Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (20 page)

But it was a police raid on Chee Kong tong headquarters in 1891 which smashed the secrecy around the tongs. A book of ritual was captured. This was passed on to Masters for translation and he found his long-held suspicions to have been correct. The book detailed the oaths of initiation, the secret signs, the passwords, and the military-like rules of the tong. Masters discovered that the neophyte had been escorted to Chee Kong tong headquarters by an Introducer. At the first portal the recruit was challenged by a guard and threatened with death. But having been given the password by his escort, the candidate would be allowed to enter. Inside he was told to get out of his Manchu costume and unplait his queue. These, of course, were signs of his renunciation of allegiance to the Manchu Emperor. He was then dressed in clothing of the Ming Dynasty, a five-colored gown with a white girdle around the waist, and a red turban such as those which figured in the Tai Ping Rebellion. Entering another portal, the Chee Kong convert was forced to drop on his hands and knees and to crawl under an archway of sword blades held by Lectors and the Chief Swordsman. He then had to bow to the Grand Master of the secret society, called the Ah Mah, or Mother. He too was dressed in Ming-style robes, with long but unbound hair.

The hatchet man-to-be, after declaring his acceptance of the tong’s twenty-one regulations, was given a potion of wine and blood (including some of his own) to symbolize the blood relationship with his tong brothers. He was next ordered to swear an oath:

By this red drop of blood on finger tip, I swear

The secrets of this tong I never will declare,

Seven gaping wounds shall drain my blood away,

Should I to alien ears my sacred trust betray.

The candidate then crawled under the bench or chair on which the Ah Mah was seated, symbolizing his “rebirth” as a tong member. After renouncing all allegiance to Emperor, family and clan, the young man was led to a third portal which opened into an area where he was introduced to the secret signs of worship of Heaven and Earth and the spirits of the monks slaughtered so long before by the Tartar soldiery. Incense and gilded paper were lighted, and wine and tea poured to propitiate the gods.

Newcomers who were guilty of past transgressions against the tong were forced to run a gantlet in which they were given a severe beating. However, this thrashing absolved them of any sins they had committed.

The final act of the initiation ceremony saw the newcomer joining the members in rhythmically chanting thirty-six oaths before the high altar as a rooster’s head was chopped off: a pointed reminder of the fate of any tong man who might break his oath. The chant was:

From rooster’s head, from rooster’s head,

See how the fresh blood flows,

If loyal and brave my course shall be,

My heir immortal renown shall see,

But when base traitor and coward turn I,

Slain in the road my body shall lie.

Many if not most of the other tongs had less impressive ceremonies than the tradition-conscious Chee Kongs. Candidates for membership in these other societies knelt in the tong’s joss room before a war god like Kwan Kong—also known as Kwan Ti or Kwan Yii—the military hero of the Three Kingdoms and originator of the Chinese blood-brother oath. Then, on the floor, before crossed swords and with another blade held over his head, the new highbinder swore fidelity and obedience to his tong.

The Chee Kongs had borrowed heavily from the ritual of the Triad Society in China. They kept a multiplicity of secret symbols and signs, even to the arrangement of a teapot and cups on a table top. The familiar Willow pattern of Chinese plates was actually a secret symbol for the Triad Society. Objects were also laid out to form the character “Hung,” for the secret name of the old Triad Society—the Hung League. A tripod was on hand, too, as a symbol of the Triad. Another secret sign was the peculiar way in which members wore their queues, winding them from left to right around the head rather than vice versa, and letting the ends hang down over the right shoulder instead of the left.

Masters found that the Chee Kongs even had a secret code of ludicrous but deadly euphemisms. To kill a person was rendered “to wash his body” (i.e., with his own blood). A rifle was called a “big dog,” a pistol was a “puppy.” Powder and bullets were actually called “dog feed” and the command to kill was “Let the dogs bark!”

Another crack in the tong’s armor of secrecy had developed about 1889, when the police seized a Chee Kong hatchet man in Victoria, British Columbia. On his person they found not only the usual weapons and coat of mail but also a document dated July 2, 1887. It was decorated with the seal of the Victoria branch of San Francisco’s own Chee Kong tong and was addressed to the bearer. It read:

To Lum Hip, Salaried Soldier. It is well-known that plans and schemes of government are the work of the learned holders of the seal, while to oppose foes, to fight battles and to plant firm government is the work of the military. This agreement is made with the above-named salaried soldier on account of sedition from within and derision and contempt from without. You, Lum Hip, together with all other salaried soldiers shall act only when orders are given; and without orders you shall not act. But in case of emergency when our members, for instance, are suddenly attacked, you shall act according to the expediency of the case and enter the arena, if necessary. When orders are given, you shall advance valiantly to your assigned duty, striving to be the first and only fearing to be found laggard. Never shrink or turn your back upon the battlefield.

You shall go under orders from our directors to all the vessels arriving in port with prostitutes on board and shall be on hand to receive them. Always be punctual; work for the good of the society and serve us with all your ability. If, in the discharge of your duties, you are slain, this tong undertakes to pay $500 sympathy money to your friends. If you are wounded, a surgeon will be engaged to heal your wounds, and if you are laid up for any length of time, you shall receive $10 per month. If you are maimed for life and incapacitated for service, you shall receive the additional sum of $250 and a subscription shall be opened to defray the expenses of your passage home.

This document is given as proof, as an oral promise may not be credited. It is further stipulated that you, in common with your comrades, shall exert yourself to kill, or wound, anyone at the direction of this tong. If, in so doing, you are arrested and have to endure the miseries of imprisonment, this society undertakes to send $100 every year to your family during the term of your incarceration.

Masters blamed the terrifyingly quick growth of tongs and highbinderism upon what he thought was shameful laxity and corruption in the courts. Law-abiding Chinese were also “locked out” of American courts, of course, by the prevailing climate of prejudice and misunderstanding. A California Chinese bitterly explained this feeling of isolation from law and order to Interpreter James Hanley: “In China, money can suborn witnesses sometimes when there is no positive proof and acquit a man of the crime of murder. But in this country money can acquit a man no matter how positive the proof. Several hundred persons witnessed two of my brethren cut to pieces like hogs, and because the murderers had plenty of money they were turned at large. If you call that law,” he snorted, “what ideas can you have of justice?”

Masters was convinced that most Chinese tong members in California would abandon the tongs for the side of the law and order
if
they had any confidence at all in the administration of justice in San Francisco. “Rightly or wrongly,” he mused, “they believe that criminals never get their just deserts.” He once described a shooting fray of October, 1890, which was witnessed by a large number of Chinese. When they were questioned, all the police could get from them was silence or a
“no sabe,”
and looks of stolid indifference. Masters explained the situation. “This taciturnity of the Chinese witnesses to highbinder crimes is very provoking, but the terror of the tongs is upon them. They dare not tell.”

As early as 1854, there were three tongs flourishing in San Francisco: the original Chee Kong, the Hip Yee and the Kwong Duck. To the dismay of the helpless district associations and family clans, these antisocial fraternities preferred to arbitrate their differences, real or imaginary, with an ax. Some say the Kwong Duck tong was organized by decent folk to fight the warlike Hip Yees. For a time the Kwong Ducks worked with Customs, identifying incognito slave girls as they disembarked from Pacific Mail steamers. The Hip Yee tong, too, was said to have started out honestly by protecting unwilling slave girls. But both ended up deep in criminal activities.

The Kwong Duck tong was apparently formed by Mock Tan who patterned it after San Francisco’s vigilance committees and who used terror and violence to force large family clans to quiet down. The Hip Sing tong, the only coast-to-coast tong, was begun with fifty members and a lot of fireworks, by Num Sing. The Hip Sings were then set up, and Yee Low Dai formed the Suey Sing tong. The Bing Kong tong, another secret society whose members liked to pose as “Chinese Masons” was started in Los Angeles. It failed there and was moved to “Big Town” (San Francisco) and “Second Town” (Sacramento) where it flourished in the hothouse climate for crime of those two cities. Eventually a Los Angeles branch was established. The tong’s head was Wong Du King, and although he was a fierce fighter he was liked by the singsong girls, who called him
Kai Yee,
or Godfather.

The Suey Sing tong got so big that its right wingers split off to form the Suey On tong while the far left deserted to form the Sen Suey Ying tong. But the great mass of Suey Sings were held together by such leaders as Hong Ah Kay, the poet, scholar, calligrapher and highbinder. Hong went wrong after his father was robbed by his associates and the Six Companies refused to help him. He was also in love with a slave girl named Kum Yong. When Kum Yong, fearful of the wrath of Hong’s rival, committed suicide, Hong was frenzied with rage and grief. He kicked the brothel’s madame down the stairs, wrecked the place, and started on a binge which may have been a record for an Oriental. It was at this time that he became a tong gunman, practicing his marksmanship in the fields outside Fresno. According to Eddie Gong, he was the man who changed the
modus operandi
of the hatchet man from cleaver, or ax, to revolver. When the Suey Sings took on the powerful Wong clan, Hong Ah Kay personally killed seven Wongs, or so the legend goes. The story is that his last victim was a prisoner in a cell next to Hong’s in the city jail. The clansman taunted and insulted Hong, so he stole a piece of barrel hoop, got a sharp point on it by honing it patiently on the stone floor, and stabbed the man to death. Hong Ah Kay escaped in the confusion and his tong shortly got him on a China-bound steamer. The Wongs were not asleep however. They tipped off the police and the vessel was searched. Hong was found in a tub under a coil of rope. He was convicted of murder and hanged. The Suey Sings and the Wongs finally called a truce. But the tongs were firmly in power now.

The Hop Sings hired Sing Dock, originally a Hip Ying but by then a member of eight tongs. He was believed to have been entitled to eight notches on the handle of his hatchet before he was killed in 1911, on the Bowery by Yee Toy—nicknamed Hangman’s Noose because whenever he appeared someone died. Sing Dock, called the Scientific Killer, and his seven cronies took on both the Bing Kongs and the Suey Sings. The Hip Sings were cautious, taking no part in the Suey Sing-Hop Sing-Bing Kong war. They did bestir themselves to wipe out the weak Hip Ying tong, however, and managed to take over the Chinatown in San Jose fairly well. But no one tong could be said to have been the sole master of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

One of the very first Americans to understand the tongs and the whys of their existence in Chinese-American society was the interpreter James Hanley. He warned the city, as early as 1856, of the tong men among the personnel of the Six Companies: “These institutions are without blemish if their members would only act in accordance with the established rules. But, unfortunately, they not only assist each other benevolently, but often in deeds of darkness, as we have witnessed here in California. For the last two hundred years they have been much oppressed by the Tartars and the venality of the magistrates, which has caused them to combine themselves into secret associations sometimes defying all law and order and carrying out their views just as they want them. Vigilance committees are of very old date in China….”

Not many years later, in September 1862, the Sacramento
Union
was already reporting such items as the following: “By telegraph from San Francisco we are informed that the war between the See Yup and Hop Wo companies of Chinese has commenced in that city. Two Johns were fatally wounded yesterday and sanguinary work is anticipated.”

The company men involved were undoubtedly tong members as well, though the Union did not realize this. In another twenty years reports of guerrilla warfare by these malevolent societies called tongs would be much more common and certainly no matter for levity. By that time tongs advertised brazenly on posters for the heads of their enemies. Hatchet men toured the bill-covered walls of Chinatown much as sailors congregated at a hiring hall. Possibly the first “advertised” tong killing in San Francisco was caused by an attack on Low Sing of the Suey Sing tong on a spring evening of 1875. He refused to tell police his attacker’s name but he told his fraternity mates. It was Ming Long, a Kwong Duck
boo how doy
and a rival for the hand of the slave girl Kum How. A poet named Mon Fung read aloud to the Quarter’s illiterati from the
chun hung,
or reward poster, on the wall at the corner of Clay and Dupont streets. It was a challenge to the Kwong Ducks to either send their best fighting men to Waverly Place at midnight of the following day or admit their error, compensate the Suey Sings, and apologize. The battle took place and the Suey Sings, crying
“Loy gee, hai dai!”
(Come on, you cowards!) scattered the Kwong Ducks. The small Chinatown squad had to call for reserves to break up the melee but there was not a single arrest made. All the combatants “evaporated,” save for three dead Kwong Ducks and one Suey Sing. (Six more men of both sides were on the wounded list.) The Kwong Ducks had to take up a collection among the merchants and turn it over to the victors with their apologies before they were invited to drink rice wine together again like brothers. According to highbinder Fish Duck, Low Sing recovered from his hatchet wounds and married the cause of all the trouble, frail Kum Ho. His rival, Ming Long, fled to China.