In an unprecedented move, a group of passionate historic preservationists is working hard to digitize century-old records of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Led by historian David Lei and University of California Berkeley lecturer Anna Eng, a group of volunteers is spending weeks in Chinatown to scan dozens of boxes of documents, notes, letters, photos and other artifacts from two of the most historic and oldest organizations, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and Cameron House.
“If these documents are not preserved, they are gone,” Eng said. “And in fact, lots of materials have already been lost.”
The benevolent association, also known as the Six Companies, started in the 1850s when it was considered to be Chinatown’s City Hall, assisting newly relocated immigrants. It spearheaded many civil rights lawsuits, including the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, which established birthright citizenship in America.
Cameron House, founded in 1874 and later named after the pioneering activist and leader Donaldina Cameron, who fought for equal rights for the Chinese people, is a longtime nonprofit that has helped trafficked immigrant girls, women and orphans in Chinatown.
Eng said the historic materials have been deteriorating over the decades, as they have been sitting in back rooms and closets, where conditions are moldy.
Most of the documents at the benevolent association are meeting minutes, which reveal the extent to which Chinatown’s leaders aided members of their community who faced detention or immigration issues. There are also many fundraising records from the late 1930s about overseas Chinese who mobilized to help China fight in World War II, including letters from the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek.
Lei said these old documents show a rarely known part of the San Francisco’s nascent Chinese community. In contrast to the stereotype of uneducated, cheap laborers, Chinatown was well-organized and very involved in social justice issues.
The preservation effort is a race against time, with one recent near-disaster highlighting the artifacts’ fragility. Days into the scanning process, pouring rain in San Francisco flooded the association's building, which houses numerous boxes of documents. Thankfully, volunteers on-site helped save the trove.
Eng said they have been working with UC Berkeley to preserve better both the physical and digital copies of the Cameron House, so researchers around the world can have unlimited and easier access.
Ding Lee, a board member of Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, said that he has been pushing to better preserve all these records since 2020, and he’ll move to formalize their donation to a major public institution.
The whole process of digitization, categorization and making the documents publicly accessible may take years.