Chinese Americans in the Heartland: Migration, Work, and Community

By Huping Ling

The term “Heartland” in American cultural context conventionally tends to provoke imageries of corn-fields, flat landscape, hog farms, and rural communities, along with ideas of conservatism, homogeneity, and isolation. But as the Midwestern and Southern states experienced more rapid population growth than that in California, Hawaii, and New York in the recent decades, the Heartland region has emerged as a growing interest of Asian American studies. Focused on the Heartland cities of Chicago, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri, this book draws rich evidences from various government records, personal stories and interviews, and media reports, and sheds light on the commonalities and uniqueness of the region, as compared to the Asian American communities on the East and West Coast and Hawaii. Some of the poignant stories such as “the Three Moy Brothers,” “Alla Lee,” and “Save Sam Wah Laundry” told in the book are powerful reflections of Asian American history.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978826304

Huping Ling

Huping Ling is a professor of history at Truman State University. She has authored/edited nine books on Asian Americans. The images carefully selected from the area archives, museums, libraries, and private collections vividly illuminate the struggle and success of the Chinese Americans in the area in the past century and a half.

Book preview

Cover: Chinese Americans in the Heartland, Migration, Work, and Community by Huping Ling

Chinese Americans in the Heartland

Asian American Studies Today

This series publishes scholarship on cutting-edge themes and issues, including broadly based histories of both long-standing and more recent immigrant populations; focused investigations of ethnic enclaves and understudied subgroups; and examinations of relationships among various cultural, regional, and socioeconomic communities. Of particular interest are subject areas in need of further critical inquiry, including transnationalism, globalization, homeland polity, and other pertinent topics.

Series Editor

Huping Ling

Truman State University

Chien-Juh Gu, The Resilient Self: Gender, Immigration, and Taiwanese Americans

Stephanie Hinnershitz, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968

Jennifer Ann Ho, Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture

Helene K. Lee, Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese

Huping Ling, Chinese Americans in the Heartland: Migration, Work, and Community

Haiming Liu, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States

Jun Okada, Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements

Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences and Racial Exceptionalism

Zelideth María Rivas and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, eds., Imagining Asia in the Americas

David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds., Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media

Leslie Kim Wang, Chasing the American Dream in China: Chinese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland

Jane H. Yamashiro, Redefining Japaneseness: Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland

Chinese Americans in the Heartland

Migration, Work, and Community

HUPING LING

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ling, Huping, 1956– author.

Title: Chinese Americans in the heartland : migration, work, and community / Huping Ling.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Series: Asian American studies today | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021058255 | ISBN 9781978826298 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978826281 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978826304 (epub) | ISBN 9781978826311 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978826328 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Chinese Americans—Middle West—History. | Middle West—Emigration and immigration. | Middle West—Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC F358.2.C5 L56 2022 | DDC 977/.004951—dc23/eng/20220323

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058255

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Huping Ling

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Asian Americans in the heartland

Contents

A Note on Translation and Terminology

1 Introduction: Defining the Asian American Heartland and Its Significance

PART I

Transnational Migration and Work

2 Transnational Migration and Businesses in Chinese Chicago, 1870s–1930s

3 Building Hop Alley: Myth and Reality of Chinatown in St. Louis, 1860s–1930s

4 The Intellectual Tradition of the Heartland: The Chicago School and Beyond

PART II

Marriage, Family, and Community Organizations

5 Family and Marriage among Chicagoland Chinese, 1880s–1940s

6 Living in Hop Alley, 1860s–1930s

7 Governing Hop Alley: The On Leong Chinese Merchants and Laborers Association, 1906–1966

PART III

New Community Structures

8 The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and the Formation of Cultural Community in St. Louis

9 The Tripartite Community in Chicago

10 Conclusion: Convergences and Divergences

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

A Note on Translation and Terminology

Although the Pinyin phonetic system, based on Putonghua or Mandarin Chinese, has been more widely used in recent academic writings, the earlier Wade-Giles system still persists. In this book I have used Pinyin whenever Chinese place-names are encountered, except those preferred transliterations of certain proper nouns, such as Canton for Guangzhou (Pinyin). Regarding the names of Chinese people covered in the book, however, the situation is more complicated. While the English-language government records, archival manuscripts, and newspapers recorded the names of Chinese people based on their pronunciations from Cantonese or other local dialects without consistency, the Chinese-language sources provided the names in Chinese characters that are consistent in writing. Such variants make consistency in spelling people’s names nearly impossible. I have managed to bring some degree of consistency to the spelling of people’s names by using the original spellings cited in the English-language sources and Pinyin spellings based on Putonghua from the Chinese-language sources. However, inconsistency in some cases is inevitable. For example, the surname Moy in Cantonese pronunciation also appears in its Pinyin form Mei in the later chapters.

In addition, both the singular form community and the plural form communities have been used to refer to the Chinese settlement in Chicago before and after 1912, respectively. Before 1912, it was primarily a single-sited community, located in the Loop area around South Clark Street. After 1912, when the majority of the Chinatown businesses and residents relocated to the Cermak-Wentworth area, some remained in the South Clark neighborhood. Since the 1960s, the expansion of South Chinatown, the emergence of suburban communities, and the revival of North Chinatown have resulted in the multisited Chinese American communities. In addition, the plural form communities emphasizes the cultural, economic, linguistic, political, and social diversity among the Chinese in Chicago.

Chinese Americans in the Heartland

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

DEFINING THE ASIAN AMERICAN HEARTLAND AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

LOCATING THE ASIAN AMERICAN HEARTLAND

The term heartland in the American cultural context conventionally tends to provoke images of endless cornfields, flat landscapes, hog farms, and rural communities. It also links with ideas of conservatism, homogeneity, provincialism, and isolation. This region is composed of predominantly red states, with voters favoring Republican candidates in general elections. These are also referred to as flyover states, the lands viewed from airplane windows by busy coastal travelers during transcontinental flights.¹

Against this backdrop, I began my doctoral program in one of the heartland universities and wrote my dissertation on Chinese American women’s history. Upon completing my dissertation, I landed an assistant professorship at a midwestern liberal arts university, and I have lived in the region for more than three decades. During this time span I encountered records on Alla Lee, a Chinese immigrant from Ningbo, China, who came to St. Louis in 1857, where he opened a tea shop and married an Irish immigrant girl, thus becoming the first recorded Chinese St. Louisan. I also found materials on the three Moy brothers, who pioneered the Chinese community in Chicago in the 1870s. Besides learning about those newcomers to the heartland in the larger urban metropolises, I personally befriended many Chinese American professionals, business owners, and laborers who chose the heartland as their destination for a new life in America. To systematically document their lives and histories, my students of Asian American Studies at my institution, Truman State University, and I interviewed hundreds of Asian Americans from major cities and small towns of the region and then meticulously recorded their stories. My research trips led me not only to numerous archives, libraries, and local museums but also to restaurants, grocery shops, laundries, clinics, accounting firms, newspaper offices, and even cemeteries. The findings of this research and investigation have powerfully shattered many popular myths and perceptions. From its inception, America’s heartland has been a land intertwined with American capitalist expansion and exploitation, machination and industrialization, continental and global commerce, and racial and ethnic complexity and confrontation. A good example of this narrative is Kristin L. Hoganson’s The Heartland: An American History (2019).²

Two midwestern metropolises, Chicago and St. Louis, stand out in particular as the best examples of the connectedness and interactions between the hinterland and the coasts, agriculture and industrialization, and urban centers and rural communities, as so elegantly narrated in William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) and Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (2020). In this volume, I focus on individuals and social forces that are missing in these two and many other books, the Chinese Americans in the heartland.³

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HEARTLAND IN ASIAN AMERICAN LIFE

New Demographic Trends

In recent decades, a new demographic trend has developed as midwestern and southern states have experienced more rapid growth of the Asian American population than California, Hawaii, and New York, the states with the highest Asian American populations. Because the 2010 U.S. Census for the first time made separate counts for the Asian population alone and the Native Hawaii and Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) population alone, I list them accordingly in table 1.1. From 2000 to 2010, the fastest Asian and NHOPI population growth occurred in the U.S. South and Midwest. Twelve states in the South (as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau) experienced a growth greater than 50 percent in both or either of the two groups: Alabama (71.0), Arkansas (78.5), Delaware (76.0), Florida (70.8), Georgia (81.6), Kentucky (64.5), Maryland (51.2), North Carolina (83.8), South Carolina (64), Tennessee (61), Texas (71.5), and Virginia (68.5). Twelve states in the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) and one state in the Northeast (Vermont) experienced growth of nearly 45 percent in their Asian alone and NHOPI alone populations. In comparison, the growth of Asian alone and NHOPI alone populations in California, Hawaii, and New York all fell below 36 percent.

Readers may immediately wonder why the heartland has attracted so many Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans. The empirical surveys I conducted along with my team point to three primary factors: a lower cost of living, a lower crime rate, and a favorable environment for raising children. At the same time, the more favorable socioeconomic and cultural conditions in the heartland also require Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans who settled in the region to be more resourceful and adaptable, with more economic resources and the social capital of better education and professional training, unlike their counterparts in the major Chinatowns on the coasts where less educated working-class Chinese are the majority of the population.⁴

This demographic change prompts the Asian American community and academia to call for the field to expand beyond its traditional scope—that is, a focus on the West and East Coasts and Hawaii—to incorporate the Midwest and the South into the Asian American experience.⁵ In the Midwest, the field of Asian American Studies faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities. The challenges manifest in a variety of bureaucratic and ideological constraints, such as less sympathetic administrations and academic discourses on the differences and connections between Asians and Asian Americans.⁶ Thus, Asian American Studies in the Midwest has to deal with a host of nuanced issues: How does the demographic and ethnic makeup of the region impact teaching and research? What issues are of special concern to midwestern Asian American communities? How do these issues force the practitioners of Asian American Studies to reconceive pedagogical and research projects? What resources—historical, cultural, and political—can students and teachers in these regions draw upon to reframe their projects?⁷

Manifestations of Asian American Studies Programs in the Midwest

The growth of Asian American Studies (AAS) programs in the Midwest is a testimony to the expansion of the field. The program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was founded in 1997 and currently is one of the largest AAS programs in the Midwest, with fourteen core and ten affiliated faculty members. The histories of Asian American student organizations at the University of Illinois are varied. Several originated as clubs for Asian international students (e.g., the Indian Students Association and the Philippine Students Association) and later evolved into organizations for Asian American students, whereas several others were conceived primarily for Asian American students (e.g., the Asian American Association and the Taiwanese American Students Club). Regardless of the origins of these student groups, it was the collaborative effort of the various Asian American student organizations and the faculty, staff, and administration that resulted in the formation of the AAS program. In the fall of 1997, the Asian American Studies Committee was organized, with the charge to build an academic program in AAS. George Yu became the program’s first director and served a five-year term. This academic program began offering classes in the fall of 2000, with six faculty positions filled. In the fall of 2002, the academic minor in AAS became available, and Kent Ono was hired as director of the program.⁸

The AAS program at the University of Minnesota followed suit. A state with a reputation for its pronounced German and Scandinavian presence (at the time of the 2010 U.S. Census, Americans of German ancestry constituted 38 percent of the state’s residents, and Americans of Scandinavian ancestry, 32 percent), Minnesota has been a magnet for immigrants from countries throughout Asia since the 1970s, when Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos began migrating there. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Southeast Asians, including Hmong, Lao, Cambodians, and Vietnamese, further contributed to the state’s Asian population growth. In more recent decades, refugees from Tibet, Burma, and Thailand have also made Minnesota their home. The 2010 U.S. Census reported that Minneapolis and St. Paul had the greatest concentration of Asian Americans in the interior of the United States (7.2 percent).⁹

The burgeoning Asian American population makes Minnesota an exciting research site for studying and addressing the challenges faced both by new refugees and immigrants and by earlier generations of Asian Americans. In 1998, faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and artists, leaders, and activists in the Twin Cities organized the Asian American Studies Initiative at the University of Minnesota. They recognized a need to reframe for Minnesota a discipline traditionally focused on the East and West Coasts and sought to establish an academic presence on campus. In 2003, that goal became a reality when the regents of the University of Minnesota voted to establish the Asian American Studies Program and an undergraduate minor.¹⁰

While the larger land-grant universities in the Midwest established independent AAS programs (table 1.2), in the 1990s, midwestern universities or colleges with fewer resources also established joint AAS programs in conjunction with ethnic studies or Asian studies. For instance, Truman State University, a public liberal arts institution in Kirksville, Missouri, launched a number of AAS courses in 1991 and finally established a joint degree-granting program in Asian and Asian American Studies in 2000, with concentrations in AAS, East Asian Studies, and South/Pan-Asian Studies.¹¹

In recent years, the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) has more frequently held its annual conference in the South and Midwest to reflect the demographic changes in those regions. The association’s annual conference was held in Atlanta in 2006, Chicago in 2008, Austin in 2010, New Orleans in 2011, Miami in 2016, and Madison, Wisconsin, in 2019. These conferences brought scholars and community activists to rapidly expanding Asian American population centers in the Midwest and the South, where they learned about the development and concerns of the local Asian American communities, discussed strategies to address these concerns, and laid out research agendas for the field.

The demographic changes, the rapid development of academic programs in midwestern higher educational institutions, and the historiographical review of sources indicate that the abundant social, economic, cultural, and political resources in the Midwest enable the field of AAS to be more diverse, dynamic, and inclusive. This volume is an effort to promote that endeavor, and I look forward to more students and colleagues joining the forces.

STRUCTURE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS VOLUME

Structure

Riding on the wave of the emerging scholarship in AAS in the Midwest, this book is a culmination of my research and writing over the past three decades. It garners the multifaceted experiences of Chinese Americans in the region and the most significant findings from empirical studies of oral history interviews, surveys, census data, archival manuscripts, court and municipal records, memoirs and autobiographies, archaeological sites and artifacts, and digital records. Reflecting the most acute and urgent concerns in AAS and American immigration policies and practices from both academic circles and the general population, this volume focuses on three areas—immigration and work, family and community, and the structural construction and reconstruction of Asian American communities—that correspond to the book’s three parts.

Part I: Transnational Migration and Work. Since the 1990s, a growing number of scholars have noted that immigrants have conducted their lives across geographic borders and maintained close ties to the country of their birth. Many social scientists have begun to use the term transnational to describe such cross-national, cross-cultural phenomena. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, anthropologists who have analyzed and conceptualized transnational migration in more precise language in their coedited book Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, define transnationalism as the emergence of a social process in which migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. Immigrants are understood to be transmigrants when they develop and maintain multiple relations—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political—that span borders.… The multiplicity of migrants’ involvements in both the home and host societies is a central element of transnationalism.¹² Other writers from various disciplines have further delineated and evaluated the theorization of transnationalism.¹³ As the concept of transnationalism has become a compelling theoretical framework for interpreting manifestations of international migration, a number of historians have also endorsed the idea in their monographs.¹⁴ To historians, the concept of transnationalism better interprets Chinese migration by focusing on both native place and host society. At the same time, scholars have cautioned against the overuse or misuse of the term.¹⁵

This study finds that Chinese Americans in the American heartland have been closely linked with the transnational migration network. From the very beginning, Chinese ethnic businesses were closely connected to the transnational ethnic economy. As shown in chapter 2, for all aspects of business, including capital accumulation, procurement of inventory, business operations, and distribution of merchandise, Chinese Chicagoans have depended on the transnational ethnic network. Although they are located in the hinterland, the Chinese in Chicago have been connected to their homeland and to other Chinese communities across the country. The Chinese ethnic economy in Chicago has also served as a vital socioeconomic link to other Chinese communities in the Midwest, thanks largely to the city’s transportation advantages and transnational connections.

Chapter 2, Transnational Migration and Businesses in Chinese Chicago, 1870s–1930s, examines the transnational economic activities of Chicago’s Chinatown. Without the English-language and other skills necessary for competition in the city’s larger labor market, the earliest Chinese residents carved out niche businesses, primarily hand laundries, grocery and general merchandise stores, and restaurants and chop suey shops. Transnational ethnic networks were essential for the sustenance and success of these businesses. Consistent with Chicago’s unique position as a transportation hub, the Chinatown businesses also served as a center for regional socioeconomic development.

Similarly, as described in chapter 3, Building ‘Hop Alley’: Myth and Reality of Chinatown in St. Louis, 1860s–1930s, the Chinese in St. Louis exhibited similar characteristics. The Chinese pioneers in this city faced much the same prejudice and discrimination as did Chinese in other localities, and they engaged in similar entrepreneurial activities—hand laundries, restaurants, grocery stores, tea shops, and opium shops. Their resilience enabled them to survive in an alien environment. This chapter further emphasizes the substantial contribution the Chinese made to the overall industrial and urban development of the city of St. Louis.

Chapter 4, The Intellectual Tradition of the Heartland: The Chicago School and Beyond, explores the intellectual contributions made by students and scholars in Chicago beginning in the 1920s. It examines the literature on Chinese Chicago from three distinct periods: the pioneering period (1920s–1950s), when the Chicago School of sociology spearheaded studies of urban ethnic and working-class neighborhoods; the expansion period (1960s–1990s), when sociologists were joined by scholars from other disciplines, including anthropology, education, geography, and history; and the blooming period (2000–present), when scholars have been producing high-quality monographs, anthologies, and articles on Asian American communities in the heartland.

Part II: Marriage, Family, and Community Organizations. Like Chinese businesses, the family lives of Chinese in the heartland have also been impacted by transnational migration. Transnational connections with the homeland have made it possible for immigrants to support their transpacific families, with money remitted to the homeland sustaining family members there and making it possible for them to purchase land and construct new houses. To cope with marital separation caused by immigration, a special marital arrangement has been practiced within many families. Chapter 5, Family and Marriage among Chicagoland Chinese, 1880s–1940s, discusses the marriage patterns and family structures of the community. Three marriage patterns emerged among Chinese families: transnational split marriages (my conceptualization), in which a man had both a Taishanese widow who remained in China and a concubine who accompanied him to America; traditional Chinese marriages; and American urban marriages, involving love union, interracial marriage, and widow remarriage. The chapter also argues that the first two marriage types were characterized by a large family size and a large age difference between the members of married couples. Life in America also elevated the position of most Chinese women to that of female family heads, co-providers, and joint decision makers.

Chapter 6, Living in ‘Hop Alley,’ 1860s–1930s, examines how the social elements of class, gender, race, religion, and sexuality defined the lives of residents in St. Louis’s Chinatown, known as Hop Alley. While the wives of affluent Chinese merchants enjoyed some of the leisure and comforts of American middle-class life, working-class Chinese women had to cope with the difficulties of daily survival. As a result of the uneven sex ratio (with many more Chinese men than women residing in the city), the Chinese were involved in interracial marriages and sexual relations, yet few of these arrangements were accepted by the larger society. Meanwhile, Christian institutions encouraged social interactions between the Chinese and European Americans that in some cases promoted the upward social mobility of Chinese youths. Recreational activities in Hop Alley helped ease the daily drudgery of laundry work, and Chinese social organizations attempted to improve the social conditions of the Chinese. The stories of the Chinese in Hop Alley were further told by the burials in Wesleyan and Valhalla Cemeteries where the Chinese men finally rested.

Chapter 7, Governing ‘Hop Alley’: The On Leong Chinese Merchants and Laborers Association, 1906–1966, examines the rise and decline of the On Leong Chinese Merchants and Laborers Association, organized to help Chinese merchants cope with the discriminatory environment they faced on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Although tainted with stereotypical imaging of criminal acts of tong fighting and drug smuggling, the St. Louis On Leong worked arduously to protect the commercial interests and legal rights of Chinatown residents.

Part III: New Community Structures. This part compares and contrasts two unique yet representative recent Asian American community structures—the cultural community model in St. Louis, Missouri, and the tripartite division in Chicago, Illinois. Chapter 8, The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and the Formation of Cultural Community in St. Louis, defines the nature and scope of the cultural community model through chronological and thematic treatment and pinpoints the significance and applicability of the model to Chinese American settlements elsewhere in the United States. As demonstrated in this chapter, urban renewal efforts from the 1960s to the present repeatedly halted the attempts by the Chinese in St. Louis to rebuild a Chinatown. The newly arrived Chinese professionals had limited incentive to re-create a Chinatown. Meanwhile, the dispersion of the Chinese restaurant businesses made it difficult and impractical to form a new Chinatown. The perspective of a cultural community concentrates on a community’s social-spatial parameters. A wide array of community organizations, ethnic language schools, ethnic religious institutions, cultural agencies, and cultural celebrations and gatherings constitute a cultural community, which can serve as an alternative model for understanding the ever-changing multifaceted American society.

Chapter 9, The Tripartite Community in Chicago, reveals Chicago Chinese communities as the battleground where interest groups with diverse and sometimes competing cultural, geographic, lineal, social, and political orientations have clashed, compromised, and collaborated. The earliest divides and conflicts emerged among the major clans of the community, the Moys, Chins, and Wongs, in their competition for economic gains and political influence from the 1870s to the 1900s. The lineal divides soon evolved into organizational competitors for community power structures from the 1900s to 1970s (the On Leong Chinese Merchants and Laborers Association versus the Hip Sing Merchants’ Association) and (the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association versus the newer community service organizations). While all power groups vied for the attention of the major political parties in the homeland, whether the Emperor Protection Association (Baohuang Hui) or the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) prior to 1949, the retreat of the Nationalist Party and government to Taiwan and the founding of the People’s Republic of China by the Communist Party in 1949 resulted in divided loyalty among the Chinese in Chicago, similar to what transpired in other Chinese communities across the United States. The post-1949 political confrontation between Taiwan and mainland China also divided the Chinese American community into pro-Taiwan or pro-Nationalist groups and pro-China groups. The influx of ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos following the fall of Saigon in 1975 further complicated the situation, contributing to the expansion of the multiethnic transnational Chinatown on Chicago’s North Side. The geographic diversity continued to evolve as suburban Chinese Americans formed cultural communities beginning in the 1970s, and a working-class Chinese community in Bridgeport expanded South Chinatown in the 1990s. The tripartite division of South Chinatown, North Chinatown, and suburban cultural communities has resulted in Chinese communities in Chicagoland that are complex and diverse.

Significance of this Volume

The rapid growth in the Asian American and Pacific Islander populations in the U.S. heartland in recent decades has required a response both from the larger society and from academia. The concept of the Asian American heartland is a breakthrough in the theoretical development of the historiography of AAS, and similarly in other regional studies on immigration, ethnicity, economics, and society, and so forth. It is hoped that the publication of this volume will inspire and invite more intellectual dialogues on the topics it has explored.

The significance of the heartland in American history and reality is increasingly recognized by both politicians and regular citizens. Consequently, more and more scholars are devoting attention to the area. However, due to the heartland’s socioeconomic differences and diversity and the past neglect of the region in research and writing, scholarly research on the region will take time to catch up with the demand.

An anthology on Chinese Americans in the heartland is both necessary and useful. As more writers have recognized the importance of scholarship on middle America to the public understanding of Asian Americans beyond the traditional regions of the West Coast and New York, books on the American heartland, either monographs or anthologies, are valuable for readers. While a monograph focuses on a single locale and on certain aspects of a subject, an anthology provides comparisons of multiple sites and broader perspectives on the subject. Both genres are equally important, with different effectiveness and purposes, but all serving as intellectual inquiries.

In addition, for at least three reasons, this work is significant to the study of regional history, urban history, Asian American history, and urban policy making. First, it is difficult to understand Chicago or St. Louis without understanding the multiethnic character of their populations, with a significant part being foreign-born. Numerous volumes have been published that depict the multicultural and multiethnic aspects of Chicago and St. Louis and explore these cities’ African, German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish heritage. Among these works, however, only a few deal with Chinese in the region, with a majority of them merely presenting compilations of data.¹⁶ The underrepresentation of Chinese in scholarly works reflects the marginalized existence of Chinese in the past and the lack of recognition of the significance of Chinese Americans to the region in the present.

Second, a study of Chinese in midwestern states is needed for a more complete understanding of AAS. Although the majority of Asian Americans still reside in the larger urban communities on the West and East Coasts, a demographic trend emerged in the 1950s, with midwestern states seeing a rapid increase in their Asian American populations. This book commits to broadening the scope of Asian American Studies from a coast-centered perspective to one that also includes the midwestern states.

Third, this book contributes to ethnic urban studies in the American heartland. Its data and interpretations provide refreshing and invaluable resources on midwestern America that will be of use to scholarly research, to public understanding, and to governmental or private policy making on urban planning and development.

PART I

Transnational Migration and Work

CHAPTER 2

Transnational Migration and Businesses in Chinese Chicago, 1870s–1930s

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, My Kind of Town (lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music composed by Jimmy van Heusen)

Chicago is a city of hope and promise. Situated in the heart of America, favored with land, water, rail, and air transportation advantages, and populated by vibrant multiethnic communities, it attracts thousands of people from across the country who seek to realize their dreams. Barack Obama, a graduate of Columbia University in New York City, moved to Chicago in the summer of 1985 and worked as a community organizer on the city’s South Side, thus starting his political journey to the presidency. His historic victory in the 2008 presidential election was a spectacular manifestation of the fulfillment of the American dream through the promise of