Chinese
pioneers of Ventura
County subjects of new
museum exhibit
From China
to Ventura
For pictures and more information see
Photo
by Museum of Ventura County, Contributed photo
These men
from a Chinese fire brigade are shown in a parade in this photo taken in the
late 1800s by John Calvin Brewster, a chronicler of late 19th century and early
20th century life in Ventura
County. The Chinatowns in
Ventura and Oxnard both established their own fire
brigades, and some said it was because of slow response times from local fire
departments to blazes in those areas.
Chinese exhibit
What: The exhibit "Hidden Voices: The Chinese of Ventura
County" opens Saturday and runs through Nov. 25 at the Museum of Ventura
County, 100 E. Main St.
in Ventura.
Admission is $4 for adults, $3 for seniors and $1 for kids 6 to 17. Kids under
6 and museum members get in free. Admission also is free for all on the first
Sunday of every month. General museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays
through Sundays. For more information, call 653-0323 or visit http://www.venturamuseum.org.
Festival: In lieu of an opening night reception, the museum will
host a Chinese Cultural Heritage Festival on Sept. 8 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Highlights of that will include a Chinese lion dance; a dance troupe and
calligraphy and brush painting shows from the Ventura County Chinese American
Association; and a papermaking demonstration from the Conejo Chinese Cultural
Association. Admission is $5; children under 12 and museum members get in free.
Other exhibit-related
events and dates at the museum include:
Oct. 7: A 2 p.m. screening of the documentary film "Courage
& Contribution: The Chinese in Ventura
County." The film
deals with 19th century Chinese immigration to California
and the evolution of Chinatown communities in Ventura
and Oxnard. It
highlights contributions of Chinese agricultural workers and merchants, Chinese
fire companies and the story of Bill Soo Hoo of Oxnard,
the first Chinese mayor elected in California
history. Free.
Oct. 27: A 1 p.m. book talk by William Gow, co-author (with Linda
Bentz) of "Hidden Lives: A Century of Chinese American History in Ventura County." Gow is the great-grandson
of Wong Ah Gow and Lou Oy Gow, who owned Gow Markets in Oxnard in the early 1900s. He will talk about
the role of Chinese immigrants in the evolution of Ventura County.
$5.
Nov. 18: A 2 p.m. lecture from local artist BiJian Fan on the
history of paper and various paper arts in China. He will also talk about
modern techniques and materials he uses in his kinetic sculptures. $5.
People interested in the
Cultural Heritage Festival and the other events are asked to RSVP at 653-0323
ext. 7.
The Chinatowns that
sprang up in Ventura and Oxnard in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries held together a tiny and hardscrabble community of gritty people who
had left their homeland to escape hardships only to find a new slate of them
here.
Almost all these people
came from the Guangdong (formerly Canton) province of southeast China, an area wracked by
rebellions and opium wars, as well as widespread hunger, poverty and death. In Ventura County
and elsewhere in the U.S.,
they suffered racial discrimination and were subjects of exclusion laws — the
first immigrant group ever targeted that way in U.S. history — that made it
impossible for most to bring their families here.
They eked out a largely
mundane life. Many — alone, not speaking English nor understanding our culture
— got jobs as farm laborers, ranch cooks, construction workers, fishermen,
domestic servants and laundry cleaners. In the local Chinatowns,
they lived in crude wooden buildings in tight quarters.
"It must have been a
really tough existence," said historian Linda Bentz of the Ventura County
Chinese American Historical Society, who wrote a 47-page journal last year
about the early Chinese here. Then, almost as quickly as they emerged, the
local Chinatowns faded away, vanished in the
annals of time. They were a secretive people and left behind little in the way
of records, diaries, keepsakes or photos.
But bit by bit, a clearer
though still fragmented picture of these local Chinese pioneers is emerging —
cobbled together from a historical olio that includes ceramic shards excavated
in present-day downtown Ventura, a few family heirlooms still floating around
here and there, the discovery of Chinese fish camps at the Channel Islands, and
traces and hints in rare old interviews and newspaper articles.
Much of this, and Bentz's
journal work, is included in the new exhibit "Hidden Voices: The Chinese
of Ventura County" that opens Saturday and continues through Nov. 25 at
the Museum of Ventura County in Ventura.
Bentz's work, which took
10 years to complete, was published last year under the museum's auspices in
the Journal of Ventura County History.
It was a reminder to the
staff "that we hadn't featured that part of our local history in a long
time," said the museum's Ariane Karakalos, who co-curated the exhibit with
Bentz.
"A lot of people
will be surprised that the city (as well as Oxnard)
had a Chinatown," Karakalos said. "A
lot of people aren't aware of that piece of local history."
It is "super
interesting," she added, "to see how these people came here and were
so very different."
A
THUMBNAIL TOUR
The
museum sports pieces of these people and their culture. A case will house what
Bentz called "brownware" — fragments of ceramic soy sauce jars,
dishes and the like, along with old coins.
"It
has a lot of meaning, realizing that someone used these things 150 years
ago," Karakalos noted.
Bentz
dug up a circa 1900 goods inventory from a Ventura Chinatown store as part of a
display on the importance role merchants played in those days. Among its items:
rice, brown sugar, pork, dried fish, vegetables, flour, black tea, cigars and
herbal medicines.
One
centerpiece figures to be the 1910 wedding dress of Nellie Yee Chung, who was
born in Ventura in 1888 and was an early
resident of its Chinatown.
The
hand-embroidered silk gown, adorned with decorative flowers and birds and
featuring a mix of pink, purple, green and charcoal black colors, is the thing
that will draw eyeballs in the exhibit room, Bentz predicted.
"It's
fantastic," she said. "It's the original thing. It's just
gorgeous."
The
dress is on loan from family descendants, Karakalos said, adding, "It's a
rare find."
Also
part of the exhibit is an abacus — Chinese shopkeepers didn't have cash
registers then. This one has wooden counting balls fashioned to resemble
pearls, Karakalos said.
Another
unique item on view is a Chinese queue, a plait or ribbon of hair worn hanging
from the back of the head. Most Chinese men, the curators noted, cut their
queues after 1911 in the dying days of the old dynasties and the coming of the
Republic of China.
More
cultural flavor will come from a contemporary lion costume on loan from Irene
Sy, the principal of a Chinese language school in Camarillo and vice president of the Ventura
County Chinese American Association.
The
costume, Sy explained, is used when people perform the lion dance at events
such as weddings, the opening of a business and, of course, the biggest celebration,
the Chinese New Year.
The
lion, she said, is an auspicious animal in Chinese culture and its meaning is
to bring peace, happiness and prosperity to the community.
Both
her group and a companion organization, the Conejo Chinese Cultural Association,
are part of the museum exhibit and also will participate in a Sept. 8 Chinese
Cultural Heritage Festival there.
The
exhibit is an opportunity to "share our culture and our history" with
the community, Sy said.
"It's
very impressive, and it's important to recognize the minorities of Ventura County
and the contributions of immigrants to our society through history," said
Yingchun Wu, a Newbury
Park resident and
president of the Conejo Chinese group.
ROUGH
DAYS
The
late 1840s Gold Rush brought many thousands of Chinese to California,
which they called Gum Saan, translated as "Gold Mountain."
Chinese miners were robbed, driven from claims and subject to an 1852 foreign
miners' tax that eventually was imposed only on them, Bentz wrote in her 2011
journal.
Around
the mid-19th century, the Chinese also came to Ventura. The Chinatown there initially was
along Figueroa Street
between Main and Santa Clara
streets.
As in
California
and the nation, the Chinese presence drew opposition. In 1882, Congress passed
the Chinese Exclusion Act that barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States.
Ultimately, the law was extended all the way into the 1940s.
Elsewhere,
the first wave of Chinese Americans were hanged and banished; there were
lynchings in Los Angeles, and Chinatowns across the West were burned to the
ground, according to Jean Pfaelzer's 2007 book "Driven Out: The Forgotten
War Against Chinese Americans."
Ventura County largely avoided such
large-scales skirmishes and tragedies, Bentz said.
But a
countywide Anti-Chinese League did form, and held weekly protest meetings at a
local hall. They thought the Chinese were "filthy" and at one point
tried to establish an American laundry because they didn't like the Chinese
doing that work, Bentz noted.
Local
papers joined the chorus. The Ventura Free Press, an ancestor of this paper,
stated in its Feb. 26, 1886 issue that "We are nothing these days if not
anti-Chinese." Another article on April 2 that year began bluntly:
"The Chinese must go."
But
things here generally didn't turn violent, though an 1893 protest march through
the Chinatown on Figueroa Street reportedly was scary
enough that the Chinese thought they were going to be deported; they scattered
into their homes, barred the doors and turned off lights.
In
another incident, an early local merchant named Ung Hing had to drive away a
mob beating on his door by threatening to shoot them with a pistol. But that,
Bentz said, "was about as rough as it got."
Through
all this, the local Chinese persevered. By the 1890s, Bentz wrote in the
journal, Figueroa Street
"was filled with the sights and sounds of a bustling ethnic
community." The Chinatown population was
thought to be around 200.
There,
one could find mercantile businesses, employment firms, a barbershop,
residences, a kitchen and other buildings. Nellie Yee Chung, in a later
interview, described simple two-room houses in Chinatown
that were connected in the back. Residents there raised chickens and pigeons,
and some gardened. They built a shed to dry clothes.
After
land around the San Buenaventura Mission was sold and developed in 1905, the
Chinese were driven from their homes. They relocated to a second Chinatown on the north side of Main Street from west of the mission to Ventura Avenue that
lasted until about 1920.
OTHER
PURSUITS
Oxnard's Chinatown rose almost as
quickly as did the town, which incorporated as a city in 1903, a mere five
years after a sugar beet factory was built there by the four brothers for whom
the city would be named. Many Chinese laborers moved to Oxnard to work in the beet fields.
An
1899 article in the Oxnard Courier noted that the area did not have a Chinatown
as in Ventura and Los Angeles — but such an ethnic enclave soon
took hold.
Oxnard's Chinatown initially was
located on Saviers Road
(now Oxnard Boulevard)
between Fifth and Sixth streets, and later shifted to Saviers between Seventh
and Eighth streets, bounded by A
Street.
Like
the Ventura version, the Oxnard
one had a China alley
through the middle and its own fire brigade; some said the latter were
established after slow response times from existing local departments to blazes
in the Chinatowns.
They
were also home to shadier activities. Both local Chinatowns had gambling halls
and opium establishments, and the Oxnard
one also had a saloon and "houses of ill repute." In the journal,
Bentz related an incident where Bartley Soo Hoo, of Oxnard's famed Soo Hoo
family, roller-skated in front of one of the brothels once during his childhood
and was admonished by one of the madams to keep quiet as "my girls are
asleep."
In a
way, that type of behavior was understandable, Bentz said. Many of the Chinese
were far away from home living in a hostile society that disliked them and
tried to pass laws against them. So they turned to such things.
"And
maybe sometimes they needed to smoke a little opium to make them feel better —
kind of like happy hour now," she said.
Both
local Chinatowns also were home to the Bing
Kong tong, Bentz wrote. Tongs were fraternal groups in the tight-knit Chinatowns everywhere. Some were benevolent, helping
people there find housing and jobs, but others were involved in protection
rackets and criminal activities; the Bing Kong tong was suspected of the
latter.
"We
don't have any evidence it was happening in these communities (Ventura
and Oxnard),
but that's what they were known for," Bentz said.
MOVING
ON
The
exhibit touches on the five people profiled in Bentz's journal. In addition to
Nellie Yee Chung, they include early Ventura Chinatown residents Minnie Soo Hoo
and merchant Tom Lim Yan.
Yan's
wide influence there lasted more than 30 years. In 1881, the Ventura Signal
dubbed him the "Boss Chinaman."
Merchants
tended to wield power in Chinatowns because
they were often the most educated and financially well off people there. They
often spoke English and assisted others with language translations, writing
letters and getting them sent home.
Thus,
their stores were gathering places and "a central element in the
community," Karakalos said. "They were pretty much the anchors of the
social fabric."
Merchants
also were exempt from exclusion laws, meaning they could travel to China and
return with family members.
The
exhibit also touches on latter-day local Chinese residents such as Walton Jue,
whose Jue's Market was a Main Street mainstay in Ventura for years until the
family gave it up recently, and Bill Soo Hoo, who was elected mayor of Oxnard
in 1966, thus becoming the first mayor of Chinese descent in California
history.
Soo
Hoo's run for City Council and to make changes in Oxnard reportedly came after he bought a lot
on Deodar Street
but was told he couldn't live there, that it was for "Caucasians
only." The exhibit is to include one of Soo Hoo's gavels from a council
meeting.
The
exhibit is augmented by photographs. Many of the early Chinese here are the
work of John Calvin Brewster, a chronicler of life in Ventura
County from his arrival in Ventura in the mid-1870s
to his death in 1909.
Bentz's
work is hardly done. She co-authored a book with William Gow titled
"Hidden Lives: A Century of Chinese American History in Ventura County"
that they hope to have out during the exhibit's run.
She
also just returned from Santa Rosa Island,
where she saw evidence of 14 Chinese camps where the men would spend three
months at a time harvesting abalone and the like.
MODERN
TIMES
Today,
the Chinese population in Ventura
County has shifted to the
east. Census numbers cited by Bentz show almost 10,400 people of Chinese
descent living in the county, up considerably from both the 2000 and 1990
censuses.
The
biggest concentration of them, some several thousand, is in Thousand
Oaks and the Conejo
Valley, Wu said. Only a
few thousand live "below the grade," Sy noted.
The
Chinese today are more likely to be doctors and health care professionals than
laborers. They are attracted by employers such as Amgen and Baxter Healthcare
Corp., Wu said. She'd know; she's a product quality coordinator at Baxter.
The
Chinese school in Thousand Oaks,
Wu added, now has an enrollment of 650; some 30 years ago, she said, they
started with 15.
Today's
Chinese community leaders say they are grateful for and indebted to the early
pioneers who came here and endured hardships.
Or as
Bentz said: "They were an amazing people."
