The Other Side of the Creek: Stanford’s Chinese Workers and East Palo Alto’s Flower Farms

Editor’s note: “The Other Side of the Creek” is a series designed to capture the life and spirit just beyond San Francisquito Creek, the shared landmark separating Menlo Park from the communities to the south. The approach to the Oval along Palm Drive passes through grounds that Chinese workers helped lay out, plant, and care for. Some of those workers lived in a cluster of buildings in the Arboretum. The cabins are gone, but archaeologists have found pieces of dishes and traces of meals where people once lived. One of the Stanford estate’s gardeners, Jim Mok, began selling flowers while he still worked on the grounds. Decades later, across San Francisquito Creek in East Palo Alto, Wanda Ching and her brothers spent their summers helping their parents grow chrysanthemums. Their stories come from different generations and different farms. Together they show what it took to grow and sell flowers in a part of the Peninsula where much of the farmland has since disappeared.

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