Paper Sons of Paper Sons: My Family's Hidden Stories (Conclusion)

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

Once we had a family poem, now lost like so much else from the past. My father’s recollection of it differs slightly from what I’ve read about Chinese generational poems, so I don’t know if he misremembered, was inaccurate, or had lost some detail in translation. As he explained many years ago, family members (only men, I assume) received names corresponding to a word in the poem. All from the same generation drew names from words on the same line, and succeeding generations used succeeding lines. Perhaps because he was the youngest of three brothers, and as a paper son had changed family identity, my father was the last to be named this way—the 26th generation according to the poem.

Twenty-six generations reach back some nine hundred years to an unknown ancestor, an amount of time beyond our personal histories, beyond our stories and deep into myth. It is a legacy I can’t fathom. If our family name—Lee—originated with a document bought in a crowded boarding house, then we don’t know our true lineage. Being a fully assimilated American, I don’t feel the loss acutely. For my own children, however, I wonder about the heritage they will never touch, like the old family house now sold and gone, which they will never visit.

So I am between generations—between the immigrants in their 90’s who remember the old country and their original identities, and my daughters in grade school who know only this country and have friends with roots in many other cultures.

What did my grandfather think a hundred years ago when he first stepped off the boat onto American soil? Did he feel the cold wind at his back and look at the hills of San Francisco, a city with all its chaos, activity and opportunity? Did he reflect on the long, hard journey across the Pacific? Or did he just focus on finding his way in a frontier so far from home? Ultimately, I believe his experience was the same as every other immigrant’s: sacrifice, risk, danger, loss, loneliness and, through it all, hope for a better life and a new home.