Robert Louis Stevenson Monument

Robert Louis Stevenson monument

Portsmouth Square Park in San Francisco predates the 1848 Gold Rush, and its monument to poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson is 128 years old. Portsmouth Square is undergoing a $71 million renovation, and Chinese-American organizations want the monument to be removed, apparently because "Stevenson 'had nothing to do with Chinatown.'” Writer Ron Lee, whose grandfather was a friend of Stevenson's, says removal would be a mistake.

Before marrying and leaving San Francisco in 1880, Stevenson lived in Chinatown. While in the city, he made daily jaunts to Portsmouth Square, where he sat for hours on end, watching the comings and goings of residents.

He also became friends with a loquacious Chinese teenager named Chow Chong, who later in his life became my grandfather. Chong’s family lived in a building facing the square on what is now Walter U Lum Place, and he took Stevenson on tours of Chinatown.

My grandfather belonged to a family of seafarers who routinely sailed their ocean-going junk on trade expeditions back and forth to Kwong Hoy, China. They were in the funeral trade and members of the clan in their home village manufactured teakwood coffins to be sold in San Francisco. They also embarked on monthly trips to Monterey Bay, and Stevenson described his newly found Chinese friends as “vagabonds of the seas.”

R L Stevenson (Brittanica)

Stevenson was invited on two occasions to join my grandfather’s family on a voyage to the Chinese fishing village at Point Alones in Monterey Bay. Along the way, they anchored at China Beach on the northern tip of San Francisco, and Stevenson watched while Chong and his uncles climbed a hill and started digging up boxes. Stevenson, who would go on to write the classic novel “Treasure Island,” imagined his new friends must be uncovering their own hidden riches. Instead, he learned that boxes contained human remains of Chinese nationals that had been earmarked for repatriation to villages across the Pacific.

The practice known in Cantonese as “jub gwut,” meaning “pick up bones,” was a sacred tradition to Chinese “sojourners” who had come to “Gum San” (Gold Mountain) with hopes of earning a fortune and then returning home. If one should unfortunately perish along the way, their remains were considered by their descendants to be more valuable than gold, and a burial back in an ancestral village was a sacred vow.

The voyages, plus Chong’s tales of avoiding pirates and British gunboats in the seas around China, deeply influenced Stevenson. In 1880, he published stories in a magazine called Frasier’s that were similar to those that had been told to him by my grandfather’s family, only with a treasure-hunting theme. It’s speculated that those stories eventually led him to write “Treasure Island,” and I often wonder whether the novel’s protagonist, Jim Hawkins, was partly inspired by a Chinese teenager.

Stevenson also wrote disapprovingly of rabble rousers such as Denis Kearney, whose racist rants went a long way in the eventual passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most immigration from China.

Despite the fact that Robert Louis Stevenson was not Chinese, or that his monument may have been funded by a man who was an anti-Chinese racist, it seems like a good idea to retain the cenotaph in the renovated square. Stevenson did nothing objectionable and had a historical connection to Chinatown. Besides, haven't we had enough attempts to erase history? I hope this is one monument that won't be torn down.