The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration (review)

This book is a case study of a Chinese American family whose home in the U.S. is greater Los Angeles. The two pivotal patriarchs in this account are Yitang Chung, who came to the U.S. as an herbalist in 1900, and his son Sam Chung, who joined his father in 1915. After trying unsuccessfully to be an herbalist himself, Sam finally settled as an asparagus farmer on a piece of his father's land in the San Fernando Valley. Although Yitang and Sam were father and son, immigration authorities listed them as business partners, for Yitang had sold Sam's immigration papers to a relative who wanted to emigrate to America. The transnational history in this book is about the progenies of (1) Yitang, who (after his wife died in China in 1908) married Nellie Yee, a much younger American-born Chinese woman from Ventura, California, who bore three daughters and a son (all except one daughter married spouses from China); and (2) Sam, his much older U.S. immigrant son who left behind in China a daughter (Constance), a son (Tennyson), and a wife (Zhiyuan), who later in 1923 came with daughter Constance to join him in the U.S. In 1927 Constance returned to China, joining her brother Tennyson at the Nankai School in Tianjin for her high school and college. In the U.S. the reunited couple (Sam and wife Zhiyuan) gave birth to two other daughters.¹

Considering himself to be a "knowledgeable" person with a classical Confucian education and training at a police academy in Guangzhou to be an officer, Sam Chung in true filial obedience but with reluctance, accepted his fate in America as a labor-intensive asparagus farmer, an occupation he held for more than half a century. What little spare time he had from his farming chores was spent in writing directive letters to his son and daughter in China, delegating family responsibilities to young Tennyson, and outlining in detail the educational schemes for both children. Much of Sam's writing time was also spent in composing poetry, and reflecting on life in America as a minority Chinese person, specifically as a Chinese farmer amid competition in white society. Over the decades, Sam Chung's cumulative writings in Chinese amounted to some 900 letters to Constance and Tennyson and other relatives in China (hand copied in "eighteen student notebooks"), more than a thousand letters to clan members and friends, including essays and poems on Chinese life in America in general and farming in particular (p. 9).

Arriving in America in 1986 from China where he taught English, Haiming Liu completed graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine. Through contacts with the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (established 1975) he came upon the collected archives of the latter with a virtual "gold mine" of Sam Chung's writings, all in Chinese. The corpus was the raw material awaiting someone like himself, a person well versed in Chinese history, culture, and the written language to decipher it and weave it into a coherent picture. For his Ph.D. dissertation Liu decided on a study of this unusual extended Chinese American family that spans the Pacific. The transcontinental aspect of the corpus led him to conclude that a Chinese family can be a dynamic network as well as a static locus of geography. His transnational thesis is succinctly encapsulated in the opening salvo of his Introduction as follows:

Family and home are one word, jia [家] in the Chinese language. Family can be apart, home relocated, but jia remains intact, as it signifies a system of mutualobligations and a set of cultural values. Deeply rooted in members' emotional affinity, ethical beliefs, and life-long obligation to one another as family...