chinese st louis from enclave to cultural community中国圣路易斯从飞地文化社区.pdfVIP

1 Introduction In 1857, Alla Lee, a twenty-four-year-old native of Ningbo, China, seeking a better life, came to St. Louis, where he opened a small shop on North Tenth Street selling tea and coffee. As the first Chinese in St. Louis—and probably the only one for some time—he mingled mainly with immigrants from Northern Ireland; in fact, he eventually married an Irish woman.1 Within a decade he had been joined by several hundred of his countrymen from San Francisco and New York, who came seeking work in the mines and factories in and around St. Louis. Most of them lived in boarding houses along or near a small street called Hop Alley. In time, Chinese hand laundries, dry goods stores, herb dispen- saries, restaurants, and clan association headquarters sprang up in that neighborhood. In St. Louis, Hop Alley became synonymous with Chinatown. Local records indicate that Chinese businesses—especially hand laundries—attracted a wide clientele. As a consequence the busi- nesses run by Chinese immigrants contributed disproportionately to the city’s economy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Chinese provided 60 percent of the laundry services for the city, even though they comprised less than 0.1 percent of the population.2 St. Louisans willingly patronized these businesses but did not welcome the Chinese themselves, regarding them as “peculiar” creatures. Hop Alley was perceived as an exotic part of town and as a hotbed of criminal activities such as murder, tong wars, and the opium trade (manufacturing, smuggling, and smoking). Despite frequent police raids and the biases of many white St. Louisans, Hop Alley showed remarkable resilience and energy until 1966, when bulldozers of urban renewal leveled the area to make a parking lot for Busch Stadium. The old Chinese settlement around Hop Alley disappeared. However, by then a new, suburban Chinese American commu- nity was quietly