This chapter takes a fresh look at the 1906 San Francisco earthquake by tracing the city’s present-day narrative of recovery, resilience, and renewal to a long-standing, multi-faceted discourse about the cultural meaning of urban disaster. The following pages convey the cultural (dis)continuities of the recent San Franciscan narrative of resilience by examining earlier non-fictional and more recent fictional reactions to the city’s tectonic shifting. This recontextualization lends historical depth to the administration’s recent call to San Franciscans to “join together to begin the recovery process” (SFCC [San Francisco City Council], Resilient San Francisco. Stronger Today, Stronger Tomorrow, https://www.sfgov.org/ccsfgsa/sites/default/files/ORR/documents/Resilient%20San%20Francisco_0.pdf, Accessed: 12/12/2024, 2016, 23). This chapter seeks to show how this call for unity intervenes into an established discourse that has framed America’s biggest urban disaster as a ‘Chinese issue’. This ethnic othering of a seismic phenomenon is closely connected to the writings by and about Donaldina Cameron (1869–1868), a Presbyterian missionary who famously fought against forced prostitution in the pre-earthquake San Francisco ‘Chinatown.’ This ethnicized narrative about the destruction of what was, essentially, a ghetto, came to replace the stories of collective survival and shared suffering that dominated the journalistic reports of the immediate post-earthquake era. After a cursory reading of some of these earliest accounts, this chapter sheds light on the Donaldina Cameron myth and its impact on more recent fictional accounts of the 1906 earthquake, Geraldine Burrows’s novel Chinatown Mission (2002) and Judy Dodge Cummings’s When the Earth Dragon Trembled (2020). As will be shown in the following, both novels reflect a conservative and (in the case of Burrows) reactionary interest in defining which kind of America would be capable of surviving another eco-urban catastrophe.