Slogging and Dr. House

This will come as a surprise to no one, but researching can be a slog. I like it most of the time and I've found some great material for my Ah Toy story: little snippets, facts, and details that don't often make it into the dry, stuffy history books. For instance, just like the San Francisco of today, the San Francisco of the 1850s had its share of mischief-makers. Some of them were somewhat clever:

By February, 1854, the city had converted to gas-lighting. In celebration of the installation of three miles of municipal gas lines and eighty-four streetlamps, 300 citizens gathered at the Oriental Hotel in an illuminated banquet hall ablaze as with tropical sunshine. As Mayor Cornelius Garrison began his speech, a prankster pulled the switch and temporarily plunged the room into darkness.

- Doris Muscatine, Old San Francisco 

However, most of the time there's a lot of searching and reading for very little reward. A whole book about immigration to California in the 1850s may produce one number or factoid that might be of some use down the line. Or a book can be almost worthless, like when a book that claims to be about the "history of the Chinese in America" but really is only about the Chinatown in New York. Often a pile of books from the library will yield just two or three notes for me to save for later, or they're so riddled with repetition from other sources that, if it weren't for the steep fines that would follow, I would have long since hurled them out the window.

And yet....

Just when I thought I've hit the nadir (apex?) of boredom and the tiny type is burning holes in my head, some little throwaway line in some random book triggers a chain reaction to another expendable sentence in an other book, which leads to another, and all of a sudden something big starts to form. Like yesterday, for example. Often I will quickly scan some pages of a book, save it as a PDF, the set it aside and continue on to the next one. This has resulted in a slug of unread PDFs that have crammed up my folder. I figured yesterday would be a good day to go through some of them with a highlighter and knock a few out before the whole thing became unwieldy.

First up was a journal article called, "Adolescent Immigrants in Search of Identity." It said, "An integrator is an individual who belongs to his/her culture of origin and the new culture concurrently, incorporating elements and norms from both." Exciting.

Next was a pamphlet about Chinatown written in 1897: "The thinness of population and smallness of trade at that time, allied to the isolated locality of San Francisco, rendered every effort to open up foreign trade a desideratum." Thrilling.

After that was Gold and Sunshine: Reminiscences of California: "When one looks back and recalls the topographical features of San Francisco at that time--" Baaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Wearily, I reached for The Age of Gold. More of the same. Numbers, figures, facts, blah blah blah. Some paragraph on some page said,

Yee Ah-Tye was the most notorious of the association leaders. The San Francisco Herald called him a "would-be Mandarin" and a "petty despot" who "inflicted severe corporeal punishment upon many of his more humble countrymen, cutting off their ears, flogging them and keeping them chained for hours together." The Alta California dubbed him a "Grand Inquisitor" who was "endeavoring to coerce his brethren into such measures as he may suggest and dictate." Various reports indicated that Yee had put a bounty on the head of a Chinese who defied him; this man then sought protection from the civil authorities. Within a week, however, the Alta California explained that the quarrel had been "satisfactorily settled outside of the judicial tribunal." In another case, Yee struck a deal directly with the court. Convicted of assault and battery, he was sentenced to five days in the city jail. But he appealed the sentence, posted bond of $1,000, and was allowed to remain at large.

Well that was certainly more exciting than anything else I had read yesterday (who doesn't perk up at accounts of coersion and bounties?), but the name Yee Ah-Tye didn't mean anything to me. I was about to move on when I thought, you know, I'll just look up his name for the hell of it. A book popped up called Bury My Bones in America that had a little blurb on him. It mentioned that "Ah Tie" was called out in a grand jury report for his extralegal brand of justice:

They have regular meetings, which are presided over by the heads of the four great houses, viz., Sam Wo, Ah Tie and the two Ah Chings. They have posted up printed handbills in their own language and signed by themselves, forewarning all from transgressing their laws and threatening their punishment.

The book went on to say that he was in court for the same reason. So I hunted around and found:

A-thai, the self-styled dictator, it seems has ordered one of his agents to summon a number of women residing on Dupont street, and under the guardianship of Miss Atoy, to appear before him, at his headquarters on Sacramento street, and show cause why they should not pay a certain tax or contribution.

The Daily Alta California, 8/15/1852 

It was about that time when I used the facial expression from my favorite TV doctor, Dr. House, when he stops mid-sentence and makes a realization.

 

Ah Toy! She's involved yet again! Once again she was in court, battling back against men who were trying to take advantage of her. This is a major theme in her American experience, and now I have another character, a villain, to add to the story. The story grows richer. And as it turns out, Bury My Bones in America is all about Yee Ah Tye and his family. I've already ordered it from the library to add to my pile of books to get through.

So with renewed energy, today's plan: keep slogging!