Celebrate Lunar New Year with a tour of Chinatown’s murals

A new year on the Chinese calendar arrives Feb. 1, but for many in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the pandemic forecasts a certain 2021 deja vu. As it has with the rest of the city, COVID has thinned the bustling crowds that previously made navigating these hilly streets like swimming up a river of salmon.

“We’re not getting the international foot traffic we’d hoped to get. We’re not getting the office workers coming in that we used to,” says community leader Betty Louie, a San Francisco Chinatown Merchants Association adviser.

But the locals haven’t gone anywhere. Restaurants and bakeries still serve lines out the door, shops hawk groceries, souvenirs and flowers and the fortune-cookie factory is churning out handmade treats. With the tourist throngs greatly diminished, now in fact, might be an ideal time to support the local community and also enjoy one of Chinatown’s shining attractions — the sprawling outdoor museum that is its public murals.

Start by heading to Grant Street and Sacramento, where you’ll inevitably find someone clicking a selfie next to a mural of pagodas, firecrackers and lion dancers, who show up in Lunar New Year parades to ward off bad spirits.

Louie commissioned this piece about a decade ago to solve a personal irritation – graffiti. “I had walls from buildings I owned that were being tagged daily,” she recalls. One day, she noticed a local artist, Francisco “Twick” Aquino, executing a sprawling design in an alley. “I said, ‘Hey, you’re crazy for doing a mural here! You’re going to get tagged right away.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Nobody ever tags me.’ So I said, ‘In that case, why don’t you come look at my building and see what you can do?’”

After the lion dancers, Louie tapped him to paint another mural at Clay and Sacramento exploring Chinatown’s gambling history. It was defaced only once. “I took a picture and sent it to (the artist) and said, ‘Oh my god, look, we got tagged!’” she says. “He said, ‘Don’t worry. Take it off – that guy’s never coming back.’ When the tagger found out he hit (the artist’s) mural, he moved out of San Francisco.”

That piece was replaced in 2020 with another that celebrated what would have been Bruce Lee’s 80th birthday, with Lee air-kicking in front of a burning sun and the maxim, “Be Like Water.” It’s one of at least four murals in Chinatown celebrating the famed martial-arts star, whose roots lie right here.

“He was born in the Chinatown hospital, and that was the same hospital where I was born. So that means a lot to me,” says Kathy Chin Leong, a journalist and author who wrote the text for the 2020 book “San Francisco’s Chinatown” (Heyday Books).

At the corner of Grant and Clay, you’ll find a luscious, pink-hued mural with a fearsome bird-creature in flight, a snarling dragon in mid-pounce and a female figure representing Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. The artist had to go through several, well, let’s say creative revisions before the piece met its current form.

“The very first one he did had a baby breast-feeding from the Guanyin. I said, ‘For god’s sake, everyone is complaining to me about this,’” recalls Louie. The artist agreed to change it — and did so by putting a nude fetus inside the goddess’ medically accurate uterus. “I said, ‘You made this even worse! What were you thinking?’” (The fetus has been replaced by a Year of the Pig symbol and the deity now looks like the Statue of Liberty.)

At the corner of Commercial and Grant is a stunning tiger-dragon chimera sailing over a bed of lotus flowers, all fangs and claws with eyes the color of jade. Dragons happen to be a popular motif in these artworks. “Dragons represent strength and power and have been part of Chinese culture for centuries,” says Leong. “People born in the year of the dragon are supposed to be very powerful and successful.”

(And folks born in the Year of the Monkey, like this journalist? “Oh, you must be kind of goofy,” she says.)

While many of the murals cluster around Grant, it’s worth heading farther afield to view other gems. But walking Chinatown’s hills burns calories, so perhaps it’s a good time to grab a bite. A few steps away is Matcha Cafe Maiko, which serves a mean vanilla-and-matcha soft serve, dusted with fragrant green-tea powder as verdant as mown grass. Yummy Bakery & Cafe draws in lovers of savory and sweet baked goods and is one of the few places to bake ghostly egg-custard tarts made with the whites.

Great Eastern Restaurant is a staple — Barack Obama once visited — with dim sum served in a decked-out banquet hall indoors and in a parklet outside. Dumplings with pea sprouts and shrimp stand out, as do rice crepes with barbecue pork, bean curd-skin rolls and eggplant stuffed with fried shrimp. Chefs also prepare a seafood version of longevity noodles that factor into New Year’s celebrations and, for auspiciousness’ sake, supposedly should be eaten without biting them through.

Good Mong Kok caters a less-formal experience with dim sum to go. The line can reach down the block, but it’s worth it for fresh and affordable scallion pancakes, chiu chow dumplings with spicy meat, celery and peanuts, and chewy sesame balls hiding a sweet red-bean filling. And a block north on Stockton Street, you can see one of the neighborhood’s oldest and largest murals, a vibrant assembly of joyous children, senior citizens and historical railroad workers.

“In the Mission, a lot of the artists do murals for murals’ sake,” says Dick Evans, a documentary photographer who worked with Leong on “San Francisco’s Chinatown.” But “Chinatown has this extremely strong cultural identity going back to the point when San Francisco tried to drive the Chinese out to the (city) outskirts after the earthquake of 1906. So the themes of the murals are a celebration of Chinese culture — a celebration of the past, of the people who lived there.”

Identity is also on display in the alley of Wentworth Place with the mural “Love Our People Like You Love Our Food.” Painted by local students and Vida Kuang, community arts program director at the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, the piece gives a “recipe” that includes “3 cups love,” “1 tsp. empathy” and “2½ cups respect.”