Oral History Program Andrea Yee & Linn Lee Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 9 May 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Andrea Yee & Linn Lee Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 9 May 2019 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Yee, Andrea & Lee, Linn, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 9 May 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Andrea Yee (Right) and Linn Lee (Left) 9 May 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Linn Lee and Andrea Yee, conducted on May 9, 2019, in the Union Station, in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Linn and Andrea discuss their relative, Lip Hong Lim, about his life and experiences while working on Transcontinental Railroad. Additionally, Linn and Andrea discuss their life, experiences, and importance of the 19th Amendment. LR: It is May 9, 2019, we are at the Union Station in Ogden, Utah. We are with Andrea Yee, talking to her about her memories of her great grandfather and of her own life for Weber State University’s Special Collections. I am Lorrie Rands, conducting, and Alyssa Dove is with me. So Andrea, let’s go ahead and talk about your great-grandfather. What was his name? AY: Lim Lip Hong. Last name is Lim, sorry. LR: Okay, so it’s backwards. AY: Chinese forward is backwards, yeah. LR: Okay, that would take some getting used to. So you mentioned that he was one of the first… AY: He was on the first Chinese crew hired by Charles Crocker in 1864, January. LR: Wow. What do you know about his journey with that? AY: My great-grandfather was born in China. He came to the United States on a wooden Chinese junk. They called those handmade wooden boats, “Chinese Junk.” They are not junk, but that’s what they called them. He came across here, 2 at the age of twelve because of the Opium War that was started by the British, and you know about that history. LR: A little bit. AY: So he came across alone, without his parents, because there was famine and the war had devastated the countryside. He arrived after sailing for six months because they were caught in the mid-ocean gyre where there is no wind. In fact, that’s where all of our junk has ended up today. Anyway, he arrived finally after several of the twelve colleagues who had sailed with him ran out of water and some of them had tried to jump overboard. I don’t know how many actually jumped overboard. When he arrived he was twelve and he was too young to continue on into the gold mine fields. So he was hired as a cabin boy by Tubbs Cordage Manufacturing Company and this is where he worked and learned English, with the Tubbs Cordage Company that was established in San Francisco. They developed a life-long relationship but I will tell you about that later. Okay. By the time he was nineteen, he continued on to the foothills of the Sierra Mountains and worked as a hydraulic gold miner in the town of Illinois with 2,000 other Chinese immigrants. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln passed the Pacific Railroad Act. In 1863, the first rail was laid in Sacramento under the offices of Governor Leland Stanford. The Irish crew started with them, but after one year they didn’t build very many miles because they were slow and they liked alcohol and didn’t show up for work. At any rate, the Comstock Lode discovered silver and they preferred to work for them, the Comstock Lode, with better pay and better conditions. When they had 3 worked up to Auburn, they looked and they saw that the mountain went straight up. They didn’t want to work with dynamite. The Chinese who were working there, on the hydraulic mines, they are not afraid of dynamite because they discovered dynamite in China. So Crocker said, “Okay, let’s try hiring the Chinese.” There were some objections by Strobridge, who was the manager, and Crocker convinced him that the Chinese had built a Great Wall so they would probably be able to build this bridge. So my great-grandfather showed Crocker that he could speak English and he had this connection with the Tubbs Cordage Company who had ships that crossed the Pacific Ocean. He convinced this company that they could make some money by bringing Chinese workers from China, because Crocker needed thousands more workers and there weren’t enough manpower in California to fill this project. They needed 15,000. So this is the beginning of my great-grandfather’s work on the Transcontinental Railroad and he worked on it until 1869, ending at Promontory Point. LR: Okay, he was there at Promontory? AY: Yes, he was, and at the end the Chinese workers were all dismissed, thousands of them. Unfortunately, they had to walk back to wherever they could find work. But they did hire 100 of the top Chinese crews, which included my great-grandfather, to continue on to Ogden, so he worked with his Chinese crew from Promontory Point all the way to here, Ogden. LR: Wow, that is cool. 4 AY: So that’s why I’m here, and this is why I have this picture. It was very difficult finding documentation because the railroad workers payroll records were almost all destroyed, except for a few that I found at the Sacramento Museum. It just so happened that his name was in it, so this is our proof. Very few records of any Chinese names at all. They were not given acknowledgement. Let alone the names, so this is what I’ve had to dig into to find census records, residents records, so I’ve been able to find those. Just before he finished the railroad up to Promontory Point, he married a Native American woman and had two children in 1878. His story is interesting in that he had wonderful relationships as a cabin boy. He learned and he was very close to the Shoshone, or maybe it was the Paiute. It’s a possibility that it was a Miwok tribe. I haven’t been able to successfully find those records yet, but because of his having lived and worked with the white Americans, Native Americans, and other races on the railroad, the legacy that he left with us was this: even though he had suffered extreme racial abuse his whole life, he taught his children that all people are the same no matter what skin color—black, brown, or white. He taught his children that here in the United States we have this wonderful democracy and rule of law and diversity. So he wanted everybody, his children to learn, “We are here to build bridges. People are all the same no matter what color and we can have peace here if we build our lives to build the bridges. Not to be successful or to make money, or become high in the status line. But to build bridges with honesty.” He had worked so hard, suffered so much. After he built all of these railroads, all of his Chinatowns up and down the West Coast, were all burned 5 down. This is not a very well known fact. His Chinatown was burned down in Virginia City when he was living with his Native American family and then separated from his family. He had to flee to San Francisco on his way back to China, because they wanted all Chinese out of here but then he turned around and decided, “No, this is my country and I’m going to stay.” He could not find his Native American family again, so he married a Chinese lady and had seven children, and his seven children became the leaders in their communities based on his legacy that he taught them. They built bridges to China in shipping. One of them became trained by the Wright Brothers and Glen Curtis to fly an airplane. He was the first Chinese American aviator. But he couldn’t get a job here, Lim Lip Hong’s son, because he was Chinese. So China invited him to establish the first aviation industry and to teach the Chinese how to fly airplanes. He brought over many airplanes from the United States and established their air force. By World War I and World War II, of course, the Japanese came. So he became a general and a war hero. So that’s one of his sons. Another son, my grandfather, Lim Fook Sing, became a leader in Chinatown, San Francisco. During the 1906 earthquake, the officials decided, “Chinatown is completely devastated and destroyed. This is a good chance to get rid of all of the Chinese.” So they made their plan, “Wipe out Chinatown, move them outside,” but my grandfather remembering the legacy, rule of law, he led the Chinese back into Chinatown and said, “This land belongs to us, we have the right to stay here,” and they rebuilt Chinatown. The white officials backed off and said, “Okay, you got it.” So this is part of our story that we really want to 6 share the fact that we are trying to rediscover our history, the true history of the Chinese Americans and how they built the wineries, and all of the railroads, and the fisheries, and they built all the stonewalls up and down the Central Valley. So many things that he did. But I’d like to introduce my daughter who is a school teacher. LR: Your name is? LL: My name is Linn Lee. LR: Linn Lee. Let me ask you a quick question while I’m thinking about it. Do you know any stories of his time working on building that? Were you able to uncover any stories of his time working? AY: We were able to uncover in journals and diaries and interviews that he became a crew leader because of his ability to speak English and to communicate with the leaders. All of the managers were white and then the workers were Chinese, so he could deal with them even during the strike, which was in 1867, because the Chinese were paid twenty-six dollars a month. LL: Compared to the thirty-five dollars that the Irish were paid. AY: But they worked twelve hour days. LL: Sometimes fourteen. AY: During avalanches and many of his workers were killed. LL: And they were tired of being beaten by the Irish overseers. LR: That makes absolute sense. 7 AY: Sometimes the workers would run away because it was such hard work. LL: If they wanted to quit, they weren’t allowed to quit, so it was a form of slavery but I guess there was money and things. AY: Each company had their own cook and they were very particular about what they ate. The tea had to be boiled and that’s all that they would drink was boiled water and tea. So they had an herbalist, a cook, and a tea boiler for each crew. But they had to live in Canvas tents, whereas, the white workers lived in the boxcars and they were of course protected from the cold, they were provided with their food and lodging. The Chinese had to pay for their own food and lodging. LL: So they made even less, probably a quarter of that. LR: So it’s totally a double-standard. AY: Yeah, but their tools were a hammer and chisel. Horse and cart. LR: I find it telling that, and I had forgotten about this until this morning when I was out there listening to the reenactment, that it was the Chinese crews that laid the most track. Not the Irish. AY: Not the Irish. There were thousands of Chinese they had to hire, because it was a race, it was a contest and for that twenty-four hour period they had to have the top thousands of workers, Chinese. There were Irish, eight of them, every name is engraved on the Irish, but no Chinese. It’s engraved, I don’t know where. But they were showing that they had found it. 8 LL: They found the names of the Irish workers, the eight Irish workers, but none of the Chinese, because their names weren’t listed anywhere by name. LR: How have you found all of this? I know you said that you found documentation, but it sounds like it was a labor of love, I mean, a lot of work went into this. LL: Yeah. So his name was Lim Lip Hong, but because his name was so difficult to pronounce, there is A Lim. Everybody is A Lim or A Choy or A Ung. So we have A Lim and we have the correct age and birthdate, right? That’s on the payroll records, and they didn’t list the workers. They only listed the bosses. So that’s why he was listed on the payroll records, which is lucky. We were very lucky, there’s thousands and thousands of Chinese workers that don’t know their descendants. LR: Because they’re not listed. LL: Right. LR: You mentioned that when he decided he was going to stay here, he got married again. Where was this at? Was it in San Francisco? LL: Yeah. AY: Yeah, we definitely have that record. LR: And he had seven children and, as you said, all of them became prominent members within their communities. The one who was the general in China, what was his name? AY: Art, Arthur Lym, and he was the third son. 9 LL: He was number five child. LR: So he had how many sons and daughters? LL: Seven. Five sons and two daughters. LR: Okay, that is helpful. You mentioned that only the Chinese were not afraid to work with dynamite, did your great-grandfather, do you know if he worked with the dynamite? AY: Well, dynamite is very important in Chinese culture. They invented firecrackers and the reason is because it scares the bad spirits away. They always used firecrackers and dynamites. They were not afraid of it at all. So for them to build the railroad, many died. They say up to ten percent of them. That’s the minimum of ten percent of the crew died. LR: Both of you can answer this. As you’ve researched your great-grandfather, besides the legacy you mentioned, what is another thing that you have learned from all of this about him and about what, I’m talking about you personally, what he’s done? What has he been to you personally? AY: I understand because after he built the railroad, he was in despair because the anti-Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by the government. This is the era of the worst racial events of the United States. LL: Yeah, it was an ethnic cleansing started in the 1870s all the way to the 1900s, actually carried into the 1920s. Up and down the West Coast, but actually all across the United States. 10 AY: 1940. Yeah, it ended in 1943. LL: The Exclusion Act ended in 1943, but the burning down of Chinatowns was that thirty year in the United States. It was all legalized by city councils and local governments that said, “You know what, let’s get rid of them.” They made some excuse up, they didn’t even ask where you were from, they made some excuse up and said, “We found a guy who has leprosy in Chinatown, so we got to burn down Chinatown because you guys are full of disease.” It was all a lie, it was just made up and they rounded them all up and brought them to the ravine and shot them all dead. You know, this is a very ugly time, so I think he felt like, “After I did all of this for the United States, this is how I get treated?” He was in depression for a very long time. My grandmother, who was his granddaughter, didn’t have a lot of good things to say about him, because her vantage point was he was always, “Good for nothing, I don’t want to have anything to do with him.” AY: But really, Linn, my most recent research, was not that he was smoking Opium. He was injured a lot by building the railroads. LR: Yeah, I can only imagine. AY: But actually, he finally discovered his Native family, so he had to be off, he was off on his white horse. LL: He had a big white horse and a big cowboy hat. He disappeared for days, weeks, 11 AY: To visit his family. So he had to divide his time between the two. But he was also hired. So we finally discovered more records of him building more railroads, so he was off, LL: Building railroads. AY: All parts of the United States, building more railroads. LL: He was very busy. When he came back from the railroad he worked for a butchery in San Francisco, and you know, the Americans and the Irish, they only used the big part of the meat. They throw away the feet, ears, and nose, right? Well, Chinese eat all of that stuff, right? So he gathered all of that stuff, put it in buckets, took it to Chinatown and made a fortune, because they loved those things, the brains, the stomach. LR: That’s really cool. LL: It makes good soup. So from that, he kind of built this entrepreneurial spirit with his sons and daughters. LR: So the families were separate then? AY: Yeah, but he did try to combine them because one of his children he would bring to visit them. But the two families never got together as families, but I am searching for that family as we speak. LL: I think for your first question about what does it mean for me or Mom. I’ve always been asked, “Where are you from?” I’m a fifth generation American but yet I still feel like I’m this foreigner when white people ask me, or sometimes how they talk 12 to me. I remember going to court and the judge said to me, “Do you need a translator?” I said, “No, thank you.” I know probably other people might and that’s a valid question, but I just felt insulted. Or like the bus driver talking to me like he thought I didn’t speak English or the DMV people. I have a great story. I go to the DMV info person to hand them the application for a driver’s license. I hadn’t even said a word, just put the application on the desk to show that I wanted to get a driver’s license. She goes, “Oh no. You. Have. To. Go. To. Line four. Four! Line four.” I hadn’t said anything. I was like, “I’m so confused why you are talking to me like that,” but I didn’t say anything, but then I was like, “I’m going to take advantage of this,” and I said, “No, you fill this out for me. I don’t want to fill out. You fill it out for me.” She said, “No, no.” I’m like, “No, I do it. You do it for me. No!” She totally thought I was an immigrant Chinese. I said, “No, I’m just joking with you. I’ll go over there myself.” Her face just went all red. “I’m so sorry, I thought you were.” I was like, “Just don’t assume, okay.” And then some negative experiences in my elementary years where I was bullied for being Chinese or being different. People would lift up my eyelid, “Oh, can I see if you have an eyelid?” I think all of that has followed me into my high school years. I didn’t feel very American. Then I went to college and took an ethnic studies class and I really understood why I didn’t feel that way because of this whole history of white washing, and not recognizing the contributions of immigrant labor. I mean, we were built on African slavery. The walls of our nation, the foundation of it was built on African slavery in the South, right? I think when I found out I was a 13 descendant of a Chinese railroad worker, I mean when I was in college I was like, “Yeah, I don’t have reason to be proud of being American.” Then I found out I was a descendant and I’m like, “You know what? I’m done. We need to make this known. Enough is enough.” I’m a history teacher, and in our history book there is one sentence that says, “Oh, by the way, the Chinese built the railroad.” One sentence. Now I’m dedicating my life to writing lesson plans on the Chinese railroad workers and any minority group, in terms of what their contribution is or their experiences here in the United States. LR: That’s all because you learned about your great-great-grandfather? LL: Right, exactly. Now I’m an activist in terms of my profession. I was on the Model Curriculum Committee for the state of California writing the curriculum for Ethnic Studies, so hopefully that’s going to come out in a year. I’m also on all kinds of committees for writing curriculum. I’m a curriculum specialist at Santa Ana Unified. I’m determined now. LR: That’s fantastic. That’s just amazing to me. [To Andrea] Then how about you? AY: My experience working with my immigrant father, who came here in the early 1900s. He came here also at the age of twelve because the famine and the destruction of China was lasting a long, long time because of the Opium War. When he came here, it was under the Chinese Exclusion Act where anybody who came during that period was subject to extreme race abuse and my father lived every single day in fear of deportation. My experience was very troubling and unsettling, feeling like we were just guests and we didn’t belong here. I 14 always remember, even in my later mature years, not being served in restaurants or things like that. At any rate, I became an actress and director in theater because I had to find a way to find myself. We started the Asian American Theater in San Francisco in order to find our stories. As an actress, I was always hired on TV or theater as a prostitute, it was the only role that I could get when I was young. Later on in my mature years, the only role I could get then was that of a mama-san or a maid. So we had to find our own stories. Talking about dialect and such, when I did get a role, they would put a Chinese hat on me, you know a straw hat, and put me in costumes, beautiful cheongsams, and whatever role I could get, my accent was never deep enough. LL: They would be like, “Can you be a little more Chinese?” AY: Having to split my personality two ways, to be really “Chinafied” or to be a real rough tough maid, very unsettling. It wasn’t until I did the research on my great-grandfather and then I realized where all of this came from. It was because of the law, the anti-Chinese Exclusion Act, that legitimized the fact that Americans are white Americans, any other color can be abused. This law, the 1882 law was renewed in 1892, and then ten years later, it renewed again, and then renewed forever. They said, “Okay, this is just ongoing. All non-whites don’t really belong here.” LL: After that, Chinese Americans who were born here were not considered citizens. AY: Yeah. You were not allowed. 15 LL: You were considered to be a labor field worker, and they were given some kind of special privilege to stay here because they were workers. That’s why, in general, there’s a certificate, we have a document that says, “He’s going to grow up and become a laborer, that’s why he’s allowed to stay in the United States, not because of his rights as a citizen.” LR: Which he was. LL: Which he was. He was born here. That’s just an example. Those people, they couldn’t be citizens, they couldn’t marry whites, they couldn’t testify, they couldn’t vote. There were just so many laws against the Chinese. LR: I didn’t know anything about this. I’m learning something today. LL: Right. Well, I didn’t either. AY: This was all silenced. We were not allowed to speak our minds or to write about it because of this law. The Chinese were all afraid of being deported, just like the Mexicans today. It’s just we have to get the United States to recognize that they created this law, it passed congress. We have to tell them, “You created this law, it’s unconstitutional. This is not what our forefathers created the United States for.” We have to say, “You made it, you apologize. Period.” Now in 2014, we went to the Department of Labor in Washington D.C. and we looked at the entire wall that is as big as this wall here, with names of all the famous laborers that built the United States. Not a single Chinese name. So, the Department of Labor chairman, he gathered all the Congressmen together and we descendants gathered together and he apologized, but that’s not enough. We have to get 16 Congress to apologize for this law, so that everybody understands that this country is made of all immigrants. White, Black, and Brown. Then we will have a united country, we will begin to have peace. We will begin to build bridges across the United States and China. The Europeans want to get to China, they get to them through us. We need to educate our children to understand that. It’s made a big difference to me in my life, because my feet were floating as a director and an actress in theater. I have to make my crew understand these stories so that they understand their feet are really planted on this land. My life has changed because of this. I feel firmly planted now. LR: Wow. That is wonderful. I have one quick question that I would love to get your take on. We are doing an exhibit next year on the 19th Amendment, women’s right to vote. You have such a unique perspective… was this law ever changed? The Exclusionary Act? AY: It was stopped only because of the War. They needed China to help them in the Japanese Ear. That was the only reason why. LL: And in 1943, they only allowed 100 in every year. LR: Right, I did know that. My question is, from your perspective, how do you think women receiving the right to vote, changed history, changed you personally? I’d like to get your thoughts. AY: Well, the Chinese culture has always put down Chinese women. LL: Very patriarchal. 17 AY: So that was an amazing event. We are on the tail head of that, coming out of the Exclusion Act, we Chinese women are just starting to reclaim our ability to vocalize, to be mouthy, express ourselves. Whereas, for 150 years now, we hadn’t been able to. We were taught by our parents, especially those during that immigration act, “Shhh! Don’t say anything. You are going to shame our family, you are going to get our family in trouble if you say anything.” So now we can. Thank God for that act. LR: Right, [To Linn] and how about you? LL: The whole intersectionality between racism and sexism is so important to me because I’m both, person of color and a woman. I think that dealing with, in my own family and in the community, these sort of lower expectations of me, or not being seen as a leader, or someone who could be very intellectual. It really affected me as I was growing up. When I got to college and I took that Ethnic Studies class, it wasn’t just a realization about race or ethnicity, it was also as a woman. I remember I became an activist in college, and in our organizations there was always that fight between the men and women. Women, we did all of the work, and we never got any recognition for it. We never were considered the spokespersons or the leaders. Finally, after my last two years of college at UC Santa Cruz I was like, “Screw that, no, I’m running for president. You guys are all going to vote for me because I do all the work.” Sure enough, I became president of the Asian Student Union and then I became a leader of the Third World Coalition. I became the spokesperson, finally, on the campus. Anytime when there was protestors or something, the vice-chancellor would call me, 18 “We’ve got to talk,” because I was finally seen as the leader. That was huge for me to really understand the importance for women to stand up. As a woman to stand up was my right, but not only my right, the right to be recognized for my work. The women’s movement has a lot to do with that. I’m like, “Look at all these women who stood up for their rights. Oh my freaking heck, put down the housewife.” The image of the housewife is a false image. They are not happy, okay. They are not going around saying, “Oh dear, let’s take off your shoes and get you coffee, everything’s okay.” That was like my first inspiration, I was just like, “Oh yeah, I’m not doing that.” So absolutely. LR: I appreciate you letting me put you on the spot like that. AY: There are generational differences. LL: Yeah, I remember fighting with her. I came home from college and I’m like, “Mom, why aren’t you standing up for your rights? Why don’t you stand up to my step-dad more? Why don’t you this… Why don’t you that…” It was like a liberation for me to go to college and understand my power. Not just intellectually, from taking women’s studies courses, but in practice and my activism. Having to fight about it in my workplace, that’s a whole other different thing. I could go on for hours about that. How many bosses have tried to fire me, Mom? AY: At least four principals. LL: They’ve all been white males. They hate my guts, I just don’t know why. What’s there to hate? 19 LR: Right, thank you. Do you have any questions or are you good? Yeah, you are good. Well it’s two o’clock, I told you I wouldn’t keep you. That you would be done in time, so let’s go ahead and stop. Do you both live in California still? LL: Yes, we do. Mom lives in Berkeley and I live in Santa Ana.