Imperial (79 page)

Dear Ging Gei
(and perhaps this was the same Ging Gei who’d written in the tunnel letter already quoted:
Ten to thirty people were caught here . . .). There is still no sign of their being released in the future. In response to your letter, we understand your situation. I asked Bak Gei to go to Wong Gei for the money Bak Gei had asked for to lend his friend for medical bills since Wong Gei owes your brother Bak Sei money. If you do not know who Wong Gei is, please go to Chung Wei for further clarification.

Another letter tells us that in 1928, thanks to the assistance of twenty-seven different communities, whose donations ranged between ten and ninety-nine dollars each, an elder by the name of Ting Zen
was able to go back to [the] home country and reunite with his family members . . . This announcement, in the name of Huan-Jiang-Xia General Association, was made to thank all the brother and sister donors.

The Mexican perception, fostered by such well-intentioned spokesmen as Mr. Auyón, that the Chinese always acted
en bloc
bears scant examination. In 1911, or perhaps a year or two before, a Chinese named Shi-Ping gets murdered by a “westerner” in Mexico. The Mexican government forecloses his property, whose eventual release two Chinese associations co-guarantee. The representative of one of the organizations, a man named Yu, begins to occupy the property. Huan-Jiang-Xia Association, which I presume is the other group, appoints someone to look into the case.
I went to the venue where brother Shi-Ping was murdered,
he reports
. I found everything was true, and there was [a] goods list with prices. The total value should be
4,414.90 rubies (currency denomination).
He meets with the consular officer, who rejects his determination, informing him that only eleven hundred rubies will be requested from the Mexican court.

Twelve years later, in 1923, a report from the Huan-Jiang-Xia Association concludes that the consular officer is “not capable,”
so if necessary, Huan-Jiang-Xia Association would take over the issue.
In other words, Huan-Jiang-Xia remains quite willing to lock horns with Yu and his Group Sub-Association.
Anyway,
the report goes on,
it is really unfair that brother Shi-Ping was murdered and his property was occupied illegally. We are of the same ancestor; we should help each other.
¹³⁷

And so one went downstairs to slowly read the
Chinese Republic Journal
with one’s brothers from Wong Kong Ja Tong, the association of Wongs, whose name appears on the letterheads and envelopes of many of these tunnel letters. (They’re still active, said Steve Leung in 2003. They still participate. They still send their members to the General Association. They still invite all of us to the New Year.) Maybe there’d be a game of mah-jongg. Maybe one stepped into the back room to negotiate a loan, building equity for the next generation. Perhaps one discussed with other brothers how to most appropriately benefit a destitute wife back in China. And probably one shared the fear, the grief when the Mexican government began to arrest Chinese, some of whom were one’s Tong brothers. How many people hid down here, and not merely against the sun itself, waiting at the bottom of the sea of light not simply until it was pleasant to surface in one of Mexicali’s twilight park-islands of screeching birds, but for weeks or maybe years? On one of my later visits to this tunnel, the Mexican cook, who was now forty-seven and had begun working at the Victoria when he was fifteen, came downstairs smiling and remembering, and he said to me: It was full of people—that room, too! There were seventeen apartments. Down here there were ten, and upstairs there were seven. It used to be really pretty down here . . .

What else do the Chinese tunnel letters say about these times? In 1925, we find Wong Kong Ja Tong in Sonora writing to Wong Kong Ja Tong in the Chinese city of Bukelesy, trying to track money its members have contributed to the Anti-Chinese Discrimination Organization. I discovered two letters on this topic. The reason Tongs subscribed to newspapers was that their members could not afford their own copies.
They overlook their own needs; they’re always thinking of the next generation.
That being the case, one can well imagine that these men of Wong Kong Ja Tong wouldn’t have donated money to the Anti-Chinese Discrimination Organization without cause.

Steve Leung said: In all the time I have been here, no Chinese has gotten murdered in Mexicali. But at the beginning of the twentieth century it was different. In that time, you can see a high concentration of Chinese people only here in Baja California. They started expanding into Sonora and Sinaloa, and the Mexicans didn’t like it, so they started killing the Chinese. So many were getting murdered. The government was kind of allowing it. You could shoot them and nothing would happen; the police would not prosecute the cases; a Mexican would take over the properties. There were some killed in Mexicali, a few dozen I would conservatively say; but the majority who were killed were in Sonora and Sinaloa; that was a few hundred Chinese who got murdered.

I find a letter on the letterhead of Wong Kong Ja Tong, with two witness signatures. It is written, so the translator notes, in excellent Chinese.
In response to your letter, I would like to inform you that ten to thirty people
(Chinese people, my translator clarifies)
were caught here. There is still no sign of their being released in the future. If I hear of any further news pertaining to this matter, I will let you know . . . 1924, October 29. From your brother, Ging Gei Chung Hi.

It was in 1919 that Prohibition began over in Northside. Guess which vices moved to Mexico? I read in the ever unreliable pages of Ramón Eduardo Ruiz that in this epoch, Mexicali’s Chinese casinos paid the police twenty-eight thousand pesos a month to stay open. In 1920, Chinese are said by one source to have owned ninety-two percent of the businesses in the city. (Do you want to know which source? Old Carmen Jaham referred me to him; he was
a certain painter; he knows what’s going on;
his name was Mr. Auyón.) If that were even half true, then what happened next would be predictable: In 1921, the Migratory Legislation prohibited Chinese immigration to Mexico. (The Chinese solution to that was equally predictable: Hide in tunnels.)

In 1924, the year after the first great fire which destroyed most of the Chinesca, the Governor of Baja California Norte signed a measure compelling the hiring of Mexicans at gambling establishments. At first this was enforced only against Mexicali Chinese. In Tijuana it took no effect against Americans until 1927, following a grassroots boycott. In his
Memoria administrativa del gobierno del Distrito Norte de la Baja California 1924-1927,
the Governor offers us the following account of the “Expulsion of Pernicious Individuals of the Chinese Nationality”:
A large quantity of individuals of the Chinese nationality who live in the municipality of Mexicali have created a problem which interrupts domestic tranquility . . . There are many secret Mafias amongst the Chinese, and they have the tendency to excite hatred and death between them. There have been horrendous homicides, many crimes. When the police tried to investigate these crimes it was almost impossible to accomplish anything due to bribery and obstructionism. In May of 1924 Señor Francisco Chiyoc, a prominent member of the Chinese colony, was murdered. Two months later the authorities and the police could not find any leads because the Chinese refused to help them.
(It was in that same year 1924 that Dashiell Hammett remarked in his latest San Francisco detective story:
Once more Tai ran true to racial form. When a Chinese shoots, he keeps on shooting until his gun is empty.
)

Governor Rodríguez continues his account:
The secretary of the Chinese Mafia was killed. Our Mexican constitution allows one to legally expel those who shed the blood of other people. So four citizens were deported.
(And in 2003 at the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, the ever kindly Señor Oscar Sánchez is searching through a book, trying to help me. He says: I’m trying to find where they threw out the Chinese because they were killing each other, one Tong against another.) On 2 October 1924 the Secretariat of Mexico sent a telegram to Mexicali stating there was in fact a Chinese Mafia, whose members were political enemies of the Republic. The authorities in Mexicali were authorized to expel the directors of said Mafia. Accordingly, forty-three more Chinese got deported.

Then came a respite from Chinese gang warfare until August 1927, when police discovered that forty pistols and two thousand cartridges were being delivered to local Mafias.
The inactivity of the past three years was just a big trick,
wrote the Governor.
What they were doing was making plans to kill each other.
So once again the authorities of Mexicali wrote the President of the Republic for permission to use Article Thirty-three of the Constitution. They expelled seven people.
It should be highlighted that the circumstances behind these cases involved serious previous investigation to arrive at the government’s being apprised of the imperious necessity to nip in the bud the cause of these bad happenings.

Although its references remain partially enigmatic, a certain tunnel letter from this year hints at some great weakness, suffering or disaster in the Chinese community when it says:
Thanks very much for flattering me and naming me to the position. However, I really can’t run for senator. The social-moral standard is going down day by day, and political situation[s] change easily. I am reflecting Yuan-Ji’s failure. Please select another capable candidate to rebuild our morale.

More heartbreaking is a letter dated November of 1934, which is to say a year after Prohibition was repealed and two years after the Anti-Chinese Campaign drove more families out of Sinaloa. (Here I transcribe a
New York Times
headline from 1931:
5 MEXICAN STATES CLEARED OF CHINESE.
Nearly All of 10,000 Orientals Who Lived There Are Gone . . .
MANY REDUCED TO POVERTY.
The states were Sonora, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Nayarit, but not Baja California Norte. Here also I quote the old Chinese shoe-store owner in Mexicali who said: I came in 1957. From 1950 to ’60 there were no problems between Chinese and Mexicans at all. But my grandfather said from 1930 to 1935 there were anti-Chinese activities.—I asked him what kind of activities these might have been, and he was silent, so I asked him again, and he looked away from my Mexican interpreter and said that he had never really heard and couldn’t answer much in detail.) The writer of this document is a certain Wu Ma Pho, whereabouts unknown. The recipient is Wong Kong Ja Tong in Mexicali:

The government has arrested a total of more than two hundred people. In Mexicali, of the twelve
[
Mexicali residents
]
of the two hundred arrested, four are our brothers

(Huang brothers, adds the translator).
They are being jailed for thirty days and will be released on the twelfth and thirteenth of this month. Please do not worry, but we still do not know what may happen in the future. According to the newspaper, seventeen of the merchants from your city will be deported and are currently waiting at the Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco. The newspaper has no proof so we cannot attain confirmation. So we asked one of our connections but he was not there. We do not know where he is. Another source informed us that on the twenty-sixth of last month, the seventeen hostages

were shipped off in
(and here the translator uses the words “cow cages” and “trucks,” with the note: “typically used for transporting criminals”),
to an unknown destination. Yet another source said that these seventeen merchants were killed on the thirty-first in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bridge. And another informant said that they are in Honolulu waiting for deportation. This is a sad, desperate and terrifying moment. There are innumerable rumors. We do not know the real truth. But do you know if any of these seventeen people are Huang brothers? If so, we will have the Chinese Ambassador Yun
(in China)
contact the Mexican government so that they will be spared. If you have any further news, please promptly let us know.

What finally happened to those seventeen merchants? How will we ever know? I find it hard to believe that they were killed at the Golden Gate Bridge, but the fact that such a possibility could have been considered at all shows how fearful and isolated these Chinese must have felt. Can you imagine them, sitting quietly in the hot humid darkness under Mexicali, playing mah-jongg and wondering whether the police would find them?

From what I heard, there was some Mafias, Steve Leung readily agreed. But the Mexicans were being unfair. As you see, Mexican society is very conservative, actually. They don’t want to let anybody in. So there is always some discrimination. At that time the Chinese when they got in here, they didn’t want to mingle. So that kept them a little apart from the Mexican society. In 1920-25, the Chinese society got so strong, so they started killing the Chinese people, taking their properties. My father had a boat ready with all the family, so they could go to the United States if those killers came into Ensenada.

I’m very sorry that your family had to suffer in that way.

Well, at the current moment, we’re still spending about ten or fifteen thousand dollars to bring a Chinese over here, which makes no economic sense, and we still don’t want to hire a Mexican person. So we also have our faults.

I found the chandelier, ornate wall-paper, nice molding and windows to be very fascinating,
Rosalyn continued,
especially since they were all Western styled as opposed to traditional Asian. We also found some portraits in the right back corner of the large room, which are probably of the past owners of the place. Mom did not recognize the people painted and so that rules out them being famous historical characters. She usually knows