Meeting Chuck Leo, Descendant of Rock Springs Chinatown merchant Leo Chan Kong

Our first stop on our road trip to Rock Springs, Wyoming to excavate the Chinatown site was Omaha, Nebraska. We stopped there to speak briefly with Chuck Leo and his friends Betty and Dennis Chin who know a lot about the former Omaha Chinatown while enjoying dim sum and other Chinese dishes at New Golden Mountain.

Chuck is the grandson of Leo Chan Kong, and currently resides in Omaha. Leo Chan Kong, also known as Leo Bing Wah, was a resident of the Rock Springs Chinatown since February 14, 1900. He worked as a merchant in a business called Lun Sing Chong & Co. which was a store aimed to supply goods to Chinese laborers (Lew Chan Kong interview 1910). Leo Chan Kong worked there until 1926–around the same time when the then Rock Springs mines closed–and he moved his whole family to the Omaha Chinatown.

Chuck Leo told us that he spent 40 years of his life working with the Union Pacific, the same company that also owned many different stores, the nearby mine, and places for their employees to live in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Since they controlled the mines and who they employed, they contributed a lot to the pull of Chinese migrants to the location since they offered them work. With Chinese laborers came Chinese merchants who set up and ran stores that catered to Chinese migrants, such as Leo Chan Kong (Gardner 2019). As these primarily catered to Chinese migrants their shelves were mostly stocked with items that would be used by them rather than general populations in the United States, giving them access to goods they need for food and activities related to their culture.

Chuck’s father and namesake Charles Leo was born in Rock Springs to Leo Chan Kong and Yup Shee. After moving to Omaha Chinatown, Charles had a close friendship with Dennis Chin’s father because their fathers–Leo Chan Kong and Chin Ah Gin–were prominent members of the On Leong Merchants Association. This demonstrates the long and deep connections formed in Chinatowns to not only the people who lived there but the descendants of those people (Alvarez 2021). Unfortunately, Chinatowns that were important to marginalized communities like Rock Springs and Omaha no longer exist.

Though Chuck knew that his father was a veteran in World War II, he did not know much about the time he had served. However, in 2020, the government provided family members of Chinese American WWII veterans to claim a Congressional Gold Medal for their family to which Chuck had missed at first but was successful in doing so the second round when Prof. Laura Ng had notified him of the opportunity. Due to receiving the honor, Chuck learned more about his father’s military record and discovered that his father not only served in the war but had been awarded a Purple Heart that he never told his family about. We would like to thank Chuck for sharing his family stories with us.

References

Alvarez, Robert. 2021. What Chinatowns Can Teach Us About Community. Institute for Policy Studies. 2021, April 28. https://ips-dc.org/what-chinatowns-can-teach-us-about-community/

Gardner, A. Dudley. 2019. Forgotten Frontier: A History Of Wyoming Coal Mining. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429033681.

Leo Chan Kong interview. 1910. File 10887/163. Immigration Arrival Investigation Case Files, 1892-1944; San Francisco District Office; Records of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region (San Francisco), San Bruno, CA.