Ep. 325 | Chin Gee Hee
The China History Podcast
Laszlo Montgomery
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the Taiwan series now behind us, it's onwards and upwards. This time I wanted to select one of the many great Chinese American heroes of his day, Chin Gee Hee. Chin was another Toisan native who came to the American west coast, not to the usual haunts of San Francisco and Los Angeles, but to Seattle. He arrived in the 1860s and stayed till 1904. Following a career in labor contracting and other entrepreneurial ventures that made him quite wealthy, he returned to his native Toisan where, together with a partner, he built the Sun Ning Railway 新宁铁路. The Sun Ning was one of the very few rail projects funded entirely by Chinese investors. During his decades living in the Washington Territory Chin Gee Hee faced the worst racism and anti-Chinese violence the future state would ever see. And when he returned to China during the final years of the Qing Dynasty to build his railroad, his best intentions encountered a different set of challenges and disappointments.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey all, CHP listeners around the world. Welcome back to the China History Podcast. |
| 0:06.7 | Laosla Montgomery here, finally talking about something else other than Taiwan. |
| 0:11.1 | Man, that was a long series. Those of you from Seattle who saw the title of this episode |
| 0:17.5 | probably knew about him already or were familiar with his name. And others who study Chinese |
| 0:22.9 | American history, perhaps know of Chen Gai-Hi. Some of you who listened to my CHP 194 |
| 0:30.1 | episode from years ago, covering the history of Hoi San immigration to the US, might recall |
| 0:36.2 | I spoke about him for about a minute or so. But if the name doesn't ring a bell, you |
| 0:41.7 | came to the right place. This time around, we're going to do a much deeper dive on the life |
| 0:46.5 | and times of Chen Gai-Hi. In Mandarin, his name was Chen Ye-Shi. I checked with a couple |
| 0:54.3 | Hoi San friends of mine who gave me conflicting versions of the correct way to pronounce Chen's |
| 0:59.3 | name in Hoi San. It spelled Chen G-Hi, G-E-E-H-E. So I consulted the Oracle at chat GPT, |
| 1:09.1 | and it gave me a very authoritative sounding response that boiled down to Chen Gai-Hi. |
| 1:14.5 | So let's go with that. I'd call him by his Mandarin name, Chen Ye-Shi, but considering |
| 1:20.4 | he wasn't a northerner, and I'm guessing didn't speak anything other than Hoi San in English, |
| 1:25.7 | let's just continue on with Chen Gai-Hi. First of all, what's nice about Chen Gai-Hi's |
| 1:31.3 | story is that it doesn't have much of anything to do with the usual suspects from Chinese |
| 1:36.2 | American history that tends to lean heavily in favor of the communities in San Francisco, |
| 1:42.7 | L.A., Chicago, and New York, which in story we can also gain some insight into the bigger |
| 1:49.2 | picture of Chinese American history in America's spectacular Cascadia region in the northwest |
| 1:57.2 | of the country. Chen Gai-Hi was born June 22, 1844 in a village close to Doshan in the |
| 2:06.2 | heart of Tai Shan, about an hour drive south of Chiangmen. This was during the Daogwang |
| 2:12.6 | era two years into the treaty port years, so Chen got to live his entire life during China's |
... |
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