The Opium Dream of Lee Fook Bow
After surviving a suicide attempt on a train, a Chinese man is convinced he has died, visited heaven, and been reborn as a different man.
Lee Fook Bow, a Chinaman accused of perjury in an attempt to keep a Chinese woman, Chummie Yung, in the country for immoral purposes, was brought back to Seattle yesterday and lodged in the county jail. Lee is convinced that he died and was reborn last Saturday on a train from San Francisco. He has renamed himself Tan Yue San, or 'Man Who Has Been to Heaven and Returned.' Lee told a reporter of his brush with death, describing how he swallowed opium on the train to avoid prison. He claims he went to the gates of heaven, where he encountered a man with a long beard and a red-faced man in white robes, who told him he was not 'cooked enough' to enter. He then 'fell down' to Sacramento, where he was revived by doctors. While the explanation is clearly an opium dream, Lee persists in his belief that he is a new man.
“I am sure that I saw the big gods of all kinds and the inside of heaven. Now I feel young again; I am just a little boy inside of an old man.”
This story highlights the harsh intersection of immigration enforcement and the criminalization of substance use in late 19th-century Seattle. The framing of Lee Fook Bow’s psychiatric episode as a ‘dream’ vs. a ‘death’ underscores the era’s lack of care for the mental health of detained immigrants.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.