The Man They Called an Informer
After learning English in the county jail, a Chinese Olympian announced he would cut his queue and become 'American.' His community branded him a snitch—and the Tribune turned his peril into an anti-Chinese exposé.
A controversy had been smoldering among Olympia's Chinese residents for a week or more, centering on the establishment of Hong Yek and others. The immediate cause was Jim, a Chinese man recently released from the county jail. During his imprisonment Jim had learned to read and write, aided by Fred Neuffer and some of the jailers, and he could now write a fair, bold hand. Encouraged by his progress, he announced that he would renounce allegiance to China, burned his Chinese books, and said that next week he would cut off his queue. Jim took pride in saying that he was 'no more Chinaman' but 'the same as an American.' Unfortunately for Jim, several Chinese men had been arrested for smuggling opium during his imprisonment, and his fellow countrymen accused him of being the informer. Jim had never been a favorite among them, and he was now ostracized. He said he expected to wake up dead some day. When several Chinese residents were questioned about the matter, they kept a stubborn silence. Jim, trying to explain, became very excited, but said he did not care whether they killed him or not. Since his release he had lived in a room over J. O. Horr's grain warehouse, getting his meals where he could. Hong Yek was described as the boss of the Chinese community in Olympia, his command law. Every Chinese resident was expected to buy necessities from Hong Yek, and woe to anyone who did not. Jim said he went there on Sunday morning to see his cousin and was talking with him when a lounger approached threateningly, placing his hand on his hip pocket as if to draw a knife. Jim understood the movement in a twinkle and ran for the police. He had not gone near the place since. He wore a sad and frightened appearance, the paper said, and might at any time be killed for $40 or $50. Jim was said to be the son of a chemist of some prominence at Canton. He was something of a doctor himself and possessed more than average intelligence. His cousin kept a drug store in San Francisco. The article then turned to the opium and gambling rooms in the Chinese quarter, alleging that opium was smoked in rear rooms and that Hong Yek and expert gamblers stripped laborers of their wages. Those claims were reported through the hostile anti-Chinese lens of the day.
“As he says, he expects to wake up dead some day.”
The Tribune's headline and much of its detail belong to the anti-Chinese panic that swept Puget Sound in the 1880s and 1890s; the paper treats a threatened man as a specimen and his community as a criminal den. Read against that grain, the story preserves a rare named glimpse of Olympia's Chinese quarter—Jim, Hong Yek, the Fifth Street stores—at a moment when Chinese residents were being driven out of Western towns. The same reflexes—policing immigrant neighborhoods, demanding assimilation, treating one man as an informer—still shape debates over immigration and belonging.
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