From the Statesman Archives: One of Austin’s Earliest Chinese Families

By Michael Barnes

Scanning the American-Statesman archives for evidence of the earliest Chinese American families in Austin — inspired by May being Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month — I came across some fleeting references to Chinese news and culture during this newspaper’s first years.

One 1876 article that included a reference to young Chinese performers reminded me of a family — the Lungs — who would have been among the earliest to settle here.

This newspaper’s stories during the 1870s included:

“The Manners of Chinese Boys” — A romanticized report from missionaries about superior male etiquette and deportment in China. (Dec. 14, 1871)
New census tables that counted 63,196 Chinese among 38,549,987 total Americans. (Aug. 8, 1871)
Reports about a growing anti-Chinese movement that was well underway by 1876: “Inform Chinese that they must not come; there will be danger to life and property if they come.” (March 31, 1876) All this antagonism climaxed in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese immigration and denied the right for Chinese immigrants to become citizens, among other restrictions.
Other articles in this paper included racist jokes; wire stories about violence among Chinese workers on the West Coast; along with opinion pieces submitted by white supremacists that compared the status of African Americans in the South to Chinese immigrants in California and Native Americans in general.

One Statesman article from July 2, 1876, however, made a positive report of a dance by young Chinese performers during closing exercises at St. Mary’s Academy. In 1874, the Holy Cross Sisters had taken over the parish school at St. Mary’s Catholic Church from the Sisters of Divine Providence. At the time, the nuns operated the school in a two-room cabin on land where St. Mary’s Cathedral now stands.

“The family opened a grocery store on Congress Avenue; in 1897, they launched a cafe at the corner of East Sixth and San Jacinto streets. In 1918, the American-style cafe moved to 507 San Jacinto St. It didn’t close until 1948,” I reported in a 2015 profile of the late Joe Lung, whom I befriended while he worked at the Capitol Extension Gift Shop. “The family, which included Joe’s father, Sam Lung, also operated Lung’s Chinese Kitchen at Red River and 12th streets. For decades, it was pretty much all that Austinites knew about locally served Asian food. It closed in 1974, a victim of urban renewal. The spot currently serves as a surface parking lot.”

In the 1960s, Joe Lung took over the family business and added a string of casual sandwich shops called Joe’s. By 1990, he had sold them off. In 1997, he, like his father before him, suffered a heart attack. He wisely slowed down and lived until 2018, when he died after a series of strokes.

Joe’s stories about Old Austin charmed me to the core.

“We lived at 1605 Canterbury St. in a two-story house with wonderful trees and soil,” Lung recalled. “When I was a kid back in the ‘40s, we had chickens in the backyard. Heck, everyone had chickens. Our family had a little farm, too, on East Riverside Drive, where all those apartments are now. My sister and I would go out there with my aunt, ride over the Congress Avenue Bridge, turn left on Riverside, past the old Tower bowling alley. When you got past where Interstate 35 is now, it was all country.”
Joe Lung’s grandfather was also named Joe. That, of course, was not his name back in Hoi Ping, China (modern-day Kaiping). The family name was Zhou (or Chou), which, in Chinese culture, comes first, as in the name of the late Premier Zhou Enlai. When Zhou Lung arrived in California, “Zhou” became “Joe.” When Joe’s grandfather died, in 1926, Sam Lung, who had attended Swante Palm School on East Avenue, dropped out of the University of Texas to take over the family business.

“His customers were country people who came into town to sell their wares at the old City Market at Seventh Street and East Avenue,” his son said. “It wasn’t a Chinese restaurant — a plain old American cafe with fried fish, chicken fried steak, steak dinner.”

Lung’s sometimes eye-opening stories about growing up in Austin remain with me.

“I had my own car,” he said. “We’d meet Saturday nights at the Holiday House on Barton Springs Road. Then, from there to Platt Lane out east. It was a straight road, which we marked off in quarters for drag racing.”