Word: chinatown
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sightseers tramping its cluttered avenues, San Francisco's Chinatown has always displayed a pungent blend of yang and yin. Those intertwined opposites-good and evil, sweet and sour, light and dark-describe not only Chinese philosophy but also the inner contradictions of a district whose neon signs and tourist bustle mask a swarming, sweatshop world of long hours, low pay, hard work and fear. For all its outward ambiance, the largest Chinese enclave outside Asia is one of America's most wretched slums...
Over forty thousand Chinese are jammed into the 42 blocks of Chinatown proper between Bush Street and Broadway, Kearny and Powell. About 30,000 have spilled north and west into adjacent residential districts; 10,000 more live throughout the Bay Area...
...gold fields and railroads beckoned, and in smaller streams when the U.S. set up immigration quotas and California passed its racial exclusion laws in 1892. Despite the restrictions, so many Chinese have entered the U.S. in the past seven decades that perhaps as many as half the people of Chinatown are there in violation of the immigration laws...
...often labor from 8:30 a.m. until after midnight, seven days a week, fingers darting frenetically to make ends meet. Asked why she would work at least twelve hours a day for a net income of $26 a week, one mother of five said succinctly: "You have to in Chinatown...
...been victimized by their language problems (even today, no more than 40% speak fluent English), their fear of deportation, and traditional kowtowing to fate and station. San Francisco's youngest, brightest Chinese-Americans leave for the suburbs at a rate of up to 15,000 a year, and Chinatown has become a way station for immigrants and a ghetto of the old and unemployed poor...