"No," answered Manning, biting his fingernails. "They took her to China,
I guess, or may be up to Oregon. That sort of thing was new twenty
years ago, and that’s why they raised such a row, I suppose. But there
are plenty of women living with Chinamen now, and nobody thinks anything
about it, and they are Canton Chinamen, too—lowest kind of coolies.
There’s one of them up in St. Louis Place, just back of the Chinese
theatre, and she’s a Sheeny. There’s a queer team for you—the Hebrew
and the Mongolian—and they’ve got a kid with red, crinkly hair, who’s a
rubber in a Hammam bath. Yes, it’s a queer team, and there’s three more
white women in a slave girl joint under Ah Yee’s tan room. There’s
where I get my opium. They can talk a little English even yet. Funny
thing—one of ’em’s dumb, but if you get her drunk enough she’ll talk a
little English to you. It’s a fact! I’ve seen ’em do it with her
often—actually get her so drunk that she can talk. Tell you what,"
added Manning, struggling to his feet, "I’m going up there now to get
some dope. You can come along, and we’ll get Sadie (Sadie’s her name)
we’ll get Sadie full, and ask her if she ever heard about Miss Ten Eyck.
They do a big business," said Manning, as we went along. "There’s Ah
Yeo and these three women and a policeman named Yank. They get all the
yen shee—that’s the cleanings of the opium pipes, you know, and make it
into pills and smuggle it into the cons over at San Quentin prison by
means of the trusties. Why, they’ll make five dollars worth of dope sell
for thirty by the time it gets into the yard over at the Pen. When I
was over there, I saw a chap knifed behind a jute mill for a pill as big
as a pea. Ah Yee gets the stuff, the three women roll it into pills,
and the policeman, Yank, gets it over to the trusties somehow. Ah Yee
is independent rich by now, and the policeman’s got a bank account."
"And the women?’
"Lord! they’re slaves—Ah Yee’s slaves! They get the swift kick most
generally."
Manning and I found Sadie and her two companions four floors underneath
the tan room, sitting cross-legged in a room about as big as a big
trunk. I was sure they were Chinese women at first, until my eyes got
accustomed to the darkness of the place. They were dressed in Chinese
fashion, but I noted soon that their hair was brown and the bridges of
each one’s nose was high. They were rolling pills from a jar of yen
shee that stood in the middle of the floor, their fingers twinkling with
a rapidity that was somehow horrible to see.
Manning spoke to them briefly in Chinese while he lit a pipe, and two of
them answered with the true Canton sing-song—all vowels and no
consonants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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