Joe Boys (also Chung Ching Yee, Chinese: 忠精義; pinyin: Zhōngjīngyì; Cantonese: Jung Jing Yi) was a Chinese youth gang founded in the 1960s in San Francisco's Chinatown. Joe Boys was originally known as "Joe Fong Boys", after its founder Joe Fong. Fong was a former member of Wah Ching.
Author Bill Lee, a former Joe Boys gang member, wrote extensively of his life's involvement in the Chinese criminal underworld, and the gang's history in his book Chinese Playground: A Memoir. Joe Boys gained further notoriety after the Golden Dragon massacre which stemmed over the sale of fire crackers in china town.
Since the Golden Dragon Massacre, the Chung Ching Yee has disbanded due to police pressure "Gang Task Force" in the San Francisco Chinatown area.
Famous quotes containing the words joe and/or boys:
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“As the two boys walked sorrowing along, they made a new compact to stand by each other and be brothers and never separate till death relieved them of their troubles. Then they began to lay their plans. Joe was for being a hermit, and living on crusts in a remote cave, and dying, some time, of cold, and want, and grief; but after listening to Tom, he conceded that there were some conspicuous advantages about a life of crime, and so he consented to be a pirate.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)