The following are excerpts from 06/23/25 Alta Journal's "California's Lost Chinatowns: A Hidden History":
By Robert Ito and Photos by Carolyn Fong
The United States is dotted with towns and cities that decimated their Chinese communities, whose residents were forced to leave, or worse. How did people later remember these places, if at all? Did they even want to remember them? Did the locals feel shame for what had happened, or build anything to memorialize these lost places? Last summer, I embarked on a road trip from Los Angeles to Northern California to find out.
Anita Wong Kwock, governing trustee of the Chinese American Historical Museum in San Jose.
I'm at San Jose’s Signia by Hilton, a luxury hotel in the heart of downtown with a day spa and a rooftop pool. Out the door are the city’s art museum and performing arts center; across the street, a grand park where kids in swim trunks horse around in a fountain’s water jets. There’s a lot to see, so one might be forgiven for missing the tiny plaque on the hotel’s side that reads, “In Memory of the Burning of San Jose Chinatown.” The inscription describes a “mysterious fire, deliberately set” on this site, which destroyed “the largest Chinatown south of San Francisco.” Similar fires were set in Chinatowns across the West, from Antioch to Sacramento to Pasadena in California, from Tacoma, Washington, to Denver, Colorado.
In the America of the late 1800s, terrorism against Chinese communities was commonplace and not limited to arson. In Los Angeles, 18 Chinese people were massacred in 1871 in what has been called the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, at least 28 Chinese miners (some bodies were never recovered) were killed by white miners in a preplanned, well-organized massacre; over the course of an afternoon, Chinese people were scalped, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive.
San Jose has had five Chinatowns. The Signia has only a plaque, so I jump in my car and head across town to the Chinese American Historical Museum. On the drive over, the skyscrapers of the city center are soon replaced by tire shops, drive-through restaurants, and lavanderías.
The museum holds artifacts that used to be at the hotel’s location, from the beautiful (ornate Chinese opera costumes) to the mundane (children’s toys, medicine vials). On the second floor is a gorgeous ... altar that once stood within the Temple of the Five Gods in Heinlenville, San Jose’s final Chinatown. A note tells museumgoers that two of the temple’s five gods—Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and the Canton City God—went missing years ago and have since been replaced by replicas.
Connie Young Yu in Heinlenville Park, which she helped create to commemorate San Jose’s final Chinatown.
John Heinlen, a German immigrant who moved to California in 1852, created Heinlenville. A victim of anti-German discrimination in Ohio, he sympathized with the plight of the San Jose Chinese. After three of the city’s Chinatowns were destroyed by fire, Heinlen decided to build his own, leasing his land to Chinese residents. “The whole population was against him, ruined his reputation, and ostracized his family,” says Connie Young Yu, a writer, historian, and activist. White residents threatened Heinlen’s life and derisively gave the settlement its name. To protect the community, he built an eight-foot fence topped with barbed wire around it. “People over the years said that the wall was to keep out gamblers and criminals,” Yu says. “But that’s not true. It was for protection! So they wouldn’t get burned down again.”
We’re talking in Heinlenville Park, which features a stainless steel sculpture called Sheltering Wing, which nods to Chinese and Japanese traditions, and a “historical memory walk” with stone tiles dedicated to the city’s five Chinatowns, labeled in English and Chinese. Yu worked for years to make the park a reality, and she doesn’t mince words when she talks about what occurred in San Jose. “The U.S. should be ashamed,” she says. “People talk about how the Chinese are the model minority. But look at what happened to them. They suffered terrorism.”
“They were not silent people,” she continues. “They were silenced.”
For more Lost Chinatowns: Read the full Alta Journal article, "California’s Lost Chinatowns: A Hidden History."
Chinese Historical & Cultural Project