Jacob Riis's Chinatown

Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing.  Next door neighbor to the Bend, it has little of its outdoor stir and life, none of its gaily-colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty.  Mott Street is clean to distraction:  the laundry stamp is on it, though the houses are chiefly of the conventional tenement-house type, with nothing to rescue them from the everyday dismal dreariness of their kind save here and there a splash of dull red or yellow, a sign, hung endways and with streamers of red flannel tacked on, that announces in Chinese characters that Dr. Chay Yen Chong sells Chinese herb medicines, or that Won Lung & Co. take in washing, or deal out tea and groceries.

Red and yellow are the holiday colors of Chinatown as of the Bend, but they do not lend brightness in Mott Street as around the corner in Mulberry.  Rather, they seem to descend to the level of the general dullness, and glower at you from doors and windows, from the telegraph pole that is the official organ of Chinatown and from the store signs, with blank unmeaning stare, suggesting nothing, asking no questions and answering none.  Fifth Avenue is not duller on a rainy day than Mott Street to one in search of excitement.  Whatever is on foot goes on behind closed doors.  Stealth and secretiveness are as much part of the Chinaman in New York as the cat-like tread of his felt shoes.  His business, as his domestic life, shuns the light, less because there is anything to conceal than because that is the way of the man.  Perhaps the attitude of American civilization toward the stranger, whom it invited in, has taught him that way.  At any rate, the very doorways of his offices and shops are fenced off by queer, forbidding partitions suggestive of a continual state of siege.

Trust not  him who trusts no one, is as safe a rule in Chinatown as out of it.  Fan tan is their ruling passion.  The average Chinaman, the police will tell you, would rather gamble than eat any day...  Only the fellow in the bunk smokes away, indifferent to all else but his pipe and his own enjoyment.  The Chinaman smokes opium as Caucasians smoke tobacco... But woe unto the white victim upon which his pitiless drug gets its grip!

...Scrupulous neatness...is the distinguishing mark of Chinatown, outwardly and physically.  It is not altogether by chance the Chinaman has chosen the laundry as his distinctive field.  He is by nature as clean as the cat, which he resembles in his traits of cruel cunning and savage fury when aroused.

From How the Other Half Lives, 1901