Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown Read Online Free PDF Page A

Flowery Kingdom, unofficially, in San Francisco. The uncredentialed spokesman for 25,000 Chinese set up an office on Sacramento Street between Kearny and Dupont.
    With some 25,000 Chinese in California, it would have taken a miracle of the first magnitude for none of them to be inclined to loose living or crime. There was no miracle; there was crime and prostitution. A disenchanted San Francisco took a closer look at the quaint Quarter which had sprung up in its midst. The city recoiled in somewhat theatrical horror. Why, there was overcrowding there, and a general lack of sanitation! It was obvious that there was no lack of crime, and to the city’s feigned shock it found the Quarter crawling with fallen women.
    Thus, ironically, the advent of the Chinese prostitute brought about the end of the Sino-Chinese honeymoon in San Francisco.

CHAPTER TWO
The Honeymoon Ends
    “I think there is a class of outlaws among the Chinese population here who give us a great deal of trouble. There are also a great many good men who are made to suffer for the doings of the evil. Among our people, if John Brown does wrong, he suffers as an individual; but if a Chinaman does wrong, the whole race suffers for the act of the individual.”
    —Charles Wolcott Brooks, 1876
    THERE WERE few Chinese women in San Francisco in the ’50s and practically none of the decent variety. One of the first to arrive from the Orient was the notorious Madame Ah Toy. The editors of the Annals of San Francisco chorused: “The lewdness of fallen white females is shocking enough to witness, but it is far exceeded by the disgusting practices of these tawny-visaged creatures.”
    Ah Toy proved to be a remarkable madame. When a complaint was lodged against her Clay Street house of ill fame as a public nuisance, she somehow abated the nuisance, without changing her line of business, to the satisfaction of Judge R. H. Waller of the Recorder’s Court. In any case, she was discharged by the court. She must have enjoyed her visit, for she soon returned. This time as an un-shingled advocate. Ah Toy represented the defendant in a case, a little woman charged with kicking and mauling a corpulent Chinese whose name the newspapers made into Jonathan Nissum. The fat man claimed that the female had abused him grossly. The press chortled, “Much to the inconvenience of his ample corporation.” Ah Toy pleaded that her friend had been forced to thrash the plaintiff for welching on debts of honor. Ah Toy lost this 1852 case. Her friend had to pay a $20 fine and hear the judge threaten her with a second helping if she dared to batter the gentleman again.
    During the last month of 1854, Ah Toy and her colleagues suffered from a police crackdown on the red-light district. A number of women were convicted—-under a Grand Jury indictment—of keeping disorderly houses. In March 1859, she was again hauled into court, protesting that she had been innocently working on a bowl of rice with her chopsticks when she was arrested. The object of this harassment of harlots was to remove them from the major streets of the city, as a nuisance. It is hardly necessary to add that the object was not realized. Not in 1854, 1864, 1874 or 1884.... Of course the white Cyprians who enjoyed good police and city hall connections were not disturbed in this cleanup drive on vice.
    In the mid-’60s the Chinese brothels were shut down tight—briefly. But 1866 was a special case. Chief Martin Burke was going out of office, being succeeded by Patrick Crowley. Burke wanted to make a big impression as a final gesture, so he cleaned up the town momentarily; or at least Chinatown. The California Police Gazette at this time hoped loudly that the force itself would be reformed, too, under the new administration. Too many men who were drawing a salary of only $125 per month were flashing diamond rings and sporting gold-plated revolvers.
    In the 1850s and 1860s the slave trade was not the big business it became in