Women hold up half of the sky.
Mao Zedong
Despite the truth of the above quote, the reality was that women in Chinese and American society during the 19th and the early 20th century were second class citizens. In Tucson most Chinese women worked in their husbands’ businesses, took care of the children, cooked, and kept the home clean. However, a few women became grocers in their own right.
Don Kim came to Tucson in about 1890 and within a few years he became a successful grocer. In 1910 he went back to China and took a second wife, Cin Sze Luie, aka Mrs. Don Kim. When they returned to Tucson, Don Kim and Mrs. Don Kim brought with them Don Wing Him, who, according to a longtime Tucson Chinese resident, was their adopted son. In 1918 Don Kim died. For a few years, Mrs. Don Kim, and Don Wing Him worked together in the store. In 1921 Don Wing Him left for California, where he lived for the rest of his life, dying in 1970. Paul Don, Don Kim’s nephew, came from China to help manage the store. In the early 1940s she retired and went to live with her daughter Maude in California where she died in 1964. In the depths of the Great Depression, both of Mrs. Don Kim daughters attended the University of Arizona. Maude, the first Chinese woman to enroll at the University of Arizona, graduated in 1934 with a bachelors and then enrolled in graduate program in business. She died in 2000. Helen graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Science in nutrition that was followed by an internship in dietetics at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, IL. She was still living in Chicago when she died in 1992. Thanks to their mother, they were the earliest Tucson Chinese of either sex to graduate from the University.
Lee Shee Low’s experience as a woman grocer was different from that of Mrs. Don Kim’s – no one was there to help her, or her six American-born children, at the Sew Kee Market in Barrio Anita after her husband’s death in 1937. She was known in the Barrio for her keen business sense and she worked as a grocer there until she retired in the mid-1970s. In 1980, at a family wedding, she reunited with her oldest daughter, who she had been forced to leave behind in China 50 years earlier. She died in 1981 in Tucson. She was survived by sons Loy Low, John Low, Sunny Low and Joe Low; daughters Somei Tong, Sui Kam Low and Mary Wong.
East of Tucson, in the railroad town of Benson, a Chinese immigrant named Hi Wo opened The Hi Wo Company Store in 1896. Hi Wo’s, first wife, Loreta Moreno, died after 1894 attempting to give birth to the couple’s third child. Jose aka Joe had been born in 1891 and Felicita/Felicia in 1894. Hi Wo then married Loreto’s sister Emeteria. Hi Wo and Emeteria had three daughters: Soledad (1902-1994), Victoria (1903-1990), and Isabel (1906-1991). Joe became a grocer in Phoenix and died in 1933. Felicia married a miner named Dario Castillo, but when he was later killed in an accident, she returned to live in Benson. In December 1931 Hi Wo died; Emeteria passed away in April 1932. After that, the store was run by Hi Wo’s Chinese Mexican daughters for the next 57 years, it closed 1989. In 1994 the Hi Wo Company Store building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Tucson Chinese Cultural Center now owns some contents of the store as well as personal family items and many business records. (Many thanks to Robin Blackwood, curator of the Hi Wo Family Collection, Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, for her input on the Wo family history.)
China Mary see China Mary: A Different Look at Her Story
Tucson’s Chinese business and fraternal organizations were for men only. However, there was one organization where women could and did participate and that was the Chinese Evangelical Church. Women were involved with the church in positions of authority since its beginnings in 1926. Founding officers of the new church were Paul Wong, President; Mrs. Don Toy, Vice President; Miss Pauline Don, (daughter of Don Chun Wo) English Secretary; Gee Quong (male), Chinese Secretary and Mrs. Don Kim, Treasurer.
Beginning in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Tucson Chinese women were graduating with college degrees and working in professional jobs outside the home and the family market. The availability of an affordable, local university was a benefit to the entire Tucson Chinese community but especially to the women. Many Chinese women became teachers in Tucson’s public schools. They were role models to the children in their classes as well as to the whole community.
By the early 1950s a young woman was even the president of the Sino-American Club.
Other notable Tucson Chinese women are:
- Carmen Lee Ban (aka Lee Kum, Lee Cun, Le Cum, Mrs. Ng Bang Sing) was the daughter of Lai Ngan and Lee Kwan, a Union Civil War veteran. She became one of Arizona’s earliest women photographers and the only Chinese photographer that I know of from this time. Her career started in Nogales, Arizona when her mother had a grocery next to Newman’s Photographers. While working there to earn extra money she learned about photography. In 1918 the studio was sold to Albert W. Lohn. She continued to work there until she married Ng Ban Sing in 1919 and moved to Tucson. In the 1920s she worked for Elite Studio and the famous Buehman Studio. She and her husband had two grocery stores in Tucson. The first was the OK Market on south 4th Avenue and 16th Street. The second was Ban’s Market, located on 6th Street & Campbell Avenue. It opened in 1934. She died in 1940 at the age of 49 and is buried with her husband in Evergreen Cemetery, Tucson, Arizona.
- May Nelda Don was the first Chinese person to graduate from the University of Arizona and the first ethnic Chinese teacher in Tucson’s public school system. After she received a master’s degree in education, she worked at Pima County Preventorium teaching young tuberculosis patients. Then she was a teacher at Richey Elementary School which served the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. Finally, she was principal of the Gump School, Tucson’s special education school.
- Norma Don (no relation to May Nelda) had a long career as a teacher in Tucson. She was inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame, “a pioneer among women athletes and coaches in Tucson at a time when the field was dominated by men and sports participation was considered taboo for women.” She is the first ethnic Chinese in the Hall of Fame.
- Mamie Kai (How Suey Yow) was a wife and an astute business partner to her husband John Kai. After John Kai’s death in 1984, she continued working to support the community. Mamie served on the committee dedicated to building a Chinese cultural and community center in Tucson. When she died in 2000 the family donated $1,000,000 to build what is now the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center.
- Esther Don Tang was named Tucson’s Woman of the Year in 1955. She served on the Pima College Board of Governors from 1975 – 1984. She was named La Doña de los Descendientes del Presidio de Tucson in 1997. In 1999 she welcomed President Bill Clinton to Tucson and much, much more. She died in 2015 and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Tucson, Arizona.
- Anna May Wong Bourett was born in Tucson to a Chinese father and a Mexican mother. She founded the non-profit Tucson Junior Strings in 1968. According to the Tucson High School Badger Foundation, “The quality of the program has grown to the point where the top level orchestra has been labeled as ‘one of the best high school age orchestras in this country’.”
- I’m sure there are more women that deserve a mention.
Resources
Akinwale, Busola A. “Women’s History Month: Discrimination Against Asian women Codified in 1875 Still Resonates Today,” Westlaw: Civil Rights Briefing, March 31, 2021, 2021 CIVILRBRF 0048, viewed on 9/16/2022 https://today.westlaw.com/Document/I9171b84291f711ebbea4f0dc9fb69570/View/FullText.html?transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)&VR=3.0&RS=cblt1.0
“Esther Don Tang, 1917-2015,” Honored as a Historymaker 2003, Historical League, Inc., viewed on 4/5/2024 https://www.historicalleague.org/historymakers/esther-don-tang Oral history interview plus a transcript.
“Hi Wo Video 1 – Final 01” (“The History of the Chinese in Arizona: The Story of the Hi Wo Company Store”). Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, YouTube, January 5, 2021, viewed on 9/16/2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmH-p_DFOnM
“Hi Wo 02 – Final 03” (“The History of the Chinese in Arizona: The Story of the Hi Wo Company Store Hi Wo Video #2”) Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, YouTube, May 9, 2021, viewed on 9/16/2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quwm7nZnn64 (This video is the best source on the women of the Wo family.)
“Hi Wo Company Store – Benson, AZ – U.S. National Historic Register of Places on Waymarking.com,” Waymarking, last updated May 26, 2013, viewed on 9/16/2022 https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm7YPR_Hi_Wo_Company_Grocery_Benson_AZ
Hung, Louise. “AAPI Women in History: China Mary,” Global Comment, March 13, 2018, viewed on 9/16/2022 https://globalcomment.com/aapi-women-in-history-china-mary/
Kai, Mamie. “Mamie Kai’s Oral History,” Arizona Memory Project, recorded 11/26/1996, viewed on 9/6/2023 https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/nodes/view/112456
Schweitzer, John Lewis. The Social Unity of Tucson’s Chinese Community, Master’s Degree Thesis, University of Arizona, viewed on 9/16/2022 https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/551194
Wald-Hopkins, Christine. “At 70, Patsy Lee is ‘still an educator at heart’, only now at the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center,” Special to the Arizona Daily Star, December 23, 2021, viewed on 9/16/2022 https://tucson.com/lifestyles/at-70-patsy-lee-is-still-an-educator-at-heart-only-now-at-the-tucson/article_6bbd9206-5c35-11ec-af0e-fb86568ef91b.html
Yang, Li. “In Search of a Homeland: Lai Ngan, A Pioneer Chinese Woman and Her Family on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Journal of Arizona History, vol. 52, no. 4 (Winter 2011).