31 - Lithe Ah Toy With The Laughing Eyes

In this episode, I tell the story of Ah Toy, San Francisco's first Chinese prostitute and madam. She arrived in 1849 at the age of 20, just as Gold Rush fever was turning the tiny harbor settlement into the wildest and most chaotic city on earth. In no time at all, she became one of the most infamous women in town.
Ah Toy was many things: entrepreneur, madam, celebrity, courtroom ninja, a source of fascination for some and outrage for others. She made a fortune servicing Gold Rush miners, repeatedly stood up to the extortionists and self-appointed community leaders who thought the tall, thin young woman from Canton would be easy prey. She used the courts to defend herself when powerful men tried to dominate her. This worked until they rigged the game.
Through Ah Toy's adventures, we see a city exploding in opportunity, greed, vice, prejudice, and ambition. For those few brief years, she  outsmarted her rivals gloriously, made a fortune, and never submitted to those who would attempt to extort her. 

Transcript

Welcome to Frisco: The Secret History. I’m your host, Knox Bronson.

I have a great episode for you today, about the exotic and alluring Ah Toy, the second Chinese woman to land in San Francisco, a year before the gold rush,  in 1848. 

She wasted no time in establishing herself as a force with which to be reckoned. San Franciscans were both fascinated and outraged by her. She took truck from no man. In the short time she lived here, stories of her exploits made front page news and flashed over the telegraph wires at lightning speed to distant newspapers across the country. 

Before we get going, I want say thank you to Walter Hass at Graffeo Coffee Roasters at 735 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. Graffeo was founded in 1935 and has been supplying high quality beans to the public and the best restaurants around to town ever since. I have been drinking Graffeo Coffee since I lived around the corner on Mason Street back in the Seventies. They make the richest and smoothest coffee I have ever tasted. They offer a dark roast, light roast, and a Swiss-water decaf bean. If you can’t get to North Beach to pick your beans up, you can go to Graffeo.com, that is g r a f f e o dot com and order there. They sell whole beans, or will grind to your request. I love starting my day with a huge mug of dark roast. I have been recommending and gifting Graffeo beans to my friends forever and I am really happy to say that Graffeo Coffee is a founding sponsor for the Frisco: The Secret History podcast. I am excited and proud to be associated with such an historic and iconic San Francisco brand.  Graffeo beans are, as it says on the package, “Simply the finest coffee in the world.” It’s true. Give them a try. You will thank me.

[intermezzo]

Ah Toy was furious, but she did not allow it to show. She stood before Judge George Baker in the Recorder's Court of San Francisco in 1849, explaining in pidgin English how she had been cheated repeatedly by men, customers, johns, tricks, who had been cheating her by giving brass filings instead of gold for her services and she today sought justice.

   She was wearing an apricot satin jacket, willow-green pantaloons, tabis on her bound feet. Her radiant black hair was arranged in the traditional chignon, her pencil thin black eyebrows contrasting exotically with her white, rice-powdered cheeks. Her English, while broken, was easily understood, at least before she became excited and spoke too quickly.

The source of her fury was that, not twenty feet from her, some of the men who had cheated her were sitting right there in the courtroom’s public seating area.

The courtroom loungers found her delectable and amusing. Judge Baker was curious. Why was it the miners ran from the Sacramento steamboat to her residence upon docking? Exactly what transpired there?

Ah Toy's exact answer is not known; a newspaper reporter paraphrased it to read "they came to gaze upon the countenance of the charming Ah Toy." 

The newspapers of the day would not print, “The miners came to look at me naked through a peephole in the door of my shack.” No matter what, the actual answer set the audience roaring. 

She charged one ounce of gold per customer and weighed the gold herself on her own scale. An ounce was worth $16 in 1851, about $700 today.   

The judge asked for proof of her charges.

She pointed out the men; who slunk down in their seats while the rest of the courtroom laughed. The judge was disinclined to believe such well-bred men would cheat Ah Toy. 

Ah Toy said that many prominent men had done so. She offer to show proof if the judge would allow her to run home. He declared a short recess. 

She reappeared shortly thereafter with a china basin full of brass filings as evidence which she showed to the court.

Although impressive, she could not prove that any of the men had been the ones to cheat her.

Charges against them were dismissed.

While Ah Toy was disappointed, she would still press on. There were reports that she had been offended by the laughter in the courtroom and thus began wearing American style clothes. Others claim that she no longer would allow caucasian men at her shanty, only Chinese. This, too, was untrue.

Gossip, mostly false, would plague Ah Toy for the rest of her years in San Francisco. 

[intermezzo]

San Francisco of 1849 was one of the most chaotic places on earth. The engine of this chaos was gold fever of a global scale. The population of the city had jumped from from one thousand to twenty-thousand in one year, the vast majority of them men. Thousands more had passed through Frisco just to catch a steamboat inland to Sacramento and then make their way in the into the foothills of the Sierra Madre where the gold lay.

Anything a man could want was for sale in San Francisco.

Ah Toy arrived in 1849 at the age of twenty.  There are questions surrounding her arrival, the main one being whether she had been married or not. 

One story has her husband dying on the sailing ship as they crossed the Pacific Ocean from China to California, whereupon she promptly took up with the captain, arriving in San Francisco as a wealthy woman. The other story is that she had never been married, as a witness testified in an 1851 court case. We will revisit that trial later. Either way, it seems that Ah Toy did shack up with the captain for at least part of the voyage, which could last from forty-five to a hundred days.

Upon her arrival, Ah Toy set up a peep show in a shanty on an alley off Clay Street. Miners returning from the foothills on steamers, loaded with gold, ran to her shack just to take in her exotic nakedness. Sometimes there would be a block-long line to see her. Armed guards stood by, pistols unholstered, to maintain order.

She converted the peep show into a brothel — called a "boardinghouse" in the polite language of the newspapers — on Clay Street, opposite the Post Office. By 1852 the papers were describing it as a "spacious brick mansion," which in early San Francisco meant she had money and intended to keep it.

Author Curt Gentry wrote in his book, “The Madams of San Francisco,”

[typewriter]

“Myths grew up around many of San Francisco's madams. Some even created their own myths and succeeded in making the public believe them. Ah Toy took a very old myth and made money from it. There is some question as to whether Ah Toy should be immortalized as San Francisco's first Chinese prostitute, which she was, or as one of the city's earliest entertainers, which she was too. In the years following her arrival thousands of her native sisters plied their trade in the city by the Golden Gate. Ah Toy proved to be memorably atypical.

The Chinese prostitutes were usually short; Ah Toy was tall. They were usually "big-foot" peasant women; Ah Toy had aristocratic "lily-bound" feet. As for general appearances, Frenchman Albert Benard noted in 1851: "The Chinese are usually ugly, the women as well as the men; but there are a few girls who are attractive if not actually pretty, for example, the strangely alluring Achoy, with her slender body and laughing eyes." 

The average Chinese prostitute came to California as a slave and remained one for life. Ah Toy was always quite independent. Men controlled the management of nearly all of the Chinese houses of prostitution; the older Chinese women in residence were usually paid servants, not madams. 

Ah Toy was a madam in the best brothel tradition.”

[end typewriter]

At the beginning of 1850, there were 789 Chinese men and two Chinese women in the city. Ah Toy was one of them. 

Later that year, five additional Chinese women arrived; two went to work for Ah Toy. She was now a madam and had moved to a larger house commensurate with her status. Her peep show and sex work had paid off handsomely.

The house was off Clay Street in an alley known as Pike Street. For the next seventy years the alley would serve as the location of some of the city's most luxurious early brothels, some of its raunchiest cribs, and some of Chinatown's bloodiest tong warfare. Today it is the colorful but quite respectable Waverly Place, a two-block street between Washington and Sacramento.) 

The Alta newspaper of May 22, 1850, reported: "Married, in Sonoma, on the 16th, Henry Conrad, to the well-known China woman Ah Toy, from Hong Kong." 

There is no further mention of him anywhere. In a little over a year Ah Toy had taken a lover. 

Ah Toy’s fierce spirit was a problem for some men, as it always has been since time immemorial. 

Just look at Lilith.

[intermezzo]

In Ah Toy’s case, trouble first arrived in the form of her neighbors in the alley off Clay Street. The Alta newspaper reported in 1850 that there had been "several nice shanties occupied by respectable men, the majority of whom were obliged to move away on account of the nuisance, but others filed complaints.” Ah Toy appeared before Judge R.H. Waller, who dismissed the charges.

The Chinese community did not welcome her. She operated outside their structures, took American clients exclusively — the Chinese did not enter her establishment — and refused to submit to the authority of the men who ran the neighborhood.  

In 1851, real trouble came in the form of Norman Ah-Sing, a merchant from Macao, the de facto mayor of Little China, San Francisco's Chinatown before it had a name, who had arrived in the city around the same time Ah Toy had. He quickly built political influence with extortion and protection schemes. He became a collector for the Triad Society. 

He demanded $10 per woman per quarter from Ah Toy, but she refused his extortionate attempt. Ah Toy’s independence, her notoriety, her American clientele, her refusal to be cowed by the power structures emerging in the city, that is to say, her courage, were an affront and a threat to Norman Ah-Sing’s perception of himself and a threat, therefore, to his authority. This would not stand.

He concocted a scheme with some friends.

The Alta newspaper reported on March 6, 1851, that Ah Toy had received a mysterious letter from China. 

It read:

Ah Toy received a curious letter, as reported by the daily newspaper, Alta, on March 6, 1851.

Chinese Difficulties

Some time since a Chinese woman, named Atoy, aged twenty-four years, left her husband, Atchoung, who resides in Hong Kong, and came to this golden land, where she has been living, it appears, in a free and easy style, greatly to the sorrow and reproach of our large, honest and industrious class of Chinese citizens. A letter was received a short time since by Hon. Mr. Woodworth, Chinese Mandarin in California, from Atchoung, informing him that he had conferred with the church authorities in Hong Kong, who had sent an order for the return of Atoy to her liege lord. The money is ready here, in the hands of the Chinese citizens, to pay her passage back to her native country, and they have addressed a representation to the citizens of San Francisco, setting forth the facts above stated, and praying that they may be allowed to return Atoy to her country and her duties as a wife. They have also applied to the authorities, requesting, in conformity with Chinese custom, that they should issue an order for her return. This they [the authorities] refused to do, and now all they ask is that there should be no interference on the part of the authorities in the matter. There is a great excitement among the Chinese community, who feel very much hurt at the conduct of their frail country woman.

The purpose of the letter was to create outrage in the community, As we know, either Ah Toy’s husband had died in transit across the Pacific Ocean or Ah Toy had never been married.

Ah Toy took the matter to the Recorder’s Court. There she was, once again, a lone Chinese woman in the white man’s court, defying all convention, further infuriating Norman Ah-Sing. 

Ah Toy put her friend Apung, whom she had known for four months at the time of the trial, on the stand.

Here is the record of the testimony  from the Court:

“Apung, a Chinese from Canton, being duly sworn, says that he has known the above named ‘Atoy,’ in San Francisco, for four months, and that he has ascertained from her that she was born in Canton; that she was never married; that she is twenty one years of age; that her father is dead, and that her mother is now living in Canton. He has further ascertained that she immigrated to this country for the purpose of bettering her condition; and that she is anxious to make California her permanent home, and not to return to China.

And deponent further says that Norman Assing, Leikid, and Chidock, three Chinamen, have conspired together to abduct the above named Atoy, against her will, out of this country, and carry her forcibly to China. And deponent further says that the above named Leikid and Chidock have threatened to kill deponent and the above named Atoy, if said Atoy will not go to China. And deponent verily believes that both he and Atoy are in great bodily danger, and that unless the above named Norman Assing, Leikid and Chidock, are arrested and held to bail to keep the peace, serious crimes will be perpetrated, and the public tranquility disturbed.

Warrants were accordingly issued for the arrest of Messrs. Assing, Leikid and Chidock, and they were examined before Judge Tilford yesterday morning. Apung testified that the defendants told Atoy that she must go to China, and if she did not go, they would kill her. Apung did not fear Norman Assing, but he was afraid that Leikid and Chidock would kill him, “all the time.” Atoy does not wish to go to China. Apung further testified that Leikid and Chidock desire to marry Atoy, but that she will not marry them, and therefore they want to send her out of the country.

Thoroughly defeated in court, Ah Ching, Leikid, and Chidock were ordered to pay $2000 each

Ah Sing was not to be deterred. He must try another tack in ridding the city of the ever-consuming nuisance that was Ah Toy. 

He had earlier petitioned the Vigilance Committee, to extradite two men, Ah Low and Ah Hone, and their property—two prostitutes—for their evil influence on the Chinese community and it had worked. 

You will remember the Vigilance Committee: they hanged Charles Cora and James P. Casey in my Belle Cora episode. They arrested two of the Sydney Ducks, Samuel Whittaker and Robert McKenzie for arson, robbery, and burglary, who were quickly tried, found guilty and hanged. You can find that story in the very first episode of Frisco: The Secret History—Vice Defined San Francisco’s DNA At Its Inception.

Ah Sing and his confederate, Lip Scom, petitioned the Vigilance Committee to extradite Ah Toy. By this time, the Committee had created a special patrol dedicated to policing the city’s brothels, headed by John A. Clark. He met Ah Toy, was smitten, and they soon became lovers.

The Vigilance Committee, realizing it was being used as a weapon between Little China factions, declined to pursue Ah Toy’s deportation. Once again, Ah Toy came out on top. They had rid her of competition, the other two Chinese prostitutes in town, and she had gained a lover.

As the saying goes, fortune favors the bold.

In the summer of 1851, the Alta reported:

Everybody has seen the charming Miss Atoy, who each day parades our streets dressed in the most flashing European or American style, having discarded the national dress of her country. She is looked upon by the true Celestials on this account as an "outsider." By a recent arrival from the dominions of the brother of the Sun and Moon, a number of Chinese girls have arrived, who, as yet, retain their native costume. One of them attracted considerable attention, yesterday, walking down the street, dressed in a splendid blue figured silk skirt, reaching a little below the knee, and below this the broad flowing pantaloons of the same material. She was rather pretty without, and her eyes were most unexceptionably turned up at an angle of about forty-five degrees. It would be well for the female dress reformers in the Atlantic States to send out here for a Chinese woman as a specimen.

That last sentence was a referral to the dress reform movement back east — associated with women like Amelia Bloomer — which advocated for women to abandon the restrictive corsets, heavy skirts, and elaborate fashions of the era in favor of more practical clothing. The movement was controversial and often mocked in the press, of course.

It was a snark at the expense of both the champions of liberation and of Ah Toy. The reformers for their earnestness and Ah Toy as an absurd embodiment of what the reformers claimed to want — a Chinese prostitute in brightly colored trousers. 

It also tells you something about how she was being covered: as comic material, an exotic figure to be gawked at and joked about, not as a person to be taken seriously.

I’m sure you know that Ah Toy would not be deterred.

By the end of 1851, newspapers as far away as Wisconsin and Tennessee carried stories about Ah Toy’s adventures. She had appeared in court many times, by early 1852, at least fifty times as a defendant for such crimes as burning a rival’s bedding, throwing offal and slop, fights at her bordello, keeping a disorderly house.

In December of 1851, Lewis Ottinger paid a visit to Ah Toy. She offered him a drink. While there, he pocketed a diamond pin worth $300, about $12,000 today. After he left, she noticed the brooch was missing and she gave chase. 

Let us not forget that At Toy’s feet were lily-bound, not the same as the severe hobbling associated with lower-class binding, but rather the aristocratic style: decorative and restrictive, but not fully immobilizing. Nonetheless, the binding surely restricted her ability to run and it is a testament to her determination that she caught up with him at the city Plaza, now the Portsmouth Square area, screaming and banging a gong.

She caught him by his collar and marched him into the nearby station house. Three days later Ottinger was on trial for the theft. Justice moved a lot more quickly in that era.

The Alta reported that Ah Toy appeared in court "blooming with youth, beauty and rouge and wearing a "gallus" bonnet with  an orange-colored shawl. Gallus was colloquialism for fancy.

Ah Toy, the paper reported, confronted Ottinger in court. She said, "You likee tief man — you likee stealy you pin? You very bad man. Dat man stealy my pin — he ought be hang!"

Strangely, I can find no record of the outcome of the case, but I would bet on Ah Toy.

[intermezzo]

In 1852, they came after Ah Toy again, except, this time, it was Yee Ah Tye, a wealthy merchant, whom the Alta mockingly described as a “self-styled dictator.” 

Yee Ah Tye sent agents to summon the women under Ah Toy's guardianship at her Dupont Street house to appear before him and explain why they should not pay a tax. Ah Toy refused to cooperate. 

A gleeful Alta reporter wrote, "Miss Atoy knows a thing or two, having lived under the folds of the Star-spangled Banner for three years and breathed the air of Republicanism, and she cannot be easily humbugged into any such measures. Besides she lives near the Police Office and knows where to seek protection, having been before the Recorder as a defendant at least fifty times herself. A-Thai had better be particular as to the powers he assumes, or he may find his dignity wiped away, he being dumped in the lock-up.”

If you do an online search about Ah Thai, or Yee Ah Tye, you will find that Google AI talks about him looking after his community, setting up a four-bed hospital and providing nursing care for elderly Chinese immigrants. 

Search a little further and you find that, a year after his run-in with At Toy, “Yee Ah Tye was indeed dumped in the lock-up, this time for assault and grand larceny. Originally from Guangdong, he had sailed to San Francisco on a Chinese junk just before the gold rush, when he was 20 years old. He spent his first night on the streets, huddled in a doorway. Yee Ah Tye had learned English in Hong Kong and before long he rose to a position of leadership in the powerful Sze Yup Association.

Sze Yup, and other such Chinese organizations, met Chinese newcomers to the gold rush at the docks, gave them a place to stay, found them jobs, or outfitted them for the mines. They provided an important service for a group of people who spoke little English. But Sze Yup had dark sides too. The San Francisco Herald alleged Yee Ah Tye "inflicted severe corporeal punishment upon many of his more humble countrymen ... cutting off their ears, flogging them and keeping them chained for hours together."

Remember this when you consider that lithe Ah Toy not only stood up to him, she beat him like the bully he was.

[intermezzo]

Ah Toy was not Cinderella. 

 From 1852 she was not only running her own house but attended the barracoon as a buyer's agent in the trafficking infrastructure that brought slave girls to San Francisco.  . 

A painting once owned, as of 1966, by San Francisco Deputy Coroner James Leonard in his remarkable San Francisciana from 1852 depicted young girls newly arrived in the city from off a China clipper, clustered together in a horse cart on the wharf, with a Portuguese duenna, hired to protect and keep them under surveillance during the voyage. Around the cart is a crowd of excited Chinese men, two policemen beating back those attempting to manhandle the merchandise, and a Yankee ship captain standing with a self-satisfied smirk in the background. 

The destination of the cart was the barracoon, a basement room under a joss house in St. Louis Alley. The joss houses of Chinatown served a number of functions. Publicly, they were spiritual sanctuaries, community gathering places, and benevolent associations. We can add slave trade auction blocks to the list.

Here the girls were stripped and examined by prospective buyers-brothel owners like Ah Toy and agents for wealthy Chinese who desired mistresses. In China the girls were often sold for $30 to $90; in California they brought from $300 to $3000, depending upon their age and beauty. That would about $12,000 to $120,000 today.

[intermezzo]

In 1854, things changed dramatically for the worse for Ah Toy. The State of California stripped Chinese people of the right to testify in court. The courts, which she had once used to to fight deportation, to prosecute thieves, and to defeat extortionists, were now closed to her. Later Emperor Norton would take up the cause of allowing the Chinese to testify in court, but by then Ah Toy was gone for good.

   That same year, the discriminatory enforcement of a "keeping a disorderly house" law targeted Ah Toy and other Chinese madams while white madams were not harassed. The triads established their own bordellos with which she could not economically compete.

As Bob Dylan once sang, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Ah Toy returned to China then, taking with her her a fortune in gold. I would intuit that Ah Toy was far too Americanized by this time, for She returned to California quite soon thereafter and married a wealthy Chinese gentleman in San Jose, California.

Ah Toy died there, in 1928.

The San Francisco Examiner reported:

San Jose Buries China Mary, 100, Famed Pioneer 

SAN JOSE, Feb. 1

In the presence of a cosmopolitan group of friends, last rites were held here today for Mrs. Ah Toy, better known as "China Mary" for more than eighty years a familiar character in San Jose, 

First as the wife of a prosperous Chinese merchant when Chinatown was located where the San Jose post office now stands, later in the Chinese quarter known as Heinlenville on the northern outskirts of the city, and finally as an aged vendor of clams at Alviso, she was known to hundreds. 

She died within a few months of her hundredth birthday.

So ends the story of the enchanting and sometimes incorrigible Ah Toy, a survivor who fought all comers and conquered an inhospitable Frisco until they rigged the game, so described by French traveler Albert Benard in 1851 as “the strangely alluring Ah Toy, with her slender body and laughing eyes.”