In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

18 I’ll Cut Your Head Off If You Write Such Things (1888–91) Stamping out vice among America’s Chinese was a cause to which Wong had been committed for many years. As he saw it, giving up destructive, Old World customs like opium smoking was part and parcel of becoming Chinese American. America’s Chinatowns, many of which grew up in urban areas considered squalid before the Chinese ever arrived, had become hotbeds of gambling halls, brothels, and opium dens. As long as Chinese were associated with such undesirable and, in some cases, criminal activities, they were unlikely to gain the respect or the rights he believed they deserved. In 1888, Wong counted about 25 Chinese firms in New York that dealt in refined opium, both wholesale and retail. Opium was smoked in 11 private “joints” and was sold at $2.25 an ounce. A regular “fiend,” he wrote, would consume about an ounce a day. Wholesalers charged $8.35 per four-ounce can and sold the drug to customers not only in Manhattan but also in other cities and towns in and around New York state. By Wong’s calculation, nearly $1 million changed hands in a year in New York’s opium trade.1 Opium and its derivatives were not yet illegal in the United States—they would not become so until the twentieth century—but they were taxed by the federal government to discourage their use. In the late 1880s, the tax was $10 per pound; smuggling was therefore a lucrative endeavor. Much of the drug came into the United States from Canada; much of the illicit activity was undertaken by Chinese. Opium that reached New York was often imported from China by steamship, refined in British Columbia, transported east on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and then smuggled in small boats across the St. Lawrence River. Another method was to ship it directly into America in bulk, with certification that it was to be re-shipped to a third country, and then to divert it once it was ashore.2 Of 140,000 178 The First Chinese American pounds of Havana-bound opium bonded in New York between 1885 and 1888, for example, only an estimated 8,000 pounds actually made it to Cuba. At $10 per pound, Uncle Sam had been defrauded of $1,320,000.3 Because it deprived the government of revenue, drug smuggling was considered an economic crime, so it was the Treasury Department’s responsibility to crack down on it. At the Port of New York, this effort was overseen by Maurice F. Holahan, a Tammany Hall figure who had served in the State Assembly and been appointed chief special agent by President Grover Cleveland in 1885.4 It was to Holahan that Wong applied with a novel idea that would address not only his desire to eliminate opium smoking among Chinese, but also his need to earn a living: he offered to help catch smugglers.5 In a letter to Holahan—news of which somehow made it into the press—Wong asked for the position of special treasury agent and promised to expose big smuggling operations in New York’s Chinatown. With his Chinatown contacts, he was probably wellpositioned to deliver on such a pledge. In return, however, he asked that he be permitted to keep 50 percent of the value of any contraband seized as a result of his efforts.6 Holahan thought Wong’s terms very steep, and told a reporter that, in any event, he did not have the authority to hire him under such terms.7 As few understood better than Wong himself, interfering with the lucrative business enterprises of the Chinese underworld was never cost-free. By his own estimate, New York was home to as many as 350 Chinese “highbinders,” a term the New York Telegram explained as “Chinese desperadoes.” And sure enough, within two weeks of Wong’s offer to help curb the opium trade, there was another attempt on his life. On March 6, he asked the Essex Market Police Court to issue a warrant for the arrest of Lee Sing, a thug he claimed had knocked him to the floor the previous night. Wong had been taking an American friend on a tour of Chinatown when he stumbled on a secret meeting of highbinders. Lee and others grabbed him by the collar, beat him, and attempted to strangle him.8 They might have succeeded had not Wong’s friend dragged...

Share