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Girls as Pedlars

Heritage Community Foundation, Albertasource.ca and The Famous Five Foundation
 
         

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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