Sun Leung owned a “chop suey” restaurant at 782 8 Avenue in New York City. He and his cousin, Leon Ling, lived in separate apartments above the restaurant. Leon hadn’t come home in several days so, on the afternoon of June 18, 1909, Sun went upstairs to knock on his door. Sun smelled a foul odor and went to the West 47 Street police station. Officer John Reardon followed him to Leon’s room, where they found a woman’s corpse in a bound trunk. The woman was nineteen year-old Elsie Sigel. She lived on 209 Wadsworth Avenue in Washington Heights. Police suspected Leon murdered her, though Leon’s neighbor, Chong Sing, had also been missing. New York newspapers covered the “trunk mystery” on their front pages for months. Periodicals outside New York reported the impact Elsie’s murder had on their local communities. They deployed sensational stories about “the heathen Chinee” and advised against racial contamination.
Headline, New York Times (June 19, 1909)
Although Sigel’s murder remains unresolved, historians like Mary Liu have demonstrated its significance to the shaping of American culture. For example, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act denied Chinese laborers entry to the United States. It made exceptions for only merchants and their families. Leon Ling had to prove his relation to the restaurant owner at 782 8 Avenue to gain American citizenship. He persevered difficult working conditions in a city carved with strict racial, gender, and sexual borders further concretized by the emergence of eugenics, capital, and overseas U.S. imperialism. “The heathen Chinee” became an “oriental other” against which White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society constructed its “occidental self.” White women like Elsie Sigel came under the occident’s protection. America demonstrated its greatness not only on the bodies of color it wiped out. It saw controlling white womanhood equally requisite in the project for global ascendancy. White women’s labor, desire, and virtue reflected the nation’s progress. Therefore, Elsie’s affairs with Leon, her Sunday school pupil, and other Chinese men held the public’s attention. Some accused the men of manipulating her. Others charged her for her own death. Not surprisingly, the speculations enabled state and non-state actors and institutions to re-carve the borders separating “us” from “them,” “good” from “evil,” “New York” from the “oriental other” that have lived and irreducibly shaped its economy, social order, and cultural identity since the colonial era.
Building where Elsie Sigel’s body was found.
The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University has been working towards the recovery and preservation of these historical formations to provide us a more complicated perspective of New York City’s history since contact to present. In 2008, the A/P/A Institute launched the Asian/Pacific American Archives Survey Project with the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. The A/PA Archives Survey was the first systematic attempt to map existing and potential A/PA archival collections throughout NYC. Funded by the Metropolitan New York Library Council’s Documentary Heritage Project, the A/PA Archives Survey ameliorates underrepresentation and misrepresentation of East Coast Asian America in historical scholarship. It surveyed and acquired collections from community organizations and individuals into the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, as well as the Fales Library and Special Collections. The collections are located in homes, offices, unions, organizations, and archival repositories available to the public. They contain boxes and boxes and boxes of programs, flyers, buttons, and ephemera materials from people society and archival institutions hitherto thought were unworthy of remembering.
A/PA Archives Survey Project website.
We access the A/PA Archives Survey Project through the A/P/A Institute website. The home page contains five links to learn more about the Archives Survey and its collections, staff, and contact information. On the right hand side, the first panel allows us to search the archive. Entering the keywords, “Greenwich Village,” we can search for A/PA materials relating to Greenwich Village. Our search yields two papers: the Yun Gee Papers and Cecily Brownstone Papers.
The year Leon Ling disappeared and Elsie Sigel’s murder captivated American public discourse, Cecily Brownstone was born in Plum Coulee in Manitoba, Canada. She grew up in Winnipeg and attended University of Manitoba. The fourth of five girls, Cecily left Canada for Greenwich Village in New York City after graduation. She found a duplex apartment in a Village brownstone. It had a spectacular kitchen. Cecily didn’t need that much room for herself, only her cooking and cookbook collection.
From 1947 to 1986, Cecily served as the Associated Press’ Food Editor. She published food essays, recipe columns, and children’s books across the United States and abroad. Parent Magazine and Family Circle also included her in their masthead, and during her downtime, Cecily helped President of Cuisinart, Carl Sontheimer, as a private consultant to the company and editor of Classic Cakes and Other Great Cuisinart Desserts (Hearst Books, 1994). Historian Heather Lee tells us that during this same time Chinese restaurants like the one Leon Ling waited at proliferated in light of Chinese Exclusion. The total number of Chinese restaurants across America was more than the combined number of McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendy’s establishments. This statistic reflected the ways Chinese merchants circumvented racist immigration laws to directed the transnational flow of U.S. capital back to their homelands. A Chinese restaurant was easily found in Greenwich Village as Cecily walked from the nearest train to her apartment. In fact, the possibility of her grabbing food to go from such restaurant and eating at home isn’t unimaginable either. “Chop suey” dominated U.S. fast food culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Cecily would not have only consumed or made some variation of the popular Chinese American meal. She corresponded with leading Chinese and Chinese American cooks and cookbook authors at the time as well.
And she did. Cecily’s papers include author files on Asian and Asian American cookbook authors like Madhur Jaffrey, Calvin Lee, Helen Chen, and Kay Shimizu. Clicking on the Archive Survey Project’s link to the Fales Library and Special Collections’ webpage for Cecily Brownstone’s Papers shows us that in Box 1 Folder 140, Cecily communicated with Yung-chi Chao Chen, author of the book, Harmony of Flavors: A Chinese Cookbook (China Color Printing, 1976). In the folder just before, Cecily has correspondence with Helen Chen, author of famous chop suey cookbooks.
The Fales Library and Special Collections’ webpage simulates an astute finding aid. The table of contents on the left side divides Cecily’s papers into thirteen series with an extensive summary of its description, biography, scope and content, arrangement, access points, and administrative information. Clicking on Descriptive Summary, for example, informs us that Cecily’s papers were collected between 1940, when she was 31 years old, and 2002, three years before she died at age 96. We also know there’s 30 records cartons and 14 document cases. The page provides names of the archivists who processed her collection, as well as the address for material reproduction requests.
From Jim Lee’s Chinese Cookbook to The People’s Republic of China Cookbook, Cecily collected A/PA peoples’ recipes—Chinese, Indian, Hawaiian, nothing eluded her authority. She reviewed them for The New York Times and, as NYT Editor Jane Nickerson testifies, Cecily gleaned massive audiences.
Neither the A/PA Archives Survey Project nor the Fales Library and Special Collection will link you to the exact documents. You can, however, use the finding aid to locate the materials you think you’d to see. Part of an archive, the materials organically reflect the Cecily’s activities situated within their appropriate spaces and times. They reveal the attention of food writers like Cecil weren’t simply concerned with WASP cuisine. Instead, Cecily’s inclusion of major A/PA cookbook authors and recipes show us that a marketplace existed for Asian/Pacific American foods in Greenwich Village during the Chinese Exclusion Act. Her letters to and from Yung-chi and Helen, for instance, demonstrate how closely connected the food universe was at that time. Cecily even collected works on tea drinking and spices, two ceaselessly oriental tropes permanently entrenched in the American imagination.
Moreover, in Box 7 Folder 22, right behind the folder containing information about proper tea drinking in eighteenth century America, is a facsimile titled “The Rules of Civility.” As a woman of WASP society in Greenwich Village, Cecily had to follow civil codes to maintain her position within the cult of white womanhood. These “rules of civility” were determined by the racial, gender, and sexual borders carved into the social fabric of NYC at the turn of the century. We see them in the “trunk mystery.” We see them here.
At a cursory glance, Cecily Brownstone might have little to do with the widely understudied histories of Asian/Pacific American peoples in Greenwich Village and New York City at large. However, looking closely, the materials articulate an alternative narrative complicating our misinformed understandings of Asian Americans in the metropolis. The A/PA Archives Survey Project brings together collections that further this enterprise for historical complication. It’s a stellar resource for archivists looking to “do history” different and historians attempting to revise familiar misrepresentations of our shared past.
Sources
The Documentary Heritage Project, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University
Mary Liu, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005).
John Kwo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999).
Researching Greenwich Village History 
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