Free A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Page A

also appointed his backer, Abe Ruef, his enemy, James Phelan, and others to the subcommittee on the Permanent Relocation of Chinatown. The plan was nothing more than a real-estate grab fueled by racism. The Chinese occupied one of the most desirable sections of the city, and pushing them to the city’s southern border or beyond would free up the land for real-estate interests.
    Modern histories of the earthquake tend to broaden this particular group’s self-interested animosity to a blanket racism. The actual record on non-Chinese reactions to the Chinese population of San Francisco is more complicated. There were racists, and there were allies. Hugh Kwong Liang was fourteen or fifteen when the earthquake struck, and he was already leading a difficult, isolated life. His mother and younger siblings had returned to China to escape the anti-Chinese sentiment in the city, and he had stayed behind to help his father, who died before the quake. He was entrusted to the care of a cousin, who after the quake took all the money from Liang’s father’s store and left him to his own devices. The boy dragged his father’s trunk to safety, joined the crowd in the Presidio, met another abandoned Chinese boy of sixteen, and concentrated on keeping sparks from setting their army tent on fire. The other boy left him that night to find his own family, and the trunk was stolen.
    Alone again, the despondent Liang headed for the waterfront to drown himself. When he arrived, he decided instead to stow away on a ship and leave the burning city behind. “To my surprise,” he recounted to his nieces and grandnieces many decades later, “the captain and men were all very sympathetic and told me that everything would be all right.” They fed him, took up a collection, gave him the proceeds, and set him down in Napa, where he soon found his way to another branch of the Liang family that embraced him warmly. He began a new life, better off than he had been before the earthquake. Disaster’s upsetting of the status quo causes some to plummet, others to rise or find new niches and allies. Liang passed through all phases on his journey.
    The other accounts are mixed too. Many Chinese men worked as live-in cooks and household servants, and their lives remained intertwined with their employers’ after the earthquake, at least through the evacuation. One policeman told of helping an elderly Chinese woman, giving her looted food and drink and leading her to the safety of other Chinese Americans in flight. One of the photographs of refugees in Golden Gate Park shows two Asian men standing among the white throng, part of the crowd waiting for food. On the other hand, many white people were seen picking through the ashes of Chinatown for loot or “souvenirs”—but soon afterward indignant citizens broke the Chinese porcelain one looter offered for sale on a ferryboat to Oakland. When it came to relocating Chinatown, some businessmen pointed out the economic role Chinatown played in the city, and the government of China weighed in, and with that Chinatown was saved. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the city fathers obsessed so much about excluding the Japanese from the public school system that they provoked an international incident with Japan. Racism was a potent force, but not ubiquitous, as this relief committee report makes clear: “The Japanese asked for very little relief, in part because many had difficulty in speaking English, but more generally because all were aware of the anti-Japanese feeling of a small but aggressive part of the community; this in spite of the fact that Japan contributed directly to the local [relief] committee and through the American National Red Cross nearly a quarter of a million dollars.”
    The self-interest of the business community played out elsewhere as well. Phelan and Adolph Spreckels were competing to take over the streetcar lines in San Francisco, and the latter man—one of the wealthiest in San