Tang Hon Cheung was born in 1892 in the Taishan area near Kaiping, Guangdong Province, China. Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which drastically restricted Chinese immigration to the United States, Tang settled in Phoenix, Arizona in 1924, among a vibrant community of other Chinese immigrants.
This collection, an epitome of Chinese immigration to the United States, features rarely seen photos documenting the Tang family and Nationalist Chinese pilots who received training in Arizona, along with family correspondence and historical papers
In Phoenix, Arizona, Tang owned a grocery store called Sun Ray Market and later started another grocery store called H. C. Tang Market. Grocery shops were a common small business for Chinese residents in Arizona in the early 1900s.
Above image: Tang Hon Cheung and his wife Soo Hoo Shee in Phoenix, Arizona, 1942
After the passing of his first wife, Tang returned to Taishan to remarry. His second wife, Soo Hoo Shee, joined him in the United States in 1932. During her immigration, Soo Hoo Shee was detained at Angel Island Immigration Station for six months. In the early 1940s, Tang and Soo Hoo, along with many others in the local Chinese communities in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, befriended the Chinese Nationalist pilots who were training to be World War II fighter pilots at nearby Luke and Williams airfields.
Above image: A portrait from a Nationalist Chinese pilot to Tang in the early 1950s
In 1953, Tang and his family moved from Phoenix to San Francisco, where Tang and Soo Hoo continued to demonstrate their generosity through their involvement in community activities with their family association (Ong Ko Met Association). They volunteered their time and services to care for aging bachelors, Chinese men who were prevented from having spouses or families due to restrictive laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1973, Tang was naturalized to become a US citizen, an accomplishment that would not have been legally possible when he first arrived in America. Soo Hoo passed in 1968 and Tang in 1977.
These materials provide valuable supplements to Hoover’s existing collections on the history of Chinese Americans such as the personal papers of Richard A. Cheu, Pardee Lowe, Renee Lym Robertson, Iris Chang, and Zhou Shilin.
