The Tongs of Chinatown
By Michael Zelenko
With whispered stories of seedy opium dens, dark alleys, and daggers, from the 1850s to the 1930s the Tong Wars seized the American imagination. In early 1900s New York, Mock Duck, a brutal gang leader with an angelic face, was rumored to wear a chain mail shirt, carry two guns, and hide a small hatchet in his sleeve at all times. In San Francisco, a running war over a young girl saw the death of more than fifty Tong members. And in the hills surrounding the California logging town of Weaverville, citizens placed bets on a full-fledged battle in which six hundred Tong members sparred using crudely fashioned spears, shields, helmets, and swords.
Tongs originated in Chinese immigrant communities in the United States in the early 1800s as associations that provided legal, monetary, and protective services to a wave of laborers excluded from mainstream American institutions. Among other services, the Tong—a word literally meaning “meeting hall”—provided loans to members in need and solved disputes between members. As racially based persecution against Chinese people intensified throughout the nineteenth century, Tongs proliferated as one of the few resources immigrants could turn to in difficult times.
Tongs played a particularly large role in Northern California as thousands of Chinese immigrated in the second half of the nineteenth century, first to mine gold and later to log forests, start farms, and provide the labor to build much of the state’s infrastructure. By 1890, San Francisco was home to an estimated twenty-one thousand Chinese immigrants—more than 9 percent of the city’s population. A large portion of that community associated with the numerous Tongs of Chinatown.
In San Francisco, the 1960s and ’70s saw gangs of Chinese men born in the United States displaced by vicious foreign-born organizations, such as the Wah Ching and the Joe Boys, with bloody consequences. On September 4, 1977, three Joe Boys stepped into the Golden Dragon, a Chinatown restaurant, to attack two rival gangs including the Wah Ching. They sprayed the restaurant in gunfire, killing five individuals and injuring eleven—all of them innocent bystanders. As one of the deadliest incidents in San Francisco history, the massacre marked a milestone in Chinatown’s gang history, led to the creation of the San Francisco Police Gang Task Force, and fundamentally changed the way the city treated Chinatown.
Author Bill Lee grew up in the turbulent San Francisco Chinatown of the 1960s and ’70s and was a member of the Joe Boys. While absent from the Golden Dragon Massacre, Lee was one of the first individuals questioned in the shooting. In 1999 he published his first book, Chinese Playground: A Memoir, chronicling his life and the development of criminal influences within the Tongs and gangs of Chinatown. Since the publication of his book, Lee has kept a decidedly low profile, mentoring incarcerated youths and publishing a second book about his struggle with gambling, Born to Lose.
MZ: Let’s start with your family history, and how far back your family has been in the United States.
My parents immigrated here—my father actually arrived here first, and because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, he had to come as a “paper son.” He came as the son of a merchant who wasn’t actually his father, and that’s how we got the last name Lee—so Lee is actually a false name. I grew up thinking our real last name was Chin, but later on, when I got older and had problems with gambling, my mother confided in me that even Chin wasn’t our real name. It was really Yee, because my biological grandfather was a gambling addict and sold my father due to his addiction. My father ended up with the Chin family, who was very well-off. But they lost everything when the communists took over.
This is an excerpt of “The Tongs of Chinatown”