The Delta Democrat Times wrote a fitting tribute on the life and times of longtime Chinese merchant and Greenville resident, Henry Fook Goon. The late Mr. Goon died on 05 January 2014, and this editorial opinion was published on 10 January 2014....... A longtime Greenville resident and downtown grocer died this past Sunday at 99 years of age — an emblem of a Greenville era that now, too, has all but passed. Henry Fook Goon was buried Wednesday at the Greenville Chinese Cemetery beneath a chill overcast. A sprinkle began falling mere moments after the eulogy and after the gathered had prayed, as one, “Amen.” Mr. Goon was born in China and, at the tender age of eight, arrived in the United States with his parents, Gen and Liang Shee Goon. That was in 1923, when America’s great promise was in full bloom, the Jazz Age at its dawn; the Great Depression, unbeknownst to anyone then alive, was aborning in the excesses of The Roaring Twenties and soon would mark the end of that celebrated decade. It was amid that financial catastrophe, the worst America has ever known, that Mr. Goon arrived in the Port City. Having saved his nickels and dimes from work at a New York laundry, here he purchased the Toi Roi Grocery, which remains open today in the same low-slung building it has always occupied on the southwest corner of Poplar and Central streets, its sign faded by decades of relentless Delta sun and rain. Here, too, he met and fell in love with the woman who would become his wife, Marion, nee Parker, an African American, and together over the years they bore five sons, one named Lansing, and two daughters. Mr. Goon’s grocery by 1951 was, according to an admiring article in the Delta Democrat-Times, one of 40 Chinese-owned groceries in Greenville, a retail niche dominated by the Cantonese just as, at the time, retail apparel was dominated by Greenville’s influential Jewish population. It is a sad commentary that that success, of the Jews and Chinese alike, engendered in the smallish minds of certain whites, perhaps feeling cheated in some inconceivable way, a hatred given to mean-spirited diatribes such as that expressed by one W.H. Lamas, the owner of a local company known as Wholesale Fruits. In his screed, which ran under the heading, he asked, “Are You an American and a Mississippian?” And demanded to know, “If so, do you believe in the Delta and Greenville? Do you want to see prosperity and good times, with businesses owned and controlled by Americans?” Never mind that Americans have always come in different hues, and different creeds, all sharing a solitary goal, to grow America and to prosper with her. He demanded to know, “Or would you rather see this business interest owned and controlled with our good American dollars being sent back to China to bring more of this race of people into our country, and to the Mississippi Delta until the American will be out of business and all business interest owned and controlled by these Chinese. … Do something — do it now — rid our fair state of this yellow menace.” Hatred born of fear is among the darkest of scourges, dragging down those gripped by it and leading to vain efforts to foster irrational accords. “I now want to make a personal appeal to the colored people, both in Greenville and the surrounding country,” he wrote, “you wake up — realize that the white man is your real friend, that will help you in trouble and sickness, give you employment, and enable you to care for your families and educate your children … and while your blood is colored try and keep it pure, not mixed with Chinese.” Just when his miscegenation had risen to its most twisted, he concluded, redeemingly: “This article was refused publication by the Democrat-Times of Greenville.” Even efforts at decency, at the time, struck discordant notes. The president of the Cleveland School District in January 1950 sought legislative approval for Chinese children to attend white schools there. Such students, he argued in a letter to Jackson, “are not colored. They are just as clean and wholesome as many of our native white children.” “Native white children” — the phrase would be laughable were it not absurd. Chinese immigrating to this land of immigrants first arrived in Greenville shortly after the guns of the Civil War had fallen silent, finally, after four years of slaughter. These new Americans arrived in time to live and to perish alongside blacks and whites, Jews and Christians, during the Yellow Fever plague, which, in 1878, decimated Greenville. Yet, together, the races survived. It has been a decade or so, now, since Mr. Goon last put on his grocer’s smock, and today his son Lansing maintains the grocery, albeit its shelves by linear foot today are more bare than stocked, serving a diminished neighborhood struggling to revive. Odds are it will return, for Greenville, throughout its history, has always proved resilient in a way worth forever bearing in mind. Tom Bassing is the managing editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Reach him at tombasing@ddtonline.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 01:09:48 +0000