The Chinatown Trunk Mystery

Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City

Mary Ting Yi Lui

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691216287
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman's strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese man named Leon Ling.
Through the lens of this unsolved murder, Mary Ting Yi Lui offers a fascinating snapshot of social and sexual relations between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sigel's murder was more than a notorious crime, Lui contends. It was a clear signal that attempts to maintain geographical and social boundaries between the city's Chinese male and white female populations had failed.
When police discovered Sigel and Leon Ling's love letters, giving rise to the theory that Leon Ling killed his lover in a fit of jealous rage, this idea became even more embedded in the public consciousness. New Yorkers condemned the work of Chinese missions and eagerly participated in the massive national and international manhunt to locate the vanished Leon Ling.
Lui explores how the narratives of racial and sexual danger that arose from the Sigel murder revealed widespread concerns about interracial social and sexual mixing during the era. She also examines how they provoked far-reaching skepticism about regulatory efforts to limit the social and physical mobility of Chinese immigrants and white working-class and middle-class women.
Through her thorough re-examination of this notorious murder, Lui reveals in unprecedented detail how contemporary politics of race, gender, and sexuality shaped public responses to the presence of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese exclusion era.

CHAPTER ONE

“Terra Incognita”: Mapping Chinatown’s Racial and Gender Boundaries in Lower Manhattan

DESPITE THE FACT that the victim and chief suspects neither lived nor worked in Chinatown and that the murder itself did not occur in Chinatown, the press and police nonetheless connected the murder to this part of the city. Newspapers such as the New York Evening Journal referred to the murder as a “Chinatown mystery.”¹ Before long, the murder became identified as the “Chinatown trunk mystery,” which also became the title of a 1910 play about the murder.² The public quickly concluded that the case was another example of Chinatown vice and immorality. The association of Chinatown with the Sigel murder was hardly an accident; it was, instead, clearly shaped by prevalent middle-class concerns over the seemingly unfixed place of women and Chinese immigrants in a rapidly changing commercial and industrial metropolis that rendered geographical borders and spaces less intelligible. To New Yorkers, Elsie Sigel’s death resulted from the increasingly unencumbered mobility of white middle-class women throughout a city that included working-class immigrant neighborhoods such as Chinatown. The linking of the murder to this part of Manhattan worked to contain discursively and physically the movements of these groups by creating and reaffirming the gendered borders of racialized territories such as Chinatown.

Journalists urged New Yorkers to take closer looks at their Chinese neighbors and their community in lower Manhattan’s Sixth Ward. Echoing earlier descriptions of Chinatown as “terra incognita,” they suggested that the general public’s failure to comprehend fully the distinct social, cultural, and political institutions of the Chinese in their city contributed to the death of Elsie Sigel.³ The editor of the Cosmopolitan, in his preface to a lengthy article on the Chinatown neighborhood published two months after the murder, alerted readers to the dangers of Chinatown and its Chinese residents. “It is a shock to the law-abiding people of this country to learn that in nearly all our great cities there are settlements of Orientals who are with us but not of us, who administer their own affairs according to their own conception of what is right and wrong, who never subscribe to or heed either our laws or our customs, and even arrogate to themselves the power of life and death over the people in the community.⁴ The editor’s claim of a shadowy Chinatown, and the ensuing article by police reporter Charles Somerville, promoted the idea that the Chinese and their communities would always remain foreign. Acknowledging the different European groups that had immigrated to the United States, Somerville concluded that for the last century America had been “a mighty crucible in the welding of a new people” but impressed upon his readers that the Chinese, unlike other immigrant groups, simply did not mix.⁵

In the same month Munsey's Magazine published an article, written by journalist William Brown Meloney, emphasizing Chinatown’s inscrutable terrain and mystical allure as grave threats to white womanhood. Describing his nocturnal adventures in Chinatown with a slumming party and its police escorts from the nearby Elizabeth Street station, he aimed to offer “a glimpse into the sordid underworld of the Mott Street quarter, where Elsie Sigel formed her fatal associations” to explain why so many young white women were attracted to Chinatown.⁶

Employing the popular narrative convention of rural innocence corrupted by urban vice, Meloney wrote that during the course of the evening “two young women—fresh-faced country lasses”—came perilously close to being ensnared in Chinatown’s web.⁷ During their visit to an opium den, he believed that the ambient smoke worked its way into the women, lowering their guard and affecting their behavior even after they had left the room: “They talk loudly; they laugh without occasion. Most of them fail to pull in their skirts now as the Chinese go jostling by them on the narrow sidewalk.”⁸ The party then headed past a shop window displaying lingerie for sale, and the two women tried to bargain with the Chinese storekeeper. Slipping into pidgin English, asking “how muchee,” they haggled with the Chinese storekeeper and pointed “unashamed at an article of feminine finery.” Though the women eventually left the store without purchasing the garment, the exchange deeply disturbed Meloney and Captain Michael Galvin, their police escort.

Captain Galvin noted that the exchange they had witnessed could very well become the beginning of the women’s descent into immorality. “ ‘That’s the way and that’s the kind,’ says Galvin, looking after the girls. ‘There is always a to-morrow for one or two of every slumming party, who have not seen enough the night before. Did you catch the pidgin English? I’ll bet those girls were never in a Chinatown in all their lives before to-night!”’⁹ The ease with which these women could slip into this racialized speech demonstrated the potential for racial and cultural contamination Chinatown posed to unsuspecting white female visitors. Galvin then instructed one of his plainclothes detectives to look out for the two women and keep them out of the neighborhood in case they returned to Chinatown the next evening.

Figure 1.1. A Chinese man’s white wife trapped in Chinatown, as described in William Brown Meloney’s article on Chinatown shortly following the Elsie Sigel murder. The original caption read: “A room on the second floor of a tenement-house on Pell Street—‘a coop with a wire-meshed window’—in which Lulu Shu, one of the white wives of Chinatown, has lived for eighteen years.” Source: William Brown Meloney, “Slumming in New York’s Chinatown,” Munsey's Magazine 41 (September 1909): 825. Courtesy of Yale University Library.

Having taken leave of the slumming party, Meloney then headed off under the escort of various plainclothes detectives from the Elizabeth Street station to visit several white women married to Chinese men to provide readers with a more intimate exploration into what attracted these women to this neighborhood. In recounting this part of the trip, Meloney devoted considerable attention to his encounter with a young woman named “Elsie,” who had married Chu Wing, a prosperous Chinese laundry owner, in St. Louis seven years earlier. The coincidence of her name and Meloney’s emphasis on her education and respectable middle-class family origins made her appear to resemble Elsie Sigel.

At first Meloney described this Elsie as appearing to be content with her current life, but later revealed that she actually felt desperately trapped in Chinatown. In a sense she fared only slightly better than Elsie Sigel, whose racial trespassing had led to her entombment in Leon Ling’s trunk. “No chains, no barred doors hold us here! But there is a wall! You cannot see it; you cannot even imagine it; but it is there! I can see it! I have dashed myself against it and been hurled back!” Elsie continued by adding that she only knew of “but one white woman to get over that wall and back to our own kind,” and that was only through the help of a newspaper man who had come across her while working on a story.¹⁰ The man worked incessantly to persuade her to leave with him so that she could “see real rainbows and green trees and grass” outside of the fake ones she experienced while in “poppyland.” She eventually left Chinatown and took up typing and stenography and worked in the same newspaper office as her rescuer. Only through the intervention of a white male hero, such as this journalist, could women such as Elsie hope to escape the trap posed by Chinatown and pass through those invisible “walls” to regain respectability by becoming part of their “own kind” again. Yet, the woman in Elsie’s story did not experience the “happy ending” expected of working-class heroines. She never married, suggesting that a complete social redemption was impossible even though she had left Chinatown. By recounting the stories of Elsie and this unnamed woman, Meloney provided a cautionary tale of the hidden dangers of Chinatown to his white middle-class female audience: women who dared to engage in such sexual and racial transgressions would either become trapped or remain permanently tainted by their association.

THE MAKING OF THE CHINATOWN SPACE

Chinatown’s rise as a site of cultural interest for middle-class New Yorkers occurred as the city experienced the rapid urbanization and expansion that brought an end to the walking city and saw the rise of new class-stratified residential, financial, and manufacturing districts. This period of growing urbanization in America instilled new fears of social fragmentation resulting from industrialization and deepening class divisions. The growing waves of new emigrants from southern and eastern Europe, along with smaller numbers of workers from Asia and the Middle East, also brought increased cultural and religious diversity that challenged the moral authority of the city’s Protestant religious institutions.¹¹ In response to these perceived problems, middle-class social reformers in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Progressive era sought to cure the ills of the city by focusing on what they identified as sources of social decay and moral corruption. Places like Chinatown, thought to be an enclave of vice and a danger to white womanhood, could not be ignored and social reformers sought not only to reinforce social and geographical boundaries to contain these threats but also undertook campaigns to “cleanse” Chinatown through the organizing of religious missions and anti-vice crusades.

Turn-of-the-century New York City writers, in turn, attempted to impose social and moral order onto the newly emerging modern cityscape by investigating and depicting life in different parts of the city. The writings of journalists like Meloney and Somerville helped to map out new class and gender boundaries on the city’s shifting residential and commercial geographies. As these popular narratives on Chinatown make clear, the policing of these borders was not so easily accomplished, and residents, including the city’s Chinese male and white female populations, continued to transgress them with alarming frequency.

The publication of tourist guidebooks, for example, enabled visitors to move through city neighborhoods that were once considered foreign and inscrutable because of the rapid settlement of new immigrants. The guidebook similarly worked to demarcate neighborhoods and bring order to the increasingly chaotic and spatially fragmented city. By cataloguing, naming, and describing these locales, such books rendered each neighborhood’s hidden dangers visible, allowing nonresidents to traverse the terrain unharmed. The following description of New York City’s Chinatown, listed under “Chinese” in the 1879 edition of Appleton's Dictionary of New York and Vicinity, depicted the neighborhood in a manner that exemplifies the usual entries found in most New York City guidebooks of this period:

New York has now quite a large Chinese population, which is mainly engaged in the laundry business. The laundries are scattered all over the city, but the Chinese quarter—in so far as it can be said that there is one—is in the neighborhood of the Five Points, especially in Mott st. [sic]. It is there that the Chinaman may be found disporting himself in ill-smelling, squalid apartments, smoking his favorite opium pipe—to the sale of which several shops are devoted—or gambling at his peculiar game of cards. The best day to see him here “at home” is Sunday, when the laundries are closed, and John takes things easy after the manner of his “Melican” customer. There is a Joss house one corner and then to gamble in another. A Christian mission occupies a building near it, where the first step in the work of proselytism is to teach the English language.¹²

This description, one of the first to appear among the city’s many guidebooks, helped to locate the neighborhood and render visible its main physical features that made it distinct from the rest of lower Manhattan: Joss house, gambling den, opium joint, etc. Such descriptions not only worked to guide readers to identify the physical markers that would indicate their arrival into the neighborhood but also warned of the potential moral and bodily risks involved.

The mention of Five Points by Appleton's Dictionary also clearly linked Chinatown to lower Manhattan’s working-class neighborhoods, further evoking images of urban poverty, disease, and immorality. Since the late 1820s the clearance of the Five Points slum area was debated by city officials, land developers, and city proprietors.¹³ The infamous cholera epidemic of 1849 was popularly rumored to have originated in this area;¹⁴ Charles Dickens’s descriptions of the wretched living conditions of the inhabitants of the Five Points neighborhood in his American Notes augmented the area’s notoriety in national and international circles.¹⁵ During the mid-nineteenth century, buildings such as the “Old Brewery” located on Park Street near Worth, was rumored to have been the most densely populated building with as many as 1,200 inhabitants at one time, and became a frequently cited example of urban poor overcrowding.¹⁶

The Sixth Ward, which housed the Five Points area, was equally infamous in the minds of New Yorkers as the “bloody sixth,” so described because of the history of reputed violence there between rival working-class gangs. Since the 1820s, gangs with ...