They were told they could not be together, kept apart by cultural oppression, discrimination and the law. Then she disappeared. A race for love across a San Francisco transformed by the railroad and the immigrant labor force the city prepares to abandon.
May 1889
Ah Ying had a choice to make that would put her life on the line.
The strikingly beautiful Chinese immigrant lived at the Mission Home on Sacramento Street in San Francisco. Inside she was safe from the threats against her. She had all the clothing and food she needed from the institution’s matrons. But she was missing something: freedom. One of the freedoms she lacked was to choose with whom she could marry, live and start a family.
Today the eagle-eyed oversight at the Mission Home was lax.
Today she saw a chance for the love she never thought she’d have.
It was time Ah Ying took matters into her own hands.
She stepped outside. From the Mission Home’s perch on the hill, the vista led all the way to the deep blue bay and the fog that frequently crept in and blanketed the city.
She dashed away from the institution, rendezvousing with the man she loved. In a few hours time, they had eloped. For a while, nobody knew where they were. It hardly mattered that their great escape started by situating themselves just down the hill from the place she had fled. For the first time in her life, Ah Ying had a home she could call her own. Here a man and woman kept a hostile world at bay, betting on a future that was theirs together, however uncertain. In the land they called “Gam Saan,” or Gold Mountain, where massive steamships sailed back and forth over the Pacific Ocean and a railroad cut through the mountain range and across the continental United States, in the streets of San Francisco roaring with both newfound wealth and vice, their unexpected love took root—a relationship that was rare, special and forbidden.
Gee Sung, groom to Ah Ying the bride, had scrambled to set up this home for the love of his life. The secret newlyweds found themselves in a two-room apartment at 821 Dupont Street, known as “Dupon Gai” in Cantonese (and renamed Grant Street after the 1906 earthquake). Horse-drawn wagons clopped down their street, which bustled with restaurants, a jewelry shop, a general store, a tailor and several gambling houses.
Gee Sung had defied as many conventions as his lover to get to this point. As one of Northern California’s immigrant railroad workers, or “coolies,” he was not supposed to find romance, much less marriage.
With blistered hands, Gee Sung had helped transform the region and, ultimately, the nation, receiving little credit for it. Leland Stanford, one of the “robber barons” who would go on to establish Stanford University, had initially called Chinese immigrants the “dregs” of Asia and opposed Chinese immigration.
But when the Central Pacific Railroad, for which he was the president, faced a shortage of white laborers, Stanford had a change of heart. Without immigrants like Gee Sung coaxed to come from China to engage in the backbreaking work—not to mention paid less than their white counterparts—“it would be impossible to complete the western portion of this great national enterprise,” Stanford said in a progress report in 1865.
That sentiment, however, was short-lived. As the main work of the Transcontinental Railroad progressed, those laborers were less in-demand, and treated worse. Anti-Chinese laws such as the Page Act of 1875, aimed at Chinese women, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—passed just a few years before the couple’s elopement—barred most immigration from China. Lawmakers reasoned that the measures would discourage Chinese laborers from settling down in the United States with hopes that their numbers would eventually dwindle. Gee Sung would prove them wrong.
Facing a hostile environment, some railroad workers returned to China. But Gee Sung and other immigrants made the bold decision to stay in the area, many of them hopping on the railroad they helped build to traverse the greater United States. Gee Sung’s brother, who had come with him to work on the railroad, made his way to the big skies of Montana. A small community of Chinese laborers built homes in the train town of Truckee, nestled high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Some stayed in Sacramento, the state capital, where work on the western end of the Transcontinental Railroad had first begun. Fanning out to Southern California, Utah, Wyoming and beyond, still others found work on new railroad projects. From about 1870 through the late 1880s, Chinese laborers helped extend the railroad in Santa Cruz and along the California coastline, about 60 miles from San Francisco. Thousands of Chinese laborers were also recruited to build Canada’s similarly ambitious—and similarly treacherous—transcontinental railway.
Gee Sung may have moved from one railroad job to the next. A man by the name of Gee Sung is recorded in the 1870 U.S. census as being in Elko, Nevada. But another man by the same name is also recorded as a miner in Mariposa, California at the same time. Gee Sung—a nickname—was also known by other monikers, a common practice among Chinese immigrants. Wherever his path brought him, Gee Sung would have made connections that stretched far and wide, and by 1889, had made his way to San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Here, as it was elsewhere, Chinatown was a bachelor society, with mainly men strolling the streets. Most had little choice but to take undesirable positions, such as laundering, house cleaning and cooking and what many considered women’s work. Even so, white laborers accused the Chinese of stealing “their” jobs, rallying, “The Chinese must go!” In one deadly incident in 1877, a mob of angry protestors stormed Chinatown, smashing windows, looting and setting businesses on fire.
While in the city, Gee Sung found a job making cigars. Demand for cigars was booming, and San Francisco had become one of the centers for cigar manufacturing for the entire country. By the early 1870s, half of San Francisco’s cigar factories were estimated to be Chinese-owned. In a backroom or upstairs gallery—and sometimes in poorly ventilated, candlelit basements—Chinese men such as Gee Sung sat shoulder to shoulder at long wooden tables, surrounded by piles of tobacco leaves. Some men prepared the filling of tobacco leaves, then passed it on to another man to mold with two wooden boards and a knife. Finally, they packaged them in colorful boxes and stacked them high against the wall. Gee Sung worked his way up to having a small cigar making business of his own.
Ah Ying, meanwhile, had to navigate the treacherous path that faced young Chinese women. Ah Ying would have been brought to the United States as a child against her will, like so many Chinese girls, as a “mui tsai,” or “little sister” to labor for a wealthy Chinese family. But her role was nothing like that of a family member, and was characterized by overwork and abuse. At one point, Ah Ying was reported to have a scar along her back and a noticeable bruise on her leg. This sort of mistreatment was common, according to records kept at San Francisco’s Cameron House, the successor to what was then called the Mission Home.
“The child was in a filthy condition, creeping with vermin. She had been cruelly treated. She was kept serving from morning to midnight,” reads the record of one seven-year-old girl in the Mission Home’s logbook. A record for another seven-year-old girl noted, “her body is badly scarred from the punishment she has received from her mistress, who is said to be a gambler, and her master, an opium smoker.”
Once Ah Ying found her way to the Mission Home, she no longer faced a life of servitude. The institution run by a woman named Margaret Culbertson sought to give a fresh start to young Chinese women who had been exploited. But in a way, Ah Ying and the other girls—appropriately called “inmates” in the Mission Home’s logbook—were still imprisoned, and not allowed to move freely in and out of the house.
Though wards of the Mission Home, the girls were never completely safe. Chinese “highbinders”—the term for the hired muscle who did the dirty work of threatening, kidnapping and killing on behalf of Chinatown powerbrokers who wanted young women for their gambling operations, opium dens and brothels—sought to steal the girls. On a hill at the edge of Chinatown, the two-story brick building at 933 Sacramento Street was guarded, with bars and locks on the windows and doors providing further protection. In a few cases, Chinese husbands, fearing for the safety of their wives, left them in the Mission Home’s care for weeks at a time while they journeyed outside the city.
For a young woman such as Ah Ying, a walk with the matrons scaling the hills and slopes of the city provided a brief taste of freedom, one she rarely had. Culbertson also chaperoned the girls on occasional trips. One summer, they sailed on a ferry across the bay, taking a special car up to the Piedmont Springs Hotel in the Oakland Hills. There, the girls had a glimpse into a very different life: Surrounded by mulberry trees and manicured gardens, with the backdrop of the bay in the distance, guests at the elegant, 20-bedroom hotel soaked in the sulphur springs that had been discovered in the hills. That day, the girls from the Mission Home sang for the guests and enjoyed a “bountiful lunch.” The San Francisco Chronicle reported: “The Matron of the home reports a pleasant day, and says the girls, who of necessity spend most of their time within the walls of the Mission, wished to take up their abode at the springs.”
Indeed, life in the Mission Home required an adjustment for its residents. The youngest ones acclimated easiest. But some—especially the older girls—did not.
While most relished having escaped from a life of drudgery and abuse, some girls chafed at the Mission Home’s regimented chores and lessons in morality. The girls were treated as exotic, heathen foreigners who had to be acculturated. Just a few months before her great escape, Ah Ying had witnessed seven police officers wrestle a young Chinese woman into the Mission Home. “She behaved badly and she did not become reconciled to her new surroundings,” Culbertson noted in her records, her frustration palpable. “After a few days, seeing no hope of reclaiming her, she was permitted to leave.”
The Mission Home records show that some girls returned to China, including a few who journeyed to China as missionaries, but another outcome saw the young women marry and establish a new life outside the Mission Home. The Mission Home hosted weddings regularly, with suitors carefully screened and selected. These suitors came from all over: a wealthy Chinese merchant in town from St. Paul, Minnesota, fell in “love at first sight” with “pretty Mary” during a church service; he soon married her and took her to St. Paul. Another young woman, accompanied by Culbertson, traveled to New Orleans for an arranged marriage. Generally, only those who fit Culbertson’s strict definition of good Christian men passed scrutiny.
One of the most memorable weddings was the union of Ng Poon Chew and Chun Fah, held a few years later. One of Ah Ying’s housemates, Chun Fah had lived at the Mission Home since she was five, was now a Chinese interpreter, and was considered “one of Miss Culbertson’s prettiest and brightest girls.” Ng Poon Chew had come to the United States as a 15-year-old. Now 27, the recently ordained Presbyterian minister had been “educated as thoroughly as an American theological student,” according to press reports. Such thorough assimilation was considered success.
Many of the girls like Ah Ying would have felt relief when they arrived, and many, in fact, begged to stay. But in her approximately three years at the Mission Home, Ah Ying was never a willing convert. As a ward of the missionaries, yet another identity was being forced upon her. Ah Ying later claimed she had been whipped at the institution. A few years in, depression and hopelessness took hold—the young woman reportedly tried to commit suicide by hanging herself with a clothesline.
But she survived, and at some point the petite and doe-eyed Ah Ying met Gee Sung. Gee Sung may have been between journeys to work on the latest railroad projects. The two may have locked eyes on the streets of Chinatown when Ah Ying took a supervised walk with the Mission Home’s matrons. Or perhaps they mingled under the backdrop of red lanterns and festive decorations during a Chinese New Year celebration, when a parade was held along Dupont Street and firecrackers set off to ward off evil spirits. Kept secret from the matrons of the Mission Home, the couple had to find creative ways to see each other again, and what would have started by chance must have grown in intensity. From the depths of despair, Ah Ying had discovered a reason to live.
Now at long last, Ah Ying and Gee Sung were together. Absorbed into the cramped quarters of Chinatown, below the gilded mansions and hotels on Nob Hill, this section of the city, the only neighborhood where they were allowed to live, at least allowed Gee Sung and Ah Ying to remain inconspicuous after Ah Ying’s unauthorized flight from the Mission Home. Outsiders may have mocked Chinatown for the smell of their food, the sound of their language and for the way Chinese men wore their hair in long braids known as queues. But for Ah Ying and Gee Sung, this was a place to call home.
Having defied expectations to be with each other, the couple settled into their humble but cherished sanctum.
As it is through the ages in the blissful newlywed stage, there was much for the couple to do to settle into their home. Gee Sung and Ah Ying’s home was likely similar to the other structures in San Francisco’s Chinatown, with Gee Sung’s cigar business downstairs, and the living quarters upstairs.
Unlike most newlyweds, Gee Sung and Ah Ying not only needed dishes and bedding but needed to avoid being seen, which counseled running errands under the cover of darkness. Anyone who spotted them could be a liability, threatened or bribed by those who might be looking for Ah Ying. This secret phase of life was their version of a honeymoon. On May 7, 1889, less than a week after their marriage, Gee Sung left on one of these nighttime errands. For one of the first times in her life, left behind in their rooms, looking out over a burgeoning city of almost 300,000 people, Ah Ying was alone.
At 2 a.m., a commotion shattered the silence. Two men burst in. These were highbinders, the thugs of the Chinese underworld.
Ah Ying tried to get away, but they overtook her. One of the men choked her, and pepper was thrown into her eyes to blind her. They rolled her up in a blanket, then carried her down the stairs and out into the dark night. There they tossed her inside a hack—a horse drawn carriage—that was waiting for them. This was no haphazard attack. It had been planned and executed. In a flash, the carriage sped away with hardly a trace left behind of the young wife.
Gee Sung returned from his errand not long afterward. Upon entering the apartment, he found eerie silence. Their little home was empty. Ah Ying was gone.
The world stopped spinning. Had Gee Sung’s new wife had a change of heart about their marriage? Had she decided to return to those who opposed their union? Or had Margaret Culbertson and her Mission Home allies found her and convinced her to come with them?
Looking closer could reveal the clues that Ah Ying had not left voluntarily: displaced furniture from the struggle, or the residue of black powder that had stung her eyes.
As it had become more difficult for Chinese women to emigrate to the United States, the danger to the few who were in Chinatown only escalated. In one calendar year, for instance, there were reports of at least eight kidnappings of Chinese women. Highbinders bought, sold and trafficked young women like Ah Ying to brothels and gambling houses to serve as prostitutes, where their lives were usually cut short from disease, suicide or abuse. Demand extended beyond San Francisco, from the state capital of Sacramento to the rainy, river city of Portland.
Ah Ying was the perfect kidnapping target: Besides her rebellious, recent marriage to Gee Sung, she was young, lovely, and otherwise alone in the world. If highbinders had nabbed Ah Ying, then Gee Sung might never see her again.
The realization was inescapable. She could be anywhere--or she could already be dead.
Gee Sung had to ward off hopelessness. If there was any chance, any at all, he would go to the ends of the earth to find her.
Margaret Culbertson, the 55-year-old matron of the Mission Home, still considered herself Ah Ying’s guardian. Culbertson was tall and slender, with “large dark eyes” and a “peaceful, benevolent face,” according to one press account. Her hair tucked into a bun, wearing long, modest dresses, she was the embodiment of a proper, white Victorian woman.
Years ago, Culbertson had come to California from New York as a governess for a well-to-do family. In 1878, she was recruited to lead the Occidental Mission Home for Girls, or as it was more commonly known, the Mission Home. Founded four years earlier by the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church, the Mission Home had a singular purpose: “to receive and train girls and women out of slavery, and also to prepare women as lay workers for the church.” They hoped to rescue and convert Chinese girls to Christianity, thus helping to spread the gospel further.
The daughter of missionaries, Culbertson had been hired for her “fine Christian character, executive ability and good common sense.” The formidable leader set about establishing order and routine in the home, running it like clockwork, with the girls rising at seven each morning and starting the day with prayer and breakfast. The home, a former boarding house, was kept clean and modest, and the girls, ranging from toddlers to young women, carried out daily chores. They were trained to sew, which helped them earn money, and were taught English. The girls also learned scripture from the Bible, and sang hopeful hymns that stressed obedience such as:
Someone will travel the streets of gold,
Beautiful visions will there behold —
Shall you? Shall I?
On Sundays, Culbertson would lead the girls, two by two, down the hill to church for service, the police providing a barrier between them and any Chinese men.
“Since the Exclusion act was passed,” Culbertson said about the precautions, “Chinese girls have rapidly increased in price, and one can form some estimate of their value when a Chinese highbinder is offered $600 if he will kidnap her as we go to and from the church.”
Culbertson was also frequently targeted, and rumor had it that highbinders had placed a price on her head. In one instance, after removing a girl from a notorious gambling house, she received a letter that said, “Your religion is vain. It costs too much money. By what authority do you rescue girls? If there is any more of this work, there will be a contest and blood may flow. Then we will see who is the strongest. We send you this warning. To all Christian teachers.” Shortly thereafter, dynamite was found on the Mission Home’s porch and windows—enough, reportedly, to blow up a city block. Police suspected the culprit was a railroad worker who was familiar with dynamite, having used it to blast through mountains of rock.
With partners such as the police and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Culbertson had her ear to the ground. When the tireless matron received a tip about a girl or young woman in jeopardy, she launched her own rescue mission. Accompanied by a translator, she wound her way through Chinatown, sometimes breaking down doors with an axe and uncovering secret hideouts in the search. Occasionally calls for help came from beyond San Francisco. Then she boarded the train, traveling to Los Angeles, San Diego and elsewhere, and bringing back a new girl or young woman in her charge. In one harrowing incident, Culbertson and the rescued girl were en route from Los Angeles when they were stopped by a local sheriff and forced to get off the train in Fresno. A telegram had been sent that accused the girl of embezzlement. The resourceful Culbertson hired a lawyer, successfully fought the warrant in court, and was able to keep the girl in her custody. Resuming the journey back to San Francisco, she and her ward took a circuitous route to evade any highbinders or their partners in crime.
Rescuing Chinese girls had become Culbertson’s life’s mission. Ah Ying had been lured away by Gee Sung, and to Culbertson he was as much a villain as the highbinders who reportedly now had her. If Ah Ying were alive and Culbertson found her, the young woman would be brought right back to where she belonged—the Mission Home.
Chee Ah Lung, also known by the Anglicized name of Adam Quinn, was one of the most feared highbinders in San Francisco. He was considered a giant of a man. “Herculean in frame,” a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle described Lung, “with… muscles of iron and a neck like a bull, he makes an easy conquest of any of his countrymen unfortunate enough to displease him.”
Lung had made a public name for himself by using his coat to help put out a fire in a theater populated by Chinese residents in the 1870s, and he used his platform of heroism and trust to grab power. Lung ended up serving seven years in San Quentin prison, on the waterfront north of San Francisco, for robbing a fellow Chinese man. In his criminal sprees, Lung seemed to be everywhere, and wherever he went violence seemed to follow. Not long after being released from prison in 1884, he was a suspect in the murder of a police detective in St. Louis, Missouri. He was considered an executioner—a hatchet-man in the literal sense, referencing a favorite weapon of his—and led a cadre of highbinders who followed his orders.
The enigmatic realm of highbinders makes it impossible to determine with certainty who grabbed Ah Ying in early May 1889, but the prolific Lung presents as strong of a candidate as any.
Lung knew the city like the back of his hand, and could be confident in evading detection for as long as he needed to accomplish his goals. He was also intimately familiar with the Mission Home: In 1877, he approached the Mission Home to board and care for his apparent wife-to-be. She stayed at the home for about a week before they were married. A year later, she returned to the Mission Home when Lung was sent to prison. Lung knew the girls and women were safe while inside the Mission Home—but once they left, they were no longer protected.
Gee Sung immediately set out on his quest to find his wife. He knew he could never outdo powerful highbinders like Chee Ah Lung alone, so he reached out for help, tapping into his ties in the community to mobilize a search and rescue operation. He quickly dispatched his friends to help him search the city. Leaving no stone unturned, he likely sent word to his network beyond San Francisco as well. He had forged friendships while laboring on the railroad, facing down death together before ultimately going their separate ways. Now Gee Sung needed these friends to keep an eye out for his missing bride, should she suddenly appear—whether in a remote train town in the Sierra Nevada mountains or in the prairie lands of Wyoming.
Finally, Gee Sung also reached out to one of the many local Chinese associations, known as tongs, which offered community services and helped govern San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Based on affiliations such as their trade or the village where they came from, some tongs were aboveboard, while others were entrenched in criminality. Chee Ah Lung’s Hip Sing Tong was among the criminal tongs that ruled Chinatown’s underground. On the other hand, the Six Companies — also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association — was an alliance that advocated for the rights of the Chinese and helped them navigate life in California.
With his tong’s help, Gee Sung placed a small notice in the personal section of The San Francisco Chronicle the next day. At the top of the page, next to an advertisement for a missing lady’s purse and a lost cream-colored English pug, appeared an announcement for the missing Ah Ying (in this case, spelled as Ah Yeng):
“A married Chinese woman about 20 years of age, named Ah Yeng, was taken away from her home… Anyone knowing her directions will receive $20 for the information, or by returning her home will receive $100.”
The reward was generous, and reflected the desperation of Gee Sung and his allies — $100 at the time was the equivalent of about $2,800 today — an enormous sum for a man whose opportunities were limited at every turn by society. Gee Sung had to hope against hope it would be enough money to tempt someone to turn against the powerful highbinders.
Gee Sung could not sit back and wait. Hitting the streets could take him far from the borders of Chinatown, from the majestic Cliff House overlooking Ocean Beach to the seedy saloons by the pier. There, a ferry could take him across the bay to the Oakland Long Wharf, where there was an extension of the Transcontinental Railroad. Gee Sung could blend in with the small but regular group of Chinese laborers who were often seen traveling back and forth on the ferry, going to and from jobs. From the deck of the ferry, a panorama opened showing the dizzying array of locations where Ah Ying could be hidden: Berkeley, Oakland and the expanding network of communities that were springing up to the east, or the hills to the north, which led to any number of mining towns.
No matter where he went, Gee Sung faced potential dangers from criminal interests. For not only were the highbinders backed by the Chinese underworld, they also had white abettors. Several years before Ah Ying vanished, another Chinese woman had been taken from her dwelling, a gun held to her head by a Chinese highbinder as she was placed in a horse and carriage driven by a white driver. Anyone spotted by Gee Sung could be an enemy.
Gee Sung would call in favors, negotiate alliances and sacrifice his hard-earned money.
Time was running short. Highbinders sometimes whisked their kidnapping victims away to other cities, such as Los Angeles, or to remote locations including private ranches concealed in the mountainous terrain of Northern California. In one recent instance, the young wife of a Chinese boat steward was kept at a ranch for over a month before being discovered, lucky to still be alive.
With a search that had to span far and wide, Gee Sung had the advantage of his extensive experience behind the scenes of the Transcontinental Railroad—a route that Gee Sung could follow to find Ah Ying. Begun in Sacramento, about 75 miles north of San Francisco and close to where gold was first discovered, the tracks then ascended into the Sierra Nevada mountains before stretching across the continental United States.
It is not difficult to imagine the awe a younger Gee Sung must have felt when he first came face to face with the Sierra Nevada many years earlier. Reaching thousands of feet above sea level, the mountains were steep, thick with pine trees and snow capped year round. They were majestic—and seemingly impenetrable.
Gee Sung’s stamina had been hardened by those years of blood, sweat and tears on the railroad. He had been a teenager when he and one of his brothers boarded a steamship bound for California around 1864, according to Dr. Russell Low, a descendant and author of Three Coins, a historical novel that traces his family’s start in California. Gee Sung came from a family of struggling farmers in southern China, part of an exodus of men looking to escape the wars and famine in China and seek a better future.
Joining the Chinese railroad crew, Gee Sung got to work. The days stretched 10 to 12 hours long, with only one day of rest. Sometimes dangling by baskets and ropes, the laborers laid down tracks along the narrow mountain sides, the path hugging the edges of the mountain. To break through the granite and carve tunnels, they drilled holes into the mountain, filled them with black powder, lit a match, and blasted the rock. Clouds of smoke hung in the air and layered dirt and soot on their skin and clothes as they did this over and over again. Gee Sung’s brother lost an eye in one such explosion, according to Dr. Low’s family history.
Gee Sung, in another story passed down in the family, also had a close brush with death. Chinese railroad workers built trestles that stretched from one end of a deep canyon to the other. While working on one such track, he looked up to see a train barrelling towards him. With nowhere to go, he hung over the side as the train lumbered over him.
The first winter in the Sierra Nevada would have stunned Gee Sung. Having grown up in southern China, where the weather was warm almost year round, this was likely the coldest he had ever been. The temperatures dropped close to zero, the terrain was blanketed with snow and the bitter wind swept against his skin like ice. Two decades earlier, the Donner Party, a caravan of pioneers, had been trapped in the same mountains for the winter, decimating more than half of the group. Worst of all, avalanches buried the Chinese railroad workers alive on more than one occasion. Many of their remains were never recovered, their names forgotten over time.
Now, racing against the clock, Gee Sung could pursue all the leads to Ah Ying’s location by riding the very railroad he had risked his own life to help build, and following it along the map of her possible whereabouts. But he wasn’t the only one. Culbertson also regularly rode the train, which sped her to the girls and young women who needed her aid. And notorious highbinders such as Chee Ah Lung also used the railroad to aid their plots. In one instance, a kidnapped woman escaped highbinders and found her way onto a train. The highbinders telegraphed to a conspirator at the next station, who boarded the train when it stopped and tried to force the woman off.
Even if Gee Sung succeeded against all odds in finding Ah Ying, highbinders would not back down, and had been known even to wrestle with ministers and constables who attempted to deprive them of the women they kidnapped. Everyone’s life—the women and rescuers—would be at risk.
The highbinders at the level of Chee Ah Lung were always heavily armed. A police report listed a veritable arsenal carried at the time of one arrest: a huge revolver in one pocket, two extra cylinders in another, a double-edged sword in the folds of his shirt. No wonder during the process of an arrest Chee Ah Lung managed to slice open a police officer’s arm. It was not an exaggeration to say the highbinders were bulletproof. Months before Ah Ying’s kidnapping, police detailed a highbinder’s custom garment hidden under his shirt: “made of compressed paper, as hard as a Pullman car wheel and was three inches thick… a bullet could not have pierced it.” Chee Ah Lung’s “Herculean” physique could be enhanced by such armor, turning him all the more into an unconquerable nemesis. Gee Sung might be able to pack a household knife or a small revolver, but such arms would hardly match these adversaries.
Worse still for Ah Ying’s prospects, highbinders of Lung’s ilk kept police on the payroll. Gee Sung not only had to race the highbinders and Culbertson’s missionaries, but the very police officers meant to protect him and his wife. Then on Wednesday, May 8, Gee Sung got word from one of his allies: a rumor was spreading about Ah Ying’s current location, and it was right in Chinatown.
Whatever locales—far and wide—she was destined to be taken, Ah Ying for now found herself stashed inside one of the innumerable laundries in Chinatown. She would have been surrounded by wooden wash bins and clothes lines strewn across the room, the day’s laundry hanging to dry.
With the reward announced by her husband, Ah Ying now had a price on her head from multiple sides. Her kidnappers were likely negotiating her sale, as was commonly the case. Once a deal was struck, the highbinders would smuggle her to a new owner. Resistance could be deadly; in one tragic case, a young woman about to be sold had resisted and tried to escape, only to be shot. Police could hardly estimate the number of victims Chee Ah Lung or his associates personally had dispatched with his infamous hatchet.
Ah Ying took matters into her own hands yet again. She could not be content to wait for death or rescue. She saw an opportunity to escape when her captors were not paying attention. Breaking free, she climbed over the back fence of the laundry yard and ran. Two of the highbinders spotted her on the street and chased after her, threatening to shoot her with a revolver.
She kept running.
She scrambled for her life for several blocks, finally seeking refuge in the basement of a boarding house on 214 Powell Street. The boarding house might as well have been on another planet. Located outside of Chinatown, it was in the fashionable neighborhood of Union Square. Cable cars rumbled down the street while wealthy residents strolled around a tree-lined park and shopped in boutiques such as Gumps and I. Magnin, which sold luxury clothing and goods. Nearby, the grand Baldwin Hotel and Theatre, with its distinctive, ornate dome, hosted travelers and performances nightly. Three Chinese cooks lived in the boarding house, and bravely allowed Ah Ying to take cover there. For hours, Ah Ying hid there, more vulnerable every minute as word leaked of her whereabouts and the highbinders had time to regroup.
Late that night, around two in the morning, police officers Fred Smith and Amos Williams were patrolling the neighborhood, when they noticed four Chinese men walking up and down Powell Street, between O’Farrell and Geary Streets. The men looked out of place. Suspicious, the officers concealed themselves in a doorway and spied on them for half an hour, before apprehending and questioning them.
The four Chinese men were helping Gee Sung’s search, and made no move to evade police. They told the officers what they were doing, and that they believed Ah Ying was somewhere on the block. The men had been waiting to see if highbinders would try to capture her again under the cover of darkness, hoping they could stop them. Gee Sung, meanwhile, was racing to the spot.
Armed with this information, the police officers quickly located Ah Ying in her place of hiding—exhausted, battered, but alive. Gee Sung appeared and informed the officers that she was his wife, and Ah Ying, facing the incredible sight of her husband, confirmed this. But Gee Sung’s heart would have sunk at the sight of the police surrounding his wife. The amazing recovery of Ah Ying would come to naught if these officers turned out to be among those bribed by highbinders.
As it turned out, the policemen were not part of the highbinders’ payroll, but something even more insidious affected them: deep-seated prejudice so pervasive it was hardly acknowledged. Police were known to have trouble distinguishing one Chinese man from another. In their view, they were all shifty, opium-addicted gamblers, and that included Gee Sung and his friends. Even though women living at the boarding house had corroborated Ah Ying’s story of being chased by highbinders to the police, neither Gee Sung nor the victim herself could be trusted, their free will and credibility diminished by their race and class.
Then came the twist of the knife. The police did trust Margaret Culbertson, whom they relied upon when they needed a place to send rescued girls. Rather than releasing Ah Ying to her husband, the police brought her right to Culbertson and the Mission Home. Husband and wife’s reunion had been heartbreakingly short-lived. And Culbertson had no intention of ever allowing Ah Ying to be with Gee Sung again. Once more, the forbidden couple were torn apart.
Ah Ying again found herself in the veritable fortress of the Mission Home. This time, Culbertson would not allow her out of her sight.
Gee Sung could have turned his back, giving up and starting fresh somewhere new. He could have followed his brother to Montana. Or he could have joined a team of laborers in the redwood forests of Santa Cruz on one of the recent railroad projects that still hired Chinese crews.
Not long before Ah Ying’s kidnapping and rescue, Leland Stanford and his business partners had been shown by a Congressional committee to have misused millions in government funds in the creation of the railroad. Through legal maneuvering and stonewalling, Stanford escaped consequences and was now reported to be worth $40 million dollars. Having long ago turned his back on the immigrants who helped build his empire, a powerful titan such as Stanford, now in Washington, D.C. as a United States senator, was not going to lift a finger to help a former employee like Gee Sung fight a biased system.
But Gee Sung would not give up. If the search for Ah Ying had required all the physical bravery and exertion he could muster, he now needed to rely on savvy and strategy in a world set up to stymie the rights of his people.
Gee Sung filed a writ of habeas corpus, essentially an accusation that Ah Ying had been locked up unlawfully at the Mission Home.
The writ of habeas corpus was one of the few ways the Chinese could assert their legal rights at the time. The Chinese Exclusion Act had essentially barred Chinese immigrants from disembarking a ship and setting foot in San Francisco, even if they had already been living here. By filing a writ of habeas corpus, Chinese passengers could demand a court hearing to be released from the ship. So many Chinese individuals filed suit that the court that heard their cases was nicknamed the “habeas corpus mill.” But the lawsuits made an impact: the case of Wong Kim Ark, which wound its way to the Supreme Court, would end up establishing the law that anyone born in the United States is an American citizen, a ruling that still stands today.
In his lawsuit, Gee Sung claimed that he had a marriage license, but that he and Ah Ying had not yet held a formal ceremony because they were waiting for an auspicious date. (Not entirely uncommon—even today, some Chinese couples consult a calendar to find a lucky date for their wedding.) Gee Sung demanded his wife back.
Culbertson fought right back. The writ of habeas corpus was a common tactic that brothel owners used to take back women for prostitution. They filed bogus lawsuits, claiming to be the girl’s parents or husband, and accusing the Mission Home of unlawfully locking up the girl. If the judge agreed, the court would release the girl—right back into the hands of the brothel owners.
The matron of the Mission Home frequently appeared in court. More often than not, she succeeded in beating back these lawsuits.
“Hardly are they within the doors of the Mission Home before writs of habeas corpus are issued by their owners for their appearance in court,” Culbertson said about the girls in her care. “For a little money, a Chinese can procure any number of witnesses to give just the testimony he wishes to support his case and regain his chattel.”
Indeed, the day after Ah Ying’s kidnapping, Culbertson had made a trip to San Francisco Superior Court for another case, a 15-year-old girl named Get Young. Culbertson had rescued Get Young from a brothel in San Diego, but now a man and a woman were claiming to be her parents and had sued for her release. Culbertson refused, and, that day, a judge sided with her, allowing Get Young to remain at the Mission Home.
In another case, Culbertson had rescued a girl from a brothel in Los Angeles and hidden her, presumably at the Mission Home. A man claiming to be her husband had sued for her return. Asked by a reporter for The San Francisco Call about the girl’s whereabouts, Culbertson replied, "All I have to say is that the girl has a good home with good Christian people and she will remain there until the courts decide who shall have the custody of her."
In Culbertson’s eyes, Ah Ying’s situation would have hardly been different. Ah Ying had run away from the Mission Home to elope with Gee Sung—or so Ah Ying claimed. Even allies to the embattled immigrants such as Culbertson condescended toward their capacity to make their own choices. Besides, Culbertson had been tricked before.
One time, a man had arranged for a girl to be rescued. Once the girl was secure at the Mission Home, the man had come to call and asked for the girl’s hand in marriage. Culbertson had made inquiries, had been satisfied with the responses and had granted the marriage. Soon, however, Culbertson was dismayed to learn that the man had sold his wife to prostitution in another city. She vowed never to make that mistake again.
Culbertson had also seen girls lie on the stand, or, for one reason or another, refuse to testify against their abusers. In one case, the rescued girls had told the judge that they did not wish to stay at the Mission Home. Released from Culbertson’s care, the girls had returned to being trafficked.
Culbertson’s management of the Mission Home and her philosophy started with keeping her wards under her control—where they could be safe—at the Mission Home at all costs. If Ah Ying were ever to be married, the union would be blessed by Culbertson, and it would not involve Gee Sung. Culbertson had fought against mighty highbinders—at one point, police had praised her for being braver than most men—and would gladly take on a railroad worker who thought he knew what was better for one of her girls than she did.
The case—and the future of the couple’s relationship—wound its way onto the court docket.
On the day of the case, Gee Sung trekked down the hill from Chinatown to court chambers housed at the City Hall bounded by McAllister and Larkin streets. The courtroom of Department 12 was the domain of Judge Daniel J. Murphy. A 55-year-old judge of Irish descent, Murphy had studied law on the East Coast before moving to California and practicing criminal law in San Francisco.
Murphy was round, stout and losing much of the hair on his head. He had served as a district attorney for San Francisco before his appointment to San Francisco Superior Court. Away from the courtroom, he and his wife threw lavish, society-page-worthy parties attended by the city’s bold faced names, empowered by the fresh wealth the railroad had swept into the region. That same wealth was on gaudy display here at City Hall, a sprawling construction project still underway after decades of work and graft; but if the cheap labor and forced servitude of immigrants such as Gee Sung and Ah Ying had laid the foundations for the city’s grandeur, the institutions that grew from prosperity largely snuffed out their rights. In a grimly appropriate symbol of this, in the months leading up to the court case, excavation work at the City Hall site revealed dozens of skeletons, forgotten men and women of San Francisco (including at least one Chinese immigrant) buried and now discarded to make way for this monument to municipal prosperity.
Murphy had ruled on cases involving the Chinese before. A year earlier, in a trial of a Chinese highbinder charged with assault to murder, Murphy made his feelings on the Chinese clear: They did not belong in the United States. When the prosecutor told Judge Murphy that the witnesses had fled, and were not expected to return, Murphy remarked, “So much the better. That will be a new way of expediting the Chinese exodus.”
This was the fight of Ah Ying and Gee Sung’s lives. With all the physical threats to their safety they had survived, ultimately the most pernicious force lined up against them was not a violent street thug, but rather the conviction held by so many that the United States could never be their true home. Chinatown, so this perspective ran, was a necessary evil, a holding pen for temporary labor before they were used up and expelled; the Mission Home, meanwhile, served as a conduit to Americanizing the women worth saving. The courts were a terrifying place for Chinese immigrants, with patterns of twisting laws to find a way to limit rights and ultimately force them out. With his hardened biases, Judge Murphy was poised to be the one hurdle that could not be overcome in the saga of Ah Ying and Gee Sung.
Ah Ying took the witness stand. She was dismissed as the “little Chinese wife” in the newspapers. But her voice rang out strong and loud. Through a translator, she insisted to the court that she was 19 years old and old enough to decide to marry. She said that she had known Gee Sung for many years, was truly in love with him, and wished to be reunited with him. The defiant Ah Ying added that she would not stay at the Mission Home if she were sent back, no doubt sending waves of frustration through Culbertson.
Judge Murphy remarked that she did not look her age, a possible signal of bias toward the appearances of Chinese women. Ah Ying was said to blush, perhaps self-conscious from the scrutiny over her personal relationship with Gee Sung, or plain anger.
Culbertson also took the stand. The matron of the Mission Home insisted that Ah Ying was not yet 18, too young to be married, and would be in danger if allowed to be with Gee Sung.
When it was his turn, the “sleek and saffron-brown” Gee Sung “did not present the figure of a fitting cavalier for the pretty young wife,” observed a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Gee Sung was said to scowl as he approached the chair for questioning, either another racist shorthand by the media or an accurate description of Gee Sung’s understandable disgust at the treatment of him and his wife.
Though the press brought up his background as a railroad worker, Gee Sung attested to being an entrepreneurial cigar maker who could take care of his wife financially. As the hearing continued into a second day, witnesses were called to testify on behalf of Gee Sung’s reputation and proof was sought for Ah Ying’s age. A lawyer for Gee Sung submitted testimonials from leading Chinatown merchants confirming his integrity and his ability to care for his wife.
Judge Murphy was hardly an unbiased arbiter, but he was their only hope for a system rigged against them.
The day of judgement finally came a few days later.
Early Saturday morning, Ah Ying slicked her black hair back and donned a flowing blue and gold robe. Nearly two long weeks had passed since she had been separated from Gee Sung.
She made her way down the hill, and was one of the earliest to arrive in the courtroom. To cross that threshold would have been intimidating for anyone. But she was not alone. In fact, she was surrounded. A throng from Chinatown soon crowded into the courtroom with her, all ready and eager to hear the verdict. At one point a reporter estimated 100 onlookers, more than could fit, tried to squeeze into the courtroom. The community came out in droves, rallying around the couple.
The moment finally came when Judge Murphy settled into his seat. When he looked out into the seats, he could see not only a couple in love, divided by lawyers and court officers, but faces that represented the wide range of talented and proud Chinese residents, a powerful swathe of their community supporting them. Murphy told the packed courtroom that he had reviewed the information presented. Then he announced his long-awaited decision: Ah Ying could leave the Mission Home and marry Gee Sung.
Neither Ah Ying nor Gee Sung needed a translator to understand the ruling, nor did the crowd need a legal analysis from Murphy about a basic human right to choose a soulmate. The sea of people made way for the two lovers. They rushed into each other’s arms before Judge Murphy finished reading his verdict.
Margaret Culbertson had to walk out of the room in defeat, but would continue her efforts for another eight years before retiring, being hailed as “heroic” by the San Francisco Call. Culbertson never gave up trying to protect preyed-upon Chinese women. Though their approach could be self-righteous and pious, the Mission Home no doubt left behind a legacy that made it possible for generations of Chinese Americans to be here today.
That day, the vindicated couple happily made their way directly from Judge Murphy’s courtroom to Judge Hebbard’s courtroom, “tripping through the corridors with their friends trooping after them,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported. Securing a certified marriage license, Ah Ying and Gee Sung were officially married in the eyes of the court and before some 40 members of their community. Then they returned to Chinatown, no longer a place where they had to hide in fear, in order to celebrate. With the attention and publicity the couple had commanded, no highbinder would want to step into their spotlight. They were finally home.
(The infamous highbinder, Chee Ah Lung, shortly after the verdict made his way from San Francisco to New York, in a plot to take his hatchet to an entire theater company of Chinese actors who had defied his syndicate’s rules. The public record for him fades after that, though there is a prison entry describing a “chink” named Ah Lung who was locked up in San Quentin from 1900 to 1910. Battered and scarred, this Ah Lung, however, was a not-quite-Herculean 5 foot 4, suggesting either the wrong man or that newspaper reports exaggerated his appearance and feats.)
Against the odds, Gee Sung and Ah Ying had found each other and defeated a system determined to keep them apart. They had overcome a society intent on forcing them to conform or sending them “back to where they came from,” and an underworld set up to exploit and profit from that vulnerable position. They would be married for 16 years, bearing children and grandchildren that included some of the earliest Chinese American college graduates, before Gee Sung died of illness. Life remained filled with barriers and challenges. The same month that they won the right to be together, the United States Supreme Court upheld the nation’s anti-Chinese immigration laws. Ah Ying and Gee Sung were barred from becoming United States citizens, owning land and traveling to and from China. But through the obstacles, they had each other.
That historic night, Ah Ying and Gee Sung’s wedding party lasted into the morning hours. The couple served Chinese delicacies, and burned incense made of sandalwood. Ah Ying oversaw the festivities and must have felt elation, a capable woman who, alongside her partner, was forging her own destiny.
Author’s Note
The details of early Chinese immigrants in the United States during the 19th century are murky and biased. Their daily lives, contributions and accomplishments were rarely chronicled, unless it fit the narrative of the dirty, immoral or exotic immigrant. Many public records, as well as Chinese language papers, were also destroyed over time, particularly from the 1906 earthquake and fire. To research the story of Ah Ying and Gee Sung, I relied on contemporaneous public records and English-language newspaper accounts, knowing, however, that they might not be completely accurate, as even their names were regularly misspelled.Thank you to the staff at Yale’s Divinity School Library for their assistance, and to Dr. Russell Low, author of Three Coins, for speaking with me about his family’s story. I would like to acknowledge the scholarship and research of Judy Yung, Julia Flynn Siler, Gordon H. Chang, Mildred Crowl Martin, Lorna E. Logan, Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, Philip P. Choy and Richard H. Dillon.
ELLEN LEE is an independent writer and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she spent her early childhood in San Francisco Chinatown, not far from the Cameron House.
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