Elsie Sigel, a young white woman who helped teach English to Chinese men in New York's Chinatown, was murdered in 1909 and found stuffed in a steamer trunk in the apartment of a Chinese, Leon Ling. A nationwide search for him for several months was unsuccessful despite "sightings" of him, real or imagined, reported around the country. Many Chinese men of his age were stopped and interrogated since "all Chinese look the same" to nonChinese.
The failure to find him was not attributed in newspapers to shortcomings of the authorities but rather to the "Oriental cunning," of Leon Ling.
I was curious to see how pervasive this stereotype of Orientals as "cunning" was using newspaper articles. A cursory archival search showed 150,749 occurrences over many decades from the late 19th century until the mid-20th century in newspapers across the U.S. A small sample of snippets of these articles is shown below.
The high number does not reflect separate stories since articles about major issues were reprinted in many newspapers across the land. Nonetheless, the negative image of the "cunning Oriental" fostered and reinforced the prevalent xenophobia. Fears and suspicions, once activated, are resistant to disconfirmation because they create social and physical distancing from the Chinese.
