The last remaining resident of a shrimping village established by Chinese immigrants on the northern shore of San Francisco Bay has died.
The Marin Independent Journal reports that Frank Quan died of natural causes on Monday last week. He would have been 91 this week.
Quan was born in and lived most of his life in China Camp Village, which once thrived near San Rafael in Marin County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Photo: AP
He played a key role in transforming China Camp into a state park in the 1970s after a developer donated the 14.57 hectare village to be preserved as a living memorial to the Bay Area’s Chinese-American history.
Until his death, he fished in the waters, maintained historic buildings and equipment and ran a small diner his family had operated for generations. Most of his catch was sold as bait, but on weekends he would cook and serve clam chowder to park visitors.
“Frank was such a rare character, really the true living history of China Camp,” said John Muir, a longtime friend and board member of Friends of China Camp. “When you visit the village, it feels like you have stepped back in time, and a lot of that feeling is there thanks to Frank.”
At its height in the 1880s, the village was home to 500 Chinese, many of whom moved from cities to the remote camp to escape anti-Chinese sentiments sweeping across California. They made their living catching shrimp on San Pablo Bay before drying, sorting and shipping them back to their ancestral homeland.
The village’s economy suffered a severe blow in the early 1900s when the export of shrimp was outlawed and the use of bag nets, then the most efficient way of catching shrimp, was prohibited.
Quan said shrimp in the bay were depleted in the 1960s when river water that normally would have poured into the bay was diverted, making the bay too salty for shrimp to thrive.
“We used to pull out 3 million pounds [1.36 million kilograms] of shrimp a year around here. One boat could bring in 2 tons [1.81 tonnes] a day,” Quan said in a 2011 interview. “It’s hard to see this all go to hell in a lifetime.”
A public memorial and celebration of Quan’s life is being planned.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS