Virginia Wing was born and grew up in Marks, Mississippi where her family owned a grocery store in a black part of in the small Delta town. A pioneer among Chinese Americans from the South who pursued a career in acting, performing, and writing, Virginia has had a long and prolific career working in opera, theatre, cabaret, TV, film, playwriting, directing and producing to script analysis. She modeled in her youth and is in the Breck Girl Hall of Fame. She was the model in the Mitsouko by Guerlain ad in the 60s, which won international awards. She was a nominee for Best Actress in the Hollywood NAACP Image Awards. Her mother who was also named Virginia Wing was born in Chicago. She met Charley Wing on a visit to Chicago from Marks in 1934 and they married in 1935 and made their home in Marks. Fascinating interviews of Virginia are available online.
0 Comments
The first Chinese to become mayors of their towns were Luck Wing in Sledge, MS., his brother John Wing in Jonestown, MS., and Charlie Wah in Turrell, AR. These achievements in the early 1970s in very small towns in the Deep South where there was strong racial segregation and very few Chinese were remarkable.
Just before I went to the Mississippi Delta in fall of 2007 for the first time to give a talk about my memoir, Southern Fried Rice, and to spend two weeks visiting people up and down the Delta to hear their stories running grocery stores, I learned of the horrific and "senseless" cold blooded murder of a Chinese grocer, Alfred Quong, and his employee, Sopiah Jung, by two local teen-aged boy. His daughter, Cindi, was devastated by this terrible event, but later made a moving and compassionate 10-minute documentary, Leadway, about the tragedy and as a tribute to her father. On my trip from Jackson to Cleveland where I was to speak, my hosts, the Sidneys drove past Shaw, which sent chills down my spine. (To view documentary click on Title below) Leadway documentaryThis tragedy is one that many Chinese merchants, whether grocer, laundryman, or restaurant owner, all over the country have suffered in one way or another for decades. These merchants are often defenseless against assaults, robberies, and homicides and offer easy targets.
Checking newspaper archives for the MS. Delta, I found many incidents where Chinese grocers were victimized. To be a Chinese grocer was not only hard work, but also a very dangerous way to make a living. Virtually all Chinese in the Delta between the 1880s until the middle of the 20th century owned neighborhood grocery stores. There were a few Chinese with laundries around 1900, but none as far as I could locate in later years.
After World War II ended, a few Chinese restaurants opened such as the How Joy in Greenville, but I was surprised to recently learn of several Chinese born in China listed in the 1880 U. S. Census as "restaurant keeper" and cooks in a restaurant in Silver City, Yazoo City, and a town in Leflore County with an illegible name on the Census sheet. Given that outside of large Chinatowns such as San Francisco and New York, few places had Chinese restaurants until after 1900 when the publicity accorded to a previously unknown dish, "chop suey," generated intrigue and curiosity among white yuppies that helped the growth of Chinese restaurants. Still, most of the customers were Chinese because the dishes served were too "ethnic" for non-Chinese diners to stomach. But in 1880, especially in Mississippi, one would not expect Chinese restaurants to exist unless of course, their menu contained mainly of entirely traditional southern dishes. Unfortunately I could find no information about what these Delta Chinese restaurants dished out to customers but it certainly differed from the offerings in the Chinese restaurants of Chinatowns in places like San Francisco, Chicago, or New York. Arkansas has recognized the importance of historic preservation and included the Chu grocery store 1915 building in Forrest City as an endangered site. Plans to use it as a multicultural museum and archive are underway. The Chu family siblings came from laundry work in Michigan and Illinois before coming to the Arkansas delta to open grocery stores in Crawfordville, Biscoe, Marvell, Madison, and Round Pond. My thanks to Henry Wong for providing detailed information about the families in the diagram below. Maybe Greenville can follow this example and preserve and repurpose the buildings that housed the Joe Gow Nue No. 2 and the Mee Jon grocery stores. |