San Francisco Chinatown - Part I

Goddess of Democracy

I had a glorious weekend in San Francisco with my fantastic book club friends. Even though it is only forty miles away from Palo Alto, we felt like we really got away from it all. The autumn weather was perfection and the weekend flowed effortlessly from one event to the next. Several of us chose to take the San Francisco Chinatown tour offered by the all-volunteer organization San Francisco City Guides sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library.

Our City Guide, Mae Schoenig, met us in the heart of Chinatown at the historic Portsmouth Square. She not only shared many nuggets of history of Chinatown with us, she also shared how she and her family fit into this history.

We learned that Portsmouth Square is where the discovery of gold was announced in May of 1848. It is also the site of the terminus of the first cable-propelled street car in the world, and it is the home of the first public school in California.

Robert Louis Stevenson lived in San Francisco when he wrote “Kidnapped” and "Treasure Island" . This marker was erected in his honor:

The poem reads:

To Remember Robert Louis Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind – to earn a little, to spend a little less - to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence - to renounce when that shall be necessary, and not be embittered - to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all on the same grim condition to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy

A bronze statue of the Goddess of Democracy stands at Portsmouth Square. It is a replica of the impromptu foam and paper mache statue that Chinese students created during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

The resemblance to our Statue of Liberty is of course the highest form of flattery. I hope that if a similar struggle for democracy were to occur somewhere abroad today its activists would still choose the Statue of Liberty as inspiration.