Tucson's Chinese Community: Stories of People and Places

Melvin Lee at New Empire Food Market, which his family has been running for over 60 years. Photo taken by author.

This Story Map emerged out of my senior anthropology thesis, which (t)races the transformations of Chinese homes, grocery stores, and suburban spaces throughout the 20th century, examining the racial meanings that these places both emerged from and created.

For my thesis, I interviewed 15 second- and third-generation Chinese Americans from Tucson, all of whom were connected to the legacy of Chinese immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. These interviews were incredibly rich, as these people had decades of life history to share with me. This Story Map was born out of a desire to point out some of the quirky, interesting, funny things people said to me that didn't make my final paper.

Additionally, I also wanted to make a public document containing the research I did about the history of Tucson's Chinese community. Particularly, I focused on different spaces.

This Story Map is split into Places and People, but the two categories overlap and inform each other. Places maps the grocery stores that were the livelihood of most of the Chinese families in the first half of the 20th century, and tells a history of Tucson's Chinese community through place. People contains the portraits I took of some of my interlocutors along with lightly edited transcripts of their life stories.

The first Chinese people to settle in Tucson in the late 1800s were railroad workers. Fong (1980) tells the story of some of these workers: “Before the Southern Pacific had reached Gila Bend, Arizona, for instance, three men who shared the family name Wong left the work gangs and came to Tucson. They arrived in the late 1870s and established the O.K. Restaurant on the southeast corner of Church Plaza and Mesilla Street. A laundry basket was used instead of a cash register and meals were seventy-five cents each” ( 234). 

After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, many of the new Chinese immigrants came illegally through Mexico. Some, like Kathleen Chan’s grandfather, were even forced to hide in a false bottom of a wagon. 

Established around this time, the first Chinese space was near the end of Pennington St. It included a grocery store, restaurant, laundry and the first shrine to Chinese gods in the Southwest outside of California (Ho and Bronson 2018, 6). 

By 1916, Chinese people were forced to move elsewhere, as the Tucson Women’s Club and the local government demolished buildings to make way for new offices and a city hall. They moved to the area bounded by four streets: Meyer, Main, Jackson, and Broadway.  Historian  Sandy Chan  describes this as “part of a slow movement of the Chinese and the Mexican community south of Congress [St.] into the area now known as Barrio Viejo.” 

This area was home to a thriving Mexican American community, called tucsonenses, who had moved there after being displaced from the area near the old presidio after the arrival of Anglo American settlers in the 19th century (Otero 2010, 16). 

Chinese families established grocery stores on street corners. By 1949, there were 710 Chinese people in Tucson and more than 100 Chinese-owned markets, according to an exhibit at the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center. Run by a credit system because many people could only afford groceries on payday, these stores relied on connections and trust between Chinese owners and their Mexican, Tohono O’odham, and Black customers. 

“Like every Friday, you would have kids going down to pay off the bill at the Chinese markets,” remembered Alisha Vasquez, the fifth-generation Tucsonan who is also the director of Tucson’s Mexican American Heritage and History Museum. 

Many Chinese kids who grew up this time spoke Spanish in addition to a dialect of Chinese. Howard Eng, whom I interviewed for a news article on the history of these grocery stores, said his father, who ran their family’s grocery for almost 30 years, spoke some Tohono O’odham in addition to English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and a bit of Spanish. 

In 1966, Tucson voters approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project, which destroyed all of the buildings in this area to build the Tucson Convention Center. Painting the area as either lacking commercial activity and in need of “revitalization,” or as a space of lawlessness and danger, proponents of the urban renewal project actively ignored the thriving communities of color there. 

After the urban renewal project, the Chinese community scattered—moving south, north, and west of downtown. The map below shows the Chinese grocery stores present throughout the 1940s and 1960s. The effect of urban renewal on the area marked by the brown square is apparent in the map; the red squares remain concentrated in the city’s center, while the blue dots have scattered. 

The map was made with data provided to me by the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center. Note that some of the addresses reference streets that no longer exist, so this map is not 100% accurate; however, it provides a rough picture of the stores changed over time.

Because most of the traces of historical Chinese presence in Tucson are gone now, it is easy to forget the community’s long and rich history here. The following map narrates places important to the community through individuals' personal recollections. The stories about the Tucson Evangelical Chinese Church and the Chinese Community Center were so rich and vibrant that I needed to expand on them further below the map.

Allen Lew: So we had the Chinese church on Main Street. Then we moved to the Rainbo Bread factory and made that into a church and community center. A lot of controversy because we had this Chinese pastor. The first pastor passed away and the second pastor moved in from California. And we were all set. We had plans to build this church and we were gonna buy this land near Grant and Stone Avenue. About five acres of land. That's a lot of land. And at the last minute, a real prominent Chinese got enough votes to stop that project and buy the Rainbo bread factory, which is really dumb because it was an old building. It had big halls because the big rooms were for mixers and bread lines, you know, to make the bread and cook it and package it and all that. And the sad part was—it took a lot of money to repair it. And it split the town in half. Half the people hated the person and the people that voted for it. And the pastor was not happy about it, moving to a building that was not really a church. 

Allen Lew: They call it a church because it became a nonprofit. If you didn't call it a church, you'd have to pay taxes on the property. So we called it Tucson Evangelical Church. And actually they changed the name to Tucson Confucius Church. And then we got a pastor from China to come take over that church. And that other pastor left Tucson—when he left, it really broke the church up. The church died and then left to some when he left. It really broke the church up. And then laws allowed the stores to be open on Sunday. Once that happened, all the Asians started opening their grocery stores on Sunday. And so a lot of them didn't go to church anymore. 

Anna: My mother-in-law, she used to round up all the women to take them to church on Sundays, because the guys wouldn't close their stores to bring their wives to church. So she would just go in the car and ‘round up all these ladies and bring them to church.

Allen: So the church died. Actually, the church was still strong because it was only a social thing. The community center became a place not only for the church having its services, but also the community center had the fourth of July, Chinese movie nights. They had to have a projector to show movies because it didn't have DVDs. We all grew up there and we had dances and Chinese school on Sunday. The reason we all went to Chinese School: to get out of work. And to play. 

Josie Gin Morgan: Growing up in Tucson, it was wonderful. My brothers—so I have three of 'em..They were in high school in the ‘70s, so the rest of us were underaged. We’d just tag along. We were the little brothers, little sisters…We were going out at night, 20, 30 of us. We would play volleyball and have 50 people on each side. It was crazy, but it was so wholesome. After everybody finished working at the grocery stores and studied and did all that, then we would typically get together like after 10 o'clock at night…They all owned hot cars. Back then there was drag racing—and there’s another clan of Gins, we’re all from the same village, but of a different lineage—and everybody would have these really hot cars and they would do drag racing. My favorite memories are going out to breakfast at four o'clock in the morning. [laughs] You know, after we did all this running around and playing and having a great time, we'd all get together and come down onto a restaurant like a Denny's, and then we'd all have breakfast and then we'd go back home.

Allen Lew: We used to throw parties, a bunch of us guys. We were good guys at the time. [laughs]. Still are. We would invite all these people to come to the dances and all that and to make everybody happy…we made an effort that we all dance with everybody. So everybody had a good time. Most homes were small…They would clear the furniture and then the whole place would be dance floor. Put some chairs along the wall for you to sit down, and then we just play the record player. 

Anna: We’d form bowling teams, baseball teams. We played against the Chinese in Phoenix. We had volleyball teams. It was really the social group that we belonged to. We would play tennis on Sundays.

Scott Chan: My dad grew up bowling, and he knew other people his age—the Woons came from a bowling family. The Gees, the Wongs: everybody bowled. My dad was really big in it. He's in the Arizona bowling Hall of Fame. Actually, for meritorious service, not necessarily like bowling like being a great bowler, but for meritorious service. He was the president of the Tucson Bowling Association for a number of years. So that opened up a lot of things for us as children. I mean, I practically grew up in a bowling alley, you know, we go free because of my father…The end of my summer since I could remember—the Chinese community in California is very big in bowling, right? So they would have this Labor Day Bowling Tournament and they would rotate it among sites in California. And we would go. A lot of Asian Tucsonans would go. Even before I bowl in it, we would go. 

Josie: And again, there's a life before the [Cultural] Center happened on River Road. There's a whole, you know, decade or decades of, you know, what happened back there. 

Jacquie: My popo came here in 1946. She had to learn Spanish first. She had never met a person who was not Chinese. How alien this landscape was to her. 

I'm the only one that gets to call her popo because it means mother's mother. And my mom is the only girl so I'm the only one in my family who gets to call her popo. So when I say my popo, I mean it. She’s mine.

As a little kid, my popo took care of me a lot. And we would go to other Chinese ladies’ grocery stores and restaurants. I think that that's another big piece of—not everybody had a grocery store. A lot of families had restaurants.

Sometimes at the other grocery stores, I had other cousins. We all had the same last name. Way, way back we’re cousins, but we don't know exactly how. We’d run around and our grandmothers still had chickens in the back and would slaughter them for lunch and give us quarters to play on their video game machines that they had in there. We’d play in the coolers and pretend. We played store and like do stuff, like the little guns to put price tags on stuff. 

Our family history on my mom's side is all about having two grocery stores, raising the kids in the back. My popo working 16-hour days whether she had a baby on her hip or she was pregnant at the time. She was always on her feet, always working. 

My grandfather didn't do a whole lot. He died when my mom was six. 

Josie: So we had that property on I-10 and Speedway. And my mom, because she was widowed, kept the property and maintained it. It was in the seventies, that's when the gas wars were. My mom is not literate in Chinese or English, and she learned Spanish just because she had to interact with the customers. But she was so shrewd, she was able to get a contract with Exxon Corporation for 20 years. She didn't have to work anymore. She was guaranteed an income. 

Jacquie: Everybody told popo she should go back to China. You have no support here, you don’t speak the language, you don’t know anything, you got four kids. And I think, from our conversations, it had a lot to do with the idea that she had a lot more freedoms as a woman and a widow in the US than she would have back home. She would have been expected to get remarried. There's no telling what kind of marriage she would be entered into. 

Josie: There weren't very many widows when my mom was widowed. So when my brothers were getting married, like the week before, I would get a letter. My family, we don't talk to each other. We don't share or that sort of thing. But I would get a letter and it would be written in Chinese. I'm not literate in Chinese at all, and I don't speak it 'cause I'm the youngest one. A good friend who I was dating at the time was from Hong Kong. And he would read it for me. And it was really slanderous to my mom. 

There's just a lot of gossip. And it was pretty ugly. That was actually the time where I didn't want my identity to be Chinese because I said, Wow, this community can be really vengeful. And, and so for a long time I did step away. I ended up marrying a Hispanic man and kinda turned my back on my culture saying, It is so judgmental. It is so unfriendly to single women. It is so gender biased. 

So I got kicked outta school, got pregnant, and I thought my mom was going to disown me. She didn't go to either one of my weddings. I ended up marrying the guy twice. [laughs] I wanted to see if I could make it work.  

I was 21 when I had my daughter. And I thought she's, she's never going to embrace my daughter. I, I really had a hard time and I thought, she's gonna hate my child because she's biracial.

Jacquie: If it wasn't for me being Mexican, I don’t think we'd have that close relationship because I’m all up in her grill. I want to hug her. I want to give her a kiss.

I was like eight or nine the first time I told her I loved her. She’d never said it to me. I'm sure she hugged me when I was a baby. But like when I got to be more of a kid and not a little one, we didn't hug anymore. And she hugs real horrible. She doesn't know how! Nobody ever taught her how to embrace. [laughs] So she would grab me and hit me real hard on my back and I’m like [chuckling] nobody wants an embrace like that.

Josie: And it's funny 'cause when my daughter came out as queer, I mean—there's no words to describe it. And my mom, I just knew that my mom was gonna ding her. Or not understand or whatever. And it turns out when you're the grandparent, you don't have to be so harsh. So when my daughter got her lip piercing, and I said, you just wait till your grandmother gets hold of you. And I was like, I was just ready for my mom to just yell at her. 

And my mom, all calm, says, “Is that what the young people do now?”

I said, “You're supposed to beat her ass!” [laughs]

Jacquie: My mom told me later that there were some issues with my grandmother and her because my grandmother was like, “Don't go back to school.” Like my mom wanted to go back to school after my dad and her divorced and she was like, “You're not going to graduate. You're not going to finish.”

Josie: I graduated from high school when I was 16, went to the U of A and all that freedom made me crazy. I did well in high school, but I came from a west-side high school [Pueblo] that didn't prepare me for college. So I got put on probation, got disqualified, got kicked out of the university. I couldn't tell my mom. So I pretended I wasn't in school. I pretended I was at U of A, but really taking classes at Pima College.

It took me 14 years to go back to school. During that break, I became a master florist. So I worked in flower shops. I was making $5 an hour under the table, and I was raising a 7-year-old daughter. And, I remember thinking, you know, knowing people who graduated, and I said, I can do that.  

My mom, bless her heart, she comes in, she says, “Move back home. I'll pay all your debt. You go to school.” And that's what I did. But I think she really did want me to get married. [laughs] It was like, find a nice Chinese guy.

When I went back to school, I did all the things right. Versus when I was incoming the first time, I did everything wrong. One of my good friends Roger knew I was struggling. He knew the issues and identity that I was really having a problem with, that I either felt I had to embrace it with all its ugliness, or I had to step away. 

And he said, “You know, Josie, you could pick different parts of your culture that you like and don't like.” 

And I, I don't know why, it's common sense, but I sat there and went, “Wow.” That was just it. It turned on a light bulb. Because there was so much ugliness during my adolescence. 

Jacquie: Me and my mom had to learn the hard way. Everything I did to try not to be like my mom—I did the same things. She got disqualified [from university], I got disqualified. It took me 10 years to get my bachelor's degree. Because I was in and out of school. I eventually finished. And then I went to graduate school. And my mom did go to graduate school too. So she has a master's degree. 

Josie: [My mom] can't even read my diploma. And then I got my master's and she's like my biggest fan now.

Jacquie: And now I get to take care of her. My mom has done all this paperwork to you know, to get her all these services. Because running a grocery store, she didn't have an IRA. She didn't have a retirement plan. So I am now getting paid by the government essentially to be able to take care of her the way she took care of me when I was little.

Since I was a little kid, she always said she was gonna take me back to China. I've always asked her. She went back when I was eight right before her mom died. And she said I'm going to take you. She didn't take me. Bummed. 

Then she said, “When you're 14. I’ll take you when you turn 14.” 

She didn't take me.

 “When you're 18—” and then I was like, “Alright, you're not taking me I get it.” You're not taking me. 

We were snowed in in Connecticut. I had the day off because we got snowed in. And I was like, “You know what, let's pop on the computer. I'm going to show her Google Earth.” She's going to take me around her village. We’re going to sit in my warm, warm apartment in Connecticut, a place that she had never even heard of, to visit me while I'm in graduate school. Her grandkid. And we're gonna go to her village right now. We Google Earth’d that and we zoomed around and walked around. 

And she’s like, “Wow. It’s changed so much.” 

I was born here in Tucson, St. Mary's Hospital in 1955. And my parents were Dan Don, an immigrant from China, and my mother, Lillian, who was a white woman from the East Coast. At the time they got married in 1953, it was still illegal to have an interracial marriage in the state of Arizona. So they drove into Lordsburg, New Mexico and were married at a justice of the peace there.

I grew up in Tucson. My parents had a little grocery store on the corner of South Sixth and Bilby, which is on the south side of town. It was called Grocer Boy Superette and then later became Liquor Dan after my dad’s first name. 

My dad always said that he did not want to be the typical Chinese grocery where you live behind the store. He said he had grown up that way because as an immigrant, he was brought here by his grandfather who had a small store in Florence. He brought my father when he was nine years old. And they lived behind their store and my dad always said, That experience—I don't want my own family to have because you always have mice and it's just not healthy. His original store actually had living quarters, the small building before he married my mom, but I don't know that he ever lived there. I'm not sure. That was probably the late 1940s when he purchased that.

But when I was born, my parents had already purchased a house about a mile and a half from our store. And that's where we lived. That's where I grew up. I could bike it. It was close by so my mom could go home during the day to do some laundry or whatever. But we operated just like the other family owned businesses. We all worked in the store. We were there long hours  and we cooked a lot of our meals there in the back of the store. We rigged up a little two-burner, gas tabletop stove. Mostly we’d cook soups and stews and things like that.

[Laughs] I just spent a lot of time in the store. I remember inviting a friend from elementary school over. We needed to practice our flutes because we were taking lessons in school and I said come to the store because that's where I was. Everything took place there. 

My dad did deliveries out on the reservation because the families couldn't come in. Especially for the elders, he really had this concern for them. He really had extensive interactions with Native people as I think back on it. Some are, of course, his business base, but he always seemed to go beyond that. 

I think Chinese merchants were often the original check cashing place. They were like little banks, which now I think about that—what an amazingly unthinkable risk that you would want to assume back at that time. Who wants to have cash around now and have somebody rob you, you know? My dad had this little fee schedule he posted and put on the window of the office in the back of the store. 

A lot of grocery stores also had a [credit system] where people couldn't pay until payday. You would just run a tab for them. They’d sign the back of the receipt, you’d put it in the register and then that night you posted in the little ledger that keeps track of that running total. And then they’d come in and ask, How much do we owe you?

It's funny you know, with you asking me about a lot of this. I've thought about some of this through time, but when you hear yourself talking about it, you start thinking about how amazing that stuff was and how it built community because it was built on interactions among people—neighbors and whole neighborhoods and parts of the Tucson community.

My parents had that store so, so long. I had my kids there, my two children, I brought them there as babies. They played in the corner and we set up a little area for them. At that time I was just helping out because I had already gone through college and I was doing other things, but you know the family just really had to pitch in.

Neither of my parents finished high school. My dad came to Tucson for maybe a year or so at  Tucson High and then he went to work in restaurants and different things like that until he got enough money together to buy his first store. My mother—she lost her father when she was only about five. The family grew up without a father and an additional wage-earner so it was tough for them. So when she got to high school age, she also started to work.

As a child, my dad did have contact with his mother in China. And he would get letters but he had left before he ever learned to read and write. He could speak Cantonese fluently, of course, but he couldn't read and write. And so he would have to save those letters up to get somebody to read them for him. And so he always sent money back over there. And a relative in Hong Kong would forward the letters because back at that time, there was no political tie between the US and China. It was called Communist or Red China. And I remember when a letter would get forwarded. When he’d get it and it might have a Mao stamp on it or whatever. I remember being so sure—when I pulled it out of the mailbox, I’d look around. I remember being so sure the FBI was probably watching our house. [chuckles] So that was kind of a weird thing, too.