Lung Kong Tin Yee Association / The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Lung Kong Tin Yee Association, also, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. . Lung Kong Tin Yee Association Chinese settlers established the Lung Kong Tin Yee Association at 233 South Third Street in the 1920s, later moving to 250 Vance Avenue, to offer mutual assistance in the New World. Most of these settlers came from the Sze Yap region in Canton, now Guangdong Province. They named the association for their hometown temple on Lung Kong (Dragon Mountain) as a place of worship and fellowship. It functioned as a community center for Chinese living in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Lung Kong sponsored picnics, zoo trips, birthday and graduation parties, wedding banquets, and Chinese holiday celebrations. It extended mutual assistance to the sick and funerals for the deceased. It also served as a boarding house for bachelors who could not be with their families in China after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882., The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 With a decline in the post-Civil War economy in the 1870s, anti-Chinese sentiment grew nationwide against thousands of Chinese immigrants who had come to America during the Gold Rush and construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. As a consequence, on May 6, 1882, Congress passed a law that explicitly banned Chinese laborers from immigrating and obtaining United States citizenship. Most Chinese who were already residents faced a dilemma: Either stay in the U.S. alone or go back to China to be with their families. Those who stayed endured lifelong hardships, many dying alone in the U.S. without their families. The Magnuson Act of 1943, passed when China was allied with the U.S. against Japan in World War II, nullified the Chinese Exclusion Act. On June 18, 2012, Congress formally expressed regret that it ever had been enacted.