Providence's Black Chinese: A Love Story
On the morning of February 23rd, 1901, Chung Yick stood chatting with Mr. Joseph Hoffman, the proprietor of the picture frame shop on the ground floor of the Charles Street house the two men shared with several other tenants. The house wasn't much better than a tenement building, with its dirty wooden face and narrow crooked stairs. A crude sign on one side said "PICTURES" in bold letters, marking the entrance to Hoffman's store. The Yicks lived on the other side, along with the Rileys and the widow Driscoll, who were cramped up on the second floor. Still, it was a decent street to live on, with a mixture of small shops and residential homes and the Mosshassuck River creeping alongside it like an emaciated and sleepy serpent.
Chung was a gaunt man in his forties with hollow cheeks and intense brown eyes-he projected a certain gravity that was somehow incongruous with popular notions of the jolly, docile Chinaman. Instead of the traditional Chinese collarless jacket, he sported a conservative brown suit, complete with vest, tie, and polished black shoes. Chung was a cook by trade and a good one, too-well enough respected for the Providence Journal to dub him one of the city's "best-known Chinese restauranteurs." Most likely, he was an employee of the Wah, Yee, Hong & Co. eating house, the Chinese restaurant located closest to his home, just a brisk fifteen-minute walk away at the bottom of College Hill.
It was a windy Saturday morning with temperatures well below freezing, and Chung relished these last moments of warmth inside the store before he'd have to venture out into the cold. Several thousand miles away from his old home in southern China, where temperatures fluctuated between hot and hotter, Chung still hadn't quite adjusted to Providence's bitter winters. That walk would be especially brisk today!
"John," Mr. Hoffman said suddenly, addressing Chung by his chosen American name, "What's all that racket?"
Indeed, some great noise-frantic footsteps and shouting-could be heard coming from the general direction of Chung's kitchen where, minutes earlier, he had left his wife and stepdaughter bustling about their morning chores.
"It's a fire!" someone shouted from outside. "The attic's on fire!"
The first official Chinese resident in Rhode Island appeared on the state census in 1865, but there may have been at least one "Chinaman" in Providence even earlier.
China's record of human rights violations is long and mind-boggling. Atrocities such as purging tens of millions of people during the Cultural Revolution, its infamous one-child-per-couple Population Policy, persistent oppression of Tibet and the bloody June 4 massacre at Tienanmen Square in 1989 have given the Chinese government a reputation of having little respect for human life. And yet, despite its tarnished record, China maintains its Most Favoured Nation trade status with the US and is one of Canada's top ten recipients of bilateral trade. As supposed supporters of human rights, Canadian and US governments have developed hypocritical attitudes toward China, compromising ethical values for material gain. Instead, North American nations should restrict aid and trade with China to programs that can be used to encourage social reforms.
Despite their being of the same culture, Asian American, the authors of the two texts have contrasting viewpoints. Elizabeth Wong, author of "The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl", looks upon Asian culture with eyes full of contempt and sees America culture as far superior. However, The author of "Notes for a Poem on Being Asian American", Dwight Okita, recognizes how the two cultures blend together, going hand-in-hand with one another. Wong's perception of her Asian culture as shameful is evident throughout the text. She wrote that her mother "forcibly" sent her and her brother to Chinese school (Wong 1).
Throughout history, Americans have always been intimidated by immigrants. The idea of an immigrant coming to America and easily being able to get a job scared Americans. Americans feared that good jobs would be taken from hard working Americans and given to immigrants for less pay because they required less money to live on or were used to no wages or lower wages in their Country of origin. People would immigrate to America in search of a better life, and often times they could find homes and jobs that made them want to stay. A melting pot is described as being a mixing of different cultures into one universal culture. In Erika Lee’s, The Chinese Exclusion Example, immigrant exclusion helped re-define the melting-pot
Dow, George F. Everyday life in the Massachussetts Bay Colony, Soc. for Preservation of N.E. Antiques, 1935.
Kaplan, Justin. "Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn." Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: St. Martin's, 1995. 348-359.
One theme that I found to be very interesting is the struggles that Asian Americans have faced in the past and the present. I never knew about the struggles that have been happening in places like China and Laos. I never realized how many families come from poverty and violence. I have only learned very little about historical events such as Vietnam. I am only now becoming more aware about the human rights problem in China. I am so used to seeing places like Tokyo, Japan in movies and television. Everything seems so clean and the city is lit up with bright lights and amazing buildings at night. Before this course, I thought that most Asians live this kind of life. I never knew that these events had even occurred and I was amazed at some of the things Asians have had to go through over the years.
Everyday people in China are suffering from their government. From being wrongly accused to being executed for petty crimes. In a country where you cannot speak your opinions, talk poorly about government officials, speak about Chinese communist failures, or even browse the internet freely. China has kept its citizens in the void. One example is the great firewall of china, which sensors most social media and other sites. This essay will go into some individual stories of the Chinese government's unfair social injustices towards its people.
In this paper I will be sharing information I had gathered involving two students that were interviewed regarding education and their racial status of being an Asian-American. I will examine these subjects’ experiences as an Asian-American through the education they had experienced throughout their entire lives. I will also be relating and analyzing their experiences through the various concepts we had learned and discussed in class so far. Both of these individuals have experiences regarding their education that have similarities and differences.
He fig-ured that the normal half hour walk home might take as long as two hours in snow this deep. And then there was the wind and the cold to contend with. The wind was blowing across the river and up over the embankment making the snow it carried colder and wetter than the snow blanketing the ground. He would have to use every skill he’d learned, living in these hills, to complete the journey without getting lost, freezing to death, or at the very least ending up with a severe case of frostbite be-fore he made it back to Ruby.
components of Halloween to identify it as a slasher film. First off we need to define the slasher
The Chinese immigrants started flooding in through the West coast to California around the time of the Gold Rush, looking for economic opportunity. With the Chinese immigrants came a whole new cultural group and a whole lot of laborers that were eager to work. The Chinese quickly became involved in all kinds of labor from gold mining and building railroads to agriculture and fishing skills. The new Asian population just kept growing and growing as immigrants spread word of their good fortune in California and swayed more and more of their family to come over to the states. With their growing population they created their own large communities and the first ever Chinatown ...
History textbooks seem to always focus on the advancements of civilization, often ignoring the humble beginnings in which these achievements derive. How the Other Half Lives by journalist-photographer Jacob A. Riis explores the streets of New York, using “muck-racking” to expose just how “the other half lives,” aside from the upbeat, rich, and flapper-girl filled nights so stereotypical to New York City in the 1800s. During this time, immigrants from all over the world flooded to the new-born city, bright-eyed and expecting new opportunities; little did they know, almost all of them will spend their lives in financial struggle, poverty, and crowded, disease-ridden tenements. Jacob A. Riis will photograph this poverty in How the Other Half Lives, hoping to bring awareness to the other half of New York.
[6]Ritzer, G. (2005). The McDonaldisation of Society, In Mapping the Social Landscape: Readings in Sociology, edited by Susan J. Ferguson. Boston: McGraw Hill.
First of all, spanking does not lead to violence. Our surrounding world and media do. "The average sixteen-year- old has watched 18,000 murders during his formative years, including a daily bombardment of stabbings, shootings, hangings, decapitations, and general dismemberment" (Meier 34). It seems unjust to blame parents who are trying to raise their children properly for today's violence. If a child touches a hot stove he does not become a more violent person because of it, he just learns not to do it again because he learned a valuable lesson from the pain (Meier 34).
Twain, Mark. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” Concise Anthology of American Literature. Ed. George McMichael, James Leonard, 7th ed. New York City: Pearson, 2011. 1187- 1365. Print