The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [88]
The American medical establishment, viewing practitioners like Leung as serious competition, conspired with authorities to drive them out of business. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese herbalists were frequently fined or imprisoned for practicing medicine without a license. Tom Leung was arrested more than a hundred times, but he took the situation in stride; recognizing that his success required defiance of the law, he accepted trouble with the authorities as part of the cost of doing business and incorporated the arrests into his regular schedule, developing a system so that his secretary would call the bank to arrange bail the moment the police arrived. The raids actually provided a windfall benefit: free publicity. “The [more] he was arrested, the more business he got,” his wife recalled.
A far less controversial Chinese business was retail trade. During the early twentieth century, the most famous Chinese department store owner was Joe Shoong, a former immigrant laborer. In 1903, he opened a tiny store in Vallejo, California, which he expanded into National Dollar Stores, a major chain recognized by 1920 as the largest Chinese business in the United States. Though the employees (and virtually all the customers) were white, the managers and stock-holders were Chinese. Within a few decades, his empire, which provided Shoong with the second highest income in the state of California, included more than fifty stores in the western states, and prompted Time magazine to describe him as “the richest, best-known Chinese businessman in the U.S.”
Of course, most Chinese-owned stores were very small. In the South, where the Chinese controlled much of the grocery industry, the typical store contained a large room in front for displaying merchandise and greeting customers, and a small room in back, where the owner ate and slept. Ray Joe, a Chinese émigré who arrived in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1920s, lived and worked in one such tiny store. During the day, he sold groceries, pies, cakes, and hot dogs, and at night, “I sleep on two trunks pulled together for bed. My brother pulled four stools together, he slept there—we tried as hard as we can to try to fight it out and make men of ourselves.”
Opening a grocery store in the South posed distinct risks for a Chinese would-be merchant; his lack of English skills and local connections left him vulnerable to unscrupulous suppliers, complaining customers, and thieves. Nonetheless, the Chinese émigré also enjoyed certain advantages. His kinship ties and Guangdong background gave him immediate access to capital and business experience, as clans often pooled their resources to pay for a relative’s emigration journey and to launch his overseas enterprise. Even more important, the southern Chinese grocer met virtually no competition. Apparently, his willingness to work long and hard hours for a thin return did not invite emulation by the locals.
One unexpected consequence of plantation slavery was that it left blacks and whites alike ill prepared to compete in a capitalist economy. As James W. Loewen, author of The Mississippi Chinese, points out, southern whites suffered from a precapitalist, almost feudal mindset. Many avoided service industries because they required waiting on customers, a practice the culture viewed as servile and demeaning, even when profitable. Meanwhile, most blacks were too intimidated by the white ruling class to open their own stores. Black business success in and of itself could be interpreted