Read The Immigrants for Free Online Page B

opening of six new banks, and the sentencing of Mayor Eugene Schmitz to five years in San Quentin for corruption.
    The city lived again.
    And with the passing of the next two years, one might walk from East Street to 20th Street, from Van Ness to Bryant Street, and see no sign or indication that this area had once encompassed the greatest civic trag edy ever to strike an American city.
    The year 1910 began with a month that saw the lay ing of the cornerstone of the American Music Hall The atre, on Ellis Street between Stockton and Powell, and in the same month, four other new theaters opened their doors, causing the San Francisco Chronicle to boast that no other city except New York could rival the number or variety of San Francisco’s theaters. The newspaper did not boast that according to the most re cent count, there were over two thousand saloons of one description or another and half as many whorehouses.
    Well, that too was a sign of life and vigor. Once again, the great
     
    3 6
    H o w a r d F a s t
    jewel of a city sat white and gleaming upon its great hills, with the magnificent blue expanse of the bay beneath it and around it.
    For two hours, Feng Wo, a Chinese man in his mid-thirties, had been waiting on the wharf. He was a slender man of medium height, and neatly dressed in an an cient black suit that had been carefully patched and re paired in a dozen places. He wore a white shirt, very clean, and a black tie, and his cracked shoes were polished until they glistened. His dark felt hat was some what large for his close-cropped head, but he wore it with dignity and held himself very straight. He carried a folded newspaper under his arm, and inside he was filled with a desperation that was almost like a sickness. He had not eaten for two days.
    He had stationed himself early that morning in front of a two-story shanty built of wood frame and siding, and standing out from the wharf on piles. For all of its crazy-quilt construction, the shanty appeared to be in good repair, and the door of the building, polished red wood with bright brass fittings, gave it an odd distinc tion.
    During the two hours since he had arrived there, Feng Wo had studied the building until he felt that he knew every board and beam in its construction.
    Now the fishing boats were coming in and tying up and unloading their catch. Feng Wo watched them, glancing from the shanty to the boats and then back to the sign above the door, where in polished brass letters was spelled out: Daniel Lavette Fresh Fish and Crabs. During the two hours he had been there, on the busy wharf crowded with buyers and sellers and fisher men and commission men and market owners, he had spoken to no one and asked no questions. That was only common sense and reasonable caution.
    This was 1910 and San Francisco, and he was Chinese. He lived
     
    t H e I m m I g r a n t s
    3 7
    and breathed and walked and talked by sufferance, and there was no moment in his life when he was not alert and wary.
    Now his eye was caught by three boats coming into the dock in precise, triangular formation, sloop-rigged and under sail with their motors quiet. In the lead boat, a massive hulk of a man, standing in the bow, his black, curly hair blowing in the wind, gave the signal to drop the sails and then leaped onto the wharf with remark able grace and agility. He was a very young man, no more than twenty-one or twenty-two, Feng Wo decided, but with a total air of authority and a sense of knowing precisely what he was about. He made no wasted mo tions, and as the boats tied up, he issued a few terse orders, paused to watch the beginning of the unloading of the catch, and then strode past Feng Wo to the shanty. He carried his oilskin jacket flung over one shoulder and walked with a slight, rather unselfconscious sway and swagger. He had a large head, a heavy face, a small nose, and a wide, sensual mouth—a face of contradictions, Feng Wo thought, a face which de fined him at one moment thus and