"Thank you for your research ...I read "Chopsticks in The Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers" and felt I had found a missing piece of history. My mother was born in the late 1930s and raised in Greenville, Mississippi... Your book gave me the opportunity to read about my family, although a bit indirectly. My mother, as well as all of her family, moved to California. She had been very hesitant to talk about life growing up... She told me stories here and there, but now I understand where they fit into her life overall. I always wondered what it was like in the segregated South,... I can now picture what (her) life must have been like."
Last week I received a surprise e-mail from a reader that was most gratifying. Writers do not hear how their books are received by the vast majority of their readers (which might be a good thing), but when you learn of a positive impact of your book, it makes the drudgery part of writing worthwhile after all.
"Thank you for your research ...I read "Chopsticks in The Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers" and felt I had found a missing piece of history. My mother was born in the late 1930s and raised in Greenville, Mississippi... Your book gave me the opportunity to read about my family, although a bit indirectly. My mother, as well as all of her family, moved to California. She had been very hesitant to talk about life growing up... She told me stories here and there, but now I understand where they fit into her life overall. I always wondered what it was like in the segregated South,... I can now picture what (her) life must have been like."
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On one book tour talk, I met a retired Chinese whose father and grandfather had run a restaurant around the 1920s. I inquired about the name of one restaurant, not really thinking that I might know anything about it. About a week later, I was in a discussion with a Chinese man in his late 20s, whose great grandfather had run a restaurant with the identical name in the same city. Surely, I thought, there couldn’t be two Chinese restaurants with the same name in the same town, could there? I was excited at the thought it could be the same restaurant and that these two men were somehow related but not know each other.
Double checking with my first source,he told me that the restaurant was originally run by two brothers, but that one of them usurped control of the restaurant when his brother had gone to China for a while, refusing to let him be involved with it when he returned. And thus began a bitter family feud according to this source. I do not know if these two descendants of the same restaurant know each other, or know about each other. I debated whether to inform both parties about what, and who, I know. I decided it best not to create problems by bringing up the past. Given that this family feud started almost a century ago, I do wonder if the descendants on the two sides know its history, and if so, are still bitter or whether they ‘just get along.' This was certainly a surprise part of my research on restaurants. At my book talks on Chinese laundries, grocery stores, and restaurants, there is invariably one or two people who ask me if a specific store is mentioned in the book. Given that these family businesses were so numerous, it is not surprising that I have to disappoint them since I am not trying to create a 'directory' or database in my works.
But, recently, when a woman inquired whether her family's San Mateo, Ca. laundry was included, I stunned her (and myself) by opening a copy of CHINESE LAUNDRIES and showed her a photo of the Ching Lee Laundry, and asked, "Is THIS your laundry?" This type of match may never happen again, but it was exciting that it happened at least once! On the occasion of a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the historic Far East Cafe in L.A.'s Little Tokyo, a Chinese who grew up in Birmingham, AL. introduced himself when he heard I was born in Georgia. During our conversation, it dawned on me that we might be distant relatives as many Chinese from one region in Guangdong had helped each other settle in the American South, all running laundries. Showing him how my Chinese name looks in Chinese, he confirmed that we were both descendants of the same clan.
My visit to Vancouver also gave me the opportunity to arrange a meeting with one of my cousins, on my mother's side, that I only discovered the existence of about 3 months ago. It was while thinking about all the small family restaurants in the Canadian prairies that I suddenly realized that it was highly likely that my aunt and her family, who I had never met, operated one of these ubiquitous Chinese cafes. As luck would have it, one cousin had moved to Vancouver so we had a wonderful get-acquainted meeting one evening during my visit.
At the end of May, I got to participate in a wonderful event that involved a Chinese dinner at a long-standing restaurant in Vancouver's historic Chinatown on Pender Street, Foo's Ho Ho. The traditional village foods were featured on the menu. Over 100 supporters of the restaurant, which is facing stiff competition from newer and bigger restaurants in other parts of town, came to dinner and to hear 3 "laundry kids," Elwin Xie, author Judy Fong Bates, and myself, talk about life as we experienced it growing up in the laundries that our parents operated. It was an enthusiastic audience and everyone enjoying learning about and sharing some Chinese immigrant history.
I have had many encounters that show how closely the Chinese immigrants from Guangdong, and their descendants, are linked, My trip to speak in Atlanta last month gave me 2 more examples, both in connection with Sweet and Sour!
First, I discovered that Alice, the mother-in-law of my cousin's daughter, Nancy had a relative who married into the family that ran the Mandarin Restaurant in N. Y. (described by Gilroy Chow in Sweet and Sour) that Gilroy's father ran. The next day, I met Winnie (Yao) and her mother, both who knew John and Lancy Wu whose Canton Restaurant in Savannah was depicted in "Sweet and Sour" by son, P.C. Wu. What a small world indeed! I had the wonderful opportunity to present a talk at the National Archives Southeast, located near the Atlanta airport. Rather than talk about any of my books, I focused on how the immigration archives informed my search and understanding of my parent's coming to the U S. in the 1920s.
I have several cousins in the region, two coming down from Knoxville, as well as several second cousins, so the event was also a family reunion of sorts. And, the event enabled me to make many new contacts and reconnect with others that I met on previous talks in Atlanta. In March, I spoke at my sister Mary's Senior Living Residence in Cupertino to about 50 interested people including, much to my surprise, my nephew Jack, from my mother's side, that we had lost contact with for a decade. It was through my location of the Canadian relatives on my mother's side that we were able to get reconnected to Jack who attended the talk with his wife and college age daughter. Now, I am hoping that I can meet two cousins in Vancouver on my mother's side that I 've never met when I go there to speak at the end of May. What a wonderful and unexpected bonus to my research!
As if all the side-effects of searching for and finding maternal relatives in Saskatchewan while researching Canadian Chinese Cafes for my SWEET & SOUR book were not enough excitement, I recently received an e-mail from a young writer in Boston who had read SOUTHERN FRIED RICE and found that it stimulated her interest in writing a novel about Chinese in the Deep South, specifically Augusta, from where her mother had grown up as part of the Chinese community there some 40 years ago.
She was particularly fascinated to learn more about the Chinese-Black interactions in the community where many Chinese immigrants ran mom and pop grocery stores in the black neighborhoods (I am not using the current term, African American, simply because that label did not exist during those days). I managed to put her in contact with other Chinese from the Augusta area, and they graciously provided her with a rich supply of anecdotes and memories of the past. She and her mother will be going to Augusta for a visit soon, which should prove very moving as it has been over 40 years since the mother has been there, and it will be the first visit for the daughter. I am delighted that Southern Fried Rice played a small role in generating the potential for an author to write more about the Chinese of the Deep South in the days when Jim Crow prevailed. |
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