The Legacy of the Mississippi Delta Chinese | Hacker News Reader

The Legacy of the Mississippi Delta Chinese

npr.org

104 pointsTomte29 comments

I've been wanting to try Chinese-Mexican food ever since I learned about it. The US border patrol was originally created to keep the Chinese laborers from coming up through Mexico. As a result, many Chinese immigrants found themselves stuck in northern Mexico in the early 1900's, and some decided to open restaurants. Today, Mexicali alone has over 200 Chinese restaurants, many of which serve Chinese-Mexican fusion. Every combination I've heard of sounds amazing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/16/399637724/th...

There was a place called Dos Chopstix in Pflugerville (just north of Austin). When I first saw it it seemed like the stupidest thing ever.

Then I looked up the menu and it looked pretty good. I never wound up going before it closed, after just 1 year in business, so it may not have been so great after all.

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As a side note, Austin also has Chi'lantro, which has awesome Kimchi Fries, and some other food that is kind of hit or miss.

I think the key to a Fusion Restaurant is having a small, unique menu, not just "some stuff" from each cuisine.

There's also a large Chinese community in Panama (about 5% of the population), with a similarly interesting fusion cuisine.

I believe that Peru has the largest Chinese population (over a million) in Latin America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Peruvians

1493 has some explanations for this, i.e. silver, but mostly guano

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_Wor...

NYC has fast food Tex Mex joints run by Chinese. It's not Chinese-Mexican fusion, but it is something. They even make their own tortillas fresh: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/02/nyregion/where-east-meets-...

its also common to see chinese-latin food, like cuban/chinese or trinidadian/chinese, especially in places like harlem and brooklyn.

James Loewen wrote the definitive work on this subject for his Harvard doctoral thesis in 1971[1]. And although I've been an engineer for the last five years, I wrote my undergraduate history thesis on Delta immigrants (including Chinese, but also Lebanese, Jewish, and Italian -- all viewed as shades of non-white when they arrived)[2]. It has been fun to watch this thread today!

The journalist has made the same error I did as a young historian: I treated this diversity as a novelty, when anyone familiar with the history of the American South (or the American West) should find this unsurprising because these places developed in the 19th Century as part of an international economy. Fur traders in St. Louis had to know the price of pelts in faraway Paris to make profitable decisions; information (and people) circulated more widely than we usually appreciate. You will find strangers in strange lands around the world wherever there's money to be made.

[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mississippi_Chinese...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/5b5leo4e41lqwul/Senior_Thesis.pdf?...

I'm curious if you know if in the south there were tensions, or perhaps why there weren't as many, as say in the west coast like the 1886 Seattle Riot or the Rock Springs Massacre, beyond just the reaction from the exclusion act?

I believe Loewen's argument is that Chinese ran the grocery stores, and because whites viewed merchant labor as distasteful (they all wanted to be agrarian landowners, even poor whites) Chinese had extra leverage because they were the only group supplying necessary goods in these small rural towns.

A case that established Chinese exclusion from white schools (Lum v. Rice, 1924) came out of Rosedale, just north of the town of Greenville mentioned in the article, when a white public school did not permit a Chinese grocer's daughter to enroll. Interestingly, the lower county court ruled against the school district and upheld the Chinese girl's right to attend the white school. The decision was subsequently overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court and US Supreme Court in favor of the school district. It's telling that the court closest to the case ruled in favor of the Chinese: these merchant families had economic leverage in their communities because they filled a role that white planters needed but disdained for themselves. A town that treated its Chinese unfairly might soon find itself with no place to buy canned goods.

There is a similar story for Jewish immigrants, who ran (and in some cases whose decedents still run) the general/department stores in these Delta towns. The oldest synagogue in Mississippi is in -- you guessed it -- Greenville.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_v._Rice

> You will find strangers in strange lands around the world wherever there's money to be made.

I learned about Punjabi Mexican Americans[1,2] in the early 1900s recently. It's interesting to think that without the various Asian exclusion acts and jurisprudence[3,4,5], the US would be even more diverse today than it is now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Mexican_Americans [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/punjabi-sik...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_...

Yeah, restaurants, grocery stores/convenience stores and laundry places are something that a lot of immigrants gravitate to.

You don't need much capital, your language skills can be subpar and your family can help out even at a very young age (6-7), sweeping up, making change, washing vegetables, and putting out stock and arranging things. Plus, in more rural places, you have enough space where you can live in the back of the store and run things in the front of the store. It's perfect for kids because they can study when the store is slow and help out when it gets busy.

Reminded me of this short documentary about the development of Chinese cuisine in the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NMrqGHr5zE

I went to Jamaica about 15 years ago and ran into some ethnically Chinese folks that were speaking Patois. I remember thinking how cool that was.

In this clip about the Mississippi Delta Chinese, you will hear ethnically Chinese folks not only speak with a heavy Southern accent, but also exhibit facial and behavioral tics that are typically associated with people who live in the deep south. It's fascinating.

Skip to 1:32

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NMrqGHr5zE

Hah! That was really interesting, thanks for sharing. I never considered that people from the south would have idiosyncratic facial and behavioral tics.

Being from the suburbs of the sf bay area, now I’m wondering is there anything similar that’s characteristic of people from the west coast?

Uptalk https://youtube.com/watch?v=pPZMy_JWsOU

As I understand it, uptalk began as more typically spoken by adolescent or young women and then spread to some men --but not just in the bay area but generally, initially east and west coasts. Then there is vocal fry but that's a different phenomenon.

I totally agree, but can you describe the facial/behavioral stuff? All I get is "she looks like a typical southern lady" and am interested in why

There are many examples. Her expressiveness and how she slows down and emphasizes certain words (5:13), the way she talks with her hands (3:49), how she expresses disappointment and how she does closes her eyes (5:47), how she whispers (6:02).

These types of expressions are atypical of most Chinese people, and even of most Americans.

As a lifelong Mississippian, that was wonderful and charming to see and hear. I get so used to hearing those voices that it's not noticeable until someone points out the unusualness of our little part of the world.

I was at a classmates house in college and his Chinese-born grandmother spent most of her life in Jamaica, she spoke english with a very interesting Chinese-Jamaican accent and made us delicious Jamaican food with a Chinese touch. I wish there were more opportunities to try these authentic fusion cuisine and not the nonsense places we have all over town that try to cater to everyone with some uninspired mish-mash of south east asian flavors.

Fun anecdote: My German teacher in high school, Frau Chen, a six foot tall German lady, was married to Chinese Jamaican man. He spoke with a thick Jamaican accent. I always wondered what that household was like.

I've been eating Chinese at the same place in Greenwood, MS since I was a kid. Never thought anything about it. Good food.

I was born in a small town on the border of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. I remember my parents telling me of the rare, old chinese immigrants there, but they only came there in the 80's to work as engineers in a glass manufacturing factory. They said they had to drive 1.5 hours to the closest chinese grocery store in Huntsville, AL.

Weirdly enough, I think this generation depicted in the article, and my parents, are among the last of the chinese-americans you'd find in Alabama, Iowa, or small town america. It seems more and more young chinese are opting to go back to China.

> "more and more young chinese are opting to go back to China"

This seems interesting. Do you have a source?

Not an academic source, but... my parents came to the U.S. for graduate school in the late 80's (physics + computer science) and decided to stay and develop their careers here. Literally every one of their classmates (my "aunties" and "uncles") stayed in the U.S.

When I was in grad school from 2005 to 2010, the Chinese grad students (e.g., from China as opposed to Chinese American) were quite diverse in where they were deciding to develop their careers. While some stayed in the U.S., many chose 1) going back to China, 2) academic and industry positions in other places in Asia (e.g., Singapore, Japan, Korea), 3) Canada, Europe, etc.

I don't have a source either, but this has been a concerning trend since around 9/11. First, there is the perception that "things are improving" back in the motherland. The middle class is expanding, and the quality of life is improving. Second, it's hard to get work visas in the US, and there is the perception of hostility towards foreigners (Bush's wars, Trump's election, etc).

The "reverse braindrain" is a serious problem that the US is experiencing in recent years, because the educated foreigners have chosen to get the hell out or have been forced out.

I know a few Chinese with graduate degrees in engineering who are considering returning to China after banking a few more years of American wages. They are heading back to an environmental disaster, but oh well, "progress".

Young Chinese Americans are opting to move to big cities, like other young Americans. Chinese are still immigrating to the USA at a similar rate to the last, but are almost all settling in big cities as well. The amount of Chinese coming to study in the USA has exploded in recent years, but those who have stayed have remained relatively the same. Suffice it to say, china’s net emigration rate has been constant over the last few years.

The last big immigration of Asians into the rural south happened to be via Vietnam refugees (many ethnic Chinese).

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