The Evening Sun, January 22, 1987

By Mary Klein, Diocesan Archivist

The October 1886, issue of The Maryland Churchman carried an article entitled “The Chinese Mission” which reported that, “Seven years ago there came to Baltimore three or four Chinamen[sic], the advance guard of the two or three hundred now resident in our midst. One year after their arrival a mission school was organized at Emmanuel Church by three noble women – the present efficient officers of the school.” The article did not name these “three noble women”, but according to Lillian Kim, the “unofficial matriarch of Baltimore’s Chinese-American community”, these three women were Miss Grace Cater, an Englishwoman, Miss Ruby Gaither and Miss Sarah Marshall. The article further states, “Within the past year one of the pupils has become a communicant of Emmanuel Church”. Looking at the confirmation book for the Right Rev. William Paret, who had been consecrated the sixth Bishop of Maryland in January of 1885, we see the name Der Foo Sam listed in the March 24, 1886, confirmation at Emmanuel Church, Baltimore. (Incidentally, the first Chinese person to register to vote in Baltimore was Sam Der Ling, who registered in November 1896, according to an article by Oleg Panczenko, written in 2018.)

In January 1888, The Maryland Churchman ran an article about a Chinese New Year celebration held at Emmanuel Church and reported that there were “between 50 and 60” Chinese participants. “A number of the Chinese rose and repeated verses of Scripture… and all of them joined lustily in the singing.” Also, the parish register at Emmanuel shows that as early as 1898, the rector, James Eccleston, baptized several Chinese members.

The 1890 Federal Census counted 189 foreign-born Chinese persons living in Baltimore. Sadly, the 1890 population schedules were all destroyed by fire early in the twentieth century, so tracking the Chinese population for that year is difficult. However, we are fortunate to have an 1890 Baltimore City Directory, which holds revealing information. The City Directory lists heads of households residing in the city, their address and occupation. (The great majority of the names are men, because the only women listed were heads of their own households, usually widows.) By targeting names mentioned in other accounts of early Chinese immigration to Baltimore, I found 25 men with Chinese surnames living in the city. Every one of them listed “laundry” as his occupation. The surnames included Chin, Jo, Joe, Kim, Lee, Ling, Quong, Sing, Wong, Yot and Yung.

The relationship between Emmanuel Church and the Baltimore Chinese community continued into the twentieth century. A “Lent 1911” card shows that the Chinese School met at 3:00 PM on Sundays. (Interestingly, St. Peter’s Church members were meeting at Emmanuel as they considered their future because they had sold their church building located at Druid Hill Avenue and Lanvale Street in November 1910, to “the African Methodist Bethel Church for $90,000.00”. In March 1912, St. Peter’s congregation merged with Grace Church, which had originally founded that church as a mission.)

One of the founders of the Chinese School at Emmanuel Church, Sarah Marshall, had two sisters, Frances, and Daisy, who shared her interest in teaching the English language, as well as Christianity, to the new Chinese residents of Baltimore. According to a 1987 article in the Baltimore Sun, the sisters had applied to go to China as missionaries, but were turned down, and thereafter devoted their lives to helping new immigrants learn the culture and language of their adopted home. In 1921 Sarah Marshall organized another Chinese language school which met briefly at Church of the Ascension (located on Lafayette Square, now St. James’ Church), but soon moved to the YMCA, located at Franklin and Cathedral Streets. Although Sarah died soon after the classes began, her sisters continued to tech new immigrants English by studying the Bible. In 1924, the sisters moved the students’ meeting place to Grace & St. Peter’s Church (711 Park Avenue) because (according to the 1987 Sun article) they “didn’t like the new single desks installed by the Y. The old-fashioned double desks, where teacher and student could sit side by side suited their teaching style.”

The Maryland Churchman Article, October 15, 1886
click image to view full article

Because the Chinese community lived and worked in a small area, the first Chinatown was usually defined as “the 200 block of Marion Street, with Fayette Street on the south; Park Avenue on the east; Howard Street on the west; and Lexington Street on the north.” Grace & St. Peter’s Church was within walking distance for most of the community, and the Chinese Language School, in addition to teaching English, also assisted new residents in qualifying for citizenship and wading through the complex immigration system.

Lillian Kim and her family arrived in Baltimore in 1921, and soon began classes with the Marshall sisters. “When parents were busy working in laundries and restaurants, they would see that Chinese children were taken to the doctor, and they paid the carfare. We learned so much from them, like how Americans eat with knife and fork…My mother always said, ‘Try to act like Miss Frances and Miss Daisy.’”

In 1954, Lillian Kim initiated the Chinese New Year celebration in Baltimore. She was hailed as “the enforcer” for making sure the celebration continued throughout her lifetime. As Chinese families gained more economic footing in Baltimore, they began moving to the suburbs in the middle of the twentieth century, but Mrs. Kim insisted that the festival continue. There were fearsome lion costumes, gongs, cymbals and drums. Good food abounded and the scattered Chinese community used the celebration to gather and remember their ancestors who had made their way to Baltimore.

In his February 1964 report, the Rev. Rex Wilkes, the rector of Grace & St. Peter’s Church, stated that there were 440 “Chinese in the area who are identified with the work” of the Chinese Mission (as he called the work within the parish) including 286 baptized members and 147 communicants. The Cantonese Language School met at 3:30 PM on Sundays, (for Holy Communion on the first Sundays, and Evening Prayer the other Sundays) with the homily in English translated into Cantonese, the lessons, Creed and Lord’s Prayer said in Cantonese. Sunday School met following the service with an average attendance of 120. There was also a Women’s Guild of 30, 40 teens in a youth group, 22 members of a choir, 10 acolytes, and 3 lay readers. Mr. Calvin Chin was elected a delegate to Diocesan Convention, and Arthur Lee served on the vestry. Father Wilkes said that the idea of an independent Chinese congregation “would defeat the purpose of our ministry”, which was “integration throughout the parish”. The assistant priest at Grace & St. Peter’s oversaw the congregation.

In the 1970’s, there was a push to hire a full-time priest to lead the Chinese congregation at Grace & St. Peter’s, a plan that never came to fruition. A part-time deacon came to the church in 1978, the Rev. Tak Yue Pong, from Taiwan, who had been ordained by Bishop Walker of Washington, and on September 23, 1979, the Rev. Tak Yue Pong was ordained to the priesthood at Grace & St. Peter’s. The ordaining bishop was his father, the Right Rev. James. T.M. Pong, the Bishop of Taiwan. By 1981, he was back in Taiwan.

 A plan put forward in 1982 set the goal to “hire a full-time bilingual Chinese priest, with good evangelistic training to begin a Diocesan-wide ministry to the Chinese community of Maryland, headquartered at Grace & St. Peter’s.”  It was also noted that although the Chinese community still worshipped at Grace & St. Peter’s, “the situation is a typical Chinese dish – sweet and sour. The attendance for the Chinese mass has gone down since Fr. Tak Yue Pong left.” Sometimes in 1981 the attendance was a low as three, and as high as 48. In an appeal for the financing of a full-time priest, the plan noted, “The price we seem to be paying for the upward mobility and social integration of the Baltimore Chinese community is a weakening of its attachment to the ‘old ways’, including Chinatown and Grace & St. Peter’s.”

The Evening Sun, January 22, 1987

Der Foo Sam, Confirmation at Emmanuel Church, Baltimore, March 24, 1886
click image to view full list of confirmations

The Ordination of the Rev. Tak Yue Pong to the Priesthood
Grace & St. Peter’s, Baltimore, September 23, 1979

Lillian Kim, considered the matriarch of Baltimore’s Chinese-American community, died in 2004, at the age of 85. Born in Toishan, China, she and her family had arrived in Baltimore in 1921, and for more than 70 years, Grace & St. Peter’s had been the epicenter of her spiritual and cultural life. She not only wrote and published a Chinese newsletter for the church’s Chinese community, she had also been director of the Chinese language school at Grace & St. Peter’s for over 30 years, which had reversed its original role of teaching English to Chinese immigrants, to teaching Chinese residents their native language. In addition, she wrote a nearly 500-page book in 1976, Early Baltimore Chinese Families, worked in the mayor’s office, helped run a family laundry, and wrote a weekly newspaper column.

Although the Chinese community is Baltimore has dispersed, it is good to take time to reflect on early attempts by two Baltimore churches to reach out to new immigrants, to educate and help make their new home more hospitable. The year 2022 is the year of the Tiger in the Chinese zodiac system, which heralds new beginnings. Perhaps the Tiger can serve as a hopeful sign as we try to emerge from the world-wide pandemic of Covid and isolation, and focus on the inclusion of all into the American experience.

Baltimore Heritage mentions Grace and St. Peter’s, Baltimore and their ministry among Baltimore’s Chinese immigrant community in one of their “Five Minute Histories” videos telling the story of Baltimore’s Chinatown.

The Sun, January 22, 1993