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).