Artwork by Dale Bridges
In the midst of our culture war over Critical Race Theory (CRT), the state of Illinois just passed HB 0376, Teaching Equitable Asian American History. By doing so, Illinois becomes the first state to require that the contributions of Asian Americans be included in its public school social studies curriculum. The bill was sponsored by state representative, Jennifer Gong Gershowitz, the second Chinese American to serve in the Illinois State Legislature. She notes despite being from a well educated family, she didn't learn about the Chinese Exclusion Act until she went to law school at Loyola.
Gong Gershowitz's mention of the Chinese Exclusion Act raises a curious issue for this Asian American. I certainly believe in making sure students know about America's first attempt to limit immigration based on ethnicity. At the same time, as someone who once taught American History, I'm painfully aware of what's missing. If you think about desegregation, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King became the faces of resistance to institutionalized white supremacy. Look in a history book about the Chinese Exclusion Act, and one name pops up: Dennis Kearney, the Irish-American labor leader who led the "Chinese Must Go" movement. Ironically, Kearny St. (not actually named for Dennis Kearney) is still one of the major streets running through San Francisco's Chinatown. So, how would African-Americans feel if they got an African-American history unit, and the only names were Bull Connor and Lester Maddox?
Even if Jeopardy—should they ever find a new host—someday does Asian American History as a category, it's unlikely that you'll ever see "Who was Wong Chinn Foo for Two Hundred?" Wong Chinn Foo attended two American colleges, returned to China only to be expelled by the Manchus, and settled in the Eastern United States while making a name for himself as a surprisingly media savvy advocate for Chinese rights and the idea of the "Chinese American" (he appears to have been the first to use the term in print), a kind of Mandarin speaking Al Sharpton. Wong Chinn Foo publicly debated the Exclusion Act with Kearney and according to newspaper accounts generally prevailed. Does Wong Chinn Foo deserve to appear on the AP exam instead of Kearney? Quite possibly not. For one, he lost and Kearney won. Wong's influence was limited at best, making him more interesting than historical.
However, the debates and Wong Chin Foo's writings show Chinese Americans didn't passively accept the Chinese Exclusion Act. Heroically, they banded together, pooled their money, and hired the best attorneys of the time. They even took it to the Supreme Court in Chae Chan Ping vs. US (1889). After they lost in the courts, the Chinese did what true Americans would do: they spent the next two generations fighting for their right to stay in America and American life by repeatedly outwitting the act's limitations.
My mother's parents came to San Francisco under the surname Yee, but our real family name is Wong. With limited education, almost no money, and initially unable to speak English, families like mine managed to flourish here with thousands of their descendants going to college, starting businesses, becoming professionals, and serving in the armed forces. My older relatives were embarrassed about evading immigration law, but were the Chinese who outwitted racist immigration laws really all that different from Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad or Jews in Hitler's Germany? There's a critical bit that fell out of the story: the Chinese weren't either spineless or voiceless; they were actually badasses. At the risk of going all Howard Zinn, I think the Critical Race Theory story isn't just one of institutionalized racism but also one about the way its targets never gave in. If you see it that way in African-American history, then Booker T. Washington deserves space, but maybe Ida Wells Barnett deserves even more. If you see it that way in Asian-American history, then Madame Chiang Kai Shek, once the most admired woman in America, deserves less mention than ummmm... Do you see the problem? It's gotten better: Fred Korematsu and Gordon Harabayashi have relatively recently gotten their due for saying "no" to the Japanese internment, at least partly because they managed to live 35 years beyond WWII. In the meantime, 19th century Asian American heroes and heroines stay largely anonymous.
Consider the 1886 case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins. In 1880, just two years before the Chinese Exclusion Act, San Francisco decided to push out Chinese laundries by passing an ordinance, Order 1569, requiring laundries in wooden buildings to get a special permit, ostensibly because wooden laundries could be a fire hazard. The ordinance made no mention of race. It seemed rational enough, since San Francisco had almost been destroyed by repeated fires a generation earlier, and an 1880 fire had broken out in a wooden laundry. The issue was that the city's Board of Supervisors granted white-owned wooden laundries 200 permits while it denied all 80 Chinese-owned laundries who applied; the law included no criteria for granting or refusing the permits. Based on the 14th amendment's (then barely 15 years old) equal protection clause, the laundrymen argued the law was being used to discriminate against them. The City claimed the law was "neutral on its face." Surprisingly, the US Supreme Court unanimously sided with the laundrymen over the City of San Francisco. It was the first time the court applied disparate impact analysis, which consists of the court not simply asking is the law equal or neutral on its face and instead going a step deeper by looking at whether it's really neutral in its application or effect. Even more surprising, Yick Wo was decided four years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
A century and a quarter later, San Francisco Unified named a public school Yick Wo Elementary. It's a good school, but the school name catches the essence of the problem. You see, Yick Wo wasn't the owner's name, it was the name of the laundry. Apparently, the sheriff thought the name over the door was the business owner's, too, and the court record never bothered to catch up, despite the fact that the owner was sent to jail in 1885 for refusing to pay his ten dollar fine.The civilly disobedient owner's name was either Lee Yick or maybe, according to some, Sang Lee, and the second, even more forgotten plaintiff and owner of another laundry was named Wo Lee (their cases were combined by the court since the facts were the same). I have yet to find the source for either named owner of Yick Wo Laundry. My own grandfather —the other side—had multiple California driver's licenses, each under a different name, in the top bureau drawer of his bedroom. It's possible Sang Lee and Lee Yick were simply two names for the same person. In the meantime, the individual Chinese Americans behind the Yick Wo case remain unhonored. I also have no idea why Wo Lee, whose name we do seem to know, gets even less attention than the owner of Yick Wo. It makes him the Elizabeth Baer of the Schenck vs. US (1919), the first major free speech case of the 20th century. Baer was convicted for protesting the draft before she, as a woman, could vote for President, but Charles Schenck is the only defendant who gets remembered. The heroes of the Yick Wo case remain something like the figures in Chinese shadow puppet theater: you see them, but only through a screen preventing you from viewing them directly. Imagine a Hollywood movie where all the stars stay nameless and faceless.
The Yick Wo victory had limited impact during the 19th century because the separate but equal case, Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), overshadowed it just ten years later. Oddly, most of the justices who decided Yick Wo were still on the court in 1896 when they voted to uphold "separate but equal," despite the fact that the "equal" part in Plessy was clearly as much a myth as "The city looks at all laundry permit applications without regard to the race of the applicant." After Brown vs. Board (1954) overruled Plessy, Yick Wo started reappearing in Supreme Court opinions to strike down various voting restrictions against blacks. Yick Wo stands as one of the landmark achievements of the Chinese American community's remarkably well organized effort to defend their Constitutional rights. Sadly, Yick Wo and Wong Ark Kim, a case that held a Chinese-American born in California remained an American citizen under the 14th amendment even if he'd temporarily left the country, were rare Supreme Court victories against what amounted to apartheid. My use of the term is no exaggeration: in 1892, the court upheld a pass system requiring even legal Chinese residents to carry a photo ID vouched for by two white persons or be deported, Fong Yue Ting vs. US. Throughout the late 19th century, the western states in particular passed hundreds of laws to keep the Chinese from staying in America, from voting, from testifying in court (In People vs. Hall, a law preventing blacks and Native Americans from testifying also applied to the Chinese because Native Americans had Asian origins and thus the Chinese were "Native Americans"), from running businesses, from acquiring property. Despite a low batting average in the Supreme Court, the Chinese mounted legal challenges to all of them. There were so many successful Chinese challenges to immigration rulings, the Federal Government had to make the rulings of immigration authorities non-appealable to regular courts.
In the '90s, I somehow wound up on an Asian American advisory committee for the California Department of Education. I suspect the main purpose of the committee was for California to say it had a committee for Asian education issues, though, after asking, we did get to meet with then State Superintendent, Delaine Eastin. We brought up the possibility of adding more Asian American history to the social studies curriculum. To be honest, it didn't occur to us that making it a legal requirement might be the best way to go about it, or that there was a difference between "that sounds like a great idea" and "let's get you in touch with the people who can help do that." I remember bringing up the possibility of including the Yick Wo case as a California or American history unit, but it never got beyond that. "How to do it" has stayed in the back of my mind ever since.
When I went through the 1880 edition of Langley's City Directory for San Francisco, something like a pre-telephone phone book, to search for Lee Yick or Sang Lee and his laundry, I wasn't surprised to discover the city's thousands of Chinese were omitted from the listings of individual residents. While Langley's equivalent of the Yellow Pages included laundries, no Chinese laundries were listed. A surprising number of businesses called themselves "French Laundries," which I assume was a way to assure the public the laundry was owned by whites, though the workers inside San Francisco's many French laundries were frequently Chinese. Interestingly, Langley's did include a separate listing of Chinese owned businesses in the city, but specifically omitted Chinese laundries, because—according to Langley—the city contained over 400 of them. The Yick Wo opinion mentions roughly 240 of the city's 300 laundries were Chinese owned. San Francisco had a population of just under 300,000. In a country that fetishizes the entrepreneurial spirit, a lot of San Francisco's immigrant Chinese were suffused with it. The white-owned "Power" laundries, a phrase used to distinguish them from Chinese "hand" laundries, responded by lobbying for city ordinances to cripple Chinese laundries under the guise of the city's police power to protect its citizens' "health and safety." Ordinance 1569 was hardly the only anti-Chinese laundry law, nor was San Francisco the only city to pass anti-Chinese laundry measures. Laws like maximum hours laws for laundry workers or requirements that laundry be delivered by horse-drawn carriage, in fact, were ratified by the courts. No one seems to know how many Chinese laundries were forced out of business during this time. Some 150 Chinese laundries were closed by Ordinance 1569, but a number of other anti-Chinese laundry ordinances stayed in effect across California even after 1886, and we don't know how many Chinese entrepreneurs they legislated out of business. Even though Lee Yick and Wo Lee ultimately won their legal challenge, we also don't know if the Yick Wo laundry at 3rd and Harrison stayed in business past 1886.
Almost everything we know about Lee Yick (Sang Lee) is limited to the court record.The most salient facts are that his laundry had been in business for 22 years. The business had also passed all of the city's prior fire and health inspections. The court record reveals Lee Yick and Wo Lee were not citizens of the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1802 was specifically limited to "free whites," and the Burlingame Treaty between China and the US excluded the naturalization of Chinese citizens. At the time, the states were free to adopt their own naturalization provisions, so Wong Chinn Foo was apparently granted American citizenship by the state of Michigan—Federalism at its most confusing. The Yick Wo court's application of 14th amendment protections to non-citizens remains one of Yick Wo's underrated features. Modern courts have largely retreated from extending Constitutional protections to non-citizens, though Plyler vs. Doe (1982) did extend educational rights to undocumented children and supported that proposition by citing Yick Wo v. Hopkins. More recently, a more conservative Supreme Court has increasingly retreated from the concept of disparate impact, as evidenced by the Arizona voting rights cases where the court majority essentially rejected the disparate impact arguments for applying section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as "insignificant" in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021). In the meantime, there appear to be no photos, no records of what happened to the laundry, and no evidence of what happened to either Lee Yick or Wo Lee. We don't even know when either man died, though I prefer to believe they're both alive and playing chess in Portsmouth Square and reminiscing about the International Hotel. I have yet to see evidence of anyone claiming to be a relative of either man. This may not be surprising since most Chinese in America were forced to live as bachelors, so the laundry owners may not have descendants.
While Lee Yick and Wo Lee, the named plaintiffs, certainly displayed courage, they also might not be the real heroes in Yick Wo. I suspect they were chosen as "test plaintiffs," businesses and individuals who present ideal facts for a court challenge. Both men appear to have been members of the Tung Hing Tong (the spelling varies from source to source, one of the challenges in doing Asian-American history), a group of Chinese laundry owners who banded together and pooled resources to defend their rights possibly as early as the 1850's. TheTung Hing Tong certainly paid for the lawyers. Since Chinese could not become members of the California Bar at that time, they hired white lawyers, but not just any white lawyers. They hired Hall MCallister, D.L. Smoot, and L. H. Van Schaik. At the time of his death, it was said that MCallister had won more verdicts and received larger fees than any lawyer in California.
MCallister may have come to theTung Hing Tong's attention because in 1849 he had prosecuted "The Hounds," an anti-immigrant group associated with the Know Nothing Party. MCallister also represented the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the passenger line that had brought most Chinese to the west coast. The real heroes of the case may well have been whoever organized the Tung Hing Tong and hired the lawyers.
Here, the story gets murky again. If you look at newspapers of the period, you'll find repeated mentions of Chinese Tongs and Tong wars as an unending source of violent crime, prostitution, drugs, and other vice-related activity. Secret societies have a long history in China. Chinese secret societies are even credited with overthrowing dynasties. The word "tong" literally means "hall," and it includes a range of Chinese-American organizations. They provided services for recent immigrants, dispute resolution, and free meals and beds for those who needed them, essentially serving as a shadow welfare state for Chinese immigrants who weren't served by the City or State. Tongs often did engage in illegal activities ranging from gambling to smuggling women.The latter could be bringing in wives for residents unable to marry due to a combination of the Exclusion Act and anti-miscegenation laws, or it could be straight ahead sex trafficking. The Tung Hing Tong appears to have been mostly legal. They controlled prices and conditions among Chinese laundries, had their own licensing system, and divided neighborhoods between members to prevent cutthroat competition. Once again, I've never seen the names of individual leaders of the Tung Hing Tong in American newspapers. In general, the only members any Tong who were ever individually named in the American press were the ones accused of criminal acts. While it's even more difficult to track the Chinese American press of the time, Tong leaders appear to rarely get named there, either.
My grandfather was closely associated with one of the more prominent tongs, the Bing Kong Tong. The Sacramento version even met regularly next to my family's restaurant.
Looking back, I feel bad for never being curious enough to ask questions about the Tong or what my grandfather did with his friends there. On one end, there are stories of their role in helping to bring people over from their village in South China, helping to settle recent immigrants with jobs and housing, and sending monetary assistance to those left in China under Mao's rule. On the other end, my cousins and I have little stories about the "cousin" who stayed in our grandparent's basement for two years and would run downstairs whenever the doorbell rang, apparently because he'd witnessed a murder. My grandfather had a gambling business pre-highway 80 to Reno, but he was also extremely civic minded. He was a major contributor to the redevelopment of Sacramento's Chinatown and to various projects to memorialize Dr. Sun Yat Sen. He was also known for helping out pretty much anyone who approached him with a business idea. His obituary in the Sacramento Bee compares him to Don Corleone, though perhaps on a smaller scale. The comparison again raises the question of why Asians often seem to be only understandable in terms of other ethnicities' famous people.
It's not just Asians. There's probably a more extreme history of Josh Gibson being the black Babe Ruth or Lena Horne as being a black Ava Gardner until Ava Gardner got Lena Horne's part as a mixed-race character in the movie version of Showboat, just as Louise Rainer won the Academy Award for playing a Chinese peasant in The Good Earth after Anna May Wong was turned down for the role. Much of the time he was just my grandfather, the guy who woke up at 7:00 AM every day to wash out the garbage cans with a hose, sweep out the kitchen, and wind his collection of mechanical clocks. He'd then spend the rest of the day in a business suit, even on days when he didn't leave the house. He never discussed his separate Bing Kong Tong world with us, even though his friends from the Tong frequently attended our family events. I suspect my grandfather kept it quiet simply because he didn't want us to get into trouble or for one of us to inadvertently get him in trouble. As it turned out, my grandfather left behind an FBI file thanks to the Kefauver racket investigations of the '50s.
Simply put, the real heroes behind the Yick Wo case may stay shadows behind a screen because the leaders of the Tung Hing Tong preferred it that way. Lee Yick and Wo Lee might have purposely kept a low profile after the case to avoid retaliation at a time when local authorities would likely have turned a blind eye. In the meantime, there's a rich history deserving to be shared even if it's difficult, even impossible, to reconstruct at a level where its heroes get faces beyond having elementary schools misnamed in their honor. In the meantime, as I tried to track down the "human" story behind Yick Wo, I'm haunted for another reason: I've never really pieced together my own grandparents' complex stories. For example, my grandmother was born in San Francisco in 1900. I don't remember anyone asking her what happened to our family during the 1906 earthquake, if she got to go to public school, or if my great grandparents ever met Lee Yick (even though Lee and Yick are surnames from her side of the family). I do remember my parents taking my grandmother to vote for President in 1964. Perhaps, it's little wonder that 130 years after my great grandparents came to San Francisco, I still get asked whether I was born in the United States or China. I don't have any family stories from back then to refer to casually, so non-Asians often assume it's not really possible for any Asian family to have been in this country for more than two generations. I suspect one of the legacies of our losing the heroes of Chinese Civil Rights struggles in the late 19th century remains a sense that our stories and ourselves are safer staying in the shadows, something especially haunting to me during this recent spate of anti-Asian hate crimes, where it's too often assumed people who look like us can't be real Americans.
