THE NEW YORK TIMES -- David Lee, a Political Science lecturer at San Francisco State University who is an expert on the history of the Chinatowns in Oakland and San Francisco, said these neighborhoods were among the first in the nation to feel the effects of the pandemic last year.
Mr. Lee says that many of the shops that are boarded up and padlocked in San Francisco’s Chinatown may not return. But the neighborhood, he says, has survived fires, an emergence of the bubonic plague at the turn of the 20th century and decades of racism.
“We will not let Chinatown die,” Mr. Lee said. “It is too important to the cultural fabric of the people of San Francisco. But is Chinatown going to look the way it did before the pandemic? That is the question I have.”