Chinese Americans in the Mississippi Delta

The Mississippi delta has been home to a small, but influential, Chinese Community starting from the American Reconstruction period just after the American Civil War. Because the labor system was unsettled, Cotton planters recruited Chinese laborers as a potential replacement for the freed African slaves. The first Chinese are listed as living in Bolivar County in 1870, but it was not until the 1900s that Chinese immigration to the delta became more numerous. Though initially recruited for working in the fields, picking cotton, but soon soured on farming. Due to arriving mostly as merchants as opposed to laborers, they started opening grocery stores, mostly catering to the African-American communities in which they lived. For many decades the Chinese community in the Mississippi delta was one of the largest Chinese American community in the American South, although in more recent times many have either moved away from the Delta or from Mississippi entirely, to the larger Chinese enclaves on the West Coast and Northeast.

History

Many of the Chinese families who settled in the delta tended to originate from the Sze Yap province of Southern China a more cosmopolitan area than most regions of China at the time due to having a long history of foreign traders. Immigrants tended to come from peasant or artisan families. In an economic and historical situation mirrored by many of their counterparts who instead immigrated to the Caribbean or Latin America, most of the initial immigrants were young men who traveled to Mississippi with the intention of saving up money to send back home to be used when they returned there. However, upon arrival they were greeted by many of their countrymen who had arrived there for the same reasons. The first immigrants were almost entirely male, with few women initially making the long journey. As they were neither black nor European-American, they were either classified as non-white or "Chinese" on early census records. Since they did not originally intend to remain in the delta they were more concerned with economic success than social status or recognition, however by the 1970's there were as many as 3,000 Americans of Chinese descent living in the delta.

Grocery Stores

Quickly realizing that working in cotton fields did not produce economic success they quickly abandoned the fields and instead turned towards the retail sector, specifically opening up and running small grocery stores scattered throughout the delta, with the first such store most likely opening in Bolivar County in the early 1870's. They were simple one room shacks who catered mostly to poor black laborers who worked on the plantations. Stores in those days were not self-service and customers had to ask for what they wanted, because they did not speak Chinese and the store owners did not speak English. This was accomplished by pointing at the desired merchandise, usually either molasses, corn meal, or various types of meat. Often times, the grocery stores would be passed from father to son, over many generations.

Ethnic Identity

Arriving into a strictly segregated society with whites on top and blacks on the bottom, the Chinese carved out their own unique niche in a primarily biracial society. Neither black nor white, they were initially classified as "non-white" and later as simply "Chinese". While not seen as being on the same social status as whites neither were they seen on the same level as blacks despite often living in black neighborhoods and serving mostly black clients and customers. The Chinese were middlemen between blacks and whites, often providing a needed contact point in a segregated society. The Chinese initially attended separate Chinese schools separate from both blacks and whites although in later decades before segregation officially was outlawed, they often attended schools with white students. In many cases they sought to identify with white society as much as they could due to whites having the highest status in Jim Crow society.

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