CHINESE LEFTOVERS

posted by James Reel

    For weeks, I've been forgetting to post this, but here we go now. Tucson Guide asked me to write an article about the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, and the history of Chinese immigrants in Tucson. That article appears in the current issue (not available online). Now, the rule of writing for magazines is that when you don't offer a sidebar, the editor will request one, and when you volunteer a sidebar, the editors won't be able to squeeze it in. With this article I submitted two sidebars on notable Tucson residents of Chinese heritage, and of course there was no space for them. I hate to let anything go to waste, though, so here they are.

ESTHER TANG
    Community leader Esther Tang was born here in 1917. Her father, Don Wah, had arrived before the turn of the century, and worked his way up to owning a bakery by the time Esther was born. She evoked Tucson’s Chinatown in Abe and Mildred Chanin’s oral history, This Land, These Voices:
    “I can recall they had a complex of … dilapidated little apartments. They were mostly single men who came from China, living by themselves and sending their slim earnings back. And their families in China thought, gee, we have to send all our sons and husbands to the United States. Literally they called it the ‘Gold Mountain.’ They didn’t realize their poor husbands and sons were really struggling. They didn’t know of the prejudices.”
    The Don household in which Esther grew up was hardly luxurious. “The store itself was small, perhaps twelve feet by twelve feet,” she told the Chanins, “and immediately at the back of the store there was a cloth curtain and, as you went in, there was a bedroom. We didn’t have many rooms and there were about three of us, I remember, in one bed … And, of course, we used chamber pots during the night, because we didn’t have any toilet facilities in the house.”
    Esther Don grew up, earned a degree from the University of Arizona, married David Tang, bought various commercial properties with her husband, and became one of the city’s leading community service volunteers. She was named Tucson’s Woman of the Year in 1955, and her name graces a plaza at the U of A.

SOLENG TOM
    Perhaps the greatest Chinese success story in Tucson is that of Soleng Tom, who arrived in America in 1929 at age 18 with no English and no money. He joined an uncle in Tucson, worked in laundries and restaurants, then in a market his uncle set up for him. He began to learn English by sitting in the back row of a second-grade classroom.
    Before long he’d earned a pilot’s license and been trained in aviation engineering. Tom served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In the late 1940s he began to open a series of supermarkets—no more little neighborhood store for him. Eventually he expanded his flagship South Tucson store into one of Tucson’s first shopping centers, and developed many other business interests over the years,
    Soleng Tom won the race for mayor of South Tucson in 1955 until a “lost” ballot box turned up and handed the election to his opponent. Next he headed an anti-corruption campaign that led to the removal of four South Tucson officials (including the mayor), but then woke up one night to learn that his store had been torched, probably in retaliation.
    Beginning in the 1960s, he ultimately served five terms as president of the school district where, decades before, he’d sat in on that second-grade class. Soleng Tom died in 2000, a much-honored Tucsonan.