Don't Box Me In

Mary Ting Yi Lui. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xiii + 298 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

Elsie Sigel's dead body was found in a trunk. The press and police believed that the nineteen-year-old white woman had been placed there by Leon Ling, the Chinese man to whom she had written "love letters." While that may have been literally true, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery shows that white women and the Chinese men with whom they were involved, and the Chinese community in general, have also been placed in boxes by commentators, the authorities, and most subsequent historians. Mary Ting Yi Lui breaks open those conceptual containers. Chinatown, she argues, was not simply in New York—"geographically bounded" and "structured along lines of racial and ethnic solidarity and homogeneity"—but of New York (p. 224). White men and women from both the working class and the middle class flowed into the neighborhood, and Chinese men flowed out. In the process, inter-racial relationships were formed, and Chinese men created identities that confounded the racial understandings of white Americans.

Notwithstanding its title, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery is thus not another contribution to the burgeoning genre of social and cultural histories of particular criminal cases. It does explore a murder, and, like those microhistories, grounds that event in a "thorough, multi-dimensional contextualization."¹ But no one was ever charged with killing Elsie Sigel; Leon Ling disappeared without a trace. As a result, there was no trial, the source of much of the narrative that constitutes the typical form of the microhistory. But in Lui's imaginative study, the case provides a narrative thread on which to hang an investigation of "the role of racial discourses in formation of spatial relationships in Asian American communities," and of the importance of not just race and ethnicity, but "gender and sexual politics in the making of Chinatown" (p. 224).

Lui begins by exploring how journalists, social reformers, and the police created and affirmed the boundaries of Chinatown. Prompted by shifts in the city's residential and commercial geographies that made "borders and spaces less intelligible," that undertaking was part of an effort to "impose social and moral order onto the newly emerging modern cityscape" (p. 17, 21). Investigations and depictions catalogued visible signs, odors (particularly the smell of opium), and sounds that set Chinatown apart from rest of city, establishing it as a self-contained colony where the Chinese could meet all their needs, "an enclave of vice and a danger to white women" (p. 20). That area was constructed in gendered terms, as a space that could be penetrated only by white men, who, unlike women, "possessed physical prowess, street savvy, and self restraint" and were thus able to remain untouched by the dangers of the neighborhood (p. 41). That white women—journalists, missionaries and social workers—nonetheless did travel the streets of Chinatown prompted "public concern and outrage" (p. 51).

What Lui is analyzing here is surveillance, and although she does not address this concept explicitly, the book highlights the need to conceive it more expansively than is typically done by historians. The surveillance of Chinatown involved not simply gathering information in order to make the neighborhood legible to the white middle class, the only activity generally associated with the concept, but also using that information as the basis of regulation. The police mounted raids and curfews aimed at removing white women and thrill seekers and turning Chinatown into a strictly Chinese district.

Not only whites crossed the permeable boundaries of Chinatown; so too did Chinese men. Although Elsie Sigel's murder was quickly associated with Chinatown, Leon Ling's room, where the body was found, was in fact at 782 Eighth Avenue, in Midtown. He was not alone among the Chinese American population of the city in living outside the Chinatown...