A native of China, 28-year-old Ah Ling was one of 68 Chinese men and boys who'd come to the Belleville, NJ area in September 1870. The group had taken the train from San Francisco to work in the Passaic Steam Laundry, then the largest commercial cleaning operation in the US, and other local laundries. Ah Ling had previously been employed as a laborer on the first Transcontinental Railroad, which had been completed in 1869, the year before his death. Despite having proven themselves to be skillful and hardworking, Chinese immigrants faced discrimination on the West Coast and in many other parts of the country, causing them to migrate to the East Coast in search of a better life. Belleville welcomed and attracted Chinese labor, and became the site of the first significant Chinese settlement in the eastern US, pre-dating even Manhattan's "Chinatown". Unfortunately, young Ah Ling did not live to fully enjoy all the benefits of his new home. He died just 2 months after his arrival on the train from California, and following a Chinese-style funeral in November 1870, was buried on a hillside in North Arlington, just across the Passaic River from the Dutch Reformed Churchyard. In 2016, 145 years later, earth from Ah Ling's gravesite was placed in an urn and interred beneath a monument honoring Belleville's early Chinese residents, many of whose remains were placed in the catacombs under the Dutch Reformed Church to await shipment to China. The number of those who were posthumously returned to their native land is unknown to this writer, but a second urn filled with earth from the catacombs was also interred beneath the Chinese Memorial Monument prior to its dedication in October 2016.