How the Other Half Lives: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Riis moves on to describing Chinatown, and argues from the start that any attempts to make an “effective Christian” out of the Chinese are doomed to failure as a result of generations of “senseless idolatry.” A Chinese man would only convert, Riis thinks, for some ulterior motive, like gaining a Christian wife.

Chinatown is next to the Bend, and its dreariness is everyday, not spectacular like its neighbor. The red and yellow holiday colors create a dull rather than bright atmosphere, “glowering” at a visitor from the telegraph pole that serves as the official newspaper of the neighborhood. The place feels secret, like all the important affairs are happening behind closed doors—not because crime is happening, Riis says, but because the Chinese are naturally secretive and untrustworthy.

While the Chinese smoke opium like Caucasians smoke tobacco, Riis says, the danger is for the white people who are gripped by this drug. Chinese women are rarely seen: instead it’s “white slaves” addicted to opium who crowd these tenements. These white women now only worship the pipe, and will never return home to their own people.

These tenements are striking for their cleanliness: Riis says it makes sense that the laundry is the chosen field of the Chinese. Riis links this cleanliness to the “cruel cunning” of the Chinese, who manage to hoodwink authorities into believing that there are no underage girls in their opium dens. Riis relates one legal report of a 13-year-old, abandoned by a father, who was fired from an Eighth Avenue store and wandered until she ended up in a Chinese laundry. Though the judge sent her home to her mother, soon enough she was back in the opium den.

Riis relates one time when he and a policeman tried to stop a Chinese man from beating his white “wife” in a Mott Street cellar. He was shocked when Riis says he would never beat his own wife.

On the telegraph pole in Mott Street the gambling news of the neighborhood—the nightly games and rivalries—is announced. Riis says he doesn’t fully understand the politics of the “colony,” though he argues that the Chinese pay more attention to their internal politics than to any American laws. Any time there is a murder or other crime, the whole community shelters the perpetrator. The police call the neighborhood quiet, and this is true, Riis says: they prefer to be left alone, though the orderliness is only on the surface. He acknowledges that his judgment may be thought harsh, but that the Chinese are highly undesirable as a population. Still, he suggests that rather than banish the Chinese, the door to immigration should open wider, so that the Chinese man can bring his wife with him rather than remaining a “homeless stranger” among “us.”