Release from Angel Island did not guarantee the Chinese freedom from further harassment by the Immigration Service, for exclusion-era policies gave immigration officials enormous discretion to seize and detain the Chinese as they wished. As the Chinese would soon learn, all it would take was one crime committed by one Chinese individual to tarnish the entire Chinese American community.

In 1909, a young white girl named Elsie Sigel was murdered in New York, her decomposing body found stuffed in a rusty trunk in her apartment. The chief suspect was William Leon, the owner of a chop suey restaurant in Manhattan who had courted Sigel but was believed to have become jealous when Sigel grew attached to another Chinese man. By the time Sigel’s corpse was discovered, Leon had long vanished, no doubt having fled the city, if not the country. When the authorities threw a dragnet out for Leon, they suspended the constitutional rights of anyone who looked even remotely Chinese.

The memorable aspect of the Sigel case was not the tragedy of the murder itself but how the nation reacted to it, and its long-term consequences for the Chinese community. The New York City police ordered that no Chinese person could leave the city without permission, and those Chinese with railway and steamship tickets were turned away at the stations and docks. Every ship leaving New York harbor was searched, their Chinese crews interrogated. As the investigation rippled across the country and into Canada, officials rounded up Chinese men from Norfolk to Chicago, from Vancouver to Revelstoke, British Columbia, arresting some the moment they stepped off trains. Chinese businesses nationwide were placed under surveillance. In Providence, Rhode Island, the police commissioner even ordered all draperies to be removed from each room, stall, and booth of the city’s Chinese restaurants so that the interiors could be viewed from the outside at all times. Japanese Americans were hauled off the streets and harassed by the police. In the end, countless Asians, entirely guiltless, bore the full brunt of suspicion, but the primary suspect, William Leon, was never caught. To the beleaguered Chinese, the Sigel case illustrated just how swiftly their rights could be stripped from them in times of mass hysteria and government-declared emergency.

(Chang 152-153)