Paper Sons of Paper Sons: My Immigrant Family's Hidden Stories (Part 1)

This article first appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.

Yesterday I heard through my cousin that the house I grew up in was being sold. “Owned by the same family since it was built,” said the real estate listing. It was a small, generic, two bedroom tract home, originally with an unfinished second story, in Columbus, Ohio. My uncle had owned it for close to 40 years. Before him, my father had owned it for twenty.

I am an engineer with a wife and two daughters, and all the juggling that entails, so I hadn’t thought about the house in a while. Now the impending sale took me back to my childhood. My sisters, my brother and I were born in the United States and English is our native language. Our father was born in Canton, now Guangzhou, and speaks Taishan and fluent English. Our mother is from Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese, Taishan and, after all these years in the United States, English with an accent.

Until recently I never considered us to be an immigrant family, although we certainly were. While growing up, the only other Chinese families I knew were relatives in neighboring suburbs. At the time, because the other kids largely accepted me, I was only dimly aware of being ethnically different. But now grade school memories surface: one boy calling me a “jew” from across the street (in retrospect, probably the only epithet he knew); another, while playing flag football, blocking me with a fist to my stomach; yet another, tricking me into grabbing the end of a baseball bat smeared with excrement. Maybe it was normal bullying; however, I doubt it.

In the late sixties, when I was ten, my family relocated from Ohio to California, leaving the house in the care of Uncle Toy, who moved his family into it and bought it some years later. For a little while, at least, I had one of the two bedrooms on the second floor. A cousin—Uncle Toy’s son—was living with us while he was attending college, and had the other one.

Every weekend for two or three years, my father had disappeared upstairs to build those bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. He learned carpentry and plumbing from reading “How to” books. He hauled planks of plywood by himself then filled the house with the whine of the circular saw and the smell of sawdust. When he came down to the kitchen for lunch, the handkerchief tied around his face made him look like the desperado in a cowboy movie.

As the second floor neared completion, we became excited about doubling the living space of our house and pitched in to help, screwing handles on drawers and doors, varnishing shelves and laying down linoleum tile.

That was a long time ago, and the house has since become a source of memories. My father leaving for work every day with an apple and an American cheese sandwich—one slice of American cheese between two slices of Wonder Bread. My mother discovering Spam. The bottle of whiskey with a piece of ginsing in the bottom. Making tofu, my parents squeezing soybean curds through a cheesecloth screen. Picking slugs out of the watercress we gathered from the Olentangy River. Relatives coming to visit on summer nights. My mother and aunts playing mah jong in the basement, gossiping in Chinese to the rapid clack—clack—clack as they shuffled tiles beneath an incandescent light.