By Elizabeth Cloutman
 Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier |
LAH resident Connie Young Yu relates father’s tales of perseverance in San Jose’s Chinatown
Connie Young Yu grew up listening to her father, John C. Young, tell stories about his childhood in San Jose’s Chinatown. Her father was the younger of the two American-born sons of Young Soong Quong. Soong Quong, as an 11-year-old boy in 1881, had immigrated to San Jose from the Kwangtung province of southern China.
“My father, through his frequent telling of anecdotes, his saving of pictures and memorabilia, conveyed to me his feeling for San Jose’s Chinatown, and it was loyal and deep,” said Yu, a Los Altos Hills resident. “He never let his children, Janey, Al and me, eat a peach or pear or plum without telling us its variety and that it was Chinese farmers who brought the fruit into being.”
Her father’s stories inspired in Yu a love of history. Beginning in the late 1960s, she wrote numerous articles about the Chinese immigrant experience. However, it wasn’t until 1985, when construction of the Fairmont Hotel unearthed remnants of a Chinatown on San Fernando and Market streets, that Yu was spurred to investigate the history of Chinese immigrants in San Jose. From this research came her book, “Chinatown, San Jose, USA” (History San Jose, 2001), now in its third edition.
“Chinatown, San Jose, USA” is the story of how the anti-Chinese movement affected San Jose. It is also the story of a first generation of Chinese Americans, who, like John Young, grew up in an era of exclusion laws, segregated into an enclave non-Chinese called Heinlenville. The Chinese, however, knew it as San-Doy-Say Tong Yun Fow - San Jose Chinatown - or Cleveland Avenue.
Yu sought out primary resources for her book, searching the archives of the San Jose Historical Museum, as well as the Santa Clara University and UC Berkeley libraries. She looked at old newspapers, conducted numerous personal interviews, and reviewed her father’s and grandfather’s extensive collection of photographs and personal papers. “My family saved everything,” she said.
As word of her project spread, both Chinese and non-Chinese, such as her Los Altos Hills neighbor Barbara Lumbard, came to her with additional anecdotes and family photographs.
Peasant farmers from the southern province of Kwangtung began immigrating to California during the Gold Rush days in 1848, Yu said. They called California Gum San - Gold Mountain. In the 1850s, plagued by drought, floods and inflation, as well as bandits and greedy landlords, many more sought escape from starvation. Men left their families behind, hoping to establish new lives.
While many Chinese male immigrants, like Yu’s maternal grandfather, came to help build the transcontinental railroad or to mine gold, those who settled in the Santa Clara Valley became agricultural workers for farmers and ranchers, laborers, factory workers, domestic servants and shopkeepers. “Those who became agricultural workers in the valley found a different meaning of Gum San, Gold Mountain,” Yu writes in “Chinatown, San Jose, USA.” “Their gold came in the form of bountiful crops, grain, seeds, vegetables and wondrous varieties of fruit. Some would build roads, work in factories, laundries and households. Others of their kinfolk would make their living shopkeeping, providing to the needs of their countrymen. Together, these immigrants from China would establish their own distinct community.”
By the late 1860s, a large community of Chinese had developed at Market and San Fernando streets. A fire forced this settlement to relocate to Vine Street for a few years, but by 1872, they had returned to a rebuilt Market Street settlement.
Anti-Chinese sentiment existed everywhere, and San Jose was no different. Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship on the basis of the first naturalization law of 1790, which made citizenship available only to “any alien being a free white person.”
The anti-Chinese feeling worsened in the wake of a long economic depression that began in 1870 and an influx of unskilled Irish immigrants, who resented the Chinese holding jobs. In 1882, President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for 10 years and permanently forbade citizenship to the Chinese. President Theodore Roosevelt renewed the Exclusion Act in 1902. The Exclusion Act remained until 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill repealing it.
Young Soong Quong certainly experienced discrimination, Yu writes. Although the young man was fed, sheltered and treated well by a white dentist and his wife who employed him as a servant, he was stoned by white hoodlums when he went out on errands.
By 1886, a move was under way to force the Chinese out of the Market Street enclave, which lay in area essential to San Jose’s downtown redevelopment plans. On May 4, 1887, Chinatown fell victim to arson.
Chinese merchants were not intimidated. Within 10 days of the disastrous fire, they had signed an agreement to lease land with John Heinlen, a farmer and businessman, at Fifth and Taylor streets.
Heinlen had for years employed Chinese laborers in his orchards and on his ranch in Coyote Valley. He knew his tenants needed a permanent and safe place to live. Heinlen and 11 Chinese merchants entered into a contract to build a fenced community, with a main street three blocks long and side streets two blocks wide. Thus began Heinlenville.
No one is quite sure about the reason for Heinlen’s generosity. Some speculated it could have been because as the son of German immigrants, he remembered the anti-German riots in Indiana and his native Ohio in the 1850s.
For the next 44 years, Heinlenville became the hub of Chinese life for those living in San Jose and the surrounding valley. The enclave had homes, stores and a Taoist temple, Ng Shing Gung - Temple of the Five Gods.
As an adult, Young Soong Quong became the prosperous owner of a Cleveland Avenue general store and a well-respected community leader.
“Chinese farmers and workers throughout the valley made weekly visits to Heinlenville for supplies and recreation,” Yu wrote. “Merchants sent for their wives in China, and soon Cleveland Avenue was alive … The walled town made family life amenable. Children could play in the streets … Heinlenville community leaders hired a white guard who patrolled the area and carried a revolver. At the end of each alley, gates connecting the fence were locked each night.”
By the 1920s, reasons for the protective fence were all but forgotten. The gates were no longer locked.
Most first-generation Chinese Americans had fond memories of growing up in Heinlenville. “The children of San Jose’s Chinatown felt they were Americans, despite growing up in a walled city,” Yu wrote. “They were taught just like all the other boys and girls, receiving a good education in integrated schools.”
Yu said integrated schools were not the norm for other California Chinese communities until the 1930s, but from Heinlenville’s beginnings, Chinese children were expected to attend local grammar schools.
Lonnie Wong Quan, when interviewed by Yu, remembered her childhood fondly. “I feel very privileged to have lived in that time,” Quan said. “Just the aroma, getting near the orchard … It was like living in another world … In the spring it would be so beautiful, you would see nothing but miles and miles of white blossoms. Prune blossoms.”
By 1931, in the midst of the depression, the Heinlen heirs went bankrupt. On Dec. 31, Heinlenville, except for the temple, was razed.
The Young family moved to San Francisco. In 1937, John earned his master’s degree in engineering from Stanford University.
“There were to be no more Chinatowns in San Jose,” Yu wrote. “The long term of exclusion was over.”
The Temple of the Five Gods remained until 1949, when, marred by vandalism, it was dismantled. All that remained were the altar and artifacts.
In 1986, an ad hoc group of Chinese citizens began a campaign to build a replica of the temple on the grounds of the San Jose Historical Museum on Senter Road. The new temple was opened in late September 1991.
“Heinlenville was born out of the Yellow Peril movement, the community that rose out of the ashes and defied prejudice and terrorism,” Yu wrote. “A generation of Chinese Americans grew up brave and strong in a unique community.”
