[Late last year, in preparation for a podcast appearance of my wife’s, we watched Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and through it were introduced to the groundbreaking cinematographer and all-around amazing American James Wong Howe. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for Howe’s exemplary life, leading to a post on that podcast!]
On three histories which contextualize Howe’s youthful immigration to the U.S.
Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in China’s Guangdong (Canton) Province in 1899, which was the same year that his father immigrated to the United States to work on the Northern Pacific Railway. Back in July 2022 I wrote a post on Utah’s 1869 Golden Spike ceremony and the frustrating exclusion of the tens of thousands of Chinese American railroad workers from both the famous photograph and our collective memories (at least until recently) of that moment. To say that both their work and the prejudices they faced continued to be part of the story three decades later is, if anything, to understate the case—the simple fact is that no railroad lines in the Western portions of the U.S. and Canada could have been completed without the constant, crucial, and highly dangerous contributions of Chinese workers, most of whom faced a great deal of discrimination in the process. I don’t believe we know much about Howe’s father, but we know that he came to the U.S. to be part of that fraught, vital, and still under-remembered story and community.
Fortunately for him, his family, and all of us Howe’s father survived the experience, and in 1904 he sent for his wife and 5 year-old son to join him in the U.S. They settled in the mid-sized Washington State city of Pasco, part of the Tri-Cities region in the state’s southeastern corner, where Howe’s parents ran a general store (until his father’s tragic death a decade or so later). Chinese Americans had been part of Washington Territory and then State (it gained statehood in November 1889) for half a century by that time, and not only as part of the sizeable and famous Chinatown communities that had developed mid-century in larger cities like Seattle and Tacoma. From what I can tell, by the turn of the 20th century almost all of the state’s cities and towns featured at least some Chinese American residents, many of them like Howe’s family having left railroad work to become part of the economic, social, and cultural life of the community in many ways. One of the most important goals of my multiple projects featuring early Chinese American histories is to help us better remember this widespread as well as longstanding community, and I love that Howe’s childhood offers another lens for doing so.
1904 was more than two decades into the Chinese Exclusion Act era, however, and so it’s important to add that those longstanding and widespread communities continued to face not only constant legal and political challenges (such as the post-Geary Act requirement that all Chinese Americans carry a “resident permit” at all times or risk immediate deportation) but also the very real threat of racial violence and terrorism. In November 1885 Washington Territory had featured one of the most overt such campaigns of racial terrorism, the multi-day white supremacist attack on and expulsion of Tacoma’s Chinatown community that so successfully destroyed much of that community that “the Tacoma Method” became a model for such racial terrorism around the region (including in Seattle) and country. It didn’t destroy the whole community, not in Tacoma and not anywhere, and Howe’s youthful immigration and childhood help us remember such impressive survivals. But it remained a threat to all Chinese Americans at all times, in Washington and everywhere else, and we have to keep that in mind when we think about such turn-of-the-century children and families.
Next Howe context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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