The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo

Preface

In the many months I have lived with Wong Chin Foo, reading what he wrote and what he read, studying what admirers and critics said about him during his lifetime and since, tracking his movements and corresponding with his descendants, I have often smiled to myself in admiration and appreciation. Had he not died more than half a century before I was born, I am quite sure that I would have enjoyed knowing this passionate and colorful man. I confess that, before I began my research for this book, I had never heard of Wong. I first saw his name on a list of the most prominent Chinese Americans, nearly all of whom were twentieth-century figures, many still very much alive today. He was described as an early civil rights activist who had opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Since I had believed that few Chinese Americans had risen to national prominence during the nineteenth century and that the community had more or less cowered in a defensive crouch, permitting the hated legislation to be brought down on their heads without much protest, I resolved to try to learn a bit more about this Mr. Wong and his accomplishments. I discovered that students of Asian-American history and politics had not overlooked Wong Chin Foo. I was pleased to find a chapter here and there devoted to some aspect of his career—for example, John Kuo Wei Tchen’s examination of his emergence on the New York stage; Qingsong Zhang’s discussion of his political activities and, to a lesser extent, his religious beliefs; and Hsuan L. Hsu’s analysis of his periodical writings.1 But no one had examined his life in its full breadth and depth. There were only sketchy accounts of his formative years; his final days in China were a complete blank. Researchers unfortunately took much of what he said about himself at face value. Given his penchant for embellishment and intermittent Preface x Preface sorties into fabrication, this meant they unwittingly got many of the details quite wrong. Wong left behind a rich archive of bylined articles—nearly all in English, which was his intellectual language—and thousands of newspaper accounts of his doings, which, taken together, offer a comprehensive picture of his public activities. By contrast, relatively little of a personal nature survives. There are a few revealing letters to his son that have been in the possession of his family for more than a century (and that I believe are new to scholars), but no surviving diaries or notebooks. There is only one confirmed photograph. Primary sources dealing with his life in China are scarce, owing to closed archives in the People’s Republic and to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, during which many documents were confiscated from his descendants by Red Guards and never returned. At least one was deliberately destroyed by a great-grandson out of a well-founded fear it might be used to brand him a foreign spy. Still, it is clear from what is available that much about this man was compelling. He was zealous and quick-witted, with a first-class mind and keen powers of analysis. He wrote forcefully and expressively , no mean feat in a language not his native tongue. Cocky and remarkably self-assured, he had an unerring instinct for drawing attention to himself and garnering publicity for his antics. He was flamboyant, quotable, and witty, and made excellent copy, appearing in the newspapers constantly as a result of some stunt or spectacle of his own devising. As a political activist, he was supremely confident in his convictions and indefatigable in the advocacy of his causes, the most important of which became full civil and political rights for “Americanized” Chinese. Author Andrew Hsiao memorably called him “a muckraker, a rabble-rouser and a consummate smartass.”2 He was all of these and much more. One of a scant few Chinese in America writing and lecturing in English in the latter half of the nineteenth century and without a doubt the most widely published on the broadest range of topics, Wong gave voice to the views and aspirations of his countrymen and made their case before an increasingly prejudiced American public. He did this tirelessly, even though he differed from most of his Chinatown compatriots in important ways, and in fact felt quite superior to them. He became a naturalized citizen, cut off his queue, and eschewed traditional Chinese dress earlier than most; moreover...