Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco
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37. Lucie Cheng Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. i (autumn 1979): 1z. According to Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp. i 8o-81, "The prices paid for prostitutes in the San Francisco market varied with the years and with the quality of the merchandise and was naturally dependent to a great extent upon supply and demand. Before the passage of the exclusion acts the prettiest Chinese girls could be purchased for a few hundred dollars each, but after about 1888, when it became necessary to smuggle them into this country, prices rose enormously. During the early eighteen-nineties they ranged from about $10o for a one-year-old girl to a maximum of $1,200 for a girl of fourteen, which was considered the best age for prostitution. Children of six to ten brought from $zoo to $8oo. About 1897 girls of twelve to fifteen sometimes sold for as high as $z,5oo each."
3 8. M. G. C. Edholm, "A Stain on the Flag," Californian Illustrated Magazine i (February 1892): 162.
39. Chinese Immigration: The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration. Testimony Taken Before a Committee of the Senate of the State of California, Appointed April3d, 1876 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1876), p. 63. Evidence that, like this contract, allegedly pointed to immoral and criminal behavior on the part of the Chinese was often used by exclusionists to justify anti-Chinese legislation.
40. On the subject of indentured servants in the United States, see Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946); and Sharon V. Salinger, "To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-18oo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
41. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, p. 180; and Mildred Crowl Martin, Chinatown's Angry Angel: The Story of Donaldina Cameron (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1977), p. 80.
42. Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," p. 15.
43. Ibid., p. 13; San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 1869, P. 3.
44. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp. 174-76; and Nell Kimball: The Life as an American Madam by Herself, ed. Stephen Longstreet (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 226-27. Both Ashbury and Kimball wrote about Selina, a Chinese prostitute who knew how to capitalize on the Oriental fantasies of white men. Kimball described her thus: "I myself knew Selina, a Chinese tart, the best looker I ever saw among them-what was called `a stunner.' She had a marvelous body, thin and yet just right in hips and breasts, not skimped as with most Chinese. She could chatter the artistic comeon to a john-about scrolls, screens, and give off a sense of culture, which a man likes sometimes when he's buying a woman's time and he's budgeting his vitality. She had a place, a three room kip in Bartlett Alley, and it was: For Whites Only.... Customers had to book her three days in ahead, she was that much in demand she claimed. And she got a whole buck, not the usual seventy-five cent price. She was a looksee seller, taking off her clothes for fifty cents so the trick could check for himself-as Lai [her laundry woman] told me-that in her sex parts she ran north-to-south like the white girls, and not east-to-west. It's amazing the idea you can sell a man about fornicationhe'll pay and even if fooled, feel at least he's gotten some knowledge or experience" (p. 227).
45. San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1892, p. I.
46. San Francisco Call, December 6, 1908, p. 3.
47. Alexander McLeod, Pigtails and Gold Dust (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1948), P. 183.
48. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp. 176-77; Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," pp. 13-14; and Nell Kimball, pp. zz1-z3.
49• Chinese Immigration, pp. 47, 80. The following sensationalized description of the "hospital" to which diseased prostitutes were brought to die appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 5, 1869: "Led by night to this hold of a `hospital,' she is forced within the door and made to lie down upon the shelf. A cup of water, another of boiled rice, and a little metal oil lamp are placed by her side.... Those who have immediate charge of the establishment know how long the oil should last, and when the limit is reached they return to the `hospital,' unbar the door and enter.... Generally the woman is dead, either by starvation or from her own hand; but sometimes life is not extinct; the spark yet remains when the `doctors' enter; yet this makes but little difference to them. They come for a corpse, and they never go away without it" (p. 3).
50. My calculations are based on statistics given in Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," pp. 23-24; Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, pp. 54-5 5, 62-63, 68-69; and idem, "Exclusion of Chinese Women," p. 107. I would favor the higher figures for 186o and i 88o given by Sucheng Chan, in which she took unlisted prostitutes into consideration by looking closely at household composition. Whenever single women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were shown living in all-female households, she coded them as "probable prostitutes" ("Exclusion," p. 141). Although the accuracy of U.S. census statistics, particularly for a group that is primarily non-English-speaking like the Chinese, is questionable, the manuscript census is one of the few sources available that provides information on household composition and the socioeconomic background of Chinese women.
51. Megumi Dick Osumi, "Asians and California's Anti-Miscegenation Laws," in Asian and Pacific American Experiences: Women's Perspectives, ed. Nobuya Tsuchida (Minneapolis: Asian/Pacific American Learning Resource Center and General College, University of Minnesota, 1982), p. 6.
52. In contrast, Chinese men were able to intermarry in British Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Hawaii, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Siberia, and Australia; as a result, prostitution was not as widespread in these places as it was in the continental United States. See Ching Chao Wu, "Chinese Immigration in the Pacific Area" (Master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1926), pp. 26-28; and idem, "Chinatowns: A Study of Symbiosis and Assimilation" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1928), chap. 4.
53. Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," pp. 8-29. Prostitution in general at this time was just as lucrative for everyone. As Barnhart points out in chapter 6 of The Fair but Frail, a wide sector of society profited from prostitution, including business people such as dressmakers, jewelers, doctors, liquor salesmen, and theater managers, as well as judges and other municipal officers who took bribes.
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, 19
81 ), 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.