Mary Ting Yi Lui

In The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, Mary Ting Yi Lui examines the murder of Elsie Sigel as a window into the gender, class, and race divisions in New York City’s Chinatown. Lui argues, “The cultural and geographical boundaries that supposedly separated Chinatown from the rest of the immigrant neighborhoods of lower Manhattan were in actuality neither as rigid nor as impermeable as these writers [of local travel guides] suggest” (pg. 33). Lui draws upon the techniques of cultural history and the spatial turn to recreate the permeable boundaries of her study.
Lui writes, “The broad-based efforts at regulating the public social interactions between Chinese Americans and whites of different socioeconomic classes demonstrate the ongoing concerns and problems with remapping gender and racial boundaries in the rapidly expanding commercial city that seemed to undermine these borders” (pg. 54). Further, “Chinatown’s status as a vice district, where activities such as opium smoking, prostitution, and gambling were often visible, informed the public’s perception of Chinese immigrants as a distinct racial group marked by a peculiar set of social and moral deviances that stood them apart from other New Yorkers” (pg. 64). Lui continues, “Social reformers feared that the Chinese hand laundry, inhabited by such a group of sexually repressed and ambiguously gendered workers, posed a serious danger to the general population, particularly the city’s women and children. But as a domestic-related service, laundries were more likely to be frequented by women” (pg. 67). She continues, “Similar to Chinatown and Chinese-owned businesses, the Chinese mission became another racialized and gendered space that required the reassertion of white masculine authority to contain the activities of white women and Chinese men” (pg. 116).
Discussing women reformers, Lui writes, “The issue of agency, therefore, largely determined whether a women could be considered a blameless victim or a destructive force responsible for her own predicament and therefore a social menace in need of proper physical restraint and disciplinary action” (pg. 87). Lui draws upon the work of Kathy Peiss, writing, “Working-class girls’ independence from their families was fostered by their socialization and participation in a female work culture that revolved around discussions of material consumption, popular commercial amusements, and heterosexual romantic love” (pg. 92). She continues, “Though single women clearly made up a significant portion of missionary personnel by the late nineteenth century, the public remained uneasy with their presence in non-white or working-class immigrant communities such as Chinatown” (pg. 129).
Lui writes, “For the predominantly working-class male inhabitants of Chinatown, marriage or cohabitation with non-Chinese women probably provided the most available opportunity for establishing families in this country during the early decades of the exclusion era. Despite allegations of immorality or impermanence, I argue that these interracial couples represented the beginnings of a working-class family life for the city’s Chinese immigrant community” (pg. 154). She continues, “Nineteenth and early-twentieth century narratives of interracial sex between Chinese and whites insisted such relationships occurred chiefly as a result of the white women’s dire physical or economic needs and not the Chinese partners’ masculinity or sexual desirability” (pg. 179).
Lui concludes, “It is particularly the intersections of the unstable, socially constructed categories of race, gender, and sexuality that help to explain the establishment of the Chinatown neighborhood in late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century New York” (pg. 226). Finally, “The creation and maintenance of racialized boundaries were clearly dependent on the circulation of sexual narratives of urban danger and the entrenchment of gendered boundaries to contain the physical and social mobility of Chinese men and white women of different socioeconomic classes” (pg. 226).… (mehr)

A well-researched and well-written account of the 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel in New York. Her death was a gruesome mystery, although suspicion quickly turned to her Chinese Sunday school student and supposed lover, Leon Ling.

Mary Ting Yi, an assistant professor of American Studies and History at Yale, meticulously culls through the evidence to try and understand the circumstances that ended with Sigel's straggled body stuffed into trunk in a New York apartment.

Yi explores turn-of-the-century conceptions of the Chinese in America and the reality of their lives -- and relationships with white women. She also explores women's experiences at a time of significant change in their societal roles. Yi's ability to engage in the reader is equal to her scholarship, making this both a great read and a great history.… (mehr)