Record of Blood
Page 41
What they found was bitter work, cramped living conditions, and extreme prejudice. The cry of Chinese Must Go! was a common sentiment throughout San Francisco’s history. And to make matters worse, the Supreme Court ruled in 1862 that a Chinese could not testify against a white man, meaning they were subject to the whims of hoodlums, thieves, and murderers without any possibility of justice.
Dreams were quickly replaced by harsh realities. And a Chinese-English phrasebook hinted at those realities. Imagine traveling to a new country and memorizing these phrases:
I cannot trust you.
He took it from me by violence.
They were lying in ambush.
He was murdered by a thief.
He committed suicide.
He was choked to death with a lasso by a robber.
He was starved to death in prison.
He was going to drown himself in the bay.
He tried to assassinate me.
He was smothered in his room.
He was shot dead by his enemy.
In 1865, fifty Chinese laborers were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad on a trial basis. Railroad officials soon realized they could pay Chinese workers less than their Irish counterparts, and began recruiting Chinese laborers for mining camps. Leland Stanford, who once denounced Chinese immigrants, suddenly started pushing for the immigration of 500,000 Chinese men. It was Chinese laborers who risked their lives building the first Transcontinental Railroad enduring harsh winter conditions, with little food, low wages, and a casual disregard for their lives.
When the railroad was complete, thousands of ex-railroad workers and ex-miners found their way to San Francisco’s Chinatown. Since harsh immigration laws actively sought to prevent Chinese men from establishing families by severely limiting Chinese women from immigrating, Chinatown became a bachelor society, full of thousands of young men with no family ties. By the 1880s, Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women by twenty to one.
The word ‘tong’ simply means ‘hall’ or ‘gathering place’. They were organizations of volunteers who originally were formed to help immigrants with legal matters, immigration advice, and provide a brotherhood to thousands of men with no families. But a new form of tong sprouted up—criminal tongs that dealt in fear, slavery, opium, and gambling.
And into this massive population of men with no women… the Yellow Slave Trade was born.
Having been sold by their family or abducted, or by boarding a ship thinking they would be reunited with their husbands, thousands of girls were smuggled into the country and sent straight to the Queen’s Room where they were stripped and sold to the highest bidder. Any who resisted were beated with bamboo sticks or branded with hot irons. And once these girls began ‘working’, the ones who showed even a spark of defiance against their new life were chained to beds or forced into a stupor with opium.
The average lifespan of a singsong girl (as they were called) was only about five years after they were sold into sexual slavery. When a singsong girl became sick, she was sent to small, dismal room in a Chinatown back alley known as a ‘hospital’. Once inside the hole, she was forced to lie down on a small shelf, and given a single bowl of rice, a cup of water, and a metal oil lamp. She generally died from starvation or by her own hand. Whether she was dead or alive when the ‘doctor’ returned… he always left with a corpse.
The sex slave trade was a profitable business for the tongs in California. A girl from China generally cost around $40. When she arrived in San Francisco, she was sold for around $300-500 in the market. The average return on a girl once the parade of men started lining up to use her was $3000 dollars. The average cost of a ‘crib whore’ was 25 to 50 cents with a special rate of 15 cents for boys under 16.
I’ll let you do the math on the number of men an average crib whore ‘entertained’ in five years.
In fact, boys visiting prostitutes was so common that one doctor remarked on the staggering number of young boys with venereal disease.
Sexual slavery was one of the cornerstones of the tongs’ existence, along with the opium trade and gambling. These tongs employed salaried soldiers called boo how doy, or killers. These were the professional hatchet men. And they were bold. It was common for hatchet men to assassinate a blacklisted person in front of multiple witnesses, and in some cases even the police. One hatchet man walked onto stage during a theatre performance in a Chinese Theatre and shot the cymbalist before casually walking away.
As a result of the ruthless tongs, Chinatown was under a crushing weight of terror and silence. Any resident of Chinatown who dared to testify against a highbinder or tong had a chun hung, or a reward poster, plastered all over Chinatown with his or her name on it. It was as good as a death sentence.
Although slavery was against the law and a few people had tried to help these girls over the years, it was a seemingly hopeless fight because San Francisco was built on graft. The tongs paid protection money to white government officials, including mayors, lawyers, custom officers, and policemen. And the tongs would often exploit a loophole in the law itself, forcing a mission (with pressure from the police) to hand a runaway girl back to her slavers.
It wasn’t until 1895 when a sewing teacher entered the fight that any real progress was made. That’s right. A Presbyterian sewing teacher who worked at a mission put the infamous, fear-inspiring tongs on the run.
Her name was Donaldina Cameron, and in a few years she would become a living legend. You may have heard of one of her descendants: David Cameron, the former Prime Minister of England. The girls she rescued called her Lo Mo—Old Mother. And the newspapers called her the Angry Angel of Chinatown, while the hatchet men, who came to fear her, called her Fahn Quai, or White Devil.
Donaldina did what no honest policeman or the Chinese Six Companies could manage to do: she struck hard and repeatedly at the tongs’ foundations—the slave trade.
This ‘beloved, gentlemanly missionary’ was described as having ‘the equivalent of carbon steel in her make up.’ She may have been armed with a detailed map of Chinatown drawn by cartographer Willard B. Farwell; she was said to be able to find her way blindfolded to every hidden den. And when Donaldina made her ‘calls’ to rescue girls, she usually brought along a trio of brawny policeman armed with axes and sledgehammers. As you can imagine, these rescue raids were not without risk.
She had a nose for trap doors, hidden panels, and secret stairways. And she was known to climb out windows onto rickety fire escapes in pursuit of a girl being whisked away.
During the 1900 Bubonic plague and subsequent quarantine of Chinatown, Donaldina slipped through the tight quarantine lines using sky lights and roofs to rescue girls as knowingly as the highbinders themselves.
But once she spirited the girls to her mission, the danger wasn’t over. The tongs’ pet lawyers used the law and police to retrieve the girls. When the police came looking for a slave girl with warrants and fake charges, Donaldina would insist ‘she’s not here’ and pray that the police wouldn’t look under the rice sacks in the dark space behind the basement gas meter.
She accepted the fact that she had to break the letter of the law in order to uphold the spirit of it. And when one of her rescued slave girls was jailed on trumped-up charges, she willingly and proudly occupied the same cell to keep the girl out of highbinder hands.
Despite great danger to herself, she was credited with rescuing over 3,000 girls. With the help of police, law-abiding Chinese, immigration officials, the Consul General, and eventually the 1906 earthquake and fire, she was able to put the tongs in retreat.
During an interview with Miss Cameron in 1961, she gave her reason for leading police into the brothels and fighting the highbinders in court. Her reason was simple: Because no one else would.
Sex trafficking is still a thriving criminal business throughout the world, and modern day heroes continue to fight a seemingly hopeless battle, doing what few will do—fighting for those with no voice.
* * *
Below is a list of some of the research books on my shelf, in case you are interested in non-fiction reading of the time and place:
* * *
Fierce Compassion: The Life of Abolitionist Donaldina Cameron —K. & K. Wong
* * *
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco —Marilyn Chase
* * *
Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown —Richard Dillion
* * *
My Own Story —Fremont Older
* * *
The Making of ‘Mammy’ Pleasant: A Black Entrepreneur in 19th Century San Francisco — Lynn M. Hudson
* * *
SamFow: The San Joaquin Chinese Legacy —Sylvia Sun Minnick
* * *
Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute —Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus
* * *
The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld —Herbert Asbury
* * *
Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900 -1954 —Albert S. Broussard
Acknowledgments
Books may be written by a single person, but they are polished by many hands, or in this case sharp eyes. I don’t speak Cantonese, and I would likely mispronounce every single phonetic transcription in this book. Cantonese, with 6 to 9 tones (compared to Mandarin’s 4 tones), is a difficult language to learn. All of the phonetic transcriptions in this book are due to the efforts of Gina Sze. She was gracious enough to share her knowledge and time with me, and for that she has my gratitude.
To Ken Littlefield for making sure that Isobel’s kedging efforts were done correctly with all her knots in order. To my editors, Merrily Taylor and Tom Welch, for putting up with my struggling grammar efforts. To Alice Wright, the queen of consistency, for making sure there were no gaping plot holes. To my beta readers, Lorene Herrera, Selena Compton, Annelie Wendeberg, Rich Lovin, and Erin Bright. Your insights are invaluable, and much appreciated.
To my husband and children. I’m pretty sure they were on the verge of asking me to stop writing during the hair-pulling ordeal that was the first draft. Thank you for your understanding, and for listening to my writerly hardships.
And finally, thank you to all my readers for your continued support.
Glossary
Bai! - a Cantonese expression for when something bad happens (close to the English expression, ‘shit’)
Banker - a horse racing bet where the bettor believes their selection is certain to win
Bong 幫 - help
Boo how doy - hatchet man - a hired tong soldier or assassin
Capper - a person who is on the look out for possible clients for attorneys
Chi Gum Shing - 紫禁城 - Forbidden Palace
Chinese Six Companies - Benevolent organizations formed to help the Chinese travel to and from China, to take care of the sick and the starving, and to return corpses to China for burial.
Chun Hung - a poster that puts a price on someone’s head
Dang dang - wait
Digging into your levis - searching for cash
Din Gau - 癲狗 - Rabid Dog
Dressed for death - dressed in one’s best
Faan tung - 飯桶 - rice bucket - worthless
Fahn Quai - White Devil
Fan Kwei - Foreign Devil
Graft - practices, especially bribery, used to secure illicit gains in politics or business; corruption.
Hei Lok Lau - House of Joy - traditional name for brothels in old days
Hei san la nei, chap chung! - 起身呀你個雜種！- Wake up, you bastard!
Highbinders - general term for criminals
Kedging - to warp or pull (a ship) along by hauling on the cable of an anchor that has been carried out a ways from the ship, and dropped.
King chak - the police
Lo Mo - foster mother
Mien tzu - a severe loss of face
Mui Tsai - little Chinese girls who were sold into domestic households. They were often burdened with heavy labor and endured severe physical punishments.
Nei tai - you, look
Ngor bon nei - I help you
No sabe - Spanish for ‘doesn’t know’ or ‘I don’t understand’. I came across a historical reference to a Chinese man using this phrase in a newspaper article. I don’t know if it was common, but it is a simple, easy to say phrase that English speakers understand.
Pak Siu Lui - White Little Bud
Si Fu - the Master
Siu wai daan - 小壞蛋 - Little Rotten Eggs - An insult that implies one was hatched rather than born, and therefore has no mother. The inclusion of ‘little’ in the insult softens it slightly.
Slungshot - A maritime tool consisting of a weight, or "shot," affixed to the end of a long cord often by being wound into the center of a knot called a "monkey's fist." It is used to cast line from one location to another, often mooring line. This was also a popular makeshift (and deadly) weapon in the Barbary Coast.
Wai Daan - 壞蛋 - Rotten Egg
Wai Yan - 壞男人 - Bad Men
Wu Lei Ching - 狐狸精 - Fox Spirit
Wun Dan - Cracked Egg
Wun… ah Mei - Find Mei
Yiu! - 妖! - a slightly less offensive version of the English 'F-word'.