Chock Wong and J.[ohn] Hoffman, Proprietors. The Oriental [Newspaper]. Vol. I, No. 21. San Francisco. Feb. 5, 1876. 4pp. 14 x 21”. Entirely in Chinese characters (untranslated) except for the masthead statement: “This Chinese newspaper, published in the Chinese language is read by all the Chinese in this City and elsewhere…This is the only Chinese newspapers published in this country…”
Rare. Many issues of early Chinese-American San Francisco newspapers have not survived.The Bancroft Library, which shows this paper published for about a year after September 1875, has only scattered issues.
As for the masthead claim, the first newspapers for Chinese residents of San Francisco, dating to Gold Rush days, were published by white men. There were other 1870s papers in the city with text entirely in Chinese characters (hand-designed as no Chinese type-face was available). But, most importantly, this newspaper was edited by a man who might lay claim to being the first Chinese to become a US citizen in California, and perhaps in the United States. (The 1874 Connecticut naturalization of a Chinese Yale graduate was revoke as illegal.)
Chock Wong, who co-published and edited the Oriental, was one of three Chinese who, in December 1875, filed legal papers asking to become naturalized US citizens. One historian asserts that Wong took no further action, while another of the trio was denied citizenship three years later in US district court on the grounds that federal law excluded Chinese from naturalization. However, in early January 1876, several American newspapers, citing an original report in the New York Times, stated that Wong has indeed been “granted his full papers of citizenship" which were "delivered to him last week."
No further newspaper accounts indicate that this action was ever legally reversed and available records are not illuminating. Not until 1900 did a Chock Poo Wong appear in US Census records of San Francisco, showing only that he was born in China in 1850 and immigrated to America in 1875, listing his occupation as bookkeeper. Curiously, in the 1890s, an Arnold Genthe photograph of Chinatown captured the sign of a Chinese newspaper office, a few doors down from Wong’s office at 817 Washington Street, which was published, written, edited and printed a Yee Jenn who claimed to have actually founded the Oriental in 1875.