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Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's Chinatown - Review
Link to the author's (S. D. Seligman) personal website
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publication Type: Journal
Tags:
- Average Age of Main Characters (30)
- Length (5 / 10)
Link to Goodreads
Blurb: Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons, and even bombs. Welcome to New York City’s Chinatown in 1925.
The Chinese in turn-of-the-last-century New York were mostly immigrant peasants and shopkeepers who worked as laundrymen, cigar makers, and domestics. They gravitated to lower Manhattan and lived as Chinese an existence as possible, their few diversions—gambling, opium, and prostitution—available but, sadly, illegal. It didn’t take long before one resourceful merchant saw a golden opportunity to feather his nest by positioning himself squarely between the vice dens and the police charged with shutting them down.
Tong Wars is historical true crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing its lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate it. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next thirty years.
Review: I've truthfully got no clue why I read this book. It's super atypical compared to what I regularly read, but I guess it just popped up in some community I lurk. I wouldn't read something else like this unless I was in a very certain mood. This book isn't a traditional story, it's rather a string of events that happened with some conjecture thrown in. The story isn't dramatised, nor are undue character traits added. It's just simply event after recorded event. It took me awhile to read, as there isn't really any downtime so to speak. Despite everything said above, I didn't feel like stopping half-way through and I actually enjoyed learning about the history of a pretty iconic Chinatown. Give it a go if you think you're in the mood, but stay away if you're looking for anything remotely related to fantasy.