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Uncle Toisan

By Charlie Chin

Submitted on March 21, 2009 to the Chinese Historical Society of America

Word count: 12,144 Pages: 21

“Uncle Toisan” is a History Alive Museum Theater piece performed in the Chautauqua format which has three sections.

1. The presenter as the historical character gives a monologue in the first person about their life and times.

2. The presenter takes questions from the audience and answers them as that character.3. The presenter steps out of character and discusses the times and circumstances of the

character and things the character that could not have known.

This script is written as a continuous monologue for a solo performer. There are no detailed stage directions as the presentations will take place in a wide and varied set of venues that may vary from small classrooms to full scale theater stages. The monologue is composed of four parts;

A. Coming to America and the Angel Island Experience.B. Chinese Americans serving in the United States Armed Forces during World War Two.C. Works stories of Restaurants and Laundries.D. Old and New Chinatown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A presentation that includes all four sections in their entirety may take more than two hours to present. Therefore it is assumed that most presentations, for example in school classrooms and in libraries, will focus one or two parts of the whole monologue for an hour or less.

The character is a composite and representative whose life accounts and anecdotes were collected from senior members of the Chinese American community. While some are popular urban folktales of the Chinese American experience that been heard and passed along in a social context, in laundries and in restaurants, in fact many are first person accounts of incidents and experiences from extended family members and friends.

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Toisan ( Putonghua:Taishan, Cantonese:Toisan, Toisanese:Hoisan.) is a small district that borders the South China sea, in Guang Dong Province about 100 kilometers southwest of Guanzhou (Canton) and 80 kilometers west of Macau. It is one of four districts or Say Yup which include the districts of Enping, Hoiping and Sunwui. The combination of overpopulation, natural disasters, and social upheavals, led to repeated waves of immigration from the tiny area in the nineteen and into the twentieth century. Before the normalization of quotas for Chinese immigrating to the United States in 1968, the Toisanese, depending on the city and state, represented 60 to 80 percent of the Chinese American community. In their home province of China, they were simple famers, fishermen, shopkeepers, and common laborers. Their reputation was that of a clannish, loud, rough edged, rebellious group of country folk who tended to be more loyal to their villages than to the national government of China.

The character called “Uncle Toisan” is born in Guangdong, China in 1923 and enters the United States as a 17 year old “paper son.” These were the Chinese men who had bought identification papers from other Chinese who had lived in the United States, and then use these papers to impersonate the sons of legal residents to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He is detained at Angel Island Station in 1940 and then later drafted to fight on the Allied side in World War Two.

He returns to America to face discrimination as a labor in the Chinese restaurant and Hand Laundries. From the Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 to the Civil Right Acts of 1964, “Uncle Toisan” is a witness to the changing attitudes, demographics, and laws of the United States.

The scene opens with an elderly Chinese man sitting on a chair and playing the Er Hu (Chinese violin). He stops a couple of times as passing tourists drop a coin or dollar into his plastic bucket. He thanks then out loud and then after they pass inspects the bucket and makes an aside comment about them before going on to play again.

“Thanks. Have a good day.” “Jerk!” “God bless you Sir. Have a nice day.” “Rockefeller just called, he wants his quarter back.” “Thank you Madame, you are very kind.” “Now I’ve got enough money to last the rest of my life, unless I want to eat and sleep under a roof.”

The character stops, stands, places the Er Hu on the chair, stretches his limbs and begins to speak.

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“I’m telling you things haven’t been the same since the 1989 Quake knocked down the highway entrance to Chinatown. Me, the shopkeepers around here, they call me Uncle Toisan. I’m here, right on Grant Ave, everyday, as long as the weather is good. I make a few bucks playing in the street, to help out my nephew and his family. They live with me over there on Pacific Street. It’s just temporary until they get on their feet. I’m down here playing the Yee Ying, they call it a Er Hu in Mandarin. I’m not very good at it. Only been playing for a couple of years, but then the Er Hu is one of the few instruments that sounds the same whether you’ve been playing for two days or twenty years. I’m telling you on a cold day, the sound of this fiddle could take the paint off of a Toyota.

Always like to play a little, only sometimes when it’s too damp or rainy, my left arm acts up. Old war wound. You know, the big one, WW ll. I got the Purple Heart for that. But I don’t wear it. Too many boys got one for wounds much worse than mine.

Well it’s a long story. See, it started back in the village in China. That’s where I was born, Hoisan district Guangdong province, China. When I reached about 15 years of age, my father started thinking where he wanted to send me to work overseas. That’s when my uncle came back from Vietnam. He had worked as a houseboy for a French family for twenty years. Back then the French used run Vietnam. That’s why they write with Western letters, when the French came in, they couldn’t understand the Chinese characters they use to use, so they made everybody there use a western alphabet.

In our village, cousins my age were planning to go overseas or had already left. Oh yeah, back in China things were so bad in Guangdong Province, most healthy men went overseas to make a living. That’s why there are Toisan and Cantonese people everywhere. When I was a boy back in the village, my father told me that between 1856 and 1908, Toisan had fourteen big floods, seven typhoons, five famines, four earthquakes, four plagues, two long droughts. On top of that, we had a kind of Civil War of own. The Hakka and the Punti War. That’s what they called it. The war started between the Hill People, that’s the Hakka, it means the “Guest People.” That’s cause they only got to Guangdong province about five hundred years ago, sort of looked at as “foreigners,” and the Punti People, who lived mostly in the valleys.

You know what happens in these things. The war started over something but after 12 years of killing, massacres, burning down villages, and revenge, mostly everybody forgotten what the war was about in the first place. When all was said and done, about 30 thousand people died and another 100, 000 people were left homeless. That’s why most able bodied people left to go someplace else. If you stayed home Guangdong, you couldn’t survive.

We used to have a saying, “Starve at home or drown at sea. What’s the difference?” Going overseas to make money was dangerous but you could get lucky and come back after twenty or thirty years with enough money to buy a little land and retire.

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Anyway, I had an Uncle who made his money working as a house boy and labor contractor for well-to-do French families in Saigon. The French ran Vietnam before World War Two. He came back to the village to retire and told my father it would be a good idea to have me get ready to go overseas to Vietnam. He had contacts and I could make some money. So from the time I was fifteen until I was seventeen, every two or three days, my Uncle would come over and give me a lesson in how to speak French. Une, der, twa, and so forth. Bon jour, bon soir, au revoir, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, like that. I always had a knack for languages. So after a while, I could parle the Francais enough to get a job.

Well, meanwhile the world situation was getting worse and worse. By 1939 Japan and Germany were trying to take over the world and by the time I should have been going to Vietnam my father told me, he had changed his mind about where he would send me. A cousin in the next village had some papers for sale, the kind of papers you needed to get into the United States. You became somebody else, see. You have to pretend to be somebody else. Why?, because the US didn’t want Chinese people here. Back in 1882, the United States put up something called the Chinese Exclusion Act. That’s a fancy name for “we don’t want Chinese people.” Sometimes I think they’re still not too happy us being here, believe me.

My father bought these papers that said that I was the son of a Chinese who had been in the USA before. The law said Chinese weren’t allowed to become American citizens, no matter how long you were here. All you could be was a “resident.” I still get the “Willys” when mail comes to me marked, “Attention Resident.” It reminds me of the old days.

Anyway, what Chinese men, who worked in the States, maybe restaurant or laundry, would say is, I’m going back to China for a year to take a vacation and then, I’m coming back. So when this Chinese guy came back to the America a year later, the immigration guys would ask, “Did you have any children in China?” So the Chinese guy would say, “Oh yeah, my wife and me have make a son.” So they would give you a piece of paper saying “the bearer of this paper is the son of a Chinese resident who was here before.” This was so your son could get in later. The Americans didn’t want any Chinese women here, so Chinese men would say, “We have make a son,” if they had one or not. Didn’t matter if you did or not, or if you had a daughter, you always said you had a son. Because 17 years later when you wanted to retire, you could sell the certificate to somebody who wanted to come to America.

That reminds me of story I heard when I first got here. Seems there was a big earthquake and fire in San Francisco back 1906. We heard about it in China. I think the Empress of China tried to send some money to help the American people out, but the President refused to take it. Didn’t want to take charity from foreigners I guess. Well, San Francisco city hall burned down to the ground and some Chinese guys who were here realized that all the birth records were gone too. See, if you were born in the United States, there weren’t many, but if you were born in the United States, you could be a citizen, but not if you just came by boat. So these Chinese men

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started saying they had been born in San Francisco back in the 1800’s, and the Americans could disprove it one way or the other.

So my father bought the papers, and they came with a coaching book. He gave me the book and said, “Now you have to study this.” I asked, “Why?” He explained, “The Americans don’t want Chinese people. So they gonna ask you lots of questions. If you don’t answer the question the right way, they gonna send you back to China.” Well, I was young and smart. So I studied that book until I knew it heart. How many steps from the house to the main road? How many windows in your house? How many sisters and brothers do you have? Where is your village duck pond? How many people live in the house across the road from your house? All kinds of stupid questions like this.

So I’m busy studying this coaching book when my father gave me another surprise. He said to me one day, “Get up and come with me. We’re going for a walk.” Now my father never asked me to take a walk with him so I knew something was going on. We took a long walk to the next village, a place called “Swallow Hill,” about a couple of miles down this dirt road, and then we went into a big house with a large gate. On the gate was written the family name, “Wong.” Inside a servant saw my father and shouted, “The guests have arrived. The guests have arrived.” Other servants came out of the back of the house. They asked us to sit down, offered us tea and cigarettes. I didn’t smoke then but my father took one, lit it up and then put another one in his pocket for later. My father still hadn’t said a word. Just when I was getting up the courage to ask what was going on, a middle-age couple came out to greet us. With them was a young girl, maybe 15 or 16, just a kid. As my father and the couple went through all this formal talk, it dawned on me that I was going to be married. My father must have arranged a quick marriage for me before I was to go overseas.

Well, a lot of old timers did this. Some people worried that if you sent the boy overseas, he might find a new life, and forget his family in China. So to make sure, even if you didn’t come back, that you would always send money back home, they would marry a boy so he had a family in China. His obligation was to always send some money back.

This kind of thing was rough on the girls. They would only be a teenager, and the next thing they know, their married to some boy they never met before and they have to leave their own family and go live with the husbands family. If they were lucky, they had a son to raise and got some respect for that. But if they had only girls, or they couldn’t have babies, they would just be treated like a servant in the husband’s house. She would just be a slave to his parents. I know several families where the wife was left in the village for seven, ten, maybe twenty years or more while the husband worked overseas. Sad, really.

Well, like all young men, I was interested in having sex, so I thought, “Why not?” And I guess I went along with the whole thing because that what people did back in those days. I

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didn’t know any different. The girl’s name was Autumn Jade, nice name. She wasn’t beautiful but she wasn’t ugly either, so I didn’t care one way or the other.

Usually it takes about of months to do all the rituals but because I was leaving soon, they sort of pushed everything up real fast. The families exchanged the regular gifts, a goose, a whole roast pig, that kind of thing. And then a small wedding banquet for just the near family. The custom of those days was for the husband’s family to sort of “oooo” and “ahhh” over the girl when she first came to the house, and then later at the banquet to make fun of her. Well, after all the rituals and customs were over, she and I were taking to a room that was going to be ours from then on, and the family closed the door behind us.

The room had a bed that the women of the family had made up with fresh linen and pillows. Everything had little flowers sewn on in design, and a big quilt that was our wedding present. We were just kids, so we didn’t know what to do. But we figured it out. And the next morning, my aunts came into the room and grabbed the sheet on the bed right away. They were busy looking for something. When they found it, a little bit of a blood stain, they broke into laugher and make lewd jokes to me and my new wife. We had about two weeks of happiness before I had to leave.

Finally, the day came when I was going to the ship to America. My father walked me down to the little ferry boat that would take me to Hong Kong. He was so nervous. “Don’t forget, the papers say you’re 21 years old, so stand up straight, try to look taller. Don’t forget, when you get to San Francisco, find the streets of the Chinese people, and go to our family association. Don’t forget, when you can see the land, throw the book over the side of the ship. They find you with that book, they’re going to send you back to China.” I told him, “Alright, alright don’t so nervous guy. I know what to do.” So I said good-by to my father. When I got a little bit down the road, I stopped to look back. I didn’t know that would be the last time I would ever see my family and the rooftops of my home village in China.

We traveled on the ship, it was a steamer in those days, for about almost three months. You had to take the long way around, not just straight across. One day, I was down stairs talking to somebody, when upstairs a Chinese boy started shouting in Chinese,”Loy ya, Loy ya,” Come, come, I can see the land. Everybody got excited and ran upstairs. Yeah, we could make out coast line. Everybody was so busy looking at San Francisco, I realized this was a good time to get rid of my book. So I took it to the other side of the ship to throw it in the water. When I looked down over the side of the ship, there were maybe twenty or thirty books floating in the water. Then I knew, many of those boys were just like me. “Paper Sons.” We all thought we were going to San Francisco right away but first they put us on a place called Angel Island. Right in the Bay, it’s still there. I don’t know why they call it Angel Island, it’s not like heaven.

Every week they ask you questions. I had to stay there for about two months. There was a funny thing that happen while I was there. Like I said, the American who ask Chinese boys who

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had gone back home for vacation whether they had any children with their wife when they were in China. Well, this one farmer was so proud that he had a baby girl when he went back to China, when they asked him if he had any children he said, “Yes, we have make a baby girl.” The White man looked at him, and asked him again, and the farmer nodded his head, “We have make a baby girl.” The White man stood up and said, “Wait here.” He went off and in five minutes came back with five or six other uniformed men. “I want them to see you,” he said, and took out a cigar out of his pocket and gave it to the farmer saying, “Chinaman, there are over three hundred Chinamen on this Island and everyone of them had a baby boy in China. You are the only one he had a baby girl.”

They had a yard outside in the back of the wood building. You could go out and stretch you leg, get a little exercise. Over the wall, because the ground kind of sloped down, you could see other people on the other side. They had Russians, and Japanese. What got our attention is that they had Japanese women on the other side. They were going to meet their husbands in California. Yeah, they called it “picture bride.” Japanese boys would work in California, save some money over the years, and then send for “Picture Bride.”’ Oh you know some girl that hadn’t gotten married by the age of 21 in those days was a “old maid.” Still it must have been rough. To end up getting married to a man you only knew by a photograph, but that’s what people did in those days.

So every day I would go out to the back yard and get some air. And I noticed this Japanese guy, real ugly, had a big mole on his face. You know, that kind that has a bunch of hair growing out of it. I saw this Japanese boy come ashore, hang around for about three days, and then I watch as he got his bag and went on the little boat that goes to San Francisco. I couldn’t believe it. I asked one of the other Chinese guys, “Hey, how come I’ve been here on this island for close to two and half months, and that Japanese guy is leaving for San Francisco after only three days.” My bunk mate looked sad and explained it to me. He told me that American people don’t like Japanese people either but they have to give them some respect. Japan had a war with Russia in 1905 and Japan won. Big deal, first time white people had been defeated by somebody who was yellow people. So they got to give Japan some respect, they got guns, they got ships. What does China have? Nothing, so they treat us like dogs, worse than dogs. But what can we do? China is old, China is wise, but China was weak. Let me tell you, when you can’t protect yourself, people walk all over you. That’s what happen.

Not much to do while you’re waiting the island. Some boys gamble, write letters, some boys wrote poems. Carved them on the wall so everybody could read. So sad, some of these boys, the whole family take what money they have and send this boy to America. If he can find work, and send money home, they won’t starve this winter. He scare he make mistake and be sent back, too bad, all that money gone and the still don’t have any food. Very sad. He can see San Francisco, just across the water. Just a little boat ride to San Francisco, but you got to wait.

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So every week on Angel Island, a guard, I think he was an Irish guy, he used to call out names. If he called your name and pretended like he was crying, too bad, it meant they were going to send you back to China. But if he called out your name and said, “Good Luck.” It meant that you would be on the little boat that goes to San Francisco in the afternoon.

One day I was eating lunch in the mess hall. The food was terrible. They used to give us butter and bread. First time I tasted butter I was surprised. I said, “Hey, it’s cold. It’s like cold fat. Ugh.” So one day I’m eating and the Irish guy started calling somebody’s name. Chan Gin Mon, Chan Gin Mon. I wasn’t paying attention because I was having a talk with this Chinese boy from Sunwui, a district close to mine. They are famous for oranges and pretty girls in Sunwui. As we are talking, I realized, the Irish guy was calling me, by my paper name. Chan Gin Mon. Then he said, “Good Luck,” so I ran to pack my stuff because I knew I would be on the boat to San Francisco that afternoon.

So next thing I know I’m in San Francisco. I find the streets of the Chinese people and my family association. Believe me, in those days, if you didn’t have a Family Association, you don’t have nothing. They told me, “Oh yeah we got a letter that you were coming. Go to this address, there’s a place to sleep and you can start looking for work. So there I was, with phony papers and living with nine other guys down in Chinatown in a common room, like a boy’s dormitory. We had five bed in two room and a kitchen and a toilet. Some of the boys worked night shift and some of the boys worked day shift, so the bed never empty. The first job I tried to get was working for a White man who wanted Chinese men to pick strawberries down near San Jose. I went down to the place where his truck was parked and stood in line. He wear big straw hat, and had a big clip board and pencil. I came up to the head of the line and asked me, “What name?” I said, “Chin.” Then he asked, “What age?” So I said, “17 year.” He frowned and waved his hand at me. “Sorry only boys 21 or over.” I was disappointed. I went back to the Gong Si Fong and when my friend asked what happen, I told him what the White man said. He laughed and said

“Go right back down tomorrow and tell him a different name and say you’re 21.”

“Won’t he recognize me?”

“You monkey head, White people can’t tell one Chinese from another and they have no idea how old a Chinese is.” So I went back the next day. When I got to the front of the line, I told him my name was Choy and I was 21 years old. He wrote in down and said, “Hurry up and get on truck Choy.”’ And that’s how I got my first job in America. I did the field labor work for about three month.

First letter I got from home had sad news. My young wife, Autumn Jade was dead. There had been some Typhoid going round in the village, and she caught it. Maybe from drinking dirty water, maybe something else but it was over in a few days. She came down with fever, couldn’t eat, had diarrhea, and died about three days later. That’s how it was back then, real fast. One

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minute you’re walking around, the next day their burning incense, and digging your grave. I wasn’t too upset, to tell the truth, because I hardly knew the girl. But it was sad.

Then the family association sent word that a cousin sent needed a prep man in his kitchen. Mostly you just chop vegetable, make sauce, stuff won hun, that kind of thing. But it was better than standing outside in the hot sun all day, without shade and no place to go to the bathroom. So I said good-bye to the fields and begin to learn the restaurant business in America.

The place had a big sign outside, “CHOP SUEY.” In those days, every Chinese restaurant had a sign that said, “CHOP SUEY.” Americans came in, just said “Choy Suey” and tea, and that was it. It wasn’t hard in those days. They only ordered one thing.

It was good business. The Americans like Chinese food and came day and night to eat. It was a good deal for them. You could get a meal for 25 or 30 cents in those days. We gave them a little something to start with, a glass of tomato juice or an egg roll. I don’t know why they call it an egg roll. There’s no egg in there. Then a cup of soup, maybe wonton or egg drop. Then the Chop Suey or Chow Mein. It not real Chinese food, not real Chow Mein. Early in the morning the boss get and chop some beef or pork. Add some cut up celery, bok choy, maybe bean sprout, like that. Then he leave it in a pot all day. Became like glue. I told him, “Hey that’s like glue. Nobody going to eat that! He said, “No, they love it.” I don’t believe it, yeah people come in and he put this Chop Suey over rice and they eat it like it was the best thing they ever had. And last, for dessert, you gave them a piece cut orange, scoop of ice cream, or fortune cookie. Let me tell you something. Food can be bad, service can be slow, but as long as they get that fortune cookie, they’re happy. I never saw a fortune cookie until I came to the United States, we don’t have them in China. I watched some American people read the fortune carefully, then put it in their wallet like it was message from God!

Several months go by, I try learn more and more English, as much as I could because I wanted to become a waiter. You made more tips as a waiter. The man I worked for was named Louie, Ah Gong. He was different that most of the other Chinese men that were here in American. His family had been in California since the Gold Rush back in 1849. His great grandfather made some money in those days and opened a store up near Sacramento. Not a very big store, just a regular Chinese grocery store. But because he had a store, when the Americans put in the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, he could stay because he was a merchant, not just a common laborer. He could also bring his wife and children over. So the Louie family had be here about four generations, maybe five. Now my boss had a daughter. She was born here too. Her name was Mei Ling Louie. She would work on the weekends as a cashier for her father and mother.

I can still see her face. She was young, and pretty, and going to school, college. The first time I saw her, I had a ball of hot wax stuck in my throat. I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t swallow. You might say I was sweet on her right off the bat. I had never seen a girl like her. Well, there were so few Chinese families over here, she was kind of a rare thing. She was pretty, and

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outgoing. She was a real American, chatty, and funny. She made jokes and smiled all the time. She liked me too. She would always ask me how I was doing and smile. I would get so embarrassed my face would turn red like I was drinking too much.

I started to wait all week just for the weekend so I would see her. I didn’t talk to her, I was too shy for that, but I would stand in the kitchen and look out the kitchen door, they had round windows you could see through, and watch her talk to the customers and make change. After a couple of months I started to think about maybe asking one of my friends to speak to her father about me marrying her. You know, make an “arrangement.” I asked a friend, his name was Ah Wing, to go to Mr. Louie, have tea and ask about a marriage proposal. Well, I gave Ah Wing a few bucks and a carton of his favorite cigarettes as a gift for doing me a favor and he went to speak to Mr. Louie. He came back to see me about two hours later. It was never going to happen. He told me that Mr. Louie had said it was impossible. Of course I argued to my friend that if it was a matter of the bride price, I could work hard for a couple of years and raise it. But Ah Wing sat me down and explained the whole thing to me.

“Don’t even dream of raising the bride price. Here in America there are 10 or 20 Chinese boys for every Chinese girl. The American Chinese families are so few, that a girl is worth a treasure to her family. Also, they are giving her a college education. That raises the bride pride even higher. She is to be the wife of an educated, rich man, not some common worker like you.”

“What is the bride price Mr. Louie is asking?”

“Ten thousand dollars US money.” I was young and in love so I said;

“I could get that money with hard work and some luck at the gambling house.” Ah Wing shook his head slowly.

“You don’t understand, even if you had the money, which you don’t, you still couldn’t marry her.”

“Why not?’ Then he spoke to me like I was a child.

“The Americans don’t want Chinese people here. You’re a “paper son.” You could never become a citizen because you weren’t born here. The best you could become under American law is a resident. She was born here. She is an American citizen. But the law says if she marries an ineligible alien, somebody who can’t become an American citizen, then she would lose her American citizenship. Even if she liked you, she wouldn’t give her American citizenship, and her father would never allow it. I’m sorry for the both of you.”

So that was it. I had to eat bitterness every weekend as I watched her at the cashier’s desk. Mr. Louie kept an eye on me too. I guess he just to make sure I didn’t try anything stupid. But I had given up the whole idea. It felt like somebody had taken out my heart from my chest with dull spoon. Mei Ling finished college and married a American Chinese boy later, his last name

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was Yee. There’s a lot of Yee’s in California. I know because I met some boys who worked with her husband in a Chinese restaurant. He had a degree in engineering but in those days, even though he was an American and had a college education, no White business would hire him. So to make ends meet, with his fancy degree and his American citizenship, he had to work the restaurants and wait on tables like the rest of us.

One morning, one of the other boys was listening to the radio in the kitchen and then starting shouting “Wahoo! Wahoo!” He started running around the kitchen shouting the Japanese had bombed some place in Hawaii called Pearl Harbor in Wahoo and the US was in the war. We didn’t know what it meant. For the next couple of months there was nothing but talk of war. Sometime later I got a letter in English. I had to ask one of the other boys to read it to me as my English wasn’t that good yet. It said, “Greetings! from the President of the United States.” He wanted me to go to war for the Americans. I couldn’t believe that the President of the United States knew where I was. Even my own father didn’t know where I was. But the deal was that most of us were listed as young men, not married, and no families. So many Chinese boys here were what they called 1 A. They had a system, I don’t think they used it any more, were the worst was 4 F and the best was 1 A. You didn’t have to be a citizen to be drafted into to the military, they’ll take anybody who is a resident. Well, that was me. According to my papers, I was 1-A, just my luck.

I had to show up for basic training. Just me and five thousand white guys. And after about six weeks they had us line up on parade for the major to review before we went to Europe. The Major looked us over and walked up and down the lines. He came by me, looked at my name tag and said, “Chin huh? Well, we’re going to make a number one cook out of you.” So I said, “Begging pardon sir, I already can cook. I was hoping can learn something I can use after the war. So he said to me, “Don’t worry son, we’ll take care of it.” The next day I was assigned to the Artillery Unit.

They sent across the county to ship out to Europe. We passed though many towns and cities. Women and girls came out when the train stopped at the station and gave us donuts and coffee. They gave stuff to anybody in an American uniform. It was nice. Then they put us on to the ships for Europe. We had to wait in England for D-Day. Oh that was a big deal. The first Allied boys to get a shore, well, the Germans were waiting for them. It was a raw deal. A lot of them died. But soon the Allied forces were turning the war around pushing the Germans back. By the time I got shipped to France most of the fighting was over.

One morning, on the base, I noticed some locals, French farmers mostly, by the fence trying to trade food for cigarettes, chocolates, whatever they could get. I spoke to them dans Francais and traded a pack of Lucky Strikes for a couple dozen eggs and some fresh butter. I made a small fire outside, found a frying pan and invite my buddies for a treat. Some real fried eggs, sunny side up. All the army gave us was powdered eggs, disgusting stuff, so this was a welcome break from that army chow.

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The smell of those fresh frying eggs got around the camp and a captain came out to see what was going on. His name was Captain Peters. He came up to me and said, “Soldier, where did you get those eggs? Did you steal them?” I told him, “No Sir, I traded some Lucky Strikes smokes for them with those locals.” He took a look and turned back to me to ask,”Soldier, how did you communicate with them?” I explained that I could speak a little French. He shouted for a sergeant to come and take my name down. I thought I was in trouble because we had been warned not to fraternize with the French locals. He told the sergeant, “When this man is finished eating he is to be assigned to me as my personal driver and translator.”

Bang, that was it. You could have knocked me over with feather. All my buddies were laughing and saying, “Oh you’ve got the life of Riley now. No fox holes and marching in the mud for you. It’s clean sheets and hot meals in the HQ now. It was true, officer’s drivers got special duty. You have to be on call all the time, but you got to sleep inside, and when there was food left over from the officers mess, even good stuff like ice cream and canned fruit sometimes, the Mess stewards would come outside and give the drivers a plate.

There was only one problem, I didn’t know how to drive. But I traded some chocolate bars for a fresh chicken from the locals. Un poule por chocolate? Oui, chocolate por une poule. It wasn’t much of a chicken, maybe about a pound with the feathers on. And then in trade for the chicken, I got one of the GI’s in my unit to show me the basics of driving a car. I fooled around with the jeep on a back road on my own for a couple hours, and got the hang of it. And because all the roads were all shot up with mortar shell holes and the jeep was a rough ride no matter how you drove it, so nobody noticed what bad driver I was. I just kept on faking it until in about a week, I could really drive that jalopy pretty good.

Well, it wasn’t long before we had the Jerrys on the run. This was in 1944. The whole war was turned around and we were pushing the Germans back into Germany. But they kept trying to hold their lines and whenever they could, they would counter attack. But Germany was going to lose the war that was pretty clear. They had a supply problem, they didn’t have any supplies to spare. Every time the Germans were told to retreat or evacuate, they had to take everything with them. See, if they left their equipment behind. If they just dropped everything and ran, then they would have do without. The German army was stretched thin and they didn’t have any more to give them. But if the G.I.’s had to run for it, you could just stand up and run. When the line reformed in the rear, they would issue the allied troops more stuff, you know ammo, food, blankets, and so on, so you were outfitted again.

So what happens was General Patton, “Old Blood and Gut’s” made a promise at the Battle of the Bulge that every American soldier on the front lines would get a Christmas dinner. Now he wasn’t concerned about how we were going to do that, he just made a big show about and told the Quartermasters that it was going to be done. First thing, the front still had a shooting war going on and the line kept shifting back and forth as the Jerry’s kept trying to push us back.

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Second, that December was so cold, and so snowy, your breath froze as soon as it came out of your mouth. I mean it was colder than your mother-in-laws hello.

About 36 hours before Christmas day, a snow storm started. Worse I’d ever seen. The snow was coming down in clumps as big as your fist and outside you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face. But Patton had promised every boy on the front a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and by golly he was going to keep that promise.

They barely had enough trucks to deliver the food and definitely not enough drivers. Yes, you guess it. In the middle of the afternoon I was told I had been reassigned to drive one of the trucks to the front lines in the middle of the snow storm, drop off the food, it was hundred frozen turkeys, and come back to pick up another load and do it again. I bundled up as best I could and went to the car pool to be assigned a truck. They set me up in a old junk heap that should be retired but it was needed so, they filled the back up with those frozen turkeys, gave me some gas, and pointed me towards the front. They had to point because you couldn’t see anything beyond twenty yards.

I started to drive that heap of junk and it bounced along in the snow. In about an hour I couldn’t see the road at all and my hands were frozen stiff. I kept driving with one hand and putting the other one in my pocket to try and keep them warm. The next thing I know, there was a big hole in the road, the front end of the truck fell into it, my head hit the ceiling of the truck cab, and something white went flying pass my head and out the windshield. The truck was still moving and began rolling over and over. I blacked out thinking that’s it. My number came up.

I came to in a hospital. I was in a bed and there were a bunch of brass at the foot of my bed saluting me. One of the officers was making some kind of speech about duty and sacrifice. My first thought was, “What happened? Did somebody die? Was it me? Oh my god, are all my parts still here?” I looked down at myself and saw that my left arm was in a cast. Otherwise I was O.K. Then they pinned a Purple Heart on my chest and moved down to the next bed where they did the whole rigamarole again.

Later, I asked a nurse what happened. She said they found me in the overturned truck wounded and passed out. They figured I must have hit by a mortar shell on the road and flipped over. She said, “You’re lucky soldier. You got a million dollar wound. You’re going home.” Lying there in the hospital bed over the next two days, I pieced together what must have happened. The sudden stop when I hit the big pot hole must have caused all those frozen turkeys to come flying out of the back of truck. That was the last thing I saw. Frozen turkeys flying pass me and going out the windshield. One of them twenty pounders must have hit me in the elbow and smashed me up pretty bad. So I didn’t say anything. First I got sent back to England and then the boat to New York City, and train back to California.

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So whenever it’s a little too damp or the weather gets stormy, my old war wound acts up. I believe I am the only American soldier that received the Purple Heart in World War 11 for having been wounded by a twenty pound frozen turkey. They call it “friendly fire” now.

So after the war, somebody told me that the United States had repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, while I was overseas. This must have been around 1943. Yeah, well you see, the problem was that America had made all this loud talk about being the “home of the brave, and land of the free,” everybody was equal and Americans were fair. But they had an Exclusion Act against one of the Allies. There was the Axis powers, that was Nazi Germany, Military Government of Japan, and Fascist Italy. And China was one of the Allies. Well, what they called ‘Free China,” that parts that were not under Japanese occupation. A friend of mine over there at Lonnies Café on Clay Street told me all about it. We were having coffee and he treated me to a Dai Bow, always like Lonnie’s Dai bow, anyway. He said the Americans struck down the Exclusion Act and Chinese could enter the US legally. I thought to myself, great, I could bring my sister over and maybe some other family members. But then I found out that government had set a quota, that’s how many can enter the country, at 105 Chinese people per year. Some big favor, we help you win the war and you let a hundred of us in a year. Haa. What are you going to do?

I had a few months to rest up and then I needed a job. I was walking down Grant Ave one day when somebody called out, “Wei Ah Hung!” I turned around because this was my real name, not my paper name, so I knew whoever was calling out to me must a friend. It was my friend from the boat when I came over, my friend from Sunwui. His name was Ah Fong. We smiled, slapped each other on the back, and went for tea. When he got called up, they ran him around.

First, they wanted to put him in with the Japanese boys that were born in the States. Those guys had their own outfit. 100th Battalion, 442nd. Army sent them over to Europe and they took a hell of beating. Pardon my French. I asked him if he had been sent to Europe and he said, “No.” It seems, that at the last minute, the Americans wanted to have a backup support team of Chinese boys for the Flying Tigers. Did you ever hear of them? They were volunteers that flew the few planes that China had against the Japanese air force. There wasn’t that many Chinese planes and they really didn’t do much, but it was good publicity. It was good for morale during war time. Problem was, there was a support team ready to go to China when they started but Chiang Kai Shek said “no.” The men were American Negros, back then they didn’t let the Negros have a rifle. Guess they were afraid of what they might do. After what the White people did to them, I wouldn’t blame them.

But anyway, Chiang Kai Shek didn’t want “negros” in China. I don’t’ know why. Just prejudice I guess. But he was the boss, leader of “Free China.” So they took a couple of months to train a bunch of American Chinese fellows to repair and service planes. That’s what Ah Fong did during the war. They put them in a place called Yunnan, that in the south of China. He said,

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even though they didn’t speak the dialect in that part of China, it was still better, because they could get off base every now and then and get some real Chinese food.

When the war was over, he was sent back to the States, like me. He told me that he got in the Hand Laundry business. A cousin of his wanted to retire and sell his business. Ah Fong had a few buck from his Army poker games, so he jumped at the opportunity. He had his own laundry now. He looked at me and asked, “What you going to do, now you no more soldier boy?”

“I don’t know, maybe go back to the restaurant business.”

“Well if you can’t find anything, come see me. I got more work than I can handle. If you got a few hundred dollars to invest, come in with me and be a partner. We’ll work together”

He wrote down the address of the laundry and told me to stop by if I needed work. I hung around Chinatown for another few weeks but so many boys were coming back from the war, there weren’t too many jobs. I had a few hundred dollars I had saved in envelope I kept wrapped in my belt. So I said to myself, “I’ll just do the laundry until the restaurant business opens up again. Then I’ll get out.” I went up to the Bronx to see my friend Ah Fong. He smiled and waved me to the back of the laundry. It was just three rooms. He did the laundry part in the front of the store, sorting and washing in the back room, and in a side room, he had a stove, little gas two burner, a sink, a toilet, a table, couple of chairs. It had just enough room for two people to live.

That’s the way we had to do it. You couldn’t rent a place nearby, back then white people won’t rent an apartment to Chinese people. They would be scared that the other white people would move out. So if you had a laundry, in a nice white neighborhood, you usually had to live in the back of the store. It was alright, because you saved a little money that way. And the hours were long, 12 hour day. People came in with a bag of dirty laundry, you gave them ticket with a number on it, that was important, very important. Some of them thought it was funny to cheap the Chinese Laundry, they would come and say, “I don’t have my ticket but that’s my laundry right there on the shelf.” And they would try to take a package that you know that belong somebody else. So have to you tell them,

“No this not you laundry. You must have ticket.” Oh then they make big noise and try to scare you.

“I’m going to call the cops.”

“Go ahead, call cop.” You see, you can’t be afraid, you have to stand up for yourself.

“They going to send you back to China.”

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“Good, then I don’t have spend the money for the ship ticket. Get out of my store you big nose Lo Gwai.”

You see, you can’t let people walk over you. That’s the way life is. So I learned the laundry business. They give you the dirty laundry, you had to sort the laundry, you know dark with the dark, white with the white, and then wash the clothes. Dry the clothes, and at the end you had to starch, iron, and fold the clothes. That was the hard part for me. I could iron pretty good, but I had trouble making the shirt fold just right. It had to be a perfect rectangle. Then you finished it with a strip of blue paper that had a glue strip on it. In the beginning, all my shirt were a little crooked. But I got the hang of it after while and settled into the job. The part I don’t like was the mangler. This a machine for sheets. Like a big monster, you have to feed the sheet in one end and then make sure it doesn’t get out of line or it will come out uneven. If you not careful, your arm could be eaten up if you don’t watch your fingers. Maybe the machine would drag you into the rollers and crush you like bug. I never liked that machine.

You got up before sun, made a cup of tea to drink while you worked, so you won’t lose any time sitting around drinking tea. Then you begin to iron. You stand there and look out the front window. As the sun come up, you the man who brings the newspapers, the man who deliver the milk, the children going to school, the men going to work. And you ironing. Then, those days they sent the kids home for lunch, then they went back to school. The mothers go out to buy food and other things. Still your ironing. Then the kids come home from school, go in the street and play, later the husband come home from work. And still you ironing. Then after dinner, the people come out to take a walk, get some air, maybe go to the movie. Still you ironing. When they come home 11:00 O’clock, our light the only light on the street. They stick they head in the door, “Charlie, you still open?”

“Yeah, we still ironing.”

Long, long hours. But the best thing, you have your own business. Chinese people believe that. It’s always better to own your own business then to work for somebody else. Nobody can bother you.

Now, just about this time a strange thing happened. Ah Fung and I used to get this newspaper called the China Daily News. It was put out by the “China Hand Laundry Alliance,” that was sort of like our union, you know for Chinese laundry men. There was nothing special about it, it just had stuff about China, what was going on back home, that kind of thing. Well one night, after we had gone to sleep in the back room, there was a loud banging on the front door. We didn’t know what the heck was happening. Ah Fong got up in his underwear and looked out from behind the cloth curtain we had between the front and the back room, and turn back to me

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like he had seen a ghost. He whispered to me, “There’s some white men in big coats knocking on the front door. They look like police men. What should we do?”

I got up and put my pants on so I could think more clearly. I said, “If they’re police, we can let them in. We haven’t done anything wrong.” Ah Fong came back to find his clothes and I went up to the front door. The front of the store had big glass windows and so they could see me coming to open the door. The men were angry and pressing their wallets with their identity cards and badges on them and shouting,

“Open the door Charlie. We’re the F.B.I.” When I opened the door, they pushed pass me to the back room and found Ah Fong trying to put his clothes on. The big white men began shouting again and looking around and in the closets. “Who else lives here? Show us you papers, make it fast. Don’t try anything cute.” We brought out our papers, ID, license, all that kind of stuff. They took our papers roughly, and looked through them. Then they became even louder, ‘Where did you buy this phony papers Charlie? You think you can fool us with this crap? You better tell us who you really are.” I looked at Ah Fong and he looked at me. We both knew the best thing was not to act scared. So Ah Fong just kept repeating his name and pointing to the picture in his ID papers and then at his own face to show it was him. They push us around a bit and then began to take everything out of our closet. Then they grabbed the beds, cots that we slept on , and began to throw the mattress over and kick our boxes over, push over the table. They weren’t looking for anything, just making a mess to scare us. Well, they did a good job because we were plenty scared.” Then all of the sudden they turned around walked out of the laundry and were gone out the front door. It all happen so fast, that if there wasn’t a big mess in the laundry and in our sleeping room, I might thought it was a dream. We spent an hour or two cleaning up and going back to sleep. We couldn’t figure out why they came to bother us. The next week, about eight days later, they did it again. The same thing all over again. They did this every one to two weeks for a couple of months. They always came at late at night, when they knew we would be in the back room. Always making a big mess for us to clean up. We had no idea what was going on until Ah Fong went to Chinatown in Manhattan and found out from somebody what was going on.

We didn’t know that the newspaper that we used to read, the China Daily News, that the FB I thought it was a Communist paper. This guy, Joseph MacCarthy, Senator Joe MacCarthy, he had everybody all riled up about there being Communists in the United States. He figured if China was a Communist country, then all Chinese people must be communists. See, the paper China Daily News, used to advertise a bank in China that you could use to send money back home to the village in China. Heck, everybody was doing it. Most of the boys here were supporting their families back in China and sent money every month. The US government didn’t like the communists and told the men at the paper that they were trading with the “enemy.” The editor and some of the workers were deported, some became so frighten by the FBI, they committed suicide. Just make sure, the FBI got the list of all the people who signed up for that China Daily News, that included Ah Fong and me. We go the paper and our names were on that

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list. The FBI went around and looked up every single person listed on the China Daily News subscription, about 6,500 people, and gave them the 3rd degree. Just shook them up to see if they could find any Communists. All that suffering and pain. All for nothing. We just wanted news from home. It was just because the Americans were scared of the Communists. Let me tell you there were some Chinese people who used the fact that the white people were scared to get rid of people they didn’t like. They would go to the authorities and whisper, “Oh, so and so, I heard he’s a communist.” Then the government people would come and deport that person back to China. Some of them had been here ten, twenty, thirty years, lost they money, their business, everything. But if you were accused of being a “Red,” that was just too bad. They didn’t need any proof, the proof was that you were Chinese. If you were Chinese and somebody said you were a Communist, that’s was it, back to China for you. Everybody in Chinatown was frightened to even use their left hand. It was a rough time.

Just about 1959, I was in Chinatown one day, when I ran into an old friend named Ah Bing. He told me he had an uncle that was looking for a man that could speak English good to be a Maitre’d in this new restaurant. It was going to big and fancy. Everything was going to be first class. I asked him to introduce me to this Uncle and a few weeks later he did. He invited me to “Yum Cha,” you know, drink tea and me him. This was so we could just talk and see if we liked each other. Well we hit it off right for the start. His name was Lung Chin and was the best restaurant man I ever met. He was pioneer in his own way. He knew the restaurant business inside and out. He sort of took me under his wing and taught me everything there is to know.

He took me through the business step by step. How to make sure the purveyors aren’t cheating you by putting old fish under the fresh fish on top of the box. How to “marry’ the cheaper vodkas and scotch into the top shelf bottles and keep up your PC, that’s your profit percentages up. How much to bribe the building inspector, the health inspector, and the fire inspector. Tricks on how to remember a good customers name. What to say to bar customers when they’re crying into their beer. If it’s a lady, “get rid of him honey, he’s not good.” And if is a man, “What is it buddy? Money or women?” If it’s money, you say, ”You can take it with you when you go.” And if it women, “You live with them, you can’t live without them.” How to take old meat that ‘s ready to turn bad, add enough curry powder to kill a elephant, then called by an exotic name and charge twice as much.

“That dish? Oh that’s Indonesian Beef Curry. We don’t always carry it on the menu. It’s a delicacy in China.’

Yeah, old Lung Chin. I’m not afraid to say I loved that guy. He was like a second father to me. He used to work the floor for years. But his arches gave out and he had to sit down all the time. So he needed a man who could stand, speak to customers, and handle the floor staff, the waiters, the bartenders, the kitchen staff. So that’s what we did. He would sit off to the side in a

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special seat that was just for him. He had a plaque screwed on to the back of the chair that said, “Mr. Lung Chin, Manager.” He just watched and made sure I did everything right. After a while, he only had to nod or shake his head a little, and I would know what to do. If the customer was too drunk to serve Ah Lung would shake his head while looking at the ceiling. I would snap my fingers and one of the big boys from the back would come out and “86” the guy. That’s restaurant talk for “no more,” of something. When American people came in for “take out,” that was a way of calling it out to the kitchen so they would know what to do. For example, you would go to the kitchen and call out;

“Ngow yuk, chow mein, hong guy!” This means an order of Beef Chow Mein. It’s walking the street. See, that’s a take-out order. If it’s for a White guy you said, “Bot Guey,” or White Ghost, this means make a lot of gravy. American people like gravy. If you shout out, “Hok Guey.” This means it’s for a Black Ghost, so put a lot of soy sauce on it. They always like things to be salty. If the customer was a regular and was used to getting special treatment, Ah Lung would nod and pull his ear. See, that way I would know that this customer was going to be a good tipper and easy to deal with.

Just about this time, around 1960 I got a letter from distant cousin who had a store just outside of a place in the south called Mobile, Alabama. Way down in the south. He heard I was in the States and his son was getting married, so he invited me to the wedding. I spoke to my boss and he said that things were slow, so if I wanted to take a few days off and go to the wedding, it was alright. But I had to be back by the next Monday. I was excited about going and bought a bus ticket. I packed a little suitcase and took the Greyhound Bus. When we reached around Virginia and the Carolinas, something happened. When the bus would stop, you know so people could stretch their legs or get something to eat, the bus stations had signs that said, “White Only,” and “Colored.” I didn’t know what it meant. This one time I had to go to the bathroom to see a man about a horse, I could figure out which rest room I was supposed to use. I wasn’t “White” and I wasn’t “Negro.” I stood that sort of helpless until a station worker, a middle aged white guy came over and said, “What’s wrong son?”

I explained that I didn’t know which restroom I was suppose to use. He thought about it for a minute, and said, “You go into the White restroom and I’ll go in with you and stand outside the door. If any white people come in, I’ll telling that I let you in, that way you won’t get into trouble.” We went in, I took care of my business and then left. I just couldn’t get over how they treated Negros in the south.

Chinese people in the south? Oh yeah, there were families in the South, mostly storekeepers, generally stores, that kind of thing. Some of the towns were so small, the big stores didn’t think they were important enough to open a branch in. So Chinese opened little general stores in places like Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. There weren’t many of them

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but there were a few. Listen, you never heard anything as funny as a Chinese guy with a Mississippi accent.

When I got to the little town outside of Mobile, Alabama, my cousin came to the Bus station to pick me up. He must have been doing alright because he had a car to drive in, a Plymouth. Even though I hadn’t seen him since the village, I recognized him right away.

As drove around town to get to his store, I saw a two Negro people standing outside of the Post Office, two men with their hats off and with letters in their hands. I asked my cousin, his name was Ah Toy, “What is that Negro man doing?” He glanced over and told me that if a Black man wanted to mail a letter, he had to wait outside the post office until a White person came by, take off his hat, and then ask, “Please Sir, would you be kind enough to mail this letter for me?” The colored man couldn’t go inside himself. I’ll telling you what I know. You couldn’t believe how White people treated colored people before World War Two.

By the nineteen sixties, things were changing. The American kids were going crazy with this Rock and Roll thing. I had a friend down the block where I lived, an Italian guy, nice guy. He had a barbershop, mostly Italian guys were in the green grocery or the barber shops then. Well he kept shaking his head, telling me, “These kids are taking the bread out of my children’s mouth. The Hippies, they don’t wash, they don’t shave, they don’t get haircuts. They’re starving my children.” And the Black people were burning things down all over the place. You see, they kept asking for their rights. Which I guess is O.K. but they thought the white people were too slow. So the Black would get angry and start to burn something down. Mostly they burn down their own neighborhoods. This I don’t understand, if you’re going to burn somebody’s neighborhood down, why burn down you own? If the white man is making you upset, why don’t you go and burn down his neighborhood? But that’s not how it was. Listen, let me tell you, those black people weren’t all crazy. They had their reasons. You know, they white people would kill some black guy down south for just talking back to white man or worse, they would hang a black man for looking at a white woman. I’m telling you what I know.

By 1964 the American government was scared by all the going on, so they signed the Civil Rights Acts. I read about it in the paper. Well, things got a little quieter for the black people but a strange thing happened for the Chinese people here. Seems, the restricted quota for Chinese had to be stuck down. They made the quota the same as for other people, about 20, 000 a year. Can you imagine? The Chinese quota went from 105 per year to 20,000. This was about 1968, so all the sudden you started seeing new people in Chinatown, and they were families, not just young men looking for work. By 1970, the Americans recognized Red China, and normal immigration started for the first time since before 1882. It was like night and day.

That’s who coming in today. Some come to Chinatown but most, they got a little money a little education, they move to the suburbs right away. I call them the “XYZ” people. They all come from the north and have names that have X,Y, Z in them. You now, “Xia, Yang, Zhang,”

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like that. Those of us that were here before, mostly Cantonese, why we’re the old timers, we’re the minority now. Soon, they won’t be any of us left. They young kids, they go to school with the white people, they live in the white people’s neighborhoods, the work with the white people, they think they’re just like white people. Well, we’ll see about that. Let me tell you, when things are good, it’s “hey Charlie you’re just like me.” But when things go bad and there’s no money, its “Sorry Charlie, you got to go back to China.” Me?, By this time next year, maybe I’ll close my eyes and go to Colma. Yeah, there’s a big Chinese cemetery in Colma. My family association has my burial plot ready. They’ll ride me through Chinatown one last time, with the little Italian band, and then, I’m taking a one way trip to Colma.

Section Two:

If any of you have any questions, about Angel Island, World War Two, the restaurant and laundry business, or anything at all. Just raise your hand and I’ll try to answer them for you.

(At this point the presenter takes questions from the audience and answers them in character. This portion may contract or expand depending on the number of questions and the detail of the answers given.)

Section Three:

Depending on the grade level and the age of the audience members; a discussion about the research and development of the character, an outline of the Chinatown Experience and the Chinese American population today, and a projection of what is mostly likely to happen to the community in the next decade takes place.

The length and details of the three sections are tailored to fit the grade level, age, and interests of the audience and of course, the time frame allotted for the presentation.

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