Rhys here on Wednesday, feeling under the weather with a cold/cough. It's lucky email can't carry that sort of virus, isn't it?
Anyway, I know I had something brilliant to write about today, but my brain is like cotton, so instead I'll write about what I've been doing for the past couple of weeks, and that is planning for my next Molly book. For me these books always start with place--a particular segment of society in old New York. I've set books in the garment industry, the stage, among the Four Hundred, on Coney Island. Often I don't know what wlil happen to Molly when she goes to one of these places--she is hired to do some kind of detective work and the crime evolves from that.
But this time I have a basis of structure for the book. She's getting married. She's promised Daniel she'll give up her dangerous career, but she's not really sure she wants to be just a wife. So I thought it would be interesting to contrast her expectations as a bride with a bride in a different society. So I'm taking her to Chinatown, where rich men could buy brides and have them shipped from China.
That was my starting point so I have been reading every book I can lay my hands on about early Chinatowns and the history of the Chinese in America. I am familiar with Chinatowns, of course, living a few miles from San Francisco where I have enjoyed wandering on many occasions through the backstreets of Chinatown, observing ducks hanging in a row in butcher's window, live fish in a tank, Chinese medicine shops with little square drawers full of herbs and powders (ground stag horn anyone?
I had always known that the Chinese had a tough time and were driven out of many towns. About five miles from me there is a place called China Camp on the San Francisco Bay, where the Chinese went after they were driven out by San Francisco Fishermen. The little houses still stand and it has been made into a nice museum. There is also Angel Island where new arrivals were detained and processed. So Chinese American history is all around me. But I had no idea how badly they were treated and how discriminatory the exclusion act was. In 1882 an act was passed saying that all Chinese laborers should be deported back to China, no Chinese allowed to enter from now on and no Chinese living in the States could become a citizen. This was at a time when immigrants were pouring in from Europe and being welcomed with open arms.
So why this Sino-phobia? One would have thought that any society would have welcomed Chinese. They were hard working, didn't drink, were quiet, kept to themselves and prospered. Ah, so maybe that was a big factor. They were thrifty, ingenious and they made money. They took over the laundry trade. They became expert market gardeners. Maybe they were resented. Maybe they just looked different--foreign and scary with their almond eyes and their long pigtails hanging down their backs. But all sorts of rumors circulated--they stole white girls for prostitution, they ate puppies, they all smoked opium.
In New York there were hardly any Chinese women because of the exclusion act. It was a town of bachelors, trying not to get into trouble with their Italian neighbors. Some of them--the early arrivals, had married Irish girls who perfered a polite and thrifty Chinese husband who could provide for them well to a drunken Irish lout. Of course they were forever outcast from white society after this. It's not actually known how many Chinese women there actually were--they would have had bound feet and not be allowed out, so they would have been invisible, hearing about life only from their children whow went to American school.
So I've plenty of juicy stuff to start my story--Tong wars, opium joints, gambling parlors, women hidden in upstairs rooms, half Irish children.... and Molly, as usual getting in over her head! I can't wait.
