Podcast 111: Stories from the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum

The Preservation Technology Podcast Episode 111

Dr. Catherine Cooper speaks with leaders of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum about the stories shared and made there.

The Preservation Technology Podcast is a series about the people and projects that bring innovation to preservation. Read articles based on episodes, listen, or subscribe. This podcast is produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT).

Catherine Cooper: I'm Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Gilory Chow: Gilroy Chow. I'm currently The President of The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, retired Engineer.

Frieda Quon: I'm Frieda Quon. I'm The Vice President of The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum. And I'm retired Librarian.

Carolyn Chan: I'm Carolyn Chan. I was born in raised in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm an elder among the group now and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have been a Classroom teacher.

Randy Kwan: I'm Randy Kwan and I teach at Hines community college in Pearl, Mississippi, and I teach Film and TV Production.

Emily Jones: I'm Emily Jones, I'm the Archivist and Curator for The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum.

Why do we tell stories?

Frieda points to a class photo

Gilory Chow: There are many stories to be told, and there are many ways to tell it, to do it with an oral history, with a video, with pictures, written. Just so many different ways to archive and capture the information and to share it.

Carolyn Chan: And I think that's what we need more and more of today, is for people to come to a museum such as The Chinese Heritage Museum in Mississippi. See that history and understand that we all have had to go through struggles. We've had to overcome a lot of discrimination, and that we have to understand how each of us have a history that certainly deserves respect, but we also need to respect everybody else's history and work together to make this a better country.

Randy Kwan: What’s really actually helped that blossom has been COVID, because people have been at home, looking for things to do, and they've actually discovered more, I would say there's a greater awareness of the various cultures and the struggles that all the cultures have had to go through. And I really think that's actually kind of helped. I've seen that with my students a little bit, much more sensitivity towards various cultures now.

Emily Jones: One that really has stuck with me since it happened, was when we were up there. I think it was November, when Madeline and your son and his family came.

Frieda Quon: Shannon from Tokyo.

Emily Jones: And they were on the third floor. And you were standing in front of the picture of your dad as a young one. And you were telling Shannon and his two children, the story of how your dad had come as a paper son and how one day your name was this, and then it was a different thing. And what that meant for your dad to admit that and record it officially and all that. And just to watch Shannon realize how close he was to what the 1882 exclusion laws had done.

Frieda Quon: Right.

Emily Jones: As a national thing, it had an effect on him. And just watching you tell your son that.

Frieda Quon: Okay. All right, because I have grown up sons and... one is 50 something. And so this son is like 40 something. He wanted to bring his children, Madeline, who is 20, and Jackson who's 15, I guess. It was the first time. He wanted to bring them to Mississippi. We don't tell our children... So I grew up with... Because my dad was a paper son. So I'm a paper daughter. So half my life, I was Frieda Pang. And then it was not until...

Emily Jones: You were in school, right?

Frieda Quon: Oh yeah. And so then we can change our name and

Gilory Chow: He took their real name,

Frieda Quon: Real name back. And so...

Gilory Chow: Rather the paper name-

Frieda Quon: Some people did it, and then others were scared. I mean, to this day they think they're going to get deported.

Gilory Chow: Because it happens.

Emily Jones: Under today's laws, looking at what paper son created, you would say that there are illegal aliens, but that's the way the system worked in order to come to America. Because the law had created a system that was the natural reaction

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Gilroy talking about the grocery stores and the generation that came before.

Gilory Chow: Because of the end of the transcontinental railroad, you had all these Chinese on the west coast and the west coast said, we need to stop these because they're taking our jobs away. And so the 1882 exclusion act said that, 'oh, they can come, we'll allow 105 families." The only time an ethnic race was...

Frieda Quon: Limited.

Emily Jones: Excluded.

Gilory Chow: Excluded from immigrating to the United States. You had unlimited Irish, unlimited Germans, unlimited Europeans, unlimited Asians, as long as they weren't Chinese

Emily Jones: Right.

Gilory Chow: Chinese were excluded the only time. And it wasn't until 1942, into the war.

Emily Jones: 43 finally.

Gilory Chow: That the Magnuson act corrected that wrong, to not exclude. But not only men in 1882, but a couple of years later, the women were excluded. And so the only group that was excluded. So therefore the only way you could come in was if you were a paper son or a merchant. And so my birth certificate says, my dad was a merchant and I said, "what is a merchant in 1940?" But it was a class that could immigrate legally. And so even though he was a teenager, he was a merchant. Also in 1906 in the earthquake. If you were here by birth—“so what year were you born?” “1906.” “Where's your birth certificate?” "Oh the earthquake got it."

Emily Jones: Yep.

Gilory Chow: So I don't care how old you were. You were born in 1906.

Emily Jones: Yeah.

Gilory Chow: Would be a way of getting in. And so we could look at it now as they were being clever, but that's how bad things were in China with war, famine, economic hardship. There was no place for them at home to...

Emily Jones: To survive yeah.

Gilory Chow: To actually survive.

Emily Jones: And so paper sons, and paper daughters was a thing that happened, but it wasn't just a thing that once happened, it created Frieda.

Frieda Quon: I mean it affected many families.

Emily Jones: And if your dad hadn't done what he did at the time that he did it, you could still be a paper child, if he didn't go the agent up in Memphis and do the things that you had to do to prove that you were worthy of being a citizen, even though you had fought in war. And could you please, sir, have your ancestral name back. He did that. So you married as Frieda Su and not Freida Pang to and...

Gilory Chow: And then she's able to share it with her children.

Emily Jones: Yeah.

Gong Lum v. Rice: 275 U.S. 78 (1927)

Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum display about the Gong Lum case.

Carolyn Chan: The Gong Lums, their daughters, Martha and Berda, they were in the schools in Rochdale, Mississippi at the white school, and they were told after they'd been going to school there that they would have to leave because they were not white.

Randy Kwan: This was in the '30s correct?

Carolyn Chan: No 1924, 1924 is when they filed it. And it went through the Mississippi courts, local courts or the county court. Then the people there, they said, well, no, they're neither white nor black. So they cannot go to school here. They already were enrolled, but they dismissed them for that day. But then Gong Lum decided to hire lawyer and file a case. And the case was decided that they were not white, so they could not go to that school. And there really was no place for them to go. They did not want to go to the black school, and of course some people say, well, they didn't really make a step toward integration. But the way I look at it is they wanted to have the best education for their children. This case went all the way to the Supreme court.

Randy Kwan: Yeah. And of course this was before Brown versus Board of Education-

Carolyn Chan: It's actually recognized as a civil rights case. This is really interesting because when I was teaching in Old Town Elementary school in Albuquerque, one of my coworkers was Rudy Sanchez and he's Hispanic. And he was taking courses on Education for his master's degree. And he actually asked me, he says, “You're from Mississippi originally, do you know anything about the Gong Lum case?” And I said, well, that's my uncle and my aunt, and he said, “Well, you don't realize how important that case is. It's a landmark case.” And I said, oh, okay. That also helped motivate me to become involved politically and advocate.

Growing Up in the Mississippi Delta

Fok Chung Grocery Store, image courtesy of Carolyn Chan

Carolyn Chan: In our neighborhood, we did have a really multiracial and multi-ethnic neighborhood. We had Jewish people, Lebanese people, African Americans that were our customers, Native Americans and Mexican customers in our particular neighborhood because our store was close to the levy. And we had during the time that I was a young person in the store, I grew up there from the time I was born.

Carolyn Chan: I was actually born in the living quarters of the store; I’m the first of the six children that are living in our family. And we got along with everybody, and we did have to go to the one room segregated at school at the time that I was going, until 1947, after World War II was over, and Chinese Americans had served in World War II. We were viewed as being patriotic, and we were then allowed to go to school with white children. Unfortunately, the time that I was growing up… well, actually when I graduated from college, then we were not able to teach in the white schools in Mississippi. So that was one of the reasons I left. Not only that, but I fell in love with my husband. We moved to New Mexico so...

Gilory Chow: I was born on a farm at Cleveland crossing and we had a store and I've heard stories of the gristmill where people would bring their corn and you'd always grind, but you'd never clean up real well until after they left, because you'd get to keep the leftovers. And that was part of it, people were happy to get their corn grounded into meal in a country store.

Gilory Chow: That's a picture. So Freida's husband is professor at Delta State Accounting, his parents had a grocery store. My parents had a grocery store, I've got a degree, my wife's got a degree. Our children have multiple degrees. And so that story's repeated time and time and time again of the hard work that they put in. And again, the values, the work ethic has carried over, and they were role models for us. They didn't realize it. We were role models for our children. We didn't realize it. But now we're being told that you were role models. We just lived life. And we did what our parents did just in a different way.

Emily Jones: Your grandparents and your parents left everything in China.

Gilory Chow: Yes.

Emily Jones: And gave all of that up. And sometimes even your ancestral identity because of the 1882 exclusion law. That's what was given up, and willingly, to come over here, to do what was most available, which was become merchants and do that. And so what I see from the outside looking in, is that's the spirit they pass on is not that I expect you to be the most brilliant person in the room, but you do what you have to do, in order to be able to make the next step up possible for the next generation, whatever it is.

Gilory Chow: Yes That's a wonderful analogy because things were hard in China. We didn't ask the question of why, and they might have been able to say why, because why did Dad come over into New Orleans as a young teenager? Because things were so hard at home. I can't imagine sending my son to a far and distant land. He probably didn't even have a suitcase.

Frieda Quon: They came as teenagers. My dad came as a teenager.

Gilory Chow: And to go by themselves and then to spend a year in New Orleans. When we were down at the Amistad Center at Tulane, Sally and I found records of my dad, Joe TM, as a student. And I tell the story, he must have been a good student because he was P: present every day, for a year. And that's the extent of his education: that year, he spent at the Presbyterian church school in New Orleans.

Discovering Connections

Oriental School in Greenville, MS, 1946

Carolyn Chan

Emily Jones: Baldwin and his brother, Edwin, had never been outside of California. They were born there. And they thought because of Charles, their dad, coming to America, when he was a teenager, that they must be the first American born Chinese in their line. But their dad, he had a picture of the headstone of his dad and his granddad. And it was in English. And so Baldwin just asked him one day, he was like, "so if it's in English, where is it?" And Charles said, “well, it's in Mississippi.” And that's all they had to go on. Edwin called the city hall and asked, “Does anybody know anything about a Chinese grocery store that was in the Delta, somewhere around Cleveland? We don't know the name of the store, but my dad's dad and his granddad died there and they're buried there, and we want to know more about that.”

Emily Jones: We don't actually archive things under people who die and leave stores. So I thought, good luck, but come on, and sent emails out to people. I remember the board, that's the greatest part about the board is they're this living, breathing institutional memory of relatives who were connected and how and why and all this kind of thing. So when I got a question like that, I sent it out to everybody I could think of. And you know, we got a couple of leads, some thoughts and stuff, but they decided to come to Cleveland, just hoping that somebody might know something. Somehow we knew a lot more than we thought we did.

Frieda Quon: So we have this Baldwin, the grandson. And so he brings his father and they don't know what they're going to find. The father didn't have any memory, he was one, so he really didn't have any memory at all of his real father, just knew that he had come to Mississippi. And so the whole family came to visit the Museum. They realized the family store was in Pace, which is just a little bitty town down the road. And so they come in and they're seeing the exhibits and everything. And so Charles who's, the father said something about his father's name is KC Lou. And he kept saying, my father's name is KC Lou. And Emily over here, in her mind, "she said, KC Lou." And she said just a minute, and she goes into her little store room and she pulls out this Bible and it was KC Lou's Bible that he had gotten for graduation. How did you remember that?

Emily Jones: I don't know. I mean, literally I think everything had to be standing right there for it to click finally. But yeah, it was one of those days where I was just really glad to have come to work. But when the Bible came out, the collection that it had come from was a totally different family, and that's how we realized. “Okay. Well, if that, if KC lose Bible is in the Dunn family collection, you need to talk to the Dunn family. And that's when the floodgate broke open-

Gilory Chow: The interesting thing about the Bible, Charles Lou is a Christian. When he realized that his father had a Bible, he thought in his mind that his father is a Christian. And so as a Christian, he knew that he had a heavenly father and he knew that his father knew the heavenly father, because he had a Bible. And he knew that he would meet his father in heaven someday because of that Bible and that tie. But then the Dunn family had acquired the Bible because it was in the store when the grandfather passed away. And so the Bible was in the possession of Dunn family. And then the Dunn family made the connection. The Dunn family had acquired their store in Pace from Baldwin and Edwin's grandfather. So there's the connection. Kevin Bacon talks about six degrees of removals from everybody. In Mississippi it's about two or three, that you will know somebody that knows somebody.

Emily Jones: Charles learned of his dad from all the people who knew him. It's a little outside of yourself feeling, to watch a man learn about his own father from everybody else who knew him best. You just think in your family pod, you are going to know your family better. But because of the situation, because of 1882, and because rules forbade people from coming and going, and the freedom, Charles never knew his father. But all these other people have opened up every memory bank they can think of and have told him and let him know his father now. And like Gilroy said, that's why he cries when he holds the Bible. He knows...

Frieda Quon: Because thought he was just abandoned orphan.

Gilory Chow: But he found out why. One of the things Baldwin found was a letter. It's in the Dunn family, and it was from..

.Emily Jones: KC wrote it to Mr. Dunn.

Frieda Quon: Okay.

Gilory Chow: And he must have dictated because it was typed; talks about how much he missed his family. And so Charles was able to hear, see with his own eyes, in his father's hand that how much he loved and missed his family.

Catherine Cooper: Thank You so much for talking to us.

Carolyn Chan: Nice to talk with you too, Catherine.

Randy Kwan: Same here.

Gilory Chow: Thanks for coming.

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