A fact from Gee Jon appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 8 November 2010, and was viewed approximately 6,100 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Gee Jon became the first person in the United States to be executed in a gas chamber, after Nevada State Prison officials found that pumping the poison directly into his cell did not work?
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Yes, there was institutionalized racist "hysteria" regarding Asian immigrants (and Asian-Americans as well) in the 1920s, but how is that relevent to the execution of someone who had been convicted of premeditated murder? Were African-Americans and European-Americans not also being executed for murder at this time?
If the accomplice had been European-American one might wonder if race was involved in sparing the accomplice and executing the trigger-man, but in this case both men were ethnic Chinese, and the victim was also an ethnic Chinese, so race does not seem to have been a factor. (71.22.47.232 (talk) 01:49, 8 November 2010 (UTC))[reply]
In this case, the source appears to be referring to the apprehension and prosecution of the suspects. According to this other source, tong violence between ethnic Chinese typically went unpunished during that time. KimChee (talk) 09:59, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for clarifying, KimChee. I wonder why this killing was investigated and prosecuted. (71.22.47.232 (talk) 04:41, 9 November 2010 (UTC))[reply]
Can someone confirm if his surname is Gee? Gee is a common surname. Also most Chinese use Surname first, then first name. SWP13 (talk) 23:40, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I just checked out the source for 吉喬恩 as the native form of "Gee Jon". This is just a phonetic approximation on part of the author, seeing as "Qiaoen" very much seems like an unusual spelling for "Jon/John" (its a real name, but seems distinctly female). The same is done with names like Allan McLane Hamilton, rendered as 艾倫·麥克萊恩·漢密爾頓 or Delos Turner, 德洛斯·特納 in the same article. Normally, if the Chinese name is known, most Chinese-language text use just that, whereas if it's not known, they usually just write it out the known romanization, which was unfortunately somewhat arbitrary at times. Gee Jon was apparently also known as "Gee Gar Hue" and a payment receipt ([1]) found on his person read his name as 朱家休 i.e. "Zhu Jiaxiu" (Gee was a common rendering of Zhu among the Cantonese at the time). This is the only recorded instance of his name being written out, so it seems to have been overlooked.
I was first inclined to believe "Jon" was the surname, since American sources even today go by Western naming order by default, though it was not unheard of for Chinese immigrants to leave their names in Eastern order and make use of their first name as the surname and vice versa in their new country. This might have been the case for the victim Tom Quong Kee though, since Tom is the Cantonese version for the surname Tan (譚) and some English sources use "Tom" as if it were his surname, though it could have just as easily been his English first name (maybe even both if the previously mentioned scenario applies). The present "廣基" might be correct, though it's similarly ambiguous whether that would be his first name (in the case that Tom is his last name) or the romanization of the full name (should Tom be an English nickname), with even more uncertainty which character is the surname or first name. There would need to be some more research for him. 62.216.215.59 (talk) 15:19, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
