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Legacies

Chinatown’s People

Clifton Fong (left) conducts a musical number for Gon Huie, at Lincoln School in Oakland Chinatown in the 1920s.

Courtesy of Dr. Wayne Fong

An Oral-History Project Preserves the Chinese Experience

   Whenever I needed a haircut in the late 1940s and the 1950s — growing into my teen years — I would walk a block and a half from my family’s restaurant in the heart of Oakland’s Chinatown to a two-story brown-shingled building at the corner of Eighth and Harrison streets. On the ground floor was the barbershop of Fong Get Moo, a petite woman in rimless glasses and slick tightly curled hair.
    I don’t remember much about the haircuts, except that when she finished, she gave me a lollipop or Tootsie Roll. What a great memory!
    Fong Get Moo passed away in 1989 at the age of 95, a legend in Oakland Chinatown because a lot of people got their hair trimmed by her — before they got candy.
Her shop doubled as an informal community hall, where family members met after a Chinatown outing.
    Every so often, I reminisce about Fong Get Moo (real name: Lon Yoke Wong Fong, “Fong Get” being part of her husband’s name, and “Moo” being an honorific for an unrelated Chinese woman) and lament that I never found out about her life as Chinatown’s first female barber.
    In early 2004, as I was researching Images of America: Oakland’s Chinatown, a photo history published by Arcadia Publishing Co., I knew I had to include an image of Fong Get Moo.
    After my book came out, a light bulb went off: Why not start an oral-history project that indirectly tells the stories of Chinatown legends like Fong Get Moo?
I searched out the children or grand-children of these now-deceased figures
and interviewed them for posterity (www.oaklandchinatownhistory.org).
     Others have a deep interest in Oakland Chinatown history, too. Janet Lem, for instance, has been collecting stories and photos of Lincoln School alumni, many of whom have Chinatown roots. Roger Glenn, an aviation buff who isn’t of Chinese descent, has persuaded Laney College to host a monument to Fong Ru, aka Fong Joe Guey, who made the first powered flight over Oakland skies in 1909. Fong’s shop where he built his plane was on what is now Laney property. A public ceremony is scheduled for Sept. 19. The Oakland Asian Cultural Center has its Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project (www.oacc.cc/programs/ocohp.html), of which I am both an advisor and participant. This project’s first phase featured young people interviewing elders.
    As for my own oral-history project, Dr. Clifton Fong, the first-born of Fong Get Moo; Arthur Tom and Jean Moon Liu were among my interviewees. Each was in his or her late 80s or early 90s when I interviewed them.
    Arthur Tom was the son of Emma Hoo Tom, one of two Oakland Chinese-American women who were the first of their race and gender to register to vote in the United States. This was in 1911, when California women won the right to vote in state elections, nine years before other American women could vote.
    Jean Moon Liu is a granddaughter of Lew Hing, who started the Pacific Coast Canning Co. in West Oakland in 1904, a business that provided canned fruits and vegetables nationwide and to U.S. military personnel in Europe during World War I.
    Their stories — and that of a few others I have gathered — collectively represent a “bridge generation” between long-gone Chinese Oaklanders who lived during the harshest days of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and those who came of age after World War II, when the dreadful exclusion act was repealed, and who may know little or nothing about the bad old days.
    Why are the stories of this bridge generation important and why do I care?
    Even though Chinese have been in Oakland since the 1850s, their stories remain largely invisible. Chinese Oaklanders helped build the city and its economy under the trying circumstances of the exclusion act.
    I care because my parents and three older sisters experienced the local effects of the exclusion act. My father, who came to Oakland in 1912 as a teenager, passed away in 1961. Twelve years later, so did my mother, who arrived in 1933. Their early lives in Oakland remain somewhat mysterious to me. I happen to believe, now that I am officially a “senior” myself, that there is intrinsic value in learning about the experiences of elders.
    Absent my father and mother telling me their stories, the next best thing is to learn from the children and grandchildren of Chinatown people who were my parents’ contemporaries.
    Fong Get Moo was a rarity — a Chinese female born in California in 1894, in a Chinese gold-mining village near the Oregon border. She moved to Oakland in her early 20s to marry Fong Get Chong, a barber. They had two sons, Clifton and James, both of whom became dentists.
    Clifton was the third Chinese-American dentist in Oakland and the first to break out of Chinatown — to 13th and Broadway. He retired in 1990, and his son, Wayne, took over his business. Clifton, who is 92, and his wife, Marion, still live in Oakland.
    Not a lot is known about Emma Hoo Tom, who along with Clara Lee, made history by registering to vote in Oakland in 1911. She died when her son Arthur was only 16 years old. When I interviewed Arthur in 2004, when he was 92, he didn’t remember much about her, having learned of her historic moment years later from local newspaper articles marking the moment.
    Arthur was a pioneer himself — the first Chinese American employee of the California Department of Motor Vehicles. He helped establish DMV policies like driving-test standards and photographing drivers for their licenses. He died in early 2006 at the age of 93.
    As a child, Jean Moon Liu remembers her grandfather, the tycoon Lew Hing, living in a house built near Lake Merritt, a locale generally unfriendly to Chinese families in the early 20th century. Lew Hing was prominent in both Oakland and San Francisco Chinatowns.
    Jean went on to a productive work life as an accountant for both private and nonprofit organizations. Her daughter, Carol Liu, has been a member of the California Legislature since 2000 (Assembly for six years, Senate since 2008). Jean Moon Liu, 91, still lives in Oakland.
    My project remains a work in progress, but already I am grateful to hear these stories, which tell pieces of the American saga in quite human terms. There is no bitterness at the discriminatory conditions, but a sturdy and quiet pride in having lived productive lives and passing on a legacy for generations to come.