During the Chinese Exclusion era, Chinese men were often called “John” and women called “Mary”.
In the time when America outlawed the immigration of Chinese laborers, between 1882 and 1943, and citizenship for non-laborers was impossible, Americans opted to call many of the Chinese living among them “John” or “Mary” in lieu of having to go through the trouble of learning their Chinese names.
Anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in the US. Despite Chinese immigrant laborers having played a major role in building the transcontinental railroad, by the late 1800s fear of Chinese people taking American jobs as well as sullying American racial “purity” was so rampant that the government enacted its first major law that stopped immigration to America based on race.
The Chinese people who still made it to American soil and chose to remain were predominantly men relegated to Chinatown slums where they worked largely in the laundry and restaurant businesses. The limited number of women allowed into the US were due to the sensationalized belief that all Chinese women were cunning sex workers who would tempt American men with opium and the flesh. In reality, Chinese women were often sold into the sex trade or lured into it under false pretenses. Chinese sex trafficking was big business in mining towns and immigrant enclaves.
Additionally, the immigration of women was carefully restricted so as to avoid not only intermixing with white Americans, but also to deplete the Chinese population. It was the hope that eventually the Chinese in America would simply die out.
But among the Chinese living in America during the Exclusion era, some fought to make opportunities where there were few.
One of those people was Ah Chum or Sing Choy or China Mary. (It’s unlikely any of these were her real name.)
Arriving in Tombstone, Arizona’s “Hoptown” (or Chinatown), around 1880, Mary’s story is a mix of legend and history. This could partly be due to the number of “Marys” during the Exclusion era, or this could also just be because of poor or sloppy record keeping. Either way, China Mary has been called the most famous Chinese person of Tombstone.
Married to restaurant owner and businesses man, Ah Lum (Chinese would often call each other “Ah” followed by their name – you can still hear this today), Mary had the reputation for being a bold, savvy business woman who favored lavish silk brocade clothing and piles of jade jewelry. She was striking both in appearance and manner.
The daughter of a Chinese gold miner in California and originally from Guangdong province, Mary, her husband, and Quong Gu Kee – another notable Chinese person from Tombstone history – ran the famous Can Can Restaurant, the hangout for Wyatt Earp and his gang. More than a restaurant owner, Mary was also trusted by both Chinese and whites alike for her ability to find reliable Chinese laborers.
Unusually for a Chinese person of the time, let alone a Chinese woman, employers believed in her word. Ingratiating herself to the white Americans of Tombstone, her guarantee regarding her laborers was supposedly, “Them steal, me pay.” Of course she strictly managed her workers, and always took a commission from their pay.
A smart investor and popular amongst all the residents of Tombstone, she came to be something of the “godfather” of Hoptown. Running a general store that stocked both Chinese and American goods, as well as investing in restaurants, laundries, and various other businesses around town, Mary was also a reputable money lender who had absolute faith in her own abilities to deduce whether a borrower would cross her. And you never wanted to cross Mary.
Not only did she have influence amongst powerful people in Tombstone, but she was a force herself to be reckoned with. Stories tell of her fearlessness in standing up for herself and other Chinese people whom she saw wronged. She might have had her own moral compass, as may have been necessary, but she adhered to it. It was this stubbornness and her forthright nature in her business dealings that won her the respect and affection of Tombstone. Mary was not a sinner or a saint, she was a survivor.
But she also supplied diversion to the town.
Running gambling houses (open to both Chinese and white Americans), opium dens, and brothels, it was clear that Mary understood that there were ways Chinese people in America could make good money, so she exploited it.
But stories of Mary do not relegate her to being some heartless opportunist. She may have had a dictatorial streak, but it seems she was not without generosity.
Accounts tell of her never turning away someone in need of food or medical care. A popular tale tells of her bringing a wounded cowboy who showed up at her door to the nearby boarding house and paying all of his bills until he recovered. Furthermore, if there was a dispute between the Chinese residents of Tombstone and the white leaders, she helped negotiate. Such was her influence.
When Mary died of heart failure in December of 1906, she was given a extravagant Chinese-style funeral, attended by most of Tombstone, complete with a carriage procession to Boothill Cemetery in order to throw evil spirits off her trail. Breaking with Chinese tradition to have her bones sent home to China after one year, Mary supposedly asked that her bones stay in Tombstone so she could “remain near her friends.”
Either that, or those same friends opted to keep her bones in America, as an express carrier at the time, George W. Chapman, admitted that he threw away the bones of many Chinese people whom he was entrusted to carry.
There are snippets of stories about Mary from friends and acquaintances that characterize her as jovial, quick with a smile, but rigid in her business practices. She was a creation of the Chinese Exclusion era – a woman whose survival hinged upon the fact that she could work both sides of the Chinese-American divide. Her job, just as much as running businesses, was to charm her oppressors, disarm them into thinking of her as trustworthy, not like the “others”.
In that way, China Mary, just like so many Chinese-American “Marys” then and even now, had to exist between worlds; both as Chinese, and better than Chinese.
Featured image via Creative Commons
