Chinese in Maine: From Struggle to Success
Gary W. Libby
self-published
There was never a Chinatown in Portland, and most locals’ impressions of Chinese-Mainer history begin and end with Empire Restaurant, which served “deluxe” Chinese cuisine from 1916 to 1953 on the second floor of a downtown Congress Street building that now boasts the dim sum destination Empire Chinese Kitchen at street level.
Thanks to the work of the Chinese & American Friendship Association of Maine (CAFAM), the rich and illustrative history of Maine’s Chinese communities is being revealed through plaques, artifacts and documents that describe an ethnic group surviving and often thriving despite overtly racist government repression that feels all too familiar today.
For example, the Friendship Association’s website (cafammaine.org) introduces us to Ar Foo Fong, who worked in the front window of a tea shop on Middle Street in the 1860s owned by Shaw’s supermarket forefather George Clinton Shaw. Dressed in traditional Chinese clothing, Fong taught the locals about different teas and “soon became the talk of the town.” That fame propelled him to open his own successful tea shop on Congress Street in 1871.
And there’s Toy Len Goon, who raised eight children in Portland and was crowned American Mother of the Year in 1952, a distinction that brought her to the White House for a reception with First Lady Bess Truman and to New York’s Chinatown, where a parade was held in her honor.
When he was a young man, Toy Len’s late husband, Dogan, was arrested in 1917 and charged with violating the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Released on $1,500 bail, he was picked up again two summers later when a cop, tipped off by a gaggle of nosy little girls, saw Dogan and a white teenage girl “hugging and kissing” through the window of a laundry on Forest Avenue. Dogan was charged with causing the teen to “become an idle and disorderly person,” but got off due to lack of evidence; his girlfriend sentenced to two years on probation.
In his new book, Chinese in Maine: From Struggle to Success, local historian and CAFAM board member Gary Libby gives us an exhaustively researched history of the Chinese Mainers who’ve helped shape our state since before the Civil War to today.
The first Chinese man to settle in Maine was Daniel Cough, who arrived in Bass Harbor as a teenage stowaway on a ship from Xiamen Island in 1857. Cough opened a general store in Tremont, speculated in real estate and married a white woman named Elvira Higgins. The Cough family quickly assimilated, but as Libby notes, their descendants are proud of their Chinese heritage and have visited Xiamen to reconnect with their roots.
The first laundryman in Maine was Sam Lee, who opened his business in Portland in 1876 at the age of 14. Libby unearthed court records showing Lee’s laundry was repeatedly raided in the early 1890s on suspicion of gambling and opium smoking.
One evening in August of 1890, hearing “a racket” inside, cops broke into Lee’s laundry and discovered nine Chinese men playing Fan-Tan after hours. The gamblers “quickly turned out the lights and kicked over the table scattering the gambling paraphernalia,” Libby wrote in a biographic sketch of Lee originally published in 2024. “The men then climbed out the back window. Sam Lee and another Chinese man hid under a counter. The police officer confiscated the gambling materials but made no arrests because he did not catch the men in the act of gambling.”
Maine wasn’t immune to the xenophobic hysteria of the so-called “yellow peril” that spread across the country from California during the decades after the Civil War. Racist opposition to Chinese immigration in Maine was bipartisan. Both Greenbacker Congressman Thompson Murch, a union stonecutter from Vinalhaven, and former Republican Maine House Speaker turned presidential candidate James Blaine backed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that banned migrants and refugees fleeing war and famine in China and denied Chinese Americans the ability to become citizens.
Not all Maine politicians were as benighted by fear and hatred. Former Maine governor Hannibal Hamlin, who served as vice president under Abraham Lincoln, compared the Exclusion Act to the nativist Know Nothing Party’s anti-Catholic bigotry. Republican Congressman Thomas Brackett Reed of Portland voted against the bill.
The Chinese Exclusion Act caused the population of Chinese people in the U.S. to plummet from 300,000 at the time of its passage to 62,000 in 1920. An 1875 law, the Page Act, had already banned East Asian women — broadly considered prostitutes by its namesake, Republican Congressman Horace Page of California — from immigrating to the U.S.
These restrictions created a bachelor society of Chinese men in this country. As Libby notes, there were 119 Chinese men and just four Chinese women in Maine in 1900.
Many of these laundrymen and restauranteurs led isolated and lonely lives, eking out a subsistence living in a foreign culture that viewed them with suspicion and outright antagonism. Some gambled or smoked opium to ease their pain of their alienation. A substantial portion of Libby’s book chronicles the history of criminal enforcement against these leisure activities in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and his account runs all the way to the illegal marijuana grows making headlines today.
I Lee Nee, who lived in Maine for more than 30 years, made the Chinese-style painting of Megunticook Lake in Knox County that’s on the cover of Libby’s book. Nee arrived in Camden in 1917 hoping to earn enough money to support his wife and children in China. He operated a laundry there in the 1920s and ’30s, but eventually went bust and moved to Bangor, where he died and was buried in a pauper’s cemetery, his impoverished family still half a world away.
The number of Chinese hand laundries peaked in Maine around World War I, and by World War II they were in rapid decline due to the advent of home washing machines and coin-operated laundromats. But Chinese immigrants here adapted and Chinese restaurants continued to proliferate. Many of the children of these pioneering restauranteurs earned advanced degrees and became doctors, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs themselves.
The last part of Libby’s book covers Chinese-American Mainers who’ve made this state their home not by necessity, but by choice. They include author and illustrator X. Fang; novelist and retired physician Tess Gerritsen; political activists and politicians like Gerritsen’s son, Josh, and Ben Chin, who’s currently running Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate campaign; as well as many exceptional artists, musicians and inventors.
Libby’s book illuminates the lives, achievements and cultural contributions of generations of Chinese Mainers whose history, too long ignored, has vital lessons for all of us in these anxious and angry political times.
