Pass under the arch reading “Historic Main Street Deadwood” and you’ll step back to the late 19th century, when this gold rush town had a reputation for lawlessness. On your left, the legendary gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok—in statue form—looks relaxed until you see his holster creeping out from beneath his blazer. Next up is frontierswoman Calamity Jane, a hard-drinking sharpshooter known for charity work, raising a bottle of whiskey in Outlaw Square. Seth Bullock, the town’s first sheriff, is also represented.
The trio are prominently featured in the tense and poetic HBO series Deadwood, which ran for three seasons, from 2004 to 2006, and concluded with a movie in 2019. This past summer, the town unveiled a fourth statue to represent another figure connected to the series, one who played an important role during Deadwood’s heyday. This person is Wong Fee Lee, a Chinese immigrant and my two sons’ great-great-grandfather.
This letter appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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My family—13-year-old Dominic, 9-year-old Donovan, my wife, Stacey, and I—traveled from Torrance, California, to join more than 60 other Wong descendants for the June dedication. Wong had emigrated from China to San Francisco, then moved to Deadwood after gold was discovered in the Dakota Territory in 1874. He was one of at least 100 Chinese residents of Deadwood, where he owned several businesses, most notably the Wing Tsue Bazaar, a store that anchored the Chinese community. He lived in Deadwood between 1876 and 1919 and was such a mainstay in town that when he died in 1921 in China, the Deadwood Daily Pioneer-Times wrote, “He was a man of many accomplishments, shrewd in business and a patriotic citizen of his adopted country.”
About 200 people attended the unveiling, which took place on a hot, cloudless afternoon in the parking lot of Mr. Wu’s, a casino. The program included speeches by Mayor Charlie Struble-Mook, state historic preservation officer Garry Guan, and the statue’s sculptor, James Michael Maher. There was also a lion dance performance and a martial arts exhibition by students from a Las Vegas kung fu school.
Eventually, it was time for the big reveal. Maher and a couple of family elders pulled away a black sheet to enthusiastic applause. The bronze Wong wears traditional loose pants and a collarless shirt. A braided queue flows out from under his cap and down his back. He clasps the hand of a young boy, one of his sons. In their free hands, both hold American flags that wave in a permanent wind. “Our great-great-grandpa helped build Deadwood and also the United States,” said Dominic. “You have to be important to get a statue.”
After the ceremony, we ate delicious pulled pork from a smoke truck and mingled with some of our relatives. “After the Wing Tsue building was demolished, there was no tangible presence of [Wong] and the Chinese community,” said Edith Wong, 66, our family’s dedicated genealo-gist and one of the event’s organizers. “The statue is a physical object that people can visit, a physical reference that literally puts us on the map.”
Around dusk, before heading back to our hotel, I turned to take a last look at the statue. It was surreal to think that one of my boys’ ancestors was now represented as a legendary Wild West figure. In the HBO series, there is a character named Mr. Wu, a businessman and gangster. (Yes, the casino is named after him.) Wu is a composite of several of Deadwood’s Chinese residents, including Wong Fee Lee. Fans of the show know that Wu’s most memorable skill is disappearing dead bodies by feeding them to his pigs. (It never happened, but it made for excellent television.)
The real-life Wong was father to 11 children, 10 born in Deadwood. Though South Dakota would not become a state until 1889, his children would retroactively gain birthright American citizenship. But Wong wanted them to be able to speak Chinese and find Chinese spouses, according to family members, and he took them to China around 1902. Wong, however, wanted to return to Deadwood and his businesses. When he tried to come back in 1904, he was thwarted by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Deadwood’s former mayor and a congressman learned of his situation and wrote letters to immigration officials, who allowed him to return. “Their support showed that he was a full-fledged member of the Deadwood community,” said Edith. (Wong suffered a stroke in Deadwood in 1919 and returned to China, where he later passed away.)
The children Wong brought from Deadwood to China later had children there. Those children—American citizens through parentage—came to the United States after fleeing the turmoil of World War II in the Pacific theater. Wong’s ninth child, Tong Quong Wong, my sons’ great-grandfather, raised eight children in San Francisco and was a famous sleight-of-hand magician. Tong’s fifth child, George Wong, worked as an electrician for the Federal Aviation Administration at the Oakland International Airport. George’s first child, Stacey, a genetic counselor, married me, a Vietnamese American refugee born in Alabama.
As for Wong’s great-great-grandsons here in Southern California, Dominic is an eighth grader who likes basketball and thrifting, and Donovan is a fifth grader who loves all things scary. Their American story is still being written—albeit in a very different, but once again complicated, time for immigrants.•
Ky-Phong Tran and his family fled to the United States at the end of the Vietnam War. A Jack Hazard Fellow, a Bread Loaf Scholar, and a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Scholar, he has been named a finalist in short fiction contests by Narrative magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Raised on the Northside of Long Beach, he writes about the refugee experience, basketball, and the underbelly of American life.
