ABSTRACT
An unprecedented wedding seems to have been the talk of San Francisco in the spring of 1875. It was reported that Father Patrick “Paddy” Powers, of St. Patrick’s Church, had joined in holy matrimony one Mary Mahoney, “a pretty and young Irish girl,” and Loo Foh, “the well-known Chinese merchant” said to have become a Christian and sought US citizenship a year earlier. Jolly Giant’s San Francisco brand of hostility to miscegenation may explain its depiction of Miss Mahoney as refined, quite the opposite of Loo Foh. The contrast points to an ugly yet familiar theme: stereotype charged Chinese men with sexually perverse intentions toward white women. In San Francisco “during the 1850s,” James P. Walsh writes, “everyone was uprooted, Americans and foreigners alike” Luring the Irish, Chinese, and indeed persons of every imaginable ethnicity to California was the discovery of gold in 1848.
