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4 Soiled Doves (1873–74) Shortly after the SS MacGregor dropped anchor off San Francisco’s Black Point Battery on the evening of September 9, 1873, a large envelope was smuggled ashore and quietly delivered to the office of the chief of police. No one saw who brought it. The envelope contained a letter written in English on two pieces of rice paper in the names of seven Chinese passengers and 100 others whose names were not given. The purpose of the note was to seek police intervention on behalf of 14 young women on board who were being brought to America against their will.1 “We sincerely hope that the good laws of California will do their utmost to obtain freedom for the oppressed ones,” it read, proceeding to list 11 of them, the three others too afraid to provide their names. Sold into servitude by poor parents, enticed by bogus promises of marriage, or perhaps kidnapped by unscrupulous middlemen, the terrified girls were traveling under the watchful eye—and corporal discipline—of two older Chinese women. Like many before and after them, they were being imported as prostitutes. Respectable Chinese women did not, for the most part, come to America during this era. Unmarried women would seldom have made the journey unless betrothed or forced into the sex trade. And few of the married men who came looking for gold brought their wives because of the rough and dangerous conditions and a fear that they might be treated poorly in a foreign land. Nor was there any place for reputable females in the grueling life of railroad workers. As a result, there were more than 11 Chinese males for every Chinese female in California in 1870. This statistic, taken together with the fact that Chinese men did not have easy access to the white community , begins to tell the story of why the sex trade prospered, and why brothels (of which San Francisco had 159 in 1870) looked regularly 40 The First Chinese American to China to replenish their supply of young women. By one estimate, fully 71 percent of the approximately 2,000 Chinese women in San Francisco in 1870 were employed as prostitutes.2 The key player in the importation of sex workers was a triad organization called the Hip Yee Tong, which by one reckoning was responsible for bringing 6,000 women into the United States between 1852 and 1873, nearly 90 percent of all the Chinese women who arrived. The underground organization’s estimated earnings for that period were about $200,000.3 Typically, Chinese girls imported for prostitution would be taken to temporary quarters in Chinatown until arrangements were made and fees paid. Some would have been promised to clients before they left China, but others would be offered to brothels after their arrival, with the prettier ones going to the higher-class houses that catered only to Chinese patrons and the less attractive ones to lower-class establishments with mixed clientele . The girls could expect to work, under exploitative contracts, for four or five years until the fees for their passage and for the middlemen , and any payments made to their parents were all repaid and a handsome profit earned at their expense.4 After this, they would be free to leave—to marry, work elsewhere, or to return to China. The authorities found it hard to police such arrangements, because the girls’ keepers generally restricted their freedom and threatened them with harm if they cooperated with law enforcement. But some of the MacGregor girls had expressed a willingness to talk. In a postscript , the letter writer had added, “the girls say they will brave it out this time, and tell the truth before the Court and before their mistresses that they were brought here against their wish.”5 The chief of police understood immediately the importance of preventing any contact with the agents waiting on shore, lest the girls be intimidated further: he arranged for special officers to go to the wharf the next day and escort them directly to the police station.6 This maneuver was not wholly successful, however. The “vile procuresses and their still viler agents” followed the girls into the station, coaching them exactly as to how to answer the questions that would be posed of them.7 The police sent for the Rev. Dr. Otis Gibson, a Methodist pastor who had spent a decade as a missionary in Fuzhoubefore returning to the United States in 1865...

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