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The Legacy Of The Mississippi Delta Chinese

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Think of the Mississippi Delta. Maybe you imagine cotton fields, sharecroppers and blues music. It's been all that. But for more than a century, the Delta has also been a magnet for immigrants. I was intrigued to learn about one immigrant group in particular: the Delta Chinese. To find out more, I travelled to Greenville, Miss., a small city along the Mississippi River. I meet Raymond Wong in Greenville's Chinese cemetery, right across a quiet road from an African-American cemetery. Wong's family has long been part of a thriving — but separate — Chinese community. "We were in-between," Wong explains, "right in between the blacks and the whites. We're not black, we're not white. So that by itself gives you some isolation." We walk in the shade of a huge magnolia tree that stretches out over the gravestones. They're carved with Chinese characters, and bear the names of the Chinese families whose history here goes back decades: Quong, Yu, Jung, Fu.... and Wong. Raymond Wong leads me to

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