Throughout January 1939, newspaper reporters across the United States were salivating over the sordid story of a freshly landed femme fatale and her tanglings with a Hong Kong drugs kingpin. A tale involving war-torn Guangzhou, teeming Hong Kong and seedy Macau, and a luxury-liner voyage across the sea ending in a bedbug-infested hovel in San Francisco’s Chinatown, culminated in a kind of hard-boiled film noir set of a California courthouse. And like any classic of the noir genre, this was a cautionary tale replete with intrigue and devoid of heroes. Picture the moody mists rolling in across San Francisco Bay, the clanging of the streetcars along the Embarcadero, foghorns on the recently opened Golden Gate Bridge signalling approaching ships, dark figures dodging in and out of the shadows, no one to be trusted with anything beyond having their own agenda. All in glorious black and white, obviously. Lights, roll film, action: EXTERIOR. MORNING. PIER 44, SAN FRANCISCO, THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 1939 The SS President Coolidge docked early in the morning after sailing from Shanghai via Yokohama and Honolulu. Customs and government agents eyed the debarking passengers with studied suspicion: there had been a national panic following the sensational uncovering of a Nazi espionage ring in California, which sold information on US Navy deployments to the Japanese consulate. And that was on top of a growing amount of opium being smuggled from the East. According to the Oakland Tribune (which ran the story on its front page), an East Asian woman deboarded and entered the customs shed “clad in a lustrous brocaded Chinese gown […] slit to above the knee”, over which she draped a long sable fur coat. Her nails and lips were blood red, and, despite the early hour after such a long journey, her hair was pulled back into an immaculately coiffured jet-black chignon. US Customs inspector Earl Smith summoned the woman to one side, where her luggage trunk was waiting. The woman, reportedly visibly nervous, stated her name as Seto Gin and her age as 32. Smith opened Seto’s trunk and using his pen knife to lift up a false bottom, revealed 49 tin cans, each containing five taels (about 190 grams) of opium, with a total value of US$15,000 – around US$300,000 today. Authorities photographed a seemingly nonchalant Seto posed in all her finery, leaning on a table and holding a smuggled cigarette tin full of drugs. Nearly every newspaper on the West Coast ran the picture. That she was “Chinese” was good enough for the Santa Cruz Sentinel ’s reporter, but from where exactly was unclear. In newspapers, police reports, shipping registers, etc, spellings often differed and names changed, as non-Chinese police, agents and journalists misspelt or made guesses. Mystery of Jewish gangster who spied for the Japanese in Shanghai Registered now officially as Miss Seto Gin, she was handed over to the federal authorities for booking, taken to the county jail in San Mateo where she was fingerprinted, photographed again for her mugshot and held in a single cell. Outside the jail, Smith told the gathered newspapermen she was “a runner, an accomplice, for a West Coast Dope Ring”. The northern Californian Napa Journal reported Smith as saying, therefore, “We want her boss, we will get the Kingpin.” INTERIOR. DAY. COUNTY JAIL NO 2 WOMEN’S SECTION, SAN MATEO, CALIFORNIA, FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 1939 Earl Smith, the tall, broad-shouldered, all-American customs agent never said what tipped him off to Seto Gin. Something about her demeanour? The fact that she was a woman travelling alone? That she wasn’t white? Smith’s comments grabbed column inches far and wide, from The Palm Beach Post to the Spokane Chronicle , speaking of “Oriental Kingpins” and “Far Eastern Narcotics Rings”. Yet despite Smith’s hype, a false-bottomed trunk was not an original stash spot, even in 1939, and drugs had been smuggled into the US in tins of Chinese sweets or cigarettes for decades. Taking the time to go through Seto’s trunk, item by item, Smith found a cache of letters, all from a man called Chung Lei, sent from San Francisco to Hong Kong. Smith called in a translator who told him they were all about whether Seto had the “jade”, where to take the “jade” and where to keep the “jade” safe. The San Francisco Examiner reported that after Smith decided “jade” was code for drugs, he launched a manhunt across the city to find Chung. But if Chung had been anywhere near the President Coolidge the day before, either to collect his mule or his product, he had absconded when Seto didn’t make it through customs. On remand at the county jail, still wrapped in her fur, her lipstick, nails and plaited chignon immaculate, Seto had been returned to her cell to wait. The hacks at the Oakland Tribune couldn’t resist a little hyperbole about the “slender, petite, almond-eyed Chinese beauty” clad in “… rich garments, brocaded trousers and silken jacket that marked her as wealthy and cultured, an upper-class Chinese woman, exciting the comment and envy of other jail inmates”. Her contact having disappeared, and now faced with serious jail time for drug smuggling, Seto confessed to Smith, while breaking down in tears, that Chung wasn’t only her boss but also her lover. INTERIOR. SAN FRANCISCO COURTHOUSE, SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 1939 Still dressed in the fur coat that had so struck the Oakland Tribune ’s court reporters, Seto was arraigned before commissioner Ernest E. Williams. She admitted Seto Gin was an alias, and that her real name was Lung Ying Lim. Speaking in Cantonese through an interpreter, she claimed, but could not prove, that she was the wife of the absent Chung. She pleaded not guilty to smuggling narcotics. She claimed she had no idea the opium was in her trunk. She refused to say if she knew who the drugs belonged to. She could not explain the letters and their repeated references to “jade”. She claimed not to know the whereabouts of Chung. He used to install spy cameras in China, now he roots them out Commissioner Williams was not impressed, and ordered Seto Gin, aka Lung Ying Lim, or maybe Mrs Chung Lei, held in lieu of a whopping US$20,000 bail pending a federal grand jury. Meanwhile, immigration officials set in motion the machinery for her deportation back to Hong Kong – though the prosecution for smuggling would take precedence – while Smith intensified his hunt for Chung, now San Francisco’s most wanted man. So back to the county jail Seto went, her next court appearance scheduled for the following Wednesday. She would be spending the weekend in prison. INTERIOR. A CHEAP LODGING HOUSE, STOCKTON STREET, CHINATOWN, SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 1939 The authorities had learned that Chung was 37 years old and that he had entered the US from China in July 1938 and was not recorded as having left. Chung was still in San Francisco, hiding out in a pay-by-the-day flophouse in the heart of Chinatown. There, among the cheap lodgings and backstreet cafes, he could pass unnoticed, just another struggling Cantonese immigrant in California, head down, keeping himself to himself. Chung knew the Feds, the police, Immigration and Customs were all looking for him. The newspapers continued to run pictures of Seto daily. Those nails, that cheongsam and fur coat – all newsprint eye candy for a while yet. Listening to the Saturday night Chinatown buzz outside, Chung felt the net closing in, and knew there was a reward for anyone offering information on his whereabouts. The police had dug up his entire past, which was reported in detail more than 350km (220 miles) away in the Reno Gazette-Journal : he was a man from a good Cantonese family with homes in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, he was a New York University graduate, a former high-school principal before becoming the manager of a branch of the Kwangtung Provincial Bank. They also knew that once the war had come and the Japanese invaded, the bank had failed and his family had been bankrupted. And to top all that off, much to the delight of the news-consuming public of Reno, Nevada, it turned out Chung had a wife back in Guangzhou, raising their eight children. Seto was his mistress. INTERIOR. SAN FRANCISCO COURTHOUSE, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1939 Seto was back in court. No word on the whereabouts of “kingpin” Chung Lei. Smith, however, had been working hard. Over the weekend he had contacted the Hong Kong Police with his detainee’s fingerprints, and Hong Kong had telegrammed back to California that Miss Seto Gin/Lung Ying Lim was, in fact, a woman known to them as Miss Yeung Yin Lin (those transliterations again …) who also went by the name Violet Wong – her fifth pseudonym in as many days. And she was not, according to their records, anything like 32, but just 24. The judge decided Seto Gin (nobody could decide what to actually call her by this point) should be remanded in custody back at the county jail until the whereabouts of Chung were established and he was apprehended. Seto/Lung Ying/Yeung Yin/Violet must have wondered just how long the man she had thought cared for her, the man who had promised to take her from war-torn China to the safety of America, the man who had told her he was going to marry her, was going to let her languish in a jail cell. EXTERIOR. SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT CENTRAL STATION, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1939 Eventually, the bedbugs, fleas, cheap soup, claustrophobia and paranoia at being betrayed to the authorities became too much for Chung and, 19 days after his mistress had been arrested and jailed, he cracked. Community elders in Chinatown, not much enjoying daily headlines about Chinese drug dealers and mules, had no interest in shielding a fugitive and persuaded Chung to give himself up, or else, they said, they would turn him in themselves. Chung walked into the San Francisco Police Department’s Central Station and surrendered. INTERIOR. SAN FRANCISCO COURTHOUSE, SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 1939 Finally reunited, Seto and Chung stood facing each other in the courtroom while the stern, unsmiling Superior Judge Michael J. Roche presided over the trial of what the Oakland Tribune dubbed the “Broke Banker and the Comely Concubine”. Both having been incarcerated in the county jail – Chung in the men’s section, Seto in her single cell on suicide watch in the women’s – Smith had grilled them separately, trying to uncover the smuggling ring. In court, Seto sat quietly and stared daggers, a woman bereft and betrayed. It was the first time she had seen Chung in more than six months, and he was about to throw her under the bus. When questioned by the prosecution, Chung vehemently denied any involvement in smuggling opium, putting the whole thing on the woman the press were not calling Violet Wong. Chung played the outraged wrongly accused for all it was worth. Yes, he admitted, she was his “second wife”, “Number Two Wife”, or his “concubine”. But she was not his legal wife, and he had no plans to divorce to marry her. On Chinese islands next to Macau, great stories played out She had pursued him from Hong Kong to San Francisco, he said – he had never told her to smuggle drugs, and he professed to know nothing of opium. He was a respectable banker and father, he said, and he was shocked that this woman had caused him to be arrested and have his family name questioned. But Smith had been diligent. He’d dug deep, sent and received a flurry of telegrams to and from Hong Kong that revealed the truth of it all, and faced with such evidence, eventually, Chung confessed. EXTERIOR. FLASHBACK – HONG KONG BUSINESS DISTRICT, 1938, GROUPS OF DISHEVELLED REFUGEES FROM WAR-TORN CHINA MINGLE WITH BRITISH SOLDIERS AND WELL-DRESSED HONGKONGERS. PANIC IS IN THE AIR. Following the Japanese attack on Guangdong, Chung’s bank had collapsed. Unemployed and broke he had drifted down the delta to Hong Kong, where he had met a young woman from Guangdong who was living alone and trying to survive in the British colony. They became lovers. However, Chung hadn’t been able to re-establish himself in either education or banking, and had fallen on hard times. He had abandoned his wife and children in Guangzhou, leaving them to their fate and the Japanese invasion, but Violet Wong, his mistress in Hong Kong, stuck by him. Desperate to recoup his losses, Chung began gambling at cards in teahouses in Kowloon and visiting the fan-tan casinos in nearby Macau. He lost heavily and repeatedly. He owed a large debt to a local Cantonese gambling concern and couldn’t pay it back. Knowing Chung had a usable American visa from his student days they suggested he could work off his debt by smuggling drugs for them. Of course, he could refuse, but he was penniless, the debt was massive, and the alternative was unthinkable – face down in Victoria Harbour with a knife in the back. According to the Hanford Sentinel , the drug ring had a plan. Chung had obtained a concession at the upcoming San Francisco Golden Gate International Expo running from February to October 1939. Chung was to manage a booth at the expo selling tins of Chinese sweets and cigarettes, and small ornate Chinese dolls in silk pyjamas. He told the organisers that one Miss Violet Wong had been hired as an assistant at the booth and should be granted a work visa. Of course, the concession was a “blind”, and whether she knew it or not, Wong was about to become a drug mule for Hong Kong gangsters. Among the cigarettes and sweets were tins of opium, and inside the dolls were even more drugs. After Chung’s arrest, Smith had searched the flophouse and found his trunk in the basement. He ripped out the lining and found several tins of opium. The pair were sentenced on Tuesday, January 31, 1939, Judge Roche handing down five-year jail terms to each of them. The time was to be served in federal prison, after which both were to be deported back to China. Wong broke down in tears as the judge pronounced her sentence. Throughout the trial she had had no counsel. Chung had not only offered her no help with her defence, he had hired a lawyer to portray her as some kind of scarlet woman. After the trial, the newspapers ran a final photograph. It was taken around the time of the verdict and shows Wong looking visibly older, tired, deceived and distraught. Life had played her a bad hand, she had become involved with the wrong man and she was going to prison for a long time. EXTERIOR. COUNTY JAIL NO 2 WOMEN’S SECTION, SAN MATEO, JANUARY 1944 Hollywood noir movies of the 1940s invariably have neatly packaged endings – villains die in shoot-outs, spend the rest of their lives in the Big House, or fry in the chair. Real life is not so straightforward. Perhaps it’s the name changes, the various spellings, bad record-keeping, lost archives, the confusion of wartime, but Chung Lei and Violet Wong went to jail on the last day of January 1939, and then, as far as any available records show, disappeared. All the California newspapers reported their trial, but it seems nobody was there when they were released. And who knows exactly when that was? It would have been January 1944 if they had served the full five years, but many inmates were paroled due to the constraints of wartime labour shortages. And whenever they were released, what became of them? The judge had ordered their immediate deportation to China when their sentences were complete, but that was before Pearl Harbour, before the Pacific war and the fall of Hong Kong . Deport them where, and how? Was Wong returned to China to disappear into the post-conflict tumult of civil war and revolution? Or did she walk out of jail, granted leave to remain in the US, unencumbered now by the deceitful Chung? Maybe she retrieved her fur coat, found a bar in Chinatown, ordered a large martini, and began the process of making another life, perhaps under yet another name, possibly in a new country.
