#4: Headquarters of the Filipino Student Christian Movement

by CBrooks Posted on July 15, 2013

In the 1930s, the Filipino Student Christian Movement national offices were located in the Equitable Life Building at 347 Madison Avenue in Midtown.

347 Madison Avenue

The FSCM was part of the YMCA’s Committee on Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students, and the FSCM’s national office was actually inside the headquarters of the Committee on Friendly Relations (which also organized Chinese, Japanese, and “Oriental” student Christian groups). Founded in 1924, the FSCM just two years later held its first national conference, which attracted Filipino students from across the country.

At this time, most Filipinos lived in Hawaii or on the West Coast, particularly in Washington State and California, while the 1930 New York census reported only about 1400 Filipinos in the entire state. The population was likely larger than that, however; a New York Times article from the mid-1930s put the number of Filipinos in the New York metro area alone at around 3000, many of them sailors who found work on American ships. Others were definitely students, the kind of men (and sometimes women) the FSCM sought to attract and serve.

Filipina students at Columbia University, 1923. Courtesy Filipino American National Historical Society.

As part of its work, the FSCM published a magazine, The Filipino Student Bulletin, that was alternately newsy and moralistic: the organization sought to push Filipino male students to avoid taxi-dance halls and other supposedly immoral forms of entertainment. According to historian Kimberly Alidio, FSCM leaders and Filipino elites worried that students (many of them self-supporting) would succumb to such temptations and stay in the United States instead of taking their skills back to the Philippines. But the FSCM wasn’t just concerned about morality; its leaders were strongly nationalistic and viewed the group as a vehicle for achieving independence for the Philippines.

President Franklin Roosevelt signs the new constitution of the Philippines in 1935.
President Franklin Roosevelt signs the new constitution of the Philippines in 1935. From Wikimedia Commons.

Because so many Filipinos lived on the West Coast, FSCM leaders like Manuel Aveda spent considerable time traveling across the country, sometimes intervening in situations in which Filipinos (some, but not all of them students) encountered hostility or discrimination. If you’ve ever read Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, you know that Filipinos in the United States faced constant harassment, segregation, and discrimination in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the West. Aveda and other Filipino leaders also gave speeches trying to familiarize the American public with Filipinos and the Philippines, an American colony that the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 promised eventual independence.

Brooklyn Eagle, Feb. 28, 1947
Brooklyn Eagle, Feb. 28, 1947

Because of World War Two, the Philippines gained independence in 1946, rather than 1944, as Tydings-McDuffie stipulated. Some of the FSCM leaders, including Aveda, became officials in the new Philippine government. Aveda’s first position was Philippine Consul-General in New York.Sources for this post include Kimberly A. Alidio, “Between Civilizing Mission and Ethnic Assimilation: Racial Discourse, U.S. Colonial Education, and Filipino Ethnicity, 1901-1946 (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2001), the New York Times, and the website of the Filipino American National Historical Society, Metro New York Chapter (http://fanhsmny.tumblr.com/).

 

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The Chinese Empire Reform Association in New York

by CBrooks Posted on June 19, 2013

A blog that chronicles the Baohuanghui, or Chinese Empire Reform Association, published this post a few months ago. It’s a really interesting history of the organization’s attempts to support advocates of imperial reform in turn of the century China, and the group’s influence in New York at that time.

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#3: Japanese American newspaper offices

by CBrooks Posted on June 13, 2013

This building, 12 W. 17th Street, is the address where the Japanese Times (New York Shimpo) newspaper operated until World War Two.

11 w 18 2
11 W 18th St., Manhattan

The publisher of the Japanese Times was Shozo Midzutani, a local businessman and art dealer who started the paper in 1911. Midzutani was extremely active in the community, helping create a credit union for Japanese New Yorkers after World War One and sponsoring a number of Japanese art exhibits in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. According to the censuses of 1920 and 1930, the Japanese-ancestry population of New York hovered around two thousand before World War Two. Regardless, the Japanese Times had two competitors: the Japanese American Commercial Weekly and the Japanese American News (New York Nichibei).

The building in the picture above isn’t the same one where Midzutani had his office, however. The current structure dates to the postwar era and was probably a modern replacement for an older tenement. By the time the lot’s owners erected the current building, the Japanese Times was long gone, having declared bankruptcy and ceased operations shortly after Pearl Harbor. In 1942, the US government imprisoned the entire Japanese American population of the West Coast in a politically motivated act of outright racism. US authorities detained Midzutani at Ellis Island as an enemy alien and likely placed in him in a Western internment camp because of his connections to the Japanese government press. Most people of Japanese ancestry outside the Pacific Coast escaped similar imprisonment, however.

The Japanese American News Corporation (JANC) occupied an office at 11 W 18th Street immediately after the war, although the current building at that address, like the one at 12 W 17th, also dates to the 1950s or 1960s.

12 w 17
12 W 17th Street, Manhattan

The JANC began publishing the Hokubei Shinpo, the first newspaper to appear in Japanese in New York after the war, in November 1945. Essentially a continuation of the Japanese American News, the paper found a ready audience in the growing Japanese American population of the city. In 1943, the War Relocation Authority, which ran the Japanese American concentration camps, began a program in which it released certain inmates to areas outside the forbidden West Coast defense region. By 1944, thousands of Nisei (American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry) and some Issei (their Japanese-born alien parents, whom American law at the time did not allow to naturalize) had left the camps, resettling across the country. Despite the open hostility of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to Japanese Americans, about four thousand Nisei and Issei eventually resettled in New York.

Newly arrived Nisei resettlers on 5th Avenue. Image courtesy of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Photographer: Tom Parker, Oct. 18, 1943.

 

The Hokubei Shimpo initially served Issei readers and then, in 1947, began an English section to cater to the Nisei. The paper continued publishing until the mid-1980s.

 

 

 

 

 

Sources for this post include Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); the New York Times; and my previous work on resettlement.

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#2: Office of the Chinese-American Times

by CBrooks Posted on May 22, 2013

This home on a quiet side street in Forest Hills, Queens, was the first office of the Chinese-American Times, a Chinese American paper that published completely in English.

CAT office
The Chang home and first CAT office in Forest Hills, Queens (from Google Earth Street View)

The founder and editor of the paper was William Yukon Chang (鄭玉安), a Chinese American from Hawaii who graduated from St. John’s University in Shanghai. After college, he worked for the Republic of China’s news agency and the popular English-language China Press. As the Chinese civil war raged, Chang returned to the U.S. and earned an M.A. in education from New York University. He began publishing the CAT (as it became known) in 1955.

The CAT was unusual for a number of reasons. First, no other Chinese American newspaper at that time published entirely in English, the language of the American-born second-generation. Second, Chang initially operated the newspaper not from Chinatown but from Forest Hills, Queens, a growing center for middle-class Chinese Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Chang himself wrote and edited almost all the CAT’s content, and after picking up the newest edition of the CAT from a printer in Manhattan, he and his family folded the newspaper and prepared it for mailing to subscribers.

Unlike many other publications serving Chinese American New Yorkers, the CAT was an independent paper at a time when most other journals in the community functioned as mouthpieces for Chinese political parties and factions. Only one other newspaper, the United Journal (聯合日報), and two magazines, the Chinese-American Weekly (中美周報), and the China Post Weekly (大華旬刊), were independent, while three daily newspapers in New York represented various factions of the Kuomintang: the Chinese Journal (美洲日報), the China Tribune (華美日報), and the Chinese Nationalist Daily (民氣日報). Less overtly, Communist Party members had helped found the leftist China Daily News (美洲華僑日報) in 1940.

1956 03 1

By focusing on community betterment and staying politically neutral, William Yukon Chang kept his newspaper going until the early 1970s. By that point, many in the English-speaking second generation had moved out of New York City, as so many people did during this period. Because of the Immigration Act of 1965, thousands of new Chinese immigrants–at the time mostly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia–were making New York their home, but they sought Chinese-language papers rather than English ones. And by the early 1970s, Chang had been writing, editing, and publishing the paper for almost two decades, so he eventually decided to end the CAT’s run.

Sources for this post include Dallas Chang, daughter of William Yukon Chang, and the Chinese-American Times.

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#1: Sing Kee’s office, 11 Mott Street, Chinatown

by CBrooks Posted on May 17, 2013

This fairly ordinary building once served as the office of Sing Kee, also known as Sing Kee  Low (劉成基).

IMG_3033

Sing Kee was a native of San Jose, California, and moved to New York at some point in the 1910s. During World War One, he served in the U.S. Army and won a Distinguished Service Cross for heroism. Returning to the U.S., he encountered many of the obstacles that American-born people of Chinese ancestry commonly faced during this era. China-born merchants dominated the Chinese American community of New York and often viewed native-born men like Sing Kee with disdain. Outside the Chinese community, however, Sing Kee faced even greater hurdles as a result of racial discrimination.

Like a number of other native-born men, Sing Kee eventually found work as an interpreter for the Immigration Service. The position epitomized the opportunities and limitations that Chinese American citizens encountered, for Sing Kee earned his living from serving a government agency that many in his community both feared and hated. At the same time, job opportunities for Chinese American men were so few that the Immigration Service job was a coveted one.

By the early 1930s, Sing Kee had quit the service and started working instead as a restaurant manager in Chinatown. Like many restaurant managers, he joined the On Leong Tong (later known as the On Leong Merchants’ Association), an influential tong involved in both aboveboard and illegal activities, such as gambling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, several American-born On Leong men served as Tammany Hall’s leaders in Chinatown. For a number of years, this building at 11 Mott Street was not only Sing Kee’s office but also the headquarters of the Chinatown Democrats.

By the 1940s, Sing Kee had become an immigration broker and travel agent. He used his knowledge of immigration policies to help Chinese immigrants travel to and from the United States, despite the very draconian laws (including, but not limited to, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) meant to keep them out. Many of Sing Kee’s clients were “paper sons” who purchased identities that allowed them to immigrate to the U.S. During the federal government’s 1956 probe of Chinese illegal immigration, investigators portrayed Sing Kee as the kingpin of an East Coast immigration “racket” and argued that he knew he was helping paper sons enter the US unlawfully..

Sing Kee convicted
From the New York Times, Feb. 20, 1957.

The truth was much more complex. Sing Kee almost certainly knew that many of his clients were paper sons. At the same time, he understood that the immigration system was racially  discriminatory, and he also made a lot of money helping undermine it (although not nearly as much as federal prosecutors contended). Eventually, Sing Kee was found guilty and served two years in prison, despite his reputation as a pillar of the community and a war hero.

Sources for this post include Y.K. Chu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi (History of the Chinese People in America) (New York: China Times, 1975); the New York Times; and the National Archives and Records Administration.

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