Mrs. Kao's Catastrophe

Returning last week from the Orient with its usual July load of tourists, plantation owners, white scientists, dark Oriental traders, the S. S. Tenyo Maru steamed through the Golden Gate. Watching the San Francisco skyline was a young Chinese woman, dressed in the smartest U. S. style--Mrs. Sui'e Ying Kao, wife of the Chinese Vice Consul at San Francisco. She was returning from a visit to her homeland. When the liner had docked she, a lady of some importance, requested courtesy-of-the-port, that her baggage might be passed and delivered at once. The Customs men demurred. She pointed to the imposing official seals that marked each of her seven wardrobe trunks and four suitcases, claimed diplomatic immunity. The Customs men communicated with the State Department, which verified their belief that diplomatic immunity is granted only to ambassadors or ministers and their wives, not to vice-consular ladies. Promptly the agents broke the seals, opened the trunks, lifted out laces, silks, and many a small tin box. The tin boxes contained a substance which the Customs men instantly recognized as opium--about $600,000 worth at current U. S. prices.

Young Mrs. Kao, high born and college-bred, daughter of the Chinese Minister to Cuba, expressed polite surprise. The tin boxes, she explained, had been placed in her trunks by influential friends in China, to be carried as gifts to other influential friends in the U. S. Asked who these friends were, she refused to tell. She would be killed surely if she did, she said. She had no explanation at all about some documents which, found with the opium and translated, indicated that she was to have received $23,000 upon delivering the tins to the "influential friends." The latter, it appeared, were high officials of the Chinese consulate in San Francisco.

Because the situation was delicate, Vice Consul Kao and his wife were not arrested for several days, sought temporary refuge in San Francisco's Chinatown. Then the Chinese Minister at Washington, Dr. C. C. Wu, announced Vice Consul Kao's suspension. The Kuomintang of America, branch of the potent political organization behind the Nanking government, demanded their recall to China for trial. The impression spread that certain death, from a headsman's sword cleaving into the back of her bent neck, awaited Mrs. Kao if she were deported. Although Minister Wu, taking pains to announce that decapitation was not China's penalty for opium smuggling,* requested deportation, in the absence of an extradition treaty between the U. S. and China it seemed legally impossible. Vice Consul Kao's suspension however removed some of the complications of the case. He and Mrs. Kao were arrested, and with them Suen Foon, for 17 years Chancellor of the Chinese Consulate, in San Francisco.

* Last week French customs agents noticed white powder seeping from packing cases addressed to Sirdar Al Ghulam Nabi Khan, Afghan Minister in Paris, just appointed Ambassador to Moscow. Four cases were seized, found to contain $33,000 worth of heroin.