 Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Mechanics Institute online program, Profits of Labor, a history of California's Chinese immigrant minors, merchants and workers with Professor Siu-Fan Chung. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. It features a general interest library, our International Chess Club, ongoing author events and literary programs, and on Friday night, our Cinema Lit film series. You can see us at milibrary.org. Please visit our website and also please visit us in person at 57 Post Street here in San Francisco. I'm very pleased to start this program as it is the first event in the Mechanics Institute NEA Big Read series. Our NEA Big Read program is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. The focus of our program through the year will be on the novel, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, who won one of the National Book Awards, and will be following some of the themes in the book throughout the year with panel discussions, author events, a film series, and many other enjoyable programs. So please watch our programs online. Charles, you will be joining us here for LitQuake on October 20, and see our website for more details. We're so pleased to have Professor Chung here for her expertise and her background as well in immigrant and Chinese immigrant history and California history. The presentation is about three men and their families, all Chinese immigrants, which offers a historical landscape of Chinatowns and the other neighborhoods in San Francisco and other Western cities from immigrant labor topics to entrepreneurship. These men fulfilled their American immigrant dream, and it's our opportunity to open the door to understand their achievements, and also what they passed down to generations to come. Professor Sufran Chung was born and raised in Los Angeles, and she received her advanced degree from Harvard and also from UC Berkeley. She taught Asian and Asian American history and Chinese art history at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She is the author of Chinese in the Woods, logging and lumbering in the American West, and also in pursuit of gold, Chinese American minors and merchants in the American West, and she's currently working on a new book about Chinese labor contractors. And also something that has been very important to her work and research is her participation at Stanford University in the Chinese railroad workers in America project, which she was engaged with from 2012 to 2019. So it's just an honor to have you here Sue, and we welcome you to mechanics Institute online. Thank you very much. And we can start the PowerPoint. I'm going to talk about three men tonight in the context of mining, merchandising and working, and their jobs as railroad labor contractors next. Before next before going into their lives. You have to realize that most of these men who came to California in the 19th century came from a small part of China, the southeastern part. And within that province there were 18 provinces in China at the time. This was just one of the 18 provinces, China was larger than the United States. So this is really a large area. Most of people came from the four counties or four districts say up, which today is called five counties because there were, there are now they added one other county make things confusing, but it's the green area of Taishan, Kaiping and King her son. And the three men that I accidentally at random chose to talk about all came from Kaiping and I didn't know that until I started putting their lives together. The other areas of emigration from China were the three districts in purple with the red area of Guangzhou or Canton, and this is a more urban area and sent many Chinese overseas. The yellow area is Johnson, which has the exit port of Macau, which was a Portuguese colony. And we see that urban merchants often came from Johnson, Hong Kong of course, was a British colony as of 1841. And so this was also one of the areas of immigration. The other counties really didn't contribute a lot of immigrants to the 19th century Chinese migration to the United States. But it's important to realize that these Chinese spoke Cantonese with seven to nine different sub dialects which were mutually unintelligible. So sometimes even these immigrants could not understand each other, unless they were fluent in more than one sub dialect of Cantonese. Some of these people traveled on their own, borrowing money from their clansmen or village organizations to travel to San Francisco. Others came by contract or and and sailed on schooners, junks and later steamships and you see a Chinese junk and a steamship on your screen next. It was a long trip, but they left because the population had grown so large in China in the 1800s, that there wasn't enough land to feed the population. And the Western trade began to open America trading in China in 1784. And a lot of Chinese occupations traditional occupations like cloth making and logging disappeared even flour making and soap making were taken over by imports from the West. The rulers of China at this time were Manchus a nomadic tribes group from the northeastern part of China, and they didn't like the southern Chinese, who were the last to be subjugated and incorporated into their empire in 1644. And so they passed stricter rules on them suppressed them. And this caused a lot of rebellions in, especially in South China, the biggest one being the typing rebellion a Christian rebellion from 1850 to 1874. There were a lot of bandits roaming around it was a, it was terrible time to be living in southeastern China. Economic needs of the family the clan and the district began to grow, and they relied upon the overseas Chinese to help them out in this situation. For many of the people who had gone overseas came back successful and rich and contributed to the development of their hometown. And so causing them to come to the United States specifically was the discovery of gold, and the idea that you could be instantly wealthy. And then there were jobs and mining railroad work service industry jobs that didn't exist in China. Now, we're open to the Chinese, and so like other American immigrants. It's a very American dream of success, both socially and economically, not only for themselves, but for their descendants and this is what we're going to look at tonight. We see that they were recruited by employers labor contractors of friends, all sorts of people, bringing them to the United States. And they felt a tide their homeland into their parents who then they left behind, but they began to create a new life for themselves and part of this new life was understanding about the United States, and learning about freedom of speech the struggles of the Declaration of Independence, the training of American missionaries who often volunteered hours to help the Chinese adjust to American life. And we see a lot of Chinese merchants realizing that they could expand their stores in the United States, and become even bigger merchants. It was the promise of a better lifestyle in the United States. Next. And so they made the crossing, and it was $50 to travel across the Pacific, and it often took 30 to 100 days to do that. When they arrived in the United States, they were registered by the Chinese six companies, and in their regional negotiations, they were required to pay membership fees and American taxes. And one of the interesting things that they did when they first got landed was to go out and buy work boots because their cotton shoes would not be useful in a place like the United States. And they had to undergo interrogations in order to land here. First they were interrogated at the Pacific male steamship warehouse in San Francisco and then from 1910 to 1940. And they were interred at Angel Island, sometimes for years they had to go through a health examinations questions about their lives. Women were separated from men. And it was a very tragic time for many people going through this experience next. The first big draw was gold mining, and at the peak of the gold rush in 1852 there were some 20,000 Chinese miners in California, who made up 30% of all the immigrants in California. Some came as independent miners. Others came in groups, forming mining companies of 20 to 35 men. Some came as employees of non Chinese mine owners, but they worked throughout the American West all the way from California to Washington and even into Canada, all the way to Montana and Idaho, Nevada, Utah, all over. But contrary to the stereotype that I grew up with was they not, they worked not only with Chinese but with other ethnic groups as well. And so what we see is an introduction through their work of other groups next. The second biggest draw was working for the railroad companies building roads and bridges and logging laying tracks creating irrigation systems, doing maintenance work from 1850 to the 1920s. And here you see them working on laying the railroad tracks, sleeping in tents that house them sometimes or train cars that house them, and taking a break drinking hot tea, which made them one of the few groups that could afford having dysentery while working on building the railroads next. They had to adjust to a new way of life. The traditional family and clan support was replaced by regional associations, who offered them job opportunities, recreations contact with home support and a network system. There was a lack of women because of the page loft 1875, which basically said the Chinese women had to prove that they were not prostitutes and if you think about that, that's not easy to do. And so recreation time was gaming telling stories playing musical instruments and doing things along that line. And labor was physical physically tiring. And often, many of them had broken bones and had to use opium to kill the pain from the broken bones, and then some of the troubles that they encountered. And they also realized that they were meeting different customs and cultures experienced a lot of racism discrimination and violence, and in encountered the Western concept of superiority, which is a 17th century thinking, and it was strange because the Chinese thought they were superior. The Western thought they were superior next. Next. So, I'm going to look at three 19th century man, and one of them was chunky. He's the least known of the three men, and we know about him first from the fact that he built a railroad from Hawthorne to Carson City that linked up with a Virginia railroad to the Central Pacific, which then was the first transcontinental railroad. And we see that that in one of his interviews in 1881 he said he immigrated in 1881 before the Chinese Exclusion Act which is one of the reasons why there's lots of conflicting information about him. But we know from that that he was a good friend of Dwayne Bliss and Henry Marvin Earrington of Carson City in Virginia City, both railroad and Lumberman as well as mine owners and Earrington married the niece of Charles and Edward Crocker, so was very closely tied in to the big four of the Central Pacific. Now, the Americans would not hire someone without a background in railroad construction so why hire chunky to build the Hawthorne Carson City railroad, if you didn't have any experience. So I began to look for someone who had railroad experience who had a name somewhat like this. And so in 1869 the Central Pacific payroll had a man named Ah Chung working for him. In the 1870s, the Virginia and Turkey railroad had a labor contractor by the name of Aki in several Nevada locations, including Empire Nevada, where Lim Lip Hong the second man I'm going to talk about also worked, indicating perhaps that they were friends. And in fact they were, and not only were they friends of children were friends, and their grandchildren friends so this is something that continues onward. I found an Ormsby County tax record that showed Aki owning a store and one block of Chinatown in Carson City, and newspaper mentions of a prosperous chunky store in the mining times towns of Calaveras, California, and a court case in which he was sold and won the back pay for his crew in Calaveras. So, we know that he settled in Hawthorne in 1881 had enough money to buy a farm, open a ranch, open a restaurant, and open a store called the chunky store, which later had a branch in Calaveras. So, this is not a poor person but one who has made himself relatively wealthy by those standards of those days. He married Carson City born and public school educated. He in 1890 she was 14 years old, and they had six children. Next, next, Hawthorne was a small city with about 200 300 people, and the keys have this garden that you see in the upper left, which grew all kinds of things including white asparagus that was sold to the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, the Salt Lake City Hotel, and big hotels, gourmet hotels around the area, and they own this farm until 1920. And then, in 1909, chunky dies and here's is in the lower left, his cemetery site and the family is standing around there, and nearby cemetery sites were those of his cousins and some relatives so he had family living in in Hawthorne. When his descendants tried to find the Hawthorne Cemetery, it took modern technology to discover that the cemetery was in the military base in Hawthorne. One of the interesting things to realize is that Akum traveled a lot on the trains, she went to San Francisco, she went to Reno, she traveled to Tonapas, went all over, and one day, when one of her good friends was getting married, Billy Ford of Candelaria, she was asked to go and bring his wife, from his prospective bride from Sacramento, down to Candelaria for the wedding so you see her with her two children in a traditional dress on the wedding day of Lloyd Ford with Billy Ford in Candelaria and so there is going to be this mixture of Chinese clothing and Western clothing next. The record showing Ah Chung working for the Central Pacific Railroad, he's forth from the bottom next. These are all labor contractors, and then the Virginia and Truckee payroll, there are only a few payroll sheets that are extant, and it's dated 1873 and you can see he's at several different sites, but number 11 he's at Empire in Nevada, where Lim Le Pong also worked so this is where they get to meet each other next. And then you see the orange tax records and you see that he's a merchant, who owns merchandise has a wagon to horses and a gold watch. And in the international directory we see the chunky store in Hawthorne. There was also a chunky store in Reno, one in Virginia City and of course, the one he started in Tonopah. So there may have been others that we don't know about and we don't know what the links were between these stores that were named the same. Next. Here we have his marriage to Akum Ki or Akum Yi was their last name. And she went to public school in Carson City, because the Ki family was friends with the, with the superintendent of instruction, and he said the Chinese children could go to public schools. Well in California they could not but she had a regular public education, you see her in the back row. The only Chinese person in the entire picture. In 1909, she has all of her children dressed in store bought American clothes which also indicates that they were a poor family, and you can see we have two cute little dogs. Well, she felt very strongly that her children should be educated. And so one of her daughters in the lower left middle decided that she wanted to be, or she was chosen to be Pocahontas in play, and there she is in the play in the next picture, next to that, and the costume came from the Paiute insurers Nevada who were friends of the keys, because the keys had taught them how to farm, and they permitted the keys to be able to sell the fish in Walker Lake and so here you see one of her sons catching a good load of fish which was very common for them. And when Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific asked if he could fish in Walker Lake and you know sell the fish and make a profit from the fish there. The Paiutes said no, you can't fish there and this was always a bone of contention between the Shers Paiutes and Charles Crocker next. The Akumki had a brother named King Yi who in 1885 fled Carson City at the age of six, because there was an anti Chinese riot, and the family left Akum back in Carson City. And I think it was because she was contracted to marry chunky when she turned 14. So they let's another family raise her, but then her brother decided that he wanted, he should come back to Carson City and take over the business. And in his immigration records that he talks about the bliss and the Earrington's being friends of the family so we know that there was this close connection. Notice he's wearing traditional dress in 1900. He had lived in a bicultural world of China and the United States. He got tired of living in Carson City moved to Texas where he married an American woman. But one of the things that he remembered was the lucky boy mine that his friend up the chunky had invested in, and where his sister had made lunch for the miners of the lucky boy mine so this is the connection of mining for the key family next. And then we see what the children some of the children did a lot of them accomplished many things but I randomly picked some the oldest son Charles left horses. And this might be because chunky might have worked with horses on the Central Pacific. At summit tunnel, there were 300 horses, and I know limb lip Hong roads, one of them in order to check on the work of his crew members working along that line. Charles served in World War one his two youngest brothers in World War two. His sister Florence married a Basque, when interracial marriages were prohibited. So she went out to the Pacific Ocean, and they got married there but when she came back to Hawthorne the sheriff arrested her and her husband, put them in jail. And then the parents got angry at him and said they had given permission for the couple to marry. The couple was so disgusted that they decided to move to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, a pandemic began, and in 1919, both Florence and her husband passed away next. But even more interesting were the two youngest son, who opened a casino in Las Vegas, catering to African Americans and the working class, and it featured great jazz and food. And it was called the real casino one of the names of that it had it burned down in 1956 poor William died at that time, Frank sold the casino and moved to Berkeley to become a CPA next and raise his family. He was born now to Lim Lipong who was living around the same time as chunky next. And he was born in a very small village in Kaiping. It is so small that you can see from this aerial shop. It doesn't take up much space. He lit he was born in this house that you see on the left. For example, the village was so small and poor that they didn't even have an ancestral temple next. At the age of 12 he came to San Francisco on a junk with his relatives. We don't know how he found a job but eventually he linked up with Albert L. Tubs, Alfred L. Tubs, I'm sorry. The Tubs family which will be a lifelong connection, not only for that generation but for the next generation as well. The tubs had a fleet that sailed to Asia, and they might have used Lim as a cabin boy and that's how he learned English, but somehow he did. The tubs were so famous that their main office of their business is now a museum on the San Francisco Marina that you can visit next. And they do. Well, they were in the courtage business they had the largest courtage business on the West Coast, and they sold to Asia, as well as to the Western United States. They employed Chinese at the factory so it wasn't unusual to have Lim Lim Pong work there, nor his eldest son, Lim Singh work there. So Alfred was a signer to the California Constitution. He served as a California assemblyman. He was a trustee of Stanford University. And in the newspapers, you could see that he socialized with the Stanford's and the crackers and so forth. He also owned a hotel in Oakland, and a winery in what is today Napa. And so he might have recommended that Lim Lim Pong go to work for the Central Pacific when Crocker decided it was time to hire some Chinese to experiment in having Chinese workers on the Central Pacific. Lim had been working as a minor in Dutch flat, and seven of the original board numbers for the Central Pacific came from Dutch flat and knew about the Chinese there. And so, probably were enthusiastic about getting these former minors into work for the railroad. Lim was six feet tall spoke good English, and worked his way up to becoming a Laoban or manager, or middleman, and hired Chinese to help build the Central Pacific across the Sierra Nevada, the hardest part of the construction work. And if you haven't seen them, these are the three big four of the Central Pacific, Charles Crocker, the superintendent, Collis Huntington, the politician, Mark Hopkins, the treasurer, Leland Stanford, the educator and politician. And the other man who was key to the Chinese working on the Central Pacific was James Harvey Strobridge, who had daily contact with the Chinese mix and favored his Chinese labor contractors and middlemen or Laoban with a great deal of pride and really enjoyed them. We see one of these rare pictures of the railroad workers in the 1860s. Lim Lim Pauling is second from the left, the three men next to the three men wearing hats, and these kind of hats are called Darlie Vartan hats, which were very popular with the Chinese. They gave up their conical straw hats for the Darlie Vartan hats, which they like to wear hats for a big thing with men at that time next. And so they, Lim told his descendants that he worked at the summit tunnel. He might have worked on the China wall this accomplishment, which has lasted for over 100 years there is no concrete or any glue on the rocks, they wedged together, and you wedge them by hewing them by hand. And from the summit tunnel you can look down at Donner Lake next. It was a real accomplishment. They did the Chinese did things that people thought were impossible, and they experienced hardships that were unbelievable, and they, they had that many of them died because of cave ins and, and fumes from different caves and all kinds of horrible stories about the death. These workers who constituted 90% of the workers on the Central Pacific, in no short order help solidify the western, westward future of the United States next. And you can see how the Central Pacific ran from Sacramento all the way to Omaha next. In this iconic picture of the meeting of the east and the west, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, they often say well they're no Chinese there. But if you look carefully, there is a Chinese man with his back face towards the camera. He has the Dolly Vartan hat. He has a patch on his long Chinese coat. And if you blow up the picture even larger. There are actually three Chinese in the picture. And the idea that at the Golden Spike ceremony there were no Chinese is false. Also, many of the Chinese labor contractors and middlemen were at a party sponsored by James Harvey. And two of the men, two of the labor contractors spoke. And in one story, the man, one of the visitors, or one of the guests at the luncheon said, my his Chinese is very good. I mean his English is very good so these men were competent in speaking English. And then LePont next, next. LePont worked from Elko, well from Summit to Elko where he got married to a Native American girl. And he was one of the few selected to finish the line for the Central Pacific in December of 1869, not May but December. And he turned around and went back towards San Francisco he stopped in Winamaka, and bought an interest in a mine there, which he could do because under Nevada Constitution, and resident Chinese could own land in San for in Nevada. He was a very powerful draw to being in Nevada, he lived and worked in empire with his wife and two children under Chun Kee, and then an anti Chinese riot occurred. He left town his wife and two daughters disappeared, and it took a long time for him to search for them and finally found them at the turn of the 20th century, but there was a shortage of women, and he didn't know what he should do about getting married, having lost his Native American wife he didn't know what happened to her next. So, we see the anti Chinese movement was growing stronger and stronger and anti Chinese laws, restricting immigration were passed in 1875 to 1924, and not repealed into 1943, and the door of America really doesn't open for Asians until 1975. So, Lynn returned at the age of 36 to San Francisco, he leased land in south San Francisco, and built the dog patch ranch so again this is a man with money, because you can't do this without money. And then in 1879 he married Chan Shi, a 16 year old San Francisco servant to a family of a Chinese physician. And here in their formal wedding photograph, they are wearing a badge from the emperor it's this rectangular design on their robes Chinese robes, which distinguishes him as being a by the emperor of China for contributions that he made to the community. Now we don't know what these were, but we know that when he walks down the street, people know that he is a special person, and has the eye of the emperor. Several times he was restless and he left home searching for his native American family, and to work on other railroads, but he does nicks, manage nicks, nicks, managed to have a number of children, he had seven children, two boys, two girls and the rest were boys, and they all were on this ranch, located next to the Tubbs Courage Factory and near Butchertown, where Lim worked at night as a butcher, and he sold the pigs feet and other parts that they didn't want in Chinatown to make soup and so forth. He raised horses, pigs, ducks, chickens and other animals on his ranch, and we see nicks. But his sons would sell some of these animal parts in Chinatown. Here is an Arnold Genthi photograph of Robert Lim, who changes the spelling of his last name to quote unquote to be more Americanized, and Lim Singh, selling the products in Chinatown. And here we see Lim Singh and his family, with their parents, Lim Lip-Hong and his wife in the center and the children, and a brother in this group picture in Dogpatch Ranch, next, in 1910, next. Well, Lim was a restless person. He loved to travel. He had a car and he traveled around. He took his grandchildren to the places that he worked at, and places that he loved, like the saloon in Virginia City, which not only was a saloon, but was also a gambling joint, and to the mine that he owned in Winamaka and so forth. So in 1914, they had a picture of the Lim clan at Robert Lim's fabulous home in Berkeley, and here you can see them. In 2011, part of the Lim clan got together and there were over 200 of them in this picture, next. Well, some of the children became very famous. Lim Singh was a, the oldest son was an entrepreneur owned a shipping company and, and was into all kinds of business activities. Robert Lim learned to fly, and he emigrated to China to help the nationalists develop an air force. He became Chiang Kai-shek's military chief of staff. And then in 1949, because he couldn't decide whether he should side with a nationalist or the communists, he settled in Hong Kong, where he later died. And so Lim, on the other hand, working under Arnold Genthe at first, became a photographer and he was the unofficial photographer for many of the Angel Island Immigration Center pictures that you see when you go and visit the Angel Island Museum. And the daughter, Lim Soo Young, married a wealthy man named Wang Yi-yao, who owned the Chinese newspaper Saigaya Bo, and gambling joint in Chinatown. Well, he died in 1912. He took over the editorship and the gambling joint, ran it successfully. And in the 1920s, this newspaper featured articles encouraging Chinese women to join the, what you might call a moderate American feminist movement. So this is her influence on the community in regards to Chinese American women's development. Nick's. Joaquin is the last of the three men that I'm going to talk about. He lived from 1848 to 1914. Nick's. He was a labor contractor for the California Southern Railroad. He was also a merchant farmer real estate investor and father of 12. So he beat out the other two is number of children, but he did sort of the same kind of thing. But unlike many of the Chinese, he left a diary in four counties dialect and in English now my grandfather also left diary so there are diaries that still exist and we're uncovering diaries and writings, left and right in recent years. Anyway, like chunky and lima pong he was born in Kaiping. He arrived in San Francisco between the ages of 15 and 19. He had studied English in with American missionaries in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and continued his English studies and missionary work in the United States. He worked in San Francisco, Alaska, visited Santa Barbara where he had a merchant uncle, San Diego, and was hired as the labor contractor for the central is the California Southern Railroad from National City through San Diego, all the way to Barstow His bilingual ability and his Christianity made his Americanization easier for him than others. He's pictured in 1874 with a typical Chinese queue, which he cuts off in Alaska to be proclaimed his desire and his intention of staying in the United States for if he had tried to go back to China without a queue. He was subject to immediate beheading by Qing laws next. He writes this diary in English with a little scattering of Chinese or in a mixture of Chinese and English, and towards the end of his life, he wrote more in Chinese that he did in English and so was an interesting transition, which I also saw in my own grandfather. As he got older towards the age of 100. He was more into speaking and writing Chinese Nick's he fishermen were very active in San Diego Chinese fishermen there were about 229 Chinese in 1881. He arrived and he knew that if he opened a store he should sell fishing goods and he knew from his experience in Alaska, what fish when wanted. And so he started selling fishing goods and then other general merchandising, and became very successful in his merchandising. He also recruited for the central of the California Southern Railroad, and by 1890. There were 909 Chinese and San Diego County next. Now what we see is the calving is Southern went from national city to San Diego to Oceanside to fall brook, where two of his workers loved for a book ball brook so much that they stayed in fall brook and became farmers there, and taught the farmers how to harvest farm, which is the really the only way to farm in fall brook, then he went on to to macula Paris. Colton which connects then with a line from the Southern Pacific to Los Angeles, San Bernardino Cajon which was the hardest part to build, and finally ending up in Barstow. So you can see how these railroad lines travel around next. The difficult part was the flooding and the ecological problems that this line have because all of the engineers came from the east coast and we're not familiar with the land in California, and the problem of flooding so in the upper left you can see the the railroad being flooded and some of the tracks even ended up in the Pacific Ocean in the terrible flood of 1840 1884, but the line was successful it did connect San Diego and made it a prosperous city. Without the line, it might not have grown as fast as it did next. It was an easy task they had huge boulders to move. They had huge ravines to cross and bridges to build next. And they had to level the ground or build up the ground for the tracks to go around curves up and down grades next next. You can see them leveling the ground and this is the train, as it passes through and you can see how curvy it is. This is Fred Paris, who took part of the crew to meet a key and he came from the south with his crew, which included some Chinese and met the north, who came down with his crew, which included some Mexicans. And so we see this international train crew working both ways. The cone passed in 1910 had over 100 trains passing every day and when you go from Los Angeles 2015 to Las Vegas you can see the trains moving and these are the tracks that Paris and I can build next. And this is a modern picture just showing you the curve and the up and down that the trains have to go next. And he even invested in farmland in Mission Valley, Bonita, Sweetwater areas around San Diego and even as far north as Los Angeles. One of his early endeavors was potato farming like this as you see in the photograph. He also sold the least farmland to other Chinese. Fortunately the California alien land laws of 1913 and 1920 did not affect him. And he was very wise he bought a lot of property along the railroad lines and near the train stations, so that his sons could stand at the station and sell their fresh produce to the passengers, as well as the train cooks, most of whom were Chinese next. And this is terrace farming in this area so you can see how it works. And he also grew oranges, lemons and things like that in orchards, and his son George and George's son, Joseph or Akin's grandson, continued the produce market in San, in San Diego next. Well, he also went into mining, like Lim Lipong, in 1898 he invested in a tourmaline mine and hired 25 Chinese to search for tourmaline, sent the tourmaline to China, where the Empress Doward did the she highly prized it and used it for jewelry and for buttons on the robes of the Chinese officials next. And he also was a interpreter for the courts and the community. Chunky and Lim Lipong also did this, but in 1890 he was even asked to appear before a congressional investigating committee at the Hotel del Coronado which you can go to today, and it is an old wooden hotel structure that was built primarily by the Chinese But it was a Chinese product, and we see that he had to answer questions to this committee that was hostile to Chinese immigration, and they will eventually recommend a stricter anti Chinese law called the 1892 act, which then was followed by other acts which concluded with the 1924 immigration act. But in this, this questioning one of the questions he had to answer was Chinese and lotteries now everyone knew that the Chinese were playing lotteries all the time. If you go to Las Vegas, it's called Kino. But anyway, he said no no only loafers make little money then go away from lotteries. And it turns out of course that one of his sons found that lottery was also a profitable game to offer to the Chinese and Chinese population so whether he would have approved of his son offering lotteries as a gaming solution we don't know but this existed next. It was gaming was an entertainment for these men who had lots of spare, we had some spare time and not a lot of spare things to do through Margaret culbert son of the presbyterian mission in San Francisco he met and married Su Liang in 1881 and they had 12 children. And if that wasn't enough he adopted another one so he had 13 children next. And that some of the children were very famous some of them achieved lots of things and like chunkies grandchildren and limited ponds grandchildren, some of them became professionals one became a very famous in Ventura and wrote this book, based on the family history. Next. Next, and we see that they carried on his spirit. Thomas was one of the first Chinese to be a policeman in, and he was a policeman in San Diego before there was ever a Chinese American policeman in San Francisco. Another one was a community leader, an unofficial mayor like his father of San Diego's Chinatown. And what we see in conclusion is that these three men born in Kaiping County, Guando, and came to the United States as teenagers, without parents or siblings to guide them, learn to adjust in the American society. Two of them learn enough English to be fluent. We don't know how good their English was but it was certainly good enough to be understood by Americans. Robert can, I can continue his study of English and I presume his English was very good off rework his corp interpreters, which was so necessary at this time. They could appear in court for themselves or their colleagues and be victorious in law cases. And this required of course a knowledge of American law which they were willing to learn and know about. Workers merchants railroad contractors and farmers bringing in their heritage from China, but these men made more than a dollar a day like the unskilled variable workers. They made a modicum of wealth that allowed them to buy property to invest in business to invest in to get married to raise a family for an auction that was a very large family in a very expensive endeavor. They were not so generous as many people believe Chinese were. They wanted and knew that they would live the rest of their lives in the American West, and they would be buried in the American West, unlike the Chinese who desired to be reburied in China. They use their knowledge in traditional Chinese irrigation systems and farming to help themselves and others prosper in the American West. They use their traditional knowledge, combined with their Western knowledge to become successful men, and through hard work and and they married raised a family on the home were active in the Chinatown communities that they belong to belong to Chinese American associations, their children achieve prominence in Chinese American and American communities, their guilt grandchildren prospered, limit Hong's great great grandson Michael even graduated from Stanford University recently. What it is is they fulfill the American immigrants dream of being moderately successful, but being having descendants who were very successful and you can't deny that of them next. Thank so many people at the list is endless but these are a few the Shirley and key Baldwin family and the descendants of chunky who helped me search for documents and especially the children of make he a Fresno California, Andrew and the other descendants of limb the Pong especially Vic limb, Glenn limb, who is the son of Robert limb Sylvia saying Cynthia Lee, who was art limbs granddaughter and warn you. And for our kin, his descendants as well as the community historian there, Murray Lee, who is, I consider a friend, a young Chan, a professor at UC Irvine, Susie Lancassell, absolutely wonderful scholar at San Marcos State University California State University. Then we have the numerous historical societies universities and museums, all of whom had staff members who helped me to the nth degree, including the California historical society, the Huntington Library and Museum the San Diego historical society were center, San Diego State University, Bancroft Library, the Asian library at UC Berkeley, Stanford University's library UC San Diego's library UNLV, the Getty Museum, a repository of all kinds of things, as well as the numerous people whom I met who are connected to museums and railroad museums especially. Thank you so much. Thank you for your attention. Oh, Sue. Thank you for such an inspiring talk and with illuminating so much of California history. I think it's an incredible story, very powerful. And when you look at the map of the railroads and you see the thousands of miles that were built across this country. This is mind boggling the amount of work and labor and decades that went into this workforce. Also, I have a couple of questions to start us off. I'm curious about the relationships between Native American workers and also the Chinese immigrant community and you gave the example of the marriage of one couple but I'm just wondering if there's any more collaboration or synergy between both communities and cultures. I went into the study learning about all of the horrible relationships between Native Americans and Chinese, you know they hated each other they killed each other, you know, all this kind of thing. And then I found out that there were a lot of Chinese men who married Native American women because there was such a shortage, and they found culture cultural ideas and principles that they felt that they shared, and then I was working on a national grant committee, and we gave a grant to a group studying the Chumash Indians and their herbal remedies and the Chinese herbal doctor remedies, and how they were alike and how they learn from each other. And then I come up in Elko and I see all these marriages of Chinese men working on the railroads are in the minds who married the women in the Native American women raised children and I met some of these children who are very prominent in their tribal relations. And, you know, it's a story that hasn't been told but is being told because I have a people from Montana and Arizona and so forth writing to me, what is the relationship what is the natural what happened, you know, and so forth. And the lim li pang descendants are trying to help me find what happened to his wife and two daughters who were that he adored because you know he kept looking for them, and finally found them and introduced them, not to his wife, but to his Chinese children from his Chinese wife so they knew they had these half sisters that were Native American and in the case of chunky's family chunky met the shares. They found that they were starving taught them how to farm his wife taught them how to can pumpkin or preserve pumpkin and preserve other fruits and vegetables so that they had something to eat during the winter months, how to collect rainwater and it was for these things that chunky and his wife did for them that they allowed the key family to fish in Walker River, Walker Lake, which comes from Walker River. It can be a positive picture, it can also be a negative picture because of the resentment, you know, and the adoption of the Western idea that the Indians and the Chinese and the blacks and you know these are all lesser beings and they're they're more equal to the white man who is so superior to all of them. And so, you know you always have this kind of prejudice, see thing through a lot of writings, so you have to reinterpret what you know or what you see, or what is being said. I'm going to turn over to Pam who's going to read out some of the questions from the chat and we'll we'll jump between the chat and the q amp a as well. Okay, so the, the first question I see had to do with the name of a newspaper is chung say that bow the English name of the newspaper, and that's question from s low. Jung is China. She is or sigh is West so Chinese Western New daily newspaper bow is is newspaper. I mix up my Cantonese and my Mandarin so please forgive me if you know Chinese, but that's what I do all the time. It was, it was one of the most popular newspapers in San Francisco and in the United States because it circulated all around and when I was doing research on Chinese newspapers I should tell you, like many Chinese businesses. If you were there at lunchtime, they would feed you so I was doing my research on stories written in the 1930s, and it was lunchtime. And every day that week they fed me lunch, I couldn't believe it, you know, but you know being a poor college student graduate student, you know, except any lunch anywhere anytime. But that was a practice not only in the newspaper but in other businesses they would have, you know, a pot of one ton or a pot of noodles with some meat and some vegetables for you to take a lunch break and it was a time when they got together and you know, or said, you know what was going on in the work or the world. Grace wing rock gone toy asks, can you provide the link to the tubs museum. She I just did a quick Google search but wasn't able to find anything for the which museum. The tubs museum TV. Oh the tubs. It's a it's a building it's at which houses a museum and it's on the San Francisco Marina so you, you know it's red color and you go to the pier and you'll see it. But if you go into the maritime museum they even have the records of the tubs business and this is how you know that they hired Chinese to work in the tub factory and in fact when there was an anti Chinese employment riot. Tubs defended his Chinese workers, and when he opened a very successful Montalegro winery in that it's in Napa today I think he eventually sold it to a Chinese man who built a pagoda and a Jade Lake on the castle that house the winery so it's in place to visit. I used to be open to the public but I don't know if it still is because of of the fires that occurred in Napa. Ada Chan has a question about that. Is it. I thought I heard Dolly burden. Pat is that is that what you were saying or is it Dolly, Dolly Hurton is Dolly bar. It's it's Dolly Parvin. It was a very popular hat at the time, and you know not just the Chinese word but they loved this kind of hat or either that or they had an in road to the wholesale price of the hat but you see it. If you study Chinese men wearing Western hats you see the hats quite often. And when you're a new immigrant and you're a young man, you want to dress like the other people and so if you had one of these sort of round felt hats you know that's you know that was a good thing that showed you had some money to to buy the hat. Jacqueline Mazziani asks, thanks you for the presentation. Can you please talk more about the connection influence the missionaries back in China. Oh, the missionaries were very active in China at this time and they. They did a lot of positive things and negative things but one of the most positive things that they did was to start an eye clinic and there was a missionary American missionary named Peter Parker. Ophthalmology clinic still operates today. They will treat the Chinese for the multitude of eye diseases and eye problems that they have for very little costs and in the 1940s they even flew a plane to Canton to do these eye surgeries and eye treatments once a year or twice a year or something like that. So that's one aspect but a lot of the missionaries knew that the Chinese needed to learn English and would hold English language classes for free. Usually at night, so that the Chinese could work in the day and then go to classes at night and one man in Arizona talks about how he would ride his bicycle one hour after work. Go to class and learn English, then ride his bicycle one hour home. Because he felt it was so important to learn English and the American missionaries were basically usually women who would do this and sort of adopted these young Chinese men in in a way that was they felt very close to their American missionary teacher. And this happened not just in Arizona or California, even as far as Pennsylvania, where the Chinese were operating where contract laborers and American missionary woman was training them to speak English at night. Jacqueline Masiani also asks, will the presentation be made available. The content needs a second look. Yes, you're going to put it on YouTube so it is it has been recorded. You can watch it over again although why anyone would want to, you know, watch it. But, but it is possible. Now let's see, let me scroll down and see trying to keep because there are so many questions I'm trying to make sure that we have them all done. Anna Aang asks, Have you done much history on your own grandfather and family also have you researched Louie or Lou Hing. It's really awful. I know my grandfather kept written records he kept the family record. And so I was able to find the home village and went to the house where he was born, met a lot of relatives and so on and so forth. But my interest was really in what developed with these other people and the kind of occupation and life that they led, you know, grandpa, you know, led an ordinary type of life. And, you know, although he was president of the district association that he came from. But he was 100 years old, you know, when he died. And, you know, he so, you know, and I wasn't. He used to tell me stories of the 1911 Revolution, and he knew the people who were martyred in the revolution and I'm sitting there going, What is the 1911 Revolution, who are martyrs and what do they do you know, no context, you know, until I grew older and majored in Chinese history, did I understand what he was trying to tell me in my youth. So no, I have done grandpa's history. We actually have a question from Brian limb. Thank you for this presentation. I am one of the great grandchildren of both them. I am fascinated with the information about limit palms marriage to a Native American woman and seeing the photo of her how did you discover this threat. I didn't hear the last part. How did you discover this thread. How did I discuss this thread well, Andrea discovered it and I did more tracing. And there are records of Chinese who married Native Americans but we could not find this particular woman. It's named, and I even tried to trace it as a Native American woman living alone with two half Chinese girls, but had no luck that way but I'm still working on it and I've got people in Nevada, trying to work on it they were they lived in Nevada primarily as a family and so that's where some of the information should be. Hello, Nellie Pang asks, which language did the early immigrants from China speak please twice Chinese Cantonese where can I please find out more information considering concerning language angle of it. Okay, Cantonese is that the instructor for Cantonese at Stanford was let go. You still can study Cantonese in Canada they do have teachers there. Surprisingly enough, traditional Chinese characters are taught in the United States more than they are in Taiwan and the People's Republic so people from China come to the United States to study traditional Chinese which is what I read. I read 19th century Chinese. And the Chinese changes in the 20th century and changes again in the 21st century so you know, to keep up you have to know the other versions of written Chinese, even though all written Chinese is basically the same. That is, you can communicate with someone in a written form where you might not be able to communicate with them in an oral form. Yang asked, was it common during this period that many of the Chinese immigrants were from Hoi Ping. Most of them were from toy son, or Tai Shan, and kaiping. That's why I was surprised that all three of my men came from kaiping I expected at least one to come from Tai Shan, but that was not the case. A chunky claimed in one document that he came from toy son, but his family records are in kaiping now, it could be that the section that he was the village he was born in became absorbed by kaiping and cut off from toy son but when Maine went back to China, it was to kaiping where she got family records. And they were listed all the children, you know, he was very good about telling the village at home, who the children were from his branch of the family. And my grandfather did the same thing the children were all listed in this village genealogy book. My grandfather was one of 11 children I cannot imagine 11 boys excuse me 11 boys not counting the girls, I can't imagine families that large I'm sorry, I have two boys and that's enough for me. In fact, one might have been enough but anyway. Anonymous asks, do you know if there are diaries of any Chinese cigar industry workers in San Francisco in the late 19th century. There are lots of diaries that exist, but whether or not someone is willing to turn them over, or give them to you or let them be noted is another story now my grandfather's writings are all in possession of his eldest grandson, who's male so the line gets the information. And in there. The only thing that my cousin allowed me to look at well no he gave me some things but one of them was my grandfather's cures for different illnesses and this was important to him because his eldest son died because no one could care for his son. And doctors wouldn't treat him and the poor boy passed away so he became very interested in what do you do if you have a cough. So he had the medications for that both Chinese and Western and a combination of that. And then he had some medications for other diseases but it was so much work to look up the disease and the medication and I said I don't want to do this kind of thing you know it's tiring. I gave it back to my cousin. Kathy asks, have, have Dr chung visited and connected with the overseas Chinese Museum for folks from hoi ping and tuition needs. Through the Stanford route Chinese river of project, we were invited to China and Taiwan several times. And so I was able to meet with people there and see other sides of pictures of that I studied and it was, it was mind blowing and it was opening. And I saw the homes where these workers came. One home had was the home of a railroad worker who sent went back to China to live but always sent descendants to the United States to work and there were nine generations of this family, coming to the United States and going back to China, and it was fascinating of this kind of connection, and that it is maintained and what's missing are some of the letters that we'd love to read about their experiences now there is a diary of a man, a ordinary railroad worker, who happened to be the son of a disgraced Chinese official in the same time period, working on the Canadian Pacific were voting talks about the evils, and the discrimination and the horrors of being an ordinary railroad worker now my railroad workers didn't have this kind of thing because they were the middle management. And, though they traveled a lot and they did experience some discrimination. It was not the same kind as Duke song long of Canada, and new minister, but he eventually settled in Canada, married, had a wife and his granddaughter I think is the one who translated the partial diary everything is partial, you have to put together things you know payrolls are partial census records aren't complete. I love census records because they'll show that you know some man Chinese man had a child, but there's no wife, and then he had another child, and there's still no wife. I mean, the man can't have children without a wife. But you know this is the kind of thing that happens and a lot of the census takers were lazy, and didn't want to know, you know, who everyone was, and the one man just got so tired he just listed everyone. Every Chinese woman he met as a prostitute and finally he met some lady that he admired and he said Chinese lady as her occupation, so you don't know what kind of information you're getting through some of these records. And Greece wing on toy asks, please clarify we're most we're most railroad workers born here or we're most railroad workers born here. Most of the Chinese railroad workers were born in China and brought over by the thousands. You know, and there were various ways of being brought over. There were American contractors, there was a very famous Dutch contractor who brought over 30,000 Chinese railroad workers. Now this is in a time period when we're building lots of railroads. We're going to stop that around the 1920s. And then there were the Chinese companies that brought over workers and charged an interest. And then there were the Chinese who were sent from the organizations at home, who charged an interest on the advancement of the payment for the trip over and you know they're making money and so the one, one family the quan family was able to earn so much money that they could buy the land of the Suhu family was, which was losing money, because they had so many workers that they had sent for the railroad. And these people were sending, you know, paying the interest and sending money home. And so they expand they double the size of the holdings of that particular clan from the overseas Chinese and it was amazing. You know, they, they chose the best part of the land so that they could grow lots of props and or have the best fishing or something like that. I'm going to end up with the last question for tonight. Sue, I'm wondering if there are legacy businesses that are that exist today in Chinatown in San Francisco or in dog patch or in any other neighborhoods that you might know of that have carried on in some way. I'm sure there are, and I'd have to stop and think about them. I know that there are a number of students who've contacted me who are working on Chinese businesses. I know that some of them had. The import export companies definitely had links between China and the United States and some of the Chinese the American branches made so much money that the Chinese branches prospered prospered and expanded the sincere department store in Hong Kong or Canton is one of those that made so much money over from overseas Chinese money that they expanded and became, if not number one, number two, merchandising firm in China for a long time. So, yes, there are these connections in small ones as well as large ones. Great. Well, that that goes into a global economy. Yes, a global economy. Exactly. Well, I want to thank Professor Sue Fong Chong for an inspiring evening and we hope that you'll join us again on our future programs and we look forward to engaging with you and talking with you further about our history. So thanks everyone for joining us. Thanks for your questions. And please visit our website and follow our programs and I want to wish everyone a good night and thank you again. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you.