"Chinaman," Popular Newspaper Header 1870s-1940s

     Newspaper articles from about 1870 until the 1940s involving a Chinese typically used the term, Chinaman, rather than the person's name, occupation, or other descriptors.  Here is a small sample of the more than 800 articles over this period from the New York Times, many of which were reprinted in newspapers around the country.  Some were short one paragraph incidents while others were extensive articles.  Common topics included robbery, assault, and murders involving a Chinaman at his laundry, as well as smuggling, gambling, and other illegal activities.  

Other common topics were marriages to white women, fights, disputes, and crimes among the Chinese. Other articles were informational, derisive comments and descriptions of some curious customs and traditions of Chinamen.

 (To enlarge the video to full screen, click at bottom right)

Tank Kee (aka George Bailey), China "Expert" Lecture Tour of U.S. 1870s-1890s

    George Bailey1 claimed to have been orphaned and found off the coast of China and raised by the royal family. Bailey’s obituary by his friend, William Payne, in the Evening Times-Republican in 1902 in Marshalltown, Iowa, explaining that Bailey’s family moved to China for business when George was a child. The young couple died of cholera, and Bailey was taken in by a wealthy Chinese family and nicknamed “Tank Kee,” a seemingly Chinese name related to the characters for blue-green and remembrance or record.  

 

         By the early 1870s, George Bailey had started a traveling lecture career in the United States using the name, Tank Kee, as if he were part of the Chinese diaspora. For over twenty years, he would travel across western, midwestern, and southern states speaking to audiences about China.  Bailey’s performances as Tank Kee was different from that of other white performers at the time who claimed to showcase Asian culture. Unlike these other popular performers, Bailey did not perform in yellowface or pander to white audiences by trafficking in cheap stereotypes. Instead, he used his lectures to push back against rising anti-Chinese racism across the United States, believing that anti-immigrant sentiments stemmed from ignorance. His lectures aimed to educate his audiences on Chinese history and culture in order to change their minds about Chinese immigration, a political message Bailey made explicit both in his public lectures and frequent newspaper articles defending Chinese people against attacks on their morality and character. 

    Tank Kee lectured about China in a tour throughout the United States that featured many “curiosities”—including dresses, statues, coins, and books. He brought these goods to the South and Midwest, including Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul.  As a part of his lectures, Bailey wore these elaborate Chinese costumes to “illustrate” different roles; sometimes he would use objects, including fans, embroidery, statues, and ivory carvings, as a visual reference. Later, he would design more formal exhibits as curator of the American Archaeological and Asiatic Society, which he created in Wichita, Kansas.

       Under the byline Tank Kee, Bailey wrote many opinion pieces strongly criticizing America’s growing anti-Chinese sentiment, which put him in direct opposition with Dennis Kearney, the champion of  "The Chinese Must Go" campaigns. During his tour of the Southeast, he wrote what came to be known as the “Mississippi Letters,” which shared his critical thoughts on race and culture in the Jim Crow South that made him many enemies in the South.

   Eventually, as visitors to see his collections declined by1890, Bailey sought a permanent home for his extensive Chinese collections. In 1891 he offered to donate everything to the University of Texas if the following terms were met: the university would build a suitable building to preserve the books; the professors would be its trustees; Bailey’s mark would be stamped on all the books; the objects would be repaired; the library would be preserved intact; and, lastly, the building would be named the Tank Kee Library. 

    The Dallas Morning News estimated that the 33,000 volumes were valued at around $120,000 to $150,000, a massive sum for the time, and the university wanted the collection. A month later, none of the books had been delivered, however. A reporter asked Bailey why he was delaying, and Bailey said that the University of Texas would not build a fireproof building and wanted only to add his books to the general library, a proposition he would not accept.   But there was never any agreement about the building, and the deal collapsed.  

    Bailey contacted the renowned Newberry Library in Chicago. which was actively seeking to expand its holdings. Instead of trying to donate the entire collection and negotiating payments for transportation and other costs, Bailey offered to sell many of the English books on China, the Chinese encyclopedia, seventeenth-century Jesuit texts, Chinese paintings, and military maps. He told the Newberry that he had acquired most of his books during his thirty years living in China.  The Chicago Sunday Tribune reported that the most treasured “curiosity” was the 239-volume “imperial encyclopedia, used only by the mandarins, and held by them under the government, to which in the end it must be returned, and but one other copy exists outside the empire.” While his entire collection was valued at more than $100,000, he sold these volumes for $12,000 to the Newberry, more than recovering the costs incurred from his Masonic misadventure. He continued to travel throughout the Midwest and Southeast and lecture about China until his death in 1902.

1 Not to be confused with the George Bailey character made famous by James Stewart in the movie, "It's A Wonderful Life."

Sources:

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/tank-kees-library

https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/10/28/tank-kee/

Mississippi Triangle: Relation of black, white and Chinese in the Delta

     Almost all discussions about problems in race relations historically have focused on a binary, black versus white, and give little or no attention to other groups. In the Mississippi Delta, such a focus misses the unique situation which has existed there for over a century. The Chinese, although small in number, played a significant role as a group situated physically and socially between the larger black and white communities.              

    There is no lack of information about the dominant relationship that whites held in the Delta with respect to blacks. Much less is known about how blacks and whites regard and treat the Chinese?  And how did the Chinese view and react to the black and the white communities?

    Whites had the most power and dominated the blacks in the Delta as throughout the racially segregated South.  The Chinese had less status than the whites but more than the blacks. They were in an in-between status, higher than blacks, but not as high as whites. The Chinese made their living for decades almost entirely operating small grocery stores in black neighborhoods of small rural towns in the Delta. They provided invaluable services to blacks, even extending goods to them on credit until payday, which was not possible in white grocery stores that were less welcoming to black customers. So, while the Chinese benefited financially from serving blacks, they wanted to have the social privileges of whites, not the least of which was access for their children to white schools which were better financed than schools for blacks. Some Chinese children attended mission schools provided by the Baptist church in Cleveland, MS. even though some had to board at the school because it was not within commuting distance.  The Chinese could not attend white schools until a few years after WWII, with one of the main reasons being white fears that some Chinese children were not "pure" Chinese but may have had a black mother.

      Blacks benefited from the better treatment from Chinese grocers than from white stores, but some blacks felt some Chinese overpriced merchandise. Chinese also had cause for tensions with some blacks, and over the years there were many assaults, robberies, thefts, and even homicides committed by blacks against Chinese. Although most black customers were innocent of such offenses, the Chinese had to be vigilant and wary of the dangers they faced from some black residents. Newspaper clippings of some of the many attacks on the Chinese over the decades document the dangers they faced constantly.

     Awareness and memories of these harmful actions by blacks on the Chinese is a sensitive topic that the Chinese do not like to discuss. They have been "sitting targets" for decades with incidents as far back as 1892. They have little control over the situation and prefer to brag about their success as grocers and the academic achievements of their children.

    One of the first attempt to film interviews and interactions with Chinese, whites, and blacks in the Delta, aptly named, Mississippi Triangle, was in 1982-3 by a trio of filmmakers led by Christine Choy, a Korean American from New York along with Worth Long, a black, and  Allan Siegel, a Jew.  Hoping to get more honest answers about racial attitudes, the filmmakers matched the race of the respondent with that of the interviewer. Although several Chinese were interviewed, one elderly woman, Arlee Hen, who was part Chinese and part black, clearly was interviewed more extensively and presented in short snippets throughout the film.

    The Chinese were very sensitive to any insinuation that they were racist and unhappy to have so much focus on an unrepresentative member of their community and felt the film sometimes depicted Chinese negatively.  The rumor, which was not confirmed, was that after the filmmakers ended their interviews and departed, they secretly returned to continue their interview with Arlee Hen. The Chinese were quite upset with the film and felt they had been deceived about the purpose of the film. Mississippi Triangle examined the attitudes of each of the three communities toward each other but some Delta Chinese assumed the film would call attention to the many successes of the Delta Chinese. At a Clarksdale screening of the film and discussion with the filmmakers attended by about 200 Chinese, the reaction was negative because they felt the film gave a negative view of the Delta Chinese, one that might have been valid decades ago but did not reflect the present.

Here is a  trailer for the film.

    I learned about the film and its controversy a decade or more ago but had never seen it until recently with I discovered it can be rented for online viewing on vimeo.com.

      I also unearthed a podcast on Soundcloud where two commentators discuss their reactions to Mississippi Triangle on a series that covers Asian American topics on Saturday School.  The above link I provided skips the opening chit chat of 8:45 before they get down to business discussing the film.

You will note the podcast audio screen below includes a photo of Arlee Hen.

    The podcast raises some worthwhile points illustrated with audio clips from the film.  Unfortunately, the two podcasters are a bit too jovial and "amused" in their discussion in my view, which detracts from their analysis.

A difficult to locate but a more detailed discussion of the film and its reception  by Renee Tajima and Adria Bernardi is in the July/August 1984 issue of Southern Exposure, pp 17-23, "The Chinese: 100 years in the South."