Is the sun setting on San Francisco’s Six Companies?
- Once a de facto embassy for Chinese immigrants in the US, the Chinatown association faces declines in finances and influence
- Now called the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), the group has been eclipsed by other service organisations
For a second year running, the Lunar New Year came and went quietly for the members of the once-grand Six Companies in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
In earlier years, hundreds of the community association’s members would flock to New Asia’s banquet hall on Pacific Avenue – now converted to a grocery store during the pandemic.
The traditional bash, held to invite luck and fortune, would have been too risky for the ageing members, anyway, amid a wave of Covid-19 cases fuelled by the Omicron variant.
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Forged from an alliance among Chinatown’s six largest regional associations, the Six Companies – now officially seven and formally called the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, or CCBA – was once the largest group supporting immigrant Chinese in the United States.
From providing jobs to labourers fresh off the boat to advocacy of Chinese civil rights to helping organise self-defences from mobs, the Six Companies permeated every aspect of early Chinatown life.
Now it faces threats that echo those early struggles: Covid-19 fears have disproportionately hit Chinatown businesses, and a surge in hate crimes have targeted its residents. But the young men who once filled association and tong halls are old now, and their children have moved away.
“How can [recruitment] go up when most of them are people like me, who are retired and help out?” said Robert Wong, a CCBA member who answered the headquarter’s phone a day before the start of the Lunar New Year.
“If we had enough money, we could give to people here in Chinatown, to the community in San Francisco, right? But no. The associations don’t help us, we don’t have any income. How are we going to survive?”
