I have never been to China, but I have been to Chinatown.
I must have made my first visit when I was five or so, visiting California from Florida with my family. My memories of San Francisco are disembodied and somewhat bizarre chunks: the seals on the rock, the occasional hotel room. I don't remember anything about Chinatown.
The next Chinatown I visited was in Washington D.C, when I was eight. This was fascinating - the huge yellow and gold gate that failed utterly to jibe with its surroundings, the tremendous escalator I rode up somewhere within its confines - and the restaurant. We ate at a big dark restaurant there, and although I barely recall the food, I do recall a black marble cat that represented a live cat that had passed there sometime in the restaurant's former life. It represented China to me, somehow - a big heavy sculpture treated, fondly, as if it were alive. Whenever I thought of China I thought of the green and gold gate and the cat.
I have a favorite Chinatown now. I live an hour and a half from San Francisco and am there often, and the first place I go to, the place I always gravitate to, is Chinatown. It's dirty, crowded, packed with overweight tourists and spitting geriatrics, but I love it anyway. That combination of star anise, frying garlic, stale urine and tobacco smoke that hangs over the area in a doleful cloud is addictive. I would bottle it and sell it to myself.
In any case, I was there this Wednesday to pick up our Chinese visas at the consulate, which is, rather ironically, positioned right next door to Japantown. After passing the silent Falun Gong protesters positioned outside (and accepting a brochure chock full of gory photos,) I went inside and was astonished to find that the pickup line was both short and fairly effective. I had been expecting some Communist bureaucratic nightmare, but instead I simply found a mid-sized line, at the end of which a lady yelled at me in Chinese. She switched to English when she realized I was stupid, and we picked up the visas.
And so I wandered over to Japantown. Japantown was built as a sort of all-contained Japanese shopping center, and it certainly succeeds in that, although the Koreans are making considerable inroads. I wanted lunch but it was still a little early, and as I wandered the clean, sanitary, and orderly halls of the shopping mall, I found myself yearning for some spit and live game birds. I had planned on getting some ramen for lunch from one of the various noodle vendors in the neighborhood, but my heart wasn't in it. I needed to eat something funkier.
So I walked all the way down Geary in my very un-practical high heeled shoes, stopping off at a decrepit Thai place, which happened to have my favorite food in the Whole World: papaya salad with salty crab. Which you can see here.
But I always gravitate towards Chinatown magnetically, wherever I am in San Francisco, and I found myself walking under the gate once again, amused by the sudden transition from Starbucks and kitsch stores to The Wok Shop and mechanical singing crickets. I walked up the street for a bit, overhearing tourists (One smug man saying, "I don't THINK sushi is CHINESE!") punk ass local kids, and various shop keepers yelling at each other in Cantonese.
There is one thing you should know when you visit San Francisco Chinatown: get off the "main" tourist street (Grant) as soon as possible, and walk up to the street directly above it, Waverley. The tourists thin out almost magically and you will be alone in a sea of Chinese people buying weird looking fruit, live pheasants, and steam table dim sum. You may also encounter incredibly awesome cakes.
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