Described as a “well-to-do, well dressed individual” (“Girl Slave”), in Edith Eaton’s journalism of Montreal’s Chinatown in the 1890s, Mr. Cheeping or Wong Cheeping (黃志平), was an established businessman and a respected member of the Chinese community in Montreal. Eaton describes that he was fairly fluent in English, well informed, and well mannered (“Girl Slave”), and gestures to a grocery business he was planning to open. In 1894, with five business partners, Lou Chan Hoy (盧燦開), Wong Chun (黃昌), Lou Sum (盧深), Chan Man (陳晚), and Lee Jian (李見) (“Sociétés et Dissolutions”), Cheeping opened the Tye Loy (泰萊) Company, a vendor of Chinese and Japanese goods, at 82 Bleury Street (Lovell’s 1894-95 40).  It likely attracted Asian customers seeking familiar tastes and smells from home, but also non-Asian customers interested in “exotic” and unfamiliar goods and products. Chinese laundries saturated the Chinese business market in Montreal, but Tye Loy was one of only thirteen Chinese groceries established between 1893 and 1900 (Helly 92). In 1895, Tye Loy was described as the most important of the six Chinese stores operating at that time (“Chinese Colony”).

Cheeping was not only an established figure in Montreal’s Chinese business landscape, but he was also an active member of the Chinese community in Eastern North America. While he did not have a wife with him in Montreal, he had several local and transnational friends and associates. For example, when Mr. Li Sing, another Chinese merchant, stopped in Montreal on his way to New York after visiting China with his wife in 1895, Cheeping hosted the couple at his residence on Bleury Street for three weeks (“Chinamen with German Wives”). This suggests that Cheeping had an expansive social network that extended well beyond Montreal and Guangzhou (Canton).He had established himself as a merchant in New York City as well, evidenced by his signing the agreement for the Tye Loy Company, as a “merchant of the city of New York” (“Laundry Ticket”). While he learned English and adapted to Canadian manners, which Eaton praises in “Girl Slave in Montreal,” he held on to Chinese customs and traditions, and shared his knowledge with people outside of his community. Continue reading →