San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1880s was not the bachelor society that many perceive it to be, John Logan, a Brown University sociology and geography professor, said in a lecture yesterday. Logan examined the residences of Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco from the 1880 U.S. Census to better understand the area's residential patterns and composition.
In the lecture, Logan referenced San Francisco's extreme residential racial segregation in the 1880s. Chinese immigrants lived in or around Chinatown, which Logan coined "the first American ghetto." Irish and German communities, meanwhile, tended to form in separate urban areas.
Logan used addresses that he found in the census to track where Chinese immigrants lived and glean information about their residential habits. Many believe that 1880s Chinatown was an overwhelmingly male, working-class society, and that most of its female inhabitants were prostitutes. People inaccurately use this conception as "a shorthand to describe the Chinese community," he said.
Data from the census, however, indicates that while Chinatown was predominantly male, many Chinese families lived in San Francisco. Marital status correlated with age, with older men more often married. Many Chinese men were married to women who remained in China.
"Men in Chinatown lived not so much the single life but the alone life," Logan said.
Within San Francisco's Chinese population, occupation further determined residential patterns. Those who worked as prostitutes or cigar makers lived in central Chinatown, while domestic servants were more scattered throughout the city.
Logan examined the average socioeconomic index, a tool used to determine a region's affluence, of certain streets to learn which regions of San Francisco attracted more financially stable residents and families.
"It's not the bachelor society, it's not the prostitution and it's not boarding houses," Logan said. "Chinatown is something much more regular."
The area's diversity indicates that many popular perceptions about San Francisco's Chinatown are not entirely accurate. Instead, it more closely resembled many other working-class neighborhoods in the 1880s.
"It means to me that Chinatown's not so exotic, not so unlike the way the world operates," he said. "It's certainly unusual in what percent of the population is male, but that's the only way it's unusual."
Emily Walton, a sociology professor who introduced Logan, said his long career as an academic adds extra insight.
"He has incredible depth to his writing and his thinking," Walton said.
Dening Chen, a visiting geography professor from the Guangdong University of Business Studies in Guangdong, China, said she enjoyed Logan's knowledge of the Chinese immigrant experience.
Logan said the project could serve as a model for how future sociologists examine census data.
"The payoff for me for this project is the ability to look at residential patterns, identify boundaries set by social class and ethnicity across neighborhoods, residential and occupational mobility," he said.
