Front cover image for The Chinatown trunk mystery : murder, miscegenation, and other dangerous encounters in turn-of-the-century New York City

The Chinatown trunk mystery : murder, miscegenation, and other dangerous encounters in turn-of-the-century New York City

"In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman's strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese man named Leon Ling." "Through the lens of this unsolved murder, Mary Ting Yi Lui offers a fascinating snapshot of social and sexual relations between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sigel's murder was more than a notorious crime, Lui contends. It was a clear signal that attempts to maintain geographical and social boundaries between the city's Chinese male and white female populations had failed."
Print Book, English, ©2005
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., ©2005
Case studies
xiii, 298 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
9780691091969, 069109196X
54279901
"Find Miss Sigel dead in truck"
"Terra incognita": mapping Chinatown's racial and gender boundaries in lower Manhattan
Beyond Chinatown: policing Chinese American male mobility in New York City
Policing urban girls' and women's mobility and desires
Playing the "missionary game"
Chinese American interracial couples and families in New York City
"The most remarkable get-away in police history"
"Disgrace on the whole body of our people."