The Life of Yee Jock Leong. VI: Mysteries
MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (DML) — I believe Yee Jock Leong kept supporting his family financially, even after the dreadful Stock Market Crash of of 1929. He seemed wealthy before the crash. At one time he owned stock in the Ohio River-Panama Coal Field. The stock was purchased—on margin, apparently—on October 1, 1910, and he made payments on the stock for several years.
Yee Jock Leong began a new family here, however. He married my great-grandmother, Myrtle Mae Robinson, on December 17, 1915. My great-grandmother gave the impression that she was an orphan an orphan of Chinese and Mexican descent and that she was born about 1892 in Santa Barbara, California. We thought she was raised by a couple of sisters, Katherine Scott and Hannah M. Robinson, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Yee Jock Leong’s address books contain several Robinson/Robison addresses in the Ann Arbor area.) More on that later.
It wasn’t unusual for Chinese men to take additional wives. Dong Shee would have been the first wife (in a Confucian sense), and my great-grandmother would have been a second wife.
The first marriage could have been a false one, too, in an effort to sneak a “paper son” back to the United States. He did not mention a marriage upon his return to the United States in 1908, but he was not asked about one in the immigration interview, either. Nevertheless, the fact that some of the letters seem to indicate the existence of a Chinese family would make this instance unlikely.
I likewise wonder what happened in China on his 1914-1915 trip. He initially intended to stay five months and bring his son to the United States, but instead stayed for more than a year and left his son behind in China. Something clearly did not go as planned.
As for my great-grandmother, she seemed to spend a lot of her life denying her real origins. She was African American, a descendant of former slaves. She was no orphan. Her father was William A. Robinson, a descendant of slaves who escaped to freedom in Canada via the Underground Railroad. Her mother was Hannah Marie (Woods) Robinson, a descendant of slaves from Kentucky. Given the racism of the time that both she and Yee Jock Leong faced, it makes sense that she would have wanted to deny her African origins. But those efforts left us with significant challenges in puzzling out her family’s past.