Chinese American History in Texas: Preserving Stories and Overcoming Barriers

The state of Texas has the third-largest Asian American population in the United States, according to the U.S. census, and Chinese people, some whose families arrived more than 150 years ago, make up the largest group.

Chinese Americans trace back for generations in the Lone Star State. Their story may not be as well known as that of their counterparts in California or New York City, but it is just as intertwined with America's history.

At Rice University, the Houston Asian American Archive, or HAAA, is keeping their stories alive and sharing them with new generations. Launched in 2009, the archive now contains the oral histories of some 500 people in its database, providing a crucial window to the past.

"Oral history gives you a sense of immediacy and maybe more informality. And it's also unfiltered," said Anne Chao, HAAA co-founder and program manager.

The archive also preserves memorabilia and artifacts from Asian Americans in Houston — a city known for its oil and gas industry. It is also known for space exploration and is home to NASA's Johnson Space Center.

One Chinese American who found success in 1960s and '70s Houston was Albert Gee, who at the time was considered the unofficial mayor of the Chinese community. Gee appeared with Hollywood celebrities in the society pages of local newspapers and was once invited to the White House of President Richard Nixon.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1920, Gee and his family moved to New Orleans, where they operated a laundry business. When his father died in 1927, Gee's mother, who did not speak English, decided to take her children back to their home in China, hoping that her three sons would return one by one to the U.S., which they did.

"Albert found himself only around 11 years old, coming back to the United States," said his daughter Linda Wu. "He was just working — working and trying to send money back to his mother."

Gee returned to the U.S. with his godfather, whom he lived with for a few years in San Francisco, California. Eventually, with the help of friends and relatives, Gee ended up in Houston.

He eventually opened grocery stores and restaurants, which became a draw for Hollywood celebrities, who would stay at a nearby hotel when in town. Wu has photos of celebrities such as singer Elvis Presley and comedian Bob Hope posing at the restaurants, some next to her father.

Wu said her parents saw themselves as Americans but never forget their roots. Her mother, Jane Eng, the child of Chinese immigrants, was born and raised in Texas.

"I always remember different people coming to live with us at the grocery store, family members who would start their roots here," she said.

By assisting newcomers, the established Chinese Americans helped fuel the growth of the Gee family surname in Houston. Not all the Gees in Houston were related, however.

Stories about some of the city's Gees can be found in the HAAA database and in the 1998 anthology "The Gees in Houston, Texas."

"For the Gee family, it's been discerned that we've come from about three to four villages in China," said Rogene Gee Calvert, who contributed stories about her father, David Gee — no relation to Albert Gee — to the anthology.

David Gee migrated from China to the U.S. in the late 1920s, during the Chinese Exclusion Act, which allowed Chinese merchants, diplomats and students into the country but banned laborers. Gee was 17 when he arrived, but his passport indicated he was four years younger. He was a so-called paper son.

"'Paper sons' and 'paper daughters' are the names given to people who buy false papers," said Casey Dexter-Lee, an educator at Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay. Part of the island served as a major immigration station from 1910 to 1940.

"It's about $100 for each year of life that the person claims," she said. "So a 10-year-old would cost about $1,000 to buy false papers."

After arriving in the U.S., David Gee was detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station for almost a year. Eventually, he received permission to stay.

David Gee worked in San Francisco with a relative. In 1938, he moved to Houston to join a family friend. He returned to San Francisco to get married, then brought his wife to Houston, where he worked in the grocery business.

"There was discrimination and, of course, there were natural barriers of language and just knowing how to navigate … how to get around and what to do," Calvert said. "So, there were some elders who were well-spoken that were respected in the mainstream community that really helped our family."

Chao said the first large group of Chinese immigrants arrived in Houston in the 1940s and '50s. At that time, racial segregation was legal in Texas and Southern states through a series of codes known as Jim Crow laws.

"Even though Houston also was subject to Jim Crow law, the law wasn't applied the same way as [in] the other Southern states. And so, there's a sense of more equitable equity in Houston." Chao said, adding that people, including Chinese Americans, settled in Houston because there was a "sense of business opportunity."

Being neither Black nor white, the Chinese Texans occupied a gray area under Jim Crow law.

"They were just in between and just dependent upon how well the neighborhood or people accepted them," said Ted Gong, senior adviser to the Chinese American Museum in Washington.

Albert Gee, as president of the Houston Restaurant Association, took part in the desegregation of the city's restaurants in the early 1960s.

Decades later, his work in the community was immortalized in a web comic for Texas students in 2023.

The comic is part of a free website called Adventures of Asia, developed by Asia Society Texas, which also collaborated with HAAA to create lesson guides for teachers called Asia in the Classroom.

"Our Asian American students in particular said they want to see themselves represented in the curriculum," said Jennifer Kapral, director of education and outreach at Asia Society Texas Center.

The Asian population in the U.S. nearly doubled from 2000 to 2019 and is expected to continue to grow, according to the Pew Research Center. But the history of the Asians who settled in the U.S. is missing from many textbooks, Kapral said.

"There was a study that looked at 30 U.S. history textbooks from across the U.S., and they found that Asian American history was only mentioned in half of them. And of that half, it was an average of about one to two pages in the entire textbook. So, it's been a big gap."

Asian American Houstonians are filling this void by sharing their stories, preserving artifacts from their past, and educating the next generation about how their forebears carved a place for themselves in Texas' largest city.