Photographic Journeys Part 2

So what does the How/Howe family tell us about Wilmington's Chinese community?

Well, it turns out...quite a lot.


In part that's because the family has roots back into the early part of the 20th century. The first Chinese person we know about in Wilmington was a man named Wa Lee, who opened a laundry in town in 1885.  According to the stereotype-ridden newspaper account, Wa Lee came to Wilmington from Boston, having landed in San Francisco “ten or fifteen years” earlier.

clipping from Bill Reaves files at the New Hanover County Public Library.  Mr. Reaves clipped newspapers and sorted them into subject and person files.  This clipping comes from his Chinese files. 

Two other Chinese men came to town and opened laundries in the same year, although only one of the men - San Lee - was still in business in 1888.

It's not clear when the How/Howe* family came to town, but the patriarch was born in California in 1879 or the early 1880s. The family does not seem to be in Wilmington in the 1900 or the 1910 census. There is a How family in the 1920 census. 

 


In 1920, Lee How and family lived at 521 Red Cross Street. Mr. How was 39 years old. He was listed as the proprietor of a hand laundry and born in California. His wife, whose name seems to have been Ng Chee, was also 39.  She came to the United States in 1919. 


At the time this census was taken, the Hows had 3 children – two born in China, one in the U.S. This suggests that Lee How visited China to find a wife. He may have visited more than once since Lee Fong/Fun How who is listed in this document as aged 14 (but who seems to have been 17) was said to have immigrated to the U.S. in 1912. That is seven years before his mother, and his younger brother came to the country.  Lee Fun's brother, Lee Jim, was aged 6 (about the right age to be conceived when Mr. How went to get Lee Fun How and bring him to Wilmington). Another sibling, Lee Ying How, was born in North Carolina. She was 8 months old when the 1920 census was taken.

If Lee Fon Howard is Lee Fun Howe, then the How/Howe family had been in the Lower Cape Fear for decades by the time they dropped these family off at the Camera Shop in 1959. 

The How family story is exceptional - they were a family at a time when most Chinese residents of the U.S. were men. And their story is significant because as a family of 5, the Hows made up more than a quarter of the New Hanover County Chinese population at the time. 

There were very few Chinese people in the county. In 1900, 25,785 people lived in New Hanover county and 11 of those people were Chinese men. Of those men, two were born in California. The rest were born in China, meaning that they were ineligible to be citizens. There were no Chinese women in the city in 1900, even though 8 of the men were listed as married on the census. 

By 1920, when the How family shows up in the record, there were 19 people of Chinese descent in the county. Fourteen lived in the city and owned or worked in one of the city's six hand laundry businesses.

Laundries listing from the 1919-1920 Wilmington City Directory

The other five were farmers.

 North Carolina’s and New Hanover County’s Chinese community was so small because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law, passed in May 1882, was the first immigration law in the U.S. that restricted entry on the basis of race and class. After that date, Chinese laborers were no longer allowed entry to the country.

This cartoon  was published in the magazine Puck in March 1882. It shows stereotypically depicted workers putting up a wall to exclude Chinese people.   The wall's bricks are labeled with words including "un-American," "Jealousy," "Fear," "Law against Race," - presumably these are what the illustrator believed motivated the desire for Chinese Exclusion. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The Chinese Exclusion Act, coupled with the country's naturalization laws, kept men born in China from having a path to citizenship until 1943. This law plus gendered citizenship laws also worked to effectively bar entry to most Chinese women. At the time, when a woman married a naturalized American or American citizen she automatically became a citizen. So there were women (and their children) who married abroad, and then entered the country as citizens without having ever set foot in the U.S. This path to entry into the county didn't exist for Chinese-born women who married Chinese-born men who lived in the U.S.  So, forming a family was exceedingly difficult for most ethnically Chinese residents of the U.S.

The Hows were one of two family units (parents with children) in the city in 1920. In both cases, the adult male of the family was U.S. born.  This meant Lee How's Chinese-born wife and Chinese-born children had derived U.S. citizenship when they came to the U.S.  And so, Lee Fun Howe and his brothers and sisters were second generation American citizens, regardless of whether they were born in Wilmington or Canton. 

So if the Lee Fon Howard on the Camera Shop envelope is really Lee Fun Howe (and it seems highly likely that they are one and the same person), then the children in our 1959 photograph were third generation American citizens of Chinese descent.

*At some point the How family added an "e" to the end of their name.  This happened in the years after 1926 (when Lee How died in 1926 the family name was still spelled How). 

Photographic Journeys part 1

Every month, I write a "This Month in History" (TMIH) column, that we send out to interested folks via email.  You can see some of the previous columns by clicking on http://www.capefearmuseum.com/month-history/

I've been writing TMIHs since 2008.  Every TMIH is tied to an artifact or an image in the Museum's collection. This helps me choose a topic, and it showcases the artifacts and images in the collection, giving me a chance to research different stories and time periods. Over the years, I've written about all sorts of things - rationing, shipbuilding, the filming of Firestarter to name just a few.

This month (October 2017), I decided to do things a little differently.  We have this wonderful collection of envelopes of photographs from a now-defunct business, the Camera Shop. They came to the Museum in 2012.  The more than 150 envelopes were found in a building in the city and were unclaimed photos from the 1950s and early 1960s. Most of the envelopes included photographs and negatives. 




Sample of front of envelope, negatives, prints, and back of envelope from Camera Shop Collection, Gift of Michelle Masson

The images provide a wonderful snapshot of an era, and they also provide insight into the daily lives of Wilmingtonians when the city was segregated.



Sampling of images from the Camera Shop Collection, Gift of Michelle Masson

I've been intrigued by the Camera Shop collection since we received it. The images are a mystery and a revelation. I love the emotions you can see in the images, the hints of peoples' personalities, the clothing, the pets, and the mid-century modern drapes, stoves, and furniture. The images help us better imagine life in Wilmington in the 1950s, even though we don't know the names of most of the people in the images. 

So, when I began to think about October's TMIH, I decided to use the images in the collection with envelopes dated "October." I thought I would tell folks about the collection, share the images in the envelopes, and that would be that.

Little did I know that the decision to focus on these photographs would open up an avenue into the history of New Hanover County's Chinese community. 

That journey started with this blurry image of two boys, outsides a brick ranch house.  This was the only print in the envelope that came to us.  

But there were negatives too. So I scanned them, and made what were effectively digital prints. And one of the negatives showed the same two boys as a part of a larger group:

I immediately had questions: who are these people? How do Asian Americans fit into the racially segregated South in the 1950s? Would our understanding of the region's history change if we knew their story?

So I went looking for answers, with the only clue I had - the name on the envelope:

I did what I almost always do when I have questions.....I went to the North Carolina room at the New Hanover County Public Library.   




North Carolina Room at the New Hanover County Public Library, photo courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library

And there, I found some clues to who was in the image.


I first looked in the city directories. For those of you who haven't used one, these are wonderful resources. They were regularly published in cities like Wilmington and they provide a yearly (or biannual) snapshot of the people, businesses, and organizations in town. You can look up a business name, a person's name, and you can look up an address and see who lived at an address (and around it). They - along with the census - are my bread and butter resource for finding out about people.






So, with the name Lee Fon Howard, I  had a place to start.

That said, there was no Lee Fon Howard in Wilmington’s 1960 city directory.  There was, however, a Lee F. Howe, who owned the California Laundry. 

Most Chinese immigrants to the U.S. lived in California in the 19th century, so I wondered if the California Laundry was a Chinese-owned business.  And it was (for more information, see part 2 of this blog post). 

Given the small number of people of Chinese descent in the city, it seems highly probable that the “Lee Fon Howard” on the envelope is really Lee Fon Howe.  


And if that is the case then the children in the picture are Lee Unwah Howe, born in 1950 and Lee Jeanie Mae Howe, born on November 14, 1949.  

The Howe children in the 1968 New Hanover High School yearbook