Marchessault Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles, early 1900s (Courtesy of Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History)
“CHINATOWN AS A SPECTACLE is disappointing,” commented Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives. Granted that this Danish carpenter-turned-social-reformer, who was also a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, was referring to the ghetto on the Lower East Side of New York City, his overall assessment of Chinese lives in America, whether in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, was one of rank condemnation—a curious comment at best for a man known for championing the lives of the immigrant poor. “The Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population, [and] they serve no useful purpose here,” opined Riis. He further asserted that each Chinese person in America is “a homeless stranger among us.”1
On the day of Anna May Wong’s birth, January 3, Riis was, in fact, speaking in Los Angeles. Under the auspices of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the statesman on immigrant pauperdom delivered a lecture in a packed Simpson Auditorium, just a few miles from the Wong Laundry. Illustrating his talk with photographic slides, Riis described an ambitious plan to transform urban slums “from darkness, dirt and despair to sunshine, cleanliness and joy, from physical and moral decay to bodily and mental health, from the haunts of robbers and cutthroats to recreation centers and playgrounds for children.” He introduced a statistical fact that could have had some bearing on the new addition to the Wong family, claiming that twenty-five percent of children died annually because of the poor conditions under which they lived.2 Although the protagonist of Daughter of the Dragon was able to beat the odds and grew up healthy, one of her future siblings would prove Riis’s claim, falling victim to the hazardous and squalid living conditions that surrounded a turn-of-the-century Chinese laundry.
Except for some indirect references, Riis had nothing specific to say about Chinatown in his lecture. In his writings and speeches, the famed interpreter of slum life always claimed that he could not access the inner soul of New York’s Chinatown, even though he had begun his journalism career by keeping a desk at the police headquarters on Mulberry Street—the heart of the city’s Chinatown. Blaming it on Chinese inscrutability, he often resorted to clichés and stereotypes in his descriptions and condemnation of Chinatown life, portraying the Chinese as idolaters, opium addicts, inveterate gamblers, and, worst of all, corrupters of white souls. To get a true picture of Chinatown, or to better understand the early life of our future film star, we need to step away from Riis’s pulpit and turn to the dusty pages of LA’s storied past.
“THE FOUNDING of the city of Los Angeles,” wrote Helen Hunt Jackson, a native of Amherst, Massachusetts, and one of the earliest mythmakers of Southern California, “is a tale for verse rather than for prose.” Flipping through the nostalgia-filled pages of mission literature created by Jackson—who happened to be a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson—and other boosters of Los Angeles as the Lotusland, we are taken back to a supposed halcyon time marked by unspoiled nature. There we would presumably find a racial order characterized by beneficent dons lording over graceful, hardworking Indians, who “knelt dutifully before the Franciscans to receive the baptism of a superior culture, while in the background the angelus tolled from a swallow-guarded campanile, and a choir of friars intoned the Te Deum.”3 But reality is far more prosaic, if not brutal, and occasionally it throws us a curve ball.
Who would have thought that a Chinese explorer was actually one of the founders of the emerald city that rose from the desert and chaparral? Or, in a crude irony, that the birth of Chinatown was the result of a massacre of Chinese?
In 1781, when a party of twelve Spanish settlers founded the village of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, one of them was a Chinese man with the westernized moniker of Antonio Rodriguez. We do not know what his Chinese name was or where he originally came from, except that he was one of the many Chinese traders and craftsmen in the Philippines who had converted to Catholicism—hence his Christian name—so that they could continue their trade there. Most of the twelve heads of families were retired soldiers who continued to receive pay and rations from the Spanish government. Records show that Rodriguez, along with the others, received from Spain’s royal treasury some material assistance toward settlement: “two each of oxen, mules, mares, sheep, goats, cows, as well as one calf, an ass, and a hoe.”4 Thus, Rodriguez became one of the earliest Chinese arriving in the New World via a detour, after a stopover in one of those nodes of the Chinese diaspora. Such a detour often leads to the erasure, or at least the obfuscation, of their Chinese origins. The so-called Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, for instance, turned out to be Chinese in origin. Born in Siam of Chinese and Siamese parents, Chang and Eng arrived in the United States in 1829, two decades before the Gold Rush of 1850 would bring a large number of immigrants directly from China.5
When gold fever hit the American West, Los Angeles was still a sleepy pueblo built around the old Spanish Plaza (now part of the Los Angeles Plaza Historic District). The 1850 census lists only two Chinese men, both servants at the house of a Robert Haley. In 1854, when Joseph Newmark, a Prussian immigrant who would one day establish the oldest synagogue in Los Angeles, moved to the town, he reportedly brought a Chinese servant with him. As the city population quadrupled from 1,161 in 1850 to 4,385 in 1860, the Chinese population inched up only slightly to fourteen.6
The leader of this small cohort of Chinese was a laundryman who went by the name of John Tambolin—it seems that the early Chinese settlers, like the Bunker brothers, all chose to initiate or consummate their Americanization by anglicizing their names. Arriving in the embryonic town around 1856, Tambolin operated a washhouse with the help of two young Chinese men. Described in the local press as sort of a cultural go-between, he promoted Chinese culture and people in America. When he took a Chinese bride in 1862, the blissful occasion became the town’s first Chinese wedding officiated by an American justice of the peace.7
The other Chinese who made overtures toward the non-Chinese population of Los Angeles in those early years was an herbalist named Chun Chick. In the summer of 1861, Chun moved down from San Francisco and opened a general store on Spring Street. A shrewd businessman who perhaps knew a thing or two about fengshui, Chun chose the location of his shop opposite the courthouse, thus avoiding the saloons and casinos of the infamous Calle de los Negros (“Negro Alley”), where the less reputable citizens and most of his fellow Chinese congregated. To entice Anglo patrons, Chun took the unusual step of running an ad in the English-language newspaper that simply announced: A CHINESE MERCHANT! In addition to stocking the general assortment of Chinese goods, Chun boasted “a fine display of preserves and other articles hitherto not obtainable in town.”8
Thanks to the efforts by these two intrepid pioneers—Tambolin and Chun—the Chinese not only gained a toehold in what was still a rough frontier town but also increased their population by almost two thousand percent in the next decade. Before the 1871 massacre, 172 Chinese were recorded as Los Angeles residents, comprising approximately three percent of the general population. But historians believe that the 1870 census undercounted the Chinese, judging by the scale of the tragedy that befell the community in the following year. Excluded from meaningful interaction with mainstream society, most of the Chinese had no choice but to take up residence with so-called undesirables, living in a block to the south of the Spanish Plaza, in the middle of the vice district. As they went about their lives as laundrymen, shopkeepers, produce vendors, cooks, domestics, or common laborers, they faced enormous animosity from whites. As Carey McWilliams describes in his classic study of Southern California history, “The inevitable butt of a thousand jokes, the Chinese were heckled and harassed by old and young. By common consensus, youngsters were given free license to stone the Chinese, upset their vegetable carts and laundry wagons, and pull their queues [braids] for good measure.”9
Increasingly, the daily harassment did not just happen on its own; it received an accelerant in the form of legislative acts and local ordinances specifically targeting the Chinese. Yet racism, even without the imprimatur of the law, had dogged the Chinese in California from the very beginning. The earliest example was the foreign miners’ license tax, passed by the California legislature in 1850. It required a monthly payment of three dollars from every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen. Since a 1790 federal law had already declared “nonwhite persons” ineligible for citizenship, Chinese miners became the main target of the tax. In 1852, Tuolumne County passed a resolution banning all Chinese from the region’s mines, a move soon followed by other counties and districts in the state. In 1870, San Francisco passed the Cubic Air Ordinance, requiring all lodging houses to contain at least five hundred cubic feet of air within its walls for each inhabitant. Since crowded lodging houses were the principal residences for the majority of Chinese in San Francisco, city officials enforced the ordinance only in Chinatown, arresting not the predominantly white landlords but their Chinese tenants. A subsequent law designed to humiliate the Chinese was the Queue Ordinance of 1873, which required all male prisoners to have their hair cut to within one inch of the scalp, a grim prospect dreaded by any Chinese man hoping to return to Manchu-ruled China, where the queue was mandated. Yet one more racist law intended to disrupt the normal lives of the Chinese was the Stick Ordinance, which prohibited the delivery of goods suspended from the ends of a pole, a convenient method of delivery commonly used by the Chinese. All in all, these laws were intended for two purposes: to exclude the Chinese from competitive employment sectors and to make life in California intolerable for them.10
No form of harassment, however, can compare to the bloody violence that broke out in 1871 in Los Angeles and other urban centers. On the night of October 24, a brawl between rival Chinese tongs in Los Angeles exploded into a race riot. After a police officer and a volunteer were caught in the crossfire, white mobs rampaged through the streets and tortured, shot, lynched, and burned eighteen Chinese. They also destroyed Chinese shops and terrorized the entire community.
The Los Angeles massacre represented but one incident in a chain of anti-Chinese violence: In the 1870s, thirty-one urban centers in California experienced burnings of Chinese stores and homes and expulsions of Chinese residents. Outside of California, a mob during an 1880 riot in Denver overwhelmed the police officers on duty and destroyed most of the buildings in Chinatown, in the process dragging a Chinese laundryman through the streets, kicking and beating him to death. In 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a mob of 150 disgruntled white miners, armed with Winchester rifles, stormed into the Chinese quarter, killing twenty-eight Chinese, wounding fifteen, and burning much of the district to the ground.11
In what became the crescendo of this anti-Chinese movement, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended labor immigration from China and reconfirmed the inadmissibility of Chinese for citizenship. Thus, the Chinese garnered the dubious distinction of being the first ethnic group in American history to be barred from entering the country, a special treatment that would later be inflicted upon other groups, based on nationality or religion, such as Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese during World War II, and Muslims in the era of Donald Trump.
In this sorrowful litany of historical facts, the Chinese often were perceived as helpless victims—passive, docile, weak, and unable to adapt or assimilate. The deeply flawed stereotype of a Chinese person as a sojourner—a transient worker who only wanted to make enough money to return to a life of ease in China—further skewed the truth and bolstered the racist rhetoric against an entire population. In reality, the Chinese community was resilient, proactive, and highly adaptive in an unfamiliar, hostile milieu. Even the 1871 Los Angeles massacre did not deter the Chinese settlement. The routine of daily life was soon renewed with vigor: Merchants rebuilt their stores, laundries reopened their doors, and farmers once again began to visit Chinatown for trade and relaxation. Within weeks, Chinese merchants and other residents demanded that the city pay for property damaged in the riot. When the city council refused or dragged its feet, they sued.12 Los Angeles County court records show that the Chinese won eleven of the thirteen civil suits they brought against non-Asians between 1869 and 1874.13 In other words, the Chinese were themselves agents of change, not passive victims of abuse and discrimination. Facing violence, harassment, and institutionalized inequality, they looked within their own communities, forming associations and tongs when denied justice in courtrooms, building networks to the homeland when marginalized by mainstream US society, seeking alternative means of influencing local politics when denied citizenship and the right to vote.14 After major events like the 1871 massacre, Chinatown residents responded to hostility and prejudice by drawing even closer together.
Chinese Massacre victims, Los Angeles, 1871 (Courtesy of Security Public National Bank Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)
Such was the kind of Chinese community, constantly threatened and yet remarkably resilient, that Sam Sing and Gon Toy joined when the newlyweds arrived in Los Angeles in 1901. Bounded by busy Alameda Street on the west, and a noisy railroad yard and a soot-spewing gas plant on the east, Chinatown proper spread out along Apablasa and Marchessault Streets, hemmed in by Macy and Aliso Streets on the north and south, respectively. The former Negro Alley, today renamed Los Angeles Street, cut a tangent into the sounds and furies of Chinese life.
Most dwellings were wooden hovels jammed closely together, with tiny shuttered holes or no windows at all. Many residents had to cook in cramped quarters, with stoves or ovens wedged perilously between sleeping bunks. Even worse, many buildings had makeshift wooden porches in the rear, as well as wooden sheds, built of nothing more substantial than packing crates. Inside many of these flimsy additions were open brick fireplaces, posing a perpetual fire menace. A report of the Board of Fire Commissioners shows that from December 1, 1898, to November 30, 1899, fifteen alarms were called for various Apablasa Street structures. Another report states baldly, “There seems to be a separate housing standard for the Chinese. Comment on their bad living quarters brings forth a remark such as ‘yes, conditions are bad, but they are Chinese.’ ”15
As more wooden buildings fell victim to fire and were replaced by more durable brick constructions around the time of Sam Sing and Gon Toy’s arrival, Chinatown began to acquire its distinctive look, an appearance that would last until its demolition in 1933. As one visitor keenly noted, “One of the most striking points in viewing Chinatown is its bright color. The houses are for the most part of red brick, built flush with the street.… Here and there are wooden balconies ornamented profusely in brilliant hues, yellow, red, and green. Occasionally are window boxes filled with bright flowers. On holidays variegated lanterns are hung on all porches and doorways and gay pennants flutter thick in the air.”16
Amid this riot of color appeared the exotically aromatic Marchessault Street, Chinatown’s restaurant row. Showcasing roast ducks, BBQ pork, and other delicacies behind their windows, these dining spots, whether ornate lounges or seedy holes-in-the-wall, catered to both local residents and curiosity-seeking visitors. For the latter, there was a perfect “Chinese” dish to delight their palates: chop suey. An ingenious California creation literally meaning “odd ends,” chop suey emerged from necessity at mining camps in the nineteenth century and soon spread across the nation. In addition to culinary adventures, visitors would also be treated, especially during Chinese holidays, to displays of fireworks, red packets, gifts, temple gods, and ceremonial rituals. As the twentieth century got underway, and when silent-era Hollywood became enamored with the so-called exotic charms of Chinatown, this neighborhood would experience a more profound change, a transformation that would seal the trajectory of the young girl known as Anna.
Yet, in 1905, the year Anna was born, Chinatown remained a dusty, noisy, if not smelly dot on the cityscape. By the end of the first decade of the century, most Los Angeles streets had been graded, graveled, or paved, some with sidewalks set in cement. But the roads in Chinatown would not be improved and modernized until the 1920s, and due to its status as private property owned by two pioneer families, the neighborhood had limited or no access to public utilities, such as heat, electricity, or sewer lines. What had helped create this disparity in the first place was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902—which wreaked havoc with Chinatown life. By preventing wives from coming to America and inhibiting family reunions of any sort, the law created an aging bachelor society among the Chinese. This, in turn, led to a sharp decline in the overall Chinese population in the United States: from 105,465 in 1880 to 89,863 in 1900 to 61,639 in 1920. In the immediate neighborhood of Chinatown in Lo Sang (Chinese immigrants’ name for Los Angeles), the 1900 census tallied 602 persons, of whom men accounted for 90 percent and women only 10 percent. In the words of an elderly Chinatown citizen, “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese. The Exclusion Act assured none would be born.”17
So, at a time when the Chinese population was shrinking, Sam Sing and Gon Toy were fortunate to have found each other and to be able to form a family that continued to grow. They were also fortunate in their choice of a business, a laundry that, as we will see, made it easier for them to gain a toehold in turn-of-the-century America.