My grandparents were born in China, raised their family in Chicago and rest eternally in Stickney.
It’s not that they had any particular affinity for the Western suburb populated mainly by blue-collar Bohemians and Moravians. But at the time they died, Chinese immigrants had few other options.
Like the majority of Chicago’s deceased Chinese, my grandmother Nora and grandfather Harry can be found at the far end of Mt. Auburn cemetery – an enclave unofficially known as the Chinese section. I’ve been trekking out to Stickney to bow at their graves – as well as those of two great-grandfathers and various other relatives – for about 28 years and yet never thought to ask exactly why so many Chinese are buried in a hard-to-find memorial park in this town of 5,900.
The answer proved even more elusive than the cemetery.
“I heard that that they came here because it was the first cemetery that you hit from Chinatown going west,” says Jack Smith, who has worked at Mt. Auburn for 25 years. “I also heard it was because the soil here is sandy like it is in China.”
Others believe it became the Chinese cemetery of choice because a streetcar went from Chinatown straight out to the cemetery.
Wayne C. Sit (my great-uncle) is the former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), which, among other duties, handles burial arrangements for Chicago’s Chinese. He said he doesn’t “think there was a streetcar that went out that far,” a fact confirmed by the CTA. I think it is more a matter of one family being buried there and then everyone following,” he added.
Still, Eunice Wong of the Chinese Trading Company expresses a view that seems most prevalent in the Chinese community.
“It probably was because Chinese were accepted there,” she said of the cemetery that saw its first Chinese burial in 1922. “They probably checked a lot of other cemeteries first and weren’t allowed in. Otherwise, why would we go way out there?”
According to Wong, whose father was the influential Chinese businessman Tom Chan Sr., Rosehill Cemetery on Chicago’s North Side, not Mt. Auburn, was the first choice for many Chinese during the early part of this century. She claims that when her father’s first wife Mary Goo Chan was stricken with influenza during the epidemic of 1918 and died in 1920, she was buried in Rosehill.
“But when my dad died in 1944, (Rosehill) wouldn’t allow him in. They no longer allowed Chinese to be buried there.”
Rosehill Cemetery has recently resumed allowing Chinese to be buried on its grounds but its spokespeople can tell neither when or why they stopped and restarted the practice.
Still, Wong’s sister-in-law Nancy Tom has her own theory.
“The reason the cemetery stopped was because of the Chinese customs. They felt that the Chinese were dirtying up the cemetery and so they stopped letting them come,” she says.
Wong concurred. “I think they didn’t like the Chinese practices of burning the incense and such,” she said. “I think they decided they really couldn’t maintain discrimination like that without having people quite upset over it.”
The Chinese customs they believe the cemetery objected to are forms of “ancestor worship” that include burning incense and fake money as well as laying out food at the grave, especially around the Chinese memorial day called ching ming in late winter. At Mt. Auburn this practice is made tidier by the use of a pagoda-like altar.
Although a large number of Chinese have become Christians since immigrating to the U.S., many still engage in these activities, more out of respect to their culture and ancestors than religious beliefs.
“Whatever religion you believe in, you still want to take something there, like barbecued pork or char siu bao (steamed pork buns),” Sit said.
But his daughter, Elaine Sit, remembers that her late Chinese-born mother Mary was not so keen on this kind of mixing and matching of traditions.
“Our mother was pretty strict about that sort of thing,” she recalled. “We had been going (to Mt. Auburn) since we were little kids and we would see people with their oranges and their incense and paper money and chicken and cups of wine and roast pork and all we had was this bunch of plastic posies. So we would say, `Hey, mom, why don’t we do that?’ and she would say, `We don’t do that because we are Christians.’ “
Still, many Christian Chinese families who may not feel comfortable bringing a picnic to the cemetery and burning money for their ancestors to spend in the afterlife show respect by bowing at least three times at their relatives’ graves.
“My family has been Catholic since the 1880s,” said current CCBA executive company officer Billy Moy, “but we still bow because that is homage and a tradition.”
Westerners may not readily understand the customs, but Wong has learned to address their questions with a sense of humor.
“When other people ask us when our relatives are going to come and eat the food, we say, `When yours come up and smell the flowers,’ ” she said with a chuckle. “I tell them it is just the same thing. It is just symbolic. We take the food home with us but usually leave the oranges there at the pagoda with incense.”
But the cemetery reflects more than just the religious development of the Chinese in America. The names and dates on the graves speak volumes about the political and socio-economic factors that shaped Chinese communities and immigration patterns over decades.
Although Chinese started burying their dead in Mt. Auburn in 1922, the cemetery contains many more post-World War II bodies than the remains of those buried before. That’s because many of these earlier burials were just temporary.
“When (the CCBA) began operating, there weren’t that many Chinese,” Wayne Sit remembered. “So every five years or so they would dig them up and send them home (to China). They were more or less recycling that piece of land.”
This practice of sending the deceased’s bones to be with the rest of his family ended soon after World War II with the fall of the Bamboo Curtain, the enacting of the War Brides Act and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act (the only federal law to exclude a single nationality), which no longer hindered immigration of wives and daughters as well as other loved ones left behind.
Consequently, between 1945 and 1947, 80 percent of all Chinese immigrants to the U.S. were women, which helped balance the male to female ratio in the U.S. Chinese community, which was 27 to 1 in 1890. The legacy of this uneven balance is reflected in the fact that, according to the CCBA, less than 30 percent of the roughly 8,000 Chinese graves in the cemetery belong to women. Due to miscegenation laws and the practice of Chinese U.S. citizens claiming their daughters in China as sons on paper so they didn’t “waste” valuable immigration rights on girls, Chinatowns in the U.S. were essentially bachelor towns, and the ratio of Chinese men to women in them didn’t even out until the 1980s.
When my grandmother left China in the late ’30s to finally be reunited with her husband after 18 years, she endured intensive interrogation at Angel Island (an infamous prison-like West Coast entry point where many women died) to travel to a state where she was one of only 500 Chinese women. She soon remedied that by bringing four more Chinese women into the world.
Although we still may not know the definitive answer as to why so many of Chicago’s Chinese chose Stickney as their final resting place, we do know why we have become regular visitors to the suburb. Because, despite our modern lives and attitudes, we still feel compelled to honor those who scraped, sacrificed and suffered, perhaps more than we will ever know, so that our lives could be just a little easier than their own. Whether these sacrifices will be appreciated by future generations is another question.
“We still observe (ching ming), but a lot of the younger kids don’t observe it,” Wong said. “I think with the younger generation, unless the mother and the father impress them with the traditions, they won’t follow it. Maybe they will go for their own holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Memorial Day. But ching ming will probably only be practiced by the new immigrants from Hong Kong and mainland China. A long time ago, Chinese used to take a whole pig out there and I mean it was a big deal. Now we don’t do that that much in the community anymore. Now maybe, at most, we’ll take a boiled chicken.”
