Empire of Orphans

05/19/21 • 32 min

No one knows just how the historical Yut Ho and Lee Yong met. Perhaps, as in our story, it was in the course of their daily routines. Yut Ho would almost certainly have lived a secluded life with her new husband. In Chinese immigrant society, most women worked alongside their menfolk. As a wealthy married woman Yut Ho had the uncommon luxury of staying home, but in practice, that luxury probably felt like a gilded cage. Chinatown was the most violent part of a violent, dangerous town, and Hing Sing’s close relationship with Sam Yuen meant that Yut Ho was automatically a target for Yo Hing’s machinations.

The politics of LA Chinatown were much as Lee Yong describes them in this episode. I have changed a couple of names for clarity: After the split in the Sze Yup Company, Sam Yuen’s faction did not actually retain the original company’s name. They started calling themselves the Nin Yung company- I thought it was too confusing with all the names changing, but I did decide to call Sam Yuen’s store Nin Yung (It was actually called Wing Chung) because of the importance of that name in the history.

As Lee Yong tells Yut HO in the story, Yo Hing’s company was really called the Hong Chow Tong. He was popular and charismatic, with a knack for getting out of trouble. The piece about Opium is my own invention, though it is not historically improbable. Opium was accessible to Chinese immigrants, who used it to varying degrees. It would not be much of a stretch for an enterprising polyglot like Yo Hing to open a line of business selling it to western doctors; this was Civil War era medicine, and painkillers were essential to the primitive, unsanitary and invasive practices of frontier medical men.

Yut Ho mentioned the (first) Opium War in Episode 2 because it was a direct cause of the Taiping rebellion. Though less bloody than the domestic conflicts that followed, the Opium war was the tipping point after which the Qing government descended into chaos. The fact that China was too large and too rich in human and natural resources to make outright conquest practical means that the impact of Colonial forays such as the Opium wars is often understated in the west. The period following the British wars is one of the most violent and tragic epochs in human history; Fighting continued in China until the communist victory in 1949, and was followed by the terrible famines of the Great Leap Forward, and the trauma of the cultural revolution. All told, well over 100 million people lost their lives during the collapse of Imperial China-nearly 20 times the number killed in the Holocaust or (estimated number) transatlantic slave trade.

To this day, many Chinese and Chinese Americans maintain a negative view of drugs, and opiates in particular because of the consequences of the very first Drug War: The one where the British told China to “Just Say Yes.”

In the Story, Sam Yuen’s decision to sell Opium in Chinatown is indicative of his hyper-competitive, myopic mindset. His disregard of Chinatown and its people would ultimately cost him his position as Company Headman, as well as causing the spillage of a large quantity of other people’s blood.

For more in-depth on LA Chinatown and the causes of migration, check out Scott Zesch’s thoroughly researched book, The Chinatown War.

If you have questions, thoughts, your own family stories, or historical context to share, please send us a message at @bloodongoldmountain on Facebook or Instagram.

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Blood on Gold Mountain is brought to you by The Holmes Performing Arts Fund of The Claremont Colleges, The Pacific Basin Institute of Pomona College, The Office of Public Events and Community Programs at Scripps College, The Scripps College Music Department, The Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department at The New England Conservatory, and our Patreon patrons.

Blood on Gold Mountain was written and produced by Yan-Jie Micah Huang, narrated by Hao Huang, introduced by Emma Gies, and features music composed by Micah Huang and performed by Micah Huang and Emma Gies. A special thanks to

For more in-depth on LA Chinatown and the causes of migration, check out Scott Zesch’s thoroughly researched book, The Chinatown War.

If you have questions, thoughts, your own family stories, or historical context to share, please send us a message at @bloodongoldmountain on Facebook or Instagram.

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Previous Episode

Bride Price

Life in California’s early Chinese communities was challenging and dangerous, particularly for women. Discriminatory laws made it harder for women to emigrate, leading to a severe gender imbalance in California’s Chinatowns.

Eve of Exclusion

Initially, the gender gap was a result of American employers’ perception that men were a more desirable form of cheap labor. However, the exclusion of women quickly became a mechanism for preventing Chinese communities from taking root in America. Yut Ho was fortunate to arrive before the Page Act of 1875, which severely restricted emigration of Chinese women by asserting that they were all prostitutes. This was the first US law explicitly restricting immigration and set the precedent for the Chinese Exclusion act.

Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women under the Page Law, 1875-1882

Women’s Lives on the Frontier

In fact, most of the Chinese women in California were married and worked as laborers or business owners. According to the 1870 census, there were thirty-four women in LA Chinatown and more than half of them were married. (Zesch, The Chinatown War, 61)

Of those who were unmarried, many were actually prostitutes. This was a normal state of affairs in the wild west; prostitution was was one of few ways American women could make money in frontier towns. Some estimates say that there were over 50,000 prostitutes of all nationalities in the West at the time of the Chinatown Massacre. Frontier society was dominated by rough men and rule of law was a questionable proposition at best. Under these conditions, most women were forced to rely on men, either through marriage or prostitution.

Where East and West Collide

The descriptions of Chinese marriage customs in this episode are based on inside information. While Western portrayals of Chinese women are usually demeaning and disempowering, traditional family structures had an elaborate system of checks and balances between the sexes. This is not to say that Chinese society was immune to patriarchy; it’s just that it contained matriarchal elements as well. The most famous 19th century Chinese matriarch was the Empress Dowager Cixi, who came to power after the first opium war and ruled China until her death in 1908. She belonged to an ancient tradition of female rulers, which dates back at least to the Tang dynasty. On a domestic scale, family matriarchs are still celebrated to this day as in the case of the writer’s grandmother, Yi-Yin Huang, or the fictional “Nai Nai” in the film, Crazy Rich Asians. Gendered divisions of labor are fluid and hard to pin down. However, some polls indicate that women still control finances in the majority of households in China.

Political Theater

Yut Ho’s unusual marital situation is a product of the bizarre ways in which respectability politics shaped LA Chinatown. While many of the details are fictional, it is indisputable that Yut Ho and a number of other Chinese women played a major role in the struggle between factions who vied for control over Chinatown. Yo Hing and Sam Yuen were both fond of accusing their rivals of mistreating women in order to damage their credibility in the press. The strategy was very effective in shaping public opinion, which was crucial in the tight-knit community of LA Chinatown.

If you have questions, thoughts, your own family stories, or historical context to share, please send us a message at @bloodongoldmountain on Facebook or Instagram.

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Blood on Gold Mountain is brought to you by The Holmes Performing Arts Fund of The Claremont Colleges, The Pacific Basin Institute of Pomona College, The Office ...

Next Episode

Beasts of Prey

Sam Yuen

Sam Yuen is one of the larger-than-life characters that drive the historical narrative of the LA Chinatown massacre. Historical sources paint a picture of a laconic, stoic-minded business leader whose traditional methods and lack of adaptability made him and his company vulnerable to disruption.

Sam Yuen was the leader of a conservative faction who thought that the Chinese community should restrict its contact with outsiders as much as possible. They were willing to provide services to wealthy non-Chinese residents of the surrounding area, but they did not go into business with people of different backgrounds. It was this attitude against which the upstart, Yo Hing was rebelling when he split off from the original Sze Yup company. By collaborating with wealthier and more influential Anglo and Latino business partners, Yo Hing aimed to fundamentally change the structure of Chinatown’s economic system. Traditionalists like Sam Yuen saw this as excessively risky. Tying up their money in joint ventures with “Gwailo,” who could turn on them at any moment was a grave cause for concern among the traditionalists, who were badly traumatized by the ethnic and political conflicts which had torn apart Qing Dynasty China.

Though he rarely spoke to the press, Sam Yuen was influential enough that certain aspects of his personality come down to us. He was indicted for fist fighting with Yo Hing on multiple occasions, though other than that, his criminal record seems to have been relatively clean. In one particularly famous incident, Sam Yuen managed to get several of Yo Hing’s associates jailed for the egregious maltreatment of an enslaved Chinese prostitute, who was working for them. Yo Hing’s actions in the case of Yut Ho and Lee Yong were probably partially motivated by a desire to retaliate.

Sam Yuen’s most famous quotation was given in an interview with the Los Angeles Star newspaper: “That brave fellow Yo Hing will be killed by those he has insulted and maligned.” Sam Yuen endeavored to make good on this public threat. Clearly, he was not averse to using force or violence in order to get his way. He was also a dangerous man with a six-shooter, as we shall see.

Information about the historical Sam Yuen can be found in Scott Zsech’s wonderful book, The Chinatown War, which also contains a fantastic bibliography that can be used to locate primary sources.

Micah’s personal spin on Sam Yuen is to play up certain aspects of a socially conservative strain, which exists in Chinese culture. This style of relating to the world is a vestige of a militaristic outlook, which was instrumental in securing and retaining power under feudal, imperial rule. Like American masculine culture of the early 20th century, Qing dynasty “conservatives” were preoccupied with physical and mental strength above all things. This preoccupation was paired with a meritocratic belief that the strongest had a natural right to rule over everybody else. In China, this type of outlook was severely impacted by contact with the West, whose superior military technology took away the title of strongest from the warrior class who had held it for millennia. This led to an obtusely anachronistic pride in hand-to-hand fighting skills, which persists to this day as a negative stereotype about Chinese and East Asian men. For this reason, Micah wrote Sam Yuen as a practitioner of external martial arts in Blood on Gold Mountain.

If you have questions, thoughts, your own family stories, or historical context to share, please send us a message at @bloodongoldmountain on Facebook or Instagram.

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Blood on Gold Mountain was written and produced by Yan-Jie Micah Huang, narra...

Blood on Gold Mountain - Empire of Orphans

Transcript

Emma: 00:00:00

Previously on Blood on Gold Mountain: Yut Ho and Ah Choy completed their journey, and arrived in Los Angeles. After an encounter with the notorious gangster Yo Hing, Ah Choy gave Yut Ho a parting gift, and asked her forgiveness for leaving. Yut Ho assured him that she was ready for anything.

Before long, that claim was put to the test. Yut discovered that her husband Hing Sing was not the prosperous merchant he had claimed to be. Instead, she fo