Chinese culture persists in Montana even has hatred spreads

Way before this interested party left the Black Hills again for Montana in 2006 I had a recurring dream of old buildings being offered for free just for those of us who love historic preservation.

So, the Odd Goddess of Basin took her new romantic interest on a tour of Butte and I wept as my dream exploded into reality. But despite all of the gorgeous, empty buildings there was work waiting in Helena so my attention shifted. Butte has the architectural inventory and most of the infrastructure for over a hundred thousand souls but is home to only about 35,000 today. The Odd Goddess and a fledgling blogger saw John Prine at the magnificent Mother Lode Theater in Uptown Butte and we ate at the Pekin Noodle Parlor often.

Now, with Montana in the news and China in the crosshairs of white nationalists it must be time to remind more readers that liberal democrat President Thomas Jefferson used an executive order to seize land from Indigenous people, then from west to east enslaved Chinese immigrants built the railroads in the 1800s. 

It's a Chinese restaurant on the top floor of this old building in uptown, filled with these closed-curtain private dining booths. But what's really significant about it is that it is the oldest, continually operating family owned Chinese restaurant in the country, kept running by members of the Tam family for over a century. Butte's Chinese community was the largest Chinese community in the Rocky Mountain West, at about a thousand. If you think about it this way, the Tams have kept the Pekin going through two pandemics, two world wars, the Great Depression and the shutdown of Butte's underground mines; feeding countless miners, families, politicians and celebrities, and all the while maintaining a living, functioning connection to the history and origins of Chinese American culture and experience in the West. [John Hooks]

What really captivated America was this thing called chop suey. And chop suey was primarily invented because it was just, basically, tidbits, leftovers of any vegetables they had late night. They would mix together and then spread over any type of noodles or rice. My father came here when he was 14. His great grandfather, Tam Kwong Yee, was business partners with a man named Hum Yow who basically wanted to create noodle parlors. The best part about it is my dad probably have provided over 1,000, probably 5,000 jobs, you know, throughout the whole history of the Pekin. [Jerry Tam]

Lawrence County, South Dakota is known to have been inhabited by humans for at least 12,000 years before white Republicans besmirched it then turned it into the Nazi enclave and cultural wasteland it is today. Deadwood gambling was legalized with a promise to preserve all the history in the Gulch and archaeologists still unearth Chinese opium pipes there. 

In 2010 two Basinites loved Tony Ballog and Roma Nota, the Hungarian Gypsy quartet during a huge turnout for the National Folk Festival in Uptown Butte.