Plague and Fire

by James C. Mohr

  Within Honolulu, the three physicians also imposed the policy that Chinatown residents had been hoping to avoid: an intra-city quarantine of that district. No one could come or go from that area without permission from a Board-appointed agent. To enforce the quarantine, Emerson, Day, and Wood called out the Dole government's national guard. Though physicians carefully explained the health risks of quarantine duty to the guardsmen, every member of the force volunteered to serve. The paramilitary guardsmen, many of whom were Hawaiians, were immediately deployed around the perimeter of the district, with their largest numbers concentrated along Nuuanu Street, which marked the unofficial border between Chinatown and the city's Euro-American commercial center immediately to the east.

  By sealing off the district where all the early deaths had occurred, the physicians on the Board of Health hoped to isolate the epidemic. Underlying this policy was a profoundly spatial, almost geographical, understanding of epidemic disease that went back at least to the Middle Ages. Plague in particular had long been thought to exist in defined spaces; it seemed to invade, entrench, and occupy particular areas very like an alien army might establish zones of occupation. Wood stated the Board's belief succinctly: "plague is preeminently a disease of locality and place." By sealing off the infected areas, he and his colleagues hoped to prevent the enemy from establishing any new zones of occupation or enlarging the one already under attack.'

  Central Honolulu, with quarantined area shaded.

  Modern bacteriology meshed perfectly with those long-standing assumptions and provided a scientific rationale for continuing to impose quarantines against bubonic plague. The enemy now had a face and a name, and each pestis bacterium could easily be thought of as a tiny hostile soldier who had to get physically from place to place in order to do any damage. By stopping the bacteria's most likely modes of conveyance, public health officials hoped to trap them in confined areas. Measures could then be taken inside those quarantined areas to destroy the bacteria, either directly or by eliminating the conditions they needed to survive.

  The area placed under quarantine formed an uneven rectangle extending inland from Honolulu's commercial waterfront. The other three sides were bounded by Nuuanu Street on the east, Kukui Street and a strip of undeveloped land on the north, and a small stream to the west. Shoulderto-shoulder wooden buildings predominated throughout the densely built district. The vast majority of the buildings were two-story structures facing on streets or alleys, although some buildings had an extra half-story or full story added above the standard two. Wedged behind and between most of the permanent buildings were hundreds of shacks, lean-tos, and storage sheds of irregular sizes and shapes. All of the latter had been erected in flagrant disregard of the city's health and building codes. With a few notable exceptions, living conditions in Chinatown were generally squalid. Residents typically lived in the same building where they worked, or in adjoining, often interconnecting and somewhat mazelike rooming houses, where scores of single men typically shared extremely tight quarters.7

  Even before the outbreak of plague, Chinatown was regarded as Honolulu's worst slum and as a generally unhealthy area. It received only a meager flow of fresh water from the hills above the city, yet parts of Chinatown near sea level remained mucky and stagnant year around. Sanitary inspections by the Board of Health would reveal overflowing cesspools, privies disgorging their contents, garbage rotting almost everywhere, and alleys impassable due to large piles of refuse. As the plague emergency played itself out, angry debates took place over who bore responsibility for those conditions-residents, owners, on-site property managers, absentee landlords, or the Board of Health itself for not enforcing its own sanitary laws in that part of the city.'

  Observers generally believed that about 5,000 people were crammed into Chinatown at any given time, though some members of the Board of Health initially feared there might be twice that number. Contrary to its name, not all of the people who lived in Chinatown were Chinese, nor did all of the Chinese in Honolulu live in Chinatown. Roughly 3,000 of the city's approximately io,ooo Chinese residents lived there. The rest were scattered around Honolulu in smaller Asian neighborhoods or in accommodations provided by their employers. According to a survey done three years earlier, the area that found itself under quarantine contained 72 of Honolulu's 153 Chinese stores.'

  Economic disparities inside Chinatown were extreme. At the top were a handful of powerful merchants, manufacturers, and investment managers who wielded tremendous influence in the community, though not all of them actually lived there. Five years earlier, those leaders had mobilized their countrymen to successfully resist discriminatory measures proposed against Asians, but they were powerless under the present circumstances to stop the emergency plague quarantine. And since a prolonged quarantine would badly hurt their Chinatown businesses, they had a strong incentive to cooperate-within reason-with the Board of Health and get it over with.

  The powerful Chinese merchant class was linked to a small cadre of professionals, newspaper editors, and law clerks. Most of the law clerks represented Chinese interests in white law offices. At the bottom of Chinatown's hierarchy were day laborers who toiled at menial jobs throughout the city. Many of them unmarried men living in Honolulu on their own, they worked as stevedores for the city's immediately adjacent wharves, house servants for the city's wealthy residents, groomsmen for the city's stables, and laborers for the light manufacturing and merchant firms owned and operated by more successful Chinese. Several hundred Chinese "floaters" without regular employment of any sort were essentially vagrant, working and sleeping throughout Chinatown wherever an opportunity presented itself.10

  Chinatown's middle class consisted of budding entrepreneurs and skilled tradesmen. Some were trusted employees in white businesses; others were involved in the city's booming construction projects; a few bought and sold items of all sorts in the surrounding countryside. Among those upwardly striving residents in 1899 was Chung Kun Ai. At the age of fourteen, Chung had emigrated to Hawaii from south China with his father, who worked in the coffee trade. Chung was left with friends in Honolulu, where his father was persuaded to enroll him as one of only 4 Chinese children among rob students at the prominent Bishop School. One of Chung's classmates and best friends at the school was Sun Tai Cheong, the same person who became a classmate of Li and Kong when he returned to China for his medical degree and emerged as Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. Chung remained a steadfast supporter of Sun and helped host the famous revolutionary during his many trips back to Hawaii in later years."

  After failing in a tailoring partnership, Chung spent eleven years as the principal business manager of a vast ranching empire on the island of Hawaii owned by a prominent white planter, James I. Dowsett. That post gave Chung valuable mercantile experience and earned him the trust and respect of many European and American businessmen. Following Dowsett's death in 1898, Chung struck out on his own. With the help of a Hawaiian friend, Chung leased land in lower Chinatown immediately adjacent to the harbor. There he launched City Mill, an enterprise designed to process rice and lumber. With the backing of both white and Chinese investors, he amassed enough capital to purchase steam-driven equipment and hire laborers. By December 1899, the lumber portion of the business, which could be done outdoors, was vigorously underway, 12 and City Mill's impressive new building was almost completed.

  Since the Republic of Hawaii barred all Chinese from citizenship, the Chinese residents of Hawaii remained-at least in theory-subjects of the Qing Empire back in China, even if they had been in the islands for two or three generations. Nominally, therefore, their interests were represented by the empire's officially appointed consul to Hawaii, Yang Wei Pin, who was formally recognized by the Dole government. But Consul Yang spent most of his time and official leverage looking out only for Honolulu's leading Chinese businessmen, especially those involved in trade with China itself. Critics openly assailed Yang as biased and corrupt. Yang's own vice-consul, the well-respected Gu Kim Fui, w
ho had led the drive to build a Chinese hospital, intimated years later that the Qing consul favored those who had sufficient money and enough finesse to find ways of paying him under the table."

  While the Chinese residents of Chinatown generally tried to present a united front to the outside world, they differed sharply among themselves, mostly over the future of their ancient homeland. Some of the Chinese who disparaged ambassador Yang no doubt did so because they, like Li and Kong, opposed the absolute monarchy he represented. They favored a shift to some form of constitutional monarchy back home, or to a modified parliamentary system similar to those that existed in Europe at the time. Still others inside Chinatown believed that the Qing Empire was not worth preserving in any form. This group favored thoroughgoing revolution, though they differed among themselves over what postrevolutionary China might look like. The Qing government regularly posted bounties on the heads of those known to be openly advocating revolution, but the Chinese in Honolulu stopped short of turning one another over to rival agents. The various factions did, however, regularly issue handbills, sometimes refuse to do business with one another, and overtly shun their opponents socially-as Li and Kong had found out in the weeks leading up to the quarantine.14

  A backyard in Chinatown. Hawaii State Archives

  Close to fifteen hundred of Chinatown's residents under quarantine in December 1899-almost a third-were Japanese. The vast majority of the city's Japanese residents had come to Hawaii quite recently, after white sugar planters stopped importing Chinese laborers and stepped up their recruitment of Japanese laborers. As a result, the Japanese population in the archipelago as a whole had roughly tripled just since 1896; during 1899, with Japanese immigration at an all-time high, the Japanese had suddenly emerged as the largest ethnic group on the islands. Lorrin Thurston had used the exploding numbers of Japanese in Hawaii as one of his arguments for American annexation: if the United States did not act quickly, he warned, then Japan, having just won Formosa in the first Sino- Japanese War (1894-95), might decide to claim the Hawaiian archipelago next. Japanese naval vessels had played games of bluff with American naval vessels off Honolulu harbor on the eve of the annexation, when the Dole administration challenged the imperial Japanese government's direct control over the flow of Japanese workers.''

  Against that tense background, the Japanese presence in the city had recently become quite formidable. Their total numbers in the city were estimated to be about seven thousand, which meant that less than a quarter of the city's Japanese residents lived in Chinatown-a smaller percentage than Honolulu's Chinese. But in economic terms, Chinatown was even more important to the Japanese community as a whole than it was to the Chinese community, since most of the city's major Japanese businesses were located there. Several of them, especially the ones engaged in largescale trade with Japan, were rapidly overtaking their white counterparts.16

  While most of the Chinese in Chinatown lived in the lower part of the district close to the harbor, most of the Japanese living in the quarantined zone resided in the more recently developed upper part of the district, away from the waterfront. Overwhelmingly single males, the Japanese of Chinatown worked in light manufacturing, heavy labor, construction trades, restaurants, stables, and a host of service jobs from gardening to retail clerking. Many of them were packed into miserable boardinghouses in upper Chinatown while they waited for plantation assignments on the outer islands. Collectively the Japanese who lived in Chinatown comprised the lowest socioeconomic tier of Honolulu's Japanese residents. Even the editor of the Japanese-language newspaper Hawaii Shimpo, whose publishing facilities were located in Chinatown, remembered Japanese living conditions in Chinatown at the time of the plague as "unimaginably unsanitary."''

  Representing the Japanese residents of Hawaii was the imperial Japanese ambassador, Saito Miki, whom the Dole government had formally recognized as consul-general in September 1898. Extensive correspondence files in the Hawaiian state archives suggest that Consul Saito took seriously his charge to promote the welfare of all his countrymen in Hawaii, not just his business associates. The Dole administration, in turn, respected Saito and considered him effective. Along with the ambassador, at the top of Honolulu's Japanese community were successful retail merchants, import and export dealers, labor brokers, newspaper editors, light manufacturers, and professionals. Among the last category were at least a dozen Japanese physicians trained in Western medicine. Saito and the other leaders of the Japanese community commanded the respect of most Japanese residents, but had ongoing trouble dealing with a number of unsavory brothel keepers, gamblers, and organized crime figures among their countrymen.'8

  The third major group of Chinatown residents who found themselves confined together under quarantine was made up of nearly i,ooo Hawaiians. Most of the Hawaiians in Chinatown were relatively poor in comparison with the approximately 12,00o Hawaiians living elsewhere around Honolulu, but some of the Hawaiians in Chinatown, particularly the most elderly, were there because they wanted to remain in homes their families had occupied for generations before the influx of Asians. Many of the district's Hawaiians left Chinatown each morning for jobs in the city center or on the wharves. Several also left to fish, returning each evening with fresh food for their families and neighbors.19

  The symbolic center of the traditional Hawaiian community in Chinatown-and the symbolic center for most Hawaiian Christians throughout the city-was Kaumakapili Church on Beretania Street. Its congregation had originally been organized to serve converted Hawaiian commoners, since the older Kawaiahao congregation, with its church near the Iolani Palace, had catered to the Hawaiian aristocracy. Ordinary Hawaiians still came from all over the city to worship every Sunday at Kaumakapili. While a struggling young lawyer, Sanford Dole had taught Sunday school there. The church's magnificent twin spires, the tallest in the city, dominated Honolulu's western skyline and appeared even taller than they were because the church sat upon the brow of a gentle ridge above the center of Chinatown. Those spires were easily visible from almost any vantage point in the region. The many Japanese who had recently moved in around Kaumakapili also admired what they fondly called-using the old term for Hawaiians-"the Kanaka Temple. 1121

  Chinatown also sheltered small numbers of other people of other ethnicities. A few score Portuguese lived in the quarantined district, as did semitransient sailors who hailed from places as distant from one another as Spain and the East Indies. Several non-Hawaiian Polynesians who had migrated to Honolulu from places like Samoa and Tonga had found refuge in Chinatown, and a handful of people from Micronesia also lived there. One of the district's first five plague victims, whose deaths had triggered the health emergency and quarantine in the first place, was a twentyfour-year-old man from the Gilbert Islands, now the Republic of Kiribati, named Nakauaila. He had come over two thousand miles to seek his fortune in the bustling mid-Pacific port of Honolulu, only to have a desperately choking rat flea inject him with a deadly dose of bubonic plague."

  To monitor the situation inside the quarantined zone, the Board of Health called for physicians and other qualified volunteers to conduct daily (later twice-daily) house-to-house inspections. Each inspector or team of inspectors was responsible for a specific subdistrict. Any suspicious illnesses and all deaths had to be reported immediately. Patients with suspicious illnesses would be removed to special quarantine hospitals for observation. The Board of Health promised that a representative would be available in the office for consultation at any time of the day or night. With these measures, Emerson, Day and Wood hoped to stay abreast of developments as they unfolded.

  Under the terms of the quarantine, no one residing inside Chinatown on December 12 was allowed out until further notice. National guardsmen patrolled the official perimeter around the clock. Lines were painted down the middle of boundary streets to prevent people from intermingling on the periphery of the quarantined zone. Still, people managed to slip out of Chinatown, particularly at night, and melt into Asian and
Hawaiian communities in other parts of the city, often joining friends or relatives. As Wood later acknowledged, "it was no easy matter to keep 8,ooo or io,ooo people confined to a small district in the heart of town, when many of them wanted nothing more than to get out. There were, undoubtedly, many escapes.""

  The perimeters of the quarantined district were perhaps more permeable from the outside than from the inside. The volunteer medical inspectors, for example, came and went daily. National guardsmen who had direct contact with the quarantined population relaxed at public theaters throughout the city when off duty. Various contractors and work crews received passes to take excavating machines and cleanup equipment into the quarantined district; then they hauled out wagon loads of material for disposal elsewhere and returned to their homes outside Chinatown at night. Security was lax. A stack of access passes was stolen from one of the guard huts. Both the Chinese and Japanese consuls were allowed to visit regularly and observe conditions within the supposedly isolated zone.21

  Though far from perfect, the quarantine nonetheless imposed genuine hardships almost from beginning. Idle workers trapped inside the quarantined area were reported to be gambling and fighting. Because their printing facilities were inside the area, most of the city's non-English language newspapers were forced to cease publication, since they could not distribute their papers to their subscribers, most of whom lived outside Chinatown. Foodstuffs like meat and fish spoiled quickly in the tropical climate and could not be replaced. Unable to get out to fish, Hawaiians in particular felt the shortages. Opposition English-language newspapers reminded "the military government established in Honolulu" that they were still "servants of the public" and had a responsibility to provide for the "men, women, and children starving in the quarantined district under the military rule." Private relief organizations formed outside the quarantined district and negotiated ways to get food, including several tons of poi, into the sealed-off area.24