Mayor John Kiggins previewed a controversial play in January 1911 along with law officers. He excluded a Columbian reporter from the preview, claiming he wanted no publicity.
Afterward the mayor approved the play, “The Chinatown Trunk Mystery,” for his Grand Theater. But despite the mayor’s wishes, it drew a lot of publicity.
As Kiggins and his group were previewing the play, it was staged at Bungalow Theater in Portland, where police cleared out the audience and arrested the actors. Although all charges were dropped within days, The Oregonian called the theatrical “unfit for Portland,” even though it “didn’t shock Vancouver.”
The “based on a true story” play showcased the 1908 New York murder of a 19-year-old white woman with two Chinese lovers. In Leon Ling’s apartment, investigators discovered 35 love letters and Elsie Sigel’s strangled body stuffed inside a trunk. Their search uncovered a second lover, Chu Gain, also holding a stash of love letters. Ling vanished, and Sigel’s murder remains unsolved.
The murder sparked anti-Chinese alarm across the country, although few Chinese lived in the United States at the time. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Chester Arthur, blocked Chinese entry into the country. Congress extended the original 10-year limit several times before ending the act in 1943.
Nonetheless the play outraged whites and Chinese alike. Its interracial sexuality, an opium den scene and a teenaged victim flamed anti-Chinese feelings. The Oregonian quoted a Portland prosecutor as saying the play was a “whirlwind of lust, greed, sin and death.”
In Vancouver, the Rev. Otis Gray urged prosecuting attorney Fred Tempes to file an injunction against the mayor to stop the debauched production, and demanded Tempes explore Washington law about similar immoral plays. In an editorial, The Columbian griped about the lack of mayoral transparency and asked whether the mayor had some “fear of the press.”
Chinese in Portland responded. So did a local Chinese businessman with ties to the Portland Chinese community, Kong Loy. By coincidence, his celery stand was robbed about the same time. The Portland Chinese and Loy protested the theatrical performance because it made Chinese look like criminals. Municipal officers considered treaty rights and their relationship to the play.
Chinese consul Thomas O’Day argued that given the “most favored nation status of China,” the local Chinese had every right to protest the production. In his view, a 1903 statute “against presenting books or plays having to do principally with the act of felons or desperados” legally covered the case. Nonetheless, the show went on.
That November, Vancouver faced its own Chinese Trunk Mystery. A beautiful, oversized trunk arrived on the afternoon express. When lifted, it was so weighty the expressman dropped it. Red liquid trickled out of a small break. Onlookers gasped. Had a foul crime occurred in Vancouver as in New York? When the police could not break open the trunk, they rounded up four blacksmiths to crack the case. Women’s clothes and a bill poured out. The bill revealed the trunk was purchased from the Beauregard’s clothing store at 21 Main St.
Meanwhile, W. Derr, county clerk, had denied Kong Loy’s citizenship application because the United States didn’t allow Chinese “to enter into citizenship under the Stars and Stripes.”
