We don’t hurt anybody unless we have to.
—STEVEN WONG
It was dusk on December 28, 1989, shoot-out time in Chinatown. On Keefer Street, in the heart of Vancouver’s Chinatown, the Goldstone Restaurant and Bakery was doing a brisk business. A huge fluorescent-lit eateria and pastry shop, the Goldstone was thick with cigarette smoke and deafening talk from hundreds of college and high school students on Christmas break. The sidewalk in front of the restaurant was crowded as well. Working-class people on their way home were stopping off to shop at the neighborhood’s fruit and vegetable stands, its curbside pushcarts, and herbal pharmacies. The smells of frying spices, pork and chicken, and the songlike calls of Cantonese street hawkers filled the air. Just blocks from Vancouver’s banking towers and underground malls, Chinatown’s narrow lanes always reminded tourists of a bygone era, when city stores were all open to the street and neighbors walked the sidewalk from shop to shop, chatting, arguing, and bargaining uninhibitedly with proprietors they had known for most of their lives.
If the old ways were preserved in these streets it wasn’t because the city had designated Chinatown a theme park for tourists; it was because Chinatown was a living ghetto, continuously inhabited by a single ethnic group since Vancouver’s incorporation in 1886. Around the corner from the Goldstone was the headquarters of the Wang Sang Company. Founded by Yip Sang in 1888, the company had served some of the 15,000 laborers who had emigrated from the Pearl River Delta to build the Canadian Pacific Railway and then had remained in B.C. after the job was completed. There were those still living in Chinatown who could trace their heritage back to the men who’d patronized the 32 Chinese laundries, general stores, and import firms that were up and running at the time the first steam engine pulled in from Toronto. As in many ethnic ghettos, however, insularity was both a chosen way of life and one imposed from without. The descendants of the men who had worked the gold fields up north and built the CPR also had a family connection to the night of February 24, 1887, when a mob of several hundred workers belonging to the Anti-Chinese League held a meeting at City Hall to protest the hiring of cheap Chinese labor, then descended on the district. The mob broke windows, set fire to businesses, and forcibly loaded the inhabitants onto wagons, driving them from Vancouver. Out of the hundreds of violent ruffians who participated in what came to be called “the expulsion of the Chinese,” the Vancouver police arrested only three.
The Anti-Chinese League’s effort at ethnic cleansing ultimately failed; by spring the immigrants had stubbornly returned to their ghetto. Nevertheless, 20 years later hundreds of thugs organized by a group called the Asiatic Exclusion League tried again. This time the ghetto’s residents boarded themselves up in the backs of their buildings and refused to leave. Not until just about every store window in the ghetto had been shattered and many buildings had been burned did the police finally move in. One rioter received a short jail sentence, a handful of others got slapped with small fines. When the Chinese complained bitterly to the federal government, Vancouver’s member of Parliament, R. G. MacPherson, blamed the victims for their misfortune, which he claimed was the natural outcome of their unchecked immigration into the province. “B.C. is white man’s country,” MacPherson declared. Robert Borden, a future prime minister of Canada, concurred: British Columbia had to be kept “a British and Canadian province, inhabited and dominated by men in whose veins runs the blood of those great pioneering races which built up and developed not only Western but Eastern Canada.”
Parliament responded to the racist rhetoric with a succession of “head-tax” laws that attempted to stem the Chinese influx, charging each immigrant up to $500 to enter Canada, then it cut off immigration entirely with the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. Local restrictive covenants already prevented the Chinese from buying property outside their ghetto, and, denied the vote until 1947, all the residents could do was fecklessly protest each new insult and then turn inward. In their homeland the Chinese called Canada Gum Shan, “Gold Mountain,” but after settling in Chinatown they quickly learned it was a mountain that white Canadians did not want them to climb, nor was its gold something white Canadians wanted to share.
The fact that the Chinese had survived and prospered within this sea of hostility was largely due to their self-help societies. Most of Vancouver’s Chinese immigrants came from the Sam-yap and Sze-yap districts that surrounded the city of Guangzhou (then known as Canton) in Guangdong Province. These districts were home to hundreds of self-help societies, and when the Cantonese-speaking Chinese came to North America their societies came with them. Based on clans, districts, and professions, the societies were originally formed in response to the anarchy that had plagued the region for centuries. Fifteen hundred miles from a weak central authority in Beijing, the whole of southern coastal China was an orderless realm at the mercy of foreign invaders, pillaging bandits, and the rapaciousness of local warlords and civil servants. As a result, the societies assumed many of the responsibilities of a regular government. They offered schooling for the young, care of the sick, upkeep of temples, the running of workers’ guilds, and the maintenance of civil law through extralegal courts. Because they existed outside the political realm established by the latest predatory governor, conquering general, or imperial appointee, they were considered a threat by the “authorities,” and were therefore run in secret. So efficient were these “secret societies” that they gave rise to two telling Chinese sayings: “Armies protect the emperor, secret societies protect the people” and “The officials draw their power from the Law, the people from the secret societies.”
At the time of the passage of the Chinese Immigration Act, there were 54 societies in Vancouver’s Chinatown, including 26 based on clan, 12 on home district, and five on trades. Some were run in secret, such as the offshoots of the Hung Shan Tang, founded by Chinese gold miners in the northern town of Barkerville in 1863; others, like the Chun Wah Commercial Association, were run quite openly as legally constituted organizations. Most of the societies were meant to serve the needs of common people, and to this day Chinese-Canadians broadly refer to them as “benevolent associations,” as in the umbrella organization called the Chinese Benevolent Association. In the United States, where the Chinese faced violence and harassment even more egregious than in Canada, the tradition of self-help societies was carried on in the form of societies that came to be called tongs, the Cantonese word for “town hall,” the place where the newly formed associations met to plan ways to help recent arrivals with food, rent, and medical care.
Unfortunately, in China a number of secret societies also served as a cover for organized crime, and when the benevolent associations came to North America, so too did these groups. Known for centuries in China as the Hung Mun societies—of which the Hung Shan Tang was one—they would eventually be labeled “Triads” by Western police, after the three-cornered ritual flags found hanging in their ceremonial initiation lodges. In their early days the Triads were, like the original Italian Mafia, a patriotic movement whose members were sworn to overthrow foreign invaders and unite the country, but, like the Mafia, they had evolved in the early 20th century into a loose federation of over a hundred strictly criminal syndicates. In southern China—particularly Guangdong and Fujian Provinces—and in Hong Kong and Macau, almost all criminals beyond the level of street thief belonged to one or another of these often warring Triad societies, and they were famous for ruthlessly settling differences among themselves, collecting extortionate “dues” from Triad members and nonmembers alike, and supplying underworld services that included gambling, opium, and prostitution. Almost as soon as the Triads arrived in North America they established a licensing system that assigned these same activities to their members in Chinatowns across the continent. To the dismay of the legitimate citizens of the Chinese communities, the Triad gangsters were sometimes the very leaders of the benevolent associations and tongs meant to help the community.
The Vancouver police, who were slow to stop the riots in Chinatown in 1887 and 1907, were not aware of the finer points of these criminal secret societies, but they knew gangs were organizing and promoting prostitution and gambling in Chinatown, at least insofar as their own investigation revealed that Chinatown’s beat cops took payoffs from criminals in return for looking the other way. They also knew that Chinatown’s dens of iniquity had some clientele from outside the Chinese community—a fact that did not please Vancouver’s upholders of morality. Especially after opium was outlawed in Canada in 1908, Chinatown found itself constantly decried in the press as “depraved” because of its various corrupting vices. The pioneer city certainly had other underground haunts that catered to inebriation, sex for money, and jackpot gambling, and which were run by affiliations of shady white men who also preferred to act in secret, but the means to those same enjoyments in Chinatown seemed more nefarious to the white population. Instead of raucous bootleg drinking barns there were dark, utterly quiet, and weirdly odiferous opium dens. There were sing-song houses with mincing, bound-foot women in thin silk cheongsams instead of brothels with the more familiarly corseted white women. And there were gambling parlors that featured not poker but fan-tan and pai gow—high-stakes bead and domino games at which a worker might win or lose a week’s wages in half an hour. Perhaps most frightening of all, while white criminals enforced the rules in their underworld haunts with bruisers who brandished guns and clubs, the Chinese used gangs of black-garbed professionals, in the U.S. sometimes called “hatchetmen” because they wielded meat cleavers.
On this December eve in 1989, the storied opium dens were gone from Chinatown, replaced at the edges of the 10-square-block neighborhood by the heroin-shooting galleries of the welfare hotels. The sing-song joints too were a thing of the past, having evolved through the decades into massage parlors. But Chinatown’s legendary pai gow parlors and the secretive organizations that ran them remained. Two of the parlors were a couple of blocks from the Goldstone, one floor above the street in decrepit buildings erected not long after Yip Sang’s day. Legally registered “social clubs” requiring a membership fee to enter, the Hoi Ming Gwok and Duk Yee Entertainment Societies were crowded round the clock with patrons, many still in their teens. Although these kids won and lost thousands of dollars at a draw, the management of both establishments maintained to the police that the great mounds of $100 chips tossed into and pulled out of the pots every few seconds were “for entertainment value only”—as the large signs above the chip cages clearly announced.
In one corner of the Goldstone sat a group of about two dozen young people ranging in age from their late teens to middle 20s. The males of this bunch were known to the police as patrons of the pai gow parlors, their notoriety arising less from their penchant for gambling than from their habit of forcing big losers to accept instant loans at usurious rates secured by life and limb. Many of these young men were dressed as if in uniform—in zoot-suit jackets and baggy trousers worn under long black coats, with their hair greased to a patent-leather sheen and coiffed with a duck’s ass in the back and a rooster tail in the front. Wearing gold rings embossed with flowers, they were all members of a criminal Chinese street gang called the Lotus, and the Goldstone was their unchallenged turf, as were its surrounding blocks and the neighboring schools that served as their reservoir of recruits.
At 4:23 P.M. a black Mercedes and a jalopy pulled up in front of the Goldstone’s glass doors and half a dozen men got out, led by a short fat Chinese fellow wearing a leather jacket and chrome-tipped boots sharpened to spear points. The new arrivals had barely taken seats by the doors when three Lotus gangsters reached into their girlfriends’ purses, pocketed the pistols they found there, and approached the intruders. One of the Lotus members, a 19-year-old named Tony Yeung, ordered the new arrivals to leave. Steven Lik Man Wong, the pudgy leader of the party crashers, sang a disparaging reply in Cantonese and looked away from Yeung in disgust, at which point a metal chair crashed across his shoulders. His five compatriots leaped to his defense and the group spilled out the doorway, soon joined by the rest of the Lotus. At some point during the melee—no one can remember exactly when, or even why, since Steve and his boys were outnumbered three to one—Tony Yeung pulled his 9mm automatic and started firing. A 41-year-old passerby went down screaming. One of Steve’s boys also went down. At which point Steve, who’d been chopped by Lotus cleavers, shot by Lotus bullets, and was a master of street combat, bravely grabbed Yeung’s shooting arm, wrestled him to the ground, and in his high-pitched voice screamed an order to one of his soldiers. The boy ran over to the nearby Mercedes, seized a tire iron and brought it down upon the thrashing Yeung’s forehead until blood began to spread across the pavement. Steve then calmly stood up, confident that he had successfully challenged the Lotus on their own turf. He took out his cell phone and dialed 911.
The night’s violence led the news on all Vancouver’s TV stations and the next morning the spectacular torment of the wounded passerby dominated the front page of the Vancouver Sun. In a picture below the fold, lying flat on the ground with their hands behind their backs, were five Lotus gangsters, uniformed cops stepping over them like they were Vietcong prisoners.
I clipped the Sun story and filed it in one of the half-dozen boxes of folders that lined the walls of my home office. At the time, I had been writing about underworld groups for two and a half years and was particularly intrigued by the international scope of the Chinese gangs. Asian crime squads from Vancouver to Los Angeles had told me the same story: local Chinese gang leaders like Steven Wong were often not acting on their own, but were commuting to Hong Kong for instructions. They were serving a larger purpose, the cops said, frequently dictated by their Asian-based dragon heads.
When Tony Yeung died a few days after New Year’s I anticipated that the Sun’s headline—“Gang-fight charges expected”—would be fulfilled. But the Vancouver police informed me that Steven Wong was still cruising Chinatown like a king. The manslaughter charge against him had been withdrawn. “We couldn’t prove it wasn’t self-defense,” said Constable Bill Chu, one of the frustrated officers in the Asian Crime Squad.
Steve’s technique in intimidating the Lotus while avoiding a manslaughter charge increased my interest in the young gangster, whose name had been cropping up more and more in my interviews with the police about other violent gang incidents. Although I’d never met Steve, I had been trying to arrange an interview for months. In the summer I’d spoken with Steve’s lawyer, a distinguished city councilman and former mayoralty candidate named Harry Rankin, and asked him to pass on to Steve a warning message I’d received from one of Steve’s enemies in California’s Wah Ching gang, Leo Ng, to whom I’d been introduced by the head of San Francisco’s Gang Task Force. The message was, “Oh Steve, he too crazy for San Francisco—maybe better tell him no good for him if he come here.” I thought Ng’s veiled threat would at least earn me a return phone call from Steve, but he never responded to the message, nor to any of the pages I left on his cell phone. I’d visited his Gum Wah gang’s hangout at Fraser Billiards a couple of times, but Steve was over in Hong Kong on both occasions. I went down to the car shop he was listed on court documents as managing, but the owner informed me that Steve managed Green Auto Body from a distance. I’d talked to a clutch of kids I knew in the Lotus gang and showed up where they said Steve would be on a Friday or Saturday night, but I always wound up just missing him.
One option I hadn’t tried was the most obvious, and also the most dicey: going right up to his house and knocking on his door at an hour when I was sure he would be home—that is, anytime before 2 P.M., since he was a late cruiser and a late riser. Finally I phoned the CBC-TV newsroom in Vancouver and made a proposal. Why not wire me up, I asked CBC senior producer Sue Rideout, park a van a block from Steve’s house, and film me as I conveyed the warning from the Wah Ching gang? If Wong invited me into his house to get the details—and I managed to keep him talking—we could get Steve on tape personally narrating a documentary on the ins and outs of the West Coast’s Asian gang scene.
Rideout and the other higher-ups at the newsroom held a meeting to weigh the unorthodox venture. It turned out there was a clause in CBC’s ethics manual that allowed for such a tactic—provided the interview served the public interest. Still, it was risky. Steve was freshly blood spattered, known to be hot-tempered, and not likely to react kindly if, in the midst of our chat, he discovered that I was secretly taping every word he said, and that there was a telephoto lens glued to his living room window. Of utmost importance would be how I handled myself once inside the door. Aside from reading some of my work, Sue Rideout didn’t know me at all. Maybe I was a suicidal cowboy—a concern I countered by explaining that I was 40, had been married for almost 20 years, and had a 16-year-old-daughter I wanted to see grow up.
Sue went for the proposal, putting me under the wing of David Paperny, a producer who would go on to receive an Academy Award nomination for a documentary on AIDS. In late January 1990, I went down to the CBC newsroom and Paperny took me outside for a screen test. Having been a part-time television and magazine model as a child in my hometown of New York, I found talking to the camera a piece of cake, and Paperny assessed me as a passable stand-up for the piece. He then took me into the line-up office to get my wish list of objectives for the project. I told him that, as a journalist, I wanted to expose Steve for his alleged links to Hong Kong, but in addition, as a one-time English as a Second Language teacher, I wanted to put a stop to what Steve and the other gang leaders were doing to the kids in their charge. Ambitious goals, I admitted, but they had become important to me in these last few years.