Detroit's lost Chinatown

A former resident remembers the downtown neighborhood that progress wiped out years ago

November 2, 1997

BY JOE GRIMM
Detroit Free Press

Long dragons of rush-hour traffic run up and down the Lodge Freeway, tearing through the heart of what was once Detroit's Chinatown.

Progress and the passage of time and traffic have drowned out Cantonese greetings and giddy cries of "Red Rover, Red Rover."

Although there are little more than concrete intersections and parking lots where Chinatown once stood, the area between the current and future homes of Tiger Stadium is attracting fresh attention as a potential casino site.

The Detroit area's Chinese-American population, now 25,000, always has been widespread, but Chinatown once was the hub.

The enclave has been gone for so long now -- 40 years -- that few can remember when Chinese-American children ran the streets while their parents ran the businesses. Dorothy Moy Matsumoto is one who does.

For more than 30 years, she has lived in Royal Oak. But for most of her first 20 years, she lived, played and worked in Chinatown.

Where was Chinatown?

Chinatown was right at Third and Porter, going toward the river from Michigan Avenue. When I look at the map today, it doesn't exist.... It bordered Corktown and Skid Row, OK? I'm a Skid Row kid.

Who lived there?

There were the Chins, the Chungs -- they were first cousins -- and the Moys. My family, the Moys, with six kids, lived in the first block, between Michigan and Porter. The Chungs, with seven kids, and the Chins, with five kids, lived on the second block, between Porter and Abbott on Third.

All three of our families had businesses. My grandfather had a restaurant on Woodward Avenue, Chinese Tea Gardens. When that closed up after the war, my dad opened up a restaurant in Chinatown called Ho Toy (Good Luck). The Chungs had a restaurant, called Chung's, and when Chinatown rolled up the streets, they moved the restaurant to Cass Avenue, where the so-called new Chinatown is, and it's still there today. Mr. Chin's father owned a store called Wah Lee, a grocery store of sorts, and he did the roasting of the pig and all that.

Moy (first row left) in 1945 with her basketball team, the Red Dragons. The coach Dolores Shadd, is on the right in the second row. (Photo courtesy of Dorothy Moy Matsumoto)

Who, other than these families, lived in Chinatown?

There were bachelors that came over from China. They were earning money to bring their families over and they lived in apartments.... They could not bring their wives and families over until they could afford to, and when the United States quotas would allow more people to come over. My oldest sister, Cora, who is six years older than me, was born in China, and she and my mother had not been allowed to come over here until Cora was about 4 years old.

What were the anchors of the Chinatown community?

The families, I suppose, were what you might think of as the anchors, because they were the people that held everybody together. When people came down to Chinatown to shop, they would look up the families.

The Moys were more or less hosts and hostesses of all the people that came down. Families would come down to Chinatown to do their grocery shopping and socialize, and they always ended up at our house. We always would end up feeding them, and the kids would hang out with us, and the mothers and fathers would play mah-jongg at our house until late at night on Sunday. The Chinese had restaurants or they had laundries all over the Detroit area, and they lived all over the city.

Describe a typical Sunday.

Most families went to Central Methodist Church on Grand Circus Park. We did, too. Our services were not held in the main sanctuary. We had our own services on the fourth floor at 3:30 in the afternoon, though we had the ministers from Central Methodist as our ministers.

How many people would end up at you house?

Oh, my goodness, for mah-jongg, you play four people to a table. We'd have three or four tables set up, so that would be 12 adults -- 12 mothers and fathers. The kids -- oh, there were a lot of kids -- I'd say 10 or 12 families would come over to our house. The fathers would always be socializing at the stores and see the other men; the mothers would be at our house with all the kids.

People would stay until 8, 9 or even 10 or 11 o'clock. Then we would clean up the mah-jongg tables and people would go home.

What did you children do?

On Sundays, we would play Red Rover, Red Rover, we would play hopscotch, tag, hide-and-seek, and we would just hang out and talk. After supper, the living room and dining room were full of mah-jongg tables, and the kids stayed in our large kitchen. That was in the days of the radio. We would turn off all the lights and listen to "The Squeaky Door," "The Inner Sanctum" and shows like that. As they got older, they would hang out at the street corners.

During the week, when there were just the three families hanging around, we would roller skate with the old-fashioned roller skates that would hook onto your shoes, or we would have bikes and ride all over. The Moys never had bicycles. The Chungs always had bicycles and we would borrow the Chungs' bicycles. My brothers finally had bicycles, because they peddled the Detroit Times.

What language was spoken in your home?

We spoke Cantonese. My father was educated here, and he spoke English and was an American citizen, but he was the one that insisted we had to learn our Chinese. He would ignore us if we didn't speak Chinese. My father wanted us to learn our language first, which I'm grateful for. I speak it very brokenly, it's kind of pidgin Chinese. My mother could not speak English, and she was the one who wanted us to speak English, because she wanted to learn.

Where did you learn English?

I learned English at Douglass Houghton Elementary, which was right next to Holy Trinity.

I hung out with the Catholic kids who went to my school, and on Mondays they always had to go to catechism. Although I was not Catholic, I used to sit through all the catechism, because I was waiting for my friends to get out of their religious classes. I'd sit in the back of the room and the nuns and the fathers would always try to convert me. I knew Father Kern when he was a young man and a pretty well-known person in Detroit.

I would hang out with Hispanic and Belgian and Maltese and Irish kids on the streets and at Neighborhood House. It was a real melting pot back then. We were all different and we all hung out together.

What was Neighborhood House?

It was a community center. They had hot lunches for those who couldn't eat at home. My mother was sick -- a bed patient for nine years -- and she died when I was 20. Our family would go to Neighborhood House for lunch. We could get a hot lunch for maybe 15 cents a day. We were called underprivileged. I was sent to Girl Scout camp, Christmas Seal camp, Free Press camp. Neighborhood House had basketball and Ping-Pong. Friday night was dance night. On Friday nights, the Chinese kids had a basketball team. We were called the Red Dragons. Our coach was black, Dolores Shadd, and we would challenge the Chinese from Cincinnati or Toronto or Chicago, so we would travel to all the different cities.... After the games, we would always have a dance. The Chinese kids then came in town and would stay at all our homes, and it was just a weekend of fun.

You lived in Chinatown during World War II. What do you remember?

On Dec. 7, 1941, I remember we were entertaining the kids again. We were eating dinner at our house, and it came over the radio ...I remember that very clearly.

During the war years, they used to have what we called China Relief. The mothers and the aunts and the elders would get together every now and then and make flowers out of crepe paper. We kids would have canisters, like they have today with poppies, and we would go around selling the flowers and all the money would go toward the war relief.

The war started in '41, and I was born in '32, so I was only 9, 10 years old, and they would dress us all up, bandage us like the war wounded, put us up on flatbed trucks and parade us down Woodward Avenue.

A lot of our Chinese families had older young men who were in the service during the war years. One family, the Fatts, had five sons, and all five were in the service at the same time.

Another important date in Detroit history was its 250th birthday in 1951. What do you remember from that?

The city wanted to recognize all the nationalities of the city and came into Chinatown looking for young girls. I happen to have been chosen as the American Chinese and was dressed in an American ball gown. One of my friends, Mary Lee, was chosen to represent the Chinese-born and to wear the Mandarin dress. There was a program at Belle Isle, and parades down Woodward Avenue.

They came into Chinatown whenever they needed Chinese people to represent anything. My first job was working for William Cain, a black man who owned Cain's Cleaners and who was looking for a young girl to be his counter girl. He was trying to bring in the Chinese trade.

How did you and your husband meet?

We met at the State Fair bowling alley on a blind date. He had graduated from the University of Michigan, and one of his Caucasian college buddies asked a friend if she knew of any single Asian girls -- back then we were called Oriental. She approached me.

My first question was, "How tall is he?" because I'm 5-feet-6 1/2.

He was tall, too, but then I found out he was Japanese. I said, "I'm not mixing my breed." But, the rest was history and we got married a year later at Central Methodist Church on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 1955.

When did you leave Chinatown?

I moved out in 1955. Chinatown was still there. After we got married, we went to live at Herman Gardens on the west side. The following year, we moved to an apartment at Collingwood and Hamilton.

When we moved out of Herman Gardens, I realized that there was prejudice. We would go from one apartment building to another looking for apartments, and they were all sold out. But when I called up the next day, they would say, "Yes, there are openings." Of course, they couldn't see me on the phone, so I knew there was prejudice. I do not have an accent and, unless you see me, you do not know I am of Asian descent.

That's how we realized there really is a lot of prejudice out there. When we were young, in this melting pot of Chinatown, Corktown, Skid Row, we didn't know of such things.

What happened to Chinatown?

They decided that progress had to come by, and they were going to put in the Lodge expressway and revitalize Detroit, and they decided to move Chinatown. They closed up all the stores, and decided to use an old wrecking ball and demolish them.

The Chinese people decided they would move their businesses to Cass Avenue, and they did, to right near Masonic Temple. Chung's is still there, and some other businesses moved there, but it never really took off.

And when did you move to Royal Oak?

We moved to this house in 1965. My husband was a teacher and was head of the math, science, physics and chemistry department at Cody High School. He died in 1975 of stomach cancer. At that time, I was not working, I was a homemaker -- a household engineer, as I like to call it. I was 43, my daughter was 10, my two sons were 14 and 17, and I had the responsibility of raising them.

When I was widowed, I realized that doors were closed to me. There were never openings when you went in, but when you called up, there were openings. I happened to get a job because equal employment practices were just starting to come in, and I was lucky enough to know that this one particular company was looking for minorities.

On Woodward Avenue, where your grandfather ran his restaurant and where you marched in parades, a Chinese-American man named Vincent Chin was beaten to death in 1982.

I thought the perpetrators should have gotten more of a penalty. They got, more or less, a slap on the wrist. I thought they should have served jail time, because they did kill a man. I thought it was wrong.

How has the loss of Chinatown affected Detroit's Chinese-American community?

There's not a central meeting area. It has kind of lost some of its togetherness.... When I lived there, most Chinese were Cantonese, from south China. Today, most of the people coming are Mandarin and speak another kind of Chinese. We don't speak the same language and can't even understand each other. It's kind of sad.