Chapter 1Above the Restaurant

Foreword

My subject, for as long as I have had one, has been the American mind at work on the page. The essayists and the novelists, the critics who fought their wars in the back of the little magazines, the intellectuals of the Black postwar who believed — as I believed, following them — that the decisive American arguments were conducted in print: in the quarterlies, in the reviews, in the long books that took a decade to write. I wrote my first book about Ralph Ellison because Ellison was the purest case of that faith, a man who staked his entire life on the proposition that the sentence, perfectly made, was itself a form of action.

Grace Lee Boggs was trained to be exactly that kind of person. She had the doctorate in philosophy. She had read Hegel in the way you read Hegel only if you intend to spend your life with him. She had the apparatus, the vocabulary, the mind that argues from first principles — everything the seminar room asks for and everything it rewards. By every marker I had learned to recognize, she was one of mine.

And then she did the one thing my subjects almost never do. She left. She left the page, or rather she declined to let the page be the whole of her life. She took the dialectic she had learned in the study groups and carried it up a flight of stairs into an apartment on the east side of Detroit, and she set it down on a kitchen table across from a Black autoworker named James Boggs, and there — not in a journal, not in a chair at a university — is where she did the thinking this book is about.

I expected, when I began, to be writing about a philosopher who had wandered off into activism, the way we sometimes say a promising mind was lost to the movement. That is not what I found. What I found was a philosopher who had decided that the assembly line was as much a text as the Phenomenology, that a two-hour meeting in a church basement was a form of argument, that the seminar could be convened anywhere there were people willing to think hard about the conditions of their own lives. She had not abandoned the intellectual vocation. She had relocated it.

The record made this difficult to see, and the difficulty is part of the story. Boggs left an autobiography and a shelf of books and articles; the movements she passed through left their newspapers and their pamphlets and their bitter internal correspondence; the press attended to her, when it attended at all, as a curiosity — a Chinese American woman in Black Detroit — and only rarely as a thinker. I worked from what such a life leaves behind: the published memoirs, the political writing, the press record, the accounts of the organizations she helped to run and the ones she helped to tear apart. It is an uneven archive, generous in some decades and nearly silent in others, and I have tried throughout to say plainly where the record speaks and where it only permits a reasonable guess.

What kept me at the desk for the years this took was the very thing that made her hard to place to begin with. We do not have many first-rate American minds who chose the kitchen table over the chair, who decided that seventy years in one wounded city was a more serious philosophical commitment than any book, and who then — this is the part that undoes the easy categories — went on writing the books anyway. She is a rebuke to the division I had spent a career maintaining, the one between the people who think and the people who do. She thought by doing. She did by thinking. And she kept it up for a hundred years.

This is a book about a philosopher who moved the seminar to a Detroit apartment and never once moved it back. I did not expect to be changed by writing it. I was.

— Solomon Treadway, Chicago

Chapter 1 · Above the Restaurant

The building stood on a street in Providence, Rhode Island, where the air carried the salt of Narragansett Bay and the grease of a hundred working kitchens. It was a Chinese restaurant. Chin Lee's, though the sign is lost to history and the precise address has been disputed in the handful of accounts that bother to record it. What matters is the structure itself: a commercial establishment on the ground floor, living quarters above, and the absolute identity between the family's livelihood and its home. There was no separation between work and life for the Chin Lee family. The restaurant was the family. The family was the restaurant. The smells of cooking rose through the floorboards into the rooms where the children slept, and the sounds of customers drifted upward like the ambient noise of a world that would never quite belong to the people who served it.

Chin Dong Gum had come to the United States from Toishan, in Guangdong Province, China, the region that supplied the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a man with political convictions: he had supported Sun Yat-sen in the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty. Toishan was not a place people left because they wanted to. It was a place people left because the land could not feed them, because the wars and famines and floods of southern China had made staying a form of slow death. Chin Dong Gum left. The precise date of his arrival is not well documented. What is documented is what he found: a country that wanted his labor but not his presence, that would take the work of his hands but would not grant him citizenship, that had written into its federal law, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, renewed and expanded in 1892, made permanent in 1902, the explicit proposition that Chinese people were unfit for American democracy.

The Exclusion Act was not an incidental piece of legislation. It was the first federal law in American history to restrict immigration on the basis of race and nationality. It was the template for everything that followed, the national-origins quotas of the 1920s, the arguments against Japanese immigration, the entire legal architecture of racial exclusion that would shape American immigration policy for the next six decades. And it was aimed, with surgical precision, at the men like Chin Dong Gum: laborers from southern China who had built the transcontinental railroad, who had dug the gold mines of California, who had worked the farms and laundries and restaurants of the Pacific Coast and the Eastern Seaboard, and who were now, in the judgment of the United States Congress, a threat to the white working class.

The mechanics of exclusion were specific and degrading. Chinese laborers were barred from entry. Chinese residents were barred from naturalization. Chinese men who returned to China could not re-enter without documentation proving they had been in the United States before the Act took effect. Chinese women were functionally barred by the Page Act of 1875, which assumed that any Chinese woman seeking entry was a prostitute unless she could prove otherwise, a burden of proof designed to be impossible to meet. The result was a bachelor society: tens of thousands of Chinese men in America without wives, without children, without families, living in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York and Boston and a dozen smaller cities in a state of enforced social death.

Chin Dong Gum managed this system. How he entered the country, whether he came as a merchant (the one exempt category under the Exclusion Act) or through one of the elaborate networks of paper documentation that Chinese immigrants constructed to circumvent the law, is not recorded in the sources available for this biography. What is recorded is that he established himself, that he opened a restaurant, and that he managed, against the structural logic of the Exclusion Act, to bring a wife to America and to build a family.

His wife, Yin Lan, came from the same region of China. She had never learned to read or write, because there were no schools for girls in her village. She bore him six children. Grace Chin Lee was the youngest, born on June 27, 1915, in Providence, Rhode Island, three years into Woodrow Wilson's first term, one year into the war in Europe, and thirty-three years after the Exclusion Act had declared her father's people unfit for America. Danny Glover, in his foreword to Grace's 2011 book The Next American Revolution, would frame the chronology with astonishment: "Imagine being born two years before the Bolshevik Revolution and still here after its demise." She was born two years before John F. Kennedy and ten years before Malcolm X. When she completed her PhD, Martin Luther King Jr. was still in grade school.

Providence in 1915 was a manufacturing city of two hundred and fifty thousand people, dominated by the textile mills and jewelry factories that had made Rhode Island one of the earliest and most concentrated industrial states in the nation. The city's economy ran on immigrant labor, Italian, Irish, Portuguese, French-Canadian, and its politics ran on the patronage systems that immigrant communities built to protect themselves in a country that regarded their presence with ambivalence at best. The Chinese community in Providence was small. It was not the dense, self-sustaining Chinatown of San Francisco or New York, where tens of thousands of Chinese lived in a parallel city with its own newspapers and benevolent associations and internal economy. It was a scattering of families and businesses, isolated from each other by geography and from the larger city by race.

The family did not stay in Providence. In 1924, when Grace was about eight years old, her father moved the household to New York City, where he opened a Chinese restaurant, Chin Lee's, on Broadway, and, a few years later, a second restaurant nearby. The family settled in Jackson Heights, in the borough of Queens — a mostly white, lower-middle-class neighborhood where the Chin Lees were the only Chinese family. Isolation of a different kind became the defining condition of Grace's childhood. She grew up as the only Chinese girl on her block, surrounded by a family that spoke Toishan dialect and a city that spoke English. She learned English. She did not learn Chinese, not fluently, not in the way that would have allowed her to read the letters her father received from relatives in Toishan or to participate in the cultural life that sustained Chinese communities on the West Coast. This was not unusual for second-generation Chinese Americans. The Chin Lee family's survival strategy was assimilation, not the enthusiastic, flag-waving assimilation of the mythology, but the quiet, defensive assimilation of people who understood that visibility meant vulnerability. You kept your head down. You ran your restaurant. You did not draw attention to the fact that you were Chinese in a country that had passed a law saying Chinese people were not wanted.

The restaurant was the instrument of this survival. Chinese restaurants occupied a peculiar position in American racial geography. They were acceptable, even popular, in a way that Chinese people themselves were not. White Americans who would not live next door to a Chinese family would eat dinner in a Chinese restaurant without discomfort. The food was a bridge that the people could not cross. Chin Dong Gum's restaurant served this function: it made the family visible as a business and invisible as a people. The customers came for the food. They did not come to know the family. And the family, understanding the terms of this arrangement, did not ask to be known.

Grace grew up inside this contradiction. She was American, born in Providence and raised in New York, educated in the city's public schools, fluent in the language and customs of the country. She was also Chinese, the daughter of immigrants who had come from a specific village in a specific province, who maintained their own customs and kinship networks and obligations, who sent money back to relatives in Toishan. And she was neither, in the eyes of the country: not white enough to be American without qualification, not connected enough to Chinese culture to be Chinese without apology. She existed in the space between, and that space would define her politics for the rest of her life, though she would not understand this for decades.

The Chin Lee household was a working household. All six children worked in the restaurant. There was no choice in this; the family's survival depended on the labor of every member, and the children understood from an early age that the restaurant's hours were their hours, that the kitchen's demands were their demands, and that the family ate after the customers ate. Grace described this later without bitterness but with the clarity of someone who had spent a long time thinking about what it meant: the restaurant taught her that work was the condition of life, not an interruption of it. It taught her that a family was an economic unit before it was an emotional one. And it taught her, by the simple mathematics of a small business in a working-class city, that the people who did the work were not the people who reaped the largest rewards.

Her father was the center of the household, not emotionally, but structurally. He made the decisions. He ran the business. He determined the family's course. Yin Lan worked alongside him, but the sources available for this biography do not reveal her as a figure of independent authority within the household. This is not uncommon in the biographical record of immigrant families from rural China in this period: the patriarchal structure of the family was imported along with the language and the recipes, and it functioned in America with the same force it had carried in Toishan. The father decided. The mother worked. The children obeyed.

Grace was the youngest of six, and the position of youngest in a large working family carried its own peculiar combination of freedom and invisibility. The older children bore the greater share of the restaurant's labor. The youngest had more time, more time to read, more time to think, more time to wander the streets of New York and observe the city that existed beyond the restaurant's walls. Grace used this time. She read voraciously. She excelled in school, not competently, but with a hunger for academic achievement that her teachers recognized as exceptional. She was the kind of student who made teachers pause: a Chinese-American girl from a restaurant family who was outperforming everyone in the classroom.

The public schools of New York in the 1920s were not designed to produce Chinese-American intellectuals. They were designed to produce workers, literate, numerate, disciplined workers who would take their places in the mills and factories and shops that constituted the city's economy. The curriculum was practical. The expectations were modest. A Chinese-American girl who wanted to go to college was, in the institutional logic of the New York public school system, an anomaly, not impossible, but unusual enough to require explanation.

Grace did not require explanation. She required opportunity. And the American educational system, for all its limitations, for all its racial blindness, for all its structural indifference to the aspirations of Chinese-American girls from restaurant families, contained within it a mechanism that could, on occasion, recognize intellectual talent regardless of its packaging. Grace graduated from high school with grades that made her eligible for college, and she applied to Barnard College in New York City. She was accepted, and she enrolled.

The departure for Barnard was the first of the great departures that would structure Grace Lee's life. She left the family. She left the household in Queens, the family restaurants, the enclosed world in which the Chin Lees had made themselves useful and inconspicuous. She was sixteen years old. She had spent her childhood as the only Chinese girl in an all-white neighborhood, surrounded by a family that spoke a language she did not fully share, in a city that regarded her as a curiosity at best and an alien at worst. She was leaving all of it, and she was leaving it for the most improbable of destinations: a women's college on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she would study among the daughters of the American elite and discover, for the first time, how large the distance was between the world she came from and the world she was entering.

The significance of this departure cannot be understood without understanding what Grace was leaving behind, not just a family and a city, but a structure of power that had influenced her entire life. The Chin Lee family's position in America was defined by the Exclusion Act and its successors. They existed in America on sufferance. They ran a restaurant because restaurants were one of the few businesses the law and custom permitted Chinese people to operate. They kept their heads down because raising them invited attention that could be dangerous. They did not participate in the political life of the city because they were not citizens and could not become citizens, Chin Dong Gum, no matter how long he lived in America, no matter how many meals he served, no matter how many taxes he paid, could not be naturalized under the laws of the United States.

This was the power structure that Grace Lee was born into: a structure in which her family's presence in America was technically illegal, practically tolerated, and permanently contingent. The Exclusion Act did not just bar Chinese immigrants from entry. It created a permanent underclass, a population that could live in America but could never belong to it, that could work but could never vote, that could raise children who were citizens by birth but who carried, in their faces and their names, the mark of a people the nation had officially rejected.

Grace would spend the rest of her life thinking about power, about who had it, who didn't, how it was acquired, how it was used, and what it cost the people it was used against. The origins of this preoccupation were not theoretical. They were not the product of graduate seminars or Marxist study groups or the influence of charismatic intellectuals, though all of these would play their part. The origins were in the restaurant. They were in her father's inability to become a citizen of the country he had lived in for decades. They were in the quiet, defensive posture of a family that understood, without anyone having to say it aloud, that their position in America was a matter of other people's tolerance, not their own rights.

She did not articulate this understanding as a child. She articulated it later, in her autobiography and in decades of political writing, as the foundational experience that made her a radical: the experience of growing up in a family that was in America but not of it, that worked within the system but had no power over it, that survived by making itself useful and invisible at the same time. The restaurant was not just a business. It was a lesson in the political economy of race, and Grace Lee was paying attention.

There is a photograph that does not exist, or if it exists, it has not been published in any of the sources available for this biography. It would show the Chin Lee family standing in front of their restaurant in Providence, sometime in the early 1920s: Chin Dong Gum in his apron, Yin Lan beside him, the six children arranged by height, the restaurant's sign visible behind them, the street stretching away in both directions toward a city that would never quite claim them. The absence of this photograph is itself a kind of evidence. Chinese-American families in this period did not, as a rule, document their public presence. They did not put their faces on display. The camera was a tool of visibility, and visibility was a tool of vulnerability, and the Chin Lee family understood, in the marrow of their bones, in the muscle memory of a generation that had lived under the Exclusion Act, that the safest position was the one that could not be seen.

Grace Lee Boggs would spend the next eighty years making herself visible, on stages and in meeting halls, in newspaper columns and on television, in the streets of Detroit and in the pages of books that challenged the most fundamental assumptions of American political life. But she started invisible. She started above a restaurant in Providence, the youngest daughter of immigrants who had been told, in the clearest possible terms, that they were not wanted. And the distance between that starting point and the life she built is the measure of what this biography is about: not just the story of a woman, but the story of what happens when a person who was never supposed to have power spends a hundred years acquiring it, not the power of office or money or institutional authority, but the power of ideas, which is the most dangerous kind of all, because it is the kind that cannot be taken away.

[Author's note: The reconstruction of the Chin Lee family's life in Providence draws on Grace Lee Boggs's autobiography Living for Change (1998), the limited secondary literature on Chinese-American communities in New England in the early twentieth century, and the legal and legislative history of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Specific domestic scenes are plausible reconstructions consistent with documented facts about the family's circumstances. The absence of certain details, precise addresses, dates, and photographic evidence, is noted where relevant.]