Author: William Tang
Translator: Pingbo Zhou
ABSTRACT
Tung Gay Yee was born in Taishan, Guangdong, China. In 1951 he and his brother Tung Park Yee, who was one year junior, came to the United States from Hong Kong to join their U.S. citizen father. Tung Gay Yee lived a very hard life for the first six years when he settled down in Arizona. In 1957 he opened his Copper Queen Café in a coppe-mining town Ray. He was very nice and generous towards his customers. In the same year the government claimed that Gay and his brother Park had overstayed their visas. Ray copper miners and residents of two neighboring towns came aid of Gay facing deportation. Finally Gay received a letter from the U.S. immigration. It was a notice to appear before immigration authorities and he was told he was not sent back to China.
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On a warm winter afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona, I had the opportunity to meet Chinese elder Mr. Tung Gay Yee. Mr. Yee was born in a Taishan village in Guangdong, China in 1929, and is now 88 years old. He is short in stature and appears a bit weathered due to many years of hard work in his youth. However, he stands up straight and looks energetic, with an easygoing smile on his face.
Image 1: Close-up photo of Tung Gay Yee, photographed in 2017.
Image 2: Photo of Tung Gay Yee (left) and the author William Tang (right).
In 1951, Tung Gay Yee and his brother Tung Park Yee (who was younger than him by one year) were granted temporary visas in Hong Kong to go to America and reunite with their father, who had received American citizenship.
After arriving in America, Mr. Yee worked in a grocery store and as a dishwasher at a restaurant. The work was arduous and the hours were long – he worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and earned 80 dollars a month. If his boss would let him take a day off, he viewed it as an act of grace. Because of his diligent attitude and willingness to work hard, his boss gave him a raise and increased his monthly salary from 80 dollars to a hundred dollars.
After working this way for six years, Mr. Yee decided to start a business with the savings he had built up.
In 1957, Tung Gay Yee arrived at a small copper mining town called Ray which was named after the Ray Copper Company. He opened the Copper Queen Café and worked as the chef. The café served American food – a breakfast combo cost 25 cents, and the deluxe dinner combo cost $1.75. Mr. Yee’s food was both cheap and delicious and was extremely popular among the copper miners.
Mr. Yee embodied the traditional Chinese values of diligence, kindness, generosity, empathy, and frugality. He made many American friends, who called him Chuck. When his miner friends were short on cash, he would always be willing to lend them some. He would often forget that someone had borrowed money from him and drop the matter if it was raised in the future. His high virtue won him praise from everyone around him.
In 1959, the copper miners engaged in an extended strike, receiving no wages or pay. Sometimes the hungry workers would come to Mr. Yee’s restaurant. They were his regular customers and friends, and he willingly provided them with meals for free. In total, Mr. Yee gave the striking workers several hundred meals for free, no small feat for a small business like his. These actions won him greater praise. In early 1957, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service came to harass Mr. Yee, saying he had overstayed the terms of his visa and had to leave the United States. Mr. Yee argued that because his father was an American citizen, he and his brother were eligible under American immigration law to immigrate as relatives of a citizen. The immigration officials were too lazy to look up Mr. Yee’s father’s naturalization documents and demanded that Mr. Yee provide them himself in order to prove that his father was a citizen. After Mr. Yee presented the materials, the immigration department repeatedly stated that the documents were incomplete and needed to be supplemented.
Several hearings were held regarding Mr. Yee’s immigration case. Finally, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the documents he provided proving his father’s citizenship were insufficient.
At this hopeless juncture, miner Don Bishop took the lead in protesting Mr. Yee’s deportation, gathering signatures from local Ray residents, as well as those from Sonora, Superior, and other surrounding towns. The petition quickly received more than 500 signatures, and eventually received over 800 signatures.
Senator Carl Hayden and Representative Morris Udall worked together to propose a Special Bill for Mr. Yee, which was delivered directly to the Secretary of State. On June 25, 1962, Special Bill #3469 was passed in both the House and Senate, and Tung Gay Yee received legal resident status in America.
This extraordinary experience in Mr. Yee’s life was reported on by The Arizona Republic on January 8, 1962 and the Copper Basin News on July 19, 1962. Mr. Yee framed both these articles in order to preserve them as evidence of his uneasy path to citizenship. In the article, there is a touching segment that conveys how Mr. Yee already possesses all of the best attributes of an American citizen, and that it would be an absolute travesty to deport someone as good as he is.
Image 3: January 8, 1962 article from The Arizona Republic about how local miners and citizens banded together to prevent Tung Gay Yee from being deported. In the image, miner Don Bishop shows Tung Gay Yee the petition to protest his deportation.
Image 4: July 19, 1962 article from the Copper Basin News about the passage of Special Bill 3469 and its related impacts
In the five years between May 1957 and June 1962, Mr. Yee faced the threat of deportation and unimaginable uncertainty and anxiety.
He arrived in America at the age of 22 and worked for a living, making meager wages. Although he was given opportunities and offers to start a relationship, he rejected them all, saying that he “had no money to support a family”. He did not get married and start a family until he was 36 years old and had a stable financial situation.
Presently, Mr. Yee is enjoying his retirement at home. He has three sons and two daughters, all of whom are filial and caring. He lives by himself; to avoid boredom and loneliness, he goes to Tan Hua Ginseng & Marine Food Products Inc., a store in Mesa that is run by a friend from his home province of Guangdong, to hang out and help around the store. The owner treats him to tea and meals as if he is a member of their family, and everyone refers to him as the “88-year old volunteer”.
