Season of the Witch by David Talbot

Author:David Talbot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

21

THE EMPRESS OF CHINATOWN

LIKE WILLIE BROWN, her longtime political comrade, Rose Pak mastered San Francisco by walking it. Young Willie, a transplant from the sleepy East Texas railroad junction of Mineola, strolled the streets of San Francisco all day long in the early 1950s after moving in with his flashy, high-rolling uncle, Itsie Collins, in the Fillmore. Uncle Itsie, who gave his nephew some pocket change every morning, advised him to talk to as many people as he could during his daily wanderings—a stiff challenge for a seventeen-year-old black kid from Texas, particularly in some less than hospitable neighborhoods. But it turned out to be good training for the man who became San Francisco’s most successful African-American politician, and the city’s first black mayor.

Rose Pak learned much about San Francisco politics from watching its master, Willie Brown, at work. Pak would turn herself into Chinatown’s top power broker. In the process, she was able to protect her own community from suffering the same fate as the Fillmore district.

Pak arrived in the city as a teenager in 1967 to study at the Catholic-run San Francisco College for Women. It was evening when she landed at the airport after a long flight from Hong Kong. She was alone and had no family or friends to greet her. But Pak was used to relying on herself. In 1951, when she was three, her family fled China after the Communist takeover, but only Rose, her younger sister, and her mother made it to Hong Kong. Her father, a wealthy businessman on the Communists’ blacklist, disappeared during their escape and was never seen again. At age nine, Pak was sent to a Portuguese Catholic boarding school for girls in Macao that was run by Italian nuns. There were only a few other Chinese students. She had to learn Portuguese, as well as Italian and English. The nuns liked to make her stand in front of the class and read from Western classics while the other girls roared with laughter at her accent. But Pak had a strong will. By the second year, she was running the school’s boarding company.

After Hong Kong’s neon blaze and hustle and bustle, the streets of San Francisco seemed so quiet and dark to Pak. She was staying with a doctor in Pacific Heights, where she received room and board in return for being his wife’s companion. When Pak looked out her window, she couldn’t see one person on the street. But she was enchanted by the city’s fairy-tale beauty. The painted lady Victorians looked like dollhouses to her.

Chinatown had a special allure for Pak. It seemed like an old movie set, with its green pagoda buildings, strings of red lanterns, and ferocious lion statue guarding the entrance gate on Grant Avenue. But the neighborhood’s quaint exterior masked a social tempest. Following the immigration reform law of 1965, which eased the longtime anti-Chinese quotas, a new wave of immigrants came flooding into San Francisco’s Chinatown, West Coast capital of the Chinese diaspora.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.