The New York that greeted these new arrivals was developing briskly. Heady economic growth had followed the recession, though its rewards were distributed unevenly among the city’s million residents. The ruling class, in their tony Murray Hill and Gramercy Park mansions, occupied themselves with lavish parties, fashion, theater, and tours of Europe. The working class, far more numerous, crowded into the tenements of the Fourth Ward—lower Manhattan’s East River waterfront—and the Sixth Ward’s Five Points neighborhood, named for an irregular intersection where Anthony (now Worth), Orange (now Baxter), and Cross (now Mosco) streets converged and which was notorious for its saloons, gambling halls, cathouses, and gang wars. Newly arrived Chinese, their numbers still minuscule, joined Irish, English, Jewish, Italian, and German immigrants and blacks in a struggle for survival in a quarter known for vice, crime, and grinding poverty.
There was bias against all newcomers, but the Chinese were in a class by themselves. Although they were not widely viewed in New York as an economic threat, it didn’t take long for anti-Chinese stereotypes, honed in California, to make their way eastward. Chinese were derided in the press as inferior, dishonest, immoral, indecent, unsanitary, and disease-ridden. They were called clannish and criticized for their unwillingness to assimilate—as if they were in any way welcome to do so. They were godless heathens with sordid habits, it was said, like smoking opium and eating rats and dogs. These very prejudices led Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, halting further immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and rendering those Chinese already here ineligible for citizenship.
In Manhattan, many early migrants were met at the railway station or pier by Wo Kee, a Hong Kong–born merchant who delivered them by horse-drawn coach over rutted streets to 34 Mott Street. There he ran a general store and a boardinghouse with accommodations for two dozen men sleeping two to a bunk. There he briefed new arrivals on life and business opportunities in New York. And there they might remain until they got established.
Wo Kee—his real name was Wong Ah Chung, but he was popularly known by the name of his store—was the de facto leader of the tiny Chinese community when Tom Lee arrived. In 1873, at age twenty-four, Wo Kee had staked out the predominantly Irish neighborhood south of Canal Street that would become the permanent home of Manhattan’s Chinese community. There was little to recommend the unsavory district, but rents were cheap.
Wo Kee’s shop carried just about everything a Chinese émigré might need. His front parlor, chock-full of merchandise, could barely accommodate four customers at a time. Waxen ducks, desiccated mushrooms, nuts, sweetmeats, dried sharks’ fins, and a variety of teas filled his shelves, barrels, and crates. Pasteboard boxes spilled over with seeds, roots, herbs, and barks, remedies for various ailments that gave the place a decidedly pungent odor. But there were also sweet-smelling incense sticks and altars for use at funerals and religious rituals. Jade bracelets, sandals, Chinese garments, porcelain teapots, tobacco, opium pipes—and opium itself—rounded out his inventory. The sallow-skinned, mustachioed Wo Kee, a stout man who stood five feet four and spoke reasonably good English, served tea to all comers, totaled purchases on an abacus, and kept his accounts with a writing brush.
Out of the same location, he also ran an underground gambling parlor and a mutual aid association called the Polong Congsee (which probably translates as “Conscientious Protection Company”). One of a pair of benevolent societies serving the small community, it collected dues and met monthly in his basement. Boasting seventy-five members and assets of several thousand dollars, the Polong Congsee functioned in part as an immigrant depot, helping newcomers open laundries or secure other employment.
In 1875, state census takers had enumerated only 157 Chinese in all of New York City, and the federal census five years later still tallied fewer than 1,000 in the entire state. This was likely a severe case of undercounting, however. The New York Times was probably closer to the mark in its 1880 estimate of 4,500 Chinese in the metropolitan area: about 2,000 in Manhattan, another 1,000 in Brooklyn, and 1,500 in New Jersey.
The discrepancy arose because census takers found it especially problematic to get an accurate count. A New York Herald reporter gave a flavor for the obstacles: “A person unacquainted in the district might easily enough ask one of the Chinamen all the questions, and then, ten minutes afterward, meeting the same Celestial in another house, innocently endeavor to repeat the examination.” This was true, he explained, because “they all look alike”—a generalization with which most New Yorkers would have readily agreed. Then, too, Chinese crowded a lot more people into a given dwelling than did other immigrants. It would have taken several trips to any given address and a good measure of patience and perseverance to interview all of its residents.
Most of New York’s Chinese lived in boardinghouses. Some had been built as tenements, with their cheerless railroad flats and gloomy hallways, jammed up against one another without so much as a narrow alley in between to let in a little light. Others had once been stately private residences but had deteriorated over time. Enterprising landlords fitted high-ceilinged rooms with makeshift, intermediate floors, doubling their profits even as they turned their properties into firetraps. Front rooms were typically given over to retail businesses, while rear chambers, attics, and cellars were used for housing. Many men could sleep, cook, and eat in one large, unheated dormitory, rudely furnished with a stove, a table, stools, and rows of shelves that served as bunks, some wide enough to accommodate three sleepers.
Most of the early arrivals had been peasants or small shopkeepers in China, and most intended to make some money in America and then return home to a comfortable retirement. Many were literate in their own language, but few spoke much English, so even if they had not been shut out by white Americans, they had no choice but to fraternize exclusively with other Chinese. As a rule, they had little to do with outsiders and lived, ate, slept, and relaxed with their own kind. They dressed in traditional Chinese robes, blouses, flowing pantaloons, and wooden-soled slippers ill-suited to New York’s muddy streets. And they sported the signature hair queues worn at the time by all men in China. They could scarcely have appeared more foreign to their New York neighbors.
Diligent laborers with few deadbeats among them, the Chinese were closely associated with the laundry business, which permitted a hard worker to put away $10 to $14 per week, about what an average white grocery clerk or letter carrier made. None of these men would have dreamed of washing clothes back in China; there it would have been a job for their women. But it was an occupation that needed little capital—they could set up shop for as little as $75—and it did not put them in competition with white males, which would have spelled trouble. By 1879, the city already boasted more than three hundred Chinese laundries.
But Chinese worked in other trades as well. Skilled cigar makers—not a few of whom had logged time as coolies in Cuba’s tobacco fields before sailing to New York—found employment in tenement cigar factories. They were paid by the piece and could take home as much as $27 a week. More than seventy-five Chinese worked as domestics and were paid $18 to $25 a month plus room and board. Fifty Chinese-run groceries, twenty tobacco shops, ten drugstores, and six Chinese restaurants were operating in the Chinese quarter in 1879. And these didn’t include enterprises in Brooklyn or New Jersey.
By early 1880, Chinese had leased nearly every building—sixteen in total—on lower Mott Street, just up from Chatham Square. But the influx of what the New York Herald called an “army of almond-eyed exiles” arriving from the West—at the rate of twenty per day, by one count—soon overtaxed the boardinghouses. More space was needed, but there was opposition to expansion of “Little China.”
When the Rutgers Fire Insurance Company was offered a large advance on the rent for a property it owned at 3 Mott, the company asserted that it would sooner pull the building down than allow a “Chinaman” to live in it. The owner of two cr
amped houses on nearby Pell Street refused $60 a month from a would-be Chinese tenant, even though the properties had not previously fetched anywhere near that amount. And another Mott Street landlord vowed to allow his property to sit idle rather than accept a generous offer of $1,000 for the year from a Chinese.
In May, Chinese tenants in five of the quarter’s residences—including 34 Mott, which housed Wo Kee’s establishment—suddenly received eviction notices. The landlords blamed opium-smoking Chinese for the fact that their properties’ market value had plummeted and vowed to enjoin future lessees from subletting to Chinese or to blacks. When an offer by the Polong Congsee to buy two of the buildings was refused, Wo Kee tore down his sign, packed up his wares, and headed for nearby Park Street. In due course, however, he would be back, and he would bring his countrymen with him.
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Tom Lee, a crafty man with no small level of ambition, came to New York with four goals: to impose order and organization on its Chinese colonists; to build bridges for them to the white establishment; to make himself rich and successful; and to start a family. He saw no conflict among those objectives and wasted little time in pursuing all of them at once.
His name wasn’t actually Tom Lee; that was just the identity the courtly emissary from San Francisco’s more established Chinatown assumed shortly after his arrival. Born about 1849 near Guangzhou, Lee—slender at five feet six inches—had come to America at age fourteen. He had worked in San Francisco as a labor contractor, supplying white-owned companies with low-paid Chinese workers, and had ingratiated himself there with powerful figures in the Chinese community. He had readily picked up serviceable English, although it was always somewhat broken and he forever retained an accent. He was a man on the move, up the economic ladder and east across the continent.
By 1876, Lee had reached St. Louis, where he opened a barrel-making business and took out citizenship papers—one of the first Chinese in America to do so—under his original name, Wung Ah Ling. And after a short stint as a merchant in Philadelphia, he moved on to New York, where he petitioned Manhattan’s Court of Common Pleas for a new moniker, explaining that Americans had too much trouble pronouncing the old one. The judge assented, and Wung Ah Ling became Tom Lee forever after.
Although Lee adopted Western dress earlier than most, he still sported a queue in the late 1870s, as did nearly all Chinese. The wearing of hair queues had been imposed on all Chinese males as a sign of subjugation when the Manchus, a minority tribe from the Northeast, conquered China and established the Qing dynasty in 1644. The penalty for noncompliance was death. After a couple of hundred years, however, the pigtails came, paradoxically, to be accepted as a symbol of national pride, and even many Chinese living abroad refused to part with them, especially if they expected to return home. To appear more Americanized, however, Lee tucked the long plait into the crown of a stiff derby hat, which caused the hair on the back of his head to stand out, someone once said, “like the quills of an angry porcupine.”
The olive-skinned Lee wore a wispy mustache under his flat nose, and a sparse goatee obscured his pointy chin. Dapper, urbane, and distinguished looking, he dressed fashionably, a diamond stickpin securing his tie and an elegant, eight-ounce gold watch chain dangling from the third button of his waistcoat.
Just before coming to New York, Lee, nearing thirty, had wed the comely Minnie Rose Kaylor, a buxom Philadelphia brunette of Scotch-German heritage who was more than a decade younger and quite a bit larger than he was. Marriage between Chinese men and women of other races was unusual in this era, but it was not illegal. A Lutheran minister performed the ceremony, even though Lee was not baptized. He moved his new bride to 20 Mott Street shortly afterward, and they lost no time starting a family.
Minnie bore two daughters who died in infancy and then two sons—Tom junior in 1882 and Frank William in 1884. A huge celebration followed the birth of young Tom: Two traditions were honored, mirroring his mixed heritage. He was baptized and was feted at a “head shaving” party held, according to Chinese custom, thirty days after the birth of a male. The elder Lee did not stint on the festivities. On April 1, 1882, he closed both of his stores—he now had two of them—for a huge party.
It took two restaurants to accommodate the three hundred guests from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. Three diplomats from the Chinese legation made the journey from Washington; the local representatives of the Manchu government had an interest in seeing to it that there was order among their countrymen in America, so they wanted to signal their approval of Lee’s assumption of the leadership of the New York colony. VIPs were entertained in the parlor of the Lee home, where banners inscribed with good wishes adorned the walls. Lee had also invited American friends, some of whom attended. But he received regrets from several who found the idea of a party to celebrate a haircut so odd that they mistook the invitation for an April Fools’ joke.
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Tom Lee’s arrival in New York had been no accident. He had been sent there by the Six Companies, San Francisco Chinatown’s supreme governing body. A fraternal organization that sat at the apex of Chinese society in the United States, it was, as its name implied, an umbrella group of about half a dozen associations.
From the moment they arrived in America, Chinese immigrants organized mutual aid societies, which fell into three broad categories. The first type—regional societies—consisted of organizations set up by and for people from a specific district in China who spoke a common dialect. Men from Taishan, for example, who made up the majority of Chinese residents, generally belonged to the Ning Yeung Society. Those from three counties nearer Guangzhou joined the Sam Yup Benevolent Association.
The second category was clan societies, where membership was available to Chinese from anywhere who happened to share a surname and were thus presumed to be kin. Most everyone named Moy paid dues to the Moy Family Association, for example, and there were similar circles for the Lee, Wong, Ng, and other families with sufficient numbers to sustain them. In one case, four numerically small clans came together under one umbrella to form the Four Brothers’ Society.
Membership in both the regional and the clan organizations was close to automatic. These groups established New York chapters as soon as the city had a critical mass of landsmen. Dues were used to help new immigrants get settled, find housing, and get established in business. The associations made loans to aspiring businessmen and provided bail and legal fees for any who got arrested. They offered protection from harm and mediated disputes among their members. And they also served immigrants in death, organizing funerals and providing welfare for their families. In due course, when resources permitted, the bones of departed members would be exhumed, scraped clean, and shipped home to be reinterred with those of their ancestors.
The third category consisted of sworn brotherhoods generally known by the term “tong,” meaning “chamber,” with no geographic or family requirements and generally with fewer members. Sometimes called triads and sometimes secret societies, these were open to Chinese from anywhere who paid dues and underwent initiation. Although they, too, were ostensibly benevolent associations and some of their services overlapped with those of the regional and clan groups, they came to be associated with a variety of underworld activities.
The Six Companies was the congress of the major regional societies, and it stepped in when issues crossed jurisdictional lines. Its chairmanship rotated among its member associations, and its authority derived in part from a clever arrangement struck with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the dominant transpacific shipping line. Pacific Mail required certification from the Six Companies that a would-be return passenger had paid his dues to one of its constituent groups and had discharged all his debts before it would sell him a ticket home. Most Chinese in America were thus stuck there until the Six Companies cleared them for departure.
Later known as the Chinese Consolidated
Benevolent Association (Chung Hwa Gong Shaw) and more or less overseen by Chinese diplomats, the organization also served as the voice of the Chinese community and, inevitably, as a lightning rod for criticism of the Chinese. Its role was much misunderstood by white America. It was accused, among other things, of ordering the execution of malefactors and of importing Chinese coolies to work at slave wages. In truth, the Six Companies played a constructive role in maintaining peace and order in San Francisco and other American cities where Chinese settled. It had already begun to speak out on the single biggest issue they faced: the prospect of legislation to exclude them.
In the late 1870s, the leading lights of New York’s nascent Chinese colony had petitioned the Six Companies to send an emissary to Manhattan. They wanted someone who could provide the young community with services already available to Chinese in California and elsewhere: governance, discipline, protection, and representation. The assignment was given to Tom Lee, whose relationships with the group’s bosses dated to his stint in California. With their backing, he assumed leadership of New York’s Chinese upon his arrival.
That most local Chinese accepted his authority stemmed from a strong penchant for hierarchy on their part. Chinese in America naturally sought to re-create communal structures familiar from the old country, where rank had always been important. The men’s strong sense of social order dictated that someone play the part the village patriarch had played in China. This involved providing leadership, settling differences, presiding over ceremonies, solving problems, and looking out for the general welfare.
Tom Lee relished the role and established himself in grand style. He rented 20 Mott Street, occupying the entire three-story, brick residence—an unheard-of amount of space for a Chinese family. He decorated the house with plush carpets and rosewood furniture, large porcelain vases, colorful Chinese paintings, and even a piano. The quarters were intended to be impressive and to serve not just as a home but as a symbol of power and prestige.
Tong Wars Page 3