Free Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown by Richard Dillon

law-abiding people of Chinatown both from hostile outside pressure and from internal lawlessness, although the Six Companies’ organization was suspected and accused of heinous activities by Americans who did not understand its history and role in the Chinese community.
    There was never any deliberate mystery about the Chinese Six Companies. Yet the American press and public, confusing tongs and companies, long insisted on investing the organization and its six member companies with a mystery. The bemused Knights of Labor called the Six Companies “a sort of tribal government.” But President Shong Gee of the Hop Wo Company made a clear-cut statement of the role of the Six Companies—which he termed, as a unit, “the Chinese Benevolent Association”—as early as 1870. He stated that the society’s object was simply to assist Chinese to come to California or return to China, to minister to the sick, to bury the dead, and to return their corpses to their native land.
    Originally the Six Companies (separately) were agents of the Chinese firms in Hong Kong which established the coolie trade to San Francisco from the Crown Colony. The pioneers of this emigrant trade were two Hong Kong portrait painters, Hing Wa and Wo Hang. There was nothing new about such companies as they were set up in San Francisco. From time immemorial emigrants had tended to form clubs in Malaya and the Philippines. Each province’s group set up a ui kun or company house. It was as if the Californians in the Far East were to set up a chapter of the Native Sons of the Golden West, complete with lodge hall. The ui kun existed in China itself when Cantonese and Fukienese settled in Shanghai or Ningpo. In Canton, too, there were these halls for “strangers” from other parts of the empire. Since the Chinese were the most alien of aliens emigrating to California, they took special pains to band together for mutual aid and protection.
    But the American public persisted in ascribing to the Six Companies all manner of evils, including the usurpation of American judicial processes among the Chinese people. The press, too, gave the companies mysterious and dictatorial (and nonexistent) powers. In later years newsmen continually confused the companies with the fighting tongs. The merchants who were being preyed upon by tong highbinders thus found themselves the targets of newspaper editorials, rather than the predators who waylaid them. To correct some of these misconceptions the Reverend A. W. Loomis wrote an article which was published in the first volume (1868) of the popular San Francisco magazine, the Overland Monthly. He listed the things which the Six Companies were not —plotting societies, despotic lawmakers, punitive organizations, hiring halls for coolies, slavers, or dreaded tribunals. In order to disabuse the public of its incorrect notions Loomis compared the Chinese companies to the Order of Hibernians or the Scandinavian Association. He tried to hammer home the point that they were simply the benevolent or mutual-aid societies of one particular group of the foreign born. Loomis reminded his readers that the poor bewildered immigrant in a strange land had to lay over somewhere upon arrival in port. He could not walk out of steerage into the trail to Hangtown or Copperopolis. He needed a caravansary or hostel. This the companies provided with their San Francisco ui kun, a combination hotel and Travelers’ Aid Society. Loomis reminded his audience that the Chinese were only temporary residents. This gave them all the more reason to stick together closely during their brief stay. Loomis emphasized that the Chinese never—or hardly ever—abandoned one home to go in search of another. When they went abroad, wives and children were always left behind to keep house until their return. Every man hoped to return home after having improved his worldly estate in foreign parts. Loomis could not know of the remarkable change that would take place.