Lunch and Learn: The Forgotten Chinese Generations

AAPI Heritage Month was established to recognize and honor the contributions and influence of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans to the history, culture, and achievements of the United States. However, the generations of Chinese who first arrived in this country in the 1850s, who helped build the transcontinental railroads in the 1860s, who fought in its wars, and continuing through the 1960s, were subjected to exclusion laws that denied them opportunities to achieve the “American Dream.”

Presenter Irving Moy will trace the hardships the Chinese had to endure using the example of Moy Chack Fong, his father. Irving will discuss his father’s immigration story, and the challenges he faced to achieve a better life for himself and his family under exclusion.

About the Speaker: Irving Moy is a first-generation Chinese American born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his parents owned and operated a Chinese hand laundry. He is the first in his family to graduate from high school and college. He retired as a manager with the CT Department of Public Health in healthcare regulation. Irving’s passion, however, is his reading and study of U.S. history, especially, of Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War Era. In July 2008, Governor M. Jodi Rell appointed him to serve as 1 of 15 members of the Connecticut Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He portrays Corporal Joseph Pierce, a Chinese, who enlisted in Company F, 14th Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, and fought in the Civil War, at reenactments and living history events. He is the author of An American Journey- My Father, Lincoln, Joseph Pierce, and Me, published in 2009, the bicentennial year of Lincoln’s birth.

Originally recorded at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, May 7, 2024.