Upon reading Bernard Wong’s article, I was astounded to find how much my father’s side of the family applied to the history I was reading. It was cool to put faces and stories to the history. My family is Toysan, and my parents have Cantonese as their native language. My great-grandfather and grandfather were both old immigrants and male sojourners that came from Kwangtung Province, so they could speak the lingua franca of Chinatown and fit in more easily. Also, they did have peasant rural origins in China, and were not very educated. It was much easier to make money in U.S. because menial jobs were easy to come by, so my great-grandfather and grandfather worked in the stereotypical Toysan laundry business that, which was more apt to hire Cantonese-speaking people.
My father said that my great-grandfather and grandfather paid money to someone who had relatives in the U.S., so the relatives could lie that they were sons. They were able to illegally bypass the Chinese Exclusion Law because the U.S. permitted spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens to immigrate.
“New immigrants have also benefited from the 1965 immigration law which permitted migration of family members and talented individuals”; my aunt was made a citizen by marrying an American, and she was able to help my father and grandmother immigrate and become American citizens.
My father immigrated with my grandmother in the 1970s, so they were New immigrants that were planning on staying in the U.S. He worked as a busboy in the stereotypical Chinese restaurant, and helped my grandmother with sewing in the stereotypical garment factory, which preferred Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong like them. My grandmother joined a labor union specifically for the Chinese sweatshop workers.
My father spoke of the Chinese youth gangs that had middle school aged children participating and murdered, and said the gangs in Hong Kong were as violent as the ones in Chinatown.
It’s quite amazing to see your family’s history written about, and makes history that much more interesting and applicable.
My father was able to get a summer job for 4 summers from the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.