Life beyond the Kitchen Doors: Why Did the Chinese Endure Such Hard Work?
The family dispute over Shuck Wing’s intended restaurant was a classic con- flict of the individual versus the collective. The twist in this story is that Shuck Wing sought to serve the Chin clan by opening a restaurant, a move that key relatives regarded as selfish and damaging to family harmony. Indeed, the Chins reacted strongly to Shuck Wing’s plans because allocations of any family member’s capital and labor affected the entire family and, therefore, needed to be carefully measured. During this era, the Chinese in China and the United States survived through collective action. This concept of “interdependence” motivated people like Shuck Wing to migrate to and make a living in the United States. Da Chen, a sociologist working in both the United States and China during the interwar period, described this commitment: “The peasant in South China is not an individualist. He feels himself bound to his sires and to his progeny by a blood relationship that involves both duties and benefits.”63 That is, the Chinese viewed the world and their place in it through the needs of the entire family. Reality, however, did not always conform to this ideal. As a result, the Chins sought ways to keep the family intact through challenges that shook the delicate ties spanning vast geographies.
Shuck Wing’s family faced the difficult challenge of being scattered through- out North America and southern China (see map 3.2). To maintain a sense of
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family unity, the Chin men regularly wrote to one another about both mun- dane and extraordinary events in their lives. While Shuck Wing served in the U.S. Air Force, he wrote or received one letter a week, which amounted to 186 letters over 161 weeks.64 The Chins benefited from the U.S. government’s investments in mail delivery during World War II to ensure that its military personnel stayed in touch with their loved ones. After 1937, because the Jap- anese occupation had made communication with Taishan very difficult, the Chins relied on the U.S. postal service to relay news from China in their let- ters to one another. Shuck Wing’s male friends and relatives in New York and Washington, DC, sporadically got bundles of mail from relatives in China. In total, they forwarded twenty-four letters that were meant for Shuck Wing to Tarrant Airfield in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was stationed. Shuck Wing’s mother managed the household in his absence and needed his consent about decisions regarding schooling and marriage for his children. Unable to read or write, she counted on her educated nephew to send her wishes to Shuck Wing through the transpacific letter network. The role of men in this communica- tion network should be striking to us today, because these men assumed the
Map 3.2. The Chin family in China and North America, 1935–1946. Source: Bachelor’s Apartment, 111 Mott Street Collection, Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY. Map by the author.
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duties of women in Western cultures. In short, the Chin men held the transpa- cific family together through their correspondence.65
Shuck Wing embraced letter writing as his form of expression. He had attended the village school for two years as a young boy in Taishan but lacked the skills to write confidently as an adult.66 As a result, even though Shuck Wing owned only a dozen books, two-thirds of them were on writing, includ- ing several dictionaries—both Chinese to Chinese and Chinese to English— and a letter-writing manual. Careful with his wording and calligraphy, he drafted letters before committing to a final version for the people listed in his little green address book.67 His family would have understood the generosity of such gestures because they knew how precious his personal time was while he served in the military. In one letter, Shuck Wing openly lamented that “it [was] a hard life working as a cook in the barracks,” rising at 4:30 a.m. to bake fresh bread and retiring after midnight when the cleaning was done.68 In addi- tion to “being worked harder than beasts of burden,” the Chinese in the mili- tary faced “racial discrimination” and other forms of “unfair treatment” from white peers and superiors.69 Correspondence with his family and friends, then, gave Shuck Wing temporary respite from the work, harassment, and loneliness he endured while in the military. Because the letters were his only line of con- tact to life beyond the barracks, he eagerly engaged in the regular exchange of letters with the other Chins in North America.
These exchanges served the greater social purpose of carrying on Chinese cultural traditions. At Christmas and Chinese New Year, Shuck Wing received cards and gifts of money from friends and relatives across North America. While Shuck Wing was stationed at Tarrant Airfield, he received nineteen holiday cards from friends and family, which, in total, contained $95, which in 2012 would be worth $1,270.70 The money-stuffed cards were adaptations of Chinese red envelopes, gifts of money given during holidays and important life-cycle moments. In China, money trickled down the social hierarchy, from married to unmarried and from older to younger individuals.71 The Chins in North America embraced this practice, with elder or more established rela- tives and friends sending Shuck Wing holiday cards while he was in the mili- tary. It is unclear to whom and how much Shuck Wing himself gave, since his money cards do not survive, though the unused holiday cards that he left behind suggest that he, too, observed this custom.72
The Chins also used letters to control the actions and behaviors of fam- ily members who threatened to break from the cycle of “duties and benefits.” Away from the village and the close watch of relatives and friends, those living in North America had more freedom to live for themselves than they had ever
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experienced before. Loneliness and hard work pushed some men to find plea- sure in gambling and extramarital affairs.73 Shuck Wing was not immune to such temptation. In 1939, Shuck Wing met Vera Bartlow while working at Jim Lee Laundry, and the two began a relationship that continued through some of his time in the air force. Bartlow was a white sales clerk and lived just around the corner from the laundry. While Shuck Wing was stationed at Tarrant Air Field, they exchanged letters every few weeks and met during his furloughs. Shuck Wing occasionally supported her financially.74 When news of his rela- tionship with her spread through the family grapevine, his relatives intervened to remind Shuck Wing of his obligations to the Chin family. Guang Lin, his older brother in Washington, DC, pressured him to end the relationship:
I can tell [what’s going on] without you saying anything—concealing is very dif- ficult because the rocks can be seen when the water is clear. In my opinion, why not confess. It’s better than hiding the truth. . . . I have some words of advice for you—in this society, you should know the way to deal with people and things. Being unethical, immoral, and unappreciative . . . you must then correct what you have done in the past, cleanse your heart, and determine to be a man; to study should be the order of your life as well as the establishment of a sense of obligation. Be cautious of becoming a prideful, arrogant, and selfish man.75
To Guang Lin, Shuck Wing needed to renew his commitment to the family. Extramarital relationships with local women were not uncommon and some- times tolerated as a consequence of families sending men to work abroad.76 They were unacceptable, however, if they interfered with men’s abilities to financially support their families in China. At the time of Guang Lin’s reproach, Shuck Wing was unable to send money home and unwilling to maintain com- munication with his mother, behaviors that threatened to dissolve the social pact that bound him to China. If he abandoned his family in China, another male relative would have had to assume Shuck Wing’s responsibilities. There- fore, his relatives had a stake in convincing him to maintain his duties as a son, husband, and father.
As a means of maintaining family cohesion, letter writing was an imperfect tool for keeping people in the fold because it also occasionally alienated them from the family network. During his first ten years (1937–1946), Shuck Wing remained true to his purpose for coming to the United States. He received twenty-two requests for money from relatives in China and sent back money on sixteen occasions. In 1939 alone, not long before communication to Dragon Village was cut off, Shuck Wing sent home $250, which in 2012 would be
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worth $4,129.77 He also participated in the cultural life of the village by doing favors for relatives, who in turn helped his mother with family affairs. Shuck Wing improved his family’s social standing among the seventeen families in Dragon Village by sending gifts of cash and goods from the United States to elders in China.78 Local power brokers returned the favors with small loans when his family was in need. But in 1946, Shuck Wing abruptly cut off contact with people in China. He stopped writing and sending money, and eventually his family quietly disappeared from his life. In the last surviving letter, dated June 24, 1946, his daughter wrote to thank him for the money she had received and to describe how she had spent it. She reminded him that Mrs. Chin, her grandmother and Shuck Wing’s mother, had a birthday soon and wished for her father’s return.79 As far as we can tell from the records, Shuck Wing nei- ther replied nor returned to China. He lived out the remainder of his life sepa- rated from his family and working wage jobs in New York City. After ten years, Shuck Wing had broken away from the transpacific social network that had embraced him so tightly.
Conclusion
The transpacific family network that sustained the Chins through years of sep- aration was a delicate web. Letter writing imperfectly extended a culture of obligation into the everyday lives of wage earners who worked for their rel- atives in small family businesses across the United States. As a Chin family wage worker, Shuck Wing felt his relatives’ disapproval when he made plans that might have severed his overseas ties. Chins from across the globe sent let- ters that guided Shuck Wing away from opening his own restaurant and per- suaded him to end his relationship with Vera Bartlow, the white sales clerk. His relatives meddled in Shuck Wing’s life because he played a critical role in the Chin family’s collective struggle for success. The family had invested much time and money in bringing Shuck Wing to the United States, which his relatives believed obligated him to accept a life of sacrifice for the family. His service to the Chin family as a dutiful laborer was essential to making the Chin family businesses in North America profitable. Accordingly, he was asked to surrender himself to the collective and to become one of thousands of Chi- nese workers who cooked and served Chinese food to American consumers. In death as in life, Shuck Wing was just another worker.80
As a man who cooked for others, Shuck Wing provides a case study for understanding Chinese restaurant operations during the era of Chinese Exclu- sion. My examination of Chinese restaurant life puts a face and name to the
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anonymous and forgotten masses whose labor built the Chinese restaurant industry into what it is today. Given that the Chinese restaurant industry con- tinues to grow and that the Chinese can easily find work in it, Chinese of all backgrounds—from educated professionals to semiliterate manual laborers— share the experience of cooking over sizzling stoves or waiting on disgruntled customers. Yet the information about this prevailing experience is limited to autobiographical or literary portraits of restaurant life and statistical reports on Chinese occupations. As a close study of one Chinese restaurant worker in New York, I hope to have sharpened our historical understanding of this common Chinese American experience by humanizing the work of feeding the “eager exodus toward Chinatown.” By studying the barely articulated and unquantifiable aspects of the experience for Chinese restaurant workers, we learn that these anonymous bachelors who dished out chop suey day in and day out have histories and aspirations that crisscross the Asia Pacific and the continental United States.
Notes My thanks to the K-Team Writing Group for nurturing this work through many drafts
and for picking through it with a fine comb in its final stages. I am deeply indebted to my dissertation committee for guiding me through the hurdles I faced while researching and writing. I wish honor to my family, especially my mother, whose love and support made this research possible. Mom, your patience and dedication to the ones you love are bottomless, and I am infinitely grateful to be on the receiving end.
1. Chop suey is the Chinese term for “different pieces” and is the name for stir-fried hash served over rice or noodles.
2. Bertram Reinitz, “Our Town and Its Folk: Chop Suey’s New Role,” New York Times, December 27, 1925.
3. I calculated these restaurant statistics from business information in the Chinese Exclu- sion Case files for New York City. I examined 115 of 225 files on Chinese immigrants who listed restaurant work as their primary occupation. From these 115 files, I gathered information on assets, gross receipts, purchases, and expenses. The restaurants included in these calculations operated in the 1920s and 1930s. These statistics calculated from these records are cited as Chinese Exclusion restaurant business data, 1920–1939. See Shepard Schwartz, “Mate-Selection among New York City’s Chinese Males, 1931–38,” American Journal of Sociology 56, no. 6 (1951): 563.
4. For the remainder of this chapter, I refer to Chin Shuck Wing as Shuck Wing to distin- guish him from his brothers who share the last name Chin. I chose this romanization of the Chinese characters 甄灼榮 because he used this transliteration in his legal docu- ments. I refer to one of his uncles by his legal English name and to his mother as Mrs. Chin. In all other romanizations of Chinese names, I use pinyin phonetics and place the family name first.
5. Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migra- tion Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 16–18.