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The Chinese tongs in Chicago promoted vice in their neighborhood
in order to bring in more business and money to the gangs. However with
time, the On Leong and Hip Sing tongs began to lose money and business
in 1930 due to the start of the Great Depression. This is the time in
which Chicago experienced its own tong war. The two gangs were fighting
for a piece of the pie. Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, authors of Chicago
Confidential write about the differences of the tongs and the result
of the tong war.
The On Leong were the top men but permitted the Hip Sings to go along
in a secondary position. When the territories were divided, the Hip
Sings, the conquered, were allowed to operate only in the small, old
Chinatown located on Clark, which was described as being between Van
Buren Street and Carrie Watson’s whore-house. The On Leong,
the winners, took the big one, new one, on Wentworth Avenue, and with
it the cream of the trade.
The treaty provided for everything in specific detail. Chop suey restaurants
and laundries in certain sections were set aside for On Leong, with
the less desirable locations reserved for the Hip Sing, who found
their fan-tan games limited as the big, profitable fan-tan and mahjong
play everywhere else in town except a bit on the North Side went to
the On Leong.
Based on arrests of Chinese dope peddlers, the indication is that
only members of the On Leong sell opium and the Hip Sing sells white
stuff- cocaine and heroin. Most Chinamen prefer the hop pipe. Few
use the needle (Lait and Mortimer: Chicago Confidential, 90).
The treaty between the Hip Sing and the On Leong tongs was carefully
arbitrated by Chin Kung Fong.
The tongs in the two Chinatowns became institutionalized in their neighborhoods.
They were a part of their communities. Just like in other Chinatowns
across America, they were helping their communities by providing services
for a fee. They became an integral part of their community structures.
For a long time, the tongs ran gambling dens in Chinatown. The Chinese
citizens around them just accepted the fact that these gambling dens
were meant to stay in their neighborhoods. Besides the gambling dens,
the tongs smuggled in heroin from the Golden Triangle, which makes up
the borders of Laos, Burma, and Thailand. The tongs survived in Chicago
for a long time due to the fact that these were not ordinary criminal
groups. They were secret societies like those, which this paper explained
early on. The tongs followed a code of silence that does not allow them
to speak to anyone on the outside like the white “foreign devils”
or the Chinese themselves. This is one of the ways in which the tongs
lasted for so long in their community. The tongs were a part of the
community. Although they were not visible at times, they were there
conducting their illegal enterprises.
Another way how the tongs institutionalized into their society was that
the outside community did not know or really care about the Chinese
was particularly doing. The outside world particularly knows about the
vice and violence that occurs supposedly quite frequently in the Chinese
communities. Walter Cade Reckless, author of The Distribution of
Commercialized Vice in the City: A Sociological Analysis writes
quite clearly about this very notion.
The relationship of Chinatown to the commercialized vice areas of
American cities is too well know for elaboration. It is only fair
to say, however, that the assumption of the usual parasitic activities
by the Chinese in the Western World is probably to be explained by
their natural segregation at the center of the cities, as well as
by their uncertain economic and social status (Reckless: The Distribution
of Commercialized Vice in the City: A Sociological Analysis, 53-54).
Why did a noted and educated sociologist write these horrible
comments about the Chinese community? Where did these racist views manifest?
The views are manifested from the history of the relationship between
the white man and Chinaman. This relationship is thoroughly explained
and examined in the earlier part of this paper. |