| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Mary Ting Yi Lui. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 298. $29.95.
In recent years, scholars such as Patricia Cline Cohen and Suzanne Lebsock have used the murder of European American women as a narrative device in order to explore the social and cultural underpinnings of a particular moment and place. Mary Ting Yi Lui employs this same device to tease out the attitudes toward and realities of New York City's Chinese immigrant community at the beginning of the twentieth century.	1
Lui's book examines the murder of Elsie Sigel in 1909. Sigel, a young, well-to-do European American woman, did missionary work among Chinese immigrants in New York City. That is how she met Leon Ling, the prime suspect in her murder, and developed a romantic relationship with him. The police quickly settled on the theory that her death was the result of a lovers' quarrel between Ling and Sigel, possibly over her feelings for another Chinese man. The general public also perceived Sigel's romantic involvement with Ling and other Chinese immigrant men as the root cause for her murder and, as such, more disturbing than her actual death. Sensationalized media coverage conflated this murder with deeper anxieties about interracial relationships and resulted in increased police surveillance of interactions between Chinese immigrant men and European American women.	. . .

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