1900-1950: A world without women
15 Dec 2004
15 Dec 2004We are used to reading that women were scarce in early Chinese immigrant communities in North America. And yet in the 1850s through1870s a fair number of women emigrated from China to the New World. In 1861-62, for instance, the female-male ratio of emigrants departing for the Americas from Hong Kong and Canton was 671:2503 (Note 1). Considering that the emigrants came from sojourner communities, where men were expected to leave their wives behind when going to work overseas, a ratio of one woman to every four men was not so bad.
After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, however, the number of women in Chinese-American communities fell drastically. No more were coming in, and many left who were already here. By the early 20th century the situation had become critical. The Chinese community was aging and, due to the shortage of women, not able to reproduce itself. Some Chinese-American women did indeed exist during this period. We have many photographs of full Chinese families in Chicago, complete with mothers and daughters, from the 1900s and 1910s. And yet those women were very few.
Trustworthy statistical information on gender ratios in the Chinese community is hard to get. Government census data is particularly doubtful when the community involved was suspicious of the authorities and afraid of deportation. A more credible kind of information, which has rarely been used in this connection, are death certificates. These exist in relatively complete form in several states, and are quite reliable for data on gender and race. It seems probable that death certificates were needed not only for all deceased Chinese who were buried or cremated in the U.S. but also for all those sent back to China for burial
In Illinois, a comprehensive tabulation of death certificates for the years 1916-1950 is now available on line, from the Illinois State Archives website. A quick search of this data, choosing Chinese surnames that were common in the Midwest, gives the following results:
Surname Total Males Females Females
(Chinese) (Other)Moy 158 141 11 6 white
11 6 whiteLee/Li 121 117 4 (no data on white female Lees)
121 117 4 (no data on white female Lees)Wong 72 59 9 4 white
72 59 9 4 whiteSing 66 65 1(no data on white female Sings)
66 65 1(no data on white female Sings)Chan 54 49 4 1 white
54 49 4 1 whiteChin 50 47 2 1 black
50 47 2 1 blackHong 48 45 2 1 white, 1 black
48 45 2 1 white, 1 blackFong 40 39 1
40 39 1 Lum 30 28 2
30 28 2 Yuen/Yuan 29 29
29 Toy 28 27 1 (no data on white female Toys)
27 1 (no data on white female Toys)Chow/Chou 27 26 1
1Eng 26 23 3(plus 2 possible white female Engs?)
26 23 3(plus 2 possible white female Engs?)Leong 18 16 1 1 white
16 1 1 whiteWoo/Wu 18 14 4
14 4 Chung 15 14 1
15 14 1 Chang 10 10
10 10 Gin 9 8 1 white
9 8 1 white1900-1950: Early Interracial marriages in Chicago 21 Dec 2004
21 Dec 2004The death certificate data discussed in the preceding mini-article does not provide accessible data on Chinese women marrying men of other ethnic groups. However, the death certificates do show that a number of white women (and a few black women as well) had Chinese surnames; presumably most of these were wives of Chinese men. Other white women may have had Chinese husbands too: there is no way of telling from these records whether women classified as white but with surnames like Lee, Sing, and Toy -- names also used by white families -- were married to Europeans or Chinese. A few German-Americans were named Eng, but these seem to have lived mostly in Rock Island. White female Engs in Chicago probably were married to Chinese.
The names of the two black women listed in the above table were Yee Sut Hong and Rose Chin. Both were Chicagoans. We do not know their stories, nor those of most white women who took Chinese husbands. The few early Midwestern East-West marriages we know about were not always happy -- see below, the Wings and Sings.
We do not have much data on the ethnicity of the white wives. A little information appears in the immigration records preserved by the Chicago office of NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration). These records, as summarized by Peggy Christoff, include entries on women who requested documents allowing them to return to Chicago or another Midwestern city after planned visits to China. Christoff lists a number of white wives and mothers of daughters with Chinese husbands or fathers. The records date to the period 1900-1940. The marriages in question involved women of the following national/ethnic groups:
German 6Polish 3"White"3Swedish 1Irish 1All of these families were wealthy enough to send wives and/or daughters back to China for a family visit or education. Ordinary biracial couples probably could not have considered such an expensive journey and thus would not have come to the attention of the Bureau of Immigration.
As none of the women listed by Christoff were of British (that is, Welsh, English, or Scots) ancestry, it seems that wealthy Chinese men and British-American women rarely married each other. Why was this? There must have been as many British-Americans as German-Americans in Chicago. Were the Germans less prejudiced? We think that is unlikely. They probably were just poorer.
A pattern of the poor marrying the poor, no matter what their ethnicity, had long existed in other big cities. In New York, for example, there were cases as early as the 1850s of Irish and Chinese peddlers marrying each other::
"Of the many Chinamen in New York not a few keep cigar stands upon the sidewalks. Their neighbors intrade are the Milesian [Irish] apple-women. Twenty-eight of these apple-women have gone the way ofmatrimony with their elephant-eyed, olive-skinned contemporaries, and the most of them are now happymothers in consequence." (Harper's 1857)It is possible that early Chicago witnessed a similar pattern. The rich could marry their own kind. The impoverished had to choose mates for reasons other than ethnicity.
[Interracial marriage has increased in more recent decades, especially among those born in America. In a just-published article, C. N. Le shows that in 2000, 19.3% of married American-raised Chinese males had white wives, while 29.9% of married American-raised Chinese females had white husbands. Interestingly, American-raised Koreans and Filipinos both had even higher rates of marrying European-American spouses.]
Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Tracking the "Yellow Peril," pp 77-143 (Rockport, Maine: The Picton Press). ISBN 0-89725-410-4.
Harper’s Weekly, October 3, 1857, page 630
Le, C.N. 2005. "Interracial Dating & Marriage: U.S.-Raised Asian Americans" in Asian-Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. <http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial2.shtml>
Young Chinese-American woman (from either Utah or San Francisco) at the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893
It is clear that there were indeed many fewer women than men in the Chinese community of the Exclusion Act period. The overall gender ratio shown here is 47: 818 or one Chinese woman for every 17 men.
We do not know why the Wongs had a higher percentage of women than any other clan/family name group. Were they richer? Did they simply have different customs?
Note 1: Williams, S. Wells The Chinese Commercial Guide, 5th Edition, p. 277. (Honk Kong, A Shortrede & Co., 1863). Williams included emigration to the Caribbean and Latin America (but not Southeast Asia) in his statistics
1903: White prostitution in eastern Chinatowns 22 Jan 2005
22 Jan 2005Historians of Chinese America as well as early West Coast newspapers often note that many of the Chinese girls brought to this country in the 19th century were prostitutes. The late Iris Chang was one such historian. She told tragic stories of young girls forced into prostitution by criminal gangs, occasionally to be rescued by public-spirited Europeans like the courageous Donaldina Cameron of San Francisco and sometimes to find husbands among their Chinese-American (or European-American) customers.
But it is rarely noted that Chinese-American prostitutes were much less common in the Chinatowns of the eastern U.S. There, most prostitutes were European-Americans. As Lee Chew wrote in 1903,
"In all New York there are only thirty-four Chinese women, and it is impossible to get a Chinese woman out here unless one goes to China and marries her there, and then he must collect affidavits to prove that she really is his wife. That is in [the] case of a merchant. A laundryman can’t bring his wife here under any circumstances, and even the women of the Chinese Ambassador’s family had trouble getting in lately.
"Is it any wonder, therefore, or any proof of the demoralization of our people if some of the white women in Chinatown are not of good character? What other set of men so isolated and so surrounded by alien and prejudiced people are more moral? Men, wherever they may be, need the society of women, and among the white women of Chinatown are many excellent and faithful wives and mothers."
When he writes about women who "are not of good character," Lee Chew means prostitutes. It is interesting that he feels obliged to add that not all white women of Chinatown were like that. That a rather conservative Chinese immigrant like Lee Chew could affirm that some white women made excellent wives and mothers shows, first, that he was conscious of the need to be diplomatic (he was writing for a European-American magazine, after all) and, second, that in the early 1900s biracial marriages were not so rare.
Lee Chew, “The Biography of a Chinaman,” Independent, vol. 15 (19 February 1903), pp 417–423.
Iris Chang, The Chinese in America, 2003, pp 84-98 (New York, Penguin Books).
1926: The cleanness of Chinese restaurants in Chicago (and New York) 19 Dec 2004
In the same vein as the 1892 description (see above) is a comment by T.C. Fan 範定九, a Chinese sociologist who in 1926 wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Chicago's Chinatown. The dissertation is the first study of Chinese-Americans to have been produced by a Chinese, rather than European-American, researcher.
"The success in the restaurant business is chiefly due to the cleanliness with which the Chinese [of Chicago] prepare their food and keep their kitchens. The investigation made by a reporter of the New York Daily News recently gives out more definite ideas of how these Chinese restaurants and their kitchens are kept. The report contains these statements: 'Of the restaurants so far investigated, the Chinese restaurants are by far the cleanest. The kitchens, without exception among those investigated, were found immaculate. The utensils were shining, the metal work shone and the tables were scrubbed. Even the scraps looked clean.' "
Tin-Chiu Fan, Chinese Residents of Chicago, 1926. Ph.D. Dissertation, U. of Chicago. Reprinted in 1974 by R & E Research Associates, Saratoga, CA. ISBN 0-88247-257-7
T. C. Fan's name in pinyin was Fan Dingjiu. He got his B.A. from the University of Nanking and his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago. He later became Dean of Hangchow Christian College in Zhejiang province. He seems to have lived until at least 1984. For further information on him, click on: http://ricci.rt.usfca.edu/biography/view.aspx?biographyID=1653
1912: Exactly when was Chicago's South Side Chinatown founded? 12 Dec 2004, modified 13 July 2005
An important event in the history of Chinese Chicago was the shift of the main Chinese-American business district from its original home in the Loop, on Clark St. between Van Buren and Harrison Aves., to its current location on the near South Side, on Cermak (called 22nd St. in those days), Archer, and Wentworth Aves. Most experts agree that the shift took place because of anti-Chinese prejudice, rent increases demanded by European-American landowners on Clark St., and quarrels between the two dominant community groups, the On Leong and Hip Sing Associations (neither group, incidentally, was ever called a "tong"). The experts do not agree about the date of the shift. Some put it as early as 1905; others as late as 1920.
Susan Lee Moy, the leading historian of Chinese in Chicago, got it right when she wrote "in about 1910." But in order to be more precise about the date -- for instance, so as to think about a 100th anniversary celebration for Chinatown -- the Chinatown Museum Foundation's researchers have been looking at historical sources. The best ones for our purposes turned out to be the Lakeside Annual Directories of Chicago, updated every year by the compiler, Reuben H. Donnelley. These gave names and addresses of individuals and businesses throughout the city and were organized in exactly the same way as telephone directories of later times. Because in those days only the rich had telephones, the Annual Directories had to be based on data from door-to-door canvassers hired by the publisher, but they were otherwise very much like modern telephone books.
We decided to focus on the locations of Chinese stores, most of which by definition were in the main Chinese business district, rather than on the locations of restaurants or laundries, which in those days were already scattered all over the city. We looked at microfilm copies of the Annual Directories for 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1915, as preserved in the Harold Washington Center of the Chicago Public Library. Here is what we found:
191040 Chinese stores in Chicago, all in the Loop, in the Clark-Harrison-Van Buren area191136 Chinese stores, all in the Loop191232 Chinese stores, 20 in the Loop and 12 on the South Side, in the Archer-22nd area191552 Chinese stores, 8 in the Loop and 44 on the South SideWe think this evidence is decisive. As each year's directory seems to show addresses at the end of the previous year, it follows that the South Side Chinatown was founded in 1911 by merchants and others who moved down from the original Loop Chinatown.
Since the preceding paragraph was written we have found that we were wrong, and that the Chinatown at Archer and 22nd was not founded until a year later, in 1912. The evidence is a group of newspaper articles from early 1912 stating that the move to "the new Chinatown" would take place later that year. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, in its annual article on Chinese New Year celebrations in Chicago noted that 1912 was the last year that the celebrations would be held in the Clark Street Chinatown.
As S. L. Moy indicates, over the next few decades Chinese businesses and residences pushed south from 22nd and Archer down Wentworth Ave. Several large buildings in Chinese style were built on Wentworth between 22nd and Alexander Sts. in the late 1920s. We believe that this may have been when the demographic wave reached the Chinatown Museum Foundation's building between Alexander and 23rd Sts. Before that the neighborhood had been Italian, and before that perhaps German or English. From the early 1930s onward, it was mainly Chinese.
Susan Lee Moy, "The Chinese in Chicago: The First Hundred Years," in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d'A Jones eds., Ethnic Chicago, A Multicultural Portrait, 4th edition, pages 378-408. 1995, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, ISBN 0-8028-0753-8.
Reuben H, Donnelley, compiler, The Lakeside Annual Directory of Chicago, 1910, 1911, 1912, & 1915. (The Chicago Directory Company, Chicago)
RESEARCH 研究小品, 1900-1949Here we present the results of research into Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian history in the interior of North America, between the East and West Coasts. The coastal regions have been well studied by historians of Chinese America; the region in between has not.
This page covers the first half of the 20th century. When the century began in 1900, the violent persecution of Chinese in the western US was just ending, while Chinese in Chicago were enjoying a time of relative safety and prosperity. When the century reached its midpoint at the end of 1949, the oppressive Exclusion Act had been canceled and Chinese-Americans were beginning to be treated, legally if not socially, like full American citizens. For the 19th century, click on RESEARCH 1857-1899.
As noted on the RESEARCH 1857-1899 page, this not meant to be a timeline. It is only a way of putting the results of our own and others' new research into chronological order. Many important facts and events are omitted, and we have included certain facts and events that are unimportant but interesting.
Chinese-American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC)
Raymond B. & Jean T. Lee Center
Celebrating the Chinese-American cultural heritage of the Midwest
1945-1950 A pair of Nobel Prize winners studies physics in Chicago 23 Jan 2005
23 Jan 2005Yang had another Chicago connection besides his mathematician father. While a student at the wartime Southwest Associated University in Kunming, he studied Chinese literature with the poet and artist Wen Yiduo, who had attended Chicago's School of the Art Institute in 1922 and written a poem about Chinese laundries in Chicago.
Both Yang and Lee settled in the United States afterward. Yang got a job at the famed Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, later moving to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Lee stayed for a while in in the Midwest, working at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, before going first to Princeton and then Columbia. Yang and Lee made their most famous breakthrough, proof that parity nonconservation only applies to weak interactions among sub-atomic particles, while eating at a Chinese restaurant in New York City in 1956. They shared the Nobel Prize in physics for that proof the next year, in 1957. It was the first Nobel to be won by anyone of Chinese ancestry.
Yang's official Nobel biography describes him in 1957 as "a quiet, modest, and affable physicist; he met his wife Chih Li Tu while teaching mathematics at her high school in China. He is a hard worker allowing himself very little leisure time."
Lee's Nobel biography, also dating from 1957, is not much more informative. It notes that "he married (Jeannette) Hui Chung Chin a former university student, in 1950. His favourite pastimes are: playing with his two young boys, James and Stephen; and reading "whodunits" (detective novels)."
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1957/yang-bio.html
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1957/lee-bio.html
Bing-An Li and Yuefan Deng, Biography of C.N. Yang -- http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~yang/
Chen Ning Yang (杨振宁), a native of Hefei in Anhui, and Tsung Dao Lee (李政道), a Shanghainese, came to Chicago in 1945 and 1946. Recognized as brilliant young physicists during their wartime studies in Kunming, both received scholarships to attend the University of Chicago, which at the time led the world in high-energy physics. Yang's father, Ko Chuen Yang (杨克纯), had also been at the University of Chicago, having graduated with a PhD in mathematics in 1928. Yang and Tsung became friends while working under such great physicists as Enrico Fermi. The two worked closely together on research projects, receiving their PhD's in 1949 and 1950.
Chen Ning Yang, 1957
Tsung-Dao Lee, 1957
1915: Lai Tin's almost-tryout with the Chicago White Sox 24 Jan 2005, modified 30 Sep 2005
24 Jan 2005, modified 30 Sep 2005David Marasco, a baseball historian, has made an astonishing discovery. In 1914 the New York Times reported that Jimmy Callahan, the manager of the Chicago White Sox (an old and famous professional baseball team), had offered a Chinese baseball player the chance to try out for the White Sox in the following spring. The player, Lai Tin or Lai Tan or Honolulu, seems to have been a truly talented athlete who held the Hawaiian records for the 100-yard dash and the broad jump. However, there is no record that he ever received his tryout. Callahan lost his job at the end of 1914 and Tin was forgotten. No Chinese American was to succeed in Major League baseball for another ninety years. (2)
Marasco reports that Tin did play in Chicago, however. In 1912 a touring team of Chinese amateur players from Hawaii played two games in the White Sox's stadium, Comisky Park, against a local semipro team that called itself the Uncle Sams. "L. Tin" was a member of the Hawaiian team. The Chicago Tribune reported that he performed creditably in both games.
Tin played in Chicago again in 1915, when the University of Chicago Maroons faced a visiting team from the Chinese University of Hawaii. The visitors lost, and "Loi" Tin, although he showed himself to be a competent fielder, did not exactly cover himself with glory in terms of hits and runs. He got none.
We have no idea how the local Chinese-American community reacted to these visits by Hawaiian Chinese teams. If you know anything about them, please let us know.
(1) David Marasco, Lai Tin, The Diamond Angle, 2004 (http://the diamondangle.com/marasco/peo/laitin.html)
(2) Chien-Ming Wang (王建民) , a star pitcher for Taiwan in the 2004 Olympics, joined the New York Yankees in 2005. As of late September, he had a won-lost record of 8-4. Chin-Feng Chen, a Taiwanese outfielder, came up to the Majors in 2005 and has played a number of games for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Bruce Chen, a Panamanian pitcher who may be of Chinese ancestry, has pitched for several major league teams since 2002. Chin-hui Tsao (曹錦輝), yet another Taiwanese, has pitched for the Colorado Rockies since 2003.
1906: A rich merchant and his wife return to China 21 Feb 2005
21 Feb 2005Moy Dong Yee was one of the three Moy brothers who were reputed to have founded Chicago's Chinatown. A successful merchant, he could afford to return to China repeatedly and to stay there for many months on each trip. This application for a reentry permit gives the dates of previous trips and, unusually, includes a photo of his wife who planned to accompany him.
Dong Yee came to the U.S. in 1875 and moved to Chicago, where his brothers already lived, in 1879. He almost immediately went back to China to find a wife. Marrying one Hue Shee, a Toisan girl, he stayed on in China (perhaps in Canton city [Guangzhou] rather than Toisan) until 1881, when he left her and returned to Chicago.
He made the same trip and stayed for a similar length of time twice more, in 1883-1886 and 1891-1893. Altogether he and Hue Shee had three children, all of whom seem to have stayed in China.
She died in 1897. He went back for a fourth time in 1898, presumably to set her affairs in order, and in 1899 married.again. This time he would take his new wife, a beautiful 16 year-old named Luk Shee, back to Chicago. She seems to have done well in her new environment. In these reentry permit photographs she and her husband both seem quite plump. In the 1912 family photograph shown elsewhere on this website, where she appears with two sons and an older niece, she looks content and proud while Dong Yee looks thin and worried.
When these photographs were taken in 1906, she was 22 and he was 50. She must have looked forward to seeing her own family again -- she had already been away from them for six years.
Very few Chinese-American men in those days could afford to do what Dong Yee did -- to return to China repeatedly, to make long stays there each time, and not only to marry twice there but eventually to bring one of those wives back to America. The average laundryman was lucky to return to China once in his life, and if he had a wife there, to see her and his children once before he died. This pattern of near-permanent separation of husband and wife was not unusual for sojourning laborers from places like Toisan, where in some villages almost all males were expected to seek a living overseas. Both men and women may have been used to the idea of long-term separation. Yet it must have been cruelly hard.
The original of Moy's reentry permit application is preserved in the files of the National Archives and Records Administration, Chicago office. It was scanned there by Soo Lon Moy, Grace Chun, and Ben Bronson
1906 Early immigrant smuggling II: the arrest of Pang Sho Yin and "Ducky" White
On June 30 1906, "Ducky" White and Pang Sho Yin were arrested near the Wabash Railroad freight yards on the outskirts of Detroit. Ducky (no other name is given in the records) was a white Canadian from Windsor. Pang Sho Yin, who claimed to be a San Franciscan by birth, had just sneaked across the border with Ducky's aid. The arresting officers were inspectors from the Immigration Bureau acting on a tip. They promptly put both of the arrestees in jail, Ducky for immigrant smuggling and Pang for unlawfully entering the country.
Pang's claims to American birth, although not backed up with papers of any kind, were treated seriously. His first court hearing was on July 22nd. The case was continued by the judge until September 18-October 30. The judge seems to have decided against Pang, and on November 1, United States Commissioner Chapin ordered him to be deported. The order was appealed by Pang's lawyer to the U.S. District Court. On December 21, Judge Swan sustained the Commissioner's deportation order.
The American future of Pang looked bleak. However, his lawyer decided to appeal again, this time bringing the case to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati .The deportation order was delayed until the appeal could run its course. As was quite often the case with such appeals, that of Pang was successful. On June 7 1907 the court decided that Pang's lack of citizenship could not be proved and ordered that he be discharged, a free man.
Ducky, who had already spent a year in jail waiting for the outcome of Pang's appeals, was then found guilty of smuggling illegal aliens. He received a prison sentence of three months. While he may have felt this to be unfair, he had at least one previous arrest for smuggling Chinese (in that case, in 1904, the Chinese also were set free) and in the eyes of the Immigration Bureau was a professional smuggler who deserved what he got.
Readers may be surprised that Pang and a good many other illicit immigrants went free. However, it seems that the strong anti-Chinese bias shown by the Immigration Bureau and much of the Caucasian public was not always shared by the courts. Those quite often ruled that an arrested immigrant had to be released because the Bureau had failed to disprove the immigrant's claim to citizenship.
As a reporter named Ralph had noted back in 1891, "the fact appears to be that of 60 Chinese, on an average, who try to enter at San Francisco every month, without unquestioned authority under the law, a large proportion succeed. Less than twenty-five per cent are sent back to China."
We do not know why White's nickname was Ducky, incidentally, or why Immigration made no effort to use his real name.
National Archives and Research Administration, Chicago, Immigration Service Chinese Case Files, 25/46
Credits: The research behind this article was done by Ben Bronson, Grace Chun, Soo Lon Moy, and Gwen Moy
Pang Sho Yin, in an official Immigration Bureau photograph,
1906
In 1913 a white Chicago woman named Alice Davis Sing was alleged to have found a more direct way of getting rid of her Chinese husband, one Charles Sing -- she took a knife and stabbed him to death in their home at 3460 Archer Avenue.
Alice had been a Christian missionary in Kansas City’s Chinatown. That is where she got to know Charles and several other Chinese men, described by her father as “admirers.” She fell deeply in love with Charles. After the murder, one Chicago journalist noted that unsuspecting white girls like Alice quite often “were lured into [Chinese men’s] parlors, stores, and chop suey joints by their pleadings and outward gentleness, then, captivated by the apparent luxury of their lives and apartments, they visit them again and again until their ruin is accomplished.” Alice’s ruin entailed not only marriage to Charles but conversion to her husband’s religion, a tendency to speak in Pidgin English, and a fondness for Chinese clothing, as shown by the lace-trimmed cheongsam dress she is wearing in this photograph.
Alice Davis Sing in September 1913, after being charged with murdering her Chinese husband
1912: Bad East-West marriages I: Emma Wing tries to deport Willie Wing 21 Mar 2005
As noted above, marriages between Chinese men and white women were not uncommon during the Exclusion Act period (1882-1943), when there were very few Chinese women in the U.S. Many of these East-West marriages were happy enough. Some, however, were not.
One such marriage reached its final crisis here in Chicago in 1912. It had begun in the early 1900s, when Emma Wing (her maiden name is not recorded) married Willie Wing. The Wings took up residence in New York's Chinatown and then went to Hong Kong where they seem to have intended to live for a while. Emma had already lived in Chinatown for a number of years and spoke Chinese. Willie seems to have been a charming man with big ambitions, no business sense, and a strong interest in his wife's money. They had an adopted son whose original parents, the Immigration Bureau noted later, were Jewish.
We first see the Wings, or at least Willie, as loving spouses. In 1906 Emma had returned to America while he stayed in Hong Kong. He wrote her this letter, pleading with her to hurry back, inquiring sweetly about their son, asking for money, and enclosing many kisses as X's.
But his kisses had already been, or were about to be, rejected. Either on her first trip to Hong Kong or on her next trip, Emma had made a shocking discovery. Willie was already married. And he had not one but two other wives. She naturally was furious. She went back to New York determined never to see him again.
Sometime before 1912, however, Willie too returned to the U.S., crossing the border illegally from Mexico. He got a job of some kind in Chicago and lived here for a number of months until Emma, who evidently had good sources of intelligence through her New York Chinatown connections, found out where he was. She informed the Immigration Bureau, which promptly arrested him for illegal entry. Emma did everything she could to get him deported. She bombarded Immigration's offices in Chicago with letters accusing him of polygamy and other illegal behavior but not, interestingly, of brutality. She offered to come to Chicago to testify against him in court.
Immigration replied that unfortunately this was impossible. According to law, they said, wives could not give valid evidence against husbands. This was when she decided to drop her bomb. She wrote back that giving evidence would be no problem because she had never been legally married to Willie anyway -- she already had another husband when she married him.
The Immigration Bureau may have felt that this revelation rather undercut Emma's credibility. They almost stopped corresponding with her. It was only as an afterthought that one official in 1913 sent her a short note saying that Willie had been released. The court had found him to be a citizen and therefore set him free.
The story of Emma and Willie Wing comes from the Correspondence of the Chinese Division of the Immigration Service, stored in the Chicago District Office of the National Archives and Research Administration. The researchers who discovered the Wing story were Grace Chun, Soo-Lon Moy, and Ben Bronson, all from the Chinatown Museum Foundation.
We first encountered the story of the Sings in Northwestern University's comprehensive on-line historical files on Chicago murders: http://homicide.northwestern.edu/.
Most of the above comes from contemporary newspaper accounts of the murder found in the microfilm newspaper archives of the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public Library. The following newspapers covered the Sing case: the Chicago American (9/5/13-9/13/13), the Chicago Daily News (9/8/13-9/9/13) and the Chicago Evening Post (9/4/13). The Chicago Tribune, rejecting vulgar sensationalism, did not so much as mention Charles and Alice Davis Sing.
1913: Bad East-West marriages II: Alice Davis Sing murders Charles Sing 24 Mar 2005
24 Mar 2005She showed touching grief when shown her husband’s body, but the hard-bitten Chicago detectives were not impressed. They still thought she was a murderer. Her husband’s brother Frank told the police that she and Charles had quarreled violently a week before about his plans to go back to China and not to take her. The police themselves seem to have looked into but rejected more exotic motives, including a nation-wide smuggling ring and a love quadrangle featuring George Norn, a strikingly handsome Chinese friend, and Alice’s sister Emma.
The case came to trial in December and, to the fury of the police and Frank Sing, Alice was acquitted. In spite of the sensational nature of the murder, the evidence against her was not strong. The jury may also have been influenced by her grief and devotion. As she told a newspaper reporter a few days after the murder,
“From the first time I saw him I loved him. There was something about him that fascinated me. He was quiet, lithe, and graceful. He was mysterious, and I guess that is what attracted me. He never laughed out loud no matter how happy he was. He chuckled…”
ca. 1910: Chinese Diaspora: Illinois sojourner’s village in Xinhui, Guangdong. 29 Mar 2005
Chinatown in the old days must have looked to outsiders like a small, closed ethnic enclave. Yet for its residents their world was vast and deeply embedded in a global Chinese networking system. Many had been born in China and journeyed back there often. They traveled to other North American cities for business meetings, visited friends and relatives in other Chinatowns, and had families - parents, wives, and children - in their home villages in South China.
Not every emigrant was driven out of his or her home town by poverty. In South China, men were expected to go abroad to make a living and a name. Dr. Sun Yat-Sen was an outstanding example of these sojourners. The tradition was so strong that men who stayed behind were frowned upon as lacking ambition.
To the average Chicago laundryman or restaurateur, life in the home village might have seemed primitive and backward. But the same home beckoned successfully to many returning overseas sons, even though those sons were already accustomed to the convenience of American gas stoves, electricity, and fast transportation. Most aimed at retiring there with enough money to lead a comfortable life. Many, though not all, succeeded.
Photo courtesy of Raymond Lum
Text by Chuimei Ho, derived from captions for a soon-to-be-published book edited by Chuimei Ho and Soo Lon Moy, Chinese in Chicago 1870-1945, Chicago: Arcadia Publishers, 2005
The Lum family home in Xinhui, Guangdong Province. It is a comfortable middle class house of the kind often built by sojourners returning from America.
1901 The boom in Chinese restaurants begins 6 Jun 2005, updated 5 Feb 2006
6 Jun 2005, updated 5 Feb 2006Some historians say that Chinese restaurants became popular in Chicago because of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, which featured a Chinese Cafe, or that they grew out of the famous dinner parties hosted on the East Coast for or by the Chinese diplomat, Li Hung Chang, in 1896. However, neither story appears to be true. The Annual Directories for Chicago list these numbers of Chinese restaurants for the period 1890-1915:
1890 01891 01892 01893 11894 1?1895 21900 11901 71902 151903 22-41905 401911 681915118The Directories missed one restaurant that opened 1889 (see below). But it is clear that the Chinese restaurant boom did not begin until after 1900, and that before this Chinese restaurants were scarce in Chicago.
One reader has suggested that the earliest Chinese restaurants were for Chinese only, so that they may not have been counted in the Directory. And yet the Directory's canvassers, who scoured each neighborhood for changes every year, knew Chinatown well and certainly knew what restaurants looked like. It seems more likely that very few recognizable restaurants existed in the Chicago Chinese community before 1890, and that most Chinese Chicagoans ate at their workplaces or -- like most single male Chicagoans of all ethnic groups -- in their boarding houses.
The first known Chinese restaurant in Chicago was the unnamed one in a basement at 329 Clark Street, in 1889. The first to be noticed by the Directory's canvassers was Hung (or Hing) Far Lo, at 309 Clark Street, in 1893, the same year that the Chinese Cafe opened and then closed at the World's Columbian Exposition. In 1895, Hung Far Lo was joined by Bung Hong Lo at 319 Clark. Both, located in the old Chinatown, had disappeared by 1900, when the Wah Sing Co. opened at 221 West Randolph Street. Wah Sing closed before the next year but was replaced by no fewer than seven new restaurants, three in Chinatown and four elsewhere in the Loop and South Side. After that progress was rapid. By 1903 Chinese menus were already appearing in Chicago newspapers. By 1905 Chicago held forty Chinese restaurants, of which only five were in Chinatown. By 1915, it held 118, of which no more than six or seven were in Chinatown. It is clear that the great majority of Chinese restaurants were aimed at European-American customers. The fad for Chinese food among non-Chinese was well underway.
This population explosion of Chinese restaurants meant that in a short time they passed laundries to become the main employers of Chinese labor. It also meant that good cooks were in very short supply (which almost certainly influenced the rise of a distinctive Chinese-American cuisine -- see the Chop Suey lecture), and that Chinese-Americans who became restaurant owners had a new opportunity (a) to achieve merchant status in the eyes of the Immigration Bureau and ((b)) to join the upper middle classes in the eyes of non-Chinese. Successful restaurateurs like Chin Foin were among the first Chinese to achieve real integration with European-American society in the Midwest.
We would be interested to know more about the chronology of the Chinese restaurant boom on the West and East Coasts. It must have been earlier than 1901, but how much earlier? And did the idea that Chinese immigrants could make a good living running restaurants for non-Chinese diners originate in the U.S., or did it come from Chinese in other countries? For instance, by 1891 all lower- and middle-class restaurants in Lima, Peru, were owned and operated by Chinese, and this may also have been true of parts of the Caribbean. We will not go so far as to claim that the idea of non-Chinese Chinese restaurants was imported to the U.S. from Latin America. But some kind of foreign connection is possible, given the scope of the Chinese information network of those days. A number of Midwestern Chinese had close Latin American connections. Those connections could have made them aware that there was money to be made in running restaurants for non-Chinese diners.
Reuben H, Donnelley, compiler, The Lakeside Annual Directory of Chicago, 1890, 1891, 1892, 18793, 1894, 1895, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1905, 1911, 1915. (The Chicago Directory Company, Chicago)
Theodore Child, Impressions of Peru, Harpers New Monthly Magazine, vol 82, no. 488, p 262. 1891.
1908: A Russian super-spy in Valparaiso Indiana 14 Jun 2005
14 Jun 2005Among the non-Chinese who played central roles in the history of China was the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Borodin (1886-1851). An intimate of both Lenin and Stalin, Borodin was dispatched to China in 1923 as the chief agent of the Communist International in support of President Sun Yat-Sen. Borodin took charge of the defense of Guangzhou against anti-Sun forces and succeeded not only in defending the city but in rallying military support for Sun all over southern China. Through his personal charisma and organizing skills, Borodin became one of Sun's right-hand men. In reference to George Washington's French general during the American Revolution, Sun spoke of Borodin as "my Lafayette."
Lover of the brilliant Nebraskan Communist Anna Louise Strong, friend of Sun's wife Soong Ching-ling, close but uneasy ally of Chiang Kai-Shek, hero of no fewer than two novels by the famed French writer André Malraux, and mentioned in poems by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth, Borodin is still remembered as the most spectacularly successful of all Soviet agents. Less well-known are the facts that he emigrated from Russia to Chicago in 1906, that he attended Valparaiso University in Indiana in 1908, and that for a number of years in Chicago he ran a school for new Russian immigrants that became a center for Marxist-Leninist propaganda.
We do not know whether Borodin was interested in China in those days or whether he had any contact with Chinese-Americans while in Chicago. However, his fluent Midwestern English was why Lenin later sent him to China, where Sun Yat-Sen -- also fluent in English -- had requested a Soviet agent with whom he could talk without a translator. Did Sun ask specifically for Borodin? He could have met him on his last trip to Chicago in 1910, but we know of no evidence pointing in that direction.
Many of Borodin's early activities were kept secret But we still hope to learn more about his Chicago days. We are intrigued by the idea of one of modern history's greatest spies cutting classes at a small conservative Lutheran university and riding the South Shore Line from Valpo to Chicago so as to attend secret meetings of Bolshevik revolutionaries.
Auditorium, Valparaiso University, 1906
Dan N. Jacobs. "Borodin, Mikhail" in Ke-Wen Wang, Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism, ca, 2000, p 33
1927: The widening of Cermak and the colonizing of Wentworth revised 21 Aug 2005
In early 1927 a major change occurred: 22nd Street, later renamed Cermak Avenue, was widened by as much as 25 feet. We are not certain why. One informant tells us that a wider street was needed for access to the 1933 World Fair, one of whose main entrances would be where 22nd Street reached the Lakefront by a viaduct over the Illinois Central Railroad tracks. But we have difficulty believing that Chicago's civic authorities could have been so far-sighted as to begin spending money on Fair-related construction as much as six years before the Fair was to begin. Another possibility is that the planners' real motive was to destroy part of the notorious vice area, the Levee District, that lay just east of Chinatown.
In any case, the effect on Chinatown was profound. The fronts of all buildings on the south side of 22nd Street between Wentworth and Princeton, then the heart of the Chinese business district, were moved back by twenty-five feet, and many buildings just to the east were demolished. The Parisian Novelty Company, formerly an employer of Chinese workers, moved out of the neighborhood. As the Chicago Tribune (7/22/1927) reported, Chinese shopkeepers complained that because "more than 25 feet have been cut from our stores," "now merchants are being forced to move to Wentworth Avenue."
Before this, there had been little Chinese activity on Wentworth south of 22nd, perhaps partly because of ethnic tensions between the Chinese and the long-term Italian residents of the area. Now, however, the move down Wentworth seems to have been unstoppable. It was spearheaded by the On Leong Association, which in 1926 started planning its new million-dollar "Chinese Center" at the corner of Wentworth and 22nd Place (Tribune 9/8/26). That center, called by almost everyone the On Leong Building or the "City Hall of Chinatown" (now the Pui Tak Center), opened in the spring of 1928 (Tribune 4/27/1928). As shown on the Historic Places page, many other Chinese associations and businesses followed On Leong's lead. By the early 1930s, Chinese settlement extended south on Wentworth as far as 24th Street and beyond.
Research & writing by Ben Bronson and Chuimei Ho;
copyright 2004-2006 by the Chinatown Museum Foundation
1900: Other immigrant groups without women 21 Jul 2005
21 Jul 2005Popular histories often state that the Exclusion Laws of 1882 and later were the reason who so few Chinese women came to the U.S. And yet the Chinese immigrant community was not the only one without women. According to the website of Chicago's Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center,
Greek immigration to the U.S. has been overwhelmingly male. During 1890-1900, one of the decadesof the most intense immigration, only four women arrived for every 100 men. Those who emigrated atthis time often did so to earn money to repay family debts, provide dowries for their sisters, and returnto Greece with sufficient funds to live comfortably. Apparently the Greeks too were single-gender sojourners, and their motives for coming to America seem not to have been much different from those of Chinese immigrants. Although there was some anti-Greek discrimination in the Midwest and elsewhere in America, it was much less virulent than prejudice against Chinese. Further, there were no legal obstacles to bringing Greek women into this country. And yet Greek men chose to come without families, leaving their womenfolk back in Greece, supporting them with remittances, and planning to retire to their Greek home towns as soon as they had earned enough money in U.S. jobs.
It follows that the popular histories may be wrong. The Exclusion Laws may not be the sole (or even main) explanation for the scarcity of females among early Chinese-Americans.
1981: The Pekin Chinks high school team becomes the Pekin Dragons 5 Sep 2005
The town of Pekin Illinois, just outside the city of Peoria, got its name from its location, which residents believed was on the opposite side of the globe from Pekin (i.e., Peking or Beijing) China. The town of Canton Illinois was named because of a similar belief: that it too was opposite a famous Chinese city, in this case Canton (i.e., Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong). As the two towns are much closer to each other than the original Pekin and Canton, it seems that some early Illinoisans were a bit shaky on geographical details.
Pekin has another claim to fame, however. Until 1981 it had a high school athletic team called the Chinks and a roller skating arena called the Chink Rink. The decision to change the team name to the Pekin Dragons is still remembered bitterly by certain residents, as shown by this apparently genuine email sent to a liberal website a few months ago:
As far as we know, the high school in Canton Illinois never adopted a racist slur as the name of its athletic team.
http://www.riotpoof.com/archives/000026.php
http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/cs-050817downey,1,4431409.column?coll=cs-college-utility&ctrack=1&cset=true
"I graduated from Pekin Community High School in 1960. I was also voted by the student body to be the mascot 'Chink'. It was a great honor and still is to me today. Another girl in my class was voted 'Chinklette.' We wore Chinese costumes and greeted cheerleaders from the opposing team in the middle of the basketball floor before each home game. It was a gesture of a welcome and good sportmanship. I'm still upset today that the school buckled under and changed the name to Dragons in 1981. It was the result of pointy headed pablum sucking liberals who run the polictical correctness gestopo in this country. I do detest them so much. I am attending my 45th high school class reunion this weekend in God's little acre called Pekin, IL and I will proudly wear my PEKIN CHINKS shirt. Liberal and their pathetic ilk can go to Hell!!
CHINKS FOREVER
1960 Chink, Bob Brown"
1912: Chin Foin wins a civil rights battle 15 Sep 2005
15 Sep 2005
In late August 1912, the Chinese restaurant owner Chin Foin closed on the purchase of the Clarence Knight mansion on Calumet Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets. The neighborhood was wealthy, all-white, and originally dead-set against an invasion by a Chinese family. Bureaucratic obstacle appeared. Foin (he used this as his family name) patiently overcame them. Inflammatory anti-Chinese statements were made. Foin responded with a public relations campaign of his own, enlisting the help of sympathetic newspaper writers and emphasizing that he was well able to keep the building and grounds up to the high standards of his future neighbors. In interviews he let it be known that he was a Yale graduate and -- even more relevant in his neighbors' eyes -- not at all poor.
The neighbors seem to have been mollified by these revelations. According to the Chicago Tribune (Aug 28, 1912), one neighbor, Charles J. Furst, commented "If Chin Foin is a gentleman, we shall welcome him. Another neighbor, J. W. Seefeld is reported to have been amused. Apparently referring to Irish-Americans, he com-
mented "I'd rather have a Chinese any day than some other nationalities."
Chin Foin and Yokelund Wong, his wife. Taken in Chicago, 1906.
Residential desegregation was not an active issue in western states at this time. In most, Chinese were not even allowed to own real estate, much less buy it in places where European-Americans lived. That Foin succeeded in buying his Calumet Avenue home shows, first, that anti-Chinese feeling in Chicago was much less virulent than in the West and, second, that -- then as now -- social class often mattered more than race.
1916 Chicago's first conviction of a white man for murdering a Chinese
The Midwest saw much less anti-Chinese violence than the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries, even though cities like Chicago were violent places. Their homicide rates were as high as those of any city west of the Rockies. It was just that both whites and blacks murdered members of their own communities more often than they murdered Asians. In proportion to their numbers during the period 1870-1930, Chinese in Chicago were murdered about as often as whites and less often than blacks.
Most of the murderers of Chinese were neither white nor black. In Chicago between 1900 and 1930, 33 such murders took place where the killers were identified. In 4 cases, the killers were white and in another 4, they were black. In the other 25 cases, those who killed Chinese were themselves Chinese.
Thus the murder rate of Chinese was both intra-ethnic and not particularly high by local standards. However, Chicago shared an ugly fact with the western states. The European-American criminal justice system was very slow to prosecute whites for killing Chinese. In California, it is said that not a single conviction was obtained in the several hundred cases of white murders of Chinese that occurred in the 19th century. In Chicago, there were four such killings before 1900. None resulted in the conviction of the apparent murderer.
The first non-Chinese to be convicted of murdering a Chinese individual was African-American. On November 12, 1910, Leroy Howard, described as “colored,” received a life sentence in Joliet Prison for the fatal stabbing of Little Wong at 2557 S. State St.
The first European-American to be so convicted was a 17 year-old named Earl Simpson, who in 1916 robbed and murdered one Lee Bow at 3037 S. Dearborn St. In October 28 of the same year, Simpson too was sentenced to life in Joliet.
The most notorious white-on-Chinese murder, always excepting the stabbing of Charles Sing by Alice Davis Sing in 1913, was the beating death in 1927 of Frank Moy (not the same Frank Moy who was the unofficial mayor of Chinatown) in front of Guey Sam Restaurant at 2203 S. Wentworth. The perpetrators were two Italians, Savaria Cortes and Pasquale Lumetta. Both were convicted and sentenced respectively to thirty-five years and life in Joliet. The motive was stated to be robbery. However, Guey Sam, at the corner of Wentworth and 22nd Street, was not only a very public place for a robbery but also a known hangout of Al Capone's gang. Moy's killers, as Italian-Americans, must have known this. They either were very foolhardy indeed or they were acting on orders, perhaps from either Capone or one of his enemies.
Data from Northwestern University's website, Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930, http://homicide.northwestern.edu/database/
1933: Hu Shih 胡適 gives the Chinese Renaissance lecture series at the University of Chicago 09 Nov 2005
09 Nov 2005
The lectures were later published under the title "The Chinese Renaissance," and had an important impact on Western views of China. There were four lectures in all:.
1) RESISTANCE, ENTHUSIASTIC APPRECIATION, AND THE NEW DOUBT: Changes in Chinese Conceptions of Western Civilization
2) THE CHINESE RENAISSANCE: The vernacular language movement and education reform.
3) RELIGION IN CHINESE LIFE: Influence of Buddhism on Chinese culture.
4) SOCIAL DISINTEGRATION AND READJUSTMENT: Democracy, feminism, social reform.
Partly because of the popularity of the Chinese exhibits at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Hu's lectures drew wide attention and he became a media celebrity. A well-known woman sculptor, Malvina Hoffman, showed her statue of him at the Field Museum during the Fair.
Hu, who had been a student at Cornell in 1910 and at Columbia after that, was already famous when he came to Chicago in the summer of 1933 to deliver a series of lectures. As a brilliant writer, historian, occasional archaeologist, and teacher, his New Culture Movement had already transformed the Chinese written language literature by substituting everyday language for classical Chinese in books as well as periodicals. At the time of his visit he was Dean of Arts at Peking University. In 1938-42 he was the Chinese Ambassador to the United States.
1905: Hinky Dink Kenna gets Chinese aid 05 Dec 2005
05 Dec 2005Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin ran the First Ward -- the Loop and the area just south of it, including the Archer/Cermak Chinatown -- from 1897 to 1938. Not only were the two politicians famed for graft and other crooked dealings but they also oversaw one of the most notorious vice districts in America. In 1905 Hinky Dink, insulted when a Republican mayoral candidate attacked a Democratic rival for associating with Kenna, "got old King Yen Lo, the manager of the Chink joint on top of my place [a famous saloon] on Van Buren Street, to write the answer. I don't know what he said [in Chinese] but if it is anything like I told him it's a peacherino" [Note 1].
The man who Hinky Dink called "old King Yen Lo" was the youthful manager of the King Yen Lo restaurant, the talented restaurateur Chin Foin. In later years Chin Foin would go on first to manage the famed King Joy Lo and then to found and run the very successful Mandarin Inn, which brought him a substantial fortune as well as respectability in the eyes of the European-American establishment.
What interests us here is not just that Chin Foin composed a political pamphlet for Hinky Dink but that the incident, related with gusto in Adam McKeown's excellent book [Note 2], shows that early Chinese immigrants, although not allowed to become citizens or vote, nonetheless had real influence in Chicago politics. The main issue, after all, was not votes but money -- what was then called "boodle" and now, campaign contributions. Because they were generous with boodle, the leaders of the Chinese community seem to have been on excellent terms with local politicians. This may explain why Chinese-Americans were never openly persecuted in the Chicago area: by the police, by organized crime, or by the political clubs that spearheaded most ethnic violence.
Chinese-Americans in the First Ward continued to be politically involved (while not doing much voting) until quite recently. In the 1920s, Wilson Moy, later to be the unofficial mayor of Chinatown, attended the same elementary school (we think, Haines School) as did Frank Roti, later to be the First Ward Alderman. The two are said to have become friends while still children. Roti later seems to have frequented (and protected) a gambling operation in the basement of the On Leong Building, which was Moy's headquarters. The friendship between Roti and Moy may explain why the On Leong Association turned to Roti for help during a Federal murder and gambling investigation in the 1980s, which led to the downfall of both the Association and the Alderman.
Note 1. Quoted by McKeown from Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Bosses of Lusty Chicago, Indiana Universirty Press, 1943.
"Peacherino" is McKenna's comic-Italian version of the slang term "peach," meaning something very good.Note 2, Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Nertworks and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, 2001
King Yen Lo postcard, 1916. For other early Chinese restaurant postcards, click here
1944: Racism at Rosehill: The Cemetery Refuses to Bury Tom Chan 26 Dec 2005
26 Dec 2005On September 10, 1944, John Vercoe, superintendent of Rosehill cemetery in northern Chicago, offered a series of excuses to the Chicago Tribune. His problem was that he was being criticized for his refusal to allow Tom Y. Chan, a recently deceased Chinatown leader (and the father of another leader, Ping Tom) to be buried next to his wife Mary Goo. She had been buried at Rosehill more than 20 years before (see the 1892 Vanishing Cemetery report).
Vercoe's excuses were as follows. First, the "Chan" (actually, Tom) family had only one grave, not a plot large enough for two, and the cemetery would not sell them a larger plot.
Second, the cemetery was not given the wife's personal name, and without that her grave could not be located.
And third, the cemetery no longer permitted Chinese to be buried there anyway. The cemetery management had begun to refuse new Chinese burials a quarter-century ago and had bought back many single graves from Chinese owners since then. Religious leaders protested, apparently against this racist policy. But according to Vercoe, the cemetery's refusal "had nothing to do with race but with practical situations."
The so-called practical situations involved traditional secondary burial customs of "non-Christian Chinese." Vercoe described these customs as follows. "They often disinterred their dead to burn the flesh from the bones over a charcoal grill; polish the bones, and pack them into tin boxes for shipment to China for final burial ... Adjoining lot owners protested the scenes and the stench."
It is evident that Vercoe, who may never have witnessed it himself, was referring to the Southern Chinese ceremony known as "bone washing." An article in the Taipei Times in 2004 notes that in modern Taiwan, where cremations are widespread, some people still hire professional bone washers to exhume an ancestor's bones, clean them and rebury them, apparently often but not always in another place. One bone washing specialist interviewed by the newspaper said that he takes the bones back to his work studio for cleaning. However, we have heard of cases where 20th century families in Guangdong chose to do the cleaning themselves right at the graveside, although never with fire to burn the flesh off the bones. The custom exists (or has recently existed) among certain families belonging to the Kejia (Hakka), Cantonese, Southern Fujianese (Minnanese), Taiwanese, Chuang, and perhaps other southern Chinese ethnic groups.
In all such cases the ceremony is/was reverent and intensely private. We find it hard to believe that any outsiders, including the cemetery officials, not to mention owners of neighboring plots, would have been allowed to see it. Perhaps the Chinese performing the ceremony were required to employ the cemetery's own gravediggers, who may have guessed what was going on and reported it to their bosses, who in turn used those reports to justify their own local Chinese Exclusion Act.
It is hard to see why the cemetery could not simply have required all exhumed bodies to be taken to a designated place for cremation or cleaning. And as Vercoe himself stated, only non-Christian Chinese performed such rites. Tom Chan, who had a Christian wife and is likely to have been Christian himself, should not have been excluded, and yet he was. Clearly, Vercoe was not telling the whole truth when he informed the Tribune's reporter that "the cemetery simply faced a practical situation that had to be changed. We are not a bit sorry about the decision and are not offering apologies for it."
Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept 10, 1944, p 26
Taipei Times, Nov 21, 2004, p 18
Andrea Stamm found the Tribune article. Chuimei Ho, Joe Chiu, Jack Simpson, and Ben Bronson contributed to this report.
The area of Mary Goo's grave in Rosehill. The names on the gravestone have been blanked out in this photograph. The neighboring gravestones bear mainly Scandinavian names.
1906 Ethnicity in the stockyards: why Chinese in Chicago weren't at the bottom of the ladder
Upton Sinclair wrote many so-so novels and one great one, The Jungle. The book is an angry and detailed expose of the meatpacking industry for which Chicago was famous.
No Chinese worked in Chicago's stockyards and slaughterhouses even though these were less than two miles from the South Side Chinatown. The wages were too low and conditions too miserable. However, it seems likely that work in the packing plants did have an effect on the public image of Chinese immigrants. In California, racists could claim that Chinese were fit only for the lowest, dirtiest jobs. But in Chicago, tens of thousands of whites and blacks worked under conditions so dangerous and degrading as to make a Chinese laundry look like a playground. And what is more, every few years a new ethnic group arrived in the stockyards to crowd onto the bottom rung of the social ladder. The average Chinese laundryman or restaurant waiter made more money than (and was at least as respected as) these constantly replaced hordes of immigrant white meatpacking workers.
Sinclair described stockyard employment in terms of ethnicity:
"The first family had been Germans. The families had all been of different nationalities--there had been a representative of several races that had displaced each other in the stockyards ... the workers had all been Germans then--skilled cattle butchers that the packers had brought from abroad to start the business. Afterward, as cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the Irish--there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a regular Irish city ... The Bohemians had come then, and after them the Poles. People said that one of the packing plant owners was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and the owner had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks ..."
As noted elsewhere on this site, there was a German phase in the history of Chinatown as well. The Germans had replaced Swedes and were themselves replaced by Italians and then Chinese. The Italians also ranked low in Chicago's social system. But neither Italians nor Chinese worked in the slaughterhouses, and in the 1900s both seem to have been higher in status than most Lithuanian and Slovak immigrants.
Union Stockyards Gateway, W Exchange Ave & Peoria St, about 2 miles SW of South Side Chinatown. Built 1875
1906: The Imperial Commission comes to Chicago 19 Jan 2006
19 Jan 2006Exactly a century ago, between January 19th and 22nd, Chicago hosted a visit by an imperial delegation from China. The commission was charged with studying foreign institutions and industries in order to make reforms in China.
While here, the commissioners were feted by the Chinese-American community, by local politicians, and by the elite merchants and industrialists of Chicago. The commission stayed in the Auditorium Annex (now the Congress Hotel) and during their three-day visit had a very active program of touring various Chicago facilities. They visited the Dunning Institutions -- Chicago's famed (and, some said, notorious) insane asylum --, Jane Addam's Hull House, the Stockyards, a McCormick Harvester plant, the Central YMCA, and a number of other places.
A commemorative program was organized on January 19 2006 by Wright College and Mark Schulman of Eli's Cheesecake Company (click here for blog), both located on the grounds of the former Dunning Institutions. Chuimei Ho of the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago was asked to give a talk presenting some of the historical background of the Commissioners' visit. We have posted slides from the talk here.
Research credits go to Andrea Stamm, Elinor Pearlstein, and Chuimei Ho.
1921: Birds Nests & The First Chinese Woman PhD in ChicagoShe came to the US as a young girl in about 1907 to attend Walnut Hill, a girl’s prep school in the outskirts of Boston She seems to have had an outgoing personality. Even though she had a Chinese fellow student, one Ping Hsia Hu 胡彬夏, to keep her company, she made friends with several white girls. She may have visited the home of one, Katherine Perry, in Reedsburgh, Wisconsin. She studied for her BA at Wellesley, but she was definitely in the Midwest by the late 1910s, for she received her PhD in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1921.
In 1921 she took two chapters from her PhD dissertation and published them as research papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry: “The Isolation and Nature of the Amino Sugar of Chinese Birds' Nests” (49 (2): 441) and “The Composition of Chinese Edible Birds' Nests and the Nature of Their Proteins (49 (2): 429). She wrote that she had gotten the birds' nests from the Hoo Loong Edible Birds' Nest Store in Chicago, "which imported them directly from China."
(1) Chicago Sun-Times, 11 Mar 2004. The park -- a very small one -- is at 1762 W. Diversey Boulevard.
Many Chinese women who got a college degree in the US before World War II went back to China to seek a career. There were few jobs in this country for educated Chinese of either sex, and in those days even educated white women could rarely find work as more than secretaries. Wang Chi Che (or Wang Chi Lian: 王季莲) was an exception, however. She graduated from Wellesley in 1914, a schoolmate of Mdm Chiang Kai-shek. A scientist in chemistry and nutrition, she headed the blood department of the Michael Reese Hospital and was the chair of the Chemistry Department at Nelson-Morris Institution between 1920 and 1930. She eventually became a professor at Northwestern University. She co-founded the Chicago's Chinese Women's Club in 1915(?). The club apparently remained active until the late 1960s. She was a charter member of the American Institution of Nutrition. She died in 1979, at the age of 84. In 2004, years after her death, she even had a Chicago city park named after her (1).
芝加哥美洲華裔博物館
