ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

Chinese merchants and grocers in the early 1940s.

by Justin Nystrom Imagine a century ago, a young Chinese couple aboard a freighter in the North Pacific, Guangdong Province far astern, steaming east in search of Gam Sahn , or “golden mountain,” a mythical place most of us would recognize as the American dream. A sheet of paper in the man’s pocket bears the address of an uncle in the Mississippi Delta; in the woman’s sits a photograph of parents she’ll never see again, while far away in Greenville, a man eagerly waits for the favorite nephew he last saw as a boy, ready to teach him the life of a crossroads grocer in this land of unfamiliar language and custom. Thus the cycle of migration unfolded for the Chinese whose grocery stores once flourished in the Delta. The first of their kind Life in the Chinese Delta

The American-born children of Chinese families fondly remember growing up in a parallel universe, socializing almost exclu- sively amongst themselves. The adults would gather together at night to play “marathon” mahjong games while they played with other Chinese children. “We called everybody uncles and aunts,” remembered Luck Wing of his boyhood in a Jonestown grocery. “It took me a long time to find out that they were not really uncles and aunts.” When not in school, the children worked in their parents’ stores yet, like Wing, they were seldom encouraged to follow into the family business. Instead, most went on to college and careers that took them far from home. Because of this self-isolation, the non-Chinese residents of theDelta remained mostly unaware of the thriving food culture on display at Chinese family gatherings after closing time at the grocery. “When the Asians got together,” recalled Raymond Wong, “they always had something to bring.” Most kept coops, producing the key ingredient for pak cham kai , a poached chicken dish served at Chinese New Year. Gardens yielded green stalks of bok choy and the dong gua , or “winter melon,” a fruit

appeared in the 1870s, a time when many plantations began closing their commis- saries, creating an opportunity for small stores to serve the needs of the region’s black majority. By the 1920s, groceries had become the only occupation of the Delta’s Chinese, with family members joining their kin in the Delta and taking advantage of hui , or the pooled capital of relatives, to open their own nearby stores. Blood ties renewed the Chinese community in the Delta throughout much of the 20th century, at first in the teens and ’20s, and again after World War II, when the U.S. finally eased immigration restric- tions. Raymond Wong’s parents arrived in 1948, drawn by family members who had come to the region a generation before. A young veteran, Wong opened a grocery store in Drew with his wife. Frieda Quon, a retired librarian at Delta State University in Cleveland, was born in the Delta and grew up in the modest living quarters in back of the Min Sang Company grocery that her parents ran in Greenville. She remembered hearing how her then 18-year-old mother, who had grown up in New York, came with her Chinese-born father to the Delta in 1941 to join uncles in the grocery business.

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JULY•AUGUST 2019