From Wong to Wong: On Beatrice Loftus McKenzie’s “The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin”

Beatrice Loftus McKenzie | The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin | University of Wisconsin Press | 2022 | 184 Pages

A pioneer-turned-well-established Chinese American family's decades-long quest to understand and share their family history is documented in The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin. The eponymous Wong family enlisted Beatrice Loftus McKenzie, a professor emeritus in history at Beloit College, to compile an account of their family’s journey to and in Beloit, a city approximately 100 miles northwest of Chicago, best known for manufacturing engines for the marine and railroad industries, the paper-making machine, and iron products. 

The Wongs is part family narrative, part academic interpretation, providing the history of one family’s emigration experiences from Mong Dee village, Taishan County in Southern China, to San Francisco, Utah, Chicago, and finally Beloit beginning in the mid-1800s, while also interweaving the historical context of the US’s Chinese exclusion laws and practices with family mysteries. Through intimate narratives, McKenzie profiles the legacies and acculturation experiences of seven third-generation American siblings, the first Wongs to grow up in Beloit. Admittedly, The Wongs could have incorporated more written Chinese characters, as well as elaborated on the evolution of the family’s religious practices as a form of acculturation. Nevertheless, The Wongs provides an important multigenerational record for academics, family genealogists, and anyone seeking to understand early Midwest Chinese American experiences.

A strength of The Wongs is McKenzie’s concise interpretation of the Chinese exclusion policies experienced by early Wong family members, alongside the hurdles today’s Wongs overcame to uncover these truths. While there is a common perception that immigration is linear, the Wongs’ experiences show how legal race-based discrimination made migration anything but. Early Wong family relations were convoluted in order to work around Chinese exclusion, which McKenzie emphasizes not only included the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 but “a set of laws that were in effect between 1882 and 1943, which set up an almost total ban on immigration from China.”

These histories were not handed down directly from the first generation. The first known Wong forefather, Wong Doo Set, had multiple aliases, as did his sons. Wong Doo Set brought sons, both real and fictitious, to the US by claiming “paper sons”—a phenomenon wherein Chinese males purchased documents to falsely claim Chinese American US citizens as their fathers—in order to navigate what McKenzie summarizes as “expansive birthright citizenship policy alongside [a] restrictive immigration policy.” 

Through fascinatingly contextualized narratives, McKenzie explores how geography, time period, and economics affected the racial experiences of Wong Doo Set’s grandchildren—the seven Beloit native Wong siblings. For instance, unlike her older siblings who reared younger siblings and chose to partake in Beloit’s vibrant World War II economy, Helen chose to pursue an occupational therapy career that allowed for travel. In venturing away, her racial identity formation took a different path. In a letter to younger sister Mary, Helen explains her first experiences in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Hawaii, in the 1950s:

There is this inexplicable feeling of really belonging—not that I ever felt out of place with Caucasians. But there’s something that came over me that makes me appreciate more the Chinese culture and people and to be a part of them. I felt so wanted and so much at home in the many places I visited and the homes I was invited to. Their hospitality overwhelmed me and, as I say, it’s a hard feeling to convey. You have never seen Chinatown SF [San Francisco] or ever experienced being with Chinese Americans. It’s different—anyways to me. At the university I met and dated Chinese, but they were all from China and I didn’t get along with them.

While McKenzie notes the younger siblings tended to be more attuned to their Chinese heritage due to expanded opportunities to travel and meet other Asian Americans, each sibling made undoubtable contributions to the Beloit community. Drawing on a plethora of family interviews, personal letters, academic and career accomplishments, and many high school superlatives, McKenzie showcases the personal and professional development of exceptional siblings. These powerful stories bring the reader close to the siblings; as if the reader is listening to an auntie recount the accomplished lives of her best friends.

McKenzie underscores how the Wong siblings’ civic engagement created generational impact. Siblings Gim and Frank led institutions to end racial discrimination and value diversity. When Gim was excluded from a white-males-only bowling tournament in the late 1940s, he leveraged his background as a US Army veteran—veterans found his exclusion “especially appalling”—and mechanical engineer to integrate the sport. Decades later, Frank, a scholar of Chinese history, contributed to the movement to diversify college campuses through his work on the board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Frank not only promoted cross-border collaboration by leading an academic exchange program to China in 1974, but also spoke openly about the need for critical dialogue around how higher education should “welcome rather disdain the new thinking embodied in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and non-Western studies” in the 1990s.

McKenzie details how the Wong siblings’ Beloit-bred identities permeated into friendships with others who were different from themselves. Harry developed bonds with many African American colleagues through his unionized foundry job at the Fairbanks, Morse and Company in Beloit, where “after work the guys would invite him to drink beer at a Turtle Creek bar where whites didn’t enter.”

Further, McKenzie highlights how daughter Fung’s initial hesitation turned into a friendship with a fellow nursing student during their US Cadet Nurse Corp training in Madison during World War II. Unexpected friendships formed through War-time career opportunities in the Midwest:  

Knowing that China and Japan were at war, Nurse Collings said she hoped Fung could work alongside a woman of Japanese ancestry. From her perspective, Fung felt that making a request like that showed Nurse Collinger’s obtuseness about race. As an eighteen-year-old, U.S.-born American raised in Wisconsin, what experience would Fung have had that would have made her feel animosity toward another eighteen year old American?… Perhaps they were seen as sharing a single racial category, and the hope was that the two women could offer each other solidarity. And in fact, that is what happened. Alice Noguchi became one of Fung’s “true friends.”

Although McKenzie chooses a series of anecdotes to mostly positively showcase the siblings’ lives, these stories point towards the rich opportunities that the Wong siblings had, heavily influenced by their upbringing in Beloit. 

A shortfall in this work is the dearth of written Chinese characters. Chinese characters are present only in one figure that shows the written Chinese names of Wong family ancestors. Written traditional Chinese characters are instructive. When Chinese characters are transliterated into the English alphabet, there can be multiple characters and meanings for a particular transliteration. Thus, excluding written Chinese characters can often obscure meanings that can be deciphered from reading the characters. For example, writing the siblings’ mother Yee Shee’s name in Chinese characters, 余氏, would have informed readers that “Yee” is the maiden last name, while “Shee” denotes Yee is a maiden name, similar to “née.” Yee Shee is not simply a “common name” as stated in the text, but is indicative of a married woman’s maiden surname. Including traditional Chinese characters, as many of the family’s primary sources likely used, would have provided further insights. 

Another shortfall is McKenzie’s asymmetrical approach to analyzing the family’s cultural amalgamation experiences. Instead of answering the question of how the Wongs “Americanized” traditional Chinese rituals or religious practices, the question answered is how the Wongs developed “Chinese” versions of American rituals. McKenzie highlights the emergence of large family reunions as one such example. The extensive Wong family reunions organized every five years since 1957—with multi-day events, Chinese food, creative poems, skits, and songs featuring Wong ancestors—demonstrate the emergence of a culturally hybrid form of a hallmark American tradition.

However, it would have been instructive to see how the Wongs celebrated traditional Chinese holidays such as the Qingming Festival (清明節), also known as Ching Ming Festival or Tomb-Sweeping Day. Did they visit the graves of deceased relatives, light incense, and provide food offerings to the deceased? Did those practices conflict with their Christian views or did they see them as compatible? Nonetheless, McKenzie demonstrates how new generations of Wongs are highly motivated to maintain connections to their family roots through the sharing and retelling generational stories with new methods.

The Wongs provides a multigenerational study of how each generation broke into unique Chinese American lives. We are shown the importance of sharing the experiences of Midwest Chinese Americans, and that history does not begin in a textbook, but with individuals who yearn to understand their ancestors and learn their past.