A Case study of Old World vs. New World
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| Old man with cane in Ross Alley |
San Francisco is steeped in various subcultures, living in nearly isolated modules within the city’s frame. One such subculture can be found in Chinatown, the largest of its kind in the world outside of Asia. Here, Chinese residents have lived for over one hundred and fifty years. Past the tall steel buildings, marble store fronts and glass bank doors of Market Street, and wedged between the refined shopping corners of Union Square, and the rows of colorful homes in Nob Hill, lies Chinatown.
Though it is surrounded by different realms that leave it intact, Chinatown is crowded in a cluster of culture and sound and smell that is unlike any other in the city. To live in this pluralistic society, the youth of Chinatown have adopted the material and technological fads from the modern world, yet many still attend Chinese high school, speak mainly Chinese, and live with their parents and grandparents who rarely step outside the boundaries of Grant and Stockton streets.
On my first visit to Chinatown, I spotted three young girls sporting Abercrombie sweatshirts, boarding the city bus. A young couple, their arms around one another, teased by their gaggle of peers who came up behind them outside a storefront, taking pictures on their iPhone. A group of teen boys, eating fried wontons as they swaggered along in their loose jeans, wearing Giants jerseys. Two girls I passed heading back from Union Square in the tunnel, thin and brimming with arms full of shopping bags from Forever 21 and GAP. Clearly, the modern world and its ensuing trends have influenced nearly every nook and cranny of today’s America. This applies even to Chinatown, where teens speak Mandarin into their iPhones.
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| Two cell phones and a frappachino |
I set out at the beginning of summer 2009 to study San Francisco’s Chinatown through photojournalism. Through my observations, I wanted to reach a better understanding of the area’s old and new worlds and discover if a rift exists between them. I set out to photograph both, to study intently the chasm between them—however wide or small it might be. Over the many hours I spent on the streets of Chinatown, I came to discover that the social parameters of each generation are comparably similar to any other neighborhood within America today. However, in Chinatown this comparison is swollen by language and culture so entrapped within the larger city.
Driven by Henri Cartierre Brasson’s “the decisive moment” approach to photojournalism, I soon discovered that taking photographs of people on the street was one of the more difficult things I’ve ever done. All too often I would fumble with the focus on my camera, missing that decisive moment—seeing it in my mind as a subject walked by—then losing it as quickly as it came. This work was frustrating at times. How could I capture what I wanted my audience to see?
When I first began my project, I would park in the garage near Union Square, because I assumed paying the cheap toll there would be easier than trying to find a space to fit my SUV in the crowded streets of Chinatown itself. The long dark tunnel of Stockton Street led me into the time warp. At first I find myself gravitating toward the touristy stores, the over-crowded boutiques with shelves full of knock-off D&G sunglasses and faux leather bags. Why was I going in here? I thought to myself. This is not the real Chinatown. Or is it? Does the culture itself now embody this world of tourism and materialism?
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| Pearl Bazaar |
For many residents of Chinatown, this is probably the best form of making a living; they cater to the wide-eyed Americans and foreigners who pass through these streets every year, seeking out a piece of history. Purchasing paper fans and lanterns, believing they now own a piece of Chinatown—or worse, that they understand it. That is what I want to avoid: pretending I understand anything about the culture and the dichotomies within it. Studying another culture means remaining humble. I can’t make assumptions. Without knowing the language or being raised within its walls, all I can do and want to do is strive to learn from its contradictions and beauty and ugliness. I want to read literature and study work that other artists have based on this place. I not only want to take photographs, I want to feel that they are taken for a reason.
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| Waiting for the bus |
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“Oh. Sorry,” I told her and hurried on, replacing my lens cap. I was quickly becoming discouraged. How was I supposed to do this? How could I come to understand these people without understanding their traditions, their language, or what was polite or impolite.
From then on I began asking if I could take photos, but many were still camera shy. Two young women working in a glitzy boutique on Stockton Street shook there heads when I asked them. I tried to sneak a shot, but again felt unwelcome.
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| Hair salon on Stockton Street |
That same day, I came across a small door which led to a narrow hallway filled with stores, like a mini shopping mall. The woman inside one of the stores was modern and had the demeanor of a mother, who was welcoming her daughter and her friends back from school.
“Can I take a picture?” I asked.
“What for? For your school, your business?” she questioned me.
“It’s a project for school.”
“Oh, for school is fine.” She must have felt reassured I wasn’t some journalist, some government spy who came to report her. I didn’t know. But I felt warmed by her invitation and began snapping pictures of the three girls who fingered jewelry at the front counter, oohing and ahhing over each piece, giggling as they leaned over one another, their arms already heavy with shopping bags and backs weighed down by school backpacks.
The woman was friendly once I talked to her. “Is this your store?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she told me flatly. She was laughing down the hall to another store owner and waved goodbye to her daughter who came in after school to say hello. Here was a working mother, dressed fashionably, her hair styled, her hands decked out with gold rings, making a living for her family by selling pricy clothing to the teens who came by before going home to do their homework.
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| After school at the Willie Woo Woo Wong Playground |
Certain locations in Chinatown welcomed opportunities for photographing different generations separately. At the Willie Woo Woo Wong Playground on Sacramento Street, kids and teens play basketball nearly everyday after school. The old playground is a hangout where groups of teens loiter near the swing sets or talk together on the concrete. Camera shy and quiet, they scurried away from me quickly. Yet four girls on a bench one afternoon let me into their after-school lives. Clutching ipods and coconut juice boxes, they glance sideways at the camera, perched on the bench, talking in low muffled whispers about things I cannot hear, smiling youthfully. One asked, “why are you taking pictures?” Another rolled her eyes at her, “she just told us, you dummy.”
In an opposing scene blocks away, circles of old men, crowd around Portsmouth square, playing cards and smoking fat cigarettes. Fifty years ago I could have seen the same picture, as if the generations of men swept through, clustering outside the playground on benches, arguing, laughing, dealing over their card games. No young Chinese people are within site, besides the occasional few who pass through, with backpacks and shopping bags. Old women set up their same circles, separate from the men. I watch as they set up makeshift card tables with cardboard boxes and fruit crates, the kind you might find dumped in an alley.
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| Some traditions never die |
Surprisingly, there are many young toddlers being looked after by their grandparents. I imagine this has occurred as more parents take over the family businesses, busy in shops and relying on their own parents to look after their children—an strong and endless cycle of family reliance.
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| A discussion over cards at Portsmouth Square |
The sound of sirens burst through the small streets, and fire trucks approached quickly, shocking the crowds on the corner of California and Grant as they stopped traffic. These fire trucks seemed like giants here in Chinatown, in my mind representing the outside industrial world, where most streets have expanded to fit them. People came out on their balconies to observe, old women rushed out of their shops. A grandmother stood holding the hand of her grandson in the crowd that watched the firemen unload their trucks and run into the smoke covered building—a restaurant that had caught fire. I snapped their photograph with people surrounding me shoulder to shoulder; some inching to get a glimpse of the fire and others to escape the crowds.
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| Grandmother and grandson on street corner during the fire |
An older man who had seen the fire, walked towards me, clutching his mouth in shock at what he had seen. Yet his face also possessed something that I realized only after I had printed the photograph of him. He was concerned, wearily escaping the crowds and mess the fire had caused. To me, he seemed to be escaping more. He was escaping the gaggles of tourists who crowded the sidewalk hoping to get a glimpse of the flames and see what the action was all about. He was escaping that destruction of the old restaurant that I later learned burned down from a grease fire in the kitchen. He, this older man, represented the “everyman” of Chinatown for his generation; hurrying away from the chaos of a modern world that changes so quickly.
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| During the fire |
Yet the fire also made me think of the history and cycle of life that Chinatown represents. Buildings burn, earthquakes shatter streets and lives, yet Chinatown rebuilds. It endures and preserves what matters—language, culture, family. On any given weekend, you can find a hundreds of people who call Chinatown their home, shopping at the fish markets on Stockton Street. A pungent rotting smell in the air wafts through the sidewalks, where pools of run-off gather from the ice the live fish are thrown on by butchers in bloody aprons.
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| Butcher through the glass |
There, an old lady was selling steamed buns, wrapped in tin foil on the sidewalk. She was old, her neck wrinkled with age, the soft skin shadowed by a bus that pulls up behind her, and people exit. A flood of a crowd sweeps by, a few gathering at her stand—a makeshift table top of milk crates—and she hands them their food, then scrawls in her notebook each purchase. I watch her for a while. I wonder silently how long she’s been doing this. It seems miniscule; perhaps once she aspired to be something greater, to escape the boundaries of her own home as a young woman, travel to the Theater district, audition and fly to New York to become an actress. Yes, perhaps once. Yet something about her home kept her there, hidden in a world of rich family traditions and the obligation of work and earning money.
Perhaps the greatest lesson I take from this project is the true, critical value of being out on the street with my camera, soaking in a culture from top to bottom, from alleyway to vegetable stand, from boutique to park bench; yet still keeping in mind that one can never fully comprehend the entire essence of what makes it run the way it does.
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| Selling lunch |
I do not venture to say that I now understand Chinatown solidly, but I have gained insights that I otherwise would never have known about its people and the everyday ebb and flow of its street life. I once read Fae Myenne Ng’s novel Bone, and I thought of my presumptions. Ng writes, “Looking out, I thought, So this is what Chinatown looks like from inside those dark Greyhound buses, this slow view, these strange color combinations, these narrow streets, this is what tourists come to see. I felt a small lightening up inside, because I knew, no matter what people saw, no matter how close they looked, our inside story is something entirely different” (Ng 145).
What I have learned is that Chinatown is America. It is not China. The glitzy storefronts, teeming with paper lanterns, wooden toy snakes, and jade Buddhas are the products of American tourism, of a Chinese-infused cultural sphere within San Francisco. I once believed that a rift existed between the older and younger generations of Chinatown, but I now know this is not entirely true. While the sadness and slow-moving nature of the street’s older generations struck me soundly, I conclude that Chinatown’s old world and new world are separate but intertwined.
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| Ehru player on Grant Street |
As the young generations stroll by cellphones in hand, a man plays his ehru on the sidewalk, his instrument case open for tips from strangers, the sound of the aching strings echo through Grant Street, recalling a time past. Yet older men and women his age lean against their storefront doors, speaking into cell phones as well, adapting to the technology and fast-forward culture of the modern age. In Chinatown, everything changes and everything stays the same. Though this small section of San Francisco adapts to the trends of the modern world, funded by tourism, it is “isolated” enough by its traditions to preserve the language and culture of its people for years to come.
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| Hollister and cigarettes |
I hope I have captured small moments that make up a larger photographic discovery, a deeper sentiment to the emotion and driving force of tradition, duty and circumstance behind the people of Chinatown. They are small moments that encompass a grander glimpse into this small niche in the city.
Ng, Myenne Ng. Bone. Harper Perennial. New York, New York. 1993.
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