smoke curled up, showering ashes like gray snow. Health officers lugged in sulfur pots and began fumigating the coffin shop. The air smelled of rotten eggs. Wong’s body was wrapped in a linen shroud that had been soaked in an antiseptic solution of bichloride of mercury and sealed in a lead coffin lined with powdery chloride of lime. The coffin was loaded onto a horse cart and driven over cobblestones west of downtown to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. There, the body was given to the flames.
Autopsy and cremation was the fate prescribed by health departments for any victim of an epidemic disease. But cutting and burning of the body violated the Confucian principle of filial piety. Autopsy was considered an affront to the parents of the deceased, who gave him life; and cremation was the final desecration. Such practices left a disembodied spirit in the void. “The ashes will be scattered in the air,” wrote the reporter for the Chinese daily, “and let go to the home of nothingness, the cave of emptiness.”9
Chinatown had its own view of what ailed Wong Chut King, and it was certainly not the plague. Elders confided that the lumberman, like many bachelor workers who visited the green mansions—suffered from “notorious gonorrhea,” also known as “poisonous mango-shaped lump.”10
In a community of lonely laborers living a continent away from their wives, such ills were as common an occupational hazard as callused hands. Although venereal disease was an unsavory topic, it would not bring down the fiery retribution on the neighborhood that was promised by a diagnosis of plague.
Speculation about the torching of the Globe Hotel reached the ears of its tenants, who fled their bunks and vanished like smoke. But the Globe wasn’t burned to the ground. Instead, the city continued its chemical assault, fumigating and spraying acrid chemicals in hopes of purging the disease. The sanitation had its drawbacks. The smoking pots of sulfur smudged paint, spoiled hangings, and ruined upholstery. In neighboring stores, it would yellow pale silks and silt carvings with gritty smoke residue. Thick, rank clouds blinded residents with tears and sent them choking and sputtering into the streets for air. If the disease didn’t kill them, they guessed the cure surely would.
The confined stared longingly at the world outside the cordon. Outside were jobs, money, food. A brave and foolhardy few tried to vault over or slip under the barricades. The crack of a billy club brought the escapees back into quarantine.
From his official residence in Chinatown, the Chinese consul, Ho Yow, watched the street scene unfold below with a leaden heart.
At home in two worlds, Ho spoke perfect English but posed for portraits in the traditional silk robes and dark silk skullcap of a senior Asian diplomat. Although he was his country’s designated representative of Chinese culture, he enjoyed Western sports like harness racing, and he raced his champion mare, Solo, all over Northern California. Solo trotted to victory behind a driver clad in red-and-blue racing silks, embroidered with a magnificent dragon with shimmering scales and flashing eyes.
Ho knew well the danger of Black Death. In his father’s household in China, two servants had died of plague.11 But, he argued, blockading the whole district was discrimination. Anyone could see the quarantine rope markedly zigzagged to exclude white stores on the boundaries of Chinatown.
More than the plague itself, Consul Ho feared that the quarantine would provoke a relapse of exclusion-law fever. He begged the city to be fair to his people. Immigrants born in China were barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. They were legally subjects of the emperor of China. Even Chinese people born in America hadn’t been deemed citizens until two years earlier, when the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court formally recognized their status in the case of Wong Kim Ark. Still, in the eyes of the white majority, their Asian features and golden hue stamped them indelibly as aliens.
Ho sought out the Chinese Six Companies. More than just a Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the group functioned as de facto diplomats, working with the consul to keep peace between the tongs and untangle immigration snarls. Now, facing quarantine, Ho and the Chinese Six Companies had another mission: protecting the civil rights of their people. So they hired lawyers and vowed to defend their small stake in America.
On Gold Mountain in the Year of the Rat, the bad times were about to get worse.
“A Lively Corpse”
CRADLING AUTOPSY SAMPLES from Wong Chut King in glass vials, city bacteriologist Wilfred Kellogg boarded a streetcar. When the driver signaled the Ferry Building stop, Kellogg got off and bought a ticket for Angel Island. Ascending the ramp to board the ferry, he no doubt saw the water afloat with garbage, the screaming gulls swooping down to pluck tidbits from the waves, and the rats gorging at low tide.
The ferry churned north, over waters ruffled into whitecaps by the stiff bay winds. Past the stony outcrop of Alcatraz, the ferry continued on toward to the tree-dotted, tan hulk of Angel Island. In mid-bay, as the ferry slapped over swells, Kellogg clutched his samples more tightly for safety. One misstep could send the stoppered tubes crashing to the cabin floor, and the translucent pink lymph fluid and bits of bloody pulp would be lost amid shards of glass. The mystery of Wong’s death would remain unsolved.
Forty minutes later, the vessel swung around the north side of Angel Island, cut its engines, and nosed into Hospital Cove. Kellogg steadied his sea legs and lurched down the ramp onto the pier, then walked on to the headquarters of the quarantine officer, Joseph J. Kinyoun. Kinyoun’s job was to inspect arriving ships, check the passengers and crew, isolate the sick, fumigate the cargo, and keep diseases out of the country. It was his duty to impose federal standards of hygiene on this port city that, after Washington, D.C., must have seemed like a frontier outpost. Sent to San Francisco from the capital just ten months before, he was a disease warrior. Angel Island was his fortress, and all San Francisco Bay was his moat.
Kinyoun was a “Pasteurian,” a doctor trained in Europe in the new science of bacteriology founded by the patriarch of infectious diseases, Louis Pasteur. He was thirty-nine years old, portly and balding, with a cleft chin and an obstinate streak. He had a tender ego and a gut to match. Kinyoun was unsuited to his politically turbulent job. A public health officer needs the hide of a pachyderm, he told colleagues.1 Instead, he had the skin of an onion.
Conceived on the eve of the Civil War, Joseph James Kinyoun was born in East Bend, North Carolina, in November 1860. The son of a Confederate army surgeon, John Hendricks Kinyoun, and his wife, Bettie Ann, Kinyoun spent his infancy in the care of his mother, who prayed and pined for her soldier husband. The Sunday after Christmas of 1861, Bettie Ann took up her pen to send him all the home news of churchgoing, hog raising, and Negro sales. The centerpiece of the letter was a sketch of their thirteen-month-old Joe, a whirlwind who was just then playing at her feet.
“Our little darling,” she wrote, “…has improved a great deal in walking, and you would be pleased to see him running across the room which he does sometimes twenty times before he seems tired. He has a fashion of walking with his little hands laid upon his breast, which makes him totter a good deal…. [H]e eats as hearty as a little shoat.”2
When the Civil War ended, the elder Dr. Kinyoun returned to practice medicine. His son would follow in his footsteps. Despite upheaval in family life—relocation to Centre View, Missouri, and the death of his mother when he was twelve—Joseph Kinyoun found his calling early as his father’s apprentice. Following his training at St. Louis Medical College in Missouri, and then at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, where he completed his M.D. in 1882, he returned to Missouri to join his father’s medical practice.3
While at home in Centre View, he met a young Missourian named Susan Elizabeth Perry—Lizzie—and married her. They were both twenty-three. Within a year Lizzie bore a girl who died in childhood.4
While working with his father, Joseph Kinyoun started reading exciting reports about the French chemist Louis Pasteur, who was exploring the world of microbes. Through the lens of a microscope, Dr. Kinyoun immersed himself in the study of bacteria as agents of disease.
Kinyoun returned east with his bride to continue his study of bacteriology at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1886 he joined the U.S. Marine Hospital Service, the federal agency that inspected ships for disease, imposed maritime quarantines, and tended sick seamen. The service needed doctors like Kinyoun, with a passion for bacteriology, who could infuse service operations with the powerful new science. So the fledgling physician was asked to set up a bacteriology laboratory at the quarantine station in New York. It was in an unimposing one-room lab, up in the attic
