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BETWEEN the tabernacles of Jewry and the shrines of the Bend, Joss has cheekily planted his pagan worship of idols, chief among which are the celestial worshipper's own gain and lusts. Whatever may be, said about the Chinaman being a thousand years behind the age on his own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successful scheming to "make it pay." It is doubtful if there is anything he does not turn to a paying account, from his religion down, or up, as one prefers. At the risk of distressing some well-meaning, but, I fear, too trustful people, I state it in advance as my opinion,
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based on the steady observation of years, that all attempts to make an effective Christian of John Chinaman will remain abortive in this generation; of the next I have, if anything, less hope. Ages of senseless idolatry, a mere grub-worship, have left him without the essential qualities for appreciating
the gentle teachings of a faith whose motive and unselfish
spirit are alike beyond his grasp. He lacks the handle
of a strong faith in something, anything, however wrong,
to catch him by. There is nothing strong about him,
except his passions when aroused. I am convinced that
he adopts Christianity, when he adopts it at all, as
he puts on American clothes, with what the politicians
would call an ulterior motive, some sort of gain in
the near prospect--washing, a Christian wife, perhaps,
anything he happens to rate for the moment above his
cherished pigtail. It may be that I judge him too harshly.
Exceptions may be found. Indeed, for the credit of the
race, I hope there are such. But I am bound to say my
hope is not backed by lively faith.
Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing. Next-door
neighbor to the Bend, it has little of its outdoor
stir and life, none of its gayly-colored rags or picturesque
filth and poverty. Mott Street is clean to distraction:
the laundry stamp is on it, though the houses are
chiefly of the conventional tenement-house type, with
nothing to rescue them from the everyday dismal dreariness
of their kind save here and there a splash of dull
red or yellow, a sign, hung endways and with streamers
of red flannel tacked on, that announces in Chinese
characters that Dr. Chay Yen Chong sells Chinese herb
medicines, or that Won Lung & Co.--queer contradiction--take
in washing, or deal out tea and groceries. There are
some gimcracks in the second story fire-escape of
one of the houses, signifying that Joss or a club
has a habitation there. An American patent medicine
concern has seized the opportunity to decorate the
back-ground with its cabalistic trade-mark, that in
this company looks as foreign as the rest. Doubtless
the privilege was bought for cash. It will buy anything
in Chinatown, Joss himself included, as indeed, why
should it not? He was bought for cash across the sea
and came here under the law that shuts out the live
Chinaman, but lets in his dead god on payment of the
statutory duty on bric-a-brac. Red and yellow are
the holiday colors of Chinatown as of the Bend, but
they do not lend brightness in Mott Street as around
the corner in Mulberry. Rather, they seem to descend
to the level of the general dulness, and glower at
you from doors and windows, from the telegraph pole
that is the official organ of Chinatown and from the
store signs, with blank, unmeaning stare, suggesting
nothing, asking no questions, and answering none.
Fifth Avenue is not duller on a rainy day than Mott
Street to one in search of excitement. Whatever is
on foot goes on behind closed doors. Stealth and secretiveness
are as much part of the Chinaman in New York as the
cat-like tread of his felt shoes. His business, as
his domestic life, shuns the light, less because there
is anything to conceal than because that is the way
of the man. Perhaps the attitude of American civilization
toward the stranger, whom it invited in, has taught
him that way. At any rate, the very doorways of his
offices and shops are fenced off by queer, forbidding
partitions suggestive of a continual state of siege.
The stranger who enters through the crooked approach
is received with sudden silence, a sullen stare, and
an angry "Vat you vant?" that breathes annoyance
and distrust.
Trust not him who trusts no one, is as safe a rule
in Chinatown as out of it. Were not Mott Street overawed
in its isolation, it would not be safe to descend
this open cellar-way, through which come the pungent
odor of burning opium and the clink of copper coins
on the table. As it is, though safe, it is not profitable
to intrude. At the first foot-fall of leather soles
on the steps the hum of talk ceases, and the group
of celestials, crouching over their game of fan tan,
stop playing and watch the comer with ugly looks.
Fan tan is their ruling passion. The average Chinaman,
the police will tell you, would rather gamble than
eat any day, and they have ample experience to back
them. Only the fellow in the bunk smokes away, indifferent
to all else but his pipe and his own enjoyment. It
is a mistake to assume that Chinatown is honeycombed
with opium "joints." There are a good many
more outside of it than in it. The celestials do not
monopolize the pipe. In Mott Street there is no need
of them. Not a Chinese home or burrow there, but has
its bunk and its lay-out, where they can be enjoyed
safe from police interference. The Chinaman smokes
opium as Caucasians smoke tobacco, and apparently
with little worse effect upon himself. But woe unto
the white victim upon which his pitiless drug gets
its grip! |
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The bloused pedlars who, with arms buried half
to the elbow in their trousers' pockets, lounge
behind their stock of watermelon seed and sugar-cane,
cut in lengths to suit the parse of the buyer,
disdain to offer the barbarian their wares.
Chinatown, that does most things by contraries,
rules it holiday style to carry its hands in
its pockets, and its denizens follow the fashion,
whether in blue blouse, in gray, or in brown,
with shining and braided pig-tail dangling below
the knees, or with hair cropped short above
a coat collar of "Melican" cut. All
kinds of men are met, but no women--none at
least with almond eyes. The reason is simple:
there are none. A few, a very few, Chinese merchants
have wives of their own color, but they are
seldom or never seen in the street. The "wives"
of Chinatown are of a different stock that comes
closer home.
From the teeming tenements to the right and
left of it come the white slaves of its dens
of vice and their infernal drug, that have infused
into the "Bloody Sixth" Ward a subtler
poison than ever the stale-beer dives |
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knew,
or the "sudden death" of the Old Brewery.
There are houses, dozens of them, in Mott and
Pell Streets, that are literally jammed, from
the "joint" in the cellar to
the attic, with these hapless victims of a passion
which, once acquired, demands the sacrifice
of every instinct of decency to its insatiate
desire. There is a church in Mott Street, at
the entrance to Chinatown, that stands as a
barrier between it and the tenements beyond.
Its young men have waged unceasing war upon
the monstrous wickedness for years, but with
very little real result. I have in mind a house
in Pell Street that has been raided no end of
times by the police, and its population emptied
upon Blackwell's Island, or into the reformatories,
yet is to-day honeycombed with scores of the
conventional households of the Chinese quarter:
the men worshippers of Joss; the women, all
white, girls hardly yet grown to womanhood,
worshipping nothing save the pipe that has enslaved
them body and soul. Easily tempted from homes
that have no claim upon the name, they rarely
or never return. Mott Street gives up its victims only
to the Charity Hospital or the Potter's Field. Of the
depth of their fall no one is more thoroughly aware
than these girls themselves; no one less concerned about
it. The calmness with which they discuss it, while insisting
illogically upon the fiction of a marriage that deceives
no one, is disheartening Their misery is peculiarly
fond of company, and an amount of visiting goes on in
these households that makes it extremely difficult for
the stranger to untangle them. I came across a company
of them "hitting the pipe" together, on a
tour through their dens one night with the police captain
of the precinct. The girls knew him, called him by name,
offered him a pipe, and chatted with him about the incidents
of their acquaintance, how many times he had "sent
them up," and their chances of "lasting"
much longer. There was no shade of regret in their voices,
nothing but utter indifference and surrender.
One thing about them was conspicuous: their scrupulous
neatness. It is the distinguishing mark of Chinatown,
outwardly and physically. It is not altogether by
chance the Chinaman has chosen the laundry as his
distinctive field. He is by nature as clean as the
cat, which he resembles in his traits of cruel cunning,
and savage fury when aroused. On this point of cleanliness
he insists in his domestic circle, yielding in others
with crafty submissiveness to the caprice of the girls,
who "boss" him in a very independent manner,
fretting vengefully under the yoke they loathe, but
which they know right well they can never shake off,
once they have put the pipe to their lips and given
Mott Street a mortgage upon their souls for all time.
To the priest, whom they call in when the poison racks
the body, they pretend that they are yet their own
masters; but he knows that it is an idle boast, least
of all believed by themselves. As he walks with them
the few short steps to the Potter's Field, he hears
the sad story he has heard told over and over again,
of father, mother, home, and friends given up for
the accursed pipe, and stands hopeless and helpless
before the colossal evil for which he knows no remedy.
The frequent assertions of the authorities that at
least no girls under age are wrecked on this Chinese
shoal, are disproved by the observation of those who
go frequently among these dens, though the smallest
girl will invariably, and usually without being asked,
insist that she is sixteen, and so of age to choose
the company she keeps. Such assertions are not to
be taken seriously. Even while I am writing, the morning
returns from one of the precincts that pass through
my hands report the arrest of a Chinaman for "inveigling
little girls into his laundry," one of the hundred
outposts of Chinatown that are scattered all over
the city, as the outer threads of the spider's web
that holds its prey fast. Reference to case No. 39,499
in this year's report of the Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children, will discover one of the much
travelled roads to Chinatown. The girl whose story
it tells was thirteen, and one of six children abandoned
by a dissipated father. She had been discharged from
au Eighth Avenue store, where she was employed as
cash girl, and, being afraid to tell her mother, floated
about until she landed in a Chinese laundry. The judge
heeded her tearful prayer, and sent her home with
her mother, but she was back again in a little while
despite all promises of reform. Her tyrant knows well
that she will come, and patiently bides his time.
When her struggles in the web have ceased at last,
he rules no longer with gloved hand. A specimen of
celestial logic from the home circle at this period
came home to me with a personal application, one evening
when I attempted, with a policeman, to stop a Chinaman
whom we found beating his white "wife" with
a broom-handle in a Mott Street cellar. He was angry
at our interference, and declared vehemently that
she was "bad." |
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"S'ppose your wifee bad, you no lickee
her?" he asked, as if there could be no
appeal from such a common-sense proposition
as that. My assurance that I did not, that such
a thing could not occur to me, struck him dumb
with amazement. He eyed me a while in stupid
silence, poked the linen in his tub, stole another
look, and made up his mind. A gleam of intelligence
shone in his eye, and pity and contempt struggled
in his voice. "Then, I guess, she lickee
you," he said.
No small commotion was caused in Chinatown
once upon the occasion of an expedition I undertook,
accompanied by a couple of police detectives,
to photograph Joss. Some conscienceless wag
spread the report, after we were gone, that
his picture was wanted for the Rogues' Gallery
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Headquarters. The insult was too gross to
be passed over without atonement of some sort.
Two roast pigs made matters all right with his
offended majesty of Mott Street, and with his
attendant priests, who bear a very practical
hand in the worship by serving as the divine
stomach, as it were. They eat the good things
set before their rice-paper master, unless as
once happened, some sacrilegious tramp sneaks
in and gets ahead of them. The practical way
in which this people combine worship with business
is certainly admirable. I was told that the
scrawl covering the wall on both sides of the
shrine stood for the names of the pillars of
the church or club --the Joss House is both--that
they might have their reward in this world,
no matter what happened to them in the
next. There was another inscription overhead that needed
no interpreter. In familiar English letters, copied
bodily from the trade dollar, was the sentiment: "In
God we trust." The priest pointed to it with undisguised
pride and attempted an explanation, from which I gathered
that the inscription was intended as a diplomatic courtesy,
a delicate international compliment to the "Melican
Joss," the almighty dollar.
Chinatown has enlisted the telegraph for the dissemination
of public intelligence, but it has got hold of the
contrivance by the wrong end. As the wires serve us
newspaper-making, so the Chinaman makes use of the
pole for the same purpose. The telegraph pole, of
which I spoke as the real official organ of Chinatown,
stands not far from the Joss House in Mott Street,
in full view from Chatham Square. In it centres the
real life of the colony, its gambling news. Every
day yellow and red notices are posted upon it by unseen
hands, announcing that in such and such a cellar a
fan tan game will be running that night, or warning
the faithful that a raid is intended on this or that
game through the machination of a rival interest.
A constant stream of plotting and counter-plotting
makes up the round of Chinese social and political
existence. I do not pretend to understand the exact
political structure of the colony, or its internal
government. Even discarding as idle the stories of
a secret cabal with power over life and death, and
authority to enforce its decrees, there is evidence
enough that the Chinese consider themselves subject
to the laws of the land only when submission is unavoidable,
and that they are governed by a code of their own,
the very essence of which is rejection of all other
authority except under compulsion. If now and then
some horrible crime in the Chinese colony, a murder
of such hideous ferocity as one I have a very vivid
recollection of, where the murderer stabbed his victim
(both Chinamen, of course) in the back with a meat-knife,
plunging it in to the hilt no less than seventeen
times, arouses the popular prejudice to a suspicion
that it was "ordered," only the suspected
themselves are to blame, for they appear to rise up
as one man to shield the criminal. The difficulty
of tracing the motive of the crime and the murderer
is extreme, and it is the rarest of all results that
the police get on the track of either. The obstacles
in the way of hunting down an Italian murderer are
as nothing to the opposition encountered in Chinatown.
Nor is the failure of the pursuit wholly to be ascribed
to the familiar fact that to Caucasian eyes "all
Chinamen look alike," but rather to their acting
"alike," in a body, to defeat discovery
at any cost.
Withal the police give the Chinese the name of being
the "quietest people down there," meaning
in the notoriously turbulent Sixth Ward; and they
are. The one thing they desire above all is to be
let alone, a very natural wish perhaps, considering
all the circumstances If it were a laudable, or even
an allowable ambition that prompts it, they might
be humored with advantage, probably, to both sides.
But the facts show too plainly that it is not, and
that in their very exclusiveness and reserve they
are a constant and terrible menace to society, wholly
regardless of their influence upon the industrial
problems which their presence confuses. The severest
official scrutiny, the harshest repressive measures
are justifiable in Chinatown, orderly as it appears
on the surface, even more than in the Bend, and the
case is infinitely more urgent. To the peril that
threatens there all the senses are alert, whereas
the poison that proceeds from Mott Street puts mind
and body to sleep, to work out its deadly purpose
in the corruption of the soul.
This again may be set down as a harsh judgment I
may be accused of inciting persecution of an unoffending
people. Far from it. Granted, that the Chinese are
in no sense n desirable element of the population,
that they serve no useful purpose here, whatever they
may have done elsewhere in other days, yet to this
it is a sufficient answer that they are here,
and that, having let them ill, we must make the
best of it. This is a time for very plain speaking
on this subject. Rather than banish the Chinaman,
I would have the door opened wider--for his wife;
make it a condition of his coming or staying that
he bring his wife with him. Then, at least, he |
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might not be what he now is and remains a homeless stranger among us. Upon this hinges the real Chinese
question, in our city at all events, as I see
it. To assert that the victims of his drug and
his base passions would go to the bad anyhow,
is begging the question. They might and they might
not. The chance is the span between life and death.
From any other form of dissipation than that for
which Chinatown stands there is recovery; for
the victims of any other vice, hope. For these
there is neither hope nor recovery; nothing but
death--moral, mental, and physical death. |
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Go to Chapter
10 |
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