The Green Pheasant

Set in 1929 lower Manhattan against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, The Green Pheasant is narrated by Arthur "Artie" Lum, a twenty-five-year-old native-born night manager at his uncle's Pell Street chop suey restaurant. After Artie inadvertently chases off two thieves while brandishing a soup ladle and wearing an apron made of leftover green silk, newspaper reporter Whitey Fallon sensationalizes the event into an urban legend about a masked vigilante called "the Green Pheasant". Realizing that a paperless mythical figure can safely protect a community that cannot risk interacting with the law or immigration authorities, Auntie Fong Yuet-sim and switchboard operator Winnie Choy organize the "Pheasant Committee of the Four Streets" to manage and deploy the rumor. The situation escalates when the Bowery & Empire Improvement Trust hires professional arsonist Nils Bergstrom to set fire to local tenements, planning to frame the fictional vigilante to collect massive insurance payouts from investigator Dorothea Twill. To defeat the trust's frame-job, the Committee manufactures eleven identical suits out of green silk and coordinates eleven simultaneous public appearances of the Green Pheasant across Chinatown during a tourist tour on October 28, 1929. This impossible stunt voids the trust's fraudulent insurance claims right before the Wall Street stock market crash of Black Tuesday dismantles the corporation entirely.