Below are two excerpts from Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America by William Gee Wong.

Who Are We?

I’m Pop’s youngest child, his seventh, and his only son, giving me an elevated status over my sisters under the patriarchy of China and Chinatowns worldwide. Chinatown parents, like those in China and its diaspora, coveted sons, and most likely still do. Being his youngest, I spent the least amount of time with him, all in Oakland, California. I didn’t know him all that well, in part because I was more into in my own developing life in an America that was just beginning to allow the heretofore dammed-up narrow and scarce Chinatown tributaries into the roaring mostly white American mainstream. I was Chinese in a Chinatown sense, but when I began to wiggle my way into white America, I sometimes felt ashamed of Pop and Chinatown because they didn’t meet the (white) American standards of status and achievement. Those standards, of course, were set by white men with impressive means and unchallenged power…

As we piled into the van, our cousins thanked us for coming and asked us to return some day. In Hoisan-wa, they said that we “you thlim” (had heart), meaning that we were kind people to visit, or words to that effect. Without a word, I sat motionless as we drove away. My mind, however, was ricocheting with emotions. I couldn’t calm them down even while others in our party fell into a loud silence, as though in shock at what we had just experienced.

That was the moment when big questions loomed large in my now overactive imagination: Who was Pop? Who was I, other than his seventh child and only son? How and why did our respective lives evolve so differently from our common beginning together in Oakland? And what do our stories say about the broader American immigration story? My thoughts drifted to the concept of actual and metaphorical distances traveled by Pop and me -- not just the 6,957 miles between Pop’s village and Oakland, but the joint and then distinctive cultural journeys we each took, which I am still taking into my ninth decade of life.

Pop was a lightly educated farm-village immigrant teenager who didn’t know a lick of English when he got to Oakland, with its cozy Chinatown across the bay from the much larger mother of all American Chinatowns in San Francisco. He eventually became a small business owner in Chinatown and his home village. He experienced hardships galore, but he also managed to grow a family in a land officially hostile to our kind. I am a relatively well-educated Chinatown-bred Chinese American middle-class professional, who has lost almost all of my first language, Hoisan-wa, and has used my second, English, to earn a living. Like everyone else, I’ve hit speed bumps, but nothing like Pop’s violent, near-death experience, which pushed our family near poverty. This cultural distance was traversed in just one generation. One.

This tale might appear to be a familiar immigrant father-American son story, but the one I am about to tell, I believe, is from a rare vantage point, one that is not all that well-known in the broad, deep, and complicated American cultural landscape. Pop came to America in the middle of the Chinese exclusion era, which spanned from 1882 to 1943. That period was when the policy of the United States was to ban almost all Chinese seeking entry and to bar ethnic Chinese already here from U.S. citizenship. It was an overtly racist law and one of the first federal regulations of immigration. Pop had to engage in shady means to come here, first in 1912 and again in 1933, when he brought his family. 

Growing up in Oakland, I knew nothing of the enormous barriers Pop had faced to be in America, nor did I care to learn about them. Chinatown’s bamboo telegraph may have buzzed with audible whispers of the effects of the exclusion law, but I either didn’t hear the gossip or chose not to listen. Shortly after he died, I began the sporadic, meandering search for who both of us were, in the context of the Chinese exclusion law and America’s contradictory expressions of love and hate for immigrants. The early arc of my life happened to coincide with the start the Chinese exclusion law’s repeal. That change enabled me to gradually integrate into the white-dominated American mainstream in ways that were impossible for Pop. 

As singular as it is, our joint story is a vivid example proving that immigration works. This reality is so even though Asians were once officially pariahs and continue to be to many Americans well into the twenty-first century and when America sends wildly confusing messages to non-Americans who want to come here to escape homeland misery. One message celebrates America as a land of unbridled opportunities for immigrants and refugees to achieve the American dream. An opposing message is more honest, truthful, and real. America has been and still is fraught with ugly racism, systemic and individualized, and violent white supremacy targeting many nonwhite newcomers and long-time residents and citizens.

Now, more than two decades into the twenty-first century, after impressive progress in the 1960s and 1970s for racial and ethnic minorities, women, disabled people, and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer communities, stubborn elements of the decreasing white majority resist that progress and wish for the days when white people, especially Christian men, were in a much larger majority and more fully in control. Our collective being, increasingly black, beige, brown, yellow and shades in between, convulses sporadically and frighteningly from emotional, volatile, and sometimes violent arguments over who is an American, who should be an American, who belongs here, and who doesn’t. 

Pop and his Chinatown contemporaries managed to mostly duck and cover to survive the ignominy of racial hatred. Those were the days, from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, when the overwhelmingly white majority couldn’t be bothered with immigrants of Asian descent living in America. Their descendants like me have learned to cope with more subtle forms of bigotry, while we have learned to love ourselves (maybe) after hating ourselves for not being white. Many of us of all different racial, ethnic, social, and cultural backgrounds still have distances to travel to co-exist in peace and respect. For a time, some of us yellow folks could relax into the illusion that we were “accepted” or at least “tolerated,” but the veritable tsunami of hatred of us during the coronavirus pandemic has given many of us renewed pause (and paranoia) about our place in America.

My sisters and I, our children, and our grandchildren, are the beneficiaries of Pop’s (and Mom’s) struggles and sacrifices. Better positioned than Pop, we can’t take for granted our freedom and liberties in a nation that is still trying to figure out what it means to be a democracy where everyone is treated with equality, justice, and dignity.

Are We There Yet?

In Pop’s sixty-five or so years on Earth, he traveled at least sixty-three thousand miles on nine voyages between China and Oakland. His American travels were limited to car, ferry, and train trips to places like San Francisco, Marysville, Stockton, Reno, and the like, a few thousand more miles. In my eight-plus decades of life, I’ve traveled close to a half million miles, throughout California to various states, and to Mexico, Asia, South Africa, Israel, and Europe. 

The difference between the physical distances we each traveled reflects the circumstances of our lives, Pop’s having been much more constricted than mine. The Chinese exclusion law, in effect for most of his life, limited his mobility. He couldn’t work and live outside Chinatown until after World War II, when restrictions began to ease for us yellow folks. Chinatown provided for all his American needs – work, shelter, and social and family life. China filled similar needs and more – a childhood, some schooling, wives, children, and work.

Chinatown was my bubble too, but only from birth to my early teens. Mobility, a very American thing, was a big factor in me growing culturally apart from Pop, who moved our housing arrangements out of Chinatown when I was seven years old but kept our Chinatown ties intact with our restaurant. Going to an almost all-white high school exposed me to life outside Chinatown in ways that Pop never experienced. By then, English was my lingua franca, not the Hoisan-wa that was native to both of us. 

I straddled Chinatown and the outside white world during most of my teen years. After Pop died when I had just turned twenty and into adulthood, I was more often in the white world than in Chinatown. My chosen career, print journalism, was in the white world. Peace Corps service in the Philippines in my twenties was analogous to a puzzle wrapped in a mystery: a white Peace Corps culture inside a mixed up Asian-European-American culture that was partially anti-Chinese.

More than the wide gap in the physical distances we each traveled, our joint and then separate cultural journeys defined our father-son relationship as a kind of moveable feast (and occasional famine). He had China, off and on, for a third of his life, and Chinatown for the other two-thirds. I had Chinatown for a quarter of my life, then mainstream America (white with a smidge of other colors and the Philippines) for the rest with a para life in a Yellow America, a misty, tiny tributary to the roaring mostly white mainstream.

Pop and I, of course, shared being ethnic Chinese, but our other identities were more distinct from one another. Pop never had the kind of cultural or national identity confusion that has animated most of my life. He was Chinese, period. During his years in Oakland, he never questioned his ethnic or national identity, Chinese, even though he spent more time in America than in China, presumably as a U.S. citizen since, when he first came, he was classified by U.S. immigration as a “son of a native,” thus a legal entrant despite using partially fake papers. It was hardly his fault he didn’t identify as an American. Thank you, Chinese Exclusion Act.