The View from China Camp

China Camp has long been a ghost town.



Starting around 140 years ago, Chinese immigrants established a thriving shrimp business at this placid location, largely outside of the view of the European immigrants who were systematically taking control of Northern California throughout the 1800s.



The people who lived and worked here had their own little paradise. The winds and fogs that assault most of the Bay Area rarely visit this obscure shore.



Looking out from the windows in their wood and brick shrimp factory was like moving back to an earlier time, when being yellow or brown skinned in California meant you had to watch your back.



You knew that a violent race of warrior people, in the midst of conquering an entire continent, were bound to show up eventually and destroy whatever little paradise you had managed to create, even if it was hardly a rich enclave.



Indeed, the whites did show up, and determined in their racist wisdom that this community was stealing some of the fishery they felt was theirs, God-given.



What followed was inevitable.



New rules. New barriers. New limits. You know the routine.



"Why is it that white people have always been so mean, so racist, so cruel," my kids asked, after reading the exhibits that in plain language, without any rhetoric whatsoever, laid out the sad fate of the Chinese people who once thrived here.



"Why, Dad?"



I'm sure a normal parent wouldn't take his kids on this kind of road trip, right? He'd take them to Disney's Fantasy Planet or Tahoe's Make-Believe-We-Are-Rich-Enough-To-Be-Here fake winter world, all fueled by plastic.



But I am not a normal Dad.



My kids' got a road trip touching in at a remote Mt. Vision, China Camp, and a stretch of the Marin Headlands that document how the U.S. was prepared to meet a Japanese invasion in the 1940s that never came.



Some fun!

But to their credit, none of them are complaining.

Photos by Aidan, Dylan, and Julia.