This was originally broadcast in 2015.

Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

In the spring of 1906, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake set off a fire that engulfed San Francisco

and reduced much of it to ashes.

As that inferno bore down on the city's Chinatown neighborhood, there was no question what

Lee Yoke Sui had to save. It was the one possession that proved his US citizenship,

his birth certificate.

That birth certificate, you know, so important to the Chinese.

You always save everything. You have to save everything or else, you know,

when you, the immigration authorities will always question, you know, why you are here,

why you as a Chinese person are here.

This is Connie Young-Yu, Lee Yoke Sui's granddaughter.

At the time that Lee and hundreds of thousands of others fled their homes,

the city by the Bay was deeply divided.

It steeped hills and sand dunes, marked the boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity.

Everyone knew their place. And for around 25,000 residents of Chinese origin,

stepping out of bounds was especially dangerous.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 placed Chinese immigrants on the margins.

Acts of racial terror were a daily threat.

While Chinatown was a segregated ghetto, it provided its residents with 15 blocks of

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