On the Chinatown Trunk Mystery

The subject of this book is wild but also really important, and I am here for it. The style of writing reminds me a lot of City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the friend of a Chinese man, Leon Ling, noticed that he hadn’t seen him for a few days. When a nasty odor began to emerge from the room, he went to the police and they opened the door with the help of a locksmith. Instead of finding a dead Leon Ling, as was expected, they found a heavily bound trunk, and inside it was a white woman. After going through Ling’s papers, the police determined that the woman in the trunk was 19-year-old Elsie Sigel, who was a white missionary that worked with Chinese residents. Sigel’s family affirmed that the body was hers. A few suspects were taken to the police station and, when none of them knew anything about Sigel, they were released. Leon Ling became the chief suspect. Yet, Ling was nowhere to be found, anywhere in the country. Ling seemed to have disappear into thin air.

The murder case did not really go anywhere, there was no trial as the only suspect could not be found. Yet, New York newspapers gave the story headline news for a week and intermittently offered stories on it months after the fact. Americans throughout the entire country would turn in Chinese neighbors, acquaintances, or passers-by to the police, thinking that these men were Leon Ling. At the end of the day, the case of Elsie Sigel is an unsolved murder.

Yet, New York faced constant tragic and unexplained deaths. Why was this case so different from all of the others? What made the case of Elsie Sigel so special? This is the question that historian Mary Lui is attempting to answer in the text. While the question of Leon Ling is interesting, the level of interest in the murder case offers much more to think about.

In the end, Lui argues that the interest in the Elsie Sigel case was so interesting because Sigel and Ling transgressed so many boundaries. Moreover, police came to believe that Ling killed Sigel because he was romantically involved with her, but she became increasingly interested in another Chinese man. Sigel’s letters to both relied on language that was generally only used by couples who were married or, at least, properly engaged; she treated them as though they were white men; and she was a Protestant missionary from a middle-class family in upper Manhattan. The public asked: “How could she have transgressed so heavily?” On the other side, Ling and countless other Chinese men were framed as inherently predatory—bringing into question whether white women should even be missionaries in Chinese communities, who would take advantage of their good will. Chinatown was framed as battlegrounds between tongs, centers of prostitution, gambling dens, opium houses, and numerous other vices (yet, Ling was not even from Chinatown, he lived in midtown).

This book is about the policing of cultural and social space between Chinese men and white women, the separation of which was transgressed far more than commonly believe (there were many mixed-race couples in New York). As well as attempting to define the space, Lui does an excellent job of showing how New Yorkers and other Americans attempted to reorder space to continue separating Chinese and white Americans through language, metaphors, and ludicrous depictions.

Really nicely done here