Madera Tribune
Tuesday - August 14, 2001 - 50¢
Sierra Vista students unearth
Madera's Chinese heritage
By Mike Chen
Tribune StaffA time machine sits at one end of Room 21 and two sixth-graders study the nearly 100-year old scene emanating from it. An image appears, a man with mutton chop sideburns is shown in profile as the students analyze the strange apparition. A date flashes by ... May 3 ... 1902.
While most kids learn about history in the abstract, reading excerpts from their textbooks written by contemporary authors, a few students in a classroom at Sierra Vista Elementary are going back in time to piece together their own history, a history of Madera unknown to any living Maderan and one that was virtually erased over the years from all memory.
In Bill Coate's sixth-grade class-
room, students are using a micro-
film reader, computers connected to the Internet, and the oral history memories of descendants of former Maderans to put together the history of Madera's Chinese community which had thrived here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The students had a tough project since very ittle remains on record of the Chinese experience in Madera. What the kids found, though, were stories on microfilm from about 100 years ago about a prominent Chinese family when they made the front page of the Madera Mercury, a precursor to the Madera Tribune.
The project began earlier this summer when Coate was contacted by Ron Chong, a teacher from Los Angeles who had thought that his great-grandfather had come from
Sierra Vista Elementary 6th-grader Dalia Damian writes an essay about the experiences of Yee Chung, a Madera Chinese pioneer who lived here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The students will be visited by descendants of Yee Chung's family on Wednesday.
Madera. Chong had seen a PBS documentary about the historical research projects undertaken by Coate and his students, and was hoping they could help him find out information about his family.
While searching through micro-film records, the students uncovered several interesting stories involving a man named Yee Chung, who had been a prominent member of the community and who was thought to be an ancestor (See Past, Page A2)
