Religion, Race, and Dying Declarations: The People v. Chin Mook Sow

The details of the crime were grisly. On the evening of December 10, 1875, a Chinese man named Chin Mook Sow was alleged to have entered the room of another Chinese man named Yee Ah Chin, who lived in a densely occupied boarding house in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Following a dispute over money, Chin Mook Sow grew enraged, took a knife from his pocket, and vigorously slashed at Yee Ah Chin. According to testimony from the ensuing trial, Sow “cut the bowels of the deceased right through so that the intestines protruded.” 

Though the crime had ostensibly little to do with religion, the case of The People v. Chin Mook Sow (1876) ended up focusing in surprising ways on the nature of Yee Ah Chin’s beliefs about God and the afterlife. It was one of several cases from the late-19th century in which the deathbed accusations, or “dying declarations,” of Chinese victims were challenged because of their alleged lack of belief in an eternal system of rewards and punishment. If they did not believe they were about to be judged by God for eternity, the logic went, what was to safeguard the reliability of their testimony? Though it had long been established that Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities could offer testimony in U.S. courts regardless of their convictions about the afterlife, Chinese residents continued to find their competence called into question. At a time of widespread racial prejudice and political exclusion, these cases raised critical questions about the extent to which Chinese migrants could enjoy the full protections of U.S. law. 

In this paper, I offer a close reading of the trial transcript of The People v. Chin Mook Sow, a remarkable source for understanding how secular discourses about religion shaped the terms on which 19th century Chinese migrants encountered and interacted with institutions of state power. I focus on the court’s surprisingly extended inquiry into the content of Chinese religion, which aimed to understand the precise nature of Yee Ah Chin’s beliefs and how they compared to analogous Christian concepts. Though the court ultimately ended up vindicating the victim’s rights, I show how they did so by mobilizing an interlocking set of religious and racial logics that served to accentuate and exaggerate Chinese difference, treating them—and their beliefs—as indelibly foreign. Even while extending them minimal legal protections, the court treated Chinese witnesses as inherently suspect, making them defend and prove themselves in ways that others did not. 

My paper makes two contributions, each of which responds to the call for proposals that address APIA religions in relation to secularism. First, it shows how ostensibly secular state institutions shaped Chinese American religious life in the 19th century, often in highly surprising ways. Throughout the Chin Mook Sow trial, Chinese witnesses and interpreters struggled to translate theological beliefs about spiritual beings, justice, and vengeance into terms that officers of the court could understand. They also pushed back and contested the court’s assumptions about Chinese difference, frequently challenging the premises of their investigations and working to collapse the purported distinctions between White Americans and Chinese, rather than reinforce them. By excavating these exchanges, my paper adds to a growing body of literature (e.g. Paddison 2012; Lum 2022) that considers how religious imaginaries contributed to 19th century anti-Chinese hostility alongside, or in support of, racial prejudice and how Chinese mobilized religious resources in response. It centers U.S. courts as a critical arena through which these negotiations took shape and tries to account for the relatively ambivalent treatment that Chinese migrants received there. 

Second, I explore how Chin Mook Sow and the other dying declarations cases offer a fascinating if largely neglected chapter in the history of legal secularism, which has mostly ignored the experience of Chinese (and other APIA) Americans. These cases show how courts were wrestling with questions of proper belief and its implications for democratic citizenship in ways that were shaped by dominant racialist ideologies of the time. Even at a time when U.S. legal doctrines, like the law of dying declarations, were being unmoored from their explicitly religious foundations, the Chin Mook Sow court engaged in extended religious inquiries that betrayed a host of underlying (Protestant) theological presuppositions. The court’s engagement with Chinese religion demonstrated the ways that U.S. law was not so much overcoming its theological underpinnings as subsuming them beneath a variety of secular justifications that left the underlying religious logics mostly in place. My analysis thus attends to the ways Chinese religionists experienced and responded to the ambivalent effects of American-style legal secularism.