Chinatown
“HE HEAR HE CAN MAKE MONEY IN NEW-LORK,
AND BOYS NO POUND HIM WITH STONES”
TODAY, FIVE POINTS is long gone. The name dropped out of use in the 1890s. The five-way intersection has become three-pointed. Virtually all the Irish, Italians, and Jews have moved away. Only one group from the nineteenth century has stayed—the Chinese. Five Points has become Chinatown.
Before the Civil War, most Chinese New Yorkers had lived in the impoverished, Irish-dominated Fourth Ward to the east of Five Points. Chinese immigrants probably settled in the Fourth Ward because it was located on the waterfront. Many of the first Chinese New Yorkers were sailors—it was not uncommon to find a Chinese cook or steward working on a ship with an otherwise all-Caucasian crew. Eventually, a number of boardinghouses opened to accommodate them.
Not all of the early Chinese New Yorkers were sailors. Others worked as street peddlers, in particular selling cheap cigars and rock candy. A few, like Quimbo Appo, found higher-status employment in the tea trade. Some had come to New York after failing to strike it rich in the California gold mines. Others had escaped to New York by way of the Peruvian Chincha Islands, where they had worked as “coolie laborers” in near-slavelike conditions shoveling guano for use as fertilizer. Still others had been tobacco workers in Cuba.16
In the years after the Civil War, however, Five Points became a magnet for the New York Chinese. By 1869, the New York Tribune could authoritatively call “Baxter st., and its immediate neighborhood, the particular locality of New-York in which all the Chinese live.” It is possible that the Irish somehow pushed the Chinese out of the Fourth Ward, for the block on lower Baxter Street on which the Chinese concentrated was remarkable in Five Points for its lack of Irish residents, and was instead dominated by Italian and Polish Jewish immigrants. The Chinese may have felt more welcome—or at least less threatened—among the city’s other outcast groups on lower Baxter Street than they did in the overwhelmingly Irish Fourth Ward.
Apart from the relocation, New York’s Chinese community remained unchanged in 1870. Sailors and cigar sellers still predominated. Most residents continued to live in Chinese-run boardinghouses, where, for three dollars a week, they received a bed, breakfast, and “a good meat supper.” And it was still a very small community. “There are not more than 60 or 70 Chinamen regularly living in New-York,” asserted the Tribune in 1869. A year later, the census recorded only thirty-eight Chinese natives living in Five Points, though the enumerator seems to have skipped some of the seediest Baxter Street tenements where additional Chinese immigrants lived.17
From the very beginning, the Chinese in Five Points organized “clubhouses” to foster sociability within their community. A Daily Graphic reporter found one such clubroom in early 1873 on an upper floor of a Donovan’s Lane tenement. Its members “are very respectable men, chiefly cooks and stewards of ships.” Dominoes seemed to be the diversion of choice, although one section of the clubhouse contained writing materials so that members could correspond with loved ones back in China. “The gamesters were sprawled about in all sorts of attitudes, and no professional gambler could have a more inscrutable physiognomy than these phlegmatic, unimpressionable beings. They played and smoked in profound silence.” By the end of the year, the Times had identified two additional Chinese “mutual benefit” clubs operating in Five Points, one on Baxter Street and another on Mott.18
During the 1870s, the Five Points Chinese began to shift from Baxter to Mott Street. Again, it is difficult to determine why. A Chinese boardinghouse already existed on Mott (probably at No. 13) by 1870. A prominent Chinese merchant, Wo Kee, moved his popular general store and boardinghouse from the Fourth Ward to 34 Mott in 1873. Wo Kee may have opted for Mott Street because he found it impossible to secure commercial space near the Chinese residences on lower Baxter, where Jewish clothing merchants virtually monopolized storefront property. But prosperous Chinese merchants instead may have sought to distance themselves from the especially decrepit Baxter Street tenements. In any case, by the mid-1870s, newspaper accounts of the Chinese in New York began referring more and more to Mott Street. In 1880, the Times called Mott Street New York’s “China Town.”19
By that point, the city’s Chinese population had increased dramatically. Some Chinese had begun filtering into New York after completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 facilitated the journey from California. But most of the increase stemmed from the anti-Chinese movement fomented in San Francisco by Denis Kearney. An Irish immigrant, Kearney rose to prominence by founding the California Workingmen’s Party, which blamed the Chinese for the massive unemployment that gripped California during the severe depression of the late 1870s. Crying “the Chinese must go,” Kearney and his supporters used intimidation and violence to drive the Chinese out of their California workplaces and prevent new employers from hiring Asians. In a typical incident, Kearney led a mob to the mansions of railroad tycoons Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker, threatening to destroy their homes if they continued to employ the Chinese in railroad construction. San Francisco vigilantes led or inspired by Kearney also wrecked numerous Chinese-owned businesses in 1877. Kearney’s tactics drove thousands of Chinese Americans from California in that year, and many headed for New York. More left the West Coast in late 1879, after Kearney’s party gained control of the San Francisco municipal government and began enacting discriminatory legislation against the Chinese.20
By March 1880, newspaper reports expressed alarm at the increasing size of the Mott Street Chinese enclave. The Tribune announced that one hundred Chinese had arrived in New York from California in a single day, and that fifty had completed the journey from San Francisco a few days earlier. “They are the vanguard of the immense army of almond-eyed exiles who are about to pour into this city if the situation in the West continues to be serious,” intoned the Herald ominously. Samuel Weeks, a prominent lower Mott Street landlord, told the Tribune that the Chinese “had been leasing all the desirable property in that part of Mott-st., in several cases they had paid large prices for the tenants to leave.” Weeks noted that Chinese entrepreneurs preferred to lease entire buildings rather than individual apartments, opening shops on the ground floor while providing dormitories and rooms for socializing above.21
With the press having played a prominent role in fomenting the anti-Chinese violence in San Francisco, few of the newcomers were willing to talk to the many journalists who converged on Mott Street to document their influx. But the Times managed to locate one new Chinatown resident, laundry operator Wah Ling, who agreed to discuss the surge in Chinatown’s population. Using another immigrant who had already lived in New York for several years as an interpreter, Wah told the Times that San Francisco was “no good place for Chinaman any more. White man flaid to bling his shirts to iron any more. Chinaman get pounded with stones by boys on stleet. He hear he can make money in New-Lork, and boys no pound him with stones.” Wah also cited a price war between rail and steamship companies, which had cut the cost of a transcontinental journey in half, as a factor in his decision to come to New York. Nearly all of the New York Chinese were natives of Guangdong, the South China region best known for the cities of Hong Kong and Canton. The 1880 census recorded 748 Chinese natives living in New York (200 of whom lived in Five Points), but the press insisted that the true figure was closer to 2,000.22
Although the Chinese constituted only a tiny proportion of the Five Points population, it seemed to many observers that the Asians had overrun the neighborhood. “Mott Street might be in Pekin instead of Gotham, so Chinese has it become,” commented Frank Leslie’s in a typical 1880 story. “. . . Almond eyes and pig-tails . . . are the order of the day.” Like the Irish Lansdowne immigrants before them, the Chinese chose to concentrate on just two of the neighborhood’s approximately twenty blocks: Mott Street below Pell and Pell Street between Mott and the Bowery. In 1890, when the New York City Police conducted a census of the neighborhood, 95 percent of the eight hundred or so Chinese they found in Five Points lived on these two blocks. So even though the number of Chinese in the city was still relatively small, noted Frank Leslie’s, they are “so distinct and so concentrated that [they] form a much more considerable community than double the number of Italians, Hungarians or Polish Jews.”23
By this point, Mott Street had become as well known in Guangdong as Mulberry Street was in Basilicata and Campania. One Chinese American vividly recalled when the idea of emigrating first dawned upon him. He remembered that when he was a child in China,
a man of our tribe came back from America and took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it. . . . The man had gone away from our village a poor boy. Now he returned with unlimited wealth, which he had obtained in the country of the American wizards. After many amazing adventures he had become a merchant in a city called Mott Street, so it was said. When his palace and grounds were completed he gave a dinner to all the people who assembled to be his guests. One hundred pigs roasted whole were served on the tables, with chickens, ducks, geese and such an abundance of dainties that our villagers even now lick their fingers when they think of it. He had the best actors from Hong Kong performing, and every musician for miles around was playing and singing. . . . Having made his wealth among the barbarians this man had faithfully returned to pour it out among his tribesmen, and he is living in our village now very happy, and a pillar of strength to the poor. The wealth of this man filled my mind with the idea that I, too, would like to go to the country of the wizards and gain some of their wealth.24
Just as newly arrived Italians always made Mulberry Street their first stop in New York, Chinese immigrants invariably went to Mott Street to find lodging and work in the great metropolis.
Work opportunities abounded. Some Chinese continued to labor as sailors and peddlers. By the 1870s, many Chinese peddlers sold “that peculiar preparation known as Chinese candy,” probably a rock candy made from brown sugar. Only a tiny amount of start-up capital was required, as the vendors usually produced the confection themselves.25
Most Chinese street peddlers hawked cigars. Ballou’s Pictorial portrayed a Chinese cigar peddler in its 1855 collage of “New-York Street Figures,” and they became especially ubiquitous by the end of the 1860s.
Most had come to the United States via Cuba, where they had worked as indentured servants on sugar plantations before escaping into the tobacco industry. In Manhattan, they bought tobacco remnants from upscale cigar manufacturers, which they rolled into one hundred fifty or more cigars each evening and sold on the street the next day for three cents apiece.26
Eventually, many Chinese began working as cigarmakers for the city’s Anglo tobacco merchants. “Because of their natural deftness and quickness of finger,” Chinese cigarmakers were said to earn even more than the city’s well-paid German cigarmakers—as much as twenty-five dollars per week. But their impressive earnings also resulted from their skill at organizing. By 1885, several hundred Chinese tobacco workers had formed a trade union. Several were able to open their own cigar factories. One, operated by Mig Atak on Chatham Street just south of Five Points, employed as many as one hundred workers. New Yorkers continued to associate the Chinese with cigars until almost the end of the century.27
By the 1880s, however, New Yorkers began to associate Chinese immigrants more with the laundry trade than with cigarmaking. The Chinese shifted their focus from cigars to shirts in part because laundrywork did not threaten the occupations of white men and therefore would not lead to the labor unrest that had driven them from California. Chinese immigrants also gravitated to laundrywork because the Irish immigrant women who had once taken in laundry were leaving the business as their economic status improved. With demand for laundry services high and competition minimal, laundrywork seemed perfectly suited to the needs of the Chinese.
Operating a laundry required the leasing of retail space, which meant that start-up costs were significantly higher than those for cigar and candy peddlers. One might acquire this capital working in someone else’s laundry. It generally took two people to run a “hand laundry”—a washer and a presser. The washer would come in early in the morning and launder the clothes. The presser would report to work at midday and work late into the evening ironing by hand. Often there was so much work that both partners worked sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days.28
Another way to obtain funds was to take part in a whey, a cooperative loan system Chinese immigrants used to raise seed money for business ventures. Signs posted on Mott Street advertised the organization of these syndicates, which typically involved a ten-dollar contribution from each of twenty participants. Once twenty subscribers had been found, each would write on a slip of paper the interest rate he was willing to pay for one month’s use of the two hundred dollars they had collectively pledged. The highest bidder went home that day with the two hundred dollars, minus the agreed-upon interest, which was divided among the remaining participants. At the end of the month, the borrower turned two hundred dollars over to the next-highest bidder, and so on until every man in the whey had borrowed the money. Some desperate immigrants paid as much as 40 percent interest to get first crack at the whey’s funds.29
As the Chinatown community matured, immigrants seeking credit relied less on wheys, and more on the enclave’s Chinese groceries. By 1888, there were nearly thirty Chinese groceries on Mott Street, enjoying the same status in the Chinese community as the Italian banks just a block away on Mulberry Street. Like the Mulberry Street banks, most Chinese groceries played on the newcomers’ regional loyalty to attract business. There were several dozen counties within the Guangdong region represented in New York, and arriving immigrants would go straight to the general store run by a native of his county to look for work and lodging.
According to the Chinese-American journalist Wong Ching Foo, if the newcomer “was in any way known in China by any of the . . . men at this headquarters, he is given capital by the storekeeper for whatever business he wished to start, to the limit of two hundred dollars. . . . Most of these storekeepers are old laundrymen who accumulated enough money from the washing business to start these more profitable groceries.” Wong reported that these merchants charged no interest on the thousands of dollars they loaned. Instead, the borrower had to promise to buy his supplies from the lender and to pay down his debt in regular installments.30
The Chinese groceries on Mott Street served the community not only as a source of credit and supplies, but also, as Wong observed, as “clubs, and general newspaper stations, [and] post-offices.” Chinese immigrants typically received mail at a Mott Street grocery rather than at their homes. This custom developed in part because the laundrymen moved frequently, especially before they purchased their own establishment. Certain groceries served as postal drops for particular clans or Chinese counties or towns. Kaimon Chin, a longtime Chinatown resident, recalled in about 1990 that his father’s store at 59 Mott became a mail distribution center for the Chins from his village. Sundays were especially busy at the groceries, because that was the only day of the week that Chinese laundries were closed. At the grocery, laundrymen would buy food and laundry supplies for the week, collect their mail, trade gossip and news from back home, and relax over a cup of tea and a game of dominoes. Most Chinese laundrymen in New York eagerly anticipated Sundays, when they could escape their exhausting, isolated workplaces and enjoy the comforting sociability of their favorite Mott Street general store.31
Describing Wo Kee’s general store, probably when it was still at 34 Mott, a correspondent from the Sun reported that “it contains apparently somewhere near a million different things of the most incongruous character.” They included
gigantic pills, roots, herbs, barks, seeds, and such like. There are incense sticks, jade bracelets; strange evolutions of Celestial fancy in the way of ornamentation, like glorified valentines; quaint and pretty tea services; dried shark fins, looking like tangled strips of amber-tinted glue; ducks split, baked in peanut oil, and flattened out dry, so as to look like strange caricatures of dragons; sweetmeats in infinite variety, nuts that nobody but a Chinaman knows the names of, dried mushrooms, opium and pipes for smoking it, tobacco, teas of many kinds, some of them exquisite and much more expensive than any American store sells; silks, fungus-looking black lumps, of which it is guaranteed that a small bit will make the drunkest man immediately sober; sandals and Chinese clothing.32
The Sun’s reporter described Wo Kee tallying customers’ purchases with an abacus and making entries into his account books with a camel’s-hair brush, leaving readers with the impression that these stores were quaint and old-fashioned. But they were also extremely profitable. By 1885, Wo Kee owned businesses and property in Chinatown worth $150,000. Most of this fortune derived from the export to China of American cutlery, firearms, and fine prints. With headquarters first at 32 Pell Street and then at 9 Doyers, Wong He Cong also exported goods to China, Southeast Asia, and Cuba, while simultaneously becoming, according to the Herald, “the foremost wholesale dealer in tea and rice in New York.” Journalists estimated his net worth at a million dollars. Such phenomenal success was rare, of course. But through their control of the enclave’s venture capital, Chinatown’s merchants became the community’s most powerful and influential members.33
Prominent merchants were able to dominate the Five Points Chinese enclave because relatively few Chinese actually lived in the neighborhood. Laundrymen were scattered throughout the city, living wherever their businesses were located. By the mid-1880s, “China Town” had become a shopping, social, and leisure center for the city’s far-flung Chinese residents. “All the Chinese do not live here,” observed a Frank Leslie’s reporter on a visit to Mott Street, “but it is safe to say that all of them are regular and frequent visitors to this centre of Mongolian business, society and dissipation.” Those who did make Pell, Doyers, or lower Mott Street their home were primarily merchants and professionals, cigarmakers, those who worked in menial capacities in the district’s businesses, and newcomers who had not yet found work or raised capital to start businesses of their own. In 1885, the Tribune estimated that 80 percent of New York’s Chinese immigrants toiled as laundrymen, but they made up fewer than one in five of the Chinese inhabitants of Five Points.34
“DRIVING OUT THE CHINESE”
Like the Italians on Mulberry Street, the Chinese in Five Points lived in both individual apartments and boardinghouses. Boarding facilities must have been especially popular given the overwhelming preponderance of men in the enclave. Like the Irish and Italians before them, enterprising Chinese immigrants in Five Points also tried to lease entire buildings and then sublet the individual apartments. But as the city’s Chinese population began to expand rapidly in early 1880, the newcomers found it more and more difficult to find accommodations in Five Points, because many neighborhood landlords refused to rent to them. The Rutgers Fire Company refused to lease its vacant house at 3 Mott Street to Chinese, even when the immigrants offered to pay a large advance on the rent. The owners’ representative vowed he would “sooner pull down the building than allow a single Chinaman to live in it.” Another Mott Street landlord let his property stand vacant rather than accept $1,000 a year from the Chinese.
According to the press, the Irish in particular sought to stop the Chinese influx into Five Points. “A determined effort is being made by property owners in the upper end of Mott Street to prevent the colony from spreading,” reported the Herald, describing the portion of the street above Pell where no Chinese had yet settled, “and to all offers of high rents they give a stolid denial. They feel that if the Chinese get sufficient headway they will take possession of that quarter of the city.”35
Some landlords even began evicting the Chinese from some of the Mott Street buildings they already occupied. On May 7, under the headline “Driving Out the Chinese,” the Times reported that the Irish Catholic parishioners of Mott Street’s Transfiguration Church, resentful of having “to cut their way through an army of ‘haythen’ on Sunday,” had spearheaded the expulsions of the Chinese from their homes. The church “had leased the whole series of tenements from Pell-street to Park, and refused to let to Chinamen on any terms.” Many current residents were told to vacate immediately; a few were given until the end of the month. “Other landlords in the vicinity took the cue, although they liked their tenants, and for the last week a wholesale eviction has been going on.” Even wealth provided little protection from the evictions, as merchant Wo Kee was forced to relocate his landmark grocery from Mott Street to dark and quiet Park Street. Yet like Wo Kee, most of the expelled Chinese managed to stay in the neighborhood.36
A Times editorial lashed out at “the Irish proscription of the Chinese colony in this City,” complaining that
. . . hatred of the Chinese springs eternal in the Celtic breast. In fact, the hospitable and generous Irishman has almost no friendship for any race but his own. As a laborer and politician, he detests the Italian. Between him and the German-American citizen there is a great gulf fixed. So, when a little colony of Chinese, scarcely one thousand in number, settles in the midst of what has been an Irish-Catholic quarter, there springs up at once an active enmity against the new-comers. . . . There might have been, at least, an attempt to convert these heathen. . . . But the most natural thing for the Americanized Irishman is to drive out all other foreigners, whatever may be their religious tenets.
But perhaps the Times was allowing its own prejudice against the Irish to color its reporting. The newspaper’s confession that it would not like “a colony of Chinese occupying the Stewart mansion on Fifth-avenue, or hanging their washing out to dry on the roof of the Union League Clubhouse,” indicates that Irish Catholic Five Pointers were not the only New Yorkers who did not want the Chinese in their neighborhood.37
In 1880, the Chinese vice-consul in California sent a telegram to New York’s Chinese leaders instructing “the companies and merchants to move to the west side of the city.” Frank Leslie’s reported that the Chinese were scouting out possible locations on Eighth Avenue uptown. But in the end, the Chinese had an even harder time renting property in other parts of town. Chinatown could not be moved. To protect themselves against the whims of Caucasian landlords, however, Chinese Americans began to buy Five Points buildings themselves. By 1883, Wo Kee had managed to move his store back to Mott Street by purchasing 8 Mott for $8,500. Another of the most prominent Chinatown businessmen, Tom Lee, bought 16 Mott at about the same time for $15,000. Other Chinese-American merchants acquired 10 and 12 Mott.38
Ironically, Wo Kee upon taking possession of 8 Mott demanded that the occupants pay a 40 percent increase in rent or vacate the premises. The other new Chinese property owners made similar demands and evicted many tenants. Chinese residents of Mott Street held an indignation meeting to protest the rent increases and collected funds to fight the evictions in court. Eventually, a compromise was reached. The landlords agreed to adopt procedures already followed in San Francisco, which stipulated that when Chinese bought buildings already occupied by Chinese, the rent would remain unchanged for one year. As the Chinese became Chinatown property owners, all talk of moving the enclave came to an end, as did most efforts to prevent the Chinese from settling in Five Points.39
THE GREAT MONGOLIAN MAGNATE OF MOTT STREET
Unmarried men dominated the Chinese community. The 1880 census taker did not find a single Chinese-born woman in Five Points, and only a small proportion of the men married Caucasian women. As a result, the Chinese-operated businesses that sprang up in Five Points catered largely to its bachelor society.
One staple of a bachelor community is the restaurant, and Mott Street soon became renowned for its “outlandishly quaint Chinese restaurants.” During the 1880s and ’90s, most Chinese restaurants in Five Points (there were eight in 1888) were located on the second or third floors of Mott Street tenements. They were small establishments that could rarely seat more than a few dozen patrons at a time. The eateries were sparsely decorated, usually adorned with little more than long scrolls on the walls bearing “maxims from philosophers for the entertainment of those who eat.” Cooks prepared the food in a kitchen at the rear of the building or in the tenement’s basement. Their custom-made wood-burning stoves, with separate stations for roasting, boiling, steaming, and frying, were often imported directly from China.40
The Chinese who patronized these first restaurants ate many of the same Cantonese dumplings, soups, and noodle dishes still served on Mott Street today. But in Chinatown’s early years, when few Asian vegetables and spices were available in America, the immigrants were forced to improvise with American ingredients to create dishes pleasing to the Cantonese palate. One such dish was “chow chop suey,” which Americans typically believe was created for their own edification, when it was actually developed by Chinese-American cooks for their Asian customers. Wong Ching Foo characterized chop suey as “a staple dish for the Chinese gourmand,” describing it as “a mixture of chickens’ livers and gizzards, fungi, bamboo buds, pig’s tripe, and bean sprouts stewed with spices. The gravy of this is poured into the bowl of rice,” with a Chinese condiment Wong termed “the prototype of Worcestershire sauce.” By the 1890s, Chinese farmers had begun to grow Chinese vegetables on Long Island, but until then, dishes like chop suey remained an integral part of Chinese-American cuisine.41
At first, Americans looked upon Chinese cooking with suspicion. But curious Americans soon began to patronize these eateries, and by the 1890s, Caucasians ventured to Chinatown just for the food. “Chow chop sui calls Americans to Chinatown,” observed Frank Leslie’s in 1896. “An American who once falls under the spell of chop sui may forget about all things Chinese for awhile, [but] suddenly a strange craving that almost defies will power arises; as though under a magnetic influence he finds that his feet are carrying him to Mott Street.” Other American favorites were “yok-e-man, a strong, palatable soup, containing bits of chicken, pork, and hard-boiled egg,” as well as “chow main.” Those who visited Five Points for an afternoon or evening of “slumming” could now include an exotic meal to round out the fun. The Tribune noted that there was “a free and easy atmosphere about the Chinese eating house which attracts many would-be ‘Bohemians.’” The dark and intimate confines encouraged patrons to “loll about and talk and laugh loudly.” By the turn of the century, Chinese restaurants had become so popular that they began to open outside Chinatown. Those in Five Points continued to thrive, with some, such as the famous Port Arthur at 7–9 Mott, catering to an exclusively Caucasian clientele.42
By contrast, white New Yorkers were almost never granted entrée into another mainstay of Chinatown’s bachelor society—its gambling dens. “The Celestial is a shameless and inveterate gambler,” remarked George Walling, a former New York chief of police, in the 1880s. “It is a rare thing to find a Chinaman who is not infatuated with games of chance.” These might have been the exaggerated comments of a prejudiced outsider, but Wong Ching Foo, who vehemently defended the Chinese community from almost every other criticism hurled its way, admitted that the Chinese were obsessed with games of chance. Stopping the Chinese from gambling, Wong asserted, would be as monumental a task as stopping the annual floods of the great rivers of China.43
Two games were especially popular: fan tan and pak ko piu. In fan tan, a large pile of coins was placed on a table. Coins were removed, four at a time, until no more than four were left. Gamblers placed bets on whether four, three, two, or one coin would be left on the table, and those who selected the correct number won three dollars for every one bet, minus a 7 percent commission. Those who were risk-averse could bet on two of the four numbers, and if successful were paid even money. A gambler could even hedge his bet still further. A wager on number 2 “toward” number 1, for example, meant that if 2 was the winning number, the bettor won two dollars for every one wagered, but if 1 was the winner, he merely got back the money he had bet. Just as casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas do today, Chinatown’s fan tan parlors gave their best customers free food, drinks, and lodging in order to keep them at the tables. By 1891, more than a dozen fan tan parlors operated in Five Points, in back rooms, basements, and in spaces above some of Mott Street’s most prestigious shops.44
Pak ko piu was essentially the same “policy” game played in antebellum Five Points. In this lottery, players were given sheets on which eighty Chinese characters appeared. Each gambler marked off a certain number of characters (the number varied from game to game) and submitted his wager (which could be as low as a few cents) with his ticket. The syndicates that operated these games held daily drawings. If the bettor matched five of the characters drawn that day, he won two dollars for every dollar wagered. If he matched six he was paid 20 to 1, seven correct earned him 200 to 1, eight correct 1,000 to 1, and so on, up to as much as 3,000 or 10,000 to 1, depending on the total number of characters drawn. By the early 1890s, about a dozen lottery offices operated on Mott Street where gamblers could lay their pak ko piu bets. Walling was told that big winners typically moved back to China with their prize money.45
Fan tan players. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (December 17, 1887): 296. Collection of the author.
In most Western societies, gambling and alcohol go hand in hand. But visitors to Mott Street invariably noted that they never encountered drunken Chinese. Opium, rather than alcohol, was the stimulant of choice. No journalist considered a story on Chinatown complete without a detailed description of its many opium dens. “Opium joints” were usually nondescript rooms lined with divans set up by the Mott Street merchants who sold the drug. An 1888 print in Cosmopolitan magazine even depicts bunks for opium smokers in a Chinese barbershop. But some opium dens operated independently in dark, secluded spaces where heavy users—opium “fiends”—could spend a day or two sleeping off the soporific effects of the narcotic.
Preparing the opium for smoking involved an elaborate ritual. First, the smoker rolled the black opium paste into a small ball ranging from the size of a pea to that of a marble, and skewered it on the end of a long piece of metal that resembled a knitting needle. Then he suspended it over the flame of a small oil lamp and rotated it to heat it evenly until the drug attained the consistency of a hard pill. Next, the smoker ran the end of the needle into the small hole on the top of the long wooden opium pipe until the opium pill became lodged in the top of the hole. Then he removed the needle, heated the pipe over the flame, and drew in opium smoke through the pipe’s ivory mouthpiece. An experienced smoker might consume the entire opium pill in one very long breath.46
The earliest depictions of Five Points opium dens were rarely judgmental. Journalists devoted most of their attention to the process of smoking itself and to conveying the exotic and mysterious nature of the drug, which was not then illegal. Describing a Donovan’s Lane opium den in 1873, a journalist for the Daily Graphic reported that “those in the habit of coming here say that it has a beneficial medicinal effect, and, if only inhaled in small quantities, animates the spirits and gives energy to the intellectual powers, at the same time imparting a languor to the body, leaving the mind free from nervous effects.” Yet those who smoked too much, the Chinese admitted, found themselves “for several days in a lethargic, torpid state, neither caring for nor taking food.” Through the early 1880s, descriptions of Chinatown opium joints took a similarly detached attitude.47
But in 1883, New Yorkers began to reassess their stance on both opium and Chinese gambling. In fact, both Chinese Five Pointers and their non-Chinese neighbors began to complain about the district’s vice industry. The Chinese objected not to the presence of gambling and opium in their community, but rather to the control exerted over them by a single man, Tom Lee.
Few facts about Lee’s life can be documented with certainty. He was apparently born Wong Ah Ling in about 1840 in Canton or its environs. He immigrated to California, eventually becoming a labor contractor there. In the mid-1870s he moved to St. Louis, where he operated a cooperage business and become a naturalized American citizen in 1876. After a return visit to China, Lee relocated to Philadelphia, where he was a merchant. He finally settled in New York in 1878, and in 1879 married a Scots-German immigrant, Elsie Kaylor, whom he had met in Philadelphia. They eventually had two sons.48
Lee appears to have first settled in New York at 4 Mott Street, where according to some accounts he ran a cigar store. But his business interests were undoubtedly more varied. Lee was “the accredited New York agent of the Six Companies in San Francisco,” that combination of powerful families and merchants that controlled the bulk of the Chinese import-export trade in California. Although a relative newcomer to New York, Lee skillfully used the press to promote his image as one of Chinatown’s most important residents. In August 1878, the Herald reported that Lee hosted a sumptuous Chinese banquet at his Mott Street home to honor attorney Edmond E. Price, who had successfully defended Chinese interests “in a number of cases.” Six months later, Price and other white New Yorkers were once again fêted at Lee’s expense.49
Just what kind of Chinatown interests Price had defended became clearer a few weeks after this second banquet when, in March 1879, police made their first ever raid on a Chinatown vice operation. Nearly fifty officers stormed the grocery and apothecary at 13 Mott—“one of the places which are popularly supposed to abound in pickled rat, edible dog and savory candles”—where they found a fan tan game and opium smokers. Thirty-one men were jailed on gambling charges. Appearing for the defense the next day, Price argued that the police had found not a gambling business but merely a social gathering. The judge ordered the men released, commenting that those arrested were only engaged in “some private amusement such as is not uncommon in the best clubs and in private houses.”50
One writer has surmised that the dismissal of charges in this case resulted from Lee’s influence among politically well-connected New Yorkers such as Price. Although there is no evidence to substantiate such speculation, Lee was making significant strides toward increasing his power base in Chinatown. In 1879, thanks to the political connections he was forging, Lee was named a deputy sheriff of New York County. And in the spring of 1880, Lee helped establish Chinatown’s first tong.51
Tongs were secret fraternal associations first created by seventeenth-century Buddhist monks to help organize the overthrow of Manchurian rule in China. When Lee and a few other prominent Chinatown residents filed articles of association for their tong in Albany in 1880, they described it as more of a mutual aid society, designed to provide “aid in sickness, poverty, adversity, and affliction.” Each of the city’s prominent newspapers transliterated the name of Lee’s tong a bit differently. The Times called it the “Lone We Tong.” The Herald referred to it as the “Loon Ye,” while the Tribune spelled it “Lung Ye.” Whatever the case, Lee’s tong became one of the most powerful entities in nineteenth-century Chinatown.52
Lee soon began demanding payoffs from Chinatown’s gambling dens. He would flash his deputy sheriff’s badge and insist that without a payment of five dollars per week, the police would close down the establishment. Lee probably also threatened to use his tong’s toughs to punish any holdouts. By 1883, virtually every one of Chinatown’s two dozen or so gambling resorts made weekly payments to Lee and his Loon Ye Tong minions, netting them thousands of dollars each year.53
The victims of Lee’s extortion eventually began to balk at making the protection payments. They hired an attorney who filed affidavits with the District Attorney’s Office documenting Lee’s demands. As a result, Lee’s commission as deputy sheriff was revoked, and a grand jury directed the district attorney to file charges. After deliberating for some time about exactly what Lee could be charged with, he was indicted on May 1 for “keeping a gambling establishment” at 17 Mott and “compounding a crime” by taking money from other illegal gambling houses.54
Lee responded aggressively. To the press, he argued that the accusations were motivated by Chinese regional jealousies. Nearly all the New York Chinese hailed from the region around Canton, explained the Times, but while Lee was from the subdistrict of Sin Ching, those charging him with extortion were natives of Ha Sin Ning. Wong Ching Foo, a Lee ally, told the Times that Lee’s enemies were “armed to the teeth” and had threatened Lee with “extermination.” Yet Lee’s men apparently did most of the threatening. They promised death to anyone who testified against Lee, leaving those who had made statements against him, their attorney complained, “in a state of almost abject terror.”55
In the days before Lee’s gambling trial was scheduled to take place, the other pillar of Chinatown’s vice industry—its opium dens—also came under attack. But whereas the fight over fan tan was an intra-Chinese battle, the assault on the opium trade was mounted by Five Points’ non-Asian residents. Many Irish-American parents had become convinced that Chinese opium joints were corrupting their daughters. The president of Transfiguration’s Catholic Young Men’s Association, John A. O’Brien, condemned the opium dens as “girl traps.” Five Pointers commonly believed that Chinese peddlers, as one eighteen-year-old woman put it, “give girls opium in candy and all sorts of things, until we can’t do without it.” Another neighborhood resident claimed that “little girls” in their early teens secretly whiled away their days in the dens.56
Spearheading this attack was the organizer of the Young Men’s Association, Transfiguration assistant pastor James Barry. In early May 1883, Barry stationed surveillance teams on the neighborhood’s rooftops. Whenever these units observed a white woman entering one of the suspected opium joints, they notified the police, who would immediately raid the premises and arrest the occupants under the state law, passed just a year earlier, that for the first time made it a misdemeanor both to smoke opium and operate a joint. But the raids did not uncover the expected hordes of opium-crazed girls. The only “girl” found in the joints, identified by Barry as a fourteen-year-old, turned out to be nineteen and was never charged. The association nonetheless claimed that many girls aged ten to fifteen had escaped over backyard fences.57
Despite the hysteria whipped up by Barry and fanned by the newspapers, many non-Asian New Yorkers stepped forward to defend the Chinese. An official of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children called the whole affair “newspaper buncombe. . . . Nothing more is going on in Mott street than has been going on for the past two or three years.” Irish women, he asserted, “tempt the Chinamen to immorality as often as they are tempted.” A Protestant missionary agreed that “Mott street wickedness is not general.”58
The stories of the arrested Caucasian women substantiated these claims. Katie Crowley had come to Mott Street to visit her sister—known as “Chinee Annie” because she had married a Chinese American and lived in Chinatown. Two other white women picked up in the raids were also Irish Americans who had married Chinese men. They admitted smoking opium, but probably had picked up the habit from their husbands. Only the last of the four, apprehended at her brother’s behest for “vagrancy,” had no apparent kinship ties to the Chinese community. She admitted frequenting opium dens, but insisted she did so only to eat Chinese candy!59
“Crazed by Opium” reflects the increasingly prevalent fear that white women were becoming addicted to opium in Five Points’ opium dens. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (May 19, 1883): 204. Collection of the Library of Congress.
Father Barry’s campaign against the opium dens was not endorsed even by the head of his own parish, Father Thomas F. Lynch. Barry’s crusade “finds no favor with Father Lynch,” reported the Tribune. “He says that the charges that the Chinese have been debauching large numbers of young girls are grossly exaggerated.” In his eighteen months at Transfiguration, Lynch told the Tribune, “not a single instance of the ruin of a young girl by a Chinaman had come under his notice.” He condemned Barry’s attempts to, in the reporter’s words, “stir up race hatred against the Chinese.” The Chinese, of course, worried about being stigmatized as well. “The trouble,” observed Wong Ching Foo after the raids and arrests, “is that the Irish are trying to direct this clamor against the whole [Chinese] race.”60
The opium raids could not have pleased Tom Lee. The one indicted opium den operator, Ah Chung, admitted selling the drug but said he thought the ten dollars per month he paid Lee was a license fee that made his operation legal. To this point, Lee had been implicated only for taking money from fan tan operators. These narcotics-related revelations, coming just days before the start of his trial on the gambling charges, did not bode well. But prosecutors did not file any additional charges against Lee. Furthermore, as his court date approached, his terror campaign seemed to pay dividends, as one after another of the men who had implicated Lee began to recant. At a preliminary hearing held on May 16, the prosecution could muster but a single witness, and with Lee’s men ominously filling the courtroom, even he changed his testimony. The charges were eventually dropped and Lee was reinstated as deputy sheriff.61
In the future, opium dealers would have to operate more furtively. The opium den proprietors also learned to forestall prosecution by keeping their female clientele to a minimum. And they learned, along with the fan tan operators, that the authorities would do nothing to prevent Lee from extorting protection money from them. Until these men could establish some organization of their own to match Lee’s Loon Ye Tong, he would remain the “the great Mongolian magnate of Mott Street,” the most powerful man in Chinatown and the best known Chinese New Yorker.62
“YOUR RELIGION IS GOOD ENOUGH AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT OURS IS BETTER AND GOES FURTHER”
New Yorkers would continue to associate Mott Street with vice. But fraternal, occupational, and religious organizations became a much more integral part of the Five Points Chinese community. The Chinese made such organizations the focal point of both their business and social lives.
Most of Chinatown’s fraternal societies had economic or social agendas. As New York’s Chinese population expanded in the 1880s, for example, Chinatown’s residents replaced the all-encompassing mutual aid societies of the 1870s with more selective groups organized around family and geographic origins. Village associations, known as fongs, rented apartments in Chinatown for use as both social headquarters and lodging houses for homeless or unemployed members. Members traded intelligence on job openings and laundry opportunities, and pooled money to start businesses. They also sent money back to China to finance flood or famine relief, build a new school, or help the village defend itself against bandits.
More consequential than these geographically based groups, however, were the family or surname organizations known as kung saw, which limited membership to those with a certain surname, no matter what part of China they had emigrated from. These groups were far more important than the regional bodies, especially for newcomers seeking loans and lodging. The Wong family association, for example, located at 5 Mott Street in a building controlled by a wealthy Wong merchant, played a major role in Chinatown life. Smaller clans often joined forces in order to attain a membership base that could sustain an organization. When one Chinese, Hor Pao, arrived in New York in the late 1870s, he could not find enough clansmen to create a kung saw. He and his kin eventually teamed with Lais and Gongs to form the Sam Yip, or Three Family Society.63
The press constantly marveled at the number and variety of Chinese mutual aid societies. Among the most important were the laundrymen’s organizations. Some catered to laundry owners, regulating the prices that were charged for a given service. Others functioned more like trade unions for their employees—it was even said that the washers and the pressers maintained separate labor organizations. Chinese cigarmakers established unions as well, while Chinatown merchants created a chamber of commerce. Even leisure activities were organized; a fan tan society, for example, regulated that game. The Chinese could depend upon one another even in death. A burial society provided for interment in the traditional manner, arranging for the return of its members’ remains to China.64
Given their penchant for organization, it should come as no surprise that Chinatown’s residents created an umbrella group to regulate their myriad societies. This was the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, established around 1883 and modeled after a body of the same name in San Francisco. The association coordinated celebrations for Chinese New Year and adjudicated disputes that could not be settled by the smaller bodies. Each year the heads of the various organizations that constituted this society elected a leader, christened by the press as the “mayor of Chinatown.” Its headquarters—a lavish brick building at 16 Mott—was known as the “Chinese City Hall.”65
Number 16 Mott also eventually housed Chinatown’s most important religious institution, its “joss house.” Chinese Americans’ religious practices are difficult to characterize, for their Taoist roots had been melded over the centuries with elements of Confucianism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship. Their temples consequently contained images of various popular gods drawn from these traditions. Whether Chinese Americans devoted much attention to religion is also difficult to determine. One immigrant, asked by the Tribune about his spiritual views, “laughingly replied that he had left all that at Canton,” and American journalists rarely found crowds in Chinatown’s places of worship. Nonetheless, these temples were one of the most talked about features of Chinese life in Five Points.66
At first, Chinese New Yorkers built makeshift shrines in their clubhouses, initially on Baxter Street and later on Mott. By the early 1880s, they had constructed a more formal and elaborate temple in a third-floor apartment at 10 Chatham Square. Americans always referred to the carved deity at the center of these shrines as “joss” (the origin of the term, first coined in California, is not known) and the buildings in which they sat as joss houses. “The joss himself sits in a gorgeous shrine of carved wood, mounted with gold,” noted one Caucasian visitor to the Chatham Square sanctuary:
The setting is most fantastic and bewildering. Birds, dragons, antediluvian animals, serpents, crabs and fishes burst out all over the front of the shrine. Almost veiled from view, the joss peers out on the worshipper. He is painted on carved wood, and is as hideous a deity as was ever seen in the most frenzied of opium dreams. In front of the shrine stands a table—a handsome one, with all the appliances of worship upon it. Worship takes the form of burning scented sticks and paper. . . . Before the god an oil lamp burns day and night. . . . On the walls are painted mythological scenes. . . . Handsomely illuminated texts from Confucius in rich frames are everywhere. . . . The costly furnishing of the room, however, is found in the magnificent two-armed ebony chairs, elaborately carved. . . . There are a dozen or more of these chairs in a row. The great merchants and teachers of the Chinese colony sit in them on feast days and occasions of solemn conclave.
By the end of the 1880s, the Chinese had completed an even more ostentatious temple in the Consolidated Benevolent Association Building at 16 Mott.67
New Yorkers were both fascinated by and suspicious of Chinese religious practices. “The Chinese have peculiar ways of showing reverence for their sanctuaries,” intoned Transfiguration’s Father Thomas McLoughlin. “Namely they sit around and smoke and chat and have a quiet little game; nay right back of the shrine is a room with two bamboo couches where the priests of the temple and their friends ‘hit the pipe’ to pass away the time.” Observing that most who entered the joss house across the street from his church merely lit incense and chanted a few quick prayers before departing, McLoughlin ridiculed the Chinese “go as you please [form of] worship, having no fixed hours, nor fixed days, nor fixed ritual, nor fixed liturgy.” The only reason most Chinatown residents attended at all, McLoughlin sneered, was to receive a piece of paper that contained “his fortune for the week, i.e., what were to be his lucky and unlucky days[,] what his lucky numbers [were] in gambling, on what days to buy and sell, etc.”
Most Protestants, of course, continued to disparage both religions practiced on Mott Street. “I visited the Joss house in Mott Street last week and saw the pagans bowed down before their idols and offering their incense,” commented one minister. “Right opposite, I entered a so-called Christian Temple and there found a lot of Papist idolators bowed down in like manner before their idols of wood and stone.”68
Catholics were initially unwilling to make efforts to convert the Chinese, but the Methodists of the Five Points Mission actively proselytized in the Chinese-American community. In 1879, they rented prime retail space at 14 Mott Street to house their Chinese mission and placed at its head Moy Jin Kee, a young immigrant whose father was a Methodist minister in Canton. At one of the mission’s first Sunday services, an uptown minister told the Chinese in attendance that “your religion is good enough as far as it goes, but ours is better and goes further.” Such an approach did not bode well for the mission’s success. The next day, Chinatown residents mobbed Moy for disparaging remarks he had apparently made about them to the press. To make matters worse, police arrested him hours later for stealing silks from his former employer. Although the Mott Street mission soon closed, the Methodists did eventually achieve a modicum of success converting Chinese immigrants. Another Protestant organization aimed at the Chinese was started in the 1890s by Baptists on Doyer Street. Known in the neighborhood as “Tom Noonan’s Rescue Mission,” it became a Chinatown institution, though it focused its proselytizing efforts primarily on Bowery drunks rather than the Chinese.69
Unwilling to lose the Chinese to the Protestants by default, Five Points Catholic leaders eventually felt compelled to proselytize in Chinatown as well. When McLoughlin replaced Lynch in the early 1890s, he announced to the press that he would work to convert the neighborhood’s Chinese immigrants. But he gave up a few years later, insisting that such efforts were pointless. The Chinese immigrant “comes here for the sole object of making money,” explained McLoughlin, “and he has the poorest idea of the spiritual world that it is possible for a human being to have.” This last point echoed almost verbatim Lynch’s assessment of the Italians a few years earlier. McLoughlin claimed that apparent Protestant success with the Chinese was a sham. “Most of their converts still carry the queue,” he noted, “which is a sign that they still hold to their own superstitions.”70
“A PECULIAR FANCY FOR WIVES OF CELTIC ORIGIN”
New Yorkers considered the Chinese—with their “heathenish” religion, strange foods, opium and gambling dens, and utterly incomprehensible language—more “foreign” than any other immigrants who had ever settled in New York. One potentially threatening aspect of this utterly foreign enclave was its overwhelming domination by men. Just as antebellum Americans had viewed the celibacy of Catholic priests as “unnatural” and speculated endlessly about the “crimes” and “perversions” to which such a life might drive them, postbellum New Yorkers worried about Chinatown’s lack of women. This was one of the unspoken subtexts of the panic over the “ruin” of white women in the neighborhood’s opium joints. Yet Americans must have realized that they themselves were partly to blame for the scarcity of women in Chinatown. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had prohibited even most Chinese already in the United States from bringing wives from Asia to New York. The law’s sponsors apparently hoped that Chinese men would return to Asia rather than face the possibility of a lifetime without a spouse.
Chinese New Yorkers began instead to marry other immigrants. Even before the Civil War, Americans noticed the propensity of Chinese men to court Irish women, who for more than a generation had suffered from a shortage of potential Irish spouses. By the late 1860s, Chinese-Irish unions were quite common. “These Chinamen have a peculiar fancy for wives of Celtic origin,” asserted the Tribune in early 1869. A reporter from the World who in 1877 toured a Baxter Street tenement housing fifteen Chinese immigrants found that all had Irish wives. With shortages of both Chinese women and Irish men, laws of supply and demand drew these Five Pointers together.71
Some Chinese Five Pointers did manage to find Chinese wives. Two spirited their brides across the Canadian border dressed as men. Most of the Chinese women who came to New York unattached were young indentured servants who, when they became old enough, could be “bought” from their “owners” and wed. In 1896, even though he already had two wives in China, forty-six-year-old Hor Poa paid $1,200 to marry sixteen-year-old Gon She, described by one reporter as “the Belle of Chinatown.” Another immigrant paid $900 for his bride.72
Nonetheless, the majority of Chinese men still married non-Chinese women. Courtship could not have been easy for these couples. Most Chinese New Yorkers spoke very little English, while their mates told the Times that “they knew little of the language of their spouses, it was very hard to learn.” Many New Yorkers could not fathom why a non-Asian would marry a “Chinaman.” When a journalist from the World asked two Five Points Irishwomen why they had wed Chinese immigrants, one just laughed, but the other replied indignantly, “Because we liked ’em, of course; why shouldn’t we?” The reporter “suggested that it was more in accordance with the nature of things that they should marry white men, whereupon Mrs. Ching Si said that [their husbands] were as white as anybody and a good deal whiter than many of their neighbors, and Mrs. Ah Muk showed her little baby as proof that she was more than content with her lot. . . . ‘Joe is his name,’ said the proud mother. ‘He don’t look like a Chinaboy, does he, when he’s asleep’?”73
Intermarriage is sometimes hailed as a benchmark of assimilation, but anti-Chinese prejudice remained strong, both in Five Points and beyond. This became especially manifest when Congress in 1892 passed the Geary Act. In addition to renewing the ban on Chinese immigration imposed a decade earlier, the Geary Act required Chinese Americans (other than merchants and professionals) to register with the Treasury Department, which would issue them a certificate of residency, including a photograph. Any Chinese caught without this photo identification were to be punished with up to one year’s hard labor followed by deportation, unless they could produce a “white witness” to prove that they had been prevented from obtaining the certificate by accident or illness.
The Geary Act inspired unprecedented indignation in Chinatown. Wong Ching Foo condemned it in testimony before Congress, noting that convicts were the only other group forcibly photographed by the American government. A Mott Street laundryman, Fong Yue Ting, organized the Equal Rights League to coordinate the Chinese community’s legal challenge to the statute. Many non-Asians also condemned the legislation. Harper’s Weekly called it “an act of bad faith” and “unintelligent zeal,” while the Times denounced it as “one of the most humiliating acts of which any civilized nation has been guilty in modern times.”74
The San Francisco–based Chinese Six Companies coordinated resistance to the Geary Act. It called on Chinese Americans nationwide not to register, asked for one dollar from each immigrant to finance a legal challenge, and hired a prominent expert on constitutional law—attorney Joseph H. Choate—to head their legal team. Choate arranged with federal prosecutors to have Fong Yue Ting and two other laundrymen arrested on May 6, 1893, the first day upon which the Chinese would be liable to deportation. Choate immediately appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had already agreed to consider the matter on an expedited basis.
New York’s Chinese Americans were stunned when the Court ruled by a five to three vote that the Geary Act was, in fact, constitutional. In their unusually vigorous dissenting opinions, the minority insisted that the law violated the Burlingame Treaty’s pledge to grant Chinese immigrants all “the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions” as other immigrants; that its presumption of guilt in the deportation proceedings violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process to all “persons”; and that deportation itself was cruel and unusual punishment. The Court majority, however, insisted that Congress had just as much right to regulate the residence of aliens who had taken no steps to become naturalized as it did to regulate immigration itself. How the Chinese could be expected to apply for naturalization when they were now banned from doing so was not addressed. As to the act’s supposed violation of due process, the Court ruled that due process was a right for citizens, but only a privilege for aliens, one that Congress could choose to withhold from them.75
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Fong Yue Ting v. the United States highlighted the importance of naturalization to the legal rights of immigrants in the United States. The handful of Chinese New Yorkers such as Tom Lee who had become citizens before 1882 must have felt both lucky and relieved. But most white Americans found the sight of any Chinese immigrant exercising the rights of citizenship appalling. In August 1904, after casting ballots for more than a quarter century in state and national political contests, Tom Lee was arrested for voting illegally. His naturalization papers were invalid, prosecutors declared, because Congress had subsequently stipulated that the Chinese were not eligible for naturalization. Police also arrested Civil War veteran William A. Hang, a Pearl Street cigar manufacturer who had lived in New York for more than forty years, on identical charges. Hang was serving aboard one of David G. Farragut’s fourteen gunboats in Mobile Bay when the admiral shouted, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.” No amount of service to one’s country could earn a Chinese immigrant the privileges of citizenship.76
Americans rationalized their refusal to naturalize Chinese immigrants on the grounds that the Chinese could never become “true” Americans. Even Harper’s Weekly, which defended them throughout the Gilded Age, insisted that “the Chinese are the most undesirable of immigrants because, with all their useful qualities, they cannot assimilate socially or politically or morally with Americans.” In truth, no Five Points immigrants had ever assimilated to an extent that would have satisfied native-born Americans. The Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, and Chinese all tended to re-create their Old World culture in New York rather than adopt American habits and values. They socialized mostly with other immigrants from the land of their birth, sang the same songs and played the same games as they had back home, ate much the same food, and complained that American values would ruin their children. While they may not have regretted coming to America, they often pined for their native soil. Italians and Chinese dreamed of returning to their homelands with great riches. The Irish yearned to return to Ireland and liberate it from the British. Only the neighborhood’s Jews gave little thought to returning to the “old country.”
It was, as ever, their children who assimilated. They were embarrassed by their parents’ “foreign” habits and wanted to be like other American kids, speak English without an accent, play baseball, and so on. And to a great extent they achieved these goals. One of Tom Lee’s sons became a Methodist minister. The other sold cars in affluent Westchester County. Although Hor Poa’s son remained in Chinatown for many years, both as a bookie and a waiter, he eventually started a bowling club, a softball team, and even organized a Chinese-American squad for the Police Athletic League basketball tournament. Sailor William Assing’s son, William Junior, became New York’s first Chinese-American policeman.77
In little more than a decade, Five Points and its reputation had once again changed dramatically. In 1875, it was an Irish-American enclave that had improved markedly since the days of the Old Brewery and Cow Bay. But by 1890, it was an overwhelmingly Italian and Chinese quarter, once again perceived as the most repulsive in the city, an incubator of vice and crime. Protestantism had not saved it after all. But Jacob Riis believed that he could.
