“But you can read that symbol?” I asked. “The character for tong?”
“Well, there are a hundred or so symbols that are so common—especially in daily life in Chinatown—that most people around here know them,” John replied. “Even people like me who were hopeless at our Chinese lessons. Or immigrants from the bottom rungs of society who never really learned to read and write.”
“That’s why I recognize it,” said Max. “I know even fewer characters than our able young escort, but tong is a common one. And easy to remember.”
I found Chinese writing beautiful and exotic, but it all just looked like abstract art to me, without identifiable patterns, so I had never noticed this symbol—or any other—in particular, though I came often to this part of town.
“A stick-figure man with a straw hat,” I said to John with a smile. “I’ll remember that.”
“It’s one that you’ll see all over Chinatown,” he said.
“That seems very bold,” I commented. “Sort of an in-your-face challenge to law enforcement, isn’t it?”
I really couldn’t picture the Gambellos—or the other Mafia families with whom they competed—writing La Cosa Nostra on their buildings.
As traffic started moving again, John said, “No, not at all. The literal meaning of tong is ‘gathering place’ or ‘meeting hall.’ It applies to any space in which people congregate, for whatever reason.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, understanding now. “It’s similar to the way ‘family’ is a common word with a harmless meaning—unless we’re specifically talking about something like the Gambello family.” In which case, family meant a criminal organization, most of whose members weren’t actually related to each other.
“Um . . . yeah,” said John, keeping his eyes on the road.
I wondered if it had been tactless of me to bring that up, given that Lucky was evidently relying on the Chen family while he was hiding from the cops. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound. I was curious and a little puzzled now, so I asked more questions as we proceeded through the center of Chinatown, passing Mulberry, Mott, and Elizabeth. Fortunately, John didn’t seem to mind answering.
“But I’m sure ‘tong’ has some kind of criminal connotation,” I said. “I sometimes read in the news about tong leaders being investigated or arrested for running extortion, prostitution, and gambling rackets. And whenever there’s a sweep of street gangs in Chinatown, the media usually describe the gangs as the enforcers for the tong bosses.”
“Yes, that’s certainly an aspect of Chinatown’s tongs,” said John as the hearse approached the Bowery. “A well-known one. They’re secret societies, in a sense, like Uncle Lucky’s work family—which my brother and I were never allowed to ask him about. Being kids we asked anyhow, of course, but my parents chewed us out if they found out about it, and Lucky mostly just told us not to ask.”
Ah. So apparently the Chens had not raised John and his brother to go into a similar line of work. Which would explain why he came across as respectable—he evidently was.
John continued, “But the tongs are also fraternal organizations. Community benevolent associations, you might say. There’s criminal activity—really bad stuff, in fact. But the tongs are also involved in helping immigrants, assisting families, supporting community activities and local businesses, and working on civic problems. It’s all based on the way Chinatown evolved, separate from the rest of the city. Self-contained and self-reliant. A lot of those old ways and established customs have far-reaching effects. Especially in a community where there are always a lot of new immigrants who don’t really speak English, don’t trust government authorities, and aren’t always here legally.”
When we slowed down for the traffic light at the Bowery, the windy north-south boulevard that bisects Chinatown, I wondered how far east we were going. Historically, Chinatown was a very small, densely packed neighborhood. Still densely packed today, it had expanded geographically in recent decades to take over much of Little Italy, which is north of Canal, and most of the Lower East Side, which was historically a Jewish neighborhood—way back when the Diamonds came to America from Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.
“Tongs are complicated,” John concluded as he turned south on the Bowery. “Well, most things in Chinatown are complicated.”
That much I had always gathered. In keeping with the long tradition of New York City as a gateway to America, there’s a constant churn of population in Chinatown, with new immigrants (legal and illegal) arriving here and working hard to scrape out a fresh start in a new land, and previous arrivals moving on after a few years—or after a generation—as they seek to turn their initial foothold in the New World into middle class prosperity. Much the way that my own forebears came to these shores more than a century ago, survived in overcrowded tenements on the Lower East Side, and labored long hours for low wages as garment workers, before ultimately saving enough money to move on to better jobs and decent apartments elsewhere. Their children, in turn, grew up as Americans, started successful businesses, and owned suburban houses. It’s the perpetual cycle of realizing the American dream, generation after generation.
The Chinese got a late start on this path, despite migrating to America as early as the mid-nineteenth century to build the railroads that eventually crossed the continent. The racist Chinese Exclusion Act severely limited Chinese immigration to the US for some sixty years, including decades during which there were no immigration quotas or restrictions for other nationalities. The act prevented Chinese men from becoming US citizens, and prevented their wives and families from joining them here.
Even Jews were treated better than that. Not a thing one often has a chance to say about my people, historically speaking.
During the decades that the Exclusion Act was in effect, the Chinese in America became a small, isolated bachelor society, largely self-governing and separate from the general population. Hence the establishment of historic Chinatowns in various major cities, which are still destinations for new Chinese immigrants every year.
The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect until World War Two, and the motivation for eliminating it was political, not moral. In the Pacific war against the Japanese, the US became allied with China. This made the typical American characterization of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril a tad inconvenient for the US government, which finally lifted the virtual ban on Chinese immigration that had been in effect since the Victorian era.
But, you know—world at war, tens of millions perishing, the Japanese occupation of China . . . There wasn’t exactly a huge rush to get in the door the moment the Exclusion Act was abolished. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Chinese population in the States really started booming. So the Chinese have made major inroads in American society in a relatively short time. And in the process, much of lower Manhattan has now turned into Chinatown.
Hey, you learn a lot about a people when you spend your whole life eating their food twice a week and every Christmas. Especially if your father is a history professor.
Still making cautiously slow progress, the hearse turned once more, cruising down to the south side of Chinatown’s historic area and doubling back toward Mulberry and Mott, where they each came to a dead end in this tangle of old streets. I realized that the claustrophobic one-way traffic system of this neighborhood had forced John to bypass our destination and circle back around to it. He pulled into a parking garage and swiped a plastic key card through a machine at the entrance. A moment later, we were granted access to the garage, and John parked the hearse in a large ground floor space that was, I noticed, reserved for Chen’s Funeral Home.