Chinese Americans in the Mississippi Delta

The Mississippi Delta Chinese are a small community of Chinese Americans that has lived in the Mississippi Delta region since the late 19th century. A related population of Chinese Americans lives across the Mississippi River in the Arkansas Delta and the nearby city of Memphis, Tennessee.^[1]

History

Tri-State Chinese Directory of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee

The earliest Chinese settlers in the Mississippi Delta were laborers recruited by cotton planters to supplement the recently emancipated African freedmen during Reconstruction. Like other early Chinese Americans, the first Chinese immigrants were peasants and merchants from the Siyi region of Guangdong province in South China. All of them were single and married men who worked in Mississippi and sent most of their income back to their families in China. Arriving in a country with a strict binary racial hierarchy, the Chinese were often classified as "colored" in early government records.^[2][3]

By the end of the 1870s, the Chinese had left the plantations where they'd been employed and began opening small family-owned grocery stores in the many small towns of the Delta. Chinese families began moving to the Delta in the early 1900s, and most modern Mississippi Delta Chinese are the descendants of Chinese who arrived in Mississippi during this time. Until the end of the 1900s, Chinese-owned groceries could be found in every Delta city and town, serving both white and black customers. Chinese children were originally segregated from the white public schools, and segregated Chinese schools were built for them in Greenville and Cleveland. However, these schools were closed and Chinese children were allowed to attend white schools and white colleges after World War II.^[4][5][6][7]

The population of the Mississippi Delta Chinese exploded after war. Many young Chinese men from the Mississippi Delta served as soldiers during the Second World War, and many women from China married these soldiers and settled in the Delta as war brides after the war. By the 1970s there were as many as 3,000 Americans of Chinese descent living in the Delta, especially American-born Chinese children who were raised in the Delta. For decades the Mississippi Delta Chinese community was one of the largest Chinese American communities in the American South, but since then, many families have moved to larger cities in Texas, the West Coast, and the Northeast. Most of the historic Chinese groceries have already closed, and only a few families remain in the Delta.^[8][9][10]

The Lum v. Rice court case involved an ethnic Chinese student in the Delta.

Ethnic identity

Given the strict racial segregation of the Jim Crow South, Chinese immigrants and their descendants had to make choices about how to move through society, where to build communities and relationships, and how to educate their children.^[11] Oral histories collected over the years, such as Chinese Grocers from the Southern Foodways Alliance (2010) and Chinese Oral Histories collected by Delta State University reflect the diversity of choices made by Chinese American residents regarding their ethnic identity, including how and if to teach their children to read and write Chinese, whether or not to attend Lucky Eleven^[12] events, how to honor their ancestors, how to source and cook Chinese food, and how to negotiate relationships with white adults and children.

Notable people

• Dr. T. G. Wing Chow, Chinese American Medical Association of Southern California president
• Sam Chu Lin, journalist and news anchor
• Martin F. Jue, entrepreneur and inventor
• Josephine Jue, NASA computer scientist
• Albert Lum, founder of Southern California Chinese American Lawyers Association
• Only Won, producer of Far East Deep South