It’s early 1968. North Vietnam’s stunning Tet Offensive means the U.S. isn’t going to win the war quickly, if at all. Near Los Angeles’ Chinatown, Toy Wing Wong (材荣) (AKA Wong Chun Sing 传胜) must have thought his health was a losing battle too.
The 71-year-old butcher, owner of Sam Sing meat market on Spring Street, was in Sunset Boulevard Hospital after a severe stroke. Toy Wing had lived an extraordinary life since coming to America from the Gom Benn area of China as a 12-year-old. He had seen and done so much. Now, possibly on his deathbed, he had one final wish.
He wanted to see the oldest of his five children. Tai Yeot Gin-Wong was his secret daughter. The one left behind. The unspoken one.
Toy Wing hadn’t seen her in decades. Just after Japan invaded China, Toy Wing had brought his entire family to America – his wife, Lee Nguey Sum, and three other children. (A fifth child was later born in America.) Tai Yeot was left behind.
The Switch
Just a few years earlier, Toy Wing had brought 21-year-old Bing Tew Wong (柏旋) here as his oldest child, as his “paper son.” Yes, that Bing T. Wong who went on to open the highly popular Great Wall Restaurant in West Covina.
By the time Tai Yeot and Bing T. were teenagers, Toy Wing was listing Bing T. as his oldest child, and not Tai Yeot. Why? Toy Wing’s grandfather and Bing T.’s great-grandfather were brothers. So their families had agreed on a plan – a deception that would allow one of their best and brightest to come to America.
Bing T. would come as Toy Wing’s paper son. Toy Wing himself had come as a paper son. And Toy Wing’s nephew would later come as Bing T.’s paper son.
Paper Sons
Okay, let’s go back to 1906, and the Great San Francisco Earthquake. Actually, let’s go back decades before that.
Thousands of Chinese laborers came for work after gold was found in California in 1850. By the 1860s they were building railroads. In the final decades of the 1800s, they harvested oranges. Non-Chinese laborers fought back, literally. There were riots and massacres.
In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act barring any more Chinese laborers from coming to America. Merchants could come, but only if they could establish businesses in America. And few could. At the time, there were roughly 100,000 Chinese in America, most of them laborers. Since most of them were likely to eventually return to China, that population was expected to dwindle.
That Didn’t Happen
First came a Supreme Court ruling in 1889 that allowed Wong Kim Ark, a Chinese American born and raised in the United States, to return from China to the United States. The case established that U.S.-born Chinese Americans couldn’t be denied their citizenship and birth rights. They could go overseas and return. Their children were U.S. citizens, even if born overseas. This may not have seemed a big deal. Afterall, there were maybe less than 10,000 U.S.-born Chinese Americans at the time.
But it was a big deal.
Why? In 1906 San Francisco was nearly destroyed by the deadliest earthquake in U.S. history. More than 3,000 people were killed and 80 percent of the city burned in a great fire. The conflagration consumed San Francisco’s Hall of Records, which contained the birth certificates for a few thousand U.S.-born Chinese.
From these ashes would arise an era of paper sons and a few paper daughters, whose immigration depended on a spiderweb of falsehoods.
Thwarting Exclusion
While the Exclusion Act was expected to stop virtually all Chinese immigration, an improbable 300,000 Chinese would come to America between 1882 and 1943 when the Exclusion Act was finally repealed. The paper sons proved brilliantly artful in circumventing the Exclusion Act.
Toy Wing may have been among the first of Gom Benn’s paper sons.
He was born January 28, 1897, in either Low or Dooey Ho Village (probably one of the villages in or near Gom Benn.) Late in his life when he confessed his paper son falsehoods, he said he was actually born as Wong Moon, and his married name was Wong Chun Sing (传胜). He was the only son of Wong Sai Hong (世芳). His grandfather was Wong Han Wu (廷瑚), the brother of Wong Han Chal (廷楚), the great-grandfather of Bing T.
Coming to America
Wong Han Chal was believed by his ancestors to be among the first from Gom Benn to come to America as a laborer perhaps in the 1860s. His four sons also came as laborers, probably late in the 19th century before passage of the Exclusion Act.
As a paper son, Wong Moon couldn’t use his birth name, so he came as Wong Toy Wing. He arrived aboard the SS Mongolia on September 25, 1909. This was just three years after the Great San Francisco Earthquake and a year before the opening of the Angel Island Immigration Station. Toy Wing came as the son of Wong Dow – a U.S. citizen born in San Francisco in 1880.
Throughout his life, Toy Wing would say almost nothing about Wong Dow, even to his children. The less said the better. Fewer lies to remember. Less chance of being tripped up.
In a 1961 naturalization interview, a confession of sorts, Toy Wing said he was not related to Wong Dow, that his parents arranged with Wong Dow to take Toy Wing to San Francisco as his paper son. He didn’t know him in China, and he didn’t stay with Wong Dow in America. Instead he moved to Los Angeles. In his 1961 interviews, Toy Wing said Wong Dow later died in the Stockton State Hospital, an insane asylum.
Did He Come Alone?
It isn’t clear from the immigration records whether Toy Wing came to America by himself or if he was accompanied by a relative, friend or “witness” arranged by the families. Let’s hope he had someone. He was only 12 years old, a very young stranger in a strange, hostile land.
Let’s hope someone helped him find his way. Let’s hope someone helped him find shelter, and find work. Let’s hope he had help surviving.
I don’t think Toy Wing ever forgot the help he received..or what he didn’t receive.
He seemed to find that help at the Sam Sing meat market – if not immediately then, within a decade or so.
Business Incubator
In a March 2024 article, anthropologists Jiajing Wang of Dartmouth and Laura Wai Ng of Grinnell College teamed with curator Tamara Serrao-Leiva of the San Bernardino County Museum wrote about Sam Sing’s history, which dates to at least the 1890s.
The Gom Benn men who partnered in Sam Sing operated within a self-reliant Chinese network of food acquisition, distribution and consumption that linked pork butchers, ranchers and rice growers. The Sam Sing butcher shop – and other businesses like it – provided the Chinese with employment, job training, housing, banking, and immigration and other social service assistance.
In a sense, Sam Sing was something like a business school where young men from Gom Benn came to live, study and work. Based on what was done later, it seems newcomers were encouraged to learn some English, to study a trade, and to learn to manage their own business.
Toy Wing carried on that tradition. He helped Bing T. come to America as his paper son. He helped Wong Gan Poy (景回) (another distant nephew) to come as a paper son. Toy Wing helped my father Bing K. Wong, who also came as a paper son. Each would later open their own restaurants.
A Strange Land
That was all later. When 12-year-old Toy Wing arrived in 1909, San Francisco was rebuilding. Though the city rebuilt relatively quickly, the disaster diverted trade, industry, and population south to Los Angeles. Toy Wing went there too. Exactly when isn’t known. But when he returned for the first time to China four years later in 1913, he listed his occupation as a cook in Los Angeles.
By this time, Los Angeles was no longer the rough and rowdy Wild West town of 1871 when a white and Latino mob murdered 18 Chinese in “Negro Alley,” the city’s original Chinatown. Amazingly, Chinatown survived and the small community of Chinese grew into the area next to today’s Union Station railroad hub.
Chinatown was notorious, known rightfully or not for its squalor, opium dens, saloons, brothels and gambling. It was also home to Chinese lawyers, accountants, grocery shops, dry goods stores, butchers, restaurants and apartments.
South of Chinatown, on San Pedro and 9th streets, the City Market Wholesale Produce Terminal opened in 1909. Many Chinese worked at City Market, selling produce grown by Chinese farmers from throughout the region.
At the time, about 2,000 Chinese lived in Los Angeles. Toy Wing would have found many Chinese from the Gom Benn area in Chinatown and City Market. They spoke his Toisan dialect, and enjoyed the same foods.
First Trip Back
When he returned to China in 1913, the 16-year-old Toy Wing married 16-year-old Lee Nguey Sum (甄氏) (b. June 30, 1897) of Yuen Village on December 14, 1913. During the slightly more than a year that Toy Wing stayed in China, it happened that Bing Tew Wong was born on October 27, 1914. Whether Toy Wing knew of the birth, didn’t matter then. Only later.
In mid-November 1914, Toy Wing returned to America. Almost exactly nine months later, Lee Nguey Sum gave birth to a daughter, Tai Yeot, on July 7, 1915.
We don’t know how Toy Wing reacted when he learned that he was the father of a girl and not a boy. We only know he never forgot her.
Finding a Trade
Did Toy Wing continue to work as a cook upon his return? Maybe not.
His youngest daughter, Judy Sai, believes he drove a truck for a grocer very early on, before joining the Sam Sing meat market. Los Angeles was fast becoming a city on wheels. Many successful businesses relied on drivers who picked up goods and/or made deliveries in the small pickup trucks of that time.
The Sam Sing & Company butcher shop at 418 North Los Angeles Street probably did too. In his 1961 naturalization interviews, Toy Wing said he joined Sam Sing in 1921, and worked and lived there at 444 N. Los Angeles Street.
It isn’t known if he had already learned to butcher meat elsewhere or got his start at Sam Sing. We don’t know anything about Toy Wing’s schooling. But whether he had any formal schooling or not, Toy Wing eventually spoke passable English and could read a little too. (Years later he also learned to speak a few phrases of Spanish.)
Young Partner
Soon he seemed to be managing business at Sam Sing, probably as a partner. At least that’s how it looks. Beginning in 1924, 27-year-old Toy Wing paid for the shop’s city business license. The records show Sam Sing’s address as 428 N. Los Angeles Street from 1924 to 1926. Toy Wing would make the payments every year for nearly 40 years – until 1961 when he retired, turning over his business to his oldest son, Albert.
The 1920s were the Roaring 20s, a boom time for Los Angeles. Oil was the new black gold, the aircraft and motion picture industries were taking off, and there was widespread real estate speculation that attracted cold-weather easterners to relocate to sunny Southern California.
Back in China
In early 1928, 31-year-old Toy Wing returned once again to China, his first trip home in more than a dozen years. In his travel documents, he wrote that he and his wife, Nguey Sum, were the parents of one child – a son, Bing Tew Wong.
Already their families had made an arrangement. In the near future, Bing T. would join Toy Wing in America. That summer of 1928, Nguey Sum, turned 31. Their daughter Tai Yeot turned 13.
Toy Wing would stay three years, time for Nguey Sum to give birth to two more children: Hin Hoi (Albert) (天开) born November 15, 1928; and Tai Jeung (Doris) born March 26, 1930. A third child, Hin Yin (Henry or Hank) (天恩) was born August 16, 1932 – again, almost exactly nine months after Toy Wing returned to America.
Before his return, there was more that Toy Wing celebrated in China. Tai Yeot turned 16 during the summer of 1931, and her parents arranged her marriage. They saw her wed on October 5, 1931, during what would turn out to be Toy Wing’s final days in China. He’d never return again to his homeland.
Depression and Demolition
During his absence from America, the U.S. stock market had crashed (in 1929). Overnight, millions of people lost their savings and their jobs. In these same years, China was once again divided by civil war. This time Mao’s Chinese Communist Army fought Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government.
For Toy Wing, his future in America was as murky as ever. Los Angeles’ economic outlook was quickly brightening but that encouraged city leaders to push ahead with a major rail station project. They had just won a key State Supreme Court ruling in May 1931 that allowed for the demolition of nearly all of the city’s old Chinatown to make way for construction of Union Station.
Sam Sing meat market bordered the construction site. At the end of 1933, demolition of Old Chinatown began. Somehow Toy Wing mapped out a survival plan for Sam Sing while also maintaining the meat market and apartment complex as a refuge.
New Chinatowns
First came Bing T. in 1935, as other Chinatown businesses were relocating. New Chinatown, with its red lanterns, neon lights and Chinese-style glazed roofing tiles, opened in 1938 north of the Los Angeles Civic Center at a vacant Santa Fe Railroad yard. Its main square was designed as a pedestrian mall with shops and restaurants – one of the first in Southern California.
A second Chinatown, called China City, also opened in 1938. It too featured restaurants, and also rickshaws and costumed Chinese greeters amid buildings salvaged from the set of the Hollywood movie, The Good Earth. China City was ultimately doomed by a series of fires and demolished in 1955.
This was the fast-changing Los Angeles that my father, Bing Kwun Wong (柏宗), found when he arrived in America in 1938 as the 21-year-old paper son of a “friend” of his mother’s. In his first few years he lived at Sam Sing’s apartments at 444 N. Los Angeles Street. More tenants were coming.
Family United?
Back in China, Japan launched an all-out war against its neighbor in 1937. It isn’t known when Toy Wing applied for his wife and children to come to America. U.S. immigration records show them finally coming in the summer of 1939, a couple of months after the opening of the new Union Station rail terminal.
His wife Nguey Sum (or Lee Shee) came as the wife of a U.S. citizen (Toy Wing). Their three children came as U.S. citizens, because they were born to a U.S. citizen. They were 12-year-old Hin Hoi (Albert), 10-year-old Tai Jeung (Doris) and 8-year-old Hin Yin (Henry).
Tai Yeot and her family remained in China.
Hog Town
In this period, mom-and-pop butcher shops like Sam Sing, which served a small ethnic community, faced ever-increasing competition from supermarkets offering fresh meat – not only competition for shoppers but for hogs. For decades, non-Chinese hog farmers had refused to sell to Chinese butchers. Sam Sing had grown its own hogs or relied on Chinese hog farmers. How did Sam Sing survive the Depression years?
Toy Wing’s youngest daughter Judy thinks he made a key deal with Farmer John. Founded in 1931 as the Clougherty Brothers Packing Co. of Norwalk, the brothers, Francis and Barney, were in financial trouble throughout the 1930s, until government contracts rescued them during World War II. Later they rebranded their company as Farmer John and became known as the makers of the “Dodger Dog,” a hot dog served at Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games.
During the hard times, maybe in the 1930s, Toy Wing provided the Clougherty Brothers with financial loans, and they provided Sam Sing with fresh pork. It certainly seems the brothers felt they owed Toy Wing a debt. Decades later when Toy Wing died, five men from the Clougherty family drove in his funeral procession, and paid for the marching band that accompanied his hearse through Chinatown, said Toy Wing’s daughter Judy.
On the Move
It wasn’t only the Clougherty brothers who faced tough times. Toy Wing had to scramble to stay ahead of the wrecking ball, moving Sam Sing from the south side of El Pueblo de la Los Angeles to the north side at nearby 208 Marchessault St. This was in 1939.
After his wife and three children arrived, they all lived for a time at 815 E. 10th Street., near City Market. A year later, the last of their five children, Judy (Tai Young), was born.
In 1941, Marchessault became part of Sunset Boulevard and Sam Sing’s address became 208 E. Sunset Boulevard. In this period, my father Bing K. was working at Sam Sing, according to Social Security records.
Soon he was employed at a French cafe in mid-city Los Angeles, probably washing dishes. Then he worked at Kim Ling Inn in Los Angeles, and then New Shanghai Cafe in Culver City. How did the newly arrived Bing K. find work? Maybe Toy Wing recommended him. Maybe Sam Sing supplied meat to these restaurants.
Exclusion Repealed
With the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. declared war with Japan. China became an ally. In late 1943, Congress finally repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, but it only opened the door ever so slightly to Chinese immigrants. The legislation gave China an immigration quota of 105 people per year. And that total included ethnic Chinese coming from other nations, too.
Still the U.S. alliance with China seemed to open a door to business opportunities for Chinese Americans, especially in Southern California. Certainly there were opportunities for Toy Wing’s proteges. And in turn more business for Sam Sing. In 1942, Bing T. joined Wong Gan Poy and others in opening Chungking restaurant in Riverside. Bing K. would join them there in 1943.
At the end of the war, in the late 1940s, Congress passed legislation that enabled many Chinese American citizens (including Paper Sons and Daughters) to bring their China-born spouses to the United States. And most of the men from Gom Benn did.
The end of the war also saw Sam Sing on the move again. This time, construction of the 101 Freeway next to the Los Angeles Civic Center forced Toy Wing to move in 1949 to his final location at 680 N. Spring Street, near China City. The end of the war also paved the way for a decade and more of entrepreneurship for the Gom Benn men who opened restaurants and other businesses.
Red Scare
The U.S. alliance with China would be short lived. Mao’s Communist Army drove Chiang’s U.S.-based Nationalist government from the Mainland to Taiwan after the end of World War II. By 1950, North and South Korea were at war with China on the side of the North and the U.S. on the side of the south.
During the early 1950s, many Chinese fled China and immigrated to Hong Kong and elsewhere. In 1956, Tai Yeot, her husband and two children were among those who moved to Hong Kong.
This was also the era of the Red Scare in the United States. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy launched investigations into Communist infiltration of government and other institutions. Some Chinese Americans were suspected of ties to the Chinese Communists.
In this fearful environment, U.S. immigration authorities offered Chinese Americans a “confession program” to clear up their immigration histories, and provide them a path to be naturalized as legitimate U.S. citizens. This was promoted as something of an amnesty program. Most Chinese Americans go for it.
Under the confession program, from 1956 to 1965, Chinese Americans – paper sons and daughters – had to “confess” their fraudulent status and implicate family members and others involved in the “paper” network. Because of widespread mistrust, only about 10,000 Chinese Americans or about 10 to 15% of their total population in the U.S. participated.
Daughter or Sister
The participants included Toy Wing. Whatever his other reasons, this gave him the chance, even if a longshot, to reunite with the child left behind.
He confessed in 1961, and became a citizen two years later. His confession implicated his three China-born children who thus were no longer U.S. citizens but became permanent residents. That was also the case for his paper son, Bing Tew Wong, who Toy Wing confessed was his “adopted” son. It meant that Bing T. also had to confess.
Ending his “paper” deception meant that once Toy Wong became a naturalized citizen in 1963, he could petition for his oldest daughter to come to America. After so many years of falsehoods, he now had to make the case that Tai Yeot was actually his oldest child.
His youngest daughter Judy recalls digging up letters exchanged with Tai Yeot’s family in Hong Kong, including thank-you notes sent to “little sister” in America for Christmas and Chinese New Year’s gifts. By this time Tai Yeot was in her 50s, and looked so much like her mother Nguey Sum that immigration authorities thought they were sisters.
Historic Reform
During this period, Congress enacted the historic Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, abolishing the national-origins quotas that overwhelmingly favored European nations. It was replaced with what lawmakers intended as more equitable preferences based on family relationships and, to a lesser degree, the work skills and education of immigrants.
But the changes proved to be far more dramatic than intended. The immigrant flows since 1965 have been more than half Latin American and one-quarter Asian. The largest share of today’s immigrant population is from Mexico by far, followed by India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.
The newly enacted family preferences must have given Toy Wing hope. Yet, there he was, hospitalized in 1968, and immigration authorities had yet to approve a visa for Tai Yeot.
A Wish Come True
Finally, and only after his deathbed plea, and after Toy Wing’s sons posted a $5,000 bond, Tai Yeot was allowed to come. But only on a six-month visitor’s visa.
A year later, Tai Yeot and her three under-21-year-old children – a son and two daughters, were finally granted permanent resident status allowing them to immigrate to the United States. (Her husband, two married daughters and their families came years later.)
Toy Wing died not long after, on January 18, 1970 – just 10 days shy of his 73rd birthday. There was a grand funeral procession through Chinatown, which included his paper sons, the five Farmer John men, their marching band, and many others.
His wife Nguey Sum would live another nine years, and died at the age of 82.
Tai Yeot died in 2002, in America, when she was 87.
