Abstract
In the immediate postwar period, threats of racial and gender disorder, and of the sinister power that both Chinese men and degenerate white women could hold over other white Britons, were at the center of the judicial, journalistic, and literary discussions of Chinatown. This refocusing of attention on Chinese men and their activities in London was neither sudden nor inevitable, but evolved over a series of highly visible court cases. The direst threat attributed to Chinese men emerged not from their opium use and gambling, activities that had been so central to earlier portrayals, but from their alleged encouragement of West End debauchery and their co-optation of white women into their schemes. Social contact between white women and the racial other had been a longstanding concern in the empire, but in the interwar period, it became an increasingly volatile issue in London.1 Court trials, press reports, and popular fiction all helped popularize the fear that corrupted white women were helping to forge sinister connections between the decadence and wealth of white West Enders and the vice of Chinatown. The conflation of opium and cocaine into a sinister “dope” culture controlled by Chinese men and their female agents proved to be an especially potent justification for judicial intervention and public scandal-mongering.
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Notes
Lucy Bland, “White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War,” Gender and History 17, no. 1 (April 2005), 33.
For an excellent discussion of the relationship between the urban geography of race and that of gender in the American context, see Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
For further discussion of nineteenth-century literary descriptions of white women and Chinese “vice” in the East End, see Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 85–97.
William Gibson, Sr., was originally from Scotland, but he had emigrated to Australia in 1882. Sally O’Neill, “Gibson, William (1842?–1918),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1981), 656–57.
This case is also discussed, briefly, in Colin Holmes, “The Chinese Connection,” in Outsiders and Outcasts: Essays in Honour of William J. Fish-man, ed. Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes (London: Duckworth, 1993), 80.
Terry Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820–1930 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983), 135.
Colin Holmes refers to such journalistic juxtapositions as the “drip” technique. Holmes “Chinese Connection,” 87. Other scholars have mentioned public anxiety and official concern over the West End, middle-class opium smoker in previous decades. Virginia Berridge, “East End Opium Dens and Narcotic Use in Britain,” The London Journal 4, no. 1 (1978): 2–28, 15; Milligan, Pleasures and Pains, 103–17.
For a recent discussion of morphine addiction in late-Victorian Britain, see Susan Ziegler, “‘How Far am I Responsible?’: Women and Morphinomania in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 59–81.
Carleton had taken several different drugs in the twenty-four hours preceding her death, and there was some debate during the trial over whether it was cocaine or veronal that had ultimately been responsible for her death. Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (London: Granta, 2001), 96–97.
These two possible interpretations of Ada Ping You were emblematic of the debate over women’s agency that had occupied a prominent place in wartime discussions of gender roles and expectations. For recent discussions of changing roles and images of working-class women during WWI, see Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998);
Nicoletta Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Laura Tabili, “Outsiders in the Land of Their Birth: Exogamy, Citizenship, and Identity in War and Peace,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 4 (October 2004): 801.
Philipa Levine, “Sexuality, Gender, and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series: Gender and Empire, ed. Philipa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 140.
Burke was openly derisive of the press’s romanticizing of the “glamorous shame” of Chinatown in the aftermath of the Carleton affair. Thomas Burke, Out and About: A Note-Book of London in War-Time (London: Allen & Unwin, 1919), 47.
Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 205.
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 197.
Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 111.
Sax Rohmer, Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic. London: Cassell, 1919; New York, McBride, 1919.
For a recent discussion of the complex racial differences between the Celts and Anglo-Saxons propagated in British public discourse, see Michael de Nie, “A Medley Mob of Irish-American Plotters and Irish Dupes’: The British Press and Transatlantic Fenianism,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 2 (April 2001): 233–36. Donald MacRaild provides a more general description of anti-Irish imagery in Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999), 155–84.
Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 111–12.
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© 2009 Sascha Auerbach
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Auerbach, S. (2009). East (End) Meets West (End). In: Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620926_5
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