In February, I went to California for the first time since I moved from LA in June 2020. As I’m wont to do about every place I go to, I spent the first few months of the year prepping by reading a bunch of books about California history to get myself in the mood for the trip - two on the Bay and two on LA. Back when I lived in LA, I got extremely into learning about the history of SoCal, but I never got around to learning as much about the Bay Area’s history as I wanted to. I’ve been looking for a comprehensive history about the entire region for a while, and it’s been impossible to find a book which gives an overview of the entire place instead of just the individual cities. Anyway, at some point, my curiosity to learn about Bay Area history brought me to buying Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Tablot which focuses on San Francisco from the late ‘60s to the early ‘80s. It’d been sitting on my shelf for a couple of months now, and with me actually going to SF, now was as good a time as ever to get to reading it.
The last book I read about San Francisco history was in the parts of Kevin Starr’s Material Dreams, which covered California in the 1950s and 1960s, that had to do with the city. Season of the Witch served a nice unintentional follow-up, and while Material Dreams is probably my favorite nonfiction about California, Season of the Witch...well, I didn’t hate it exactly, but it’s definitely not a favorite of mine.
So, on the positive side I did learn a lot from reading, and Talbot did inspire me to visit some of the neighborhoods that he spent the entire time focusing on like Haight-Ashbury and The Castro. But for better or worse, if there was a list of things that you’d expect a stereotypical white San Francisco boomer liberal to write a book about, Season of the Witch covered all of it. Whether that’s a good or bad thing comes down to personal taste. I enjoyed the parts that dealt with municipal politics, cults, and how cults influenced municipal politics - the most interesting thing I learned from this book was that Jim Jones apparently was decisive in getting George Moscone elected mayor, and the throughline Talbot draws from the hippie communes in the Haight-Ashbury to Jonestown, and the influence that had on San Francisco liberal politics was something I never thought about before. The chapters on how the LGBTQ community became big in SF, and because I’m me, the apparent redemptive power of the 1981 49ers healing the city from the scars of Jonestown, the Zodiac killer, and the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, were also highlights. And, also, it’s nice to read a positive story about a city getting up from the muck, especially in 2023, when a lot of media coverage of SF post-covid makes it sound like the city’s really going through it and facing an uncertain future.
But to get to the parts that I enjoyed, I had to slog through chapters upon chapters of Talbot idolizing ‘60s hippie culture and the pop music scene around it that I didn’t care about before I started reading, and still don’t care about now. That being said, II understand for a lot of people, the hippie culture is the appealing part about this era of SF history, and not necessarily Bill Walsh’s insecurities. The one place where I thought this book utterly failed however is that it ends up being very white. Outside of some stories about black music promoters and one chapter on Chinatown kingmaker Rose Pak, Talbot almost exclusively focuses on white San Francisco. Normally, I’m not inclined to hold this against a history book - America was a very white place - but for a book that covers one of the epicenters of the beginning of a very profound demographic change in the US, it was disappointing. During the time period Talbot covered, San Francisco's white population dropped by 1/3, while its minority population doubled, mainly off the backs of Asians and Latinos. That is not the impression this book gives you, and it’s disappointing to see from a liberal writer, especially in an era where major events like the I-Hotel fight are happening.
The other SF book I read was Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community by Yong Chen, which as the title hints, covers a different San Francisco from David Tablot’s. This book was very academic, and I’m not sure if anyone’s actually read it outside the context of an Asian American studies class. Anyway, I went with this book since, as anyone who’s talked to me for more than 20 minutes can attest, I’m into the history and geography of Asian America and the San Francisco Chinatown is the start of that. Chen does a great job of tracing the history of the neighborhood from the beginning of Chinese immigration to the city to the depths of the exclusion era, and ending with the increased acceptance of the Chinese community during WW2. Chen also answered a lot of questions that I always curious about and ones that I didn’t know I had like why so many migrants from Guangdong? (Answer: Many reasons, though Guangdong being relatively prosperous and international was the big one.) and how did Chinatown last being in the middle of downtown San Francisco (Answer: International pressure from fear that moving the neighborhood would ruin US-China relations).
What I ended up finding to be the most interesting part of the book was the second part of the title, Chinese San Francisco as a trans-Pacific community. This isn’t too dissimilar to the relationships between diasporas and motherlands today, which actually surprised me to an extent because of the relative standing of America vis-a-vis China during this time period and worse communication technologies. Chen makes the point that the San Francisco Chinese community and China itself remained closely tied for all of this period, even as immigration was limited after the passage of the exclusion act, to the extent that one of the main reasons Chinatown wasn’t relocated after the 1906 earthquake was fear that doing so would create an international incident. But you this relationship show up in other ways too - the fairly constant back-and-forth travel between the two countries for brides and goods, discourse in Chinese-American newspapers on how to modernize China, the diaspora playing a role in the Chinese legislature post-revolution, boycotts in Chinatown over anti-China trade policy, and so on. This is definitely a book that I’d recommend to anyone with a deep interest in Asian American history (though with an emphasis on deep, since as an academic book the writing can be a slog sometimes if you’re not into the topic), and it left me wanting to know more about what happened in Chinatown after the end of the time period it covered.
