The New Trends in American Chinatowns: the Case of the Chinese in Chicago

CHAPTER THREE

The New Trends in American Chinatowns: The Case of the Chinese in Chicago

Huping Ling

And each time I roam, Chicago is Calling me home, Chicago is One town that won’t let you down It’s my kind of town — Frank Sinatra/Sammy Cahn/Jimmy van Heusen

Situated in the heart of America, and privileged with land, water, rail, and air transportation advantages, and a dynamic multiethnic and multi-cultural population, Chicago is a city with opportunities. The vast opportunities that Chi- cago presents were evident to newcomers even more than a century ago. The city has attracted thousands of immigrants from around the world since the mid-19th century. Canadians, Germans, British, Irish, Swedish, Norwegians, Scottish, Poles and Italians have poured into the city over time, making it a truly multiethnic community. For the Chinese who first arrived on the West Coast, Chicago offered a growing and attractive economic opportunity in the 1870s. Here, the Chinese established a small but vibrant community in the downtown Loop area. Chinese grocery stores, laundries, restaurants, and community associations sustained the residents of the early Chinatown. The anti- Chinese sentiments prevalent in the country, due to the Chinese exclusion acts since the 1880s, affected the relations between the Chinese and the larger society. In the 1910s, the downtown property owners raised rents that made it difficult for Chinese businesses to survive, which forced the vast majority of the Chinese to move to the South Side of the city where properties were cheaper. On the South Side, the Chinese soon established a new Chinatown, known as the South Chinatown today, which remains a major tourist attraction of the city. Since the 1970s, the influx of the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia revitalized the Argyle Street area on the North Side, which emerged 56 huping ling as the North Chinatown. Meanwhile, the suburban Chinese communities have also been rapidly growing. This new community formation has been coined as “Tripartite” Community by scholars (Rohsenow 2004; Ling 2012: 229-237). While some earlier studies have provided valuable information on Chi- nese in Chicago up to the 1950s, for example, Tin-Chin Fan’s dissertation “Chinese Residents in Chicago” (1926) and Paul C.P. Siu’s dissertation “The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Isolation” (1953) and its publication in 1987 edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen, and Adam McKeown’s, Chinese Migrant Net- works and Cultural Change, Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936 (2001), this ethnic community has not received much scholarly attention. Building on the exist- ing works and utilizing primary sources in both English and Chinese, in partic- ular the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) Chicago Chinese Case Files (CCCF), local newspapers, sources from the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, interviews, and Chinese gazetteers, genealogies, overseas Chinese magazines, and government statistics, this paper aspires to reconstruct and analyze the formation of the tripartite community structure, and further delin- eate its implications and significance.

Locating Chicago Chinatown: Moy Brothers and the Early Community

The birth and development of Chicago Chinatown were an integral piece of the Chinese diasporic mosaic. The first large wave of the Chinese international migration movement in the mid-19th century sent Chinese immigrants to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Initially welcomed as cheaper laborers, they soon faced persecutions and expulsions on all these receiving lands in the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the Pacific Northwest Coast, the anti-Chinese sentiment, compounded by the economic depression on the West Coast, was most rampant and violent (Saxton 1971; Sandmeyer 1991; Pfaeler 2007), thus contributed to the redistribution of Chi- nese immigrant population in the United States. Centrally located and as a center of land, water, rail, (and later air) transpor- tations, Chicago had served as a hub for Chinese immigrants in North Amer- ica. Among the dispersed Chinese laborers, a man named Moy Dong Chow (梅宗周 Mei Zongzhou in Pinyin, a.k.a. Hip Lung) was particularly interested in the Windy City, Chicago. As one from the Moy clan in Taishan county, the coastal Guangdong province of China where most of the early Chinese immigrants in Americas came from, Moy Dong Chow was known among his country fellows for his stubbornness, resourcefulness, and shrewdness. The rare pho- tos of Moy show him a man with a commanding presence, and a stern face