Why this site exists
Far removed from Chinatowns of my parents’ youth, in the suburbs where I grew up, assimilation was easier than learning Cantonese. What little I was taught did not take. Our family’s past provided lessons in survival more often than reasons to celebrate. What stuck were fragments — instructions to work hard but don't be dependent on a corporate job; be frugal and save for a rainy day; a story mentioned once at dinner; a name brought up and never explained; a gravestone where I laid flowers a hundred times, always knowing who was buried there, never trying to comprehend the Chinese couplet written for them. I knew the facts, not the feeling behind them.
In college I was interested in learning about my Asian heritage. I studied the history and cultures of China and Japan. Later as an adult, I studied Mandarin, not my grandparents' native Hoisanese, but the dialect my father and his siblings learned in Burma from teachers “left over from World War II”, one dialect floating among the several that I couldn’t sort out as a kid.
Later I worked in Hong Kong and Shanghai for five years. By that point, I knew enough Chinese to to write letters to my grandmothers with the aid of a dictionary. Living there, I was liberated from American stereotypes. I could contribute to my full potential and be recognized and rewarded for my efforts. Yet, I was still an American who needed English subtitles for movies, couldn’t read a newspaper, and didn’t fully understand the culture. I existed between two worlds. A foreign stereotype in America. Not Chinese enough in China.
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| Great-grandfather Hong Yin Ming's Citizenship Affidavit, June 21, 1898 |
When I returned to the U.S. in 2000, my father suggested, of all things, that we take a trip to the National Archives in San Bruno, CA. We were not entirely sure what we’d find, but this visit was the first step in an ongoing journey to uncover and understand my family’s history that is now well into its third decade. Among the trove of immigration documents, we discovered a photograph of my Dad’s grandfather, the first one I’d ever seen, taken around the same age I was. In it, I recognized a face I’d never known and saw myself.
