by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As has been pointed out here before, it can be challenging finding information and artifacts about people of color during our interpretive period of 1830-1930. Today’s highlighted object from the Homestead’s holdings is an illustration of this, being an order from Thomas J. Stuart, secretary of the Los Angeles Board of Charities and an inspector, to Superintendent John C. Fifield of the Los Angeles County Cemetery to permit morticians Orr and Hines to bury Jeo Mon Ling.
The county cemetery comprised the “potter’s field” where indigent residents of the Angel City were interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. The notation on the document that “Grave paid for” meant that the fees for Jeo Mon Ling’s burial in an unmarked grave in the southeastern corner of Evergreen near the intersection of First and Lorena streets, where many remains, including those of Chinese persons, were unearthed outside the official bounds when the Metro Gold Line was built along 1st, was paid for through a fund for the purpose.
There is a listing in the official county “Record of Deaths” book for “Joe Mon Ling,” showing that the married 50-year old “Mongol” and native of China had as “Physician or Coroner” George W. Campbell and that the cause of death on 15 May was “fatty degeneration of heart.” Moreover, the Los Angeles Express of the 18th recorded his death, though it was said to have occurred on the 16th, in the city’s Chinatown.
Notably, however, there were several reports in Angel City newspapers of what the Express of the 16th called “A Queer Case.” The paper stated that “an unknown Chinaman died in front of the Chinese drug store of Kim Yuen at 115 1/2 Marchessault street, early yesterday morning.” Before 4 a.m., a passerby “heard some one crying out as if in great pain” and then found “a Chinaman writhing about on top of a bale of hay.”
The account continued “the heathen,” a pejorative commonly used for the Chinese, “died shortly after, and a few minutes later a small dog ran up to the corpse, and after smelling about for a few seconds, fell down in convulsions and also died within a minute or two.” The piece concluded that the remains were taken to the mortuary of Orr and Hines, but also noted that “the officers think the Chinaman was poisoned, as was the dog, but whether the Mongolian [yet another negative term] committed suicide or the poisoning was the result of design they are unable to say.”
The Los Angeles Herald of the same day called the discovery “A Mysterious Death” adding that the discoverer of the stricken man found a police officer and that, when the two returned to the scene, the man soon died. It speculated that the animal was the pet of the deceased “and after giving a sign of recognizing the corpse” it went into spams and expired. The other bit of detail was that, after the body was taken to the Orr and Hines parlors, “an inquest will be held today by Coroner Campbell today.”
A coroner’s inquest was standard procedure for then in any cases of death that could not be obviously explained and, because of the concern of possible poisoning, Campbell examined the remains and then conducted an autopsy. Because of the determination that the cause of death was natural, as recorded in the official death listing, this meant that Stuart could then proceed to issue the order to Fifield for the burial of Jeo Mon Ling in the “potter’s field” at Evergreen.
The Los Angeles Record, which tended to be the most liberal of the city’s English-language daily newspapers, thought the subject to warrant the headline of “Ah What?” for the lack of identification of the body. It repeated most of the other salient facts of the matter and indulged in using the word “mystery” twice in its brief account, which concluded with new information that “the only papers found on the dead man were two city license receipts for stalls in the public market.”
Further details were elicited by the Los Angeles Times of the 17th, in which it was reported that “Charles Toon, a Chinese merchant who is doing business at No. 314 Marchessault [went to the mortuary] and identified the Chinaman” and “says it is his cousin, whose name is George Bork, and that he is a member of the Quong Men Company, who furnish vegetables to Chinamen on the market.”
It was added that the truck farm operated by the tong, one of several mutual benefit societies in the city and which were frequently publicized for actual or purported criminal activity, was eight miles from the city near Cahuenga, and that Coronel Campbell was to conduct the inquest that morning concerning the death of the man said to be about 60 years of age and in bad health for the prior two years.
This would seem to explain why the burial permit was issued on that date, but the name of “George Bork” confuses matters somewhat, though none of the 29 Chinese persons found in the 1898 “Record of Death” listings had that name and there were two other names registered in May, but from dates closer to the beginning and ends of the month. Moreover, the Times of the 18th briefly recorded that the inquest of “George Borak” showed the cause of death being “fatty degeneration of the heart,” this, of course, corresponding exactly to Jeo Mon Ling.
As for other items related to the Chinese of Los Angeles during May 1898, there are some notable ones. One involved appropriation on the vaudeville stage as the duo of Robetta and Doretto appeared at the Orpheum Theater billed as “The Chinese Emperors of Acrobatic Comedy.” The team, which toured much of the United States and Canada from at least 1893 to 1899, often called their act “The Effect of Opium at the Heap Fun Laundry,” blithely making fun of a debilitating drug habit and the name of a common Chinese place of business.
The routine involved an opening scene in which the comedians played Chinese launderers smoking the drug in their bunks during a break and then a darkened stage allowed for a quick change. The second scene showed one of the performers as a policeman trying to arrest the other and who was kicked or had things thrown at him as he chased his quarry. The set included a revolving door and another that was partitioned into sections and featured a bar over it for the acrobatic escape, though the cop finally nabbed his man.
The 10 May edition of the Herald described the act in some detail and critiqued that it “caused a great deal of merriment” as the Chinese character displayed “great agility” as he would “reappear from some unexpected part of the house.” The Times of the 8th, however, dismissed the idea that Robetta and Doretto, described as “impersonators of Chinese character life” were said to “have developed a new vein of comedy caricaturing” as it observed that “the Chinaman has not been entirely neglected by stage folk in the past.” Remarkably, a very early film recording of the act from 1894 survives in the collection of the Library of Congress.
Whatever one makes of this piece of entertainment, most of the rest of the coverage in the local press was more decidedly negative. On the 20th, the Herald and the Times reported that Long Leng Hok, convicted of operating an opium den and fined $100, went into hiding, but was spotted by a police officer walking on Alameda Street and was nabbed so that he would either pay the penalty in cash or spend the like number of days in the city lockup. Eight days later, the latter noted that another opium den case involving Ah Jim continued to be delayed because the wealthy defendant had three lawyers to argue the matter.
Also on the 20th, the Times briefly recorded the situation involving Gee Hee, accused of several instances of embezzlement, the latest purportedly involving the absconding of a bridle and part of a harness and found in a pawn shop. On the 7th, the Express made mention of the lottery case of Ah Luey and Ah Sing, who were convicted in the Police Court, but an appeal before the Superior Court led to a reversal because a defense request for a definition of a lottery was denied by the justice.
A new trial, however, was set for early June and the conviction reaffirmed, but Ah Luey sought to hide, Long Len Hok did, and was likewise captured and sent to jail to serve 300 days. Ah Sing, though, was acquitted in late July because a ticket said to be sold to a police officer and one found on the defendant turned out to be duplicates, so he was released on this technicality.
A case that was covered in several editions of Angel City papers involved the arrest in Chinatown of Chan You, a woman who claimed to be 25 years old but was thought to be much younger. While the Record insisted she was a “slave girl” and she was subjected to a hearing before a federal immigration official for an alleged violation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it turned out that Chan, called the “Golden Lily” in the press, already been through a similar proceeding in San Francisco and found “that she had complied with the law’s requirements in coming to this country.
Another notable legal matter involved the lengthy detention in the county hoosegow of ship captain James E. Wright, who was convicted by a federal court “for having landed [seven] Chinese unlawfully in this country at San Juan Capistrano,” this almost certainly being where the Orange County harbor at Dana Point is today. Even though Wright served his sentence, he remained incarcerated because a fine went unpaid, but he was freed on a writ of habeus corpus and fellow prisoners “decorated the entrance to the tanks with a knot of mourning ribbons and rosette.” At the end of the month, two crew members of a ship anchored at Anaheim Landing (Seal Beach) at the other end of Orange County were detained for ferrying fifteen Chinese and this completed the arrest of all of the ship’s crew for the incident.
It was rare to find reports of criminal behavior against Chinese residents, with the sole instance from May involving a group of bicyclists riding on Main Street between 2nd and 3rd streets accosted by messenger Frank S. Sistoyes. After knocking one of the men off his machine, Sistoyes tried to do the same to Ah Ying, who, however, resisted, so a spirited bout of fisticuffs ensued.
The Times of the 23rd observed that this matter involved the idea that “China and Young America were mixed up” in the fracas, but the next day the paper reported that a judge fined Sistoyes $15 and released Ah Ying under the premise that “the Chinese, as a rule, will never bother the boys unless first attacked by them, and in this case Sistoyes was the aggressor.”
It was also unusual for the Chinese to resort to the courts to address civil grievances, though there was a report in the Times of the 25th that stated that “a Chinese contingent has appeared in court to fight for their rights” as four men filed an action for $2,000 in damages against Charles H. Forbes, agent for the prominent woman landowner, Arcadia Bandini Stearns de Baker, who leased land on the Laguna ranch southeast of Los Angeles to the plaintiffs.
The quartet claimed that they were in legal possession (Asians could not own land in California then) of fifty acres on which they were farming, but Forbes showed up and “cleared them all out, bag and baggage, placed a constable in possession and took forcible possession of the Chinese syndicate’s tools and crops.” Nothing, however, could be located of any further proceedings on the matter.
Some Chinese operated businesses as physicians and surgeons, using the pulse of a patient to diagnose complaints that were generally addressed by the use of herbal remedies. One firm, the Foo and Wing Herb Company, located at the southwest corner of Olive and 9th streets, took out lengthy advertisements in the form of an article that addressed its remedies for colds, with it stating “half the diseases that kill people originate in simple colds.” The company offered that “Oriental Herbal Remedies are more efficient in curing colds and all diseases originating in colds than any others known” and published “The Science of Oriental Medicine” to explain how its herbal teas worked. Testimonials were provided from Anglos who affirmed how they were helped.
Positive mentions of the Chinese were notably few and far between and some of these were still couched in blatant racial terms, as was the situation with a 1 May Herald article titled “A Loyal Chinaman.” With the United States in the midst of its latest imperial war, this one with Spain involving Cuba and The Philippines, the paper reported that,
Monday there was a lively scrap lasting a few minutes, between a darkey and a Chinaman. The row, which was a dandy while it lasted, was precipitated by the Chinaman, who is thoroughly Americanized . . . resenting the colored man’s loud-mouthed assertion that the only nation Spain could lick [beat] was China. Quick as a flash John [another term for a Chinese man] smashed the coon, and as Sambo [equivalent to John for whites] was game, the row went merrily along, until stopped by the crowd separating the. The Chinaman [who formerly worked on an American Navy vessel] made many admirers by the remark, “Spain lick Cubans, but no lick China or anybody else.”
At the end of the month, the Pomona Progress briefly made note of an address made by the only Chinese student at Pomona College, now part of the Claremont Colleges, this being Fong Foo Sec, whose lifespan was identical to that of Walter P. Temple, 1869-1938. Fong, from a rural part of Guangdong, China, migrated to California the year the Exclusion Act was passed, and was a cook for a Sacramento family before joining The Salvation Army and becoming a Christian.
In 1897, he enrolled in the prep high school at Pomona and the Progress article concerned his address before a council of churches in San Jacinto, next to Hemet, in Riverside County, with the paper praising his presentation and identifying Fong as, along with a woman student speaker, Mary Parker, having brought honor to their school.
Fong went to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of California and a master’s from Columbia University before returning to China where he was an editor for a book publishing firm’s English-language volumes. He was considered a Pomona College graduate and was the subject of a 2023 feature in the school paper.
Innocuous and unassuming as the burial permit for Jeo Mon Ling is, it is a portal not only into what could be found about his life and death but for conditions for the Chinese of greater Los Angeles as the 19th century was drawing to a close and we are glad to offer this post as part of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the 19th century were primarily from Southern China. Traditionally, people from this region were perceived by their fellow Chinese in other areas as less refined, despite being equally intelligent and diligent. Their behaviors and dialects were often mocked as barbaric. Likely due to their loud speech, distinctive appearance, comparatively rude behaviors, and strongly competitive ambitions, they were easily disliked by local people and subjected to racial slurs.
After decades of assimilation, and with most newer Chinese immigrants having higher educational backgrounds, Chinese Americans have gradually earned respect and recognition in American society, particularly in academic fields and business achievements. Unfortunately, in recent years, many immigrants from China who were heavily influenced by the Cultural Revolution have come to the U.S. Their commonly perceived and newly bred mentality of greed, dishonesty, and selfishness has deeply disappointed many, including Chinese Americans from other regions.
This is why I’ve observed that racial slurs against Chinese people are becoming more common. It supports my theory that derogatory terms are either used by low-class individuals or provoked by the behavior of low-class individuals.