This blog is a continuation of a series exploring a letter in the Wallace B. and Madeline H Chung Collection. You can find part one HERE.
Thanks to Jeffrey Wong for assistance on translation, and to the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration, Seattle branch.
THE MAN, THE LETTER
The story of the Shaunavon Crystal Bakery, introduced to me by a single letter found in the Chung Collection, offered an intimate lens into the lives of every-day Chinese Canadians: their resilience, and the vibrant networks of family and business they built across the Prairies and beyond. As we shift our focus from Saskatchewan to Seattle, we’ll explore how these transnational connections informed another story, beginning with Harry K. Mar Dong, the letter’s recipient.
First off, what does the letter itself say?
“To Younger Brother Gim Dong,
Last time I received a letter from you about these matters, but I haven’t heard back from you about things and miss folks dearly. I am now writing to you to inquire if all was done properly regarding Oct 30th money transfer to Hong Kong so that [Mah] See Gey can pass over the $300 cash to [Mah] Gay Yun. I have yet to hear from See Gey that he has received this money and the last money I sent previously, so now I’m asking you now if you can inquire on both the money transfers to ensure they have received.
From Gim Sing.”
This letter is a somewhat everyday business affair that reflects some of the dynamic networks that connected the Chinese Canadian and American communities, namely those for sending money back to family in China. From our small town of Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, this author is writing to a broker, someone who is a trusted and maybe powerful member of the Mah clan who is facilitating the transfer of these hard earnings. That person is Harry K Mar Dong.
Citizen’s Travel Card used by Harry K Mar Dong to cross into Canada, NARA Seattle, Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files series, Mar Dong, Box 566, Case File 7030/4626
According to historical records, Mar Dong was born in 1881 above a shop in San Francisco Chinatown, to a shopkeeper and his wife. When interviewed by US Immigration in 1923, he had sworn witnesses to attest to this fact, and even his mother’s death certificate, to establish he was a native-born US citizen. This all, however, was false. Mar Dong was a “paper son.” [1]
The term “paper sons” refers to Chinese immigrants who entered the United States and Canada by falsely claiming citizen status, domicile, merchant status, or descent from citizens using real or fake government documents. This practice grew widespread after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed city records, allowing many Chinese individuals, including Mar Dong, to claim U.S. citizenship. These claims often involved elaborate stories and forged documents, helping immigrants bypass restrictive laws like the US Chinese Exclusion Act and build new lives in America.
Detail from a depiction of the 1886 Anti-Chinese Riot at Seattle, “The anti-Chinese riot at Seattle, Washington territory / illustrated by W. P. Snyder,” Harper’s Weekly Magazine, 6 Mar 1886. Chung Collection, RBSC-ARC-1679-CC-TX-288-94
According to Mar Dong’s son Al Mar, the real story is that his father arrived in the United States in the late 1800s with a brother, working in Montana, and then Seattle, where he witnessed the violent 1885-86 anti-Chinese riots.[2] By the 1920s, Mar became a powerful labor contractor managing mostly Chinese and some Filipino cannery crews. When US canneries moved towards employing more of the latter, his business declined. He did not lose his status though, for he soon became a transportation agent for the many transportation companies that Chinese immigrants relied on to travel in a world of Exclusion barriers.[3] Maybe these is the reason he bought papers to establish his US citizen status, which would improve his business and personal legal protections.
You can learn more about the Chinese Diaspora’s role in the Pacific Northwest cannery industry and the importance of Chinese ticket agents at the Chung Lind Gallery.
By 1924, Mar Dong was the official Chinese agent for the Admiral Oriental Line, a steamship line with offices across the globe, and was meeting their regular ship arrivals in Canada every month by taking coastal ferries like the CPR Princesses to Victoria and Vancouver. This required the swift navigation of both the US and Canada’s labyrinthine Exclusion regulations. However, with powerful friends in the shipping industry, this was possible. In fact, Mar Dong was issued a special permit and ID card to cross with their assistance. Emboldened, he even tried to get permission to cross on CPR ships without being manifested, a bold tactic that most of the poor, single Chinese workers could never dare to try, fearful of being deported or turned away on arrival.[4]
Mar Dong in the 1930s, “Form 430-Application of Alleged American Citizen of the Chinese Race for Preinvestigation of Status, Seattle.” NARA Seattle, Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files series, Mar Dong, Box 566, Case File 7030/4626
In 1926, Mar was implicated in an affair where a detained potential immigrant, Wong Yick, sought entrance to the US. Ticket agents were powerful brokers, often using bribes, false papers, and political influence to shape Chinese movement across borders, but also could exploit these migrants for profit. According to Al Mar, his father was deeply enmeshed in this trade of paper lives.[5] The incident above may or may not have involved shady dealing, but it definitely involved the strategic deployment of a box of feces.[6]
The Hotel Mar
In 1927, one of Mar Dong’s most lasting legacies was completed: The Mar Hotel building, still standing at 507–511 Maynard Ave. S. in Seattle. It was at this address that our humble letter arrived in 1944. This building became the hub of Mar’s offices, his ticketing and money transfer business, as well as a bustling residential hotel. The Mar Café, yet another business of his, opened on November 10, 1927, with a public announcement in the Seattle Star proclaiming that it was not only “offering under Oriental atmosphere-the best food, best service-Chinese and American food, dancing and music” but that it was “The only original Chinese Cafe in America.”[7]
Big banquets of both the White and Chinese community were held there in the following years, with one notable occasion featuring the full live orchestra from the SS President Pierce.[8] It’s no coincidence that this steamship was part of the Dollar Steamship Co. and American Mail Lines fleet that Harry K. Mar Dong was now the Chinese agent for. Harry Mar Dong was also a founding executive of the Seattle branch of the powerful Hoy Sun Ning Yung Benevolent Association when it was formally incorporated in 1928.[9] The celebratory banquet, with delegates from across the North American Toisanese diaspora, was held at the Cafe Mar in the Mar Hotel.[10]
Inside cover of a pocketbook with details on Mar Hotel and Company, note the exterior image. “Note book of a Mar clan member” 1933, Chung Collection, RBSC-ARC-1679-CC-TX-102-18-1
The Mar Hotel was often called the “Hong Kong Building” after the Mar Café transitioned into the popular Hong Kong Restaurant.[11] In the 1930s, the Mar Hotel hosted an infamous nightclub and dance hall called the Hong Kong Chinese Society Club, nicknamed the “Bucket of Blood.”[12] During the latter years of Prohibition, the club was raided, catching some of Seattle’s blue-blues red-handed at the craps table, sipping on bootleg whiskey (potentially smuggled from Canada) and in-house moonshine.[13] The blaring headlines did not stop the community of mostly Chinese men living in the tiny single rooms of the Mar Hotel, or even some famous Chinese visitors, from making use of this so-called “sordid structure” as a place to lay their head at night.[14] The Mar family continued to run the Hotel until 1941, when Al Mar sold it. Interviewed by the Seattle Times about his father in 1993, Al remembered his father as ““jolly; he was one of Chinatown’s most prominent members, but he wasn’t that Chinafied; a lot of his association was with the lo fan [white folks, lit. barbarians 佬番].”
: Letterhead from Hotel Mar, “Pad of writing paper from the Hotel Mar (馬登旅館) in Seattle, Washington” Unknown, Chung Collection, RBSC-ARC-1679-CC-TX-102-8-1
In the early 1950s, the Sakamoto family, survivors of internment at Minidoka and Tule Lake Camps, purchased the Mar Hotel. Daughter Janet Sakamoto provides the following description of residential hotel life:
“Our family had the entire second floor of rooms where we lived right next to the lobby. We children didn’t go upstairs to the floors where the guests were staying. At the top of the stairs from the first to the second floor was the lobby with a check-in desk, mailboxes, and a switchboard system connected to the rooms. There was also a huge kitchen and a ballroom floor that was once part of a restaurant. It wasn’t used when we bought the hotel and hadn’t been for years. We rode our bicycles on the marble dance floor. Most of our residents were either white or African Americans who worked in the neighboring train stations or jazz clubs. Sarah Vaughn and Count Basie stayed at our hotel along with other Black entertainers who weren’t allowed to stay in the other downtown Seattle hotels.”[15]
Living legacies of objects, place and space.
The lives of those who inhabited hotels like the Hotel Mar often represent a historic cross section those most marginalized by urban society: poor Chinese bachelors, single working-class women, sex workers, transient LGBTQ+ folks, performers, homeless, addicted, widowed seniors on fixed pensions, and more. By 1971, the Mar Hotel closed, but the building continued to live on the street level. Seattle icon Ron Chew shares a memory from his time as a busboy with his head waiter father at the Hong Kong Restaurant downstairs:
“The Chinese men had very Spartan lives… A lot of the kitchen help lived in the Mar Hotel upstairs or other hotels in the district. You learned things from paying attention to the men you worked with…you’d just know some things without their saying a word. Picture yourself…12 hours, non-stop with a few breaks for food…standing and running back and forth with trays that weighed 50 pounds. You could do it in your twenties and thirties, but forties, fifties, sixties, seventies…it wasn’t a way to live your life. Some of the waiters faded away because they couldn’t continue to handle the ten to fourteen hour days on their feet. Both waiters and busboys would be so tired at the end of the day…you’d open up the door and smell the air outside of the kitchen along with your own clothes that smelled of grease and subgum.”[16]
One of the main reasons inspiring me to write this series was to highlight how our encounters with daily objects, or even the spaces we inhabit and move through each day, can connect us back to a deeper history if we seek it. Behind each archival object is a real memory, a person with a family and story. In the case of the Chinese diaspora community, these are stories that have been too often ignored, erased, appropriated, or papered over. Working class stories are minimized or forgotten. Real work remains to reclaim the archive as a place of reconciliation and community story sharing.
The same holds true for physical spaces, especially Chinatowns, which currently face displacement across North America. Returning to our narrative, the Hong Kong Restaurant in the Mar Hotel closed in mid to late 1980s, a period corresponding with many beginning to move away from Chinatowns to suburbs. Entrepreneur James Koh purchased the historic Mar, Milwaukee, and Alps residential Hotels in Chinatown in 2003. By 2008 the Mar reopened with offices for rent.[17]
I hope you have enjoyed this two-part series, please keep an eye out for continued blogs about the Wallace B. and Madeline H Chung Collections, as well as the Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection on this webpage or HERE.
The Hotel Mar or “Hong Kong” Building, 507 S. Maynard Ave., Seattle, Washington, U.S.,1975. Item 195772, Historic Building Survey Photograph Collection (Record Series 1629-01), Seattle Municipal Archives.
Further Reading
Groth, Paul. Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999
Wong, Marie Rose. Building Tradition: Pan-Asian Seattle and Life in the Residential Hotels. First ed. Seattle, WA: Chin Music Press, 2018.
Endnotes
[1] NARA Seattle, Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files series, Mar Dong, Box 566, Case File 7030/4626
[2] Links To History — Passengers And `Paper Sons’ In Chinatown, The Seattle Times, Sep 5 1993, Online Edition, https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19930905/1719427/links-to-history—-passengers-and-paper-sons-in-chinatown
[3] McKeown, Adam. Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
[4] There are extensive correspondences on these dynamics or border crossing in Mar Dong’s Seattle Chinese Exclusion Act case file. Reference above.
[5] Links to History, Seattle Times, 1993
[6] Mar had to provide some excuses for this incident to immigration authorities and was banned from the building for a time. NARA Seattle, Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files Series, Mar Dong.
[7] Seattle Star Nov 10 1927 Pg.3
[8] Seattle Union Record Jan 11 1928 Pg.3
[9] 台山寧陽會館 the Native-place association for those from Taishan/Toisan county. Notably, both Mar Dong and our Mah men of Crystal Bakery in Shaunavon are Toisan men. Perhaps they came from the same village area?
[10] Seattle Star, Dec 8 1928 Pg.2
[11] Historic South Downtown Oral Histories: Marie Wong Discusses Her Research on Seattle’s SRO Hotels and the Men and Women Who Lived in Them, historylink.org. Essay 11135. Nov 2 2015. https://www.historylink.org/File/11135
[12] Wong, Marie Rose. Building Tradition: Pan-Asian Seattle and Life in the Residential Hotels. First ed. Seattle, WA: Chin Music Press, 2018. Pg.248
[13] Seattle Star, Feb 12 1931 Pg.1
[14] Famous General Fang Zhenwu 方振武 (Fang Chen/Cheng-Wu) stayed at the Mar Hotel while on his North America leg of a two year anti-Japanese imperialism tour in 1936 (Seattle Star, May 27 1936 Pg.2) . He later stopped in Victoria and Vancouver (see RBSC-ARC-1679-CC-TX-301-23). General Fang was assassinated by the KMT in 1941.
[15] Pg. 236, Building Tradition, Wong
[16] Pg.298, Building Tradition, Wong
[17] Pg.332, Building Tradition, Wong
