The moral geography becomes a connotation for someone’s self guilt or pity. It
doesn’t necessarily deal with an environment or place of living but rather where one’s
values live as we begin to see areas differently in a moral sense. As a society becomes
more diverse differences between right and wrong shift according to the changing
beliefs and culture of the population. In both “The Chinatown Trunk Mystery” and
“Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight,” the idea of an ultimate other is
reinforced.
In “The Chinatown Trunk Mystery” written by Mary Ting Yi Lui Elsie Sigel is
murdered and found dead in Leon Ling’s trunk. Although murdered in New York the
press and police linked the murder to the city of Chinatown. “The association of
Chinatown with the Sigel murder was hardly an accident, it was clearly shaped by
prevalent middle-class concerns over the the seemingly unfixed place of women and
Chinese immigrants in a rapidly changing commercial and industrial metropolis that
rendered geographical borders.” Chinatown is given a negative connotation and is
perceived as a dangerous and forbidden place. It was viewed as the “other” place
where unpleasant and disagreeable things happened, relatively to what is known as
“sin city” presently. The purpose of these places was to alleviate stress and make us
feel as if we were without sin. Given that Elsie Sigel was a young white middle-class
