S.F. could become 4th California city to apologize to its Chinese community. Three students are the reason why
(Left to right): Drew Min, Dennis Casey Wu and Dennis Wu in front of the Goddess of Democracy statue at Portsmouth Square on Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, in San Francisco, Calif.
Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle
S.F. could become 4th California city to apologize to its Chinese community. Three students are the reason why
Drew Min was at a Chinese restaurant last month when he got his chance to help San Francisco confront more than 150 years of wrong.
The UC Berkeley junior and two friends — Lowell High School senior Dennis Casey Wu and Stanford University sophomore George Tilton-Low — had been researching the city’s mistreatment of early Chinese immigrants since May, when Antioch became the first California city to apologize to its Chinese community for historic injustices. In the months since, San Jose and Los Angeles issued their own apologies.
But not San Francisco, which functioned as a quasi-laboratory for anti-Chinese laws in the 19th and 20th centuries.
“I remember watching the news about Antioch apologizing and remember thinking, ‘Why not San Francisco?’” recalled Wu, 17. “Why not the city with a deep history of Chinese Americans and one that still has a vibrant population of us?”
During an early October luncheon with Asian community leaders at Harborview Restaurant & Bar, Min posed that question to Supervisor Matt Haney. The dialogue that began then resulted in a resolution that Haney plans to introduce at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.
If adopted, San Francisco would become the fourth California city to apologize for historical wrongs that still haunt the present. The resolution comes during what Haney described as a year “of overdue reckoning” for the nation as a whole when it comes to the treatment of Asian and Pacific Islander communities. And he credited the three local students with making it happen.
Chinese laborers first arrived in San Francisco in the 1850s as the Gold Rush took off. Discriminatory laws were here to meet them. In 1850, California adopted a “foreign miners’ tax” for non-white miners, primarily affecting those from China.
According to the resolution that Wu, Min and Tilton-Low prepared, Haney said, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors was responsible for issuing “some of the worst local statutes targeting Chinese residents” in the state, if not the nation.
“This was really the hub of a lot of awful xenophobia and violence toward Chinese residents specifically,” Haney told The Chronicle. “At the time San Francisco was very much the urban center of this region, and so it sent ripple effects throughout the entire state.”
In 1870, the Board of Supervisors barred anyone of Chinese descent from government work, outlawed the use of gongs and yeo ho poles, which Chinese residents carried over their shoulders to transport goods. From 1873 to 1883, the board passed more than a dozen ordinances intended to crack down on Chinese laundries, culminating in the infamous riots of 1877, which left four people dead and 20 laundry houses destroyed.
The San Francisco Unified School District also enacted racist policies, according to the resolution. A decade after the state prohibited Chinese students from attending public schools with white students in 1860, the district closed the city’s only segregated Chinese school, essentially leaving Chinese children without formal educational opportunities until a California Supreme Court decision overruled the district’s decision in 1885.
“These separate education systems were unequal in terms of resources with Chinese children getting an inferior education,” said Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a San Francisco nonprofit. “For years the Chinese community and other Asian communities were subjected to these types of institutional racism.”
Wu, Min and Tilton-Low pored over books and archives and consulted historians at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum to reconstruct the largely overlooked local record. They found that the laws and the hostility they stoked also impacted other Asian and Pacific Islander communities, as the enforcers of discriminatory policies painted with a broad, ignorant brush.
“Korean, Japanese, Mongolians — they were kind of shoved into this umbrella group of ‘Chinese,’” said Min, 22, who is of Korean descent and executive director of the nonprofit SF Community Alliance for Unity, Safety and Education. “And so an attack on the Chinese community was and is an attack on all of us.”
Eight years after the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the nation’s first anti-immigration law, supervisors enacted policies to control where local Chinese residents could be. One forced them to the outer fringes of the city, while another empowered the Board of Health to essentially quarantine all of Chinatown as its residents were wrongfully scapegoated for carrying the bubonic plague.
For Wu, recovering this history more than a century later — amid a different pandemic fueled by anti-Asian rhetoric and a rise in hate crimes — was a call to action.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Wu, who also participated in the Yellow Whistle project, which distributes whistles in neighborhoods where Asian elders have been attacked. “The same thing was happening again, and I felt compelled to do something about it.”
The history isn’t abstract to Wu. His grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1950s, his father a few years later when he was 16 years old.
“My parents couldn’t buy a home here in the 1950s,” recalled the elder Dennis Wu, who now serves as chair of the SF Community Alliance for Unity, Safety and Education. “I think every Chinese family has faced some type of discrimination at some point. It becomes a way of life, something we learn to navigate.”
Haney said it was crucial to acknowledge the “very shameful role” the Board of Supervisors played in legislating discriminatory policies, all of which were eventually overturned by state and federal courts. But he said it was also important to recognize that this history hasn’t stayed in the past.
“There’s a legacy of it now that’s still with us,” he said.
The resolution follows that arc to the present day, with tracking project Stop AAPI Hate tallying more than 4,500 anti-Asian hate incidents this year through June, with more than a third of those reported in California.
Besides calling for an admission of wrongs, the resolution also pushes the city to find ways to “rectify the lingering consequences of the discriminatory policies.”
