Tuesday, January 7, 2025:

Introducing Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.

In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.

Daily Diary, Day 1588:

Once again, I am going to provide one of my short stories for free to subscribers to this newsletter. This time it is the fourth short story, Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, a story I published back in 2014 (over ten years ago!) Starting on Thursday, I will put up a new scene (there are six of them) every Tuesday and Thursday, with an occasional brief historical tid-bit thrown in. But first, some background on why I decided to give Mr. Wong his own short story.

As I wrote in the introduction to my first volume of collected short stories, “This story is an example of what happens when I don’t want to let go of a character. Mr. Wong, a Chinese manservant, plays a crucial role in my first book, Maids of Misfortune. I quite fell in love with him and was delighted that many fans of this book seemed to feel the same way. I kept waiting for a reason to reintroduce him, even having Annie Fuller wonder what he was up to during a scene in Uneasy Spirits. After I finished my third book, Bloody Lessons, I was delighted when I came up with a plot for a short story where Annie would desperately require his services.”

I also briefly re-introduced Mr. Wong in my most recent full-length historical mystery, Entangled Threads. And when I did a poll in this newsletter last year about which minor characters were readers’ favorites, Mr. Wong got the largest number of votes among those characters living outside the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse.

But I had another reason I wanted to write a story featuring Mr. Wong and that was to be able to examine some of the history of the Chinese living in San Francisco at the end of the 19^th century. I had decided to have a Chinese male servant in the murdered man’s house Maids of Misfortune right from the beginning when I had discovered doing my dissertation that the existence of a significant number of Chinese male servants in the western cities I was researching was a real deviation from national patterns. First I my work with the 1880 census and working women showed that a higher than usual number of female servants in San Francisco worked alongside male servants, a significant proportion of these male servants were Chinese. Both the number of male servants and their ethnicity were unusual.

National data showed that by 1870, no more than ten percent of domestic servants in America were male, but in my data for fSan Francisco, among those female servants who did work alongside another servant (instead of being a maid-of-all work), over half-worked with a male servant.

Part of the explanation for this deviation was that the demand for domestics outpaced the supply of available women, in the west where men still outnumbered women. At the same time, it was in the west that you could find a large group of men, Chinese males, who didn’t have the cultural prescription against domestic labor that most European immigrant and native-born men had.

The result of these two factors is that over half of the female servants in San Francisco who worked in households with male servants were working with a Chinese male servant, like the character, Wong, in Maids of Misfortune.

Ironically, this put two different ethnic groups who were antagonistic towards each other, the Irish and the Chinese, in close proximity to each other. The Irish tended to dominate urban areas in both the east and west, making up 29.5% of the foreign-born population in San Francisco. And this is the ethnic group who were most likely to make up the female population of servants in that city…which is one of the reasons I chose to make the boarding house servant, Kathleen Hennessey, and the cook, Mrs. O’Rourke Irish. What was so unusual was that it was the Chinese who made up the second largest group of foreign born (20.3%) in San Francisco in 1880, and the vast majority of these Chinese residents were male.

For a variety of reasons, the Irish therefore saw the Chinese as their greatest competitors in all economic spheres (construction, manufacturing, etc.) and several local politicians did a good job of blaming the inequalities of wealth in the city on the Chinese as a way to distract from the role the rich “Robber Barons” of this period had played in causing the low wages, unhealthy working conditions, and frequent unemployment, etc. that characterized the period. While the Irish men did not see domestic service as one of those contested areas, this didn’t mean they were all that happy about their daughters working in households with Chinese males.

I allude to this a bit in Maids of Misfortune, and then I consider the antagonism between the Irish and the Chinese in manufacturing jobs more explicitly in the recent novel, Entangled Threads.

However, in Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, I wished to looking at the broader history of the Chinese in the city, the effects of the imbalanced sex ratio, anti-Chinese sentiment, and exploitive practices of Chinese and non-Chinese employers specifically on women and the attempts by certain religious groups to ameliorate the condition of these women. But I will address some of these issues in a later post.

So, I hope you will enjoy reading, and re-reading Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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