Here is an excerpt from Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The New York Times.
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Lau Sing Kee was an American war hero, but he was also mocked as a “Chinese boy.” He was a civic leader, but he also became a convicted criminal for skirting discriminatory immigration laws.
His path, from decorated soldier to prison inmate, was emblematic of how Chinese immigrants and their descendants struggled to find their footing in early 20th-century America.
In 1917, after he moved to New York City from California and settled in Chinatown, Kee enlisted in the Army in the midst of World War I. His unit, the 77th Infantry Division, became known as the Cosmopolitan Division because of its high concentration of first-generation immigrants. It soon shipped out to the Western Front.
In August, Kee, by then a sergeant, was stationed at the village of Mont-Notre-Dame in northern France when German guns began to bombard and gas his post at a rate of 30 shells a minute. Kee was one of 20 runners who were a crucial communication lifeline between units and from command posts to the front lines. In the face of a German offensive to take the village, the runners navigated through machine-gun fire and gas and flamethrower attacks until all were wounded, unconscious or dead. Kee was the only one who managed to keep going.
“I felt as if I had been hit in the face with a pound of red pepper,” he recalled in a 1919 interview with The San Jose Mercury Herald. “It burned my eyes, nose and throat, and I could not breathe. The pain was so intense.”
But he maintained communications single-handedly for more than 24 hours, collapsing on the ground after delivering his last message. The village held.
When asked by a reporter for The Los Angeles Evening Herald how he had managed to man his post for so long on the battlefield, Kee said simply, “There was nobody to do it but me.”
Kee’s division pushed the retreating German forces across the Vesle River in France. Kee was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest military award for an Army service member after the Medal of Honor. He is believed to be the first Chinese-American to win a United States combat medal.
“Throughout this critical period he showed extraordinary heroism, high courage, and persistent devotion to duty and totally disregarded all personal danger,” the medal citation said. He was promoted to color sergeant and awarded a Purple Heart as well as France’s Croix de Guerre for valor.
Kee was honorably discharged after the war, on May 9, 1919, and returned to the United States, where he was met with a mix of admiration and incredulity. Thousands of spectators greeted him and the other soldiers ecstatically in June when they marched in a military parade down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. But most news coverage of Kee’s honors made reference to his race, sometimes in disparaging ways. The New York Times described him as the parade’s “star exotic.” The Brooklyn Eagle, calling him “the Chinese boy,” published a cartoon of him as a diminutive, paddy hat-clad child being stroked on the head by Uncle Sam. The Los Angeles Evening Herald called him a “quiet, law-abiding, little almond-eyed ‘chink.’”
Credit: J.C. Gordon/History San José
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Andrew R. Chow is a New York City journalist. He is a Harvard ’14 graduate, was the Music Editor for the Harvard Crimson, and has been published in The New York Times, TV Guide Magazine, The Writer, and the Santiago Times.