Racism against Asian Americans recalls troubling treatment of Santa Rosa’s early Chinese

This is our shortest month we are leaving behind and it is also, without question, our most diverse.

We have honored presidents and Black history, ushered in the Chinese Year of the Ox, and marked, with our Japanese community, another Day of Remembrance anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the wartime measure that sent people of Japanese descent — many of them native-born Americans — to what was called, in gentler terms than deserved, “relocation camps.” Our most diverse month is crammed full of chances to look back and to learn. What we have learned, at this point in the nation’s political life, is that we don’t seem to be very good at diversity.

Look at the headlines. Listen to the news. Asian Americans are being targeted by angry people who, for reasons that defy any real explanation, blame them for the current health crisis. It’s yet another avenue for those bent on mob rule.

There are already more than enough chapters in the history of the world that begin this way. The subject, in fact, is in Sonoma County’s political DNA. In the 1880s, in a worldwide financial depression, a hyperactive San Francisco politician created the Workingman’s Party, organizing a boycott of Chinese labor and charging that the Chinese workers — men who had built the railroad and worked in the early timber harvest and were the source of farm labor — were “taking the white man’s jobs.”

Santa Rosa joined (dare we say “eagerly”) in that Pacific Coast boycott of all Chinese labor, a sad chapter in the city’s history. The white business community united to force the Chinese workers to leave. A banner reading “The Chinese Must Go. We Mean Strictly Business” was stretched across Mendocino Avenue. Signs went up in store fronts reading “No Chinese Employed.” Santa Rosa’s busy Chinatown, southeast of the plaza, emptied within weeks as the two newspapers — Sonoma Democrat and Santa Rosa Republican — splashed triumphant headlines on front pages tallying how many left each week. In some towns along the coast, like Eureka, Chinese residents were murdered. In Santa Rosa they were “only” driven out of town.

Those headlines were in the spring of 1888. By August of that year, when the harvest season was underway, the headlines were just as large but very different: "Urgent Need for Hop Pickers!” and so on.

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We cling to the notion that such a thing cannot be allowed to happen again, despite the pockets of 19th century ignorance that still seem to exist. We look for guidance. And always and forever, we look for happy endings. It is a search that takes us directly to a remarkable Chinese woman named Song Wong Bourbeau.

Song was born in Santa Rosa’s “new” Chinatown along Second Street east of Santa Rosa Avenue in 1909. Her father was Tom Wing Wong, known to Chinese workers as “Boss Man,” and to white residents as Chinatown’s “Mayor.”

Wing was one of the first to arrive in Santa Rosa’s deserted Chinatown. By 1900 the nation’s financial condition had improved, the boycott had ended, the Workingman’s Party had faded on the political scene and Wing was able to supply farm and domestic labor from his connections in San Francisco’s Chinese community.

Soon after his arrival, there would be as many as 200 residents of Chinatown in the harvest season and a small but busy commercial district throughout the year.

It’s Wing’s daughter, Song, who tells the story best

In a video made two years before her death, Song talks about Chinatown, of her extended family, and her life.

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Song grew up surrounded by family — including her mother, Lun Moon Wang; maternal grandfather and great uncle. Her father not only owned the largest grocery store but also provided a boardinghouse for seasonal laborers, and was responsible for the care of the Buddhist Temple that was very important, if not central, to community life.

Song’s grandfather, Poy Jam, owned a restaurant called Jam Kee on Second Street, later on Third. His brother, Ah Moon, was a brandy maker at Chauvet Winery in Glen Ellen and also worked for many years as a steward at the Santa Rosa Elks Lodge.

Song had a brother, Harry, eight years younger, as well as several much older half brothers who also ran stores and businesses in those Chinatown blocks, including a laundry.

Chinese laundries were a lucrative industry in white communities of the day. There was, in fact, a competing Chinese laundry on Hinton Avenue on the east side of the courthouse, at an address that would become, ironically, the Topaz Room, the fanciest restaurant in the county.

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In her childhood, Song and her mother were the only females in that workingman’s Chinatown. They lived upstairs over her father’s store where he sold Chinese groceries, clothing and farm implements. Like other businesses on the street, he also sold lottery tickets. It was Chinese lottery — a complex system involving words not numbers, that brought many white residents to Chinatown.

In interviews, Song told of her chores — harvesting vegetables from a backyard garden, tending the chickens and rabbits and pigeons they raised for food, rolling cigarettes for sale made with tobacco grown in that same backyard and washing huge pans of rice for the meals her mother prepared for the workers.

She also remembered morning visits, before school, to put incense on the altar of the temple, which was on the second floor of the workers’ boardinghouse where there were sometimes men lying on the floor, smoking opium as she passed. Once, when San Francisco “tong war” participants came to Santa Rosa in a futile escape effort, Song found herself walking past bodies lying on Second Street on her way to place the morning offerings on the temple altar.

Her memories of early school years are not happy ones.

“I was the only Chinese going to school.” (Fremont School on Fourth Street stood on the site that became Fremont Park and is now Cancer Survivor Park.)

“My dad had to take me and come and get me because they’d beat me up,” she said. “I had long hair,” and in the classroom, “they’d tie it to anything they could tie it to and put it in inkwells.” She was afraid, she said, to go to school, went out to the playground at recess only when she could be near a teacher, and never got close to any of the playground equipment.

Some of her tormentors came to her restaurant as adults and “used to laugh about how they treated me,” she said.

Did she laugh? A long pause, and then “Oh yes, I laugh about it. …” But it wasn’t a response to convince an interviewer.

When her father died in the flu pandemic of 1918, Song was just 8 years old but found some protection from bullies when a boy a couple of years older who lived on E Street offered to walk with her to school. Young Wes Daniels, later the owner of Daniel’s Chapel of the Roses, became a friend for life. Wes’ daughter-in-law, Patsy Daniels, would recall, at a tribute lunch for Song in the 1990s, her first date with Wes’ son, Bill, her future husband.

“He took me to dinner at the old Jam Kee on Third Street and we sat in one of those wooden booths. Song must have known that we liked each other,” Daniels said, “Because she drew the curtain.”

Song had met her own husband, Charles Bourbeau, when both were students at Santa Rosa High School and, after a brief time at Stanford University, she returned to join her grandfather in the restaurant business and to marry Charles. When Poy Jam died, Song inherited the old-style restaurant which was the first and, for a long time, the only Chinese restaurant in town.

When the city’s urban renewal project of the 1960s turned the Third Street site into a parking lot, Song and Charles bought an early-century house on Fifth Street and moved Jam Kee to the site.

Her name on the deed was a triumph for Song. As she reminded us in her video, in the early years Chinese people were not allowed to own property.

Generations of faithful Jam Kee clientele gave the business another three decades of success. But when Charles died in 1988, Jam Kee closed. Song could not bring herself to continue without him. Any thoughts of a sale disappeared in ‘92, when the building burned.

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As a successful businesswoman, Song was a very active member of the Soroptimist Club, Business and Professional Women and, after Charles’ service in World War II, the American Legion Auxiliary. In the ‘90s she received national honors from the Auxiliary, state honors from BPW, and the Soroptimists created a scholarship in her name.

Song worked hard at being part of the community, finding many ways to appreciate kindness. Regular Jam Kee patrons may still have in their cupboard small blue and white rice bowls, made in China, pressed on them by Song as she bade them good night. Soroptimist friends, including Patsy Daniels and Phyllis Rogers, recall that she was the first to volunteer to sit at the entry table at meetings, greeting each of her fellow members as they arrived.

She always had a treat for children she met on the street, and she wore the happiest face in Santa Rosa throughout her lifetime.

Song was, in short, a “class act.” And she spent her life proving that Asians AND women do definitely matter.

It is said that the more we learn about people the less likely we are to hate them. Others would argue that if your thinking process is clogged with vitriol, any movement toward tolerance is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

But, history — and Song — both tell us that sometimes “impossible” means “keep trying.”

(Footnote: The Old Post Office history museum on Ninth Street houses what remains of the Buddhist Temple above Tom Wing’s Second Street boardinghouse, along with artwork and clothing of the time and place, gifts from Song as she neared the end of her life. Interviews with her and the video can be accessed online on the Museum of Sonoma County homepage or at Sonoma State’s Schulz Library special collections website.

Led by the Soroptimist Club, organizations that Song belonged to financed the conversion of the museum’s basement to a lecture and exhibit room in her honor.)

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Song Wong Bourbeau’s last name in photo captions.