The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City by Mary Ting Yi Lui (review)

On June 18, 1909, New York City Police Officer John Reardon uncovered the putrid body of Elsie Sigel in a trunk, with a rope wound round her neck. The room where her corpse was found bore thirty-five love letters addressed to William L. Leon, a "Chinaman" also known as Leon Ling. Sigel, a young Protestant missionary and the granddaughter of a prominent Civil War general in the Union Army, had written the letters. Soon, papers around the country were abuzz with the news of her death and the disappearance of her alleged killer and lover.

Responses to the brutal event become emblematic, in The Chinatown Trunk Mystery, of attitudes toward the Chinese and other immigrants in the United States. Juridical and popular accounts of "Chinatowns" often enforced the sense that the Chinese immigrant community was hermetic. But the cultural and geographical boundaries that were thought to separate Chinatown from the rest of Lower Manhattan's immigrant neighborhoods were permeable: only 4,000 Chinese were estimated to have lived in Chinatown in 1898. The rest, numbering 13,000, were scattered throughout metropolitan New York. According to Lui, social reformers such as Elsie Sigel, the city's police force, and Chinese and non-Chinese residents contended daily for dominance over Chinatown.

The death of Sigel and the implication of Leon Ling dramatized the sense of danger in encounters across perceived ethnic boundaries. The public learned that white middle-class women, like Sigel, ventured voluntarily into Chinatown; and census surveys revealed that an overwhelming number of interracial marriages existed there. The capture of Leon Ling came to mean effective regulation of Chinese movement, but the sweeping manhunt for his capture was doomed to failure from the start. "With police and civilians doubling their efforts to scrutinize every Chinese person in the country, these efforts," Lui writes, "demonstrated the problems derived from executing a search for a man that ultimately depended on the illusion of racial differences and classifications for success." Leon Ling could not be captured, precisely because he was thought—despite every indication to the contrary—to be fixed and locatable in one place.