Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (25 page)

There was no Donaldina Cameron to rescue the white girls of Chinatown. The Caucasians were slaves in only the most poetic sense. They had matriculated into their lucrative calling voluntarily. The do-gooders realized this, and drives in this area were simply to banish the girls. Groups like the Society for the Suppression of Vice urged that the evil be eradicated, but they had no plans for rehabilitating the girls once Brooklyn Alley was transformed into an economically depressed area.

The prostitutes of such sinful thoroughfares as Stout’s Alley or Ross Alley were a mixed lot. The problems caused by the Caucasian women were not intimately related to crime among the Chinese, but unfortunately they did much to help give the Quarter a bad name. Two of San Francisco’s most notorious homicides took place in Chinatown and involved white girls—Celina Boudet and Jennie French. The former was murdered by her paramour, while the latter got her boy friend to shoot down a harmless German.

The singsong girls picked up American slang and customs from such denizens of Chinatown’s back alleys as Jennie French. They even copied the decor in Caucasian parlor-houses, and visitors to Stout’s Alley were surprised to find Chinese harlots’ walls hung with Currier and Ives prints. The idea of escape and liberty was perhaps germinated for the poor Chinese girls by their free white co-professionals. This influence weakened their fatalistic acceptance of their lot. It would be wrong to make ministering angels of San Francisco’s white prostitutes, but they did play some little part in the undoing of the strict system of harlotry-slavery, if only by opening the singsong girls’ eyes to the possibility of escape and freedom.

The Protestant missionaries in Chinatown did a magnificent job. However, they accomplished more in sociology than in religion. Baptists and Congregationalists had led the way with early missions in Chinatown, and the Episcopalians called a Chinese minister back from Ohio and Pennsylvania to preach in the Quarter. But the two major Christian outposts of nineteenth-century Chinatown were the Methodist and Presbyterian Missions, each of which boasted an Asylum for Rescued Prostitutes. They built upon the work already done by the law-abiding majority of the Chinese community. In the very early days of statehood, representatives of the merchants and other respected people of Chinatown had protested against the importation of loose women of the so-called “boat-people” class. But the city and State each turned its good ear from them, and the lucrative business continued to prosper. Not until 1870 was satisfactory evidence required of female immigrants that they were of good character and morals and that they came to California of their own free will.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, prostitutes made up three-fourths of all arrests of Chinese in San Francisco. That year saw 160 girls actually convicted in police court. The great majority were not even caught. Some forfeited their bail and went right back to “business as usual.” In the mid-’60s the city set up a “house” of its own, but without visiting privileges. This was called the Little Jail, which it was. It was a
calabozo
restricted to oriental prostitutes. In 1866 there were more in than out; almost 90 were locked up and a mere 50 were left at large. This little jail was part of an ambitious campaign of the city fathers to remove all bagnios and their occupants to the suburbs. The supervisors passed the ordinance but it was thwarted by the State Legislature’s enactment of a Chinese House of 111 Fame Bill. This was a completely ineffectual piece of legislation but it did take the wind out of supervisorial sails. The resulting calm proved to be a lasting one, and Ross Alley never did move to Burlingame or Kent Woodlands.

When a committee of the California Legislature investigated Chinatown in 1862, in one of the first of several official safaris through the district, the body praised the action of the Six Companies in regard to organized prostitution. The committee commended them for their attempts to send abandoned women home to China but lamented that these efforts had been largely frustrated by the pleas of vested interests that America was a free country and that Chinese women could do as they pleased.

Actually the girls had no say in the matter. They were treated as chattels. A correspondent for
Blackwood’s Magazine
in England was appalled by the slave-girl traffic in San Francisco. He could find nothing to parallel it, not even the worst features of Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district. Perhaps he had been given a look at the
barracoon.
It was situated underneath the joss house which fronted on St. Louis Alley and which ran through to Dupont Street. Here girls were stripped of their clothing and put up for bid. Those who resisted could be identified easily by the black-and-blue marks on their bodies from bamboo staves wielded by their highbinder masters. The most recalcitrant sometimes bore the sears of hot irons. But few were ever killed; they were too valuable for that, being worth up to $3,000 each. When old they were turned into cooks. Once in a while a pimp might kill his girl in a rage if she refused him money. This is exactly why little Toy Gun was shot three times by her master. Other murders of prostitutes remained complete mysteries, though many of them were probably crimes of passion. There was the case of Quee Sing. A highbinder walked up the stairs of Wong Ah Gum’s Dupont Street brothel, stopped at the head of the staircase, poked a pistol barrel through the wicket and shot Quee Sing in the mouth. Quickly but quietly the man slipped downstairs and melted into the crowd, although police officers were on the scene in two minutes. Quee Sing’s companion had been blinded by the pistol flash. There were no other witnesses to the murder and no clues. The murderer was never found.

According to two influential Chinese who called on the editor of the San Francisco
Bulletin
in 1873, Hip Yee highbinders began the prostitution traffic in 1852. Two years later the Six Companies tried to stop it but failed. Another try was partially successful and a handful of singsong girls were turned around and sent back to Hong Kong without being able to land in San Francisco. But shortly after the Civil War the Hip Yees stepped up production from their headquarters in Choy “Poy’s Jackson Street restaurant. Under new management, the tong membership jumped from 50 to 300. An elite corps of hatchet men was formed and equipped to fight a war against any Celestials who dared to interfere in the slave-girl traffic. Soon respectable Chinese, who at first had protested against the traffic, feared the terrible revenge of the slave dealers. Newspapers estimated that the Hip Yee tong imported 6,000 women between 1852 and 1873, and netted $200,000 from the illegitimate traffic.

Mayor-Bryant loudly condemned Chinese prostitution but his words rang a little hollow. One of the presidents of the Six Companies remarked pointedly to him, “Yes, yes, Chinese prostitution is bad. But what do you think of German prostitution, French prostitution and American prostitution? Do you think them very good?” Since San Francisco was a wide-open town, there was little the mayor could say in answer. Occasionally Bryant or some other occupant of city hall made a big show of clamping down on Chinese houses of ill fame. Police measures of the ’70s were particularly ludicrous, however. To “check” prostitution, courtesans were forbidden to stand in the open doorways of their dens. One policeman was heard to scold a prostitute, “You must close your front door. You may invite as many people as you please through your window, but I can’t let you stand in the door any more.” But the girls were permitted eight- to ten-inch openings in their doors, with movable slides to allow them to maintain good public relations.

Such were the methods employed by authorities while Police Officer James R. Rogers bragged: “It is almost impossible to entirely suppress them, for they will naturally open. But they
can
be kept closed and the business made unprofitable. There is no ordinance that cannot be enforced, and I presume the ordinances we have are sufficient to keep these houses all closed. It don’t require a large force to close these houses. I can do it in one night. Arrest the inmates of one, and it travels like electricity from one to another and in ten minutes every one will be shut up and the doors will be barricaded.”

Thoroughly impatient with such farcical “control” of the red-light district in Chinatown, the decent people of the city—particularly the women—decided to take action themselves; and they took a constructive course. The ladies began a deliberate and well-planned campaign to rescue slave girls from their masters. (As early as 1857 the city was shocked by the desperate attempt of two girls to escape their lives of slavery by throwing themselves into a well in attempted suicides.) One of the first to become interested in the singsong girls’ plight was Mrs. H. C. Cole. She helped set up the Methodist Misson, but the matron had no customers for almost a year. Then, late in 1871, a despairing girl, Jin Ho, escaped from her bagnio, fled to the Embarcadero, and threw herself into the bay. A Negro fished her out with a boat hook and turned her over to police, but she refused to talk to any Chinese, even police interpreters. She told Captain Clark that she would speak only with a “Jesus man.” So the captain sent for Reverend Otis Gibson. As soon as Gibson appeared the distraught girl fell on her knees and begged him, “Don’t take me back to Jackson Street.” He reassured her and took her to the Methodist Mission. A year later she became a Christian and married. By 1874, Jin Ho had seventeen “classmates” in the mission, all under the supervision of Laura S. Templeton.

The Presbyterians were not far behind. They opened their mission in 1874. At first they had a hard time attracting any refugees. The highbinders had begun a program of what would today be called brainwashing. They filled the heads of their girls with horrible nonsense about mission brutality and torture to deter them from escape attempts. They also secured dishonest lawyers and those on the thin line between light and shade—like Three Fingered Leander Quint—to produce writs of
habeas corpus
in order to recapture legally the girls who did make good their escapes. To the two asylums also came Hip Yee tong emissaries who posed as relatives of the girls hiding inside. They promised to take them away to a new and good life. The brothel owners also got girls to enter the asylum as spies. Once inside the mission they would try to persuade the legitimate refugees to leave. (Sometimes this strategy backfired on the Hip Yee men and they lost another girl.)

All of the tongs’ countermeasures were doomed to failure. More and more public support came for the missions when Reverend Gibson translated and had published the text of cold-blooded bills of sale of several of the unfortunate girls. Typical of them all was the contract of Ah Ho. The document read as follows:

An agreement to assist the woman, Ah Ho, because in coining from China to San Francisco she became indebted to her mistress for passage. Ah Ho herself asks Mr. Yee Kwan to advance to her six hundred and thirty dollars, ,for which Ah Ho distinctly agrees to give her body to Mr. Yee for service as a prostitute for a term of four years. There shall be no interest on the money. Ah Ho shall receive no wages. At the expiration of four years, Ah Ho shall be her own master. Mr. Yee Kwan shall not hinder nor trouble her. If Ah Ho runs away before her term is out, her mistress shall find her and return her. Whatever expense is incurred in finding her and returning her, Ah Ho shall pay. On this day of agreement, Ah Ho, with her own hands, has received from Mr. Yee Kwan six hundred and thirty dollars. If Ah Ho shall be sick at any time for more than ten days, she shall make up by an extra month of service for every ten days of sickness. Now this agreement has proof. This paper, received by Ah Ho, is witnessed by Tung Chee in the twelfth year, ninth month and fourteenth day.

There were reversals for Gibson and the missionary ladies during their running fight with the tongs. One such defeat was the Yat Sing case. Yat Sing was a young man who aided three Chinese slave girls to escape. He took them to the Methodist Mission where he proposed marriage to one of them and was promptly accepted. All seemed well. Yet only a few weeks later Yat Sing and his wife came to the mission house, terrified. The former owner of the girls had taken the case before the Hip Yee tong. One of that society’s destroying angels had looked Yat Sing up and demanded the girl or $350. When the young husband answered that he could not pay he was dragged by force before a tribunal of the tong in their secret council chamber. He was given three weeks in which to return the girl, pay the money, or be assassinated. Reverend Gibson consulted with lawyers and aided Yat Sing. He had 8 Hip Yee agents arrested for conspiracy to extort money from his Chinese friend. Before the case came up in police court, more than 50 Chinese merchants called on Gibson to encourage him and to promise their help against the tong. They themselves hired the brilliant Ward McAllister, the best legal counsel in the city, to aid the prosecuting attorney. But the latter suddenly refused to allow McAllister to help him or to take part in the trial in any way. He further refused to bring into court the tong’s seized records which showed that the defendants were officers of the society. Gibson angrily exclaimed, “His whole conduct showed that he did not wish a conviction, and would not have it if he could prevent it.” The hatchet men blandly denied that they were even members of the Hip Yee tong. Each brought forward two Chinese witnesses who swore that the eight were good and true men. As even Gibson anticipated, the jury brought in a verdict of acquittal. It was now commonly reported that the prosecuting attorney had been “consulted” by agents of the secret society and that the affair had cost the Hip Yee tong treasury a neat $10,000. Because of the greed or lack of fortitude of one attorney, Gibson’s big chance to smash the Hip Yee tong was thwarted.

Shortly after the disappointing trial of the eight highbinders, the forces of good scored a few points. Ten Chinese women who had just arrived found their way to the Methodist Mission and asked permission to be sent back to China. Gibson told Chinese merchants of his acquaintance about them. These businessmen furnished money for the women’s passage and assured him that they would do so for all women or girls who called upon them for help. They prepared a huge placard announcing this policy and had it carried through Chinatown. But the merchants feared the tongs enough to hire a white man to carry the sign.

In the meanwhile Gibson translated and published widely the text of another slave-girl’s contract. The plight of Chinatown’s singsong girls became a national issue when this contract was read in the United States Senate. Aaron Sargent, Senator from California, quoted it in a speech of 1876.

The text of the document—”An agreement to assist a young girl named Loi Yau”—was almost identical to that of Ah Ho’s and just as damning.

The tide of battle between the tongs and the missions ebbed and flowed. The Six Companies re-entered the fray as an ally of the missions in 1878, making another try to turn back the flood of slave girls. They sent two representatives to call on Assistant District Attorney Darwin. The men told him that the
City of Peking
was bringing in 60 prostitutes. Darwin referred them to the police, and 25 of the girls were taken to city hall upon landing. Here they all said that they had come of their own free will and they showed certificates from the United States Consul in Hong. Kong. They had to be set free, of course, although the police knew that the girls had been coached with a catechism of answers and provided with forged immigration certificates. They were set at liberty and quickly rounded up and packed off to the
barracoon
by the waiting highbinders.