Interstitiality

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery

I am reading an interesting book right now for an Asian American reading group to which I belong. It is called The Chinatown Trunk Mystery by Mary Ting Yi Lui. It uses the true story of an unsolved mystery as its basis for constructing a social, racial, and gendered history of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. The mystery involved a Chinese man named Leon Ling, in whose apartment was found the murdered body of a young white woman, Elsie Sigel. Sigel’s body was found in a trunk within Leon Ling’s apartment, hence the title of the book.

The book traces the ways in which gender and race were policed within New York, a state in which there were no miscegenation laws. With the absence of a legal code for controlling the interaction between Chinese men and white women, cultural norms, social institutions, and popular opinion became driving factors.

On a personal note, it made me realize that I take many things for granted. There would have been many things within the social structure of early 20th C. N. America that would have made it difficult for Michelle and I to have the life that we do. The book details incident after incident of how men and women were treated with suspicions because of their interracial marriage. White women who were with Chinese men were assumed to be morally weak. They were assumed to be poverty stricken and drug dependent. Chinese men were seen as evil predators who would lure young white women into the vices of opium addiction. Japanese men were sometimes lumped together with Chinese men in this characterization (because, of course, all Asians look alike, ugh).

Needless to say, I am grateful to be in the interracial relationship that I have. Even if Michelle married me for my opium pipe!

Posted by Frank Yamada at March 11, 2005 07:41 PM