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Part of the reason for this sharp shift of perspective, ironically, was opium consumption. The drug that the West had forced into China at gunpoint, that had been the making of many New York fortunes, and that was widely hawked to middle-class Americans in the form of laudanum-laced patent medicines, cough syrups, and child quieters, came to be considered an evil substance to which Chinese were peculiarly addicted and which they used to subvert the morals of decent white women. Newspapers that had once treated pipe smoking light-heartedly now presented stories about the ruination of adolescent girls, headlined “Horrors of the Opium Dens” and accompanied by drawings of white women reclining alongside yellow men in collective stupor.

The fact that the Chinese had laid claim to an occupational niche that left them isolated from the wider society, against their earlier integrationist inclinations, was used as proof that they were racially inassimilable. Racist images of ravenous Chinese who would devour rats, cats, and dogs mingled with fears that yellow hordes would gobble up American jobs. Labor leaders like Samuel Gompers, whose cigar workers had actually encountered Chinese competition, called for race-based exclusion rather than making an effort to organize the Asians. The combination of middle-class revulsion and working-class animosity won passage in 1882 of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The law had serious repercussions in New York City. Though it allowed for class exemptions—officials, diplomats, scholars, teachers, students, merchants, and tourists could enter the country—they were denied citizenship, the right to vote, and thus inclusion in the political life of the city and country. The law also indirectly barred Chinese from the licensed professions, most of which required citizenship. It forced Chinese already here to obtain residence certificates, in effect internal passports, which branded them permanent aliens and left them peculiarly subject to political, social, and economic exploitation, especially if they had entered illegally. Finally, the law erected gender barriers, barring Chinese laborers from bringing their wives to the United States and making it extremely difficult even for members of the “exempt classes” to do so. This guaranteed the perpetuation and exacerbation of a gender imbalance that went way beyond the merely lopsided; it would lead to formation of what would become known as a “bachelor society.”

In response, New York’s Chinatown turned farther inward. In 1883 all the city’s fang and clan associations combined into an umbrella organization called the Zhonghua Gong Suo, a group that for much of the next century would serve as Chinese New York’s unofficial but extremely potent local government. In 1887 its officials purchased a building on Mott Street, and Tom Lee, now styled as “Chairman of the Chinese Municipal Council,” raised twenty-five thousand dollars for a new structure. When the building finished in 1890, the organization incorporated itself under state law and came to be called the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of the City of New York (CCBA).

The CCBA was not a conventional Chinese institution transplanted to the metropolis but a local response to local conditions. The organization became the place where groups and powerful individuals settled disputes. It allocated business sites to hand laundries and required them to maintain a fixed schedule of prices. It kept records of leases and business contracts and posted on the board in front of its headquarters notices about partnerships formed and businesses or goods up for sale. Its agents watched docks and rail stations to make sure no one left town without settling debts. It acted as liaison to the rest of the city and defended community interests in municipal forums.

New Yorkers, spared by the 1882 act and its 1892 extension from invasion by “Mongolian hordes,” now embarked on their own invasion of Chinatown. To adventurous uptowners the area’s “evils