Tong

Western Union operators in Boston were puzzled, last week, by a number of enigmatic telegrams sent from their station to various parts of the U. S. The messages appeared, at first glance, to be in code, but a closer scrutiny revealed that they were merely lists of names--Chinese names. Did some sinister purport lodge in these formal messages--a hint of vague hatreds, of malice palely half-smiling from faces as yellow as the telegraph blanks, and as inscrutable? It was hard to be sure. The police, at all events, evinced some interest in the messages; they were also curious to trace certain long distance telephone calls from Boston to obscure places in the Chinese quarters of St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh--calls in which the connection had been requested in carefully articulated English, followed by the rushing speech of a dim voice haranguing in a chant of monosyllables an unseen Oriental a thousand miles away. ... a staccato cry of comprehension. . . . the click of a receiver.

Pressmen could get no aliment from these reported phone-calls and telegrams; but when, next day, a number of Chinamen were shot down, singly, and for no apparent reason, in widely separated parts of the U. S., typewriters stuttered, and a frightening word began to boom in the headlines of even the conservative papers: TONG!

TONG WAR RENEWED-- TONG DEATHS MOUNT--TONG CHIEFS... TONG HATE. . . TONG. . .

The delicious menace of that word has been long savored by people who have yielded to the importunity of a megaphoning bus-starter and have ridden THROUGH CHINATOWN FOR $1. On such rides they beheld Orientals going and coming in the streets, with the short scuffling step and the furtive stoop which they have borrowed from the cinema. They scrutinized the houses of these yellow men-- miserable places for the most part, tenements, tumbled shanties, bars, and chop suey joints, all dingy, or garish, not one of them revealing the least hint of that exotic magnificence without which, as everyone knows, no Chinaman can exist. But the sightseers were not deceived.

They knew too well what really went on behind those apparently dismal walls; no housefront however dreary, could hide from them its inner chambers hung with a thousand twilit blazonries and perfumed with the musk of frankincense and grated orris-root--chambers wherein slim Chinese girls with scarlet fingernails and breasts like almond-petals submit among Himalayas of varicolored cushions, to the embraces of opium-bloated laundrymen. . . .

Few sightseers know that tong means "Parlor." The implication of the word is a genial one, implying conversation, compromise, good cheer. Tongs were originally started as protective trade organizations. They became, by degrees, political bodies--compact, powerful, antagonistic. Thus was the word perverted. Now, when that word appears in print, it clangs like a terrible bronze bell summoning unseen hordes to war, sounding the knell of many pathetic, dingy little men who will die by violence, in secret places.

Tong wars begin quickly, kindled by rivalry between two rich tea- merchants for the favors of one of those slender concubines that so vividly people the imaginations of sightseers; by a trade jealousy; a stolen opium shipment; in short, by almost any obscure betrayal of Oriental honor. Once begun, they are conducted on a system much re- sembling that which governs the game of chess. The purpose of each side is to wipe out the important leaders of the other. Hired assassins do the actual campaigning--tong gunmen who have originated many of the devices in favor with detective story writers. Their knives flicker in bad doorways. Their shapes are seen outlined against a gibbous moon, while they scurry over city roofs at night, or swing down a silk rope-ladder to their victim's window. They are carried up hotel elevators in packing cases; they train cobras to crawl through the speaking-tubes of limousines and bite their enemies on the lip; but the type of crime which entertains them most is the far simpler business of entering some all-night chop-suey restaurant, firing six or seven shots, and departing, while the proprietor splutters out his life upon the greasy floor. Of this daring feat no tongman seems to tire.

The Hip Sings and the On Leongs, the two tongs concerned in the present outbreak, fought in 1910. In 1912 the nephew of On Leong Mayor of Manhattan's Chinatown was killed by two Chinese, both subsequently electrocuted. In 1922 the head of the Hip Sings choked and fell faceforward upon the asphalt of Pell Street, Manhattan, with a bullet in his heart. Another war flickered briefly last year until it was ended by the efforts of Arbitrator Lee Kue Ying, rich merchant. Last week Ying, presumably of natural causes, perished. It was on the afternoon of his death that the wires from Boston began to crackle with Chinese communications.

For the murder of a tong chief, a gunman may receive as much as $10,000; for a pawn or coolie, not more than $500. At the end of a war, the better shots are often rich men. Last week, obedient to the messages from Boston, they began business in a number of cities:

In Baltimore two young Chinese, dressed in department store clothes, entered a restaurant, ordered a meal of rice and soup. The cook, one Charley Lee, withdrew to prepare it. To the proprietor, who sat beaming behind his counter, one of the men beckoned with a rolled newspaper; he approached. When he had come to within a yard of the table, the fellow dropped his paper; the other fired. Lee rushed from the kitchen; the murderers were gone, his employer was dead. A bubble of blood from his lips incarnadined the newspaper.

In Pittsburgh late at night, in a line of smoke-stained houses on a miserable street, the darkness was broken by a single orange oblong, the doorway of a Chinese laundry. Two short, stocky men were perceptible, for a moment, in its glow. They shot the laundryman where he toiled over his ironing board, then stepped back into the darkness.

In St. Louis the Baltimore crime was repeated, this time by five intrepid gunmen.

In Newark one Chin Hin, a member of the Hip Sing Tong, locked the thin door of his hall-bedroom, went to sleep. He was awakened by a soft repeated, terrifying knocking on the door. Summoning all his courage, he flung it open. There was no one outside. He returned to bed. An interval of silence; the sound began again. Once more Chin Hin, with cold sweat starting from him, threw open the door; once more he was met by vacancy. He turned his key; almost instantly, the knocking was resumed. Chin Hin, deranged by terror, jumped out of the window.*

In Manhattan in the kitchen of a restaurant, one Ho Kee, a cook, was mixing curry. A slight noise made him glance behind him; a face like a soiled lemon wafer leered at him from the shadow of a barrel; a roaring flash filled the kitchen. The shot that killed him scorched his apron; he was buried with a .38 calibre revolver in his right hand that he might be equipped to revenge his murder in the next world.

At present the only Tongs fighting, are the Hip Sings, the On Leongs. Many others exist;--the Hong Tuck Tong, made up of cigar makers; the Gum Longs, of fishermen on the Sacremento river; the Gin Sin Sear, founded by Little Pete, famed Chinese badman; the Bo Sin Sear, its rival; the Suey Sings, the Juke Lums, Om Yicks, Bing Kongs. The war of 1905 brought in twelve tongs on one side, nine on the other. Remembering this, police commissioners in all cities stationed double patrols, last week, in their Chinatowns.

*He lived.