History of Chinese Americans in Albany

Chinese Americans in Albany, Past, Present and Future

Keynote Speech given by New York State Assemblyman John McEneny at CCC’s 30th Anniversary Dinner on Nov. 8, 2003.

Transcribed by Cynthia Cramsie from a videotape recorded by Jian-Guo Wang
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Dajia Hao (Greetings to You All).

It’s a great honor to be here and to be able to address the Chinese Community Center. What your accomplishments have been over the last few years is absolutely astounding. I’ve been asked to talk about the Chinese in Albany in the past, in the present, and in the future.

I was born and raised in Albany, as my parents and grandparents were. My great-grandparents were all Irish immigrants or the children of Irish immigrants. I know I’m dealing with people who understand family and ancestry – as my mind’s eye goes back my memory is somewhat longer than my years would indicate. My father was born in 1899 and my mother in 1902 - although she’d be very upset if I announced that publicly while she is still living – and I was raised in an extended family, which included my grandmother, who was born just after the Civil War. All four of my grandparents were born in the 1860s. All of us carry in our minds and in our hearts our own memories and our own life experience, but we often forget that we also carry the memories of our parents, who carry the memories of our grandparents and their parents before them. It’s often said that when an older person dies, it’s like a library burning, because so much is contained in a lifetime, not only your memories but things that were passed down to you from those people in your ancestry that went before you.

One of the projects that I hope the Chinese community will take on, particularly now that you are so well-organized and you have support and you have so much enthusiasm from within the Chinese-American community and the larger community as well, is that you will put down those memories, the memories that you carry in your parents, and also of older members of the community, because these are rarely written down and when they are they are written only in a very cursory, superficial manner. And those valuable archives are most fragile. They are in the memory of men and women. And this I would hope is a good oral history that will explain the struggle of Chinese and Chinese Americans coming to this country. Tell the good parts, but don’t leave out the struggle and the bad parts, and there are many.

When I grew up – I was born in 1943. Is that an important year? Other than the fact that if you follow American coinage, because the war was on, all the pennies were silver-looking. They made them out of steel because we ran out of copper. I always tell my kids it was because I was born they changed the coins. 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, was the year that an act of Congress ended one of the shadiest, darkest periods of American history in terms of how we regarded other races of people. For 61 years, from 1882 until the middle of the war, people who were called ‘Mongolian’, and that was the term that was used at the time, were denied citizenship in the United States.

Not long ago, I came upon a pamphlet in a used bookstore, and it was a dollar for the pamphlet, and it said, ‘The Rules of Citizenship’ and it was a 1924 volume and it was written by an old professor who, when I was a child – I grew up on North Pine Avenue in Albany – I remember the professor because he wore a big – those of us who are older remember we called it a Gaby Hayes beard – a big beard that went around like that. He was quite a character and he taught political science – they called it government – at what was then called the State Teachers’ College. So I recognized Dr. Hutchinson’s name, and I go, ‘Well, I collect Albany authors. You know, Bill Kennedy and the like, and Bernie Conners and what have you.’ So I bought the pamphlet for a dollar, thinking I’ll just put it on the shelf, that’s one more. And one day, for whatever reason, I started to page through it, on what the rules of citizenship were in the 1920s. And they gave examples, that since members of the ‘Mongolian’ race were ineligible to be citizens of the United Sates and had been since 1842, that obviously they would be denied citizenship. There was a case that started and they were giving case law in, ironically in this area, where an RPI student, who was from Thailand, applied. He had long-term respectable residence here, he was educated with a college degree and he applied to be an American citizen. And in those days you went to the Albany City Court which would be the lowest, like a town court, and was denied, quite legally, because he was ‘Mongolian’. And this went to another court and another court and finally up to the Supreme Court and the ruling was – this was 1894 – by the time it went through the courts and they said, ‘Yes, that was the law.’ And he could not become a citizen, even though he lived here, he was educated here, and was certainly outstanding, in terms of what he had to offer. He was ineligible. Perhaps even more shocking, as late as the 1920s, it was ruled – now bear in mind that you know your history as well as I do – that the United States, because of the Spanish-American War, owned the Philippines from roughly 1899 to 1900 on (what official date you use, it’s never later than ’02). So the Philippine Islands were a part of the United States and a ruling came up that if an American citizen, in this case a Caucasian, married a Filipino, were they still citizens? And the ruling was, ‘Of course not.’ They married a member of the ‘Mongolian’ race and were therefore not citizens anymore, of the United States.

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