More Surprises About the Chinese Jugglers Troupe 1850s Tour of the U.S.

In a previous post describing my research into why my father went directly to Chattanooga, Tennessee, when he emigrated from Hoiping in1921, I mentioned stumbling upon a notice of a troupe of jugglers from China performing in Montgomery, Alabama. Surprised by this intriguing find, I searched for more information and learned that this troupe performed in several places in the U.S. with impressive skill and artistry.

Now, about a  year later I got another surprise when I received an email from Tony Bosch Reitz, in Melbourne, Australia.  His maternal great grandfather, Frederick Taen, was one of the jugglers of this troupe that also performed in England and Europe! Reitz gave me a link to a poster for an 1853  performance in Natchez, Mississippi.

Reitz also included an1867 photograph of Ar Hee, in costume, posing with his two sons, Frederick and Alfred Taen, and a friend.

Preservation of Historic Chinese Sites

Chinatowns everywhere are undergoing many inevitable physical changes. Such is "progress" and it is not necessarily all bad. But some physical structures and landmarks are "iconic" aspects of the history of Chinese throughout the U.S., Canada, and many other places where Chinese emigrated to during the diaspora of past centuries. The focus here will be only on historic presentation in North America.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has included descriptions of several significant historic sites for Chinese.

Julia Morgan, the famed architect of the iconic Hearst Castle, also designed the Chinese YWCA building (1932) in San Francisco, now the home of the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA).     
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Director Sue Lee recorded at the CHSA in 201

Lynching John Chinaman

Vigilante justice involves mob rule where victims, guilty or innocent, get no day in court to plead their case. In American history, the lynching of black Americans in the South was not uncommon. In the first 6 months of 1903, for example, of lynchings of 48 men, mostly Colored men, 44 took place in southern states.

There were a few cases. however, that involved Chinese victims.  The sketch below was a political statement expressing resentment toward cheap Chinese labor that took work from whites and was not a representation of an actual lynching. Nonetheless, it could incite real-life incidents where Chinese were lynched.

In 1871 some Chinese had an argument among themselves and they fired guns, accidentally killing one policeman who came on the scene which angered a mob of about 500 men who destroyed Chinatown and attacked any Chinese in their path. Known as the Los Angeles massacre, they murdered 20 Chinese who were found hanging at three locations in the area. Some of them may have been lynched, but apparently, some were killed before they were then hung from supports.

In 1874, two Chinese murderers were lynched in of all places, Happy Camp, in a mining area in northern California.

A Chinese in Marysville, California, was found to have sexually molested a 13-year-old girl. Local authorities saved him from a lynching by quickly moving him out of town.

A Chinese cook lynched near Bakersfield, California, had attacked a mill employee with a knife.

Chinese Herbal Doctors Treated Americans

“Dr. Gee Wo Chan made a name for himself as a proprietor of Chinese herbal medicine. Described as one of the most influential Chinese-Americans of his time, Chan was one of three Chinese-American businessmen who sponsored the Chinese Village exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition, with an investment of $90,000.

Excerpt From: David Dodson. “Chinese Medicine in Post-Frontier America: A Tale of Three Chinese-American Doctors.” 

 Dr. Chan then opened storefront clinics in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Omaha. Clever advertisements in English for the C. Gee Wo Chinese Medicine Co. in the Milwaukee Journal daily from 1894 through 1897 clearly aimed at selling Chinese medicine to European-Americans.  Nearly identical as ran in the Omaha Bee newspaper simultaneously for a storefront of the same name in Omaha.

He placed large ads in newspapers such as this one in Omaha in 1891.

How could a single doctor run a practice in three separate cities at the same time? It turned out that in Milwaukee and Omaha, men impersonating Dr. Gee Wo Chan were arrested for practicing medicine without a license.

One such arrest in Omaha was described in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1899:

The . . . Board of Health today . . . secured the arrest of the manager of Dr. Wo’s medical parlors.  It is claimed that Dr. Gee Wo Chan is practicing his profession in Chicago, and that his Omaha office is being conducted by another Celestial, who assumes the name of his principal. . . . The[…]”

“he expanded to multiple cities, developing a chain of clinics using his name and image.  To accomplish this, he hired other Chinese herbalists to stand in for him.  His denial notwithstanding, this was possibly an intentional strategy for circumventing anxieties and negative beliefs about the Chinese in a violently anti-Chinese place and time; the customer was assured they would be personally seen and treated by the familiar and trustworthy Dr. Chan himself."

Chan was charged with practicing medicine without a license in Nebraska.  He fought the charge and the case was seen by the Supreme Court of Nebraska on Feb. 15, 1893.   Nebraska had just passed a law in 1891 restricting who can practice medicine.  

Similar laws passed in other states with the requirement of being a citizen in order to practice medicine.  Training in traditional Chinese medicine and herbalism was nowhere recognized as a medical degree.  Dr. Chan lost his case and the State Supreme Court upheld the recent law, and yet, his Chinese medicine business continued to thrive.”

“The Chinese Exclusion Act file contains a single transcript, one page in length, of an interview with a “witness” Gee Way Chan, dated 9/8/1905. [7] Gee Way Chan was the acting manager for the Gee Wo Chan Chinese Medicine, Co., at 427 Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill.  
At this time, Dr. Chan himself was visiting China.  The purpose of the interview was to establish that Dr. Chan was still a merchant—a requirement for him to return to the country under the Chinese Exclusion Act.  The interview establishes that Dr. Chan still maintained a $5,000 interest in the company. 

By 1924, Chan moved to Portland, Oregon, where he opened a Chinese medicine company.

Excluding Chinese Continued Even When Jobs for Whites Were Abundant

The primary reason cited for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was that cheap Chinese labor was taking jobs from whites, especially during the great economic depression that started in 1873.  As dramatized in an 1894 cartoon depiction, the Chinese would eventually take over all forms of work.

       However, the 1882 exclusion law, proposed initially for 10 years, was renewed several times and was not repealed until 1943. Over these many years, there were periods of prosperity and the initial rationale for Chinese exclusion was not valid for its continuation.  Factors other than economic ones played an important role in continuing exclusion such as intolerance of cultural differences in customs, values, dress, and food, to name a few.  Feelings of white superiority over "Orientals" or xenophobia, fear of different peoples, often unwarranted, also contributed to exclusion.

Chinese Acting Badly

It is generally known that Chinese laundrymen suffered hostility and even physical violence from communities all over the country. In addition, they sometimes faced harmful actions from other rival Chinese laundries in their neighborhood. Several examples that I posted several years ago on a different blog, illustrate some wicked reactions by competing Chinese laundrymen.

Cut-rate pricing offered a way to increase patronage, but at the expense of other laundries.  For example, in 1896, Sam Sing, a laundryman in Alexandria, Virginia, accused a nearby competitor, Ah Moy, of sending anonymous obscene letters to Sing’s wife. It was suspected that Moy may have been motivated to send these letters because Sing had cut his laundry prices to gain more business at Moy’s expense. Moy, being single, may also have been motivated by jealousy of Sing who seemed happily married with two children.

Two years later, another bitter battle developed among some laundrymen in Washington that also involved conflict over cut-rate laundry prices. Moy Gee You, aka Hop Sing as well as Ah Sing, was the only laundryman offering cut-rate prices, which the Chinese laundry union opposed. They retaliated by accusing him of mailing obscene literature. The plaintiffs admit they paid off Moy Gee You to hold the line on higher laundry prices. They charge he did not live up to their price-fixing contract, and should be required to refund the money he had received to fix prices.

It is interesting that in both cases, the way chosen to get back at someone was to accuse them of sending obscene mail. You could get your opponent in trouble with the authorities and he would have to spend time and money defending himself.

 

Chinese laundrymen often faced stiff competition from white-owned laundries, which often had newer and better steam-operated machines. In one encounter in Indianapolis with the threat represented to their laundry business when a white laundry opened, two Chinese took the rather drastic action of allegedly dynamiting the building of the new competitor.