ROLLING FORK - The Sam Sing Co. is the last Chinese grocery store left from the four that once jostled for customers along appropriately named China Street in this mostly black Mississippi Delta town.
It sits as a relic of a bygone era that began more than a century ago, when small-town groceries were the businesses of choice for Chinese immigrants in this poor region who reached out to a burgeoning population of black workers.
As 86-year-old owner Sam Jue watches over shelves crammed with cereal, sodas and produce, he wonders how long it will be before the rest of the Chinese groceries finally succumb to the desire of younger generations to do something else and competition from low-price chains such as Wal-Mart.
"I don't know anything but this," Jue says from behind the counter inside the aging brick store. "I enjoy it. Everybody knows me and that means a whole lot."
Chinese were first brought to the region after the Civil War as cheap labor to replace freed slaves. Another wave of Chinese came after they completed work on the Transcontinental Railroad in the West. Others were sugar cane workers in the Caribbean and south Louisiana who migrated up the Mississippi River.
Initially, they were hired as farm laborers in Mississippi's white-ruled society, but that soon changed.
"They wanted to make enough money to send back to China, but what they discovered was that there was a market for grocery stores among the African-American agricultural workers," says Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. "That was really a distinctive thing in the Delta."
The industry blossomed for decades because of the then-unheard-of willingness on the part of many Chinese store owners to offer credit to poor, black sharecroppers.
There's no official record of how many Chinese groceries once operated in the Delta. Researchers estimate there were once about 200 stores, with only a dozen or so left now in the 18-county region.
Rolling Fork, a town of 2,486 about 60 miles northwest of Jackson, still has two Chinese groceries - Jue's on China Street and Brooks Food Store in another part of town.
Sam Jue was just a teenager when he arrived from the Quan Dong province. He spoke Cantonese and hired a tutor to learn English because Chinese were banned from public schools.
Jue served three years in the Army before coming back to the Delta and Sam Sing Co., which was opened by his father in 1933.
Jue says as he reared his two sons, he didn't try to retain much of his Chinese heritage because "this is really my home now."
The Chinese often found themselves locating in the black community that they served. Jue's 57-year-old son, Larry, says he remembers a childhood filled with white and black friends.
"I didn't feel different or anything," Larry Jue says. "I knew I was, because I knew I was the only Chinese in town."
Today, about 19 percent of the nation's Asian population lives in the South compared to 49 percent in the West. In Mississippi, less than 1 percent of the state's 2.8 million residents are of Asian descent, including Vietnamese, Cambodians, Japanese and Thais.
Over the decades, the Delta's Chinese population has remained fairly stable. As more younger Chinese of Cantonese descent moved away, they were replaced by Mandarin Chinese, or those from northern China, who made a living with restaurants and other jobs.
John Quon, a professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, grew up living behind his parents' grocery, The Quon Co., in Moorhead. He says the language barrier between the Cantonese and the Mandarin has kept the two groups apart socially.
As decades passed, the cracks widened in the area's Chinese society and younger generations lost touch with the traditions of their culture.
Those who once celebrated Chinese New Year, attended weddings and worshipped together went their separate ways.
"Mainly, it's the weddings," Quon says. "We do not invite
all of the Chinese as we once did because we're no longer that close."
The congregation of Chinese Baptist Church in Cleveland is down to just four members. Built in 1959, the church is on the verge of closing. And at Quon's church in Greenville, a holiday crowd tops out at 60.
"When we have church services, a Bible scripture reading would be done in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. The younger Chinese do not know any Chinese at all," Quon says.
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