Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America

2: Family: From Agrarianism to Cyberspace

2 Family From Agrarianism to Cyberspace FindingSacredGround November 1994 As I wander through Goon Doo Hong, a remote southeastern Chinese village where my father was born and where my mother gave birth to two of my sisters, I am overwhelmed by what I see, what I remember of my family’s history, and what I imagine life was like here for my parents when they were young. It is like Shangri-la, a pristine place untouched by time. The water-laden fields with symmetrical rows of rice stalks glisten in the warm November sun. In the background are rolling hills in various shades of mint, beige, and gray—a real-life Chinese brush painting. This village in Guangdong province seems like a dream to me, an overseas Chinese in search of family roots. But such a perspective is also an American middle-class conceit. I came here to Goon Doo Hong with some of my sisters to explore the generational and cultural gaps between us and our relatives in China, and, as it turned out, to experience subtle and sometimes wrenching differences among ourselves, a generation of siblings who have so much, yet so little, in common, who span preindustrial agrarianism and postindustrial cyberspace. None of us on the American side really knew what to expect. What we found was a tiny dilapidated brick and tile-roofed hut, ravaged by time, weather, and natural disasters. But we found much more—distant cousins and a village life that was little changed from the time when my father first journeyed to the United States in 1912 and when he finally took his wife and three daughters with him in 1933. 30 Our family story, while not unique, illustrates the dynamic history of Chinese America and, by extension, the Chinese Diaspora. Some of my nuclear family was born in China, some in America, all within one generation . To think of the distances traveled—physically, culturally, emotionally —is to be humbled by the tenacity of the human spirit. To us, of course, our journey of discovery was special. My five living sisters now range in age from the early seventies to mid-fifties, and I am in my early fifties. The time was right to reverse the journey my family made sixty-one years ago. The journey began with our father, Gee Seow Hong, which was only one of his names. In the village he was known as Gee Bing Do. In the United States, he was first called Gee Ghee Geng, then later Gee Seow Hong. My father left Goon Doo Hong at the age of sixteen, pushed by his mother to find his fortune in Gum Saan, the Cantonese words (gold mountain) for the United States of America. My father’s particular journey took place more than a half century after the discovery of gold in California. For the poor and ill-educated villagers in the Pearl River Delta of southeastern China, Gum Saan was a magical place to get rich, then retire back home. My father settled in Oakland, California, amid a small, tight-knit community of Chinese from nearby villages. Over the next twenty years, he returned to Goon Doo Hong several times to father daughters, but he always returned to Oakland, to resume his prosaic American adventure. It’s been thirty-three and twenty-one years, respectively, since my father and mother died in their adopted country. During those years the lives of their children grew complex, filled with their own children’s lives and with their work and other pursuits, worlds apart from Goon Doo Hong. The strands of the close-knit Chinese American family stretched thin in the years after our parents had passed on. Nonetheless, each of the siblings harbors a curiosity to one degree or another about where we came from. For me, the curiosity could be traced to a mixed cultural identity. I was born in 1941 into an immediate cultural environment of Chinese immigrants surrounded by white, black, and Mexican Americans. In the 1950s, there was no particular currency in flaunting one’s Chinese-ness. My sisters, whether Chinese- or Americanborn , and I were developing dual identities. Even as I made my way through college and a journalistic writing career, which at times took me far from my Chinatown roots, I could not—would Finding Sacred Ground 31 not—shed part of my core existence, my Chinese-ness, whatever that was...