More interesting, however, was Kee Wong’s home life. Both Wong Kee and Kee Wong Brown belonged to a secret society, referred to as a tong. Perhaps it is because of their tong affiliation that both men were able to get their families into the U.S. despite immigration exclusions, as the tong “pimps easily bribed their way through the inspection process.” Mr. Wong remembers his father telling him stories as a teenager about how his grandfather, Kee Wong Brown, regularly held illegal gambling rings at their house when he was a child. Chinese-American gambling ties back to lawless Chinese mining life of the mid-19th century. Worse than gambling, however, was the fact that Kee Wong Brown kept a stash of weapons in his house because he was regularly …show more content…
Wong described yet another aspect of typical tong society when discussing the prostitution that his father, Gan, grew up around. Kee Wong Brown lived in a neighborhood surrounded by prostitution houses, which meant that his children grew up in the same environment. While his mother was out playing mahjong with her Chinese friends, Gan remembered being babysat often by a woman that his mother clearly disliked. Though perplexed as a child, Gan later came to learn that his babysitter was his father’s girlfriend, as well as a local prostitute. Tong societies were notorious for bringing women to the U.S. from China and ‘pimping’ them out to bachelor …show more content…
Chinatowns were being monitored by surveillance because of the national Communist paranoia and stereotyping towards ethnically Chinese people. This attitude “forced overseas Chinese to severe ties with their homeland.” McCarthyism had suffocated any possibility of Chinese-American comfort or security by “permitting all excesses, as long as their ultimate goal was defending America against Communism.” Though McCarthyism weakened by the late 1950’s, “anti-Chinese discrimination remained strong” in the 60’s. The experiences of Yen, Gan, and their siblings were quite different to the mid-20th century historical generalizations of severe anti-Chinese sentiment. Out of Kee Wong Brown’s eight children, not a single one experienced professional or personal discrimination between the middle and late 1900’s. In business, Chinese reportedly had unequal “earning power [to] white men and women with comparable backgrounds.” Mr. Wong’s uncle, Yen, was a very successful engineer in California until his retirement and never claimed to experience any racial discrimination or limitations on his life, despite even being born in China. Furthermore, all six of Kee Wong Brown’s sons fought in the U.S. military and became celebrated, decorated veterans. Barclay Wong’s father, specifically, became a high-ranking officer in the U.S.