Today, Chan is a retired hospital administrator, a passionate skier and snowboarder who prefers to winter in Utah’s backcountry, and a tour guide who takes locals and visitors to Chinatown to discover its historic landmarks, marvel at its modern developments, and sample from its bounty of excellent restaurants. That’s where you go if you want good food!” Even before I became a Chinatown tour guide. “But I still, in my entire life, I still go down to Chinatown probably two or three times a week. “After two years in Chinatown, my family bought a Chinese hand laundry and we moved up to the North Side,” he says. The act was not rescinded until 1943.Ĭhan’s generation was among the first that could move to the United States without those onerous restrictions he immigrated with his mother and his sister, and rejoined his father. They’d come to make a living, though the legacy of the racist Chinese Exclusion Act-passed in 1882 as a way to limit Chinese immigration to the United States-meant that they could only come to the country as single men, without their wives or families. “I always carried a British passport because when I was born it was a British colony.”Ĭhan’s father, like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, had immigrated from the Canton Province (now referred to as the Guangdong Province) in southeastern China to the United States. “I was born and raised in Hong Kong,” he says. It was 1962, and he was a second-grader who had just traveled halfway around the world to find himself in an entirely unfamiliar place. The first time that York Chan stepped foot in Chicago’s Chinatown was also the first time that he stepped foot in the United States.
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