The Killing Look
Page 28
Any work dealing with 1870s San Francisco —its societal divisions, racial tension, roller-coaster economy, and decadence— is going to rely heavily on classic works such as Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast and Benjamin Estelle Lloyd’s Lights and Shade in San Francisco, and this book is no exception. The website Sfgate.com also provided innumerable tidbits of information about Gilded Age San Francisco, as did foundsf.org and kqed.org.
The Red Boat Opera companies were an actual phenomenon, and in the 19th century they were indeed centers of the resistance to the declining and corrupt Qing dynasty. Whether or not they were also secret schools for teaching the martial art of Wing Chun is, like a lot of the history of the martial arts, a matter of dispute, legend, and occasionally total balderdash.. When there was conflict between sources, I went with the one that was most fun. I am indebted to the work of Lorretta Siuling Yeung and her MA thesis paper “Red Boat Troupes and Chinese Opera” found online at https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/yeung_loretta_s_201005_ma.pdf, as well as Ben Judkin’s article “Understanding the Red Boats of the Cantonese Opera: Economics, Social Structure and Violence 1850-1950.” found at https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2013/11/15/understanding-the-red-boats-of-the-cantonese-opera-economics-social-structure-and-violence-1850-1950/
Finally, special thanks to Alexandra Sokoloff, Carolyn Ritchie and John Lovell for reading and advice on the early drafts.