Woo Yee Sing, Liang May Seen and Minnie Wong

Chinese language class at Westminster Presbyterian Church
Minnie Wong is seated third from the left in the back row

This past Wednesday, I went with Fr John Schroedel to the Lakewood Cemetery, where several members of his extended family are buried, as well as the remarkable Father Anthony Coniaris of blessed memory, who founded Light & Life Publishing and was responsible for the translation and publication of some of the first Orthodox theological materials in English on the continent of North America. Orthodoxy in this country owes a great debt to Father Anthony. Although I never made his acquaintance in life, I am happy to have been given the privilege to visit his grave and offer prayers there.

One of the other grave markers that I saw in the cemetery, not that far away from the Greek section where Father Anthony is buried, belonged to a certain Minnie Wong. Minnie Wong is a name which deserves to be better-known in the Twin Cities. She was as important in her way for the Chinese community here as Father Anthony was for the Greek community. It is only on account of my work for Global Learning Alliance and Minghua Chinese School that I became aware of her in the first place. However, Minnie Wong’s history is closely intertwined with that of another outstanding Chinese woman here, Liang May Seen.

Chinese people have been coming to North America for a long time. Many Chinese folks worked as ship-hands on Spanish galleons operating out of Manila during the Age of Sail, and some of them ended up in Mexico and California in the 1500s and 1600s, where they worked primarily as hairdressers for the Spanish. These Chinese communities ended up as a part of the United States at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. But there are interesting archaeological finds indicating that Chinese trade goods—belt buckles and beads made out of bronze—ended up in the hands of Alaska natives long before contact with the Europeans. (This doesn’t exactly prove the wilder theories of Gavin Menzies, but it is tantalising, and should force a massive rethink of the way archaeologists think about the region.)

The first Chinese woman in Minnesota, though, came here a different way. Born in Kaiping in Guangdong Province, Liang May Seen was essentially lured onto an America-bound ship by a human trafficker, who promised her a wealthy marriage to a Chinese-American businessman but sold her into a brothel instead. This happened in 1885. She managed to escape the brothel in 1889 and took refuge at the Presbyterian mission in San Francisco, where she availed herself of the opportunities to learn English, housekeeping and mathematics.

There she was introduced to Woo Yee Sing. Woo Yee Sing, originally a laundryman, had come to Minneapolis in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act in order to escape the persecution, harassment and violence that Chinese people faced in San Francisco. Together with his brother Woo Du Sing, he opened the first Chinese restaurant here, the Canton Café, in 1883. Woo Yee Sing had come back to San Francisco in 1892 to look for a bride, which is how he met Liang May Seen.

Liang May Seen and Woo Yee Sing

Liang May Seen took an active role in building relationships in her new town. Thanks to her excellent study of English, she befriended many white women through the Presbyterian Church—among whom was women’s suffrage activist, Urban League director and state congresswoman Mabeth Hurd Paige—and opened a curio shop in 1904 to bolster her family’s income and to broaden her network of friends. More importantly, though, she took the lead in welcoming other newcomers of Chinese descent to Minneapolis. Through the Presbyterian Church she established a Chinese Sunday school and an afterschool programme for English language learners to help recent Chinese immigrants acculturate to their new home.

It was in this capacity that she met and befriended Minnie Wong, the wife of George Wong Gee. Minnie Wong was also from Kaiping, and evidently hit it off immediately with Liang May Seen. She excelled in her own English studies. The two women’s shared interest in promoting the welfare and advancement of Chinese women in Minneapolis led them to found and co-teach the first ELL classes specifically for Chinese women in the state. The two of them collaborated on a number of charitable and advocacy projects together.

Unfortunately, Liang May Seen was unable to have children of her own with her husband. (This isn’t attested in the actual history, but reading between the lines, her infertility is likely on account of the sexual violence she experienced during her involuntary servitude at the San Francisco brothel.) She and her husband adopted a young boy from San Francisco, named Howard.

Even though they had come eastward to escape the organised anti-Chinese violence and racism that characterised life on the West Coast, life here in the Twin Cities was still hard. Canton Café changed its name to Yuen Faung Low (遠芳樓) or ‘John’s Place’, and it became famous as a restaurant which was open to everyone regardless of race. As Woo Yee Sing put it in an interview with the Minneapolis Journal: ‘They are men like you or me. They have got to eat and there must be some place for them to do so… They are all brothers, and there is no room for race prejudice.’ (It is worth remembering that at this time, even though Jim Crow didn’t exist de jure in Minnesota, segregation was still the de facto norm and was enforced extralegally.) Despite this, in 1912 Yuen Faung Low fell victim to a bomb attack, probably motivated by race prejudice. Woo and Liang’s foster son Howard, in another interview, also recalls being attacked and taunted with anti-Chinese slurs on the street when growing up.

Yuen Faung Low, however, expanded—a second-floor tearoom was built to accommodate more upscale clients, and the restaurant continued to operate until the 1960s. Woo Yee Sing passed away in 1925, and Liang May Seen twenty years later in 1946—by the end of her life she was able to see the end of Chinese exclusion.

Things have certainly improved for AAPI people in the United States since the days of Woo Yee Sing, Liang May Seen and Minnie Wong—and these improvements are largely the efforts of precisely such people who were active in their own communities. It is with gratitude, then, that we should remember these three people and their contributions, and continue working to ensure that the current atmosphere of anti-Chinese bigotry in the United States is dispelled. For this I ask the added prayers and intercessions of Fr Anthony Coniaris of blessed memory, whose own experiences as the son of Greek immigrants assuredly parallel those of Howard Woo.