Immigrant Song

Can you guess where this vingette is taking place? Chinatown Family Life -What Tourists Don't See

Zhihua Mo is a good son. He cooks and cleans regularly for his 85-year-old father, Bao Qi Mo, who lives in a room not much bigger than a closet.

Today, Mo, 48, must get his bedridden father to a medical clinic, so he climbs the narrow staircase that leads to his father's 8-by-10-foot apartment on Powell Street near Broadway in a Chinatown single-room occupancy building. Because there is no elevator, Mo puts his father on his back and slowly negotiates the staircase.

"It is our tradition to take care of our parents," Mo says. "Someday my son will take care of me."

Three generations of Mos live in SROs within a block of each other in San Francisco, sharing cramped units that some say are barely suitable for individuals, let alone families. But like many immigrants in Chinatown, the Mos keep soldiering on - even when the situation seems backbreaking.

Forgot the tourists. This is a side of SF that most of its boho-bourgeois residents don't see, and can't fathom. Can you imagine the typical white bread SF progressive regularly carrying his father down a flight of stairs? I can't.

SF's Chinatown is one of the most densely populated areas in the CA, if not the country. An estimated 100,574 people - surely this is an underestimation - live in a one-mile square space that borders on glittering Union Square, and hip (that's what the co-eds think...) North Beach. The linked article doesn't mention this, but if you want to see the real Chinatown, you should get off Stockton Street and Grant Street and dive into the alleys. You will literally be transported to another world of store-front temples, hidden restaurants, and sidewalk barbers. And, of course, people everywhere. But, then, you turn a corner, and you are staring out at the Bay Bridge, reminding you that you are in San Francisco, not old Shanghai.