Joseph On Moving from Green Street

A picture of Joseph Tape's company on the water, which highlights the tension and closeness between Joseph's Chinese heritage and his distance from it. The very dock that Joseph tried to avoid in being like the mass of Chinese immigrants is precisely where he does business, an activity that additionally set him apart.

Dear Journal,

Mary just wrote a letter to the newspapers about getting our daughter Mamie into the Spring Valley school. I share Mary’s sentiments. We have worked so hard to distance ourselves from our Chinese identity. At times I regret this, feeling proud of my heritage, but in practice I have no regrets. To be white is to be successful in this city, and so I have done everything in my power to be distance myself from the culture of Chinatown.

It seems at this point in time that we don’t get to choose our identity. Our neighbors have declared our identity, and once we have been declared as Chinese we can never be anything else in their minds. We must send Mamie and Frank to school, and the only option is to send them to the new Chinatown school. I fear the consequences of strengthening our ties to the Chinese community. Yet, I have always been cunning and I am a businessman and I know that we will adapt and thrive. Mamie and Frank are both very bright, and I am confident that they will succeed regardless of whether they get to learn alongside the other white children in our neighborhood.

However, I fear we will be slowly dragged into the gulf that is Chinatown. Our block is becoming ever more populated—with large two-story houses no less. This whole school drama is changing the tide of our reputation in this neighborhood. I have overheard people already talking about how strange it is we live here. It seems quite foolish to me for our new neighbors to assume they belong here more than we who built our house a number of years before them. Nonetheless, as I have come to learn, so often in this city you don’t get to choose your identity. We strive to be American just like the whites, but now we are at an impasse where that opportunity is being withheld from us. We will give a try at accepting our Chinese heritage and our conncetion to Chinatown, and so we will move closer to the school—but not completely in Chinatown of course.

But I will never concede our status as Americans. We are not the same as the sloughs of Chinese being docked and shuttled directly into Chinatown, making no attempt to assimilate. We are Americans just as the Irish are too. Though we happen to be Chinese as well, this does not preclude our status as Americans and our skill and cunning to take advantage of the great opportunities here in this city.

Joseph Tape

“The Tapes’ side of the block had become built up, and the family’s house now looked like an odd insertion in the middle of a row of new two-story homes with high front stoops and bay windows… The more white families there were in the neighborhood and the tenser the racial climate in the city became, the more conspicuous were the Tapes.” (57)