Abstract This combined interview includes conversations with Alice Young, Joseph Eng Young, Tom Wong, and Helen Wong. The topics covered include their immigration story coming to the United States from China, family life, their education, and careers. Joseph and Tom provide insights into the Chinese restaurant industry in New York Chinatown during the 1920s and 30s. Helen describes the types of discrimination she and her family faced as Chinese living and working in the United States. Alice shares...

Abstract Daniel Chu was born in Kohanaiki, Hawaii in 1914, the tenth child in a large family of eight boys and four girls. His father’s parents were Hakka and had first migrated to Trinidad or Jamaica in the 1870s to work on rice or sugar plantations. After their contracts ended, they sent his father, who was eight years old at the time, back to their home village in Guangdong Province. When he was eighteen, they sent for him to join them where they had settled in Honolulu, Hawaii. Daniel’s mother...

Abstract This interview with Dr. Paul Chu (b. 1925) was conducted by an NYU graduate student who was working with the Chinatown History Project (now MOCA) to collect stories for a workshop on earlier generations of Italian American and Chinese American students at PS 23 (Public School 23). Paul, a dentist and longtime resident of Chinatown, grew up in Oakland’s Chinatown and moved to New York in the 1930s with his parents at the age of 8 or 9. His grandfather, a merchant in San Francisco, was the...

Abstract Mr. Guo-Gan Yan is an immigrant who arrived in the United States from Guangdong, China in the 1990s in search of better educational opportunities for his daughter. Yan describes his life and career in Guangdong before immigrating. He details aspects of life in China related to recreation and work habits and compares it to his life in the United States. Yan also describes the effects of the 9/11 Terrorist attacks on his job as a restaurant worker in Chinatown, and the assistance he received...