This is Tucson Speaks! featuring voices from the collections  of the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center’s Oral History Program. I’m Priscilla Martinez.

Born in 1838 in Guangdong Province in southeast China, Kwong Lee immigrated to the United States in 1861 at the age of 23. When he stepped off the passenger steamship at the port of San Francisco, Kwong Lee entered a country on the precipice of a civil war. Called to serve in his newly-adopted country, Kwong Lee enlisted in the U.S. Navy in May of 1862. Three months later in July of that same year, desperate for Union soldiers, the U.S. Congress passed an act that stated that any foreign-born male living in the United States not yet naturalized at age twenty-one could enlist and be granted full citizenship if they could prove at least one year’s residency. Kwong Lee would go on to serve for three years on a Mississippi gunboat and mail vessel as a cabin boy, one of the only jobs afforded to non-white soldiers. He would be shot five times in service of his country.

Raymond Lim, a Chinese Tusconan, remembers his grandfather Kwong Lee’s participation in the Civil War.

Lim: Because he was in the Civil War, later on he was granted a citizen. He became—They gave him citizenship in the United States.

In 1874 in St. Louis, Missouri, Kwong Lee would file for and receive his naturalization papers, which gave him the ability to cross transnational borders as a citizen in an era of increasing Sinophobia.

However, in a country divided by race in the late-nineteenth century, issues of citizenship, particularly for Chinese peoples, came under immense scrutiny. Kwong Lee would move to La Colorada, Sonora, to run and operate a gold mine in the early-1890s, presumably to escape the mounting Sinophobia taking root in his home state of California.

Raymond Lim recounts how his grandfather negotiated citizenship in the face of Chinese Exclusion.

Lim: And, so he was a citizen. And then because of the Chinese Exclusion Act—

Martinez: Uh-hm

Lim: They revoked his citizenship. So they took it away from him. After that he went to Mexico and he worked and he learned how to make cigars. He was a cigar maker down there. And then, I guess he got the urge to go hunt for gold so he had a little gold mine down there, and then that’s when he took two of his kids—the oldest kid down to Mexico. And then my grandmother knew he was down there so she took off and went to look for him.

His wife, Lai Ngan, and his children did indeed join Kwong Lee in Mexico where they moved around northern Sonora running various grocery stores and cigar shops for much of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. Kwong Lee would later return to San Francisco in 1908.

In the process of filing for his Naval Veteran’s pension and registering to vote, Kwong Lee’s military naturalization was revoked and his pensioned denied. These actions may have reflected then recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that held that foreign-born Chinese were unfit to be citizens.

Many newspapers at the time claimed that Kwong Lee was the only Chinese man granted military naturalization only for it to be rescinded decades later. In fact, he was one of many Asian military veterans in the post-Civil War era who were promised naturalization through service. However, like Kwong Lee their citizenship was revoked years or even decades after their service in the midst of mounting xenophobia and nativism during the Chinese Exclusion era.

Yet, despite federal exclusionary laws, Kwong Lee and his family would go on to live transnational lives and form communities in California, Sonora, and Arizona. This demonstrated that, while precarious, for borderland Chinese like Kwong Lee and his family, belonging could be fluid and negotiable even in the face of national exclusion.

After his death in 1913 in San Francisco, Kwong Lee’s wife,  Lai Ngan, would remarry and eventually re-settle with her family for the final time in Tucson, Arizona, in 1918. Stories like Kwong Lee’s can illustrate both the complexities of citizenship and the day-to-day flexibility of belonging in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

https://tucsonspeaks.omeka.net/spot-01-fighting-for-citzenship?fbclid=IwAR2rxjD8g_MGx-aCzKSaK4OxSSVO_KJ07W0EoWf8yR5LJvZLNZ3_Bxl7jqQ

http://bluegraychinese.blogspot.com/2014/04/kwong-lee.html

For Kwong Lee was naturalized in 1874

That this Chinese-American was no noncombatant was proved yesterday when he bared his queueless head to Registrar Zemansky 

to show where a confederate bullet had plowed its way. Kwong Lee was shot five times in the defense of the country of which he 

was not yet a citizen. Besides the bullet hole in the head, he has another in the breast, one in the left leg, one in the right foot and a shell wound in the hip.

The Chinese appeared at the registrar’s office yesterday with Cameron King Jr., who asked Zemansky whether he was entitled to register.

 After hearing the facts and examining Kwong’s naturalization appears, Zemansky said that he was qualified. The Chinese accordingly 

registered, refusing to state his politics.

Kwong Lee is 70 years old and belongs to the Chinese reform society.