Source: http://sistercities.lacity.org/images/map/guangzhou.jpg
In the early 1900s, Yee Bick Chan had finally saved up enough money and acquired the papers that would allow him to leave Canton’s (now Guangzhou) farmland and start a life in the United States with the hopes of bringing his wife and children at some point in the future. The son of his father’s second wife, Yee Bick would have no inheritance to fall back on and finding steady work in China was difficult. A member of Yee Bick’s village, Lee, had returned from the United States to stay in China, Yee Bick bought the documents that would allow him to go to America under his name (because Lee was legally permitted to enter the United States) and he left on a boat to San Francisco, leaving behind his wife and two children, and a life with little prospect.
Washington Bridge, 1932. Source: New York Public Library
Yee Bick Chan was my great-grandfather. He worked odd-jobs in San Francisco until a friend offered him part ownership of a laundromat in New York City. He arrived in Washington Heights to work at the laundromat (near the Washington Bridge) and eventually became the owner. As he had done in San Francisco, he slept and lived at his place of work. It was then around the 1940s, and Yee Bick feared deportation because of his fraudulent admissions papers. He was afraid to try to bring his family to America, because he had not declared that he had any such relatives and he feared that he would be sent back to Communist China.
Around the late 1950s, Yee Bick Chan was granted amnesty due to his time in the United States. After he saw others report themselves without repercussion, he applied for his family, which had moved to Hong Kong in the meantime, to come to the United States. In 1964, Yee Bick’s son, his son’s wife, and three children including my mother arrived by plane to New York, benefiting from their status as family and as refugees.
The family (Yee Bick, his son, daughter-in law, and their three children) resided in Washington Heights. Yee Bick’s son and his wife worked from dawn until dusk – he in a restaurant and she in a sewing factory – and the children went to school. All three attended college on scholarship. Eventually the family would move to Flushing, Queens. Over time, their children got married and moved out. My mother (one of the three children) met my father, who is also an immigrant, while in vocational school. They married and soon raised two American-born Chinese children, me and my brother.
