Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [896]
Chinatown Restaurant, 1896. (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
The neighborhood grew only slightly in size—inching into Pell, Bayard, Doyer, and Canal—but its internal organization got considerably more complicated. By 1888 there were at least thirty all-purpose store-centers in Chinatown, now often run not by an individual entrepreneur but by mutual aid and protection societies known as fang (house), organized by kin or area of origin. These houses provided temporary lodging and financial assistance and sponsored social events and cultural festivals. They also provided deceased members with proper burials in a plot at Green-Wood Cemetery—or, rather, temporary interment, as men came periodically from San Francisco and, for a price, exhumed bodies, collected and packed the bones, and shipped them to Canton and on to home villages for a truly proper burial.
The neighborhood also developed a quasi-criminal wing, as mah-jongg and card games gave way to organized fan-tan gambling, especially after the arrival of Tom Lee. Wong Ah Ling, as he was known before he changed his name, had been a labor contractor in California, moved on to St. Louis, where he became a citizen, and arrived in New York in 1879. Lee did well in the tea and silk trade business, in manufacturing cigars, and in less legal pursuits as well. In 1880 he and some colleagues incorporated the Lung Gee Tong—translated for legal purposes as “the Order and Brotherhood of Masons”—and established a headquarters at 4 Mott. The Lung Gee Tong (later famous as the On Leong Tong) was a lodge of the Triads, or Sam Hop Hui, an underground oppositional society reputedly founded in the seventeenth century by Buddhist monks seeking to return China to Han rule. (“Oppose the Qing, Restore the Ming” was their slogan.) Staunchly nationalist, the secret brotherhood was involved in various revolutionary movements in China; in New York City their muscle was devoted, among other things, to establishing a criminal underworld.
Tom Lee, identifying himself as “the President of the Chinese Society of this city,” wined and dined prominent members of the Democratic Party and won de facto recognition from Tammany Hall as the leader of Chinatown. The only organized opposition to Lee came from the Christian Chinese. In 1875 Sara Goodrich of the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church established a mission at Pearl Street that provided English-language classes every evening and religious instruction in Chinese on Sundays, by a missionary back from Canton. By 1883 there were ten Sunday schools operating in Manhattan and another eight in Brooklyn, with a combined enrollment of about six hundred. There was also a Chinese Young Men’s Christian Association and the first independent Chinese church in New York, founded by Huie Kin, a Lane Theological Seminary graduate who arrived in 1885 to work with the Presbyterian schools. He and others dressed as workmen, infiltrated gambling houses, got to know the proprietors, had warrants made out, and took part in ensuing police raids. But the charges were almost invariably dismissed, and the shuttered houses did not remain so long.
The emergence of organized “vice” contributed to a sharp change in the wider city’s attitude toward the Chinese community. The former high esteem for Chinese goods and culture turned to fear and loathing in the late 1870s, and early nineteenthcentury images of clever craftsmen transmuted into harsh portraits of cunning deceivers. Wong Ching Foo, who in 1883 launched the first (and short-lived) Chineselanguage newspaper in New York, the Chinese American, lectured at Steinway Hall and published articles in leading