Chapter 625

Mark Twain once said that the coldest winter is the summer in San Francisco.

In fact, San Francisco in summer will never be cold. Many people don't understand why Mark Twain said that.

Mark Twain is just a pseudonym. His real name was Samuel Langhorn Clements. Mark Twain was originally a term used by sailors on the Mississippi River to express the depth of water measured on the channel.

The circumstances of life are ups and downs, and no one knows when they will be unlucky. When Mark Twain was a reporter, relying on the information and experience he collected, he bought the stock of a silver mine.

In his cognition, he has already repaired a "pipeline", and he only needs to wait for it to "flow" out money. However, what he did not expect is that the stock did not rise to the position he expected. Nevada's law No change either.

In 1873, the United States abolished the status of silver as a legal tender to pave the way for returning to the gold standard, which aroused opposition from silver-rich regions. In 1890, the new Silver Act was introduced, and the price of silver plummeted. Samuel Langhorn Clement went bankrupt. In order to repay the debt, Mark Twain had to come back to work. In 1894, he failed to invest in the manufacture of automatic typesetting machines and went bankrupt. In order to pay off his debts, he traveled and lectured, visiting places such as Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, India and South America.

Fortunately, he was still famous, and his speeches were still listened to. Before and after the publication of "Fool Wilson" in 1894, his family suffered misfortune: two daughters fell ill and the other died, and his wife's health also deteriorated.

It is recorded in the library of Chinatown in London that from May to October 1894, the plague in Hong Kong killed more than 2,000 people. The population fled Hong Kong.

The plague began to spread around the world. In 1896, the plague broke out in Taiwan and Mumbai, India, and later became a local endemic disease.

In 1899, plague broke out successively in Egypt, South Africa, Hawaii, San Francisco and Northeast China, and there were also cases in Japan. It broke out in Australia and Russia in 1900, and eventually spread to all continents except Antarctica until the end of the global pandemic in the 1950s.

After the bubonic plague broke out in Hong Kong in 1894, some ports took measures to prevent the introduction of the plague, but these measures failed to completely prevent the spread of the plague in the end.

Western medicine did not fully understand the role of rats and lice in the spread of plague before 1898. Many Chinese laborers still left Hong Kong as smugglers. The environmental sanitation conditions they lived in were extremely poor. If pneumonic plague spread , it is easier to spread in narrow cabins.

Chinatown in San Francisco is very dirty and messy. Many hotels are "single rooms", that is, there is only one room that can only fit one bed. There is no separate bathroom and kitchen. Many "piggy" rooms cannot afford to live in an old warehouse. If you pull it up with a rope, you can dry clothes and make a partition.

The dense population and the unclean appearance of Chinatown are in sharp contrast to the affluent areas of San Francisco. Since 1885, the city of San Francisco has been driving out Chinese.

In 1900, a suspected case of bubonic plague was discovered in Chinatown of San Francisco, which gave the San Francisco Sanitation Bureau an excuse to expel the Chinese.

In 1898, Mark Twain paid off all his debts, and his family returned to the United States in October 1900. At that time, Chinese and English newspapers were arguing about the Chinese exclusion and the plague incident, and the "Chinese and Western Daily" was tracking the progress of the plague every day. San Francisco Chinatown It has become a place where the contradictions between Chinese society and American mainstream society intersect.

Before the boycott of American goods in 1905, the Chinese still had a good impression of the United States, because they reported the incident of the Eight-Power Allied Forces fairly fairly in 1900.

But when it comes to the plague incident in San Francisco, Americans have a different attitude.

On February 16, 1900, health officials set fire to Honolulu's Chinatown for disinfection purposes.

On March 6, 1900, the first "suspected" plague death occurred in San Francisco. Without waiting for the results, the health officer used ropes to isolate Chinatown overnight, distinguishing white and Chinese shops.

Inside Chinatown, the health department neither isolated the building where the Chinese tenant lived, nor searched for people who had contact with him, nor restricted the business and external traffic of white people in Chinatown. They pushed the crime to everyone Chinese residents.

At that time, the San Francisco Consul sent people to investigate the death cases and issued a notice to clarify the facts. After the Chinese Chamber of Commerce recognized the announcement, it donated money to hire a lawyer to ask the federal court to lift the ban.

The deceased, Huang Zhijing, had been ill for a month, so it couldn't be the plague, a vicious infectious disease that can be fatal within a few days.

After Huang Zhijing's body was dissected on Angel Island, quarantine personnel injected the extract into rabbits, monkeys and mice, none of which showed symptoms.

So the first "encirclement" was lifted in this way.

However, the Health Bureau did not stop there. Every time a Chinese died of illness, the corpse was carried away, dissected and burned, and even slandered as a plague without any basis.

At that time, the Chinese believed that it was safe to burrow into the ground, and dissection and cremation were considered disrespectful to the corpse. Therefore, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce hired white coroners and lawyers to examine the corpse before the health department, so as to avoid the end of "death without a whole body".

Later, when the smallpox vaccine came out, the health department required the Chinese to get vaccinated. The vaccine at that time was not as safe as it is now, and the vaccination would be life-threatening, and the smallpox vaccine could not prevent the plague, and it was only aimed at Asians. The Chinese people in San Francisco were outraged and gathered in Chinese businessmen Guild appeal.

The San Francisco consul contacted U.S. ambassador Wu Tingfang to request exemption from vaccination, and the businessmen went on strike to protest.

On May 28, the federal court ruled that the vaccination against Asian residents was discriminatory and suspended. However, the California Department of Health ordered the San Francisco Department of Health to surround Chinatown again.

In the second siege, the doctors hired by the Chinese were not allowed to enter. Only the people from the health department were allowed to enter. The Chinese were not allowed to enter other places except Chinatown. Later, they said they would burn Chinatown. It seems that they intend to follow suit. In the Middle Ages, people were burned at the stake.

Wu Tingfang met with the President of the United States this time and accused the San Francisco Health Department of violating the Sino-US contract by besieging the city. Mr. President sent the governor of California to inspect, and the ban was still not lifted after a few days.

The second time Chinatown was besieged, when the ambassador complained to the president, the Chinese in San Francisco also began to actively rectify the sanitation, which made the sanitation situation in the area much better.

Although the siege was finally resolved, the siege left many people unemployed and starving. The Huashang Association distributed the donated food to various branch halls and churches according to the rules.

At the same time, the Chung Wah Guild told all the townships to clean the house after this incident and keep it clean, so as not to make excuses for people from the Health Bureau to encircle the town.

San Francisco is the largest and most prosperous city on the West Coast, and Mark Twain, debt-free after traveling the world, may return to San Francisco once again to see where he once stayed when he was rich and his family was intact.

His works did not cater to the public, he criticized unreasonable phenomena or the ugliness of human nature. 1900 was the era of the magicians Houdini and Sherlock Holmes at the end of the century.

Perhaps, the coldness that Mark Twain mentioned did not refer to the weather, but to the people's hearts. Among the many equatorial tropical cities he traveled, the coldest was the summer in San Francisco.

Today, in Chinatown where dragons and snakes are mixed, there are still "single room" hotels with poor conditions, and there are also five-star hotels like W Hotel.

Hotels with a flashy appearance are actually not as clean and bright as they appear on the surface. There are many so-called five-star hotels. "Snow-white" sheets will never be changed, but for people who sleep in clothes, as long as there are sheets You can fall asleep quickly in the bed you can lie on.

Hermione is now sleeping soundly on the double bed in the bedroom. She has no interest in the gorgeous decoration of the hotel, and went straight to the bedroom after opening the door.

This girl not only wandered in the wild for a long time to destroy the horcruxes, she knew what it was like to go without a bath for a long time and to be hungry. She also experienced the Battle of Hogwarts. She can't stand it.

everything will get better.

Looking down from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room, not far away is the archway of Chinatown in London. Mr. Lin, the chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, is negotiating with the police in the "enclosed port" under the archway.

Tourists wanted to enter Chinatown, but the police said there was a gas leak and they were investigating, so no one could go in. Mr. Lin and the superintendent in charge of the siege had a "quarrel".

The person sent by Scotland Yard should be a good-natured person. No matter what Mr. Lin said, he kept smiling from beginning to end, but he just refused to give orders to remove the police cars blocking the entrance.

"Tiaozi" is really harmful.

"What are you looking at?"

A familiar deep voice came from behind Pomona, and then a pair of hands encircled her waist from behind. From the reflection of the glass window, she saw a face as pale as a vampire. The unattractive Half-Blood Prince was kissing her neck, looking like he was sucking blood.

"A demon that I wanted to kill but couldn't." Without turning her head, she whispered, "Why are you here?"

"I miss you." He lowered his eyes and smelled her body with his hooked nose.

"I didn't wear perfume today."

"I know." He kissed her earlobe "I like your smell."

"We're working." She closed her eyes, struggling to avoid his entanglement.

"Stop talking." He ignored her resistance and continued to unbutton her coat.

"Please... Hermione is in the bedroom."

"There are many other rooms in the presidential suite."

"She needs information, and she asked me, where did I get the information from Night Call!" Pomona finally broke free from his entanglement, and talked to him a step away.

His hair was disheveled and greasy, his upper lip was tightly pressed, his round eyes were bloodshot, his back was bent, and his black robe was dragging on the soft carpet, looking as if he was about to rage.

"You taught me what to say to her, Professor." Pomona immediately added cleverly, "Now I'm at your command."

"I don't like your spy game!" He bared his yellow teeth and snarled at her ferociously, holding his hands in front of his eyes, as if he was about to strangle her with his bare hands. "Don't play tricks with me!"

"I didn't." She said timidly, "I listened to you and didn't betray you."

The roaring beast suddenly put away its ferocious face and regained its human features.

"I'm afraid that Kingsley will lose patience if he continues to deny it like this. How about asking him to make up for his mistakes?" Pomona put her hands together and begged, "Now we need his power, especially in cities with sufficient electricity."

"I hate werewolves," he said deliriously. "It almost killed me."

"I know." She said, choked with tears, "I'm just worried about Teddy, he's done nothing wrong, all his father's hard work will be in vain once humans and werewolves go to war, oh, what should I do, Sis Fleurs."

She was crying, her eyes were dim, and it didn't take long for her to feel surrounded by a warm embrace.

She smelled sage and blood on him.

"Did the werewolf recruit?" she asked.

"Yes." He said in a husky voice, "Stop talking about that, do you want to dance with me?"

"Yes," she whispered in his arms, "but we don't have music."

"We can picture it in our heads."

"Can't you sing to me?" she berated her new husband. "You never sang to me!"

"Waltz or tango?" he asked her forcefully.

"I don't want to dance anymore!" She was so angry that she broke away from the place that gave her a brief warmth, and was pulled back immediately.

"You never want to leave." He said with a smug smile, and then pulled the black robe, wrapping her in the darkness.