by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu
That the first Chinese immigrant to St. Louis was Alla Lee of Ningbo, arrived 1857;
That Alla Lee acquired English while accompanying a missionary as a translator who ministered in Gold Mountain to the Cantonese railroad laborers & weaved his passage east through church & business contacts like a spider trail tracking white silk up the Mississippi;
That Alla Lee opened a coffee & tea shop on North Tenth Street & intermingled with the Northern Irish community having no other Chinese present in St. Louis for the first twelve years of his residence;
That no photographs survive of Alla Lee himself but was described as an open-faced Celestial of unusual height for a Chinaman his eyes pretty wide awake to most things;
That Alla was not his born name but instead the first-person pronoun in the Ningbo dialect because of this his name has been a subject of interest to researchers who propose the origin as being ease of pronunciation in an American mouth or in response to an immigration officer’s question WHAT IS YOUR NAME to which Alla Lee may have replied 阿拉李 though how could you confirm;
That according to the researcher Alla Lee being the local John Chinaman attracted intrigue & ire from the whites of St. Louis who crowded into Market Street to catch a glimpse of him as to inquire about the “alien and ridiculous” queue & other oddities of his Chinese customs which he explained patiently to local reporters who found him quite hilarious in his comparisons of China & America;
That Alla Lee advocated for assimilation into American culture though you must wonder of loneliness the desire of a face like his own peering through the tea shop window;
That Alla Lee was followed in 1869 by around 250 men from San Francisco seeking factory work, followed again by a trickle of women, until the Chinatown numbered 423 Chinese in the 1910 census (Chinese women listed as several) & hummed with hand laundry groceries restaurants barbers herb dispensaries & tea shops;
That the new immigrants to the St. Louis Chinatown were mainly “remigrants” who left the West Coast after conditions deteriorated there economic discrimination & housing discrimination & the murder of 10% of Los Angeles’ Chinese population en masse in 1871 driving the Chinese from city to city in order to survive;
That according to the researcher Alla Lee was “mostly tangential” to the other Chinese laborers in St. Louis having aligned himself more closely with his Irish friends & their networks of patronage though you question the researcher’s tone on this point for the anthropologist who names himself “of German & Scots-Irish descent” has never been the sole & the only who had never uttered his boyhood tongue only into the curious gaze of bewildered strangers or in the company of a reporter or under his breath as he counted inventory into twelve years of wind;
That Alla Lee married an Irish woman named Sarah I. Graham in 1858 & did they have children;
That between 1835-1969 Missouri outlawed marriage between a white person & “Mongolian” yet Alla Lee & Sarah Graham married in St. Louis in 1858;
That the 1860 Census requests the color of the person white black or mulatto & for Alla Lee the enumerator lists no color but records the birthplace China which the software recalls as whiteness in the absence of a mark & lists Alla Lee himself as a white storekeeper the value of his personal estate estimated at $800 & his wife Sarah Lee born in Ireland white too in the absence;
That in the software you cannot find the names of Alla Lee & Sarah Graham’s children & if a body does not exist in a document does it exist;
That the St. Louis Chinatown was by 1966 razed to build a stadium which was also demolished & rebuilt as an even bigger even better stadium homing a team that your Chinese brother pastiched in Little League the red bird winking from the bat;
That when you were small & restless at your brother’s Little League games you’d run from your parents into the undersleeve of the green plastic slide always it was scorching & you’d sob when they found you;
That the thriving Chinese community was displaced by the demolition of Hop Alley & the destruction was called urban renewal;
That in 2022 you go to the new Chinatown on Olive to buy pork belly & dark soy sauce & you stand in line in front of a white woman gesticulating at the Chinese cashier & she turns toward the Chinese people waiting in line & calls out ANY. BODY. SPEAK ENGLISH.;
That both the women stare at you when you tell the cashier in Mandarin that you brought your own bag & the white woman says CAN. YOU. ASK HER. IF. THEY HAVE. SLAP YA MAMA. FISH FRY. & the cashier stares at you;
That you don’t know how to say SLAP YA MAMA FISH FRY in Mandarin & the cashier asks you what does this woman want & you say I’m sorry have a good day;
That you nod regardless of understanding not the word but its backlight cast over your bridged nose when you interrogate this you find yourself small & hovering inside a silo the little things pouring out of you into the subterranean vortex of grain the grain of course says nothing it is grain but the vortex devours the compatible air;
That if consumption is a language of unspindling & transfiguration is it the language you seek that which collapses the distance between two points;
That sometimes you pretend you don’t speak any language & tighten your smile toward whomsoever beckons your splitting mouth;
That Alla Lee did have several children with Sarah Graham their first daughter was named Emma but the several others were not disambiguated into names they lived in a rooming house on Thirteenth Street across from Biddle Street Market adjacent to but not within Chinatown just a street over though all trace of them goes cold after 1882;
That around 1880 Alla Lee went to China & never returned though no explanation is given in the archival documents though as a Chinese man Alla Lee was never able to become a citizen per the precedent of in re Ah Yup (1878) & the US canceled all Chinese return visas in 1888;
That according to the researcher “the Exclusion Act would have made completely futile and irrelevant the model of active assimilation and participation coupled with his sense of dignity as a person from China that Alla Lee advocated and exemplified in the early years of St. Louis”;
That you have searched for Emma Lee in the archival software through birth certificates passenger manifests & death records evidence of love or its exit so that you might unzip her from the archive & she may step out of the 1860 Census to bite into a persimmon in the late fall breeze & death would not make a meal of you both;
That born in 1859 Emma Lee would have been one of the first Chinese women born in the Midwest if not the first though she too has slipped from view;
That there are no pictures of Emma Lee when she was young online only one photograph survives in it she is in her 60’s her dark hair hidden beneath her hat which wrapped in a polka-dot ribbon casts a shadow over her brown face though her eyes pierce the sepia her expression captionless;
That the Lee family home was demolished in the urban renewal project the home is a park now in an interlocking matrix of parks around a military memorial museum & the crackling energy of the stadium does not radiate toward the grass;
That you see in the prairie restoration project Emma Lee crouching in the goldenrod her brown eyes lifted by brown freckles she rolls a slim green flute out of the grass but how will she play it where is her mouth.
Kathryn Hargett-Hsu is the author of Good Listener (2024), winner of the Frontier Poetry Breakthrough Chapbook Contest. She is Senior Poetry Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Find her in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Pleiades, The Hopkins Review, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, The Margins, and elsewhere.
Adrian Acu is a Filipino American teacher, writer and photographer living in Oakland, CA. His writing has previously appeared in Boulevard Magazine, Bivouac Magazine, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television; his photography has been featured at thirdspace. He is currently working on a photo essay on the Coliseum BART Station and an essay collection on the poetics of video game mechanics.