On the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was the jewel of the West Coast: a lively, bustling city bursting with self-made millionaires, theaters providing every kind of entertainment, and all kinds of raucous good fun. Three days later it was a smoking ruin, leveled by one of the biggest natural disasters in US history—much to the delight of the Flying Rollers of Benton Harbor, Michigan, who really did send missionaries to call down destruction on the cesspit of the West if San Franciscans did not mend their sinning ways. The quake alone measured an estimated 7.9 on the Richter scale, toppling countless buildings and causing untold damage, but it was the fires that followed that sealed the city’s fate. San Francisco boasted what was supposed to be an excellent firefighting system, but the earthquake shattered the water mains: when fires began all over the city in the immediate aftermath of the quake, lit by scattered candles, broken kitchen stoves, and blocked chimneys, the fire department found very few functional water mains to connect their hoses to. Despite a heroic battle from civilians and firefighters alike, San Francisco burned for three days and nights. Nearly thirty thousand buildings were lost, including the massive mansions of Nob Hill, the Grand Opera House, which had hosted Caruso the night before, the entirety of Chinatown, and countless homes and businesses. Refugees fled ahead of the flames to impromptu camps in Golden Gate Park or to Oakland by ferry, and lawlessness gripped the city—the army was ordered to shoot looters on sight, and many sound buildings were dynamited in a fruitless effort to create firebreaks. Despite these precautions, at least six hundred lives were lost, and the true tally is likely in the thousands. Yet San Francisco picked itself up from the ashes and rebuilt in record time, sufficiently recovered to host the world’s fair in 1915.
[Kate Quinn: I have been endlessly fascinated with the idea of writing a San Francisco earthquake book, with a heroine who sang at the famous opera house before it was destroyed. But I knew the book would also need a Chinatown heroine . . .]
[Janie Chang: My first response to Kate was “We both just got through writing books set during world wars. How traumatic could it be to write about an earthquake?” After just a bit of preliminary research on the lives of Chinatown women of that era, I could tell that my character would be challenging and complex to write. And I wanted to write her!]
Newspapers and politicians of the time portrayed Chinatown as dirty and sinister, and as such, evidence that the Chinese were a decadent and evil race. They ignored the fact that San Francisco’s Chinatown was not a typical Chinese community; it was warped by unfair laws and racism. Fifteen thousand residents lived and worked inside an area of twenty square blocks out of a need for mutual protection, a situation that created crowded and squalid living conditions. An 1885 map of Chinatown’s buildings and their usage accompanied a report commissioned by San Francisco’s board of supervisors intended to show the supposed moral turpitude of the Chinese. Thus the map highlighted brothels (both white and Chinese), gambling parlors, and opium “resorts,” all contributing to Chinatown’s notoriety. Yet the vast majority of buildings on the map housed families and shops; there were factories, an opera theater, joss houses (temples), Christian missions and churches, a large herbalist store that was the closest thing Chinatown had to a hospital, and of course, laundries.
A citizen of Chinatown such as Suling would understand absolutely how gambling, opium, and prostitution ruined lives. She would also possess a nuanced grasp of the reasons why so many fell victim to these vices. One reason was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which blocked immigration for Chinese, exempting only a few categories of professions. After 1882, most men couldn’t bring their wives or children over. They’d come during the gold rush and to build the railways, and now the best they could do for their families was to work and send money home. Living as bachelors, many turned to the comfort of drugs, gambling, or prostitutes to forget their loneliness. Those who could afford it found wives—or married second wives.
In 1890, Chinatown’s population was 90 percent male, a gender imbalance that promoted human trafficking. Chinese and white human traders smuggled women from China and sold them to brothels or as indentured servants. It was a chain of tragedy that began with the girls’ families (and some were just girls). Traditionally, Chinese parents valued sons over daughters, and when faced with starvation some sold their daughters. They may have been naive enough to believe their girls were destined for domestic service in America. Others knew better and sold their children anyway. In Chinatown’s cheapest brothels, women were treated brutally and most could expect to die within three to five years from illness, ill treatment, or suicide.
Missionary Donaldina Cameron made it her life’s work to rescue these young women by bringing them to the safety of her Mission Home. Sometimes women managed to escape and ran to her Mission for safety. Cameron helped some of the rescued women find husbands, usually Chinese Christians. So scarce were Chinese women that their unfortunate histories barely mattered to men desperate for wives and children. This is the past we gave Suling’s mother.
Yet as Suling points out to Reggie, Chinatown was not all vice and exotic bordellos. There were perfectly ordinary families leading ordinary lives. Photos of Chinatown from before the earthquake show children walking along the street holding hands; women strolling together to attend New Year’s festivities; a vendor selling pots of narcissus; a grocer standing in front of his store surrounded by crates of vegetables. All this burned down after the earthquake. The Chinatown you see today was designed deliberately to reflect Western notions of oriental architecture. Chinatown’s merchants and leaders made a conscious decision to rebuild Chinatown in a way that would attract non-Chinese to exotic-looking streets and shops, a tourist destination that could promote not just business but perhaps cultural exchange. Chinatowns around the world have since followed this template.
[Kate: San Francisco’s Chinatown today is wonderful, but it looks nothing like it would have looked in 1906. We both mourned that we couldn’t see it.]
[Janie: Something I learned during research was that the spectacular, noisy, cheerful Chinatown New Year’s Day parades were not always a Chinatown custom. The first such parade took place in 1953. The Cold War was raging and China, a Communist country, was the enemy. Fearing more discrimination, Chinatown’s community leaders felt they needed a platform to emphasize the positive contributions of Chinese Americans. They organized a parade that brought more tourism to Chinatown and San Francisco and that has become a highlight of the year for the whole city.]
Suling is a fictional character, born in California, the child of immigrants, living in a community that works hard to find success despite racism and exclusion. By 1906, there were Chinese who had lived in the USA long enough to become Westernized and have children who considered themselves Chinese American rather than Chinese. Some of these immigrants owned businesses that served both white and Chinese customers, lived outside Chinatown, and sent their children to public schools. Suling belongs to a demographic in transition: she doesn’t reject traditional values wholesale, but wonders how she can live at the periphery of those values while carving out a life completely unlike what her community might expect. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were limited career options for Chinese men and even fewer for women. Sewing and embroidery, which could be done at home as piecework, was a common cottage industry. It seemed only logical that Suling would have such skills, but after researching the art of Chinese embroidery, we just had to use it in the story. Thus, Suling’s expertise at creating intricate embroidery became the ticket to her career at a Paris fashion house.
[Janie: I’ve always marveled at the courage of pioneers and first immigrants and decided that Suling’s courage comes from growing up surrounded by people who had taken a deep breath and made big risks to change their lives completely.]
[Kate: From the very beginning we chose Suling’s family name Feng (“phoenix”) as a direct tribute not just to the title, but to her own bravery in rising from the ashes of an old life to create a new one.]
Our opera singer, Gemma Garland/Sally Gunderson, is fictional, but it is very true that the Metropolitan Opera Company was in town the day San Francisco was destroyed: the great Enrico Caruso (who had rejected the chance to sing in Naples because he was uneasy about nearby Vesuvius erupting!) starred in a performance of Carmen mere hours before the earthquake hit. The city’s finest (including famous actor John Barrymore, who happened to be in town) turned out in diamond-decked splendor to hear the famous tenor sing, and he earned gushing reviews in the papers, which had barely rolled off the presses by the time the first tremors hit. Bessie Abott as Micaëla was not reviewed well, nor was Olive Fremstad in the starring role of Carmen. Olive, who really did get into a shouting match with her costar during the day’s rehearsal, had an otherwise splendid career—and she did indeed train her lungs by holding her breath and counting how many lampposts she could pass at a jog.
[Kate: I trained as an opera singer in college—a high lyric soprano like Gemma—and my student loans are very grateful I could finally put my degrees to good use! Gemma’s character and career are partially based on my wonderful college voice professor, Sally Arneson, a determined blue-eyed blonde who did indeed grow up on a Nebraska farm, make it big in Europe’s opera houses with her thrilling high F’s as Mozart’s Queen of the Night, and marry a wonderfully skilled pianist named George, who partnered her in countless concerts and recitals. I count them as friends to this day.]
[Janie: The “Queen of the Night” aria was the piece that turned me into an opera fan—I will never forget falling dumbstruck at those high F’s ringing like a bell. Now Kate and I are arguing over which soprano’s performance to feature on our Bonus Materials web page.]
[Kate: Edita Gruberova.]
[Janie: Nope. Diana Damrau.]
Botanist Alice Eastwood had such a sensational life, she threatened to take over the entire book. She was an extraordinary self-taught scientist whose career roamed the globe, an intrepid explorer who set off on strenuous and dangerous hikes in pursuit of new plant samples, and a meticulous scholar who published hundreds of scientific articles. At thirty-five she was named head of the Department of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences, a position she held until age ninety. When the 1906 earthquake hit and fires threatened to consume the Academy, Alice matter-of-factly hung her lunch bag on a mastodon horn and climbed six stories up the outside of the shattered staircase to her office where she managed to save fifteen hundred botanical samples from the herbarium that was her life’s work. Afterward, escaping San Francisco with little more than the clothes on her back and her favorite Zeiss lens, she remarked of her lost work, “It was a joy to me while I did it; I can still have the same joy in starting it again.” She did exactly that, returning to the California Academy once it was rebuilt in Golden Gate Park. Over a dozen species would be named in her honor, and her portrait hangs in the Academy’s botany department to this day.
[Kate: We invented Alice’s adventures in the octagon house with Gemma, but Alice was a lifelong lover of opera and had a huge eclectic circle of friends—why not an opera singer?]
[Janie: When we found a photograph of her wearing an extravagantly flowered hat, we both practically screamed “Suling made the flowers on that hat!”]
Reggie/Nellie is fictionalized, and so is the epilogue’s art book detailing her artistic legacy, but female artists were making a name for themselves both in San Francisco and in Paris in the early nineteenth century. The Left Bank in particular thrived with expatriate women artists (including American writer Natalie Barney) who lived for their art, flaunted romantic relationships with other women, and were socially accepted without a French eyelash ever being batted. The mental institution to which Reggie was unfairly confined is fictionalized, but based on the very real State Insane Asylum at Agnews near San Jose, which collapsed in the 1906 earthquake and released hundreds of inmates to roam free from their cells.
Our villain is fictionalized: we found the name H. Thornton on old maps, listed as owner of thousands of acres of land in California, and based his character and background on any number of ruthless nineteenth-century tycoons who accrued massive fortunes (frequently through shady means) and then tried to build themselves up as philanthropists and patrons of the arts. His octagon house is also fictional, though there was a fad for eight-sided houses in the nineteenth century since they were supposed to be luckier and more healthful than the ordinary kind, and more than eighty notable octagon houses exist in the United States today, two of them in San Francisco. Chinoiserie collections were very popular among wealthy Westerners as the fad grew for Chinese antiques—many of them looted first from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, and then from the Forbidden City in 1900. The Park Avenue Hotel fire in which Thornton obtains the seed money for his fortune was a notorious disaster taking place in 1902; the fire claimed twenty-one lives, though it is unlikely to have been caused by arson.
[Janie: We researched endless New York catastrophes before finding one that would work as Thornton’s backstory.]
[Kate: And we have the Google spreadsheet to prove it.]
Callot Soeurs where we placed Suling as embroideress was a real fashion house in Paris at the turn of the century, run by four sisters. Callot Soeurs designs were known for their exquisite embroidery. At the same time, Paul Poiret was starting to take the fashion world by storm, becoming known for his hobble skirts, his corsetless gowns, his “oriental” designs, and his over-the-top entertaining. He rented the Pavillon du Butard near Versailles in June 1911 and decked it with exotic birds, gilded furniture, and hundreds of bottles of champagne for one of the century’s most sensational parties: guests were provided with Persian costumes, French ballerinas and naked African dancers performed to the music of Egyptian and Indian musicians, and jewel-colored cocktails were spun up at his bar/laboratory for the dazzled crowd.
Our primary goal in teaming up to write this book was to turn out a story we could be proud of, without ruining a long and wonderful friendship. We’re thrilled to have succeeded in that, and we attribute our successful collaboration to three things: Google Docs, a compatible work ethic, and the unshakable belief that a spreadsheet will solve everything! Not to mention a passion for the history we write about—in our history-nerd hearts we mourn all the wonderful historical tidbits that could only be mentioned in passing in this story.
[Kate: I still regret we couldn’t do more with the character of Donaldina Cameron at the Chinatown Mission Home—a legitimate badass who was feared by pimps all over San Francisco.]
[Janie: And I only got to mention Tye Leung in passing. As a teenager, she ran away from an arranged marriage and grew up to be a civil rights activist. She was the first Chinese woman employed by the US federal government, working at the Angel Island Immigration Station, and the first Chinese woman to vote in a federal election. But marriage to her coworker Charles Schulze cost them both their jobs because marriage between Asians and whites was banned in California.]
We have taken some minor liberties with the historic record to serve the story. Our fictional heroines have been inserted into real historical events: Alice Eastwood rescued her botanical samples with the assistance of several colleagues but not the fictional Gemma; Bessie Abott was not bumped out of her Micaëla role for the pre-earthquake performance of Carmen, and Enrico Caruso fled San Francisco somewhat earlier than we have implied here. The roles Gemma sings in Buenos Aires were chosen to suit her voice, not the exact historical performance calendar of the Teatro Colón.
In Paris, Suling pays a visit to La Pagode, a Chinese antiques store. There was a store of that name owned by C. T. Loo, a colorful and controversial antiques dealer. The building still stands and is used as a venue for cultural events. However, the real La Pagode didn’t open for business until 1926, and so the store Suling visits is La Pagode from Janie’s novel The Porcelain Moon and the children she meets will grow up to be two of the characters in that novel.
Alice Eastwood made a number of trips to Europe and we know these dates because she wrote them in little notebooks where she kept meticulous records of her expenses: food, lodgings, transportation. We moved her from London to Paris a little early in her European botanical travels so she could attend Poiret’s famous oriental ball.
Our research led us to far too many books to list here. For more reading about the fascinating history behind this novel, from the San Francisco earthquake to the looting of the Forbidden City and the Old Summer Palace to embroidery stitches and opera houses, please visit the Book Clubs page on either of our websites (katequinnauthor.com or janiechang.com) and look for bonus materials associated with The Phoenix Crown. There you will also find discussion questions for book clubs, exclusive Spotify playlists, and recipes for Suling’s shrimp with peas, Gemma’s lemon tart, and authentic San Francisco Pisco Punch!