The Wong family’s path to Beloit, Wisconsin, was unlikely. During the long period of Chinese exclusion stretching from 1882 to 1943, it was nearly impossible to emigrate to the United States from China. Most Chinese men living in America were sojourners who claimed a family connection in the US. They earned money abroad but maintained a family in their home villages where their children would continue their family lines, remaining close to and venerating their ancestors. Sojourners would return home to make sure that their families were doing well and to engage in marital visits that would ensure additional children. Most would eventually resettle in China.
Charles Wong chose a different path. Like several of his male family members, he had been claimed as a son by an uncle who was already a US citizen.1 Because Charles was an American citizen, his Chinese-born wife, Yee Shee, was eligible to enter the US. In 1923, concerned by tightening immigration laws, Charles traveled to China to bring Yee Shee to America. The couple settled in Beloit, Wisconsin, where Charles had moved with family members several years before to operate a restaurant, Lo Nanking (and later, Nan King Lo and the Chop House). Charles and Yee Shee would have seven children between 1924 and 1937. As the Wong family grew, they made up most of the Chinese people in town. Others were their cousins, some co-owners of the restaurant and other workers, all either single men or men whose families lived in China.
Although they were the first Chinese Americans to raise a family in Beloit, the Wongs were not the first to settle in Beloit. When Charles arrived in Beloit, sometime between 1916 and 1920, two Chinese businesses in adjacent buildings—the restaurant and a Chinese laundry—shared a backyard and men’s living quarters. A Chinese man had purchased Coates Steam Laundry on Bridge Street in the first decade of the twentieth century, renamed it Wa Sam, and moved it to a location on the west side of the river near the corner of 3rd Street and West Grand. The building had previously been the pattern shop and storage for J. Thompson & Sons Manufacturing, a plow works operated by a Norwegian immigrant family. Wa Sam laundry operated out of the first-floor storefront on 3rd Street with living quarters for workers on the second floor. In 1914, two men named Wong opened the Lo Nanking Restaurant on West Grand and used the upstairs of the laundry as living quarters. By 1920, Charles and his close relatives owned the restaurant and he lived in the
