The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [107]
During the Great Depression, the San Francisco Chinese, concerned about the business slowdown, redoubled their efforts to draw tourist revenue, no matter the means: “Make tourists WANT to come; and when they come, let us have something to SHOW them!” The result was a live fantasy version of the “wicked Orient,” exploiting the most debased stereotypes of the Chinese. Tour guides spun tales of a secret, labyrinthine world under Chinatown, filled with narcotics, gambling halls, and brothels, where beautiful slave girls, both Chinese and white, were kept in bondage. They ushered gaping tourists into fake opium dens and fake leper colonies.
Other Chinatowns across the United States also played the tourist game. In Los Angeles, teenagers earned money after school by pulling rickshaws for white sightseers. In New York City, where tourism in Chinatown had already thrived for decades, guides warned visitors to hold hands for safety as they walked through the neighborhood’s streets. They paid Chinese residents to stage elaborate street dramas, including knife fights between “opium-crazed” men over possession of a prostitute.
The reality of the 1930s was that Chinatown neighborhoods were actually becoming less violent. The tour guides, who entranced their white audiences with stories about hatchetmen and highbinders, were describing a bygone era that reflected poorly on the realities of modern organized crime within the Chinese community. By the early twentieth century, Chinese tongs had become more professional in their operations, less willing to risk scaring off white tourists with real bloodshed. If in previous years merchants and tong leaders had fought over money, they now colluded to increase profits. In fact, merchants themselves often joined tongs to expand their power base, and in some instances the line between respectable Chinese businessman and crime syndicate leader vanished altogether. Historian Adam McKeown has noted that in the 1930s, the minutes of the Hip Sing tong, historically a powerful criminal and extortionist association, resembled the meetings of “a joint stock company.” Each branch voted for a “congressman” to represent local interests at the national meeting, the topics discussed including protection and extortion rates, deadlines for payment, and the distribution of revenue.
Although prostitution in Chinatowns also declined through this period, thanks largely to the efforts of missionaries and middle-class Chinese activists, the purveyors of the tourist trade continued to exploit flesh for profit. During the 1930s, Charlie Low opened the Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco Chinatown, hiring hundreds of Chinese women (most of them middle-class and college-educated) to dance in his floor show. Like the famous Cotton Club in Harlem, Low’s establishment featured ethnic minority talent performing before a largely Caucasian audience. When Low put nude acts on the stage, he scandalized all of Chinatown, which condemned the dancers as whores. Outraged mothers forbade their daughters to work there or even to go near the place. But many young Chinese women continued to take the work. Sex appeal was lucrative, and the Forbidden City thrived, attracting more than one hundred thousand customers a year, among them senators, governors, and at least one future president (Ronald Reagan, then a young actor, is reported to have been an eager patron). Toward the end of the decade, the World’s Fair in San Francisco exposed the crass ambitions of certain Chinatown merchants eager to distort the image of Chinese women to entice white sensibilities. When the organizers of the fair committed $1.2 million to build an authentic Chinese village on Treasure Island,