Capturing the imagination_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Capturing the imagination

“There’s various forms of driving out. One form was, instead of mass murder, to just burn the place at night. The Chinatown in Sacramento was burned over and over again. … The Sacramento fire department oversaw a burning. Their job was just to make sure to protect the city, but to let it burn. The Chinese running out of the buildings on fire were not allowed to go to the hospital.”

That Chinatown of the late 19th century didn’t much resemble Sacramento’s current Chinatown, with its embellished buildings on the north side of J Street between 3rd and 5th streets. Instead, it was a collection of shanties that squatted along the banks of what used to be Sutter’s Lake, before Central Pacific Railroad Company filled in the polluted slough. There, men on their way to the gold fields set up a small city of their own, complete with laundries, markets, gambling and a joss house. Now, the Amtrak station sits atop the former lake and, Yee contends, the ruins of Sacramento’s earliest Chinese settlement.

To commemorate those who lived and died there, Yee proposes that the local Chinese-American community, the city and Thomas Enterprises partner on a new museum that both commemorates Chinese labor and also exposes the history of anti-Chinese sentiment in California.

“Chinatowns were established for protection. If a Chinese person stepped outside a Chinatown, most likely they would be murdered,” said Yee. “So Chinatowns were cities within a city. And there was a Chinatown at the rail yard. It was called Yee Fow, Second City.”