Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown

The Story of the Tong Wars

in San Francisco’s Chinatown

“The Chinese are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare and a lazy one does not exist.”

—
Roughing It,
Mark Twain

KIPLING was right—at least, temporarily. East
was
East, West
was
West, and the twain did not really meet, as equals, in San Francisco for some twenty-five years after his now invalidated pronouncement of 1889.

For although some 30,000 Chinese resided in the environs of San Francisco’s Dupont Gai, as the Chinese called Grant Avenue (old Dupont Street), and although they constituted a whole city within a city, they were never fully accepted during the entire nineteenth century. Indeed it was not until after World War I that first-class citizenship was extended to San Franciscans of Chinese extraction.

Much of this apartheid is to the discredit of San Francisco, of course. The general lack of such antisocial diseases as Jim Crowism and anti-Semitism in its history has unfortunately been cancelled out by a long and unpleasant era of anti-Chinese feeling. This campaign was carried on for decades by rabble-rousing demagogues for the most part, but not entirely. The more respectable politicians, members of the public in general, civic leaders, the pulpit and even the usually enlightened press were all guilty of bigotry and oppression. Of course there were many exceptions to this tendency, ranging from Reverend Otis Gibson to irreverent Mark Twain.

But the blame for the apartness of the Chinese in Gum San Ta Fow (Big City in the Land of the Golden Hills) of some 75 or even 50 years ago does not rest entirely with the host community. For 50 years after the Gold Rush, Chinatown was the Celestial Empire’s most far-flung political and cultural outpost. Chinatown was run, not by the Mayor of San Francisco, but by the Consul General of Imperial China and the Six Companies. (This was so until the fighting tongs moved in with a rule of terror.) The Quarter was not merely an ethnic enclave in the city, like the Italian sector of North Beach. It was truly China in San Francisco.

Much of the fault for the misunderstanding, the suspicion, and the lack of cooperation which existed between the two peoples and which kept them apart so long was due to the unwillingness of the Chinese to integrate—to even acclimate to the extent of modifying their dress or diet in their new environment. The reason was not, as Hinton Helper and others suggested, an outright hostility to Caucasians and their customs, based on a superiority complex. Rather, it was simply that the average Oriental did not—
could
not—pick up the language and customs of his new home, and frankly saw little reason to do so. He preferred to live with his own kind. He did not intend to stay. John would have remained an alien even had citizenship been thrust upon him at this stage of San Francisco’s history. He might go so far as to trade his split-bamboo basket hat or skullcap for a wide-brimmed, black felt fedora, but he kept his old ideas and philosophies. Inwardly he refused to change. The so-called coolie was the alien par excellence. The term coolie gained wide acceptance as a synonym for Chinaman in the vocabulary of Americans. It was an Anglo-Indian word, not a Chinese term at all, and came from the Bengali or Tamil word
kuli
which signified “burden bearer” and which originally meant “bitter work.” For a coolie it was much easier to form his own little China in the midst of bustling, confusing Fah-lan-sze-ko (San Francisco) than to undergo the psychological wrenching necessitated by the passage from one culture to the other. The typical Chinese immigrant of the 1850s wanted to remain in Ka-la-fo-ne-a no longer than necessary. When he had made his pile—perhaps $500—he would return home to his patient wife and family for a life of relative ease in Kwangtung. The typical Chinese in the Big City of the Golden Mountains was what the sociologists describe as a sojourner—here today and gone (home) tomorrow. John was just passing through. He did not want to be assimilated; on the contrary he preferred to be insulated from the
fan kwei
(foreign devils) all around him. He had one foot in Frisco but the other was still firmly planted in Canton. His great ambition was to make a lot of money and become a
Gum San Hock
—a returnee from the Golden Hills. While he was in San Francisco his one pressing desire was to be left alone.

The English traveler, Mrs. Algernon St. Maur, determined the real cause of the strained relations between Chinese and Caucasian San Franciscans early. She said: “The only real difficulty is that the Chinese do not make citizens. America wants citizens.”

Police Chief George W. Walling of New York not only described the attitude of withdrawal practiced by Chinese immigrants, but also unconsciously betrayed the prevailing bias of Americans of that day against the puzzling newcomers. Walling said of the Chinese: “Suspicious as a man who finds himself in a den of thieves, he is ever on the watch, while he works, for some new manifestation of that American temperament which his own mind, dense with the superstition of many thousand years, can never quite understand.”

The posters of Hong Kong which had led to his sailing to the Embarcadero in the first place had told John that California was a nice country without Mandarins or soldiers. Leery of these two elements of mankind, he steered clear of the few Yankee Mandarins (officials) and soldiers (policemen) he saw. He did his best to blend into the landscape, like a chameleon. But the Chinese was so
outré
because of his costume, coiffure and habits, that even in as diversified a city as San Francisco he stood out starkly.

In the last 50 years the people of San Francisco have tried to make up for the shoddy treatment meted out to the city’s great minority group during the first 50 years of its existence. There is no doubt that the city has taken Chinatown to its heart, and the affection is sincere. But more important to the metamorphosis of Chinatown since 1850, or the bloody tong-war days of 1880, is the fact that somewhere along the way—at some unknown day and hour, at some invisible line in time—the majority of the residents of Chinatown decided to stay; to become Americans. The sojourners became a minority. Slowly and surely San Francisco began to win over the larger segment of its Oriental population. It was as simple as that—and as complicated. No one can put his finger on any particular individual who took the lead, any more than one can ascribe the change of attitude to a given year. It was a gradual process of change—of unwitting acclimatization. But acceptance and integration were not easy decisions to make for those involved. Even after death the ties with China were strong in the Chinese. Hence the shiploads of bones and ashes of the dead which year after year left the Embarcadero bound for Hong Kong. For example, when the French ship
Asia
sailed in January, 1858, she bore the embalmed bodies of 321 Chinese. When the great American clipper
Flying Cloud
followed her in February it was with the bulk of her cargo consisting of the corpses of 200 Chinese Argonauts. There were no older or stronger family, clan and homeland ties on the face of the earth than those in Chinese society.