CRIME: Tong

Western Union operators in Boston were puzzled, last week, by a number of enigmatic telegrams sent from their station to various parts of the U. S. The messages appeared, at first glance, to be in code, but a closer scrutiny revealed that they were merely lists of names—Chinese names. Did some sinister purport lodge in these formal messages—a hint of vague hatreds, of malice palely half-smiling from faces as yellow as the telegraph blanks, and as inscrutable? It was hard to be sure. The police, at all events, evinced some interest in the messages; they were also curious to trace certain long distance telephone calls from Boston to obscure places in the Chinese quarters of St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh—calls in which the connection had been requested in carefully articulated English, followed by the rushing speech of a dim voice haranguing in a chant of monosyllables an unseen Oriental a thousand miles away. ... a staccato cry of comprehension. . . . the click of a receiver.

Pressmen could get no aliment from these reported phone-calls and telegrams; but when, next day, a number of Chinamen were shot down, singly, and for no apparent reason, in widely separated parts of the U. S., typewriters stuttered, and a frightening word began to boom in the headlines of even the conservative papers: TONG!

TONG WAR RENEWED— TONG DEATHS MOUNT—TONG CHIEFS... TONG HATE. . . TONG. . .

The delicious menace of that word has been long savored by people who have yielded to the importunity of a megaphoning bus-starter and have ridden THROUGH CHINATOWN FOR $1. On such rides they beheld Orientals going and coming in the streets, with the short scuffling step and the furtive stoop which they have borrowed from the cinema. They scrutinized the houses of these yellow men— miserable places for the most part, tenements, tumbled shanties, bars, and chop suey joints, all dingy, or garish, not one of them revealing the least hint of that exotic magnificence without which, as everyone knows, no Chinaman can exist. But the sightseers were not deceived.

They knew too well what really went on behind those apparently dismal walls; no housefront however dreary, could hide from them its inner chambers hung with a thousand twilit blazonries and perfumed with the musk of frankincense and grated orris-root—chambers wherein slim Chinese girls with scarlet fingernails and breasts like almond-petals submit among Himalayas of varicolored cushions, to the embraces of opium-bloated laundrymen. . . .

Few sightseers know that tong means "Parlor." The implication of the word is a genial one, implying conversation, compromise, good cheer. Tongs were originally started as protective trade organizations. They became, by degrees, political bodies—compact, powerful, antagonistic. Thus was the word perverted. Now, when that word appears in print, it clangs like a terrible bronze bell summoning unseen hordes to war, sounding the knell of many pathetic, dingy little men who will die by violence, in secret places.