Plague, however, was still a lethal force. Its next assault occurred in late August, just as Chinatown celebrated a festival of the dead. People donned their fine silk robes. The streets were hung with lanterns and bouquets. Scrolls of poetry were burned, and tables of delicacies were spread out to propitiate the souls of the departed. The very next day they had a new spirit to appease.
On August 31, the body of a twenty-eight-year-old Chinese man, Lee Mon Chou, was carried to the plague morgue. Lee had an infection that ruptured glands in his pelvis and invaded his lungs. He died at the Oso Cigar Factory on Dupont Street, where he worked among a dozen men. With a cough or a sneeze, Lee could have infected them all. The cigar factory was immediately shut down, fumigated with sulfur, and swabbed with formaldehyde. But before the doctors could find the dead man’s co-workers, they disappeared like wisps of incense from a joss stick.27
Just before Labor Day, Blue boarded a train out of San Francisco to settle some personal business, leaving the Merchant Street morgue and lab in the able hands of Mark White and Donald Currie. The bullying of the plague doctors intensified in his absence. For the first time, San Franciscans opened their papers to read about some unorthodox uses of Governor Gage’s plague fund.
The Morse Detective Agency billed the state health board $326.25 for spying on the bacteriologist H. A. L. Ryfkogel and the federal doctors as they made their rounds in Chinatown. They insinuated that Ryfkogel was inoculating Chinese corpses with plague, as they had said Kinyoun was. “Governor Gage has not the instincts of a gentleman,” Ryfkogel told the local press. “I am not a bit surprised to hear that he had my footsteps dogged through Chinatown by hired shadows.”28
But any outrage brewing over the state-funded spying was immediately eclipsed by the report of gunshots three thousand miles away. In Buffalo, New York, while President William McKinley attended a reception inside the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition, an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz rushed up and pumped two bullets into his chest and abdomen. McKinley remained conscious, prayed aloud, comforted his wife, and bade the American people to keep courage. For eight days he fought, but he ultimately succumbed to his wounds.
At 2:15 A.M. on September 14, San Francisco fire stations tolled, ringing fifty-eight times, once for every year of McKinley’s life. Stricken crowds gathered outside the newspaper offices and numbly absorbed the news. Behind his wire rims, the newspapers said, the newly sworn forty-two-year-old President Theodore Roosevelt fought back tears.
Rupert Blue headed back to San Francisco just in time to tie on a black crepe armband for the month of mourning ordered by Surgeon General Wyman.
The Bite of a Flea
COOPED UP IN RAILROAD CARS for two weeks, Blue was restless and itching to get back to the plague lab and morgue on Merchant Street. After his brief personal leave, he seemed eager to plunge back into the fray and forget his own troubles. “Work of any kind, after such an experience, would [be] a blessing,” he told the surgeon general.1
His life with Juliette was unraveling. Since their marriage in 1895, they had moved nine times for the federal health service. The life of a circuit-riding sanitarian—as rootless as a soldier’s, but without the status—was rough on families. Now, seven years later, the nomadic life, with its constant transfers, modest pay, and no permanent home, took its toll. If Rupert and Juliette’s marriage in 1895 didn’t give his mother the vapors, then their breakup certainly did. Divorce was scandalous in his church and his state. But despite the stigma, their union ended in 1902. After they parted, all traces of Julie—as he once affectionately called her—disappeared from his life. No letters, pictures, or mementos of the young actress he loved survive in his family’s records or correspondence, as if purging her name would efface the shame of divorce.
Blue would immerse himself in the plague zone. He had a lot of catching up to do; the men had been very busy in his absence. But at least the team now had a Chinese translator.
Before he had left San Francisco, Joe White had tried to hire Wong Chung, the Chinese Six Companies’ old secretary, to act as the Marine Hospital Service interpreter for the then substantial wage of $5 a day. Wong had been a key to the success of the independent plague commission. Guiding the men through Chinatown, he opened up access that only a native speaker could provide. But apparently the interpreter wasn’t eager to work with the white doctors as a steady job—not yet, anyway. After White’s overture, Wong Chung shied away, left town, and stayed incommunicado for several weeks.
But federal doctors intensified their courtship and overcame Wong Chung’s reluctance. Wong took the job. After his brief stint as translator for the visiting plague experts in early 1901, he now expanded his role into that of regular translator for the Washington doctors. Translators in that day wore many hats, from simple interpreter to cultural emissary to negotiator with the whites. (Indeed, one term for translator, cheut faan, literally means one who goes “out to the barbarians.”)2 So it’s likely that Wong’s access to federal health officials helped keep Chinatown leaders informed of Washington’s next move against the plague. However, it’s also likely that Wong now saw that plague wasn’t merely the invention of white racists, or a pretext for a crackdown on Chinatown, but a dangerous disease that imperiled his people. Whatever his private motives for taking the job, it was a role that carried heavy personal risks—the risk of being censured by the state, and shunned by his own kind.
The translator was proving to be a font of medical and political intelligence. Wong tipped off the federal doctors that a clerk was sick in the basement of Fook Lung & Company, a Washington Street grocery. Mark White—not to be confused with Joseph White—set out to investigate. Languishing in a basement bunk beneath the sidewalk, twenty-eight-year-old Ng Chan burned and shivered with a fever of over 103 degrees. The walnut-size lump in his groin conformed with the clinical picture of plague. It seemed clear-cut.
But not to the doctors of the state health board, who called it venereal disease and advised Ng Chan not to cooperate with the federal physicians. Ng denied requests for a blood test or a photograph of his bubo. At the Oriental Dispensary, he received visitors, five and six at a time, who chatted at his bedside as if he had a cold.
One evening during visiting hours, the friends of Ng Chan hatched a plot to smuggle the patient to a Sacramento River ranch—with help from the state health board. A hospital janitor let in on the scheme slipped word to Wong Chung. Wong alerted Mark White, who posted guards at the bedside, foiling the getaway.
Spiriting sick people away to the country had to be prevented, or all plague measures would be for naught. But Mark White was aware that the situation was delicate. If he were punitive or disparaging, as Kinyoun had been, he’d lose the trust and goodwill of the people. “I do not think the Chinese here very different from the Human Race elsewhere,” he wrote to Washington. By treating people with respect, he added, public health goals “can be far more readily attained.”3 It was a simple observation, but radical for its day.
The city’s rats continued to gnaw through the illusory wall separating whites and Asians. Their next victim was a middle-aged white seaman. Alexander Winters, a fifty-year-old salt, toiled aboard small schooners and scows from San Francisco Bay to the Sacramento River Delta. He’d never had anything more than a case of clap in his youth.