Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (21 page)

Scribner’s Magazine,
in October, 1876, published a translation of one of the
chun hungs
of Chinatown which had been captured and used as evidence in a “chopping” case in which one man was murdered and 6 wounded. The magazine stated that 50 highbinders had invaded the merchandise store of Yee Chuy Lung & Company at 810 Dupont Street, and attacked 12 men eating there. The diners dropped their chopsticks, abandoned their meal, and came up swinging meat axes and hatchets. Police officers A. J. Houghtaling and David A. Peckinpah broke through the crowd and forced the riot to a halt. A few Chinese carrying bloody hatchets were chased onto the roof and captured, but most of them melted away as usual in the crowded alleyways of the Quarter. Left behind as souvenirs of the scuffle were three iron bars, a club, a meat ax, a revolver, and four new hatchets, their blades ground razor sharp. The head-hunting poster featured by
Scribners
was not connected with this particular tong raid but was typical of the whole school of
chun hungs.
It read:

WING YEE TONO PROCLAMATION. THE MEMBERS OF THE WING YEE TONG OFFER A REWARD ON ACCOUNT OF CHEUNG SAM’S SHOE FACTORY VIOLATING OUR RULE. CONSEQUENTLY, OUR SOCIETY DISCONTINUED WORK. UNLESS THEY COMPLY WITH OUR RULES AGAIN, WE WILL NOT WORK. SOME OF OUR WORKERS SECRETLY COMMENCED TO WORK FOR THEM AGAIN. WE WILL OFFER $300 TO ANY ABLE MAN FOR TAKING THE LIFE OF ONE OF THESE MEN WHO SECRETELY COMMENCED THE WORK, AND $500 IN FULL FOR THE KILLING OF SAM LEE [Cheung Sam], WE WRITE THIS NOTICE AND SEAL BY US FOR CERTAINTY. THE REIGN OF QUON CHUE IN THE SECOND YEAR. THE FOURTH OF CHINESE FEBRUARY.

In November of 1894, yet another crack appeared in the tough shell of secrecy overlying tong activities. Sergeant J. W. Gillin captured secret documents from Mar Tan. The latter was known to Gillin as a capper for attorneys. He would follow Gillin and the Chinatown squad around and notify white lawyers of arrests made, and therefore of customers for bail. On Friday night, November 2, Officer John Lynch arrested a Chinese and marched him to city prison. Mar Tan, alias Ah Chung, followed at a discreet distance. But Lynch spotted him, and as he left the scene the officer tailed him. He shadowed the capper until he saw him engage Attorney N. S. Wirt in conversation, apparently making arrangements for the new prisoner’s release. Lynch arrested the capper on the spot and was surprised when Mar Tan tried violently to escape. Sergeant Gillin had to run up to help Lynch subdue him.

The reason for Mar Tan’s energetic attempt at flight was soon evident when the officers searched him. Besides the cards of six attorneys, they found two small Chinese documents in his pockets. One was on red paper, one on white.

They were taken from him over his howls of protest and given to Chinese scholars to translate. The red document turned out to be his San Francisco tong membership card, the white one his Sacramento card. The documents had a great deal of secret code which the experts were unable to translate.

The
Call
hoped in print that Mar Tan would be deported, but was crushed when the Chee Kong highbinder was released on only $20 bail. This was shocking to the
Call;
even a routine vagrancy charge normally required $150 cash or a $300 bond. The paper contrasted this bit of legal leniency with the case of an earlier Chee Kong highbinder, Tom Fun, who had also been a capper for attorneys. Caught with similar documents on his person during a visit to China in 1887, he was beheaded. The Chinese Consul General in San Francisco, perhaps in hopes of securing some of the same attention for Mar Tan, got the two certificates from the police and opened diplomatic correspondence with the authorities in Hong Kong, urging them to turn over to the Chinese Government all Chinese deportees from San Francisco. While all this excitement was going on Mar Tan calmly sought a change of pace. He found a new job as a lookout for a lottery parlor at 633 Pacific Street.

Near the turn of the century either a San Francisco
Call
reporter successfully became a hatchet man, or else—well primed with information cribbed from Reverend Masters and others—he pulled off a first-rate hoax. According to his own feature story, B. Church Williams joined the Chee Kong tong in either late 1897 or early 1898. The
Calls
Sunday section for January 9, 1898, carried an almost full-page drawing of Williams by the eventually famous artist, Maynard Dixon. It depicted the reporter, stripped to the waist, taking the blood-brother oath of the secret society whose watchwords were Death to all Tartar rulers!

Williams said that his sponsor was an old-time Chinese criminal who deposited his entrance fee, or “rice money,” and told him to wait developments. One day the reporter, who had lived in China as a boy and who spoke Cantonese fluently, was told that a rendezvous was arranged for midnight of the next full moon. Two
boo how doy
showed up right on schedule. One was to be his father and the other his mother in the secret society’s ritual. Passwords got the trio through an iron door and into a low-ceilinged room whose walls reeked of dampness. An assembly of men squatted on their heels, unsmiling, facing an improvised altar at one end of the room.

Williams was led to a corner and asked to strip off all his clothes. He did so, and his body was scrutinized carefully for birth marks—but just why he did not learn. Allowed to pull on his trousers, he was ordered forward to meet the Grand Master of Ceremonies. This man looked like a pirate. A saber scar disfigured even more a face already made ugly by smallpox; the cicatrice ran from his forehead to the end of his nose.

Williams had memorized the traditional responses, and when he was asked “Have you carefully considered the step which you are about to take?” he answered correctly, “Yes, Reverend Scribe.”

“Are you ready to storm the Great Wall?”

“Quite ready, Reverend Scribe.”

“Have you been prepared with weapons?”

“Not as yet.”

“How can a child be born without a mother?”

“My revered mother accompanies me, Reverend Scribe,” said Williams, gesturing toward the tough at ‘his side. “She stands upon my left, and my godfather stands upon my right.”

“Are you ready to become a blood brother?”

“All ready, Reverend Scribe.”

“Then let thy mother proceed to shed the blood of maternity.”

The reporter was led to the altar. Upon it lay the insigne and symbols of the Chee Kong tong. These included dishes of sugar to remove all bitterness from hearts; ears of corn to symbolize plenty; a dish of oil so all could have light in the future; and a bowl of vinegar into which the blood of the neophytes would be mixed.

Williams’ “godfather” pricked the reporter’s finger with a needle. As it dripped blood he plunged it into the vessel of vinegar, stirring it. Others in the assemblage did likewise. Then each man placed his finger in his mouth and sucked it dry before exclaiming loudly, “Thou art my blood brother!”

When it was the journalist’s turn to take part in the ceremony he surrendered to his fastidiousness and surreptitiously dipped his finger into the bowl of oil first, covering his finger with the viscous fluid, and only then performed what he called the “disgusting operation” with the bowl of blood and vinegar. But he shouted as loudly as the rest, “I am thy blood brother!” and he was greeted with a loud “Ho!” (Good!) from his new tong brothers.

Led before the Grand Master, Williams was ordered to kowtow three times. This he did. Next, his personal courage was tested. He was made to walk between two lines of sword-bearing men. As he walked they dropped the sharp-bladed swords onto his shoulders. But as each blade fell it was skillfully turned at the last moment so that it was the flat of the blade which fell on his naked flesh.

The Grand Master then outlined the objects of the tong and prescribed on diet and deportment. He finished by saying:

Should a brother fall by the wayside, either through sickness or violence, it shall be your duty to assist him, both with your purse and your right hand. The sign of distress is clapping your hands three times above your head. Upon this manifestation you will hesitate and bold yourself in readiness to do battle with the coming enemy. Should the brother exclaim
“Ah ga la!”
[Strike him] do
not
proceed. Should he exclaim “Um ah!” [Do not strike] you must assist him in every means at your disposal. You must interpret each expression as the reverse of its actual meaning.

Know you that our Society is most potent and its brothers inhabit every corner of the globe. Where ever your steps may carry you, there you will also find the true heart and the strong arm of the Chee Kong tong. Bear also in mind that while the Chee Kong tong protects it also punishes, and should you prove traitorous to our cause your blood shall pollute the soil of the land. Be you where you may, the Chee Kong tong will find you out.

After hearing this warning, Williams and the other neophytes took oaths to observe these instructions, and in a grand finale swore, “Should I prove untrue to my promise, may my life be dashed out of my body as I now dash the blood from this bowl.” With that they raised bowls of chicken blood and hurled them to the floor where they shattered in hundreds of pieces. The ceremony was over as his prey collapsed without a sound on the landing Big Queue coolly walked down the stairs past the lazing bodyguards to disappear into the street crowd. This murder was followed by the Sam Yups boycotting all See Yup stores and products. Commerce in Chinatown was virtually paralyzed for a time, but eventually the embargo was lifted and the feud forgotten. It would be revived when Little Pete came to power in Chinatown.

When the Six Companies campaign in opposition to the Geary Exclusion Act went down in defeat the tongs quickly tried to capitalize on a situation made to order for them. The leader of the opposition to the Chinese Registration Act was none other than their old antagonist Chun Ti Chu. He had lost face in the defeat of the Six Companies’ campaign of passive resistance to the Geary Act. The tongs put a price on his head and “published” (posted) the fact widely. Described as a friend of the police and an enemy of the tongs (true enough), he was worth $300 to them dead. But Chun was not worried, and Detective Christopher C. Cox explained why he was not. “Chun Ti Chu is one of the ablest and smartest Chinese here. He can fight as well as talk. He is a fine shot, and the highbinders fear him as much as they hate him. He is brave enough to stand off three or four highbinders.”

Chun Ti Chu was one of the men responsible for the new policy of forbidding membership in the Chinese Native Sons or office in the Six Companies and Chinese Chamber of Commerce to any member of a fighting tong. But success would not crown his efforts until the Americanized
ki di
(short hair) portion of Chinatown’s population grew larger in both numbers and strength. Already the handwriting was literally on the wall, however, as a legend was placed over the door of the fine Kwan Kong Temple on Waverly—HIGHBINDERS, KEEP AWAY!

Chun Ti Chu escaped tong vengeance, but less brave and powerful opponents were not always so lucky. In 1900, the Consul General of China, shamed by the fact that since December, 1899, a Chinese had been either killed or wounded in Chinatown by hatchet men at a rate of two a week, posted a proclamation outside the gate of the consulate general on Stockton Street. He began it with an appeal and the recruits were now literally hatchet sons.

Opposition formed against the tongs, but it was sporadic and not unified. Chun Ti Chu, president of the Sam Yup Company, tried to turn back the tongs in the ’90s by forming a sort of vigilance committee of Six Companies men. But Richard H. Drayton proved himself recklessly overoptimistic when he exulted that “since the establishment of that committee the fertile fields of plunder have been fenced in against the highbinders, and hard times [for them] have followed.” It took the earthquake of 1906, plus the formation of the Wo Ping Woey Peace Association in Waverly Place in 1913—not Chun Ti Chu’s Vigilantes—to create a condition of (lingering) tong moribundity.

Another who fought the tongs was Loke Tung. He was also the head of the Sam Yups for a time. According to Eddie Gong, he changed his stripes however. After tipping off police to gambling dens and brothels he is said to have moved in to start them up again after they were raided and closed. If we can believe Gong, he was a hijacker rather than a reformer. Gong also claimed he harassed his rivals by forming a real-estate syndicate, and was soon boasting he could smash the See Yups like eggs at any time he chose. Loke was able to get a murderous restaurateur off when he shot a young See Yup, by claiming that the man was a robber. The boy’s family association, Chin, demanded justice at the same time that the See Yups were out to get Loke and his partner Mark Kem Wing. The latter fled to China but Loke Tung stood his ground. He simply took the precaution of securing a bulletproof vest and a pair of bodyguards. The Chins are said to have gone to a small mining town in the interior for a hatchet man unknown to the people of Chinatown. A killer named Big Queue was their choice. He methodically stalked Loke while in the guise of a beggar. Big Queue scorned firearms, being a
boo how doy
of the old school. But he knew that an ordinary thin-bladed dirk might not penetrate the coat of mail which Loke Tung wore under his clothing. So the assassin filed a knife steel to a needle point and finally caught Loke unprotected on a staircase. His two bodyguards were waiting in the street below. The hatchet man grabbed him by his coat, stabbed him in the neck just above the armor, and ended it with a threat. “I implore my people to keep the peace. In a country so far from our native land, a colony such as exists in San Francisco should be in continuous peace. We should be as one brother to another. There should be no more quarreling. It is shameful in the eyes of other nations. Only two tongs are engaged in the present war and this is not their first quarrel. These men must change their ways and not be like wild beasts of the jungle. If this trouble is not settled without further blood I will invoke the aid of the Six Companies and the Merchants’ Association and bring the offenders to American justice.”