More on poontang

[Jonathan Lighter]

Karen Abbott, sez _USA Today_, is pioneering  "sizzle history" with her talk-o'-the-town tome, _Sex in the Second City_ (N.Y.: Random House, 2007)!  Included is a many-paged, boffo bibliography of earlier sizzle histories that failed, in most cases, to click like Karen's! Lots of end notes too!
 
If you're one of those old fuddy-duddies who still think that hard-workin' workin' girls in Chicago a hundred years ago led miserable, dangerous, and sleazoid lives of (yawn!) "victimization," _Sex in the Second City_ may slip you the tip that you could be sooooo wrong.  Especially if they worked in the "club" presided over by the fabled and fabulous "Everleigh Sisters," who didn't just popularize the phrase "getting leighed" (Note from reality: that's what it says at http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_karrenabbott/ ); they also employed, before the patriarchally engineered "First World War," international ultrageishas like the fabulous and fabled Asian sizzle pioneer "Suzy Poon Tang"!
 
Evidently Ms. Poon Tang really was from China and even more evidently she worked for the Everleighs for just one night!  We won't spoil the story by revealing every sizzling detail, but what we *can* say is that the author's source for her tales of Suzy is an old-time sizzle history by Ray Hibbeler called _Upstairs at the Everleigh Club_ ([S.I.]: Volitant Books, 
196- [not quite how it appears in Karen's biblio, though]), which may even be based on the recollections of people old enough to have visited or inhabited said club so long ago as 1908, had they a mind to do so at the time.  Only two copies are known to WorldCat!
 
Here's an informative recent exchange between Karen and sizzle meta-historian Will Doig at the aforementioned website:
 
" [Will:] Suzy Poon Tang was a Chinese girl who was the most sought-after prostitute in the Levee District. Is that where the phrase "poon tang" actually comes from?

"[Karen:] When I found her in a book, I thought, no, this can't be. I started trying to do some etymology research. There is a phrase in China, punata — I think I'm saying it incorrectly — but there is a Chinese word and you could see how it would be bastardized in English into poon tang once she came over here."
 
So there you have it, even though Karen acknowledges she may have been saying the Chinese word incorrectly!  In Spanish, this word also morphed into _pinyata_ (though I think I'm misspelling)!
 
Howsomever that all may be, it does prove that chronicler of sizzle Ray Hibbeler believed it possible, in 1960, that "poon tang" had been a well known lexeme to the high-end (no wisecracks, please!) Chicago demimonde fifty years earlier.
 
And that should be good enough for anyone!
 
JL
 
 
 




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