CHINATOWN.
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, 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-à-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, un-meaning 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!
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 purse 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 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 an 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.
[Illustration: IN A CHINESE JOINT.]
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."
"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
at 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.
[Illustration: "THE OFFICIAL ORGAN OF CHINATOWN."]
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 in 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 a 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 in, 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 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.
[Illustration]