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

subsequent decades. It merely offered an excuse for the city to strike out at the irritant which was Chinatown. To the city emerging from an era of good feeling, the trade in Chinese wantons was a source of annoyance but hardly an economic foundation for the terrorization of the Quarter by armed bands of killers. The handwriting was clear but it was in the hieroglyphs of old China, and city hall could not figure them out.
    An overwhelming percentage of all Chinatown arrests between 1850 and 1870 were of harlots. In the fiscal year 1865-1866, for example, some 91 Chinese prostitutes were actually imprisoned in the county jail. Many more got off with fines or forfeiture of bail for the age-old misdemeanor of “tapping at their windows”—that is, soliciting.
    The cleanup of prostitutes was usually a perfunctory and meaningless gesture. The California Police Gazette, which enjoyed sensational cases while attempting to preserve an expression of outraged decency, said that the hounding of the girls of Chinatown was: “The usual offense, the usual bail and the usual result, bail forfeited. It is a pity officers could not find better employment than persecuting these poor Chinese slaves. Do they not know that these poor serfs were obliged to do as they do?” Even more fruitless was the arrest of customers, but this was done half-heartedly for a time, starting with the case of Antonio Juan Baptiste who was fined $20 for visiting the Pike Street establishments.
    The city could hardly clamp down on Chinatown’s prostitutes without brushing up against crime in general. There was plenty of criminal activity there, but no gang or tong wars. When there were instances of assault or murder—the latter extremely rare—it was usually a case of cherchez la femme.
    But there were relatively few crimes of violence such as rape, assault, murder or even armed robbery in these early years of Chinatown’s history. In comparison with the city which surrounded it, Chinatown was practically a haven of peace. (Frisco itself, on the other hand, was described in these terms: “Cases of political corruption, or party jobbing, or personal scandal, of ruin by debauching and gambling, by duelling and suicide, of squatter violence, or robbery and burglary, or assault and murder—these are nearly as plentiful as blackberries.”)
    Most so-called crime in Chinatown was ludicrous. The majority of arrests were for petty larceny—stealing bread, pipe, chickens, boots or scrap iron. Following this in number of arrests were cases of burglary and the carrying of concealed weapons. As late as the 1880s, when hatchet men were prowling the alleys, a great percentage of arrests of Chinese were for such atrocities as running liquor stores without licenses, peddling unstamped cigars, or fencing stolen hardware in Waverly Place’s hock shops.
    The real crime which existed in Chinatown generally fell into four categories: lotteries and gambling, no crime at all to many people; opium smoking, the Chinese equivalent of alcoholism; prostitution, again a social phenomenon not essentially criminal; and petty thieving. What we might call hard-core crime was difficult to find in the early decades. Chinatown was then, as it is now, a relatively law-abiding area of San Francisco.
    There are no brothels or opium dens in Chinatown today; thieving is minimal; lotteries, if any, are discreet. There are a few confidence men, of course, but only gambling remains as a major “evil,” with poker, pai gow, or Thirteen Cards having replaced the classic tan, or fan-tan. It is difficult to convince many blond Anglo-Saxon, church-going Caucasians—who join their Chinese neighbors on flights or bus trips to Reno’s gaming tables, like commuters—that Chinatown is, by reason of gambling, still a den of iniquity. Arrests are still made of those who prefer a game chancier than placid mah-jongg, but the officers who pull off such raids are apt to be labeled “spoilsport police