Emily Murphy, The Black Candle (Toronto:
Coles, 1922) 223, 238-39.
Much has been said, of late, concerning the entrapping of
girls by Chinamen in order to secure their services as
pedlars of narcotics. The importance of the subject is one
which warrants our closes scrutiny: also, it is one we dare
not evade, however painful its consideration.
Personally, we have never known of such a case. It is
true, of course, that hundreds of girls are living with
Chinamen, and are peddling drugs, but almost invariably the
girl has put herself in the way by visiting Chinese chop-suey
houses, or other places of business.
Generally speaking, the girl goes to the Chinaman because
she has learned the drug habit and wants to get her drugs
secretly. At first; she doesn't know what is before her:
later she doesn't care.
It is not true, however, that a white girl or woman who
is keeping to her own preserves is hunted like game, stalked
to windward, and trapped by the Chinaman in order that she
may be bent to his criminal purpose, or minister to his
libidinous desires.
* * *
And once, a mother brought some letters her daughter had
received from Ah Pie, a Chinaman, requesting that she call
for her washing. He wrote well, framed his sentences
correctly, and expressed himself with deference.
The girl was an accountant in a well-known business
house, and of such marked probity of character that her
mother would not allow her to be even questioned on the
matter.
Yet, the happening seemed to require an explanation from
the girl in that she never sent her laundry to Ah Pie; that
the letters had been addressed at intervals to both her
former and latter places of residence, and because she had
never shown the epistles to her mother, their discovery
being accidental.
The more one studies the subject, especially when all the
facts are available, the more one is convinced, that in the
marital relations between white women and men of color, the
glove is always thrown by the woman, or, at least
deliberately dropped.
"What difference does it make?" you ask.
Not a great deal. In any event, the girl becomes an
outcast from her people. If not already a drug user, she
drifts into the habit, or becomes an agent for the
distribution of inhibited drugs. Almost invariably, she
becomes another recruit for that army of workers, those
desperately hard workers in the non-essential industry known
as prostitution.
In any study of the problems presented by the drug
traffic, the relation of the girl pedlar to the yellow man
is one which cannot be overlooked, and, indeed, it seldom
is. Usually, we shift the responsibility for her fall upon
the shoulders of the alien where it does not necessarily
belong.
Certain journalists, with all sincerity of purpose, have
stirred up racial hatred against the Chinamen on this
account, and have called them beasts and yellow dogs.
Let us punish these foreign immigrants if they deserve
it; let us exclude them from our country if our policy so
impels, but let us refrain from making them the eternal
scapegoats for the sins of ourselves or of our children. It
is not the Saxon way.
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