Tong Wars

by Scott D Seligman

  The efforts by Tom Lee and others to build relationships with New York’s powerful had paid off in spades, and Chinatown and its tongs would remain exactly where they were.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  At the end of March 1906, an eighteen-course dinner for three hundred was held at the Port Arthur Restaurant on Mott Street to celebrate peace in Chinatown. The organizers managed to get officers of both tongs to sit together at the same meal. As far as anyone could recall, it was a first.

  Judge Foster, credited as the architect of the peace, occupied the place of honor, directly under a stuffed white dove suspended from the ceiling. The meal took five hours from start to finish, but despite the armistice nerves remained frayed. When a waiter dropped a tray, breaking several bowls and causing a loud crash, “every Chinaman who did not plainly see what had happened either jumped or ducked.”

  In mid-April, Mock Duck’s attorney got his bail reduced by arguing that it had been set high not because of the nature of the charge—which, after all, was only bribery, not murder—but rather because of his record. Once bond was cut to $2,000, he was able to put up the cash. He had languished in the Tombs for two months.

  Asked if he intended to honor the peace compact struck between the Hip Sings and the On Leongs, he dodged the question. But he did declare, “I’m not going to do any shooting. I’m not the bad man the police make me out to be.” Tom Lee, for one, certainly wasn’t persuaded. Less than an hour after Mock Duck’s discharge, Lee showed up at the Criminal Courts Building, hoping to persuade a judge to secure a promise from his nemesis to keep the peace, even as a non-signatory. But the judges had all gone home for the day.

  Three days later came the news of the devastating earthquake that had hit northern California. Although the mostly wooden buildings of San Francisco’s Chinatown had by and large survived the tremor, they quickly succumbed to the subsequent fires that burned out of control. Many New York Chinese had friends and relatives in San Francisco, then as now the city with the largest concentration of Chinese in America, and a committee was organized to raise money for the Chinese victims. Three Chinatown merchants spearheaded a drive that raised $5,000 within five days of the initial shock. Tom Lee headed the list of donors with a contribution of $50.

  Several days later, Mock Duck was once again in jail, though only briefly. On April 24, he was accused of running a gambling house at 11 Doyers and arrested, together with twenty-five other men, although all were quickly released for lack of evidence. Their defense was that the police had disrupted not gambling but a discussion about sending funds to San Francisco. In fact, there was no evidence Mock Duck was in any way affiliated with the relief committee, as Tom Lee was. Lee and the On Leongs were always ready when philanthropy was needed; the same could not be said of Mock Duck or the Hip Sings.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  Chinese women, even in America and even in the twentieth century, were sometimes bought and sold. Their favors might be offered up to other men for profit, or they might be used as chattel to discharge debts. Even those who were ostensibly “married” were often not legally wed. For at least eight years, Wong Get cohabitated with a white prostitute turned actress named Florence Fucci, who sometimes went by the name of Florence Wong, but he was later enumerated in the census with a Chinese-born wife named Fong Shee and two children. There is no record of either marriage.

  By contrast, Tom Lee and Warry Charles married white women in formal, lawful ceremonies. As a practical matter, though, because fraternizing with “Chinamen” was highly discouraged among women of high station, and because most Chinese men lived at the bottom of the society anyway, Chinese in America typically chose only from among lower-class women. This often meant immigrants, most commonly Irish, English, German, or Italian ones.

  Mock Duck, too, had lived with a white consort in 1902, but by 1906 the newspapers recorded him as married to a Chinese woman known as Tai Yow Chin. This, too, was probably not a legal union, and Tai Yow, five feet four inches tall and rotund, had a habit of getting into compromising situations. In March 1906, while Mock Duck was still incarcerated, she showed up in Rhode Island. One story held that she had been kidnapped by On Leongs, but Wong Get denied they had had anything to do with it. Providence police, believing she had been brought there to be sold, arrested her but released her when Mock Duck’s relatives came up from New York to retrieve her. A few months later, she was picked up in a dingy room in Philadelphia. Again, local police felt sure she was being “held in captivity for immoral purposes.” She had been in town for three weeks.

  On learning of her arrest, Mock Duck, by then out on bail, went to Philadelphia to rescue her. Although the police didn’t believe she was really his wife, they permitted him to visit her cell, where he surely coached her on what to say to the judge. The following day, the magistrate heard testimony not only from the Hip Sings but from several local On Leongs, who alleged that the woman had been brought to Philadelphia to liquidate a $1,000 debt incurred by Mock Duck and that she was not his wife. But the judge, declaring that the police had erred in arresting her in the first place, released her, and Mock Duck hustled her out of court.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  When Tai Yow came to live with Mock Duck, she did not come alone. Her first husband, a jeweler named Chin Mung whom she had wed in San Francisco, had earlier been married to a white woman who had died in 1901 shortly after giving birth to a baby girl. That was when Chin Mung married Tai Yow and moved his family to Manhattan. In 1905, after he, too, had died, Tai Yow moved in with Mock Duck on Doyers Street. And the little girl, known as Ha Oi, came with her.

  Portrait of Tai Yow Chin, the first Mrs. Mock Duck, 1906.

  Although there was never a formal adoption—indeed, there is no record of a formal marriage, either—Mock Duck effectively became Ha Oi’s stepfather. She lived with the couple in their spotless, four-room flat at 10 Doyers. The household also included an elderly cousin and an Irish housekeeper named Bedelia who spoke English with a strong brogue and could also manage pidgin Chinese. The little girl was, by nearly all accounts, an adorable and well-loved child who was watched over carefully. Mock Duck was overprotective of her, rebuffing entreaties from the teachers at the Morning Star Mission across the street to send her to their kindergarten. Instead, he brought in a tutor. Ha Oi was permitted to play with a few friends but was not allowed on the street alone.

  The child had some Caucasian features. Although her skin was light yellow and her dark hair was tied in knots on the top of her head, her eyes were large, round, and blue. But she was always dressed in Chinese clothing and lived in an entirely Chinese environment. She couldn’t speak a word of English.

  On the morning of March 19, 1907, two agents from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, with police backup, knocked insistently on the door of No. 10. At first, Bedelia refused to let them in, protesting that the family was still asleep. But she relented when they identified themselves as officers of the law. They made their way through the flat and discovered the child asleep in the arms of the aged cousin. Then Mock Duck and Tai Yow were roused, and the agents explained the purpose of their mission.

  Their society—known as the Gerry Society after Elbridge Gerry, one of its cofounders—had received a letter asserting that a six-year-old white Christian child was being kept in slavery by Mock Duck and was being beaten and abused. The letter was poorly written, and the Gerry Society believed it had been penned by a Chinese. The writer alleged that the little girl’s hair had been dyed to disguise her race and demanded she be removed from the household immediately.

  The couple explained Ha Oi’s origins and assured the agents she was loved and well cared for and that nothing untoward went on in their home. They contended the letter writer had been one of Mock Duck’s enemies and pleaded with them to leave the child be. But the men insisted on seizing the girl and told the couple she would be brought before a ma
gistrate at the children’s court, who would decide her fate.

  At which point, the hard-boiled Mock Duck, the most feared highbinder in Chinatown, frequently jailed and twice tried for murder, threw himself on the child’s bed and wept.

  The couple attended the arraignment, at which the magistrate reviewed the charges and listened to both sides. He directed that the girl be cared for by the Gerry Society for two days while its agents investigated her background and her treatment in Mock Duck’s home. This gave the couple confidence she would be restored to them, because they saw nothing wrong with the way she had come into their care or the way in which she was being raised.

  When the time came for the hearing, however, the Gerry Society asked for an extension. The girl’s caretakers had unbraided the child’s pigtails and after washing her hair thoroughly discovered that she was, in reality, an auburn blonde. They believed she might be a full-blooded Caucasian and suspected she had been kidnapped. So they took photographs of her in both Chinese and American clothing and sent them off to San Francisco to see if their counterparts there could shed any light on her origins.

  Based on nothing other than the child’s appearance, the Gerry Society concluded unequivocally that “there is not a drop of Chinese blood in Ha Oi’s little body.” And their San Francisco colleagues—even though all birth records from that period had been destroyed in the fire that followed the earthquake—declared categorically that both of the girl’s parents had been white and that her mother, a servant girl, had “abandoned her to the Chinese.”

  Mock Duck resolved to use every legal means possible to fight for custody. He retained counsel and filed a writ of habeas corpus. The child was then taken to the Supreme Court of New York County, where his attorney contended he and Tai Yow had taken excellent care of her and remained fit to raise her. The Gerry Society, for its part, argued that given his record Mock Duck was no proper guardian.

  The judge questioned Mock Duck about his two murder indictments and the pending charge of bribery. In his final ruling on April 12, he declared that the child was Caucasian and in no way bound to Mock Duck and his wife by “ties of race” and that Mock Duck was, in any case, not a fit guardian. Ha Oi was thereupon remanded to the custody of the Gerry Society, which was to find a new home for her. She would never see Mock Duck or Tai Yow again.

  In its annual report that year, the Gerry Society congratulated itself on its handling of the case. “The greatest satisfaction has been experienced in . . . the rescue of an American child from a degraded life among Chinese criminals,” the report read. And public opinion was squarely behind the society. But a rare note of sympathy for the aggrieved Chinese couple in what had otherwise been a public crucifixion, and a suggestion that Ha Oi’s future might not be so bright after all, was offered by a letter writer to the New York Herald identified only as “Cosmopolitan”:

  So the courts have deprived Mock Duck of his little white foster child, Ha Oi. Well and good. That he loved her and lavished upon her all that money can buy counts for nothing, for has he not been accused or suspected of all the crimes in the code, although none has been proved? “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” wrote Shakespeare. So might he have written of a Chinese, and the answer would have been equally in the affirmative. But what of that? Mock Duck has committed the crime of being born of an alien race. Happy little Ha Oi, that she has been dragged from the lap of pagan love and luxury that she may become the drudge of some Christian household and the target of its taunts.

  Chapter 10

  Have Gun, Will Travel

  Although New York was at peace, it wasn’t the only place where Hip Sings clashed with On Leongs.

  By the turn of the century, both organizations had begun to expand into other cities in the East and the Midwest; the Hip Sings, a California import, were present in several West Coast locations as well. Chapters could form when the Chinese population in a given city was large enough to sustain them, and sometimes New Yorkers were dispatched to help organize them.

  The Hip Sings, for example, had been active in Philadelphia as early as 1889; they made the newspapers there when several tried to deter witnesses from testifying in a case against gamblers through a combination of bribery and blackmail. And in 1895, Wong Get had traveled to Washington, D.C., to organize a local Hip Sing chapter, or, as the Washington Post put it, “to bleed resident laundrymen and Chinese merchants.” He and another senior tong man threatened laundrymen with harm or false accusations unless they made weekly payments ranging from $2 to $10. The On Leongs, for their part, became particularly strong in Boston, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, and both tongs had a sizable presence in Chicago.

  While New York remained the center of gravity, the tongs continued to add locations as the twentieth century progressed. And although there had always been informal cooperation among the branches in various cities, by the early part of the century a formal coordinating structure was established. The Boston-based Meihong Soohoo took credit for establishing the On Leongs’ national organization in about 1905. The Hip Sings did so somewhat later, at a 1918 national convention in San Francisco.

  Each branch of the On Leong Tong elected its own president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. The various presidents sat on a combination “executive committee and arbitration board” that constituted the supreme governing board of the national association. Charged not only with leadership but also with mediating any disputes among the individual associations, the board also elected national officers—a national president and vice president and two secretaries—who organized annual conventions. They not only helped the local branches keep in closer touch but also helped them come to one another’s aid when needed.

  Such aid sometimes called for the lending of hit men. When attacks and assassinations were required, common practice was to recruit boo how doy—“hatchet men”—from other locations. These men, who might be fellow tong members or hired guns, could be brought in, set to their deadly tasks, and spirited out of a city quickly. They were less likely than locals to be identified and arrested.

  But in drawing the far-flung branches closer together, the national organizations also increased the chances that conflict in one location might spill over into others. This would become a bigger and bigger problem as the years passed and an explosive one by the 1920s.

  In mid-August 1907, the New York On Leongs once again sat down for a meal with the Hip Sings. The occasion was a celebration of a full year of peaceful coexistence. Ninety people attended the costly feast at the Tuxedo Restaurant, which began at 8:00 p.m. and ran well beyond midnight before the fruit and cigars appeared at the upscale Doyers Street eatery. The district attorney’s office came in full force. Chinese government representatives were also on hand, as were many men of note from New York’s financial and professional worlds.

  In his toast, Judge Foster, whom the New York Sun had dubbed “the Great White Father of Chinatown,” related the events that led to the armistice and declared that the truce had been kept faithfully. He also assured the audience that recent outbreaks of violence between branches of the two tongs in Philadelphia and Boston that had been in the news had had nothing whatever to do with the New Yorkers.

  On this latter point, however, he was both naive and sorely mistaken.The enmity between the Hip Sings and the On Leongs transcended geographic boundaries. Philadelphia’s troubles began in 1906 and broke out for the same reasons that had caused the earlier New York war. In June, local On Leongs fired on a Hip Sing who had helped police organize an antigambling raid. Brother Hip Sings returned the fire, four men were shot, and many arrests were made. Another clash shortly afterward resulted in the shooting of three Chinese men, one fatally, as well as one of the white heads of a Christian mission in Chinatown. Two On Leongs were convicted, and a peace treaty was signed, but the feud was renewed a year later when two Hip Sings were shot to death. One of those arrested was Char
lie Boston, senior functionary of the New York On Leongs, who had been lent to his Philadelphia brothers for the battle.

  The Hip Sings, too, sometimes dispatched assassins from New York. After the Chinese Theatre and Pell Street shootings, “Scientific Killer” Sing Dock and “Girl Face” Yee Toy headed for Boston, where they set to planning another spectacular bloodbath. In July 1907, a dozen New York Hip Sings led by Sing and Yee arrived in Boston and rented rooms near Chinatown. Within a few days, they opened fire on local On Leongs on Oxford Place, killing three and wounding seven in the worst violence Boston’s Chinese quarter had ever seen.

  It was all connected. The killings were acts of revenge on Boston On Leongs believed to have been among the Philadelphia shooters. Sing Dock and Yee Toy evaded capture, just as they had after the Chinese Theatre murders, but Boston police arrested seven other Hip Sings who were held without bail for manslaughter. Of the three men who were apprehended the following day, one was reported to be Mock Duck. He had been caught in a laundry in Quincy, Massachusetts, with a revolver on his person.

  New York braced for a revenge attack. Captain Robert F. Dooley, drafted by Commissioner Bingham the previous October to take over Elizabeth Street as part of the largest shake-up in New York Police Department history in which eighty-six captains were transferred, stationed ten men in Chinatown, including one ordered to frisk every patron who entered the Chinese Theatre. But he needn’t have worried, at least not on account of Mock Duck’s alleged capture. Strolling leisurely into the office of the New York Times on August 5, a smiling Mock Duck, holding a copy of the morning’s Times detailing his supposed arrest in Boston, told a reporter, “Never been in Boston in my life. Guess some Chinaman tell ’em he’s me just for fun.”