they've stayed within their neighborhoods, Americans shouldn't care that much about language issues. Right. There will be little introductions anyway, you know, except for shopping in Chinatown. But overall, American people think that while it is a naturally American thing, if a group of immigrants come to the United States and they should speak English no matter what, no matter where they live, no matter how segregated they live, it is a cultural thing, they should speak English. And so that's the reason why they kind of emphasize English learning and English speaking for Chinese immigrants. And you probably, you have heard a lot about when I say Americans, Chinese, etc. As Americans, non Chinese, but many times I would just say Americans versus Chinese, even if those Chinese immigrants were already in the United States because they had no pathway towards citizenship. So even if both groups of people are in the United States, I think it is kind of natural to just call them Americans versus Chinese. But even in this case, Americans wanted the Chinese immigrants to learn English because they were physically present in the United States, and it's kind of a cultural requirement for them to speak the local language. But such kinds of cultural thing or some minor point, so they didn't exist among the Chinese immigrants as well, but it was the minor point and was not as important as economic reasons.
- [27:09]
C
Okay, yeah, that's helpful to understand. And this point of sort of segregation versus assimilation, I think is really interesting because it doesn't just show up kind of in this initial moment of Chinese people coming over to San Francisco. You talk in the book that kind of when, after the earthquake, when there were questions around sort of how to rebuild Chinatown, whether to rebuild Chinatown, these questions around assimilation and segregation and English language come up again. Right. Do you want to tell us about that?
- [27:37]
B
So I think it is a natural question about why these people don't speak English. Right. Because it is a cultural requirement for American people. So, but let's go back to the very early version of language learning from education. Okay. So we all know that education is probably a very good channel for people to learn language and especially learn English in the United States. So before the earthquake, Chinatown had a very small school school, and then there was very, very few Chinese kids set. It turned to no public school setting in San Francisco for Chinese people for decades. And then the government finally decided to start a school within Chinatown. And I'm not singling out Chinese because school segregation was common and it is for African Americans as well. But for Chinese, a very big issue is that their native language is not English. And when such debates came up as a big event happened, for example, what you said, San Francisco's Chinatown, whether it should be rebuilt after the earthquake, definitely this hurt a lot because there was just no channel for the Chinese immigrants to learn English. And especially it is a crucial thing for the second generation Chinese immigrants if they could not speak English, and that would be very bad for them to transfer themselves from children to workers in the future. So there was one channel which is going to religious school. But most Chinese people don't like it because of the price, because more importantly, they just didn't like the religion part because they were not Christians. Well, I need to clarify that. In the Chinese school, the official language was actually English. But in such a setting where all the students were Chinese and people spoke Chinese at home, it was not easy to learn Chinese after all. So after the 1906 earthquake, language definitely became a new issue as well. And you could see that some people were thinking about, well, we probably treated Chinese immigrants a little bit too harsh because we didn't really give them the chance to learn English. Right. So they were thinking about public schools for sure. And the schools were rebuilt and in a very nice way. The architecture was great. The problem is that the policy didn't change substantially. So you cannot just have a school. And then you cut off all the interactions between the Chinese people and non Chinese people and other ethnic groups. So in this case, language learning was just very slow. And here we have another comparison, which is again, Japanese immigrants who are allowed to be enrolled in non segregated schools. So they became highly segregated and I'm sorry, highly assimilated. And they assimilated into the US society very, very, very quickly. And why is that? Because of. It is because of those desegregation policy. And just like marriage and gender, the American immigration policy was kind of paradoxical at this point. So the policymakers required language assimilation, but then they created barriers to such simulations. Eventually it was like a vicious cycle. And it was difficult for Chinese immigrants to break inside the United States. So I would say that definitely language once again became a hot topic after the decision of whether rebuilding the Chinese town or not. But actually, some local policymakers also realized that it was probably not a very reasonable excuse to just exclude Chinese immigrants based on their language simulation, because the conditions were just not very good for them to learn English. Eventually, though, the policy didn't change much. So you can see that the physical conditions of the neighborhood changed a lot, but it was not really the language pattern that could change immediately, like in the case of Japanese immigration. So if you look at the census statistics, two decades, three decades later, definitely language assimilation steadily happened, but it just couldn't happen overnight.
- [32:45]
C
Yeah, of course, nothing happens overnight. And aside from questions around language assimilation or segregation, there's also residential segregation and assimilation. Right. Because, of course, Chinatown, by definition, like, implies that the people from China live in this neighbourhood. Like, there's an element of segregation kind of in the name. And one could think that, oh, well, you know, it's all been destroyed by the earthquake, so let's just rebuild a bunch of houses and kind of anyone could live there. Right. It wasn't inevitable necessarily, that, like, a thing called Chinatown would be recreated. So why was that, in fact, the case? Right. Segregation was kind of part of the point. Right.
- [33:22]
B
It is kind of actually the starting point of the Chinese neighborhoods back when Chinatown was built many, many decades ago. But people have different perceptions about whether recitation, segregation is actually a good thing or the bad things. And nowadays, if we look at scholars, like academic scholars, we usually just think that residential segregation is generally a bad thing, because normally you just cannot earn that much within a segregated neighborhood. And for the Chinese, they definitely wanted to move out of their neighborhoods. And if you look at places outside of San Francisco's Chinatown and in American West, Chinese immigrants were actually not very, very segregated, and San Francisco's China was actually an exception, and the people had traveled across the Pacific Ocean, so why not move a little bit more miles and for getting more opportunities. But the problem is that there was discrimination, and it was not only about discriminating the workplace. It was the real danger that the Chinese people might be attacked violently. And this exactly happened in the American west in the 1880s. And you could see that there were literal massacres and people destroyed, physical beatings for Chinese immigrants. It was definitely more difficult to burn entire neighborhoods if your neighborhood is large enough. So that's the reason why, on the one hand, Chinese immigrants wanted to move out of their segregated neighborhood. But on the other hand, residential segregations kind of helped them a little bit as well, because segregation provided social networks. And this is even true after the earthquake, if you consider that language is a big problem. It was no clear marriage pattern. There were some paper sons and paper wives, but there were just a certain proportion. But not everyone could bring their wives or their sons. And even if they brought their sons, they were not biological sons. And there was due discrimination outside of the neighborhood. So eventually people said that, well, a good Chinatown changed the perceptions of the Chinese culture, but not in time, immigration policy. And plus the Chinatown became better, so why leave to Chinatown? So that's the reason why I would say that residential segregation is definitely bad for many people. But on the other hand, it also provides some basic safety and some economic opportunities as well for the Chinese. And this is also true for the version for the American and or non Chinese people as well. So previously Chinatown was considered bad and so was Chinese immigrants. But again, you could do, for example, massacres and physical violence in non segregated neighborhood in American west in a very, very bad way. And this happened a lot of times. And that's sad. And, but fortunately for the Chinese immigrants, and unfortunately for the American populist, they couldn't do that in San Francisco. You just cannot destroy the Chinatown overnight. So since the American populists could not really destroy Chinatown overnight and could not destroy Chinese immigrants overnight, then probably keeping them segregated would be a good idea. So their point was not to break segregation, break residential segregation. And to some extent, their idea of trying to claim that living in a segregated area is bad is something like the requirement for the family values and the requirement for language. It was more like a cultural thing because they wanted to label America as a melting pot. And if you live in a segregated neighborhood, it's probably not like melting pot. So there's not a future of Melbourne Port. So people wanted Chinese immigrants to theoretically move outside of their neighborhood. But in reality, they didn't really like the idea that having a Chinese immigrant, having a Chinese family in their own community, and at least in the first place, and if so, then keeping Chinese immigrants segregated would still be a good idea. So I think their main, main argument was that something just Chinatown was in the city centers and it was a very valuable place. Perhaps they should be segregated in less valuable suburbs rather than the city center. But they did find that segregation, residential segregation as a solution as well. Just like Chinese immigrants, they definitely picture that in a different way. But such kinds of feelings coexisted among the two groups of People.
- [39:10]
C
That's really interesting to think about what's happening in San Francisco and the comparison as well to other places in the US Looking then at this rebuilding of Chinatown, with all of these politics of residential and linguistic segregation, can we talk about the architecture a little bit and the kind of identity of being Chinese? What did that mean for the new Chinatown?
- [39:31]
B
The Chinese identity encompassed a lot of things, and there was something that always happened. And this is a very broad idea about connecting with the homeland, connecting with China. So it can be about economic ties, it can be about family ties. And this happened a lot, of course, and it is definitely about architecture as well. And this is also the part that many today's Asian American historians might not have the same feelings with me, because their families have been there for so many generations. They were the third generation, fourth generation. So the idea of connecting with the homeland is probably stronger for me compared to them. And if you think about architecture, it is more like an umbrella, and it includes a lot of things. It was about also about economics because you need to get money from the homeland, because you are doing trade and you need money to pay for the reconstruction. And it was also about politics, so how Chinatown could be built. But also this was another way for the Chinese immigrants to show that, well, we have good culture as well. So you American people always say that, well, we are the Western culture and we are good, but Chinese culture can be as elegant as Western culture. And that was under an era that there was strong anti immigration politics and Chinese Central Ciscans. And many of them were actually doing okay, and some of them were doing very good. And they were just like Americans by the time the San Francisco earthquake happened. So they still found that they were excluded from the mainstream American society just because they were Chinese, no matter how well they could speak English, no matter how much money they earned. So they stepped back a little bit and they thought, well, maybe we should show our Chinese identity rather than trying to develop such kinds of American identity. So. And they thought that architecture would be a good way to show and to show up Chinese, to show up Chinese identity, because that's about culture. And they thought that American people should be interested in this. And indeed, the results were good. So the Chinatown was built with good architecture, and American people liked it a lot. And they didn't really use the words like inclusion or diversity back then, but what they said was essentially just Chinatown was a good contributor to San Francisco's cultural diversity. And they were proud that the United States is the country where there are lots of different Types of cultures, and Chinese is one of them. So I would say that this is a way that Chinese San Franciscans found that no matter how Americans they tried to become, they just could not be accepted. Light to bite. So they changed their idea to show that, well, Chinese culture was also good. And this indeed attracted people with more like a metropolitan fars in San Francisco. And they might not really be that interested in the modern ideas of diversity, et cetera, et cetera, but they definitely like the idea of including many, many different types of cultures just to make their cities look good.
- [43:37]
C
That's really interesting to think about the incentives there for kind of getting people on side. Thinking then about all of this together. To what extent do can we say that the goals of Chinese San Franciscans, especially the ideas of kind of moving out of the poverty and over overcrowded housing you talked about before in 1906, how much did that actually happen after the earthquake when Chinatown was rebuilt?
- [44:04]
B
I would say that it was not very successful. So and American people, and if they were not Chinese, they thought that, well, it was a big success because their perception of Chinese culture and Chinese neighborhoods were becoming so much better. But ultimately, as I said before, immigrants came to the United States because they wanted to have a better life. And so eventually wanted to focus more on economic status, economic returns of any project. So like rebuilding Chinatown. So definitely it was not a complete failure, but it was not very successful. And I said it was not a complete failure because for example, the Chinatown was reviewed in a way that it was delicate markets, the so called big bazaars. And people could earn more money by doing trade with local people, local customers for sure. And merchants and salespersons became one of the biggest occupation groups after the earthquake. And this didn't happen before the earthquake. And after the earthquake there was a striking pattern and definitely this helped, but there was no substantial improvement. And that was because generally the domestic policy didn't change a lot or maybe didn't change at all to many extent. And with the same policy, the social environment didn't change as well. And the Chinese immigrants still faced a lot of different types of challenges in the labor market. So eventually Chinatown was a good thing to have, but it didn't change the thing that Chinese immigrants cared most, which is economic well being.
- [46:08]
C
That's really interesting to understand and definitely sort of takes us back to those questions that you came into the project with. So I think a good place to wrap up our discussion on the book. What may I ask, are you working on next? Any related or unrelated projects you want to tell us a little bit about?
- [46:25]
B
I'm in again. In the beginning of my academic career, I was more interested in the United States, actually the European immigration. But now after writing this book, I'm looking at China as well. And I wanted to see how China became more or less connected to the world during the 20th century and how, for example, immigration played a role here. Like after 1949, there was a new People's Republic of China and there were some immigrants who came back from the United States, who came back from the United Kingdom. And what were the policy implications for these people? And what were the perspectives of immigration from the American side and from the Chinese side? And this is actually something about the policy implications of this Chinatown book as well. So, for example, how do we treat these immigrants? And currently look at the Asian American historians, many people would think about this from the America perspectives. And people say that Asian American history is actually part of American history and this is their task. And this is definitely true. But you can think about it was also a part of the global history as well. And if you look at the so called populism in the 19th century, there was American populism that basically created a social environment behind this book. Now there is American populism as well. There is Chinese populism as well. And it was actually as strong as the populism in the United States. So and you can see that many Chinese people nowadays would develop the ideas of those immigrants were traitors. You know, they escaped from the country and we were poor, we're not doing very well. But they didn't stay to build the new country with us and they just moved to the United States and they kind of, they betrayed us. And populism plays a very big role role here. But if we think about a new project, it is very easy to think about how immigration could actually do good things rather than being treated as traitors or rather than ignite those debates on populism. Because if we think about international collaboration on trade, this already happened in the 19th century. And scientific collaboration, this is pretty new things. And the connection between public policy or domestic policy and international policy, it happened in the 19th century already. It is becoming important, increasingly important nowadays, given the information technology and how good and how bad international relations can be, and whether immigration and those immigrants or immigrants can play a role of reducing such tensions between the countries. And this is something that I'd like to study, but from the Chinese perspective. But eventually I would consider it as a global history rather than in this book. It is more like an American history book, but if we broaden the idea a little bit more, it is actually connecting different countries across the world.
- [50:06]
C
Well, that certainly sounds like plenty to keep you busy. So while you are off exploring those ideas, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled chinatown, San Francisco's 1906 earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2026. Dafang, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [50:26]
B
Thank you, Sam.