THE YELLOW SLAVE TRADE.
During the administration of President Hayes the United States consul
general at Shanghai, Mr. D. H. Bailey, made a report to the president,
relating to slavery in China and the menace to our country from that
cause. He enclosed with his report a translation of the laws governing
slaves, some of which are as follows:
"If a female slave deserts her master's house she shall be punished with
eighty blows. Whoever harbors a fugitive wife or slave, knowing them to
be fugitives, shall participate equally in their punishment.
"A slave guilty of addressing abusive language to his master shall
suffer death by being strangled.
"The master or the relatives of a master of a guilty slave may chastise
such slave in any degree short of death, without being liable to any
punishment.
"All slaves who are guilty of designedly striking their masters shall,
without making any distinction between principals and accessories, be
beheaded.
"If accidentally they kill their master, they shall suffer death by
being strangled."
In China, and wherever Chinese live, slave girls and women are subject
to two forms of slavery, domestic slavery and brothel slavery. Every
respectable Chinese family has one or two house slaves. The brothel
slave is a literal slave, bought and sold like a sheep or cow. Traffic
in Chinese girls for wicked uses extended to Hong Kong as soon as the
island became prosperous and populous after being ceded to Great Britain
in 1841. From Hong Kong the horrid trade reached to California, and to
Singapore and other places.
Commissioners appointed by the governor of Hong Kong made a report in
1880, from which the following accounts are taken:
"Young girls, virgins of thirteen or fourteen years of age, are brought
from Canton or elsewhere and deflowered according to bargain, and as a
regular business for large sums of money, which go to their owners. The
regular earnings of the girls go to the same quarters, and the
unfortunate creatures obviously form subjects of speculation to regular
traders in this kind of business, who reside beyond our jurisdiction.
Mr. Lister speaks of the brothel-keepers as a horrible race of cruel
women, cruel to the last degree, who use an ingenious form of torture,
which they call prevention of sleep, which he describes in detail."
"Two girls were brought before the registrar general, both of whom
pleaded for protection against their owner, stating that she intended to
sell them to go to California. One of these had been bought by this
woman for eighty dollars; the girl saw the price paid for her. The
other said her mother was very poor and sold her for twenty dollars. The
inspector said: 'There has been at times a number of women residing in
the house, and I do not know what has become of them. I believe that
they have been sent to California by the defendant.'"
The poor slave girls, as shown by court proceedings at Hong Kong, had
the same terror of being "sold into California" that the negro slaves in
this country had of being "sold down the river." One of the girls
testified that she had seen several women sent away to California. She
had been present when bargains were made, the price varying. In Hong
Kong the price was from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars; they
would bring in California from two hundred and fifty to three hundred
and fifty dollars.
Owing to the restriction of Chinese immigration, and the penal laws
against importing women for evil uses, the value of a slave girl on the
Pacific Coast has greatly increased; it is now $3,000.
The system of Chinese brothel slavery differs from the white slave
trade, in that the Chinese brothel slaves are not weak or wicked women
who have fallen into the clutches of traffickers, as so many of our
European and American white slaves unquestionably are, but are good
girls who have been sold by their actual owners into a life of shame
for money, sometimes sold by their own parents. Some are not sold
outright, but are mortgaged to pay off a loan. So much is credited each
month until the debt is canceled--unless fresh debts, real or
fictitious, keep the victim indefinitely, as with the white slaves. On
the marked differences between the white slave and the yellow slave, the
commissioners previously quoted say: "Prostitutes in Europe are, as a
general rule, fallen women, the victims of seduction, or possibly of
innate vice. Being the outcasts of society, and having little, if any,
prospect of being admitted again into decent and respectable circles of
life, deprived also of their own self-respect as well as the regards of
their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of conscience,
they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek oblivion in
excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese prostitutes of Hong Kong
are an entirely different set of people. Very few of them can be called
fallen women, scarcely any of them are the victims of seduction in the
English sense of the term, refined or unrefined. The great majority of
them are owned by professional brothel-keepers or traders in women in
Canton or Macao, have been brought up for that life and trained in
various accomplishments suited to it. They frequently know neither
father nor mother, except what they call a pocket-mother, that is, the
woman who bought them from others." There are 18,000 such slaves in
Hong Kong, if the estimates accepted by the commissioners are correct.
In China the yellow slave has hope of escape from her bondage. If she is
pretty and accomplished, some rich man may buy her for his first,
second, third or fourth wife. If she is homely some honest working man
may take her. Or she may sing or play an instrument and thereby add to
her earnings until she can buy her own freedom, if dissipation and
disease have not killed her first.
The mortgaged girls are often such as have sacrificed their own to their
family's honor, according to the Chinese and Japanese notion of filial
piety. The money thus advanced by the keeper is thought necessary to
rescue the girl's family or some member of it from calamity or ruin. One
Japanese man is quoted as saying that such sacrifice on a girl's part is
"Christ-like." He should hear the voice of Christ, saying of all these
sins, "which things I also hate." Revelation, 2:6.
YELLOW SLAVES IN AMERICA.
The terrible system of Chinese and Japanese brothel slavery has been
imported into San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities of California.
Americans and Europeans have invested money and devoted business ability
to this enormous iniquity, because it pays well. Apart from the horrors
of Chinatown, one thousand Japanese women are held in this form of
slavery in California. The San Francisco Chronicle said of this
statement: "There is not the slightest doubt of the truth of the
assertion, disreputable as it may seem."
The police will generally say after investigating, that these women are
willing to remain in their present condition. Doubtless this is true of
most of them, but they are slaves, none the less, literal and actual
slaves, bought and paid for and acknowledging the ownership. In a letter
of Abraham Lincoln, written before the war, he tells of a company of
negro slaves that he saw on a boat on the Ohio and he never saw such a
happy company of people in his life. When John Brown made his raid into
Virginia and captured 200,000 stands of arms at Harper's Ferry, he hoped
that the thousands of negro slaves in that region would join him and
fight for their freedom. He could only get six or eight negroes to join
him, and those at the point of the bayonet. One was shot rather than
seek his liberty. At the beginning of the Abolition movement a petition
from slaves was sent to Congress in favor of slavery! Women terrorized
by such laws as are quoted at the beginning of this chapter, and further
terrorized by all the brutal treatment and threats of the slave traders,
are not likely to say to the police that they desire liberty. But it is
our duty to give them liberty and to punish their owners, who cannot
legally own them, but do practically own them under the Stars and
Stripes.
The following cases illustrate the traffic and the work of
missionaries. These three girls were in the Methodist Home for Chinese
Girls, located since the earthquake at Berkeley. One says:
"I am twelve years old; born in Canton; father a laborer; mother a
nurse; parents very poor. Mother fell sick and in her need of money sold
me to a woman three years ago in Hong Kong. The woman promised my mother
to make me her own daughter. My mother cried when she left me; I have
heard that she is now dead. The big ship City of Pekin took me soon out
of sight. There was trouble in landing me. The woman had no trouble in
landing, because she had been in California before. She told me what I
was to say. She told me I must swear I was her own daughter. The judge
asked me, 'Is this your own mother?' and I said, 'Yes.' This was a lie,
but I did not know it was wrong to do as I was told, and I was afraid of
my mistress. The Judge said, 'Did this woman give you birth?' and I
said, 'Yes.' The judge said, 'did anybody tell you to say all this?' and
I said 'No,' because my mistress had instructed me. She taught me on
shipboard what to say if I was taken to court. She beat me with thick
sticks of firewood. She beat me with the fire tongs. One day she took a
hot flatiron, removed my clothes and held it on my naked back until I
howled with pain. (The scab was on her back when she came to the
Mission.) My forehead is all scars caused by her throwing heavy pieces
of wood at my head. One cut a large gash and the blood ran out. She
stopped the bleeding and hid me away. I thought I better get away before
she killed me. When she was having her hair washed and dressed I ran
away. I had heard of the Mission, and inquired the way and came to it. A
white man brought me here. I am very happy now."
Another little slave, eleven years old, who was about to be sold from
domestic slavery into a brothel, was saved by a Chinaman. She says: "A
Chinaman living next door, knowing how I was treated and that I was
going to be put in a brothel, when I saw him in the passageway, asked me
if I wished to come to the Mission, and I said 'Yes.' My mistress had
gone out into the next room, leaving her daughter and another slave girl
in the room. I said I would go at once and he brought me. I am very glad
to live here and lead a good life."
In the following case the rescuer was a negress. A young girl came from
China to San Francisco as a merchant's wife. Missionaries visited her in
Chinatown, but she disappeared and explanations were not satisfactory. A
year later the door bell rang one night at the Mission and when it was
opened a Chinese girl fell in a faint across the threshold, a colored
girl holding her by the queue. The colored girl saw her running and, to
prevent her from being dragged back by her tormentors, seized her by the
queue and helped her run to the Mission. It was the merchant's young
wife. The wretch had left her on false pretense in a den of shame. She
was tied to a window by day and to a bed by night, a thoroughly
unwilling slave. Three days before her escape, the chief of police and
an interpreter had gone through the house, questioning every inmate as
to whether they wished to lead a life of shame or not. She was asked the
question in the presence of the divekeeper, the madam and all the girls.
She had been told beforehand, "If you dare say you want to escape, we
will kill you." The chief of police announced in the papers that there
were no slaves in Chinatown. Though watched night and day, she rushed
out at an opportune moment and, with the help of the colored girl, ran
to safety.
Since the earthquake immense slave pens have been built at Oakland and
in San Francisco. A photograph of one large wooden structure, to hold
more than a hundred girls, is before me as I write. The girls are kept
in small rooms, nine or ten feet square. Americans and Chinamen are
partners in the horrible business.
This chapter is a review, in part, of the book, "Heathen Slaves and
Christian Rulers," written by Dr. Katharine Bushnell and Mrs. Elizabeth
Andrew.
It was my good fortune and delight to meet Dr. Bushnell and Mrs. Andrew
in Bombay, at the time when Lord Roberts had contradicted their
statements about procuring women for British soldiers in India--"Queen's
women" as they were called. Upon being convinced that Dr. Bushnell and
Mrs Andrew had told the truth, Lord Roberts, then commander-in-chief of
the forces in India, said, "I apologize to the ladies without reserve."
E. A. B.