Butte, America’s Story Episode 101 - The Chinn Family

Welcome to Butte, America’s Story. I’m your host, Dick Gibson.

When Chin Yee Fong came to Butte in 1905 to join his father at the Wah Chong Tai Company, he was about 16 years old. He attended Garfield School and by 1910 he was the assistant bookkeeper of the most prestigious Chinese business in Butte.

Discriminatory laws excluded most Chinese immigrants from America beginning in the early 1880s, but the emphasis was on laborers such as those who worked on the railroads, and in Butte as cooks and laundrymen. Members of the merchant class were not subject to the exclusionary laws, but they still had to undergo intense questioning when they traveled.

The Chins, like many of the Butte Chinese, were from southeastern China, in the Taishan District southwest of Guangzhou. Emigration in the late 1800s was driven by famines and civil war in China and by the lure of gold (and business) in western America.

Chin Yee Fong returned to China in 1911 to marry his wife – likely an arranged marriage, but we are not sure. He had to get testimony from his business associates as well as from unrelated members of the non-Chinese community who swore that he had never worked as a laborer, together with pages of additional questions on departure as well as on return. Among other things, we know that Chin Yee Fong was a partner in the Wah Chong Tai Company in 1911, owning $2,000 worth of the $16,000 capital value of the company.

The fact that Chin Yee Fong could return to the United States with his wife and daughter is remarkable, given the attitudes about Chinese immigration at the time. Through interpreters, his wife Liu and daughter Sue Kee were also subjected to seemingly irrelevant questions such as “was your father in the grocery business or the fish business?” After lengthy interrogation, the family was admitted to the United States at Seattle on March 26, 1912, nearly two weeks after their arrival at Port Townsend on the steamship Luceric.

In Butte, the Chin family eventually Westernized their names to Albert and Lou Chinn, and their eldest daughter was called Kay. The Chinns had 11 children in Butte; three died young, but the others all attended Butte schools. Kay returned to China in the 1930s, where she worked as a secret agent for British intelligence before and during World War II. The other children dispersed across America after the war, except for William (Bill) who returned to Butte. He worked in the mines and as a TV repairman until he died in 1980.

The Mai Wah Society received the Mai Wah and Wah Chong Tai buildings from Bill Chinn’s daughters in the early 1990s, and the organization now has close ties with descendants of Albert and Lou all over the United States.

As writer Edwin Dobb has said, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places America came from." Join us next time for more of Butte, America’s Story.