It’s hard to tell a city’s story. In many cities, there’s a tension between pointing with pride and bowing in shame.

Los Angeles—where I have lived and worked for most of my life, including my years as an elected official—has long preferred the civic booster side of its identity, promoting itself as a city of the future. But L.A. also struggles to face the dark, violent, and racist episodes in its past.

One of the bloodiest nights in Los Angeles history took place 150 years ago, on October 24, 1871, when at least 18 Chinese (about 10 percent of L.A.’s Chinese population at the time) were slaughtered by an angry mob of Angelenos. Why does almost no one know about it today? Why didn’t I, the first Asian American on the L.A. City Council, know this history until less than a decade ago?

Los Angeles was an unremarkable Far West town of about 5,700 residents in 1871, overshadowed by its larger and more sophisticated neighbor to the north—the Gold Rush center of San Francisco. Yet despite its small population, L.A. already had a mix of ethnic and cultural origins and influences, with Spanish and Mexican settlers, newer arrivals of European origin including French, Germans, Italians, and Irish, some African Americans, and Indigenous peoples who preceded everyone else.

In 1871, L.A. had about 172 Chinese residents, mostly single men who fled famine and social disorder in southern China in hopes of making money in mining and railroad construction jobs. The wages earned by Chinese workers—doing arduous, extremely dangerous jobs—tended to be much lower than the pay for white workers. After the mining jobs disappeared and the transcontinental railroad line was completed in 1869, Chinese workers fanned out across the West. Some ended up in Los Angeles, taking low-paying jobs as cooks, vegetable peddlers, laundrymen, or houseboys. Other Angelenos looked down on the Chinese, who were scapegoated for problems ranging from sanitation to low wages.

L.A. was considered the most lawless town west of Santa Fe. And Calle de los Negros, a one-block-long alley just north of present-day Civic Center, near Olvera Street and Union Station, was the worst part of one of the worst towns in the West. Amidst the bars, gambling and opium dens, and brothels of Calle de los Negros were the homes and businesses of L.A.’s Chinese pioneers.

In the late afternoon of October 24, 1871, a gunfight broke out on Calle de los Negros between two gunmen from rival Chinese factions, injuring a police officer and a white rancher and former bar owner. The rancher, Robert Thompson, died of his wounds. As word of the shootings and the fatality spread across the town, about 500 vigilantes converged on Calle de los Negros to seek revenge.

By the end of the night, at least 15 Chinese were hanged and three Chinese were shot to death. Chinese-owned businesses were vandalized and looted, resulting in estimated losses of $40,000 (around $1 million in 2020 dollars). Eight rioters were found guilty of manslaughter, but all the convictions were later overturned.

Some Chinese refused to go down quietly. Business owner Wing Chung demanded that the City Council pay $6,530.34 in restitution for his losses on the night of the massacre. After the City Council failed to respond, he sued the city. The next year, after the City Council levied a new license tax, 14 out of 15 Chinese laundrymen refused to pay.

A few years later, the buildings around Calle de los Negros were demolished and the Calle obliterated—entirely wiped off the map. Many of the Chinese were uprooted, resettling on the other side of Alameda Street, where the community thrived for five decades until the construction of Union Station forced more relocations in the 1930s.

While little is known about the lives of most of the massacre victims beyond their names and occupations, researchers have uncovered the story of Chee Long Tong, a Chinese doctor who treated both Chinese and non-Chinese patients and was probably one of the best-known Chinese in Los Angeles. Like all of the other lynching victims, Dr. Tong had no connection to the gunfight that triggered the massacre. But some details of his life are known, such as the location of his home and examination room (just off Calle de los Negros), his ownership of an employment brokerage business that placed Chinese in local jobs, the fact that he had a wife, and his tragic attempts to persuade the vigilantes to spare his life.

The Los Angeles massacre was a harbinger of other horrific anti-Chinese incidents in California and across the western states in the 1870s and 1880s. At least 200 California communities, including Fresno, Pasadena, and Riverside, carried out forced expulsions of the Chinese. One of the most shameful took place in 1885 in Tacoma, Washington, when a large mob forced 150–200 local Chinese to march eight miles through heavy rain to take a train out of town. Afterward, the mob torched Tacoma’s Chinatown, leaving no physical traces behind. That same year, the single most brutal anti-Chinese attack in U.S. history was triggered by white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, who were angry about the willingness of Chinese miners to work for lower pay. The white miners killed at least 28 Chinese, wounded 15, and subsequently looted and burned all 79 houses in Rock Springs’ Chinatown.

While Los Angeles never witnessed another massacre like the 1871 attack on the Chinese, the city’s history has been marked by eruptions of racial violence. These tend to fade from our collective memory. Many current Angelenos know something about the violence that started in South Central Los Angeles following the verdict in the Rodney King beating case in 1992, but recollections of the 1965 Watts riots are less distinct. And our memories of the 1943 Zoot Suit riots, when white sailors, soldiers, and marines attacked Mexican American and African Americans in East L.A., have faded even further.

But almost no one has ever heard of the massacre of the Chinese in 1871, even in Los Angeles—despite the fact that it remains the largest massacre of Chinese in California history and the largest mass killing of any kind in Los Angeles history.

I’m one of the Angelenos who was born and raised in L.A. and never heard a word about the 1871 massacre. My parents and grandparents were active in L.A.’s Chinatown for many years, but never said anything to my sisters and me about the history of Chinese being lynched by an angry L.A. mob. The massacre wasn’t taught in schools or mentioned in the media or history books.

L.A.’s barbaric treatment of the Chinese in 1871 was met not with official condemnations or apologies, but with muffled silence. And then forgetting. To the extent that they knew about 1871, older generations of Asian Americans may have chosen not to dwell on negative stories from the past.

The first time I ever heard about the 1871 massacre was in 2012, when I was asked to write a review of The Chinatown War by Scott Zesch, the definitive account of the tragedy. Writing the book review etched the incident into my adult consciousness. But I didn’t feel a sense of urgency until current events connected the dots between the past and the present.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Chinese and other Asian Americans have begun to feel as if they are walking around with targets on their backs. The escalation of epithets like “China virus,” and the sporadic physical and verbal harassment of women and senior citizens, seemed to have reached a peak with the shootings of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta in March 2021.

Just a few weeks later, in April 2021, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti released a far-sighted report reviewing the city of Los Angeles’ track record recognizing both the tragic and the triumphant episodes of local history. One of the report’s recommendations called for redressing the lack of public commemoration of the 1871 massacre of the Chinese.

I was one of many Asian Americans who instinctively saw the connection between the 1871 vigilante killings and, in 2021, the continuation of attacks on Asian Americans, which rose 76 percent in L.A. County over the past 12 months alone. We resolved to seize the moment to do something about it.

In June, Mayor Garcetti’s chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne, convened a steering committee of community representatives—which I am co-chairing—to start figuring out how to create a suitable public memorial to the 1871 massacre. A formal process will be launched to invite designers and artists to submit their ideas, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. One possible outcome our group has discussed would be an alternative to the conventional statue-on-a-pedestal approach, setting out a pathway of physical memorials along a “constellation” of massacre-related sites connecting Calle de los Negros, the lynching sites, and perhaps even symbols of mercy and reconciliation.

There may be some skeptics who assume that an 1871 memorial will appeal only to the Chinese community, or who doubt the value of rehashing sad stories from the past. The best response is to create a unique memorial that dusts off the people and the places of 1871 Los Angeles and brings them to life.

Ultimately, I hope that the memorial, like the story itself, offers shreds of hope. At least a few citizens in 1871 Los Angeles gave sanctuary to some of the Chinese fleeing the violence, sheltering them in their homes or businesses. Even at the bleakest of times, against all odds, there are people who try to do the right thing.

The post After 150 Years, Is L.A. Ready to Remember the Chinese Massacre? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The anti-Asian violence was spurred on by widespread rhetoric projecting blame for the COVID-19 pandemic onto China and people of Asian descent. But the stigmatization of Chinese immigrants as a threat to public health and safety has a long history in the United States. It emerges from an entrenched mode of racism that targets not only Chinese bodies, but Chinese air.

What do I mean by “Chinese air”?

Answering that requires returning to the epidemic of violence that swept the West after Chinese immigrants began settling in the U.S. in the 19th century. White Americans refused to live in proximity with Chinese settlements—literally, they refused to breathe the same air. The consequences were deadly. A mob massacred 19 Chinese men in Los Angeles in 1871, and anti-Chinese race riots erupted in cities such as San Francisco, Vancouver, and Seattle. Living on the periphery was no protection. As urban travelers in the West rode railroads built by Chinese migrants to take in the pure air of nature resorts, more than 100 violent purges forced Chinese immigrants out of rural settlements and into overcrowded, poorly ventilated accommodations in urban Chinatowns.

At the time, many scientists didn’t understand that microbes spread disease. Instead, they believed that illness was transmitted through poisonous air or miasma and endorsed changes to urban planning and sanitation in their efforts to sustain public health. Anti-Chinese agitators quickly adapted miasma theory as a tool in their campaign. Even after germ theory gained acceptance in the 1880s, they stigmatized Chinese air and smells, associating overcrowded spaces, laboring bodies, opium smoke, culinary odors, and incense in several urban Chinatowns with disease.

An image published in The Wasp magazine depicting Cubic Air Law arrests—Chinese men being moved out of a crowded apartment into even more crowded jails. Courtesy of public domain.

As the historian Nayan Shah has documented, 19th-century San Francisco public health officials regularly blamed Chinatown for the city’s recurring outbreaks of diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, and bubonic plague. In response to the 1868 smallpox epidemic and working-class agitation against the Chinese, the city’s Board of Supervisors passed the Cubic Air Ordinance in 1870, requiring that dwellings contain at least 500 “cubic feet of air” per adult resident. This law was enforced exclusively against Chinese people, and critics noted that the city detained Chinese immigrants in jails that were much more overcrowded than their homes. The Cubic Air Ordinance thus targeted Chinese people not only as foreign bodies, but as deviant assemblages of bodies and air.

Sanitation became a common pretext for disciplining and displacing Chinese residents. In 1903, the physician Woods Hutchinson praised San Francisco’s health officials for adopting aggressive cleaning methods: “The seven and thirty separate smells of Chinatown have all been drowned in one grand olfactory delirium of chloride of lime and carbolic acid. Never was Chinatown so free from vermin.” Nevertheless, Hutchinson went on to declare that Chinatown “can never be cleaned except by fire.” He may have had in mind a fire that burned down 4,000 homes in Honolulu’s Chinatown, permanently displacing many residents—a conflagration that started when Honolulu’s Board of Health burned down buildings to control an outbreak of bubonic plague.

Hutchinson’s fantasy for San Francisco nearly came true in 1906. In the wake of the city’s devastating earthquake and fire, officials proposed relocating its Chinese community from the burned-out but centrally located Chinatown to far-flung Hunter’s Point. This plan, which was eventually stopped after intervention from China’s consul-general, presumed that the Chinese community would not be out of place amid the latter neighborhood’s slaughterhouses and industrial fumes.

On a smaller scale, American nuisance charges have also posited Chinese air as an offense to public well-being. In the 1880s, complaints about the smell of drying squid shut down a thriving Chinese community of squid fishermen in Monterey, California. More recently, similar protests have been lodged against Asian restaurants and food manufacturers, including the Sriracha sauce factory in Irwindale, California. In a 1999 case in Pennsylvania, grease smells from Wok’s Chinese Restaurant were deemed “noxious” even though, the defendant noted, they were comparable to the smell of burning wood from a nearby pizza restaurant.

An 1882 cartoon from The Wasp of disease figures hovering over San Francisco. The LEPROSY figure (right) holds a strand of smoke that says “CHINA TOWN”. Courtesy of public domain.

The notion of Chinese miasmas has had support from respected academics. In the 1890 essay “Mongolianism in America,” the historian and ethnologist Hubert Howe Bancroft (for whom UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is named) wrote that he found it difficult to breathe when he walked through the crowded alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown. “Faces swarm at every door, inhaling poison, exhaling worse,” he claimed. Bancroft never considered that he might be experiencing anxiety, triggered by his own discomfort with something unfamiliar. Instead, he speculated “whether a Chinaman’s lungs are not formed on a different principle from ours … He certainly seems to thrive in stench where others would suffocate.” Attributing Chinatown’s poor air quality to cultural and biological differences, so-called experts like Bancroft drew attention away from the forces of mob violence, poverty, social marginalization, and housing inequity that had pushed Chinese immigrants into substandard living conditions.

Because culture plays a powerful role in shaping olfactory responses, I have been studying how American narratives spread—and sometimes challenge—these ideas about Chinese air. Stories about Chinese stench date back to the first decades of Chinese immigration. In the 1860s, Mark Twain wrote about a San Francisco detective who could smell a chicken feather from a crime scene and “tell which block in Sacramento street the Chinaman lives in who committed it.”

The Yellow Peril has a smell in Frank Norris’s novel Moran of the Lady Letty, in which a white woman is held captive by a crew of reeking Chinese pirates. In Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Fu Manchu, published in 1913, the first Asiatic supervillain attacks detectives with a mysterious poison gas, which leaves “no clew-remaining—except the smell.” By the time Raymond Chandler wrote that a character “had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman,” “Chinese” had become a metaphor for stench.

Edith Maude Eaton, a mixed-race Canadian writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who has been called the mother of Asian American literature, fought this pattern of olfactory stereotyping in her stories about domestic life in several urban Chinatowns. Writing under the pen-name Sui Sin Far (“Chinese water flower”) and titling her book Mrs. Spring Fragrance, she associated Chinese immigrants with pleasant smells.

When they could afford to, Eaton suggested, Chinese immigrants preferred a cool and fragrant atmosphere: “After the heat and dust and unsavoriness of the highways and byways of Chinatown, the young reporter who had been sent to find a story, had stepped across the threshold of a cool, deep room, fragrant with the odor of dried lilies and sandalwood, and found Pan.” Where the natural aromas of lilies and sandalwood indicate the careful housekeeping of the Chinese family, the smell of the streets was the result of the city’s failure—or refusal—to fulfill its responsibility of cleaning Chinatown’s streets.

The contemporary artist Anicka Yi took a more direct approach to olfactory racism in her 2017 Guggenheim Museum exhibition, Life is Cheap. The first installation consisted of three gas canisters emitting a blend of odors sourced from both a colony of ants and from Manhattan’s Chinatown and Koreatown. The main gallery featured two dioramas Yi created by using visually captivating bacterial cultures sourced from the same neighborhoods, and the same colony of ants inhabiting an enlarged circuitboard. The piece is a meditation on Asian stereotypes, and Western dependence on inexpensive Asian imports.

Not unlike Fu Manchu’s gas attack, the scents Yi works with—which she describes as vegetal, floral, citrusy, and meaty—insidiously penetrate the bodies of visitors. But the museum setting recasts the smells of Asian neighborhoods as an unusual olfactory experience, something to be sought after rather than avoided. Yi hints that inhaling the scents of Chinatown, Koreatown, and ants might predispose her audience to perceive their connections with the beautiful forms presented in her living dioramas.

Life is Cheap asks how smells usually thought of as foreign are already part of us, whether as bacteria inhabiting our bodies or as fumes emitted in the course of producing our computers and phones. After all, China’s industry and urban development are intimately connected with the U.S. addiction to cheap technology.

And, like the perceived unsavoriness of Chinatown streets, the conditions that promote COVID-19 are part of something much bigger than a wet market in Wuhan. Chinese air is not made in China, it is an exhalation of the global economy.

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