Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1881 — The Wealthiest Chinaman in New York. [ARTICLE]

The Wealthiest Chinaman in New York.

Tom Lee is A short, slender man of modest manner* and of an eitremely retiring disposition. He wears a stiff Derby hat, into the crown of which he pokes his queue. This causes the hair on the back of Iris head to stand out like the quills of an angry porcupine or the hair on a cat’s back rubbed the wrong way. He has a tiny blacK mustache, and a sparse growth of wiry black hair on his chin. He wears a diamond pin in an old-fashioned scarf, and an eight-ounce gold watch-chain dangles from the third button of his waistcoat. He is well-to do ; owns three tea farms in China, and is worth a few thousands, perhaps. He is a very influential man among Chinamen. He is a Christian, a citizen, a deputy sheriff, and is married to a girl who was born down town somewhere in that neighborhood. She has borne him a lovely little daughter, of whom Tom Lee is justly very proud. He talks pigeon English, but he dresses as you and I do, except that he wears his queue. Very many among the 3,000 Chinese in New York retain their pigtails, not because they cannot go back to China without them, or because of any heathen notion about them, but because a good many Chinamen who were cigarette or cigar-makers in China have come here from Cuba without their queues. They were rid of those appendages in Cuban prisons, where they were sent for wrong-doing, and it is considered best by respectable Chinamau not to cut off the queue, so as to obviate the necessity of explaining where and how it disappeared.