The grandfather of Mary Wong arrived in Tucson in the early 1880s, searching for the Gold Mountain he had heard so much about in China.
Like most of Tucson's early Chinese immigrants, Ling Kee Low came into the country to lay down miles of railroad tracks across the American landscape. It was grueling, low-paying work that Wong's grandfather later left to seek his fortune in the Old Pueblo.
"They came to look for the Gold Mountain — that's what they used to say," Wong recalled as she played a game of mah-jongg at the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center recently. "But they found out that it wasn't easy making it; you couldn't get rich overnight in America, like many people thought."
Even in the face of blatant racism, Wong's family and other early Chinese immigrants thrived as merchants in and around what is now Downtown Tucson. Through places like the cultural center, their descendants now work to preserve that history.
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Late last year, the center launched an effort to record the lives of elderly Chinese residents. Their taped oral histories, as well as stories published in a newsletter, will be archived in the center's library for public access, said Susan Chan, interim volunteer executive director.
"It's important to be able to pass on their knowledge, so that future generations will know how Chinese immigrants came here and how they made a life for themselves in Tucson," Chan said.
Schoolchildren already hear some of those stories and learn about Chinese cultural traditions from older community members who visit various schools during February's Chinese New Year festivities, Chan said. This year, the lunar Chinese New Year falls next Sunday. In China, the celebration traditionally lasts 15 days.
Chinese immigrants had to modify their observance of the New Year in their adopted country. When Wong was growing up, she said, her extended family celebrated with large family gatherings and special Chinese dishes for a couple of nights.
Her grandfather, who was the first in Wong's family to call Tucson home, had a grocery store on Convent Street, where Wong's father, Sew Ping Low, arrived in 1910 to help run the business. A few years later, Wong's father opened his own market.
Defiant of time, the building that housed the market — as well as the living quarters for Wong's parents and siblings —still stands on Anita Street. Urban renewal long ago erased most other physical traces of Tucson's Chinese past.
"That's where most of us were born," Wong said of her siblings and their childhood home. A nephew now lives in the house, she said. Growing up in the heart of Barrio Anita, Wong said she grew up alongside Mexican-Americans, speaking Spanish as they did.
Later, she married Edward C. Wong, the city's first Chinese doctor, and had two children. For years, Wong said, she worked as her husband's assistant in his private practice. He died in 1976.
For Wong, the time spent at the cultural center — which opened on the Northwest Side in 2005 — is a time to socialize with people she has known for decades, people who can reminisce about the old days, both the good and the bad.
She and others still remembers the racism that their community endured, how they were kept out of certain parts of the city, and how they couldn't legally marry white people.
"Back in the old days, there was a lot of prejudice," said Walter Tang, 67, a retired railroad worker. "If you were not white, you couldn't buy property on the east side of Campbell (Avenue)."
Tang, whose family owned Joe W. Tang's Market on Ninth Street, also has pleasant memories of growing up on Tucson's South Side. He liked fishing in the Santa Cruz River with his grandfather, he said.
"When I was young, he used to take me there to catch some catfish — we called them mudcats," he recalled.
Carmen Lee, 89, stared discrimination in the face after she met her late husband, Henry, in the early 1940s. She was Mexican-American, waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant on South Sixth Avenue. He was the son of Chinese immigrants. The two fell in love.
"We couldn't get married here, so we went to Los Angeles to do it," Lee said at the cultural center recently.
Norma Don, a retired schoolteacher and sister of community leader and businesswoman Esther Tang, said it is heartening to see that society has moved past the discriminatory practice of prohibiting people to live in certain areas.
"Now the Chinese are everywhere," she said. "They don't own as many grocery stores as they used to, because most of the younger people are professionals."
Still, some of the more recent Chinese immigrants are following in the footsteps of the railroad workers who turned into entrepreneurs.
They are people such as Lisa Quang, 39, who runs a grocery store on West Irvington Road near South Sixth Avenue. She and her husband, Chun Shing Lee, have operated Liberty Market seven days a week for 13 years.
Quang and her husband work hard, she said, but at least in this country, they have an opportunity to get ahead. "In China, there's no money to have our own business," Quang added.
View a slide show of images from both the past and present at azstarnet.com/slideshow
