We are used to reading that women were scarce in early Chinese immigrant communities in North America. And yet in the 1850s through1870s a fair number of women emigrated from China to the New World. In 1861-62, for instance, the female-male ratio of emigrants departing for the Americas from Hong Kong and Canton was 671:2503 (Note 1). Considering that the emigrants came from sojourner communities, where men were expected to leave their wives behind when going to work overseas, a ratio of one woman to every four men was not so bad.
After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, however, the number of women in Chinese-American communities fell drastically. No more were coming in, and many left who were already here. By the early 20th century the situation had become critical. The Chinese community was aging and, due to the shortage of women, not able to reproduce itself. Some Chinese-American women did indeed exist during this period. We have many photographs of full Chinese families in Chicago, complete with mothers and daughters, from the 1900s and 1910s. And yet those women were very few.
Trustworthy statistical information on gender ratios in the Chinese community is hard to get. Government census data is particularly doubtful when the community involved was suspicious of the authorities and afraid of deportation. A more credible kind of information, which has rarely been used in this connection, are death certificates. These exist in relatively complete form in several states, and are quite reliable for data on gender and race. It seems probable that death certificates were needed not only for all deceased Chinese who were buried or cremated in the U.S. but also for all those sent back to China for burial
In Illinois, a comprehensive tabulation of death certificates for the years 1916-1950 is now available on line, from the Illinois State Archives website. A quick search of this data, choosing Chinese surnames that were common in the Midwest, gives the following results:
Surname Total Males Females Females
(Chinese) (Other)
Moy 158 141 11 6 white
Lee/Li 121 117 4 (no data on white female Lees)
Wong 72 59 9 4 white
Sing 66 65 1(no data on white female Sings)
Chan 54 49 4 1 white
Chin 50 47 2 1 black
Hong 48 45 2 1 white, 1 black
Fong 40 39 1
Lum 30 28 2
Yuen/Yuan 29 29
Toy 28 27 1 (no data on white female Toys)
Chow/Chou 27 26 1
Eng 26 23 3(plus 2 possible white female Engs?)
Leong 18 16 1 1 white
Woo/Wu 18 14 4
Chung 15 14 1
Chang 10 10
Gin 9 8 1 white
1900-1950: Early Interracial marriages in Chicago21 Dec 2004
The death certificate data discussed in the preceding mini-article does not provide accessible data on Chinese women marrying men of other ethnic groups. However, the death certificates do show that a number of white women (and a few black women as well) had Chinese surnames; presumably most of these were wives of Chinese men. Other white women may have had Chinese husbands too: there is no way of telling from these records whether women classified as white but with surnames like Lee, Sing, and Toy -- names also used by white families -- were married to Europeans or Chinese. A few German-Americans were named Eng, but these seem to have lived mostly in Rock Island. White female Engs in Chicago probably were married to Chinese.
The names of the two black women listed in the above table were Yee Sut Hong and Rose Chin. Both were Chicagoans. We do not know their stories, nor those of most white women who took Chinese husbands. The few early Midwestern East-West marriages we know about were not always happy -- see below, the Wings and Sings.
We do not have much data on the ethnicity of the white wives. A little information appears in the immigration records preserved by the Chicago office of NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration). These records, as summarized by Peggy Christoff, include entries on women who requested documents allowing them to return to Chicago or another Midwestern city after planned visits to China. Christoff lists a number of white wives and mothers of daughters with Chinese husbands or fathers. The records date to the period 1900-1940. The marriages in question involved women of the following national/ethnic groups:
German 6
Polish 3
"White"3
Swedish 1
Irish 1
All of these families were wealthy enough to send wives and/or daughters back to China for a family visit or education. Ordinary biracial couples probably could not have considered such an expensive journey and thus would not have come to the attention of the Bureau of Immigration.
As none of the women listed by Christoff were of British (that is, Welsh, English, or Scots) ancestry, it seems that wealthy Chinese men and British-American women rarely married each other. Why was this? There must have been as many British-Americans as German-Americans in Chicago. Were the Germans less prejudiced? We think that is unlikely. They probably were just poorer.
A pattern of the poor marrying the poor, no matter what their ethnicity, had long existed in other big cities. In New York, for example, there were cases as early as the 1850s of Irish and Chinese peddlers marrying each other::
"Of the many Chinamen in New York not a few keep cigar stands upon the sidewalks. Their neighbors in
trade are the Milesian [Irish] apple-women. Twenty-eight of these apple-women have gone the way of
matrimony with their elephant-eyed, olive-skinned contemporaries, and the most of them are now happy
mothers in consequence." (Harper's 1857)
It is possible that early Chicago witnessed a similar pattern. The rich could marry their own kind. The impoverished had to choose mates for reasons other than ethnicity.
[Interracial marriage has increased in more recent decades, especially among those born in America. In a just-published article, C. N. Le shows that in 2000, 19.3% of married American-raised Chinese males had white wives, while 29.9% of married American-raised Chinese females had white husbands. Interestingly, American-raised Koreans and Filipinos both had even higher rates of marrying European-American spouses.]
Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Tracking the "Yellow Peril," pp 77-143 (Rockport, Maine: The Picton Press). ISBN 0-89725-410-4.
Harper’s Weekly, October 3, 1857, page 630
Le, C.N. 2005. "Interracial Dating & Marriage: U.S.-Raised Asian Americans" in Asian-Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. <http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial2.shtml>
Young Chinese-American woman (from either Utah or San Francisco) at the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893
It is clear that there were indeed many fewer women than men in the Chinese community of the Exclusion Act period. The overall gender ratio shown here is 47: 818 or one Chinese woman for every 17 men.
We do not know why the Wongs had a higher percentage of women than any other clan/family name group. Were they richer? Did they simply have different customs?
Note 1: Williams, S. Wells The Chinese Commercial Guide, 5th Edition, p. 277. (Honk Kong, A Shortrede & Co., 1863). Williams included emigration to the Caribbean and Latin America (but not Southeast Asia) in his statistics
1903: White prostitution in eastern Chinatowns 22 Jan 2005
Historians of Chinese America as well as early West Coast newspapers often note that many of the Chinese girls brought to this country in the 19th century were prostitutes. The late Iris Chang was one such historian. She told tragic stories of young girls forced into prostitution by criminal gangs, occasionally to be rescued by public-spirited Europeans like the courageous Donaldina Cameron of San Francisco and sometimes to find husbands among their Chinese-American (or European-American) customers.
But it is rarely noted that Chinese-American prostitutes were much less common in the Chinatowns of the eastern U.S. There, most prostitutes were European-Americans. As Lee Chew wrote in 1903,
"In all New York there are only thirty-four Chinese women, and it is impossible to get a Chinese woman out here unless one goes to China and marries her there, and then he must collect affidavits to prove that she really is his wife. That is in [the] case of a merchant. A laundryman can’t bring his wife here under any circumstances, and even the women of the Chinese Ambassador’s family had trouble getting in lately.
"Is it any wonder, therefore, or any proof of the demoralization of our people if some of the white women in Chinatown are not of good character? What other set of men so isolated and so surrounded by alien and prejudiced people are more moral? Men, wherever they may be, need the society of women, and among the white women of Chinatown are many excellent and faithful wives and mothers."
When he writes about women who "are not of good character," Lee Chew means prostitutes. It is interesting that he feels obliged to add that not all white women of Chinatown were like that. That a rather conservative Chinese immigrant like Lee Chew could affirm that some white women made excellent wives and mothers shows, first, that he was conscious of the need to be diplomatic (he was writing for a European-American magazine, after all) and, second, that in the early 1900s biracial marriages were not so rare.
Lee Chew, “The Biography of a Chinaman,” Independent, vol. 15 (19 February 1903), pp 417–423.
Iris Chang, The Chinese in America, 2003, pp 84-98 (New York, Penguin Books).
1926: The cleanness of Chinese restaurants in Chicago (and New York) 19 Dec 2004
In the same vein as the 1892 description (see above) is a comment by T.C. Fan 範定九, a Chinese sociologist who in 1926 wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Chicago's Chinatown. The dissertation is the first study of Chinese-Americans to have been produced by a Chinese, rather than European-American, researcher.
"The success in the restaurant business is chiefly due to the cleanliness with which the Chinese [of Chicago] prepare their food and keep their kitchens. The investigation made by a reporter of the New York Daily News recently gives out more definite ideas of how these Chinese restaurants and their kitchens are kept. The report contains these statements: 'Of the restaurants so far investigated, the Chinese restaurants are by far the cleanest. The kitchens, without exception among those investigated, were found immaculate. The utensils were shining, the metal work shone and the tables were scrubbed. Even the scraps looked clean.' "
Tin-Chiu Fan, Chinese Residents of Chicago, 1926. Ph.D. Dissertation, U. of Chicago. Reprinted in 1974 by R & E Research Associates, Saratoga, CA. ISBN 0-88247-257-7
T. C. Fan's name in pinyin was Fan Dingjiu. He got his B.A. from the University of Nanking and his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago. He later became Dean of Hangchow Christian College in Zhejiang province. He seems to have lived until at least 1984. For further information on him, click on: http://ricci.rt.usfca.edu/biography/view.aspx?biographyID=1653
1912: Exactly when was Chicago's South Side Chinatown founded? 12 Dec 2004, modified 13 July 2005
An important event in the history of Chinese Chicago was the shift of the main Chinese-American business district from its original home in the Loop, on Clark St. between Van Buren and Harrison Aves., to its current location on the near South Side, on Cermak (called 22nd St. in those days), Archer, and Wentworth Aves. Most experts agree that the shift took place because of anti-Chinese prejudice, rent increases demanded by European-American landowners on Clark St., and quarrels between the two dominant community groups, the On Leong and Hip Sing Associations (neither group, incidentally, was ever called a "tong"). The experts do not agree about the date of the shift. Some put it as early as 1905; others as late as 1920.
Susan Lee Moy, the leading historian of Chinese in Chicago, got it right when she wrote "in about 1910." But in order to be more precise about the date -- for instance, so as to think about a 100th anniversary celebration for Chinatown -- the Chinatown Museum Foundation's researchers have been looking at historical sources. The best ones for our purposes turned out to be the Lakeside Annual Directories of Chicago, updated every year by the compiler, Reuben H. Donnelley. These gave names and addresses of individuals and businesses throughout the city and were organized in exactly the same way as telephone directories of later times. Because in those days only the rich had telephones, the Annual Directories had to be based on data from door-to-door canvassers hired by the publisher, but they were otherwise very much like modern telephone books.
We decided to focus on the locations of Chinese stores, most of which by definition were in the main Chinese business district, rather than on the locations of restaurants or laundries, which in those days were already scattered all over the city. We looked at microfilm copies of the Annual Directories for 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1915, as preserved in the Harold Washington Center of the Chicago Public Library. Here is what we found:
191040 Chinese stores in Chicago, all in the Loop, in the Clark-Harrison-Van Buren area
191136 Chinese stores, all in the Loop
191232 Chinese stores, 20 in the Loop and 12 on the South Side, in the Archer-22nd area
191552 Chinese stores, 8 in the Loop and 44 on the South Side
We think this evidence is decisive. As each year's directory seems to show addresses at the end of the previous year,it follows that the South Side Chinatown was founded in 1911 by merchants and others who moved down from the original Loop Chinatown.
Since the preceding paragraph was written we have found that we were wrong, and that the Chinatown at Archer and 22nd was not founded until a year later, in 1912. The evidence is a group of newspaper articles from early 1912 stating that the move to "the new Chinatown" would take place later that year. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, in its annual article on Chinese New Year celebrations in Chicago noted that 1912 was the last year that the celebrations would be held in the Clark Street Chinatown.
As S. L. Moy indicates, over the next few decades Chinese businesses and residences pushed south from 22nd and Archer down Wentworth Ave. Several large buildings in Chinese style were built on Wentworth between 22nd and Alexander Sts. in the late 1920s. We believe that this may have been when the demographic wave reached the Chinatown Museum Foundation's building between Alexander and 23rd Sts. Before that the neighborhood had been Italian, and before that perhaps German or English. From the early 1930s onward, it was mainly Chinese.
Susan Lee Moy, "The Chinese in Chicago: The First Hundred Years," in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d'A Jones eds., Ethnic Chicago, A Multicultural Portrait, 4th edition, pages 378-408. 1995, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, ISBN 0-8028-0753-8.
Reuben H, Donnelley, compiler, The Lakeside Annual Directory of Chicago, 1910, 1911, 1912, & 1915. (The Chicago Directory Company, Chicago)
Here we present the results of research into Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian history in the interior of North America, between the East and West Coasts. The coastal regions have been well studied by historians of Chinese America; the region in between has not.
This page covers the first half of the 20th century. When the century began in 1900, the violent persecution of Chinese in the western US was just ending, while Chinese in Chicago were enjoying a time of relative safety and prosperity. When the century reached its midpoint at the end of 1949, the oppressive Exclusion Act had been canceled and Chinese-Americans were beginning to be treated, legally if not socially, like full American citizens. For the 19th century, click on RESEARCH 1857-1899.
As noted on the RESEARCH 1857-1899 page, this not meant to be a timeline. It is only a way of putting the results of our own and others' new research into chronological order. Many important facts and events are omitted, and we have included certain facts and events that are unimportant but interesting.
Chinese-American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC)
Raymond B. and Jean T. Lee Center
Celebrating the Chinese-American cultural heritage of the Midwest
1945-1950 A pair of Nobel Prize winners studies physics in Chicago 23 Jan 2005
Yang had another Chicago connection besides his mathematician father. While a student at the wartime Southwest Associated University in Kunming, he studied Chinese literature with the poet and artist Wen Yiduo, who had attended Chicago's School of the Art Institute in 1922 and written a poem about Chinese laundries in Chicago.
Both Yang and Lee settled in the United States afterward. Yang got a job at the famed Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, later moving to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Lee stayed for a while in in the Midwest, working at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, before going first to Princeton and then Columbia. Yang and Lee made their most famous breakthrough, proof that parity nonconservation only applies to weak interactions among sub-atomic particles, while eating at a Chinese restaurant in New York City in 1956. They shared the Nobel Prize in physics for that proof the next year, in 1957. It was the first Nobel to be won by anyone of Chinese ancestry.
Yang's official Nobel biography describes him in 1957 as "a quiet, modest, and affable physicist; he met his wife Chih Li Tu while teaching mathematics at her high school in China. He is a hard worker allowing himself very little leisure time."
Lee's Nobel biography, also dating from 1957, is not much more informative. It notes that "he married (Jeannette) Hui Chung Chin a former university student, in 1950. His favourite pastimes are: playing with his two young boys, James and Stephen; and reading "whodunits" (detective novels)."
Bing-An Li and Yuefan Deng, Biography of C.N. Yang -- http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~yang/
Chen Ning Yang (杨振宁), a native of Hefei in Anhui, and Tsung Dao Lee (李政道), a Shanghainese, came to Chicago in 1945 and 1946. Recognized as brilliant young physicists during their wartime studies in Kunming, both received scholarships to attend the University of Chicago, which at the time led the world in high-energy physics. Yang's father, Ko Chuen Yang (杨克纯), had also been at the University of Chicago, having graduated with a PhD in mathematics in 1928. Yang and Tsung became friends while working under such great physicists as Enrico Fermi. The two worked closely together on research projects, receiving their PhD's in 1949 and 1950.
Chen Ning Yang, 1957
Tsung-Dao Lee, 1957
1915: Lai Tin's almost-tryout with the Chicago White Sox 24 Jan 2005, modified 30 Sep 2005
David Marasco, a baseball historian, has made an astonishing discovery. In 1914 the New York Times reported that Jimmy Callahan, the manager of the Chicago White Sox (an old and famous professional baseball team), had offered a Chinese baseball player the chance to try out for the White Sox in the following spring. The player, Lai Tin or Lai Tan or Honolulu, seems to have been a truly talented athlete who held the Hawaiian records for the 100-yard dash and the broad jump. However, there is no record that he ever received his tryout. Callahan lost his job at the end of 1914 and Tin was forgotten. No Chinese American was to succeed in Major League baseball for another ninety years. (2)
Marasco reports that Tin did play in Chicago, however. In 1912 a touring team of Chinese amateur players from Hawaii played two games in the White Sox's stadium, Comisky Park, against a local semipro team that called itself the Uncle Sams. "L. Tin" was a member of the Hawaiian team. The Chicago Tribune reported that he performed creditably in both games.
Tin played in Chicago again in 1915, when the University of Chicago Maroons faced a visiting team from the Chinese University of Hawaii. The visitors lost, and "Loi" Tin, although he showed himself to be a competent fielder, did not exactly cover himself with glory in terms of hits and runs. He got none.
We have no idea how the local Chinese-American community reacted to these visits by Hawaiian Chinese teams. If you know anything about them, please let us know.
(1) David Marasco, Lai Tin, The Diamond Angle, 2004 (http://the diamondangle.com/marasco/peo/laitin.html)
(2) Chien-Ming Wang (王建民) , a star pitcher for Taiwan in the 2004 Olympics, joined the New York Yankees in 2005. As of late September, he had a won-lost record of 8-4. Chin-Feng Chen, a Taiwanese outfielder, came up to the Majors in 2005 and has played a number of games for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Bruce Chen, a Panamanian pitcher who may be of Chinese ancestry, has pitched for several major league teams since 2002. Chin-hui Tsao (曹錦輝), yet another Taiwanese, has pitched for the Colorado Rockies since 2003.
1906: A rich merchant and his wife return to China21 Feb 2005
Moy Dong Yee was one of the three Moy brothers who were reputed to have founded Chicago's Chinatown. A successful merchant, he could afford to return to China repeatedly and to stay there for many months on each trip. This application for a reentry permit gives the dates of previous trips and, unusually, includes a photo of his wife who planned to accompany him.
Dong Yee came to the U.S. in 1875 and moved to Chicago, where his brothers already lived, in 1879. He almost immediately went back to China to find a wife. Marrying one Hue Shee, a Toisan girl, he stayed on in China (perhaps in Canton city [Guangzhou] rather than Toisan) until 1881, when he left her and returned to Chicago.
He made the same trip and stayed for a similar length of time twice more, in 1883-1886 and 1891-1893. Altogether he and Hue Shee had three children, all of whom seem to have stayed in China.
She died in 1897. He went back for a fourth time in 1898, presumably to set her affairs in order, and in 1899 married.again. This time he would take his new wife, a beautiful 16 year-old named Luk Shee, back to Chicago. She seems to have done well in her new environment. In these reentry permit photographs she and her husband both seem quite plump. In the 1912 family photograph shown elsewhere on this website, where she appears with two sons and an older niece, she looks content and proud while Dong Yee looks thin and worried.
When these photographs were taken in 1906, she was 22 and he was 50. She must have looked forward to seeing her own family again -- she had already been away from them for six years.
Very few Chinese-American men in those days could afford to do what Dong Yee did -- to return to China repeatedly, to make long stays there each time, and not only to marry twice there but eventually to bring one of those wives back to America. The average laundryman was lucky to return to China once in his life, and if he had a wife there, to see her and his children once before he died. This pattern of near-permanent separation of husband and wife was not unusual for sojourning laborers from places like Toisan, where in some villages almost all males were expected to seek a living overseas. Both men and women may have been used to the idea of long-term separation. Yet it must have been cruelly hard.
The original of Moy's reentry permit application is preserved in the files of the National Archives and Records Administration, Chicago office. It was scanned there by Soo Lon Moy, Grace Chun, and Ben Bronson
1906 Early immigrant smuggling II: the arrest of Pang Sho Yin and "Ducky" White
On June 30 1906, "Ducky" White and Pang Sho Yin were arrested near the Wabash Railroad freight yards on the outskirts of Detroit. Ducky (no other name is given in the records) was a white Canadian from Windsor. Pang Sho Yin, who claimed to be a San Franciscan by birth, had just sneaked across the border with Ducky's aid. The arresting officers were inspectors from the Immigration Bureau acting on a tip. They promptly put both of the arrestees in jail, Ducky for immigrant smuggling and Pang for unlawfully entering the country.
Pang's claims to American birth, although not backed up with papers of any kind, were treated seriously. His first court hearing was on July 22nd. The case was continued by the judge until September 18-October 30. The judge seems to have decided against Pang, and on November 1, United States Commissioner Chapin ordered him to be deported. The order was appealed by Pang's lawyer to the U.S. District Court. On December 21, Judge Swan sustained the Commissioner's deportation order.
The American future of Pang looked bleak. However, his lawyer decided to appeal again, this time bringing the case to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati .The deportation order was delayed until the appeal could run its course. As was quite often the case with such appeals, that of Pang was successful. On June 7 1907 the court decided that Pang's lack of citizenship could not be proved and ordered that he be discharged, a free man.
Ducky, who had already spent a year in jail waiting for the outcome of Pang's appeals, was then found guilty of smuggling illegal aliens. He received a prison sentence of three months. While he may have felt this to be unfair, he had at least one previous arrest for smuggling Chinese (in that case, in 1904, the Chinese also were set free) and in the eyes of the Immigration Bureau was a professional smuggler who deserved what he got.
Readers may be surprised that Pang and a good many other illicit immigrants went free. However, it seems that the strong anti-Chinese bias shown by the Immigration Bureau and much of the Caucasian public was not always shared by the courts. Those quite often ruled that an arrested immigrant had to be released because the Bureau had failed to disprove the immigrant's claim to citizenship.
As a reporter named Ralph had noted back in 1891, "the fact appears to be that of 60 Chinese, on an average, who try to enter at San Francisco every month, without unquestioned authority under the law, a large proportion succeed. Less than twenty-five per cent are sent back to China."
We do not know why White's nickname was Ducky, incidentally, or why Immigration made no effort to use his real name.
National Archives and Research Administration, Chicago, Immigration Service Chinese Case Files, 25/46
In 1913 a white Chicago woman named Alice Davis Sing was alleged to have found a more direct way of getting rid of her Chinese husband, one Charles Sing -- she took a knife and stabbed him to death in their home at 3460 Archer Avenue.
Alice had been a Christian missionary in Kansas City’s Chinatown. That is where she got to know Charles and several other Chinese men, described by her father as “admirers.” She fell deeply in love with Charles. After the murder, one Chicago journalist noted that unsuspecting white girls like Alice quite often “were lured into [Chinese men’s] parlors, stores, and chop suey joints by their pleadings and outward gentleness, then, captivated by the apparent luxury of their lives and apartments, they visit them again and again until their ruin is accomplished.” Alice’s ruin entailed not only marriage to Charles but conversion to her husband’s religion, a tendency to speak in Pidgin English, and a fondness for Chinese clothing, as shown by the lace-trimmed cheongsam dress she is wearing in this photograph.
Alice Davis Sing in September 1913, after being charged with murdering her Chinese husband
1912: Bad East-West marriages I: Emma Wing tries to deport Willie Wing 21 Mar 2005
As noted above, marriages between Chinese men and white women were not uncommon during the Exclusion Act period (1882-1943), when there were very few Chinese women in the U.S. Many of these East-West marriages were happy enough. Some, however, were not.
One such marriage reached its final crisis here in Chicago in 1912. It had begun in the early 1900s, when Emma Wing (her maiden name is not recorded) married Willie Wing. The Wings took up residence in New York's Chinatown and then went to Hong Kong where they seem to have intended to live for a while. Emma had already lived in Chinatown for a number of years and spoke Chinese. Willie seems to have been a charming man with big ambitions, no business sense, and a strong interest in his wife's money. They had an adopted son whose original parents, the Immigration Bureau noted later, were Jewish.
We first see the Wings, or at least Willie, as loving spouses. In 1906 Emma had returned to America while he stayed in Hong Kong. He wrote her this letter, pleading with her to hurry back, inquiring sweetly about their son, asking for money, and enclosing many kisses as X's.
But his kisses had already been, or were about to be, rejected. Either on her first trip to Hong Kong or on her next trip, Emma had made a shocking discovery. Willie was already married. And he had not one but two other wives. She naturally was furious. She went back to New York determined never to see him again.
Sometime before 1912, however, Willie too returned to the U.S., crossing the border illegally from Mexico. He got a job of some kind in Chicago and lived here for a number of months until Emma, who evidently had good sources of intelligence through her New York Chinatown connections, found out where he was. She informed the Immigration Bureau, which promptly arrested him for illegal entry. Emma did everything she could to get him deported. She bombarded Immigration's offices in Chicago with letters accusing him of polygamy and other illegal behavior but not, interestingly, of brutality. She offered to come to Chicago to testify against him in court.
Immigration replied that unfortunately this was impossible. According to law, they said, wives could not give valid evidence against husbands. This was when she decided to drop her bomb. She wrote back that giving evidence would be no problem because she had never been legally married to Willie anyway -- she already had another husband when she married him.
The Immigration Bureau may have felt that this revelation rather undercut Emma's credibility. They almost stopped corresponding with her. It was only as an afterthought that one official in 1913 sent her a short note saying that Willie had been released. The court had found him to be a citizen and therefore set him free.
The story of Emma and Willie Wing comes from the Correspondence of the Chinese Division of the Immigration Service, stored in the Chicago District Office of the National Archives and Research Administration. The researchers who discovered the Wing story were Grace Chun, Soo-Lon Moy, and Ben Bronson, all from the Chinatown Museum Foundation.
We first encountered the story of the Sings in Northwestern University's comprehensive on-line historical files on Chicago murders: http://homicide.northwestern.edu/.
Most of the above comes from contemporary newspaper accounts of the murder found in the microfilm newspaper archives of the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public Library. The following newspapers covered the Sing case: the Chicago American (9/5/13-9/13/13), the Chicago Daily News (9/8/13-9/9/13) and the Chicago Evening Post (9/4/13). The Chicago Tribune, rejecting vulgar sensationalism, did not so much as mention Charles and Alice Davis Sing.
1913: Bad East-West marriages II: Alice Davis Sing murders Charles Sing 24 Mar 2005
She showed touching grief when shown her husband’s body, but the hard-bitten Chicago detectives were not impressed. They still thought she was a murderer. Her husband’s brother Frank told the police that she and Charles had quarreled violently a week before about his plans to go back to China and not to take her. The police themselves seem to have looked into but rejected more exotic motives, including a nation-wide smuggling ring and a love quadrangle featuring George Norn, a strikingly handsome Chinese friend, and Alice’s sister Emma.
The case came to trial in December and, to the fury of the police and Frank Sing, Alice was acquitted. In spite of the sensational nature of the murder, the evidence against her was not strong. The jury may also have been influenced by her grief and devotion. As she told a newspaper reporter a few days after the murder,
“From the first time I saw him I loved him. There was something about him that fascinated me. He was quiet, lithe, and graceful. He was mysterious, and I guess that is what attracted me. He never laughed out loud no matter how happy he was. He chuckled…”
