By Nathan Ng
I always learned to fight for my share, growing up in a family with seven siblings. I had five brothers and two sisters. We were considered full of luck because we had more opportunities to carry on the family name. It’s different than how it is today. Back then, it was important to have many children, especially sons. Sons carry on the family name and increase the chances of bringing wealth back to the family. It’s a popular saying that in marriage, if your son marries, you gain a daughter, and if your daughter marries, you lose a daughter. If the daughter in the family is found in marriage, she is considered lost to their own family and gained to the other family. Though our family seemed to have great luck, my childhood consisted of always fighting for food at the table. Anyone with the slow hand with their chopsticks would be the hungry one.
1946 was a year full of tumult for my home country China. The country had just ended the Second Sino Japanese War. During the later years of the war, the Communist Party and the Kuomingtang (KMT) had the country divided. The communist’s reign was too much for my family as their regime sought to control every aspect of culture, including arts and education. My parents were part of the Kuomingtang party and moved to Taiwan during the surge. This was especially hard for my mother because she was pregnant with my sister Lee Xiao Fei. We lived in Tai Chung, Taiwan until 1963. At that point, my youngest brother Lee Dong Shen was seven and old enough to not need the constant care and attention of my mother. It was in the 1960s where my siblings slowly began to immigrate to America. We moved to Oakland Chinatown from 1963-1969, with me being the last to leave as my younger siblings were still not old enough to endure life in the new world.
The thing that I can remember most was the food. My elder siblings couldn’t stand steak, hot dogs, and hamburgers, which are considered American staples. My elder siblings didn’t like eating out with their American friends whenever the rare incidence did occur. Hamburgers and steaks were considered half-raw and completely disgusting and foreign to the Taiwan-nurtured palate. For us, meat should not show any hint of red since we were used to eating meat that usually wasn’t fresh enough to eat “medium rare”. I enjoyed hamburgers but couldn’t handle eating hot dogs. It was foreign to grasp food that glowed with [yellow] sauce. Sleeping was hard too, as we all had to fit into one tiny room. There were nights where we had to take turns sleeping and if one person in the family was sick, we all became sick after.
This definitely was a time of tumult for America. The protests in Berkeley to the Vietnam War and the fact that most of my American and Chinese friends didn’t trust the president lead to two of my siblings moving to Long Island, which was surprisingly a place where Chinese dealt with racism better. It was hard for everyone because my family was divided all over now and I was trying to balance education with working odd jobs in laundry and cleaning at a local Chinese food market. I remember days where my shoes would smell like fish after hosing down the curb. My American schoolmates would ridicule me because of it. These were odd jobs I needed to do to survive and help with the family.
My family was never considered highly involved with the politics, whether in our home country in China and later Taiwan, nor in the Bay Area. My sister was the exception here as she participated in the San Francisco State protests with the Third World Liberation Front, blending in with the more engaged students but still standing out to our family. Our family really never had much to do with social activism but my parents carried a heavy grudge for all things Japanese. For the longest time, my father would refuse to step into a Japanese car every time he visited America. With technology like Sony and Toyota, it would be hard and almost impossible at times to avoid usage of Japanese made technology. The Second Sino Japanese war had affected my family even if I was born right after it. The Japanese community stuck out amongst the other Asians, often blending in better with the Americans. Their families were second and sometimes third generation citizens, and spoke far better English than the Chinese even if the Chinese were the first to arrive to Oakland Chinatown. Because of this, they were almost foreign to us though we shared the same colored skin.
The holidays were the most rough during the 60s and most of the 70s because our family couldn’t afford to see each other. While our few and affluent American-born Chinese friends would celebrate with big feasts, my siblings and I would use the time to work odd shifts and enjoy Chinese donuts at Jack London Square, dreaming about how life will be like once we are fully grown up. Immigration status was harder for us because we had a hard time understanding the policies and long documents on our own. I had better English than my elder siblings but still struggled to understand all the terms. Because of this, we sometimes relied on our American-born Chinese friends though they sometimes made fun of our accents. The only common ground we could find sometimes was our interest in Bruce Lee, which we would watch at the cinema and talk about after school and work.
Going back to China was never an option for my family, but the pilgrimage had to be made in 1983, as my eldest uncle had passed away from Tuberculosis. We didn’t quite fit in during our visit in China because of our ideologies, which seemed too progressive for the Chinese raised yet too regressive for the Chinese American community. This is the struggle that every immigrant must face when relating to people in their motherland and people in the new land. They are often too much of one thing to totally fit in. Therefore, we immigrants must all stick together and share the unique bond we have of always striving for the escaping concept of home.