George Wong was thought eccentric for staying on in Riverside’s “Little Gom Benn” Chinatown decades after other Chinese pioneers moved on. Protective of his collection of old cars and chickens, he let passersby know that he was armed.
“Not with a rifle,” remembers longtime Riverside resident Kevin Akin, “a shotgun.”
Akin recalls that as a teenager, he chatted with George Wong, enchanted with his tales of Riverside’s Chinatown (later also known as “Little Gom Benn”). In those days, Riverside’s official histories ignored the role of the Chinese pioneers, although Chinese laborers, many from Gom Benn, played a prominent role in founding the Inland Empire’s citrus industry beginning in the 1870s.
“In the early 1900s, many hated the Chinese,” says Akin, who would later become active in Riverside’s Save Our Chinatown. “All reference to them was eliminated from the history books.”
That was the Riverside that George Wong confronted when came from China in 1914 as a 14 year old. He was born Wong Ho Leun in the Toishan area that includes Gom Benn. His mother was a Chinese American born in San Francisco who had returned to China to marry when she was young, and never came back to America. George’s father, Wong Ben Chow, lived many years in America. He was known in Riverside as “Little Joe.” George’s father managed vegetable farms along the Santa Ana River, worked by Chinese laborers. George went to school at Riverside’s Grant School, Poly High and Riverside College. He’d go on to work as a cook at the Mission Inn, a Riverside landmark. By 1936, George was operating his own restaurant, the Bamboo Gardens. He’d run the restaurant for 20 years. But that’s not why he’s remembered.
In 1941, Riverside’s historic Chinatown was largely abandoned when its last major landowner, Wong Nim, died. George would come to own roughly 3 to 5 acres. He’d hang onto the property for the final three decades of his life. It would become his home, and the home for his dozens of old cars and chickens. There he spun tales of the old Chinatown to anyone who’d listen, and show off his Chinese artifacts. In the late 1950s, Press-Enterprise reporter Harry W. Lawton wrote a series of stories about George, the old Chinatown and the Chinese pioneers. George died in 1974, and he was buried at the nearby Evergreen Cemetery on a hill overlooking his old Chinatown. But that wouldn’t be the end of his story.
A couple of years after George’s death, the City of Riverside — which once shunned the Chinese — designated the old Chinatown site a historical landmark. In 1980, the County Office of Education proposed a maintenance yard for the site. The city’s cultural heritage board insisted on archaeological testing. To assist with the “dig,” members of the Riverside community (including Kevin Akin and his wife Margie) helped out, and united with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (led by Eugene Moy) and the Great Basin Foundation (a research affiliate of the San Diego Museum).
The limited excavation would yield three tons of artifacts, eventually placed in the care of the Riverside Metropolitan Museum. To document their findings, the Great Basin Foundation published a two-volume history titled Wong Ho Leun (George Wong): An American Chinatown. In nearly 1,000 pages, the books — including an article based on Harry Lawton’s interviews with Bing S. Wong, the founder of the Gom Benn Scholarship Fund — cover the history of Riverside’s two Chinatowns and the archeological findings from the 1984-85 dig. Most of the site was covered in soil and left for the future, after a proposal to build a park was scuttled by an Office of Education official who wanted, but didn’t get, more money.
When faced with another proposal for an office building on the Chinatown site in 2008, locals formed the Save Our Chinatown Committee, and sued to stop the project after the City Council approved it. The committee won the suit, and saved the archaeological site. Riverside officials now agree with the Save Our Chinatown Committee that the site should become a park to honor the memories of “Little Gom Benn” — whenever funds can be found.
There have been excavations of the Inland Empire’s two other Chinatowns. In 2001, there was a dig of the San Bernardino Chinatown, which yielded about 10,000 items and is chronicled in an 16-page article, The Luck of Third Street: Archaeology of Chinatown, San Bernardino, California, published in 2008. In 2019, an excavation began of Redlands’ Chinatown, with the findings destined for the Museum of Redlands.
Once written out of official histories, the Chinese pioneers are finally getting their due, in part because of the tales of a colorful eccentric.
“Many people in the community became interested and involved in the effort to save Riverside Chinatown because they knew George,” wrote Julie Wong Duncan (the daughter of Voy and Fay Wong from Gom Benn) in a 1985 Save Our Chinatown newsletter.
“It is through George and the various people who knew him that a way has been opened for us to discover, learn and understand more about Chinatown and the early Chinese pioneers in California. Little did he know that he would turn out to be the guardian of the buried history and past of Riverside Chinatown.”
