Tim Stanley draws parallels between a New York gang war of the 1900s and an act of horrific violence in south London.
Conflict relocated: New York's Chinatown, c.1900In
May a British soldier was murdered in the streets of Woolwich, London.
One of the alleged killers gave the following statement to camera: ‘We
swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you
leave us alone ... I apologise that women had to witness this today but
in our lands our women have to see the same.’The message was that the attack was tit-for-tat, bringing the war in which the British have been involved in foreign lands home to the streets of London. The wise would reject either the statement’s political analysis or the perverse morality behind it, but it’s undeniable that a large part of the power of the scene came from seeing something we normally associate with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan happening in England. The attacker, wielding a machete in his bloodstained hands, was out of place and time.
This cultural displacement has happened before. When I saw the images on television I was reminded of the Tong Wars of New York City in the early 20th century. On August 15th, 1909 a policeman entered a third-floor room on Mott Street, where he found a girl in a pool of blood; her arms and wrists were slashed from where she’d tried to defend herself against an eight inch blade. Her name was Bow Kum and her death plunged an American city into a war between Chinese gangs with imported grudges and an exotic code of honour.
Born in China in 1888, Bow had been sold for a few dollars by her father to work in San Francisco as a slave bride to a man called Lau Tang, a member of the Hip Sing and Four Brothers gang, or ‘tong’. Lau was arrested shortly afterwards and, unable to produce a licence for his ‘wife’, Bow was ‘confiscated’ and put into the care of a Christian missionary. There she fell in love with Chin Lem, who happened to be a member of the rival On Leong tong. The lovers fled to New York to hide, but Lau tracked them down. When Bow refused to return to him, Lau contacted the local chapter of the Hip Sing and Four Brothers and asked for help. The tong dispatched a hatchet man to stab Bow to death. He cut off some of her fingers by way of a calling card.
The gang war that then engulfed New York astonished Americans. The newspapers listed the names of those killed as if keeping track of baseball scores. Police segregated Chinatown between known adherents of either tong and posted police every 100 feet to enforce the rule. An effort to negotiate a ceasefire in 1909 broke down when the On Leong tong demanded too high a price: a Chinese flag, a roasted pig and 10,000 packs of fireworks. The war only ended when the Chinese government ordered it to stop in 1913.
What shocked Americans was the importing of foreign grievances and foreign ways of settling them. Of course, the host society was just as capable of cruelty: parts of the US were still governed by the lynch law. But, as in Woolwich in 2013, the alien nature of the violence added to the sense of unease. Immigration had relocated ancient Chinese conflicts right into the heart of the American metropolis, immigration spurred on by economic greed. Bow Kum would not have been sold to Lau Tang in the first place had the demand for cheap Chinese labour in America not created a class of young, single, lonely Chinese men who used their meagre wages to import brides from overseas. She was caught in the web of an early wave of globalisation.
Bow’s story is a reminder that violence which may seem out of place can be located in the host country as a consequence of that nation’s policies and actions. The young men who have been charged with the murder of a soldier in 2013 were British by birth but motivated by anger at wars the British conduct overseas. They were irrational and wrong, but in an age of globalised war on terror we can no longer expect such outrages to be confined to the savage lands of our imaginations.
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