SAN FRANCISCO CHINATOWN ALLEYWAYS

As you know, I head over to Chinatown regularly to have either a late lunch or an early tea, sometimes dinner. After which, because my apartment needs four hours of complete non-smoking with windows open to ventilate so that my apartment mate Savage Kitten does not kvetch, I will wander around for a bit with a pipe and a full load of tobacco. Chinese people on the streets do not, for the most part, mind smoking. Many of the older men enjoy tobacco, as do a small number of the ladies. Their children, naturally, are modern Americans and probably loathe the habit, but they're still respectful towards their seniors and too polite to run around screaming about the looming anti-Christ or witchcraft while gathering faggots to burn the offender when someone lights up in their purely accidental vicinity, unlike the office-workers and suburbanites in the financial district.

Who are convinced that they have rights dammit, but no one else does.
Even if San Francisco downtown smells like pollution.
Sewer, pissoir, and freeway combined.
Scream, baby, my sidewalk!
Kill the heretic.


Grants Tobacconist (now out of business) on Market Street bent the scholars at the beauty academy three floors up permanently out of shape. There are now several hairdressers whose studies were put on hiatus because of the psychological trauma they endured there when the faintest whisps of tobacco sent them into panics oh the poor babies.

"Thank you SO much for RUINING my lungs!"

You're very welcome, ma'am.
It's a pleasure.


Did I mention three lanes of slow moving high exhaust traffic? Or the deranged people in every other doorway, some of whom haven't been medicated in years? How about the meth-freak twitching halfway down the block? Naked man under an old rug? Daytime drunk?

But me you bitch about.

I get it.


Anyhow, that's not a likely set of reactions in Chinatown, except from tourists, who usually stay on Grant Avenue because everything else scares them. Unless they visit the one alleyway that has a fortune cookie factory, where there is also a Christian mission in case they want some spiritual restoration: Ross Alley.

There are never any tourists in Trenton Street, around the corner from Y Ben Lau (now a "wellness" clinic and library, extension of the Chinese Hospital) between Jackson and Pacific, and you seldom see them in Beckett or Wentworth either, though there are some hip Caucasians who live in an SRO on the latter. You might spot one or two down on Commercial, because it is picturesque and easy to find, being between the Eastern Bakery on Grant and R & J Lounge on Kearny.

If I've had snackipoos at the dim sum counter on Stockton, I will often head over to Hang Ah, pause for a while watching whoever is playing Tennis at willie 'Woo Woo' Wong, then either head over to Spofford (mahjong parlours) or Waverly (not really an alley, and herds of Germans with informative guides tromp through during the season), before circuitously going further down hill and ending up watching rickety old people playing cards just outside the perimeter of Portsmouth Square (on Walter Lum, between Clay and Washington), within the boundaries of which smoking is not allowed in English.


INFORMATIONAL INTERSTICE

Grant Avenue: 都板街 'du baan gaai'; metropolitan plank street.  
Ross Alley: 舊呂宋巷 'gau leui sung hong'; old Luzon lane.  

Trenton Street: 登頓街 'dang duen gaai'; thresh-gather arrangement street, which slopes past Ping Yuen. Y Ben Lau: 會賓樓, a defunct restaurant, where in a yet earlier incarnation of that space I took three Shanghainese girls for dim sum. I cannot remember the name it had then, but my guests loved the food.  
Chinese Hospital: 東華醫院 'dung waa yi yuen'; east China medical court.  Beckett Street: 白話轉街 'baak-waa juen gaai'; vernacular turning street; formerly Bartlett Alley.  Wentworth Place: 德和街 'dak wo gaai'; moral harmony street.  Commercial Street: 襟美慎街 'kam mei san gaai'; lapel beauty caution street.  Hang Ah Alley: 香亞街 'heung ya gaai'; fragrance street, after a parfumerie that once was located here.  Willie 'Woo Woo' Wong Playground: 黃顯護球場 'wong hin wu kau cheung', named after a local sports hero. Spofford Alley: 新呂宋巷 'san leui sung hong'; new Luzon lane.  Waverly Place: 天后廟街 'tin hau miu gaai'; heaven empress temple street, though the Matsu Temple on Beckett is more commonly known than the Tin Hau shrine nowadays. Tin Hau and Matsu (媽祖'maa jou'; maternal ancestor) are considered the same deity.  Germans: 德國人 'dak gwok yan'; ethics country person.  Eastern Bakery: 東亞餅食公司 'dung ya bing sik gung si'; east Asia biscuit food public manage. Public manage ('gung si') means company, biscuit foods obviously are baked products such as cookies and pastries. The Eastern Bakery is more commonly know as 東亞餅家 'dung ya bing kaa'; East Asia Cake Family (餅家 means bakery). R & J Lounge: 嶺南小館 'ling naam siu kwun'; southern China minor establishment, deservedly one of the best known restaurants in Chinatown, where you take your snooty out-of-town relatives who aren't easily impressed. Kearny Street: 乾尼街 'gan nei gaai'; dried nun street.  

Stockton Street: 市德頓街 'si dak duen gaai'; market harmony arrangement street.  Portsmouth Square: 花園角 'faa yuen gok'; flower garden corner.  Walter U. Lum Place: 林華耀街 'lam waa yiu gaai'; forest (surname) China glory street, though 花園街 (flower garden street) is more common; it used to be Brenham Place.  Clay Street: 企李街 'kei lei gaai'; tiptoe-standing plums street.  Washington Street: 華盛頓街 'waa sing duen gaai'; illustrious abundance arranged street.  English (language): 英文 'ying man'; brave writing.
-   -   -   -   -


There are good places for milk-tea on Waverly Place, Washington, and Pacific right where Beckett ends. They know me there because all three places are part of my ambit, usually before filling my pipe.


If I'm heading to the cigar bar of an evening, I will often pass by the dancing ladies in the park on my way. Middle-aged Chinese women dance somewhat better than young hipsters, but not remarkably so.
Unlike the hipsters, however, they enjoy doing it without petulantly seeming to demand that you watch. Which I don't.
Dancing Chinese women.
In a park.



WHAT'S THE POINT?

To conclude, here's a text that perfectly encapsulates my feelings about tourists and suburbanites:

1:1 "What's the point of visiting San Francisco if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling bacon cheese-burgers and Sierra Pale Ale and Red Bull and calamares plus two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day." 1:2 "And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellevues and Continentals with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Sierra Pale Ale and Red Bull and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues." 1:3 "And if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners."

2:1 "And adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman ruins to buy Orange Fanta and melted ice cream and bleeding Sierra Pale Ale and Red Bull and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, Torremolinos" and complaining about the food, "It's so greasy isn't it?""  2:2 "And you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Donald Trump should be running this country and how many languages Jeb Bush can speak and then he throws up Sierra Pale Ale over the Cuba Libres." 2:3 "And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'. Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Sierra Pale Ale and Red Bull and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'."

3:1 "And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Sierra Pale Ale because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays." 3:2 "And they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Serbia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning." 3:3 "And you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing enterovioform tablets and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished."

4:1 "And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel Del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet." 4:2 "And half the rooms are double booked." 4:3 "And you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door, and you're plagued by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hipsters, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Democratic candidate wins the election, and fat American matrons with sloppy buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out."

5:1 "And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is "merely a case of mild Spanish tummy", like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe, and meanwhile the bloody Guardia Civil are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco." 5:2 "And then on the last day in the airport lounge every one's comparing sunburns, drinking Asti Spumanti and Red Bull and buying cartons of duty free designer crap and using up their last Euros on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes, and Brian Pooles of Norwich" 5:3 "And 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco." 5:4 "And everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a sardine-packed antique Iberian airplane ..... "



Monty Python was right about so many things.
A profoundly formative influence.
And a philosophy.


Watneys Red Barrel is unavailable here.
Which is a good thing.





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