Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (58 page)

54. Eng Ying Gong and Bruce Grant, Tong War! (New York: Nicholas L.
Brown, 1930), PP. 14-2-3-

5 5. Also known as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the Chinese Six Companies was formed in x862 to protect the general interests of the
Chinese on the Pacific Coast. It originally consisted of six huiguan (united clans
of people from the same region or district in China): Ning Yung, Hop Wo, Kong
Chow, Young Wo, Sam Yup, and Yan Wo. See Him Mark Lai, "Historical Development of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association/Huiguan System," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1987, PP. 13-51.

56. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp. 170-71.

57. According to Sue Gronewold in Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in
China, 186o-1936 (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985), PP. 30-34, the
hierarchy of prostitution in China was very similar to that in San Francisco. Prostitutes in China were categorized into three classes: courtesans who worked in
luxurious establishments that catered to high officials, wealthy merchants, scholars, and artists; singing girls and prostitutes in wine houses, restaurants, or taverns frequented by lower officials and middle-level scholars and merchants; and
prostitutes in sparsely furnished rooms who provided cheap, quick sex to poor
men, soldiers, and young scholars. As a prostitute's beauty faded, she was sold
downward to lower-class brothels where her life was shortened considerably owing to physical abuse and disease. For another depiction of organized prostitution in China, see Gail Hershatter, "The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution,
1870-1949," Modern China 15, no. 4 (October 1989): 463-98.

58. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp. 154-55.

3.
59. Ibid., p. 259; Nell Kimball, p. 12

6o. Richard Symanski, Immoral Landscape: Female Prostitution in Urban Society (Toronto: Butterworth, 1981 ), p. 13 0. Symanski uses the "geopolitical sink"
principle in this work to explain discrimination against minorities-that is, the
idea that public opinion and political action combine to confine immoral institutions to areas that have the least political clout, namely ethnic ghettos. According to Symanski, it is no accident that San Francisco's red-light district encompassed both Chinatown and Little Chile in the nineteenth century and that
these communities were singled out for moral condemnation and legal suppression.

61. See, for example, John A. Davis, The Chinese Slave Girl: A Story of
Woman's Life in China (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, [ca.
188o]); Gibson, Chinese in America; Helen F. Clark, The Lady of the Lily Feet
and Other Stories of Chinatown (Philadelphia: Griffith & Rowland Press, 1900);
Augustus W. Loomis, "Chinese Women in California," Overland Monthly 2 (April
1869): 344-46; Edholm, "Stain on the Flag," pp. 159-70; "Her Back Was Burnt
With Irons," San Francisco Call, July 23, 1897, p. 1z; and "Taken Out of a Den
of Slaves," San Francisco Call, July 27, 1897, p. 7.

62. Albert S. Evans, A la California: Sketches of Life in the Golden Gate (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1873), p. z85; and Facts upon the Other Side of the
Chinese Question: With a Memorial to the President of the United States from Representative Chinamen in America, 1876, p. z1.

63. Chinatown Declared a Nuisance! (San Francisco), March io, i88o, p.
i z. In another municipal report, a physician estimated that nine-tenths of venereal disease cases in San Francisco were contracted in that city ("Condition of
the Chinese Quarter," p. 171).

64. Quoted in Barnhart, Fair but Frail, p. 47; emphasis in the original.

65. Ibid., pp. 48-49; Pillors, "Criminalization of Prostitution," pp. 113-15;
and Chan, "Exclusion of Chinese Women," pp. 97-105. Organized Japanese
prostitution, although lesser in degree, was similar to Chinese prostitution in
that Japanese women were also sold, kidnapped, or lured into the trade. According to Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1865-1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. z9, the number of Japanese prostitutes in San Francisco ranged from thirty to seventy-one in the 189os.
They worked mainly in Japanese brothels near Chinatown, although Japanese
prostitutes were also found in Chinese brothels and Chinatown cribs. Concerned
with America's image of Japan and the Japanese people and fearful that Japanese prostitution would be used as a pretext to exclude Japanese immigration
(as happened to the Chinese), Japanese government officials instructed the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco to cooperate with American immigration officials in apprehending Japanese prostitutes at the port of entry, thus nipping the
problem in the bud before Japanese prostitution became widespread.

66. See George Anthony Peffer, "Forbidden Families: Emigration Experience of Chinese Women Under the Page Law, 1875-1882," Journal of American Ethnic History 6 (1986): z8-46.

67. My calculations are based on statistics given in appendix table z.

68. M. Culbertson, "Report of Chinese Mission Home," Women's Occidental Board of Foreign Missions, Annual Report, 189o, p. z6. In another similar case, sixteen-year-old Lee Yow Chun, suspecting that she had been sold into
prostitution instead of marriage as promised, refused to be landed upon arrival
in the United States. As she testified from a rescue home, "When word came
from the collector that I could land, not being able to do anything else I fell in
a lump on the floor and cried loudly, saying I did not want to be landed by those
people [the procurers]; that I would jump into the sea rather than be taken by
them. Somehow the fact that I cried reached the ears of the official interpreter,
who came and said the collector had allowed me to go to a rescue home and
there to remain until the next returning boat to China" (Ching Chao Wu, "Chinatowns," p. 105).

69. Quoted in Curt Gentry, The Madams of San Francisco (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 5z.

70. Benard de Russailh, Last Adventure, pp. 88-89.

71. San Francisco Examiner, January z3, 1881, p. i.

72. McLeod, Pigtails and Gold Dust, pp. 175-77; Gentry, Madams of San
Francisco, pp. 50-59; Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese
in the United States, 1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1964), PP. 84-85; William Bode, Lights and Shadows of Chinatown (San Fran cisco: Crocker Co., 1896), n.p.; San Jose Mercury Herald, February z, 1928, p.
8; and San Francisco Examiner, February z, 1gz8, p. 8.

73. San Francisco Call, April z, 1899, p. z5; and Ashbury, Barbary Coast,
p. 178.

74. For a discussion of how linkages among race, class, and gender can create privilege or subordination between different groups of women, see Maxine
Baca Zinn, "Feminist Rethinking from Racial-Ethnic Families," in Women of
Color in U. S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, -1994), PP. 303-14; Judith Rollins, Between
Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1985); and James Francis Warren, "Chinese Prostitution in Singapore: Recruitment and Brothel Organization," in Jaschok and Miers, eds., Women and
Chinese Patriarchy, pp. 77-107.

75. Gibson, Chinese in America, p. z07-

76. For an in-depth study of the activities and influence of Protestant missionary women in San Francisco Chinatown, see Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939
(New York: Oxford University Press, 199o).

77. See Gibson, Chinese in America, chap. 9.

78. Martin, Chinatown's Angry Angel, p. 87. According to the Mission
Home's annual reports and "Register of Inmates," a total of 392 Chinese women
and girls found refuge there between 1874 and 1893. See Sarah Refo Mason,
"Social Christianity, American Feminism, and Chinese Prostitutes: The History
of the Presbyterian Mission Home, San Francisco, 1874-193 5," in Jaschok and
Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy, pp. zo5-6.

79. See Martin, Chinatown's Angry Angel, chaps. 3 and 4; Gibson, Chinese
in America, chap. 9; Laurene Wu McClain, "Donaldina Cameron: A Reappraisal," Pacific Historian 27, no. 3 (fall 1983): 25-35; Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," pp. 25-28; and Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, chap. 3. Pascoe
finds the number of Chinese women who married from the Mission Home impressive, estimating that z66 such marriages occurred between 1874 and 1928
(p. 157). Because of the skewed sex ratio, legal constraints against interracial
marriage, the economic difficulties in sending for a bride from China, and the
acceptability of former prostitutes as brides, there was no shortage of suitors at
the Presbyterian Mission Home. In her study of the home, Sarah Refo Mason
found that the staff did not insist on non-Christian residents marrying Christians. However, they were adamant that the women not become second wives.
By 1889, there were forty-six families on the West Coast that had been established by marriages of women from the Mission Home ("Social Christianity,"
pp. zo6-9).

8o. See Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, chaps. 3 and 5.

81. John W. Stephens, "A Quantitative History of Chinatown San Francisco,
1870 and 188o," in The Life, Influence, and the Role of the Chinese in the United
States, 1776-1960 (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1976),
p. 73. Most likely, many mui tsai were listed as "daughters" in the manuscript
census. According to Lucie Cheng Hirata's examination of the manuscript censuses ("Free, Indentured, Enslaved," p. z1), in 186o more native-born girls lived in brothels than not; in i 87o an even number lived in brothels and outside; and
in 188o more lived outside brothels than in them. Hirata suspects that these
girls were the daughters of prostitutes and that they somehow managed to escape the clutches of brothel owners by 18 8o, since only seven of the prostitutes
were listed as native born in the r88o manuscript census.

8z. See Maria Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants (London: Zed Books,
1988); Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise; Royal Mui Tsai Commission, Mui
Tcai in Hong Kong and Malaya (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1937);
Lai Ah Eng, Peasants, Proletarians, and Prostitutes: A Preliminary Investigation
into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 1986); and Suzanne Miers, "Mui Tsai Through the
Eyes of the Victim: Janet Lim's Story of Bondage and Escape," in Jaschok and
Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy, pp. io8-z i.

83. Salinger, Labor and Indentured Servants, p. roo.

84. The following account is derived from Kathleen Wong, "Quan Laan Fan:
An Oral History" (student paper, Asian American Studies Library, University
of California, Berkeley, 1974).

85. The following account is taken from Victor Nee and Brett de Bary Nee,
Longtime Californ': A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 83-90. There, Wu Tien Fu is given the pseudonym Lilac Chen. Her story also appears in Martin, Chinatown's Angry Angel; and Pascoe, Relations of Rescue.

86. For other rescue accounts of abused mui tsai, see Margarita Lake, "A
Chinese Slave Girl in America," Missionary Review of the World z6 (July 1903):
532-33; and Martin, Chinatown's Angry Angel.

87. In Hong Kong during this same time period, the mui tsai system was
said to be a main supplier of prostitutes. See Elizabeth Sinn, "Chinese Patriarchy and the Protection of Women in 19th-Century Hong Kong," in Jaschok
and Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy, p. 148.

88. My calculations arc based on statistics given in Stephens, "Quantitative
History of Chinatown," p. 77, and on my tally from the 1900 manuscript census of population for San Francisco (see appendix table 4).

89. Judging from the household composition in the manuscript censuses and
missionary and newspaper accounts, we can assume that polygamy was practiced
by the merchant class in Chinatown. Although illegal and considered immoral
in America, polygamy was not so regarded in China, where it symbolized a man's
wealth and was often practiced to ensure a progeny of sons.

90. Sui Seen Far, "The Chinese Woman in America," Land of Sunshine 6,
no. z (January 1897): 6z. Sui Seen Far was the pen name of Edith Maud Eaton,
a Eurasian who identified strongly with her Chinese heritage and who wrote
about Chinese life in America. Her stories were published in various popular
magazines and later collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago: A. C. McClurg,
1912). For more information on her and her writings, see Amy Ling, Between
Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990),
PP. 21-55.

91. The following account is taken from the San Francisco Chronicle, October 1, 1893, P. z.

9z. Stephens, "Quantitative History of Chinatown," p. 79; and Hirata,
"Free, Indentured, Enslaved," p. z3.

93. Quoted in Connie Young Yu, "From Tents to Federal Projects: Chinatown's Housing History," in The Chinese American Experience, ed. Genny Lim
(San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1983), P. 132.

94. Quoted in ibid., p. 133.

95• Chinatown Declared a Nuisance! P. 2.

96. Quoted in Charles Loring Brace, The New West; or, California in 18671868 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1869 ), p. z 11.

97. Facts upon the Other Side of the Chinese Question, pp. 30-31.

98. Richard Dillon, The Hatchet Men: San Francisco's Chinatown in the Days
of the Tong Wars, 188o-i9o6 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), PP. 152-53

99. Hirata, "Chinese Immigrant Women," p. 237; Stephens, "Quantitative
History of Chinatown," p. 73. According to Evelyn Nakano Glenn in "Split
Household, Small Producer, and Dual Wage Earner: An Analysis of ChineseAmerican Family Strategies," Journal of Marriage and Family 45, no. i (February 1983): 3 5-48, until the 192os Chinatown remained a bachelor society of
"split-household families," a situation where production (wage earning) was separated from other family functions and carried out by the husband overseas, while
reproduction, socialization, and family consumption (supported by the husband's
remittances) were carried out by the wife or other relatives in the home village.
The nuclear family structure, though, was prevalent among Chinatown families
where wives were present.