The Apaches of New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Although the white devils' law failed, the Chinese law was not so powerless. Because of that murder, eight Four Brothers and five On Leon Tongs have been shot dead. Also, slippered feet have stolen into the sleeping rooms of offensive ones, as they dreamed of China the Celestial far away beyond the sunset, and unseen bird-claw fingers have turned on the white devils' gas. In this way a dozen more have died. They have awakened in Chinatown to the merits of the white devils' gas as a method of assassination. It bids fair to take the place of the automatic gun, just as the latter shoved aside the old-time barbarous hatchet.

Little Bow Kum had reached her nineteenth year when she was killed. Her husband, Tchin Len, was worth $50,000. He was more than twice as old as little Bow Kum, and is still in Mott Street waiting for her spirit to return and strangle her destroyers. This will one day come to pass, and he is waiting for that day. Tchin Len has another wife in Canton, but he does not go back to her, preferring to live in Chinatown with the memory of his little lost Bow Kum.

Little Bow Kum was born in the Canton district, China. Her father's name was Wong Hi. Her mother's name doesn't matter, because mothers do not amount to much in China. As she lay in her mother's lap, a chubby, wheat-hued baby, they named her Bow Kum, which means Sweet Flower, for they knew she would be very beautiful.

When little Bow Kum was five years old, Wong Hi, her father, sold her for $300. Wong Hi was poor, and $300 is a Canton fortune. Also, the sale had its moral side, since everyone knows that children are meant to be a prop and support to their parents.

Little Bow Kum was bought and sold, as was well understood by both Wong Hi, the father, and the man who chinked down his hard three hundred silver dollars as the price, with the purpose of rearing her to a profession which, while not without honor among Orientals, is frowned upon by the white devils, and never named by them in best society. Much pains were bestowed upon her education; for her owner held that in the trade which at the age of fifteen she was to take up, she should be able to paint, embroider, quote Confucius, recite verses, and in all things be a mirror of the graces. Thus she would be more valuable, being more attractive.

Little Bow Kum accepted her fate and made no protest, feeling no impulse so to do. She knew that she had been sold, and knew her destiny; but she felt no shock, was stricken by no desire to escape. What had happened and would happen, had been for hundreds and thousands of years the life story of a great feminine fraction of her people. Wherefore, the thought was at home in her blood; her nature bowed to and embraced it.

Of course, from the white devils' view-point the fate designed for little Bow Kum was as the sublimation of the immoral. But you must remember that morality is always a question of geography and sometimes a question of race. Climates, temperatures, also play their part.

Then, too, there is that element of support. In the tropics, where life is lazy, easy, and one may pick a dinner from every tree, man is polygamous. In the ice locked arctics, where one spears his dinner out of the cold, reluctant sea, and goes days and days without it, man is polyandrous, and one wife has many husbands. In the temperate zone, where life is neither soft nor hard and yet folk work to live, man is monogamous, and one wife to one husband is the only good form.

Great is latitude!

Take the business of steeping the senses in drinks or drugs. That eternal quantity of latitude still worms its way into the equation. In the arctic zone they drink raw alcohol, in the north temperate whiskey, in the south temperate wine, while in the tropics they give up drinking and take to opium, hasheesh and cocaine.