The Chinese beauty caught smuggling drugs to the US in 1939, and the gripping case of the ‘broke banker and his comely concubine’
- When ‘Seto Gin’ arrived in San Francisco from Hong Kong with opium worth US$300,000 today, authorities and newspapers scrambled to unravel the details
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.
