Benson & Co. Grocery storefront in 1938

Leland Gion

Belonging & Prejudice Chinese-owned Groceries Interracial Dating

Date of Birth: April 1, 1938Store: Benson and Co. Grocery, Altheimer, AR
Benson & Co. Grocery storefront in 1938
"Altheimer would have something like a population under a thousand, somewhere like between four hundred or six hundred at that time. And on weekends, like on Saturday night, you couldn’t drive through because all the farm workers were in town. So that’s probably the dominant time that Pop would be making his money, Saturday night. And you know the rest of the week, except for maybe appealing to early morning cotton pickers, I would say the customer traffic was pretty light."

Leland Gion was born into a family of Chinese immigrants in his family’s grocery store in Altheimer, Arkansas, on April 1, 1938. Leland’s parents originally settled in Mississippi but difficult race relations there prompted their move to Arkansas. Leland was the last of his father’s five children and his mother’s eleventh. Leland, his parents, and four siblings lived and worked in the Benson & Co. Grocery store, where they shared beds behind a wooden partition in the back of the store. From a young age during the 1940’s, Leland helped work at the counter-service grocery store, which primarily served Black customers. He recounts his father grinding and butchering his own meat to make sausages to sell in the store.

As the youngest in his family, Leland did not feel pressured to learn Chinese, though his father did encourage him to trace Chinese characters on a parchment pamphlet using a brush pen. His family was not close to other Chinese families in the area.

Leland’s upbringing consisted of lots of family meals at home. His mother made rice for every meal which was made in a three-pound cooker, and the bottom crust left from making the rice would be watered down and also served. Leland remembers a specific moment from his childhood when his parents used to make salt fish by placing a raw fish into a paper bag and hanging it on the clothes line outside to dry out.

Despite attending an all-white school in Altheimer, Leland noted that there were only a few “bad apples” who bullied him, and he recalls classmate Howard Guffey standing up for him. After graduating from high school, Leland was encouraged to continue to seek higher education, instead of taking over the store. Leland graduated from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas with a dual degree in Mathematics and Physics, despite battling tuberculosis during his college years. Leland recalls pressure from his dad to “learn more. Learn”.

Growing up, Leland attended meetings of the Chinese Association of Arkansas, which was founded in 1943. They would meet a couple of times a year at Oakland Park in Pine Bluff, now known as Martin Luther King Park, with food, dancing, ping pong, and raffles. Leland is the current chairman of the Chinese Association of Arkansas.

Story by Hailey Molden, Clara Spivey, Jonah Williams, and Pennelope Wilson

  • Alice Gion sitting in front of Davis Hall at the University of Arkansas
    Leland Gion's sister Alice attending University of Arkansas. Image courtesy of Susie Tonymon
  • Letter to Bank of China from Benson and Co. Grocery c.1944
  • Aviation Salvation Coupon belonging to the parents of Leland Gion
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