Celebrity Sightings and Sensationalist Mysteries: Chinese Americans, Inter-Racial Borders and Being American in Popular Culture

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. By Mary Ting Yi Lui (Princeton UP 2005)

Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity. By Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (University of California Press 2005)

In the sixty-plus years between the Chinese Exclusion Act and its repeal in 1943, the popular demand for goods from East Asia, and in particular China, was at an all-time high. American constructs and images of the Chinese were featured in museums, minstrel shows, the fashion industry, and dime store novels, and in the emerging narratives of Hollywood. Yet, while imported items were welcome, Chinese immigrants were not, despite the fact that Chinese labor was instrumental in the development of the mining and railroad industries. While U.S. immigration laws and the propaganda of the "Yellow Peril" have been widely documented in discussions of history, literature, politics, and sociology, few studies have discussed how popular culture framed the interactions between Chinese Americans and non-Chinese during this time.¹ Continuing the threads of such studies, Mary Ting Yi Lui's The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity delve into a new area of inquiry that focuses on alternative images of Chinese Americans which refute popular print journalism and Hollywood film representations. Both books explore Chinese American movements and crossings of racial, gender, and class boundaries, and question the more familiar image of American citizenship and identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Importantly, these works highlight the transient and subjective nature of racial categories even at a time when many believed racial categories to be more rigid than those of our current climate. Both books talk about the purposeful strategies that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans employed to survive, and even thrive, in the era of Chinese Exclusion and naturalization laws that denied the rights of citizenship to Chinese Americans and eventually to all Asians until after Second World War.

Mary Ting Yi Lui's book, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery, is the perfect blend of a thrilling mystery bestseller and a detailed cultural history—a book that mirrors the popular pulp fiction and newspaper serials that gained popularity in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As her frame for the book, Liu focuses on how one touchstone sensationalist murder mystery intersected, challenged, and highlighted race, gender, and class relations between Chinese and non-Chinese residents of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century New York. In June of 1909, New York police found the strangled body of Elsie Sigel stuffed in a large trunk in the apartment of her lover and former student, Leon Ling. Despite a massive international manhunt, Leon Ling was never captured and the case remains unsolved. Lui draws us in with the lurid details of the case and the popular press coverage of the murder. She then proceeds to answer the questions arising from this murder, such as how did a Chinese man and a white woman meet, study together, and become lovers at a time when cross racial interactions were often against the law? Mary Lui's creative, lively, and informative book addresses each aspect of this question with a chapter-by-chapter analysis.

The first two chapters of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery document the history of Chinese Americans in New York, and focuses on the social and cultural position of Chinese men at the turn of the nineteenth century. One of Liu's major interests is examining the physical mobility of Chinese Americans in New York, and thereby countering the popular static and one-dimensional stereotypes of Chinese as exotic others. Increased...