by Iris Chang
Lilac Chen, a former prostitute, recalled that her father gambled away all his money, leaving the family destitute. When Lilac was six years old, her father told her he was taking her to see her grandmother, whom she adored. She eagerly boarded the ferry, but then felt something was amiss: “Mother was crying, and I couldn’t understand why she should cry if I go see Grandma. When I saw her cry I said, ‘Don’t cry, Mother, I’m just going to see Grandma and be right back. [Then] that worthless father sold me on the ferry boat. Locked me in a cabin while he was negotiating my sale.” Lilac kicked and screamed, but when she was finally let out her father had disappeared and she was on her way to America.
Some women were deceived by pimps who bamboozled unsuspecting girls and their families with stories of the incredible wealth and leisure to be enjoyed in the United States. One nineteen-year-old girl, Wong Ah So, agreed to emigrate when a stranger posing as a rich laundryman offered to take her to Gold Mountain as his bride. On the journey she was thrilled that she was headed for a “grand, free country, where everyone was rich and happy.” Upon arrival in San Francisco, however, Wong was horrified and heartbroken to learn that she would be forced to work as a prostitute.
Western authorities at the treaty ports were charged with detecting and preventing such trafficking in women and children, but pimps easily bribed their way through the inspection process. During the journey, traffickers coached women to give proper answers on arrival, ordering them to memorize key phrases in case they were interrogated by officials seeking to ascertain whether they had traveled to the United States of their own free will. Some traffickers warned the women that if they failed to answer correctly, they would be locked up and left to rot in a “devil American prison.” Quick-witted girls managed to escape their fate by creating a commotion upon arrival, either on the ship or the docks—shrieking for help, crying that they had been kidnapped, begging passersby to save them. Thus a few were rescued and later given passage back to China, but most of the new arrivals had no chance to win either freedom or sympathy, especially in the early years of San Francisco’s rough-hewn, male-dominated frontier society.
Gripped by terror and confusion, these young women were locked in barracoons, stripped and inspected, and then auctioned off to the highest bidder, their sale price determining their place in the city’s hierarchy of prostitution. Though California was not officially a slave state, it tolerated the sale of female flesh during the antebellum period; slave auctions of Chinese women were held openly and brazenly on the docks, before large audiences that included police officers. By the 1860s, however, a stricter code of morality disapproved of such public transactions. The auctions didn’t stop but simply moved to Chinatown and then indoors—for instance, to a Chinese theater or even a Chinese temple. At these auctions, the youngest and most beautiful were usually sold as mistresses or concubines to Chinatown’s wealthy elite—merchants, tradesmen, and business owners. Relatively speaking, they were the lucky ones, though as property they had no rights and could be sold or disposed of at whim. Other women—the next tier—were acquired by exclusive “parlor houses,” where, elegantly dressed and perfumed, they were expected to entertain men in luxurious apartments of teak, bamboo, and embroidered silks. Most girls ended up in low-class brothels, or “cribs,” tiny shacks no larger than twelve by fourteen feet, facing dim, narrow alleys and sparsely furnished with a washbowl, a bamboo chair, and a bed. These loungei (literally, “woman always holding her legs up”) were forced to service, often in rapid succession, laborers, sailors, and drunks for as little as twenty-five cents each, drawing in customers with their plaintive chants: “Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee!”
Chinese prostitutes shipped to mining camps on the western frontier were deterred from escape by the wilderness itself. One woman fleeing from her master in Nevada was later found half-dead in the hills, with both feet frozen and requiring amputation. In the hinterlands, they faced an even greater male-to-female ratio than in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They also endured insults and abuse from white miners, who called them “Chiney ladies,” “moon-eyed pinch foots,” and “she-heathens.”
At the same time, the prostitute-trafficking tongs were battling incessantly among themselves for control over territory and profits. Before such a war would erupt, the tongs often contrived a public excuse for the pending hostilities, such as a slap in the face or a stolen prostitute. In outbursts of Chinese tong warfare on the western frontier, some prostitutes were kidnapped and held for ransom; others died in the crossfire between rival gangs. In one notorious case, tongs seized four women in the Comstock Lode; only one victim was found alive—nailed shut inside a crate that had been shipped from San Francisco to Reno.
By the 1860s, the tongs almost entirely controlled the sex trade, leaving little room for independent operators. For prostitutes on the lowest level, there was no respite from work: many were doubly exploited by San Francisco brothel owners, who leased them out to local garment factories to sew by day, then sold their bodies by night. There was no respite from abuse: most were routinely beaten with clubs, threatened with pistols, burned with red-hot pokers. If they failed to make enough money, the madam “beats and pounds them with sticks of fire-wood, pulls their hair, treads on their toes, starves them and torments and punishes them in every cruel way.” One prostitute had acid thrown in her face by a Chinese actor who resented having to share her with other men. Some women chose to escape their unbearable lives by committing suicide, often by swallowing opium or flinging themselves into San Francisco Bay.
For some Chinese women taken into prostitution, the only escape was death. Those who tried other methods found themselves up against a corrupt system comprising not only the tongs and their network of opium dealers and gambling houses, but also the police, the courts, and even the Six Companies. Since prostitution was so lucrative—in 1870 the average brothel employed nine women, each of whom brought in an average net annual profit of $2,500 (compared with the $500 average annual income of the Chinese male laborer)—the tongs jealously guarded their golden-egg-producing property, hiring “highbinders”—associations of Chinese thugs—to monitor the women. They also paid $40 in insurance for every Chinese prostitute brought into the United States, as well as weekly or monthly fees to hire special policemen for surveillance. Brothel owners forced women to sign contracts penalizing them if they fell ill or were unable to perform their duties because of menstruation or pregnancy, virtually guaranteeing deeper bondage for these women. The following agreement is typical:
Yut Kum consents to prostitute her body to receive company to aid Mee Yung for the full time of four years. When the time is fully served, neither service nor money shall be longer required. If Yut Kum should be sick fifteen days she shall make up one month. If she conceives, she shall serve one year more. If during the time any man wishes to redeem her body, she shall make satisfactory arrangements with the mistress Mee Yung. If Yut Kum should herself escape and be recovered, then her time shall never expire. Should the mistress become very wealthy and return to China with glory, then Yut Kum shall fulfill her time, serving another person.
By the 1870s, horrified Christian activists, mostly middle-class white Protestant women, established rescue homes for Chinese women. San Francisco had two sanctuaries: the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, established by Reverend Otis Gibson, and the Presbyterian Mission Home, founded by the Woman’s Occidental Board. Soon a stream of prostitutes began slipping away from their cribs to beg admission. To bring them back, the brothel keepers sent emissaries to the mission, asking to interview the former prostitutes for just a few minutes. If an interview was granted, they would cajole the women, then threaten them if they refused to return, frightening them to tears. On occasion, the brothel owners even sent their attorneys with writs of habeas corpus.
To protect the women, the mission took to hiding them wherever they could—between folding doors or under floorboards. One resident
of the Presbyterian Mission Home recalled how the tongs would “search the whole house, even dig into our rice bins to see if we put any [prostitutes in] there!” They harassed the director, Donaldina Cameron, by smashing the mission’s windows and planting sticks of dynamite on doorsills and against the foundation.
But the courageous Cameron would not be stopped in her cause. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, she struck upon a new, even more aggressive strategy. Rather than wait for the women to find her, she went looking for them. With the help of the police, she began paying daring surprise visits to bordellos, first ascending to the rooftops of adjoining buildings, crossing to the bordello’s rooftop, then climbing in through the building’s skylights. In an attempt to thwart this latest assault, the tongs established a sophisticated system of alarm bells to warn brothel operators of approaching police. Not surprisingly, these heroic efforts drew considerable press attention to Chinatown’s criminal element and greatly contributed to the demise of Chinese prostitution on the West Coast. In 1942, the Presbyterian Mission Home was renamed the Donaldina Cameron House to honor her life and work. Through her efforts and those of others it is said that eventually an estimated fifteen hundred Chinese women were rescued.
What did those women do afterward who were rescued or had broken free on their own? As surprising as it may seem, some went on to become madams and brothel owners themselves, using their own experience to exploit other Chinese women. The most famous was Ah Toy. She was possibly the first Chinese prostitute in America, a woman who had migrated “to better her condition,” mostly likely of her own free will. Arriving from Hong Kong in early 1849, she began her career as a loungei in an alleyway shanty. Soon she became San Francisco’s most successful Chinese courtesan, owning a brothel in a prestigious neighborhood and enjoying near-celebrity status. At the peak of her popularity, Asian and white men alike lined up for blocks and paid an ounce of gold just to “gaze upon the countenance of the charming Ah Toy,” as one man breathlessly put it. Part of her success derived from both her strong will and genius for self-promotion. The Chinese crime syndicates could not control her; she successfully fought the tongs that tried to extort money from her. Men who cheated her (such as one who paid her with brass filings instead of gold) found themselves hauled into court. Her name appeared constantly in the local newspapers. And unlike most women in her profession, Ah Toy lived a long life. She reportedly ended her days peacefully and died three months short of her hundredth birthday.
Then there was the case of Suey Him, first sold at age five by her father for a piece of gold, and then again at age twelve for three handfuls of gold. For a decade she worked as a prostitute, until she wed a poor Chinese laundryman who loved her. For eight years they scraped and saved to buy her freedom from the brothel keeper. But later her husband fell ill and died, forcing her back into the profession. This time, however, she returned as a capitalist, importing some fifty girls from China to work for her. She worked as a madam until she converted to Christianity and freed all her girls.
Other former prostitutes, however, joined mainstream society in substantial numbers as wives and mothers. (This is evident from statistics indicating that while the total number of Chinese women in the United States decreased during the 1870s, those keeping house grew from 753 in 1870 to 1,145 in 1880.) Many former prostitutes married Chinese laborers, and a few married Caucasians. The union of Polly and Charlie Bemis is one of the most famous love stories of the American West; it inspired the 1981 novel Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn and a 1991 feature film of the same name starring Rosalind Chao and Chris Cooper.
Originally known as Lalu Nathov, Polly Bemis was born in 1853 to an impoverished farm family in China. After a severe crop failure and a raid on the village by outlaws, her father was forced to sell Polly to the outlaws for two bags of seed. Resold in the United States for $2,500, she became the slave and concubine of Hong King, a Chinese saloon owner in Warren, Idaho, until Charlie Bemis won her in a poker game. An educated man from a prominent New England family, Bemis granted Polly her freedom. She soon repaid his kindness: when a miner shot Bemis in the face, Polly performed surgery with a razor blade to save his life. After his recovery, Bemis asked her to marry him, and they spent the rest of their lives as ranchers at the bottom of a canyon on the Salmon River in Idaho. Polly Bemis, who used her knowledge of Chinese herbs to nurse sick children, became a much-beloved neighbor in the community.
Yet other women were never able to escape the world of prostitution. There are stories of women rushing into marriage to escape the brothel, only to discover themselves wedded to a new pimp. Their desperation for a better life made them easy prey for unscrupulous men with no qualms about forcing them back into the sex trade. Some former prostitutes married honest, loving men, only to be abducted by gangsters in their husbands’ absence. According to Donaldina Cameron, highbinders would hunt down and kidnap these married women even after they had moved to remote rural villages.7
In time, those who unable to leave the profession became outcasts, scorned by Chinese and whites alike. When they grew old and sick, many were treated like human refuse and simply thrown out onto the streets. The hospitals of the American West would not help them—white San Francisco physicians lobbied to exclude Chinese prostitutes from the hospitals—and few could afford the services of Chinese herbalists. Clan associations and the Six Companies established nursing facilities for former prostitutes, but they were tiny, dark, squalid rooms furnished with a few straw mats, referred to by some as “death-houses.” A visitor to one of these facilities described entering through a low door into a room dimly lit by a Chinese nut-oil lamp, and finding “stretched on the floor of this damp, foul-smelling den... four female figures . . . victims of the most fearful... loathsome disease.”
And what of those Chinese women who came to America as wives? In China, society mandated that a married woman’s life centered on the family, serving them from cradle to grave. According to one school of ancient Chinese philosophy, the “Three Obediences” dictated that she first obey her father, then her husband after marriage, and finally her eldest son when widowed.
Because the average worker could not afford to support a family in the United States, most Chinese women emigrants who were not prostitutes were wives of merchants. Most had grown up in modest but respectable families in small villages near Canton. They tended to be middle-class, because upper-class families would not allow their daughters to marry outside China, and because many Chinese merchants in the United States considered working-class women beneath them.
Having been raised in a protected, insular household, the typical merchant’s wife had never ventured far beyond her village until journeying to the United States. Even more problematic was the fact that the middle and upper classes in China practiced the nine-hundred-year-old tradition of bandaging a young girl’s toes under the ball of her foot, reducing the foot to a length of five or even three inches. Reflecting the same impulse as the Western fashion of warping the female ribcage with corsets, foot-binding existed primarily to symbolize a family’s wealth and power, advertising its ability to support a nonworking, purely ornamental human being.
For many of the wives, home in the United States was nothing more than a gilded prison, where they were jealously guarded as treasured possessions. Some Chinese immigrant women could easily count the number of times in their lives they had ever stepped outdoors. “My father traveled all over the world,” one Chinese American remembered, “but his wife could not go into the street by herself.” Only during holidays were some permitted to venture out, accompanied by a chaperone. A merchant’s wife in Butte, Montana, recalled, “When I came to America as a bride, I never knew I would be coming to a prison . . .”:
I was allowed out of the house but once a year. That was during the New Year’s when families exchanged New Year calls and feasts. We would dress in our long-plaited, brocaded, hand-embroidered skirts. These were a part of our wedding dowry brought
from China. Over these we wore longsleeved, short satin or damask jackets. We wore all of our jewelry, and we put jeweled ornaments in our hair.
The father of my children hired a closed carriage to take me and the children calling. Of course, he did not go with us, as this was against the custom practiced in China. The carriage would take us even if we went around the corner, for no family women walked. The carriage waited until we were ready to leave, which would be hours later, for the women saw each other so seldom that we talked and reviewed all that went on since we saw each other.
Before we went out of the house, we sent the children to see if the streets were clear of men. It was considered impolite to meet them. If we did have to walk out when men were on the streets, we hid our faces behind our silk fans and hurried by.
No doubt many Chinese men felt they had good reason to keep their wives under lock and key. The scarcity of women in the West and the violence of frontier society posed a very real danger of kidnapping or molestation in the streets. A bound-foot woman could neither run from assailants nor fend off attacks. Indeed, with several toes rotted away from foot-binding, she could hardly walk—or even remain standing—for an extended period of time. The annals of nineteenth-century California recount many stories of helpless Chinese women being thrown down into the mud, dragged by the hair, pelted with stones, their clothes and earrings yanked off.
