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7 A Most Delightful Dish of Chow Chow (1875–79) The peripatetic Wong delivered variations on the Boston speech for the next several years in the East and the Midwest, as well as presentations on the domestic life, manners, and customs of the Chinese. He remained in New England for the balance of 1874, addressing audiences in Massachusetts and Maine, with a short side trip to Philadelphia in November. In 1875 and early in 1876 he went on an extended tour, speaking in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. He also crossed into Canada and spoke in Kingston, Ontario, in late 1875.1 By the spring of 1876, he had returned to New England, where he visited several towns in Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts during the balance of the year. It must have been a lonely and exhausting period in his life. Wong did not make the arrangements for these speeches himself. An agent was required to do advance work such as booking venues, preparing handbills, posters, and circulars, and placing advertisements . During the 1874–75 season, he became affiliated with Boston’s Redpath Lyceum Bureau,2 a speakers’ bureau that represented some of the great authors, political figures, and orators of the late nineteenth century, including Mark Twain, P. T. Barnum, Henry Ward Beecher, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Francis Adams. Founded in 1868 by James C. Redpath, a noted journalist and abolitionist, the agency arranged speeches, debates, and discussions and retained ten percent of the fees it negotiated on behalf of its speakers.3 The organizers were often local lyceums, societies that had been providing adult education programs in their towns in some cases since early in the century. Admission was generally about a quarter, but was in places as low as 15 cents and as high as 50 cents. Sometimes the audiences were tiny, but in larger 64 The First Chinese American cities they could number as many as 4,000, as they did during one of Wong’s appearances in Philadelphia.4 By late 1875, Wong had switched agents. He had signed a contract for representation with the Rev. William Henry Benade, a Philadelphiabased pastor of the New Church (Swedenborgian), a driving force behind New Church education. At first blush this appears odd, as Benade was not a businessman. But at the same time, some church funds were allocated to the Rev. J. P. Stuart, also a prominent figure in the New Church and a close associate of Benade, “to aid in the theological education of a young Chinaman, Wong Chin Foo.”5 And after a month of coaching by Stuart,6 it was his son Lyman who was appointed by Benade to travel with Wong, suggesting that the church had plans for the young Chinese to help spread its message. Wong, however, proved a willful and costly client. In a letter to Benade written on the road, an exasperated Lyman Stuart likened working with him to a vegetable relish popularized by Chinese workers in California in the mid-nineteenth century: We have, served up to us at the hands of a “Genuine Chinese Mandarin,” a most delightful dish of Chow Chow; or, in boarding house parlance, “Mystery” otherwise Hash. The difference between the Chinese and the American dish is this: in the latter we know what we are getting, in the former we do not.”7 Lyman, who was in charge of Wong’s appearances in the Midwest in October 1875, had indeed had absolutely no idea of what he was getting. Early that month, he had met Wong in Wyoming, Ohio, where the latter had been spending a couple of weeks with a friend and had lectured in the local Presbyterian church. Lyman’s strategy, forged in consultation with his father, was for Wong to build up his reputation slowly by speaking in small towns, and in so doing garner some publicity and earn enough money to finance speaking venues in the cities. Wong, however, would have none of it. Impatient with such baby steps, he imperiously—and unwisely—pressured Lyman into securing an engagement in a large city immediately. Lyman assented reluctantly and booked the Exchange Hall in Indianapolis for October 12. When only about 50 people showed up, however, Wong flatly refused to go on. The audience was dismissed, refunds were handed out, and all were invited to hear Wong at the Academy of Music two days later. But that event did not go much better. They incurred a loss...

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