Adult audio: S.F. Chinatown

1-2. Chinatown: Ross Alley & Stockton Street

[SOUND—STREET NOISE AND MUSICIANS.]

STANLEY GEE—First of all, let’s stop on Ross Alley. This is where the famous fortune-cookie place is. Let’s go through here.

NARRATOR— Stanley Gee is another one of Chinatown’s great tour guides.

STANLEY GEE—Now Ross Alley is the most notorious alley in Chinatown during the old days. This alleyway is where all, how you say, all your gambling house? And when a Westerner come to Chinatown looking for smoke of dreams: it’s opium, the opium dens. So most of the opium dens are down in the basement, everything’s in the basement, all right?

NARRATOR— We stopped at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, where two employees make 20,000 cookies a day by hand.

STANLEY GEE—Try some hot cookies!

NARRATOR—Ross Alley’s home to a tiny barbershop owned by Jun Tu, who calls himself “the Famous Operator.” Don’t laugh: he’s served Frank Sinatra, Clint Eastwood, and the Beatles.

[SOUND—CROSS-FADE TO STOCKTON & JACKSON: LOUDER, MORE PEOPLE.]

NARRATOR—Next Mr. Gee took us to Stockton Street north of Jackson.

STANLEY GEE— Have you ever seen so much people? This is how shopping is in Chinatown! Everybody try something, everything for sale, everybody arguing—not really arguing, but how they’re bickering prices. But that’s how they are, all right?

NARRATOR—Here’s where local people buy fresh food along with dried fish and vegetables for soup.

STANLEY GEE— So everything is very easy about Chinatown, everything you buy fresh, you don’t have to spend too much time. But it’s the most enchanting place, for all this unusual stuff! Like here? This is dried bean curd, okay? This one here is black fungus. Seaweed, it’s a seaweed.

NARRATOR—He held up something that looked like a black cucumber.

STANLEY GEE—The black thing here, this is what we call water slug. … But it still costs you $65 a pound.

[SOUND—MORE MARKET SOUNDS AS WE MOVE TO NEXT SHOP.]

STANLEY GEE—All the meats hanging and all the chicken hanging up there? Like, oh my god, look at them! Oh, you notice they got the head hanging on them? Because again, Chinese respect all living things. So what happened, when we eat the duck we eat everything. Nothing is wasted. That means the feet, the neck, the beak, the tongue, everything! And eating the tongue is very expensive! [eat whole animal-all parts] … Okay, let’s go down through this alleyway here. Come on, let’s jaywalk a little bit…

[SOUND—WE MOVE INDOORS, AT VITAL TEALEAF.]

NARRATOR— We recovered from our shopping trip at Vital Tealeaf, 1044 Grant Avenue. Visitors can sit down and sample different kinds of fine tea with no purchase necessary.

STANLEY GEE— Tea will purify your body. So the concept is just like a wine-tasting deal. We have people come in here, sit down, chitchat. At the same time, what you’re learning from them is the culture. And where else do you learn about each other, and it’s over a cup of tea?

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