Chinatown Time Capsule

In Chinatown’s Central Plaza, elderly men sit on benches sipping milk tea, old women nosily shuffle mah-jongg tiles and cooks clack metal spatulas against their woks, filling the air with the pungent aroma of ginger and garlic.

Overlooking this scene is a white, three-story building guarded by a pair of stone lions. Venturing up the building’s darkened stairway to the top floor is like entering a time capsule that tells the history of Chinatown and the community that grew from it.

An intricate, 1930s typewriter with minuscule Chinese characters stained with ink rests on a counter. A private office is adorned with shaped wood and Art Deco furniture. Then there are the dusty file cabinets whose contents date to the 1920s. Within those yellowing pages is the story of the burgeoning Chinese diaspora.

For nearly 60 years, You Chung Hong practiced law here. His office was a legendary entry point for the thousands of Chinese he helped gain citizenship, often despite economic hardships and prejudices. Many of his clients became successful businessmen. One is a federal judge.

Hong’s office was for years the only place that Chinese Angelenos could find immigration advice. The first Chinese American to pass the California bar, Hong testified before the U.S. Senate to reform immigration laws.

His workplace appears frozen in time from the day he died of a heart attack in 1977; it was largely untouched by his family. But this month the family sold the building. And that left Hong’s youngest son and head of the family trust, Roger, with the task of sorting through the papers and artifacts in the office.

Some of the papers -- mainly personal immigration files that stretch from the 1920s to the 1950s -- will be donated to the Huntington Library.

“This collection has been very much sought after,” said Suellen Cheng, curator at the El Pueblo Historical Monument and executive director of the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles. “In the field of Asian American studies, this is a treasure.”

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Hong, who was referred to by his first two initials, Y.C., was born in San Francisco in 1898. His father came to the United States to work on the railroads, but died when his son was only 5. That left his mother, Lee Shee, with a son and a daughter, whom she took care of by working as a cigar roller and seamstress, according to John G. Tomlinson Jr., who wrote about Hong in a USC law magazine.

It was her hardship as a single parent that Hong recognized when he erected Central Plaza’s now famous, neon-tinted, east gate facing Broadway in 1938 to commemorate mothers everywhere.

He moved to Los Angeles after graduating from high school, and began teaching English to Chinese immigrants and worked as a bookkeeper in Chinese restaurants. Hong was dropped as a baby, causing a deformity that curved his spine much like a hunchback. Fully grown, he was only 5 feet 3, but his ambition and his American-accented English distinguished him, Roger Hong said.

Hong became an interpreter for the U.S. Immigration Service in 1918, and was encouraged by a Japanese American at USC Law School to attend night classes. He enrolled, but was so poor that classmates had to lend him textbooks.

Hong, the first Chinese American to graduate from USC Law School, passed the bar in 1923, becoming the first Chinese American to become a certified lawyer in California, Roger Hong said.

Then Hong set up an immigration law practice in Chinatown and married Mabel Chin Qong, a U.S.-born Chinese American who graduated from Oregon State University.

“For someone like him to show up and claim he was a lawyer at the time was pretty outrageous. But of course he had the credentials, so there was nothing they could do,” said Hong’s eldest son, Nowland, a litigator based in downtown Los Angeles.

At the time, thousands of Chinese men who came to the United States -- many of whom worked on the railroads, in laundries or as house boys -- could not bring their wives or family over because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Hong often had to argue meticulously for his clients, proving that many were American citizens and legally had the right to have their loved ones come here.

Such was the case of U.S. District Judge Ronald S.W. Lew’s family, which was separated for nearly two decades because of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

“My father arrived in 1922, and it wasn’t until 1939 that my mother and brother came,” Lew said. “How Y.C. did that, I don’t know.”

Lew’s father encouraged him to follow in Hong’s footsteps, which he did, passing the bar in 1971 and becoming a judge in 1982. Hong was something of a folk hero to Lew’s father’s generation when he testified before a U.S. Senate committee to advocate immigration reform while only 28 years old. He was also a prominent leader of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, which fought for civil rights.

“He was very small in stature, yet he was so powerful because of what he did,” Lew said.

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Roger Hong, the youngest son, said Lew’s family records probably are among the 6,500 client files he found in his father’s office. He spent more than four years searching for a suitable institution to receive the papers -- settling on the Huntington Library in 2003 because it specialized in archival exhibits and is in one of Southern California’s newer Chinese enclaves, San Marino.

“Each file has a photograph, and they’re in good condition,” said Bill Frank, a curator at the library. “There’s maps of villages, so it also tells us a great deal about life in China. We’re very interested in the [Chinese character] typewriter too. It’s a gold mine.”

The library also received such Hong family artifacts as photographs, documents, letters and books, which all will be made available to the public. The client files, the bulk of which are from the late 1920s to the 1950s, are far more complicated. Many will remain protected under federal privacy laws unless the client has died or 75 years has passed since the document was initiated, Frank said.

Cheng, of the El Pueblo Historical Monument and Chinese American Museum, said not much research has been devoted to Hong, though he is known by Asian American historians.

“However, once the Hong papers are made available, I would guess many scholars would be very interested in studying them,” she said.

As for the office building, it has acquired a great deal of sentimental value for Roger, 63, and his brother Nowland, 70. They would visit their father there when they were youngsters, often to get noodles and tea or eat at Little Joe’s, an Italian restaurant that has since closed.

In the kitchen, a glass soap dispenser is still half full. Vintage yellow tin cake covers and cookie jars lie on the counter. A sleek, shoulder-high, General Electric refrigerator is still stocked with all the firecrackers that Roger Hong’s mother didn’t want her sons to play with.

Hong’s office is surrounded by law journals. They are illuminated by a square ceiling lamp made of white frosted glass and brass strips evoking a Chinese screen door.

Everywhere there are cardboard boxes, especially in the former waiting room where clients often sat with bags of groceries they used to pay Hong with for his services.

The boxes were removed from the former Hong home in Country Club Park. The house was purchased in the 1930s for $1 from a white family friend who wanted to defy neighborhood laws that prevented Chinese from owning property. The family sold it in 1997 shortly before Mabel Chin Hong died.

Hong’s office building is being sold to Richard Liu, a Burmese Chinese interior architect who also bought two other buildings owned by the Hong family. He converted one into his company’s headquarters and the other into a trendy store that sells Asian-inspired dishware, glassware and books.

The buildings were completed in 1938 as part of the so-called New Chinatown that Hong and other community leaders designed after the construction of Union Station forced everyone out of the old Chinatown.

The new Chinatown was the first Chinatown in America to be owned entirely by Chinese; it became a nightclub district for Hollywood celebrities in the 1940s and ‘50s.

The Hong buildings had many lives. Some as restaurants. Others as banks. One was an underground nightclub that once served as the city’s punk rock epicenter.

But Roger Hong says one thing will live on: his father’s private office, which the new owner assured he will retain almost the same.

“I wouldn’t have sold the building if I didn’t find the right person,” Roger Hong said. “We have a culture here in L.A. that needs to be preserved.”