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My first uncle is to the left of my second uncle surrounded by the aunts. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

The passing of my two uncles has led to my reflecting on their lives, and the indelible impressions both left on me. My first (older) uncle, Cui Wen-Chiao (1925-2017), and second uncle, Cui Wen-Tse (1931-2021), led very different existences, but both experienced much of China’s upheavals from the past century.  

After graduation from boarding school, my first uncle left home to seek his fortunes in the 1940s. In contrast, my second uncle kept close to the family and helped to look after the younger siblings during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) while his father and brother were away. In his late teens, however, he was separated from the family after the occupation of Nanjing and Shanghai by the PLA in 1949-50. By this time, my first uncle had married his classmate and stayed behind in Shanghai.  

The career of my first uncle in the Chinese Merchant Marine spanned 50 years, where he toured the East and South China Seas, making ports of call to Japan and Hong Kong. He would captain his own vessel and serve as instructor at the Merchant Marine College of Shanghai Maritime University.  Meanwhile, my second uncle studied history in college at Chengdu in Sichuan province, where he met his future wife. In the coming years, they and their families endured the travails of the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the ensuing famine (1959-61), during which my second uncle nearly perished from starvation. They all felt the effects of the political and economic turbulence that was the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), as their children (my first cousins) were compelled to forego college/university education. 

Upon meeting my first uncle and his family in 1979, I was struck by his towering presence ( 6’ 2”) that belied a soft-spoken, dignified demeanor. He and his family enjoyed a quiet, simple life in the Latin Quarters near the Bund. Their apartment was furnished with rosewood antiquities, the only remnants of the material wealth from his wife’s family to have survived the Cultural Revolution. We met again in 1995 during the reunion among the six siblings.

Upon meeting my second uncle and his family at Xian in 1995. I was struck by his quick wit, easy banter, and sense of humour. He recalled as a youth fleeing with the family from one place to another to escape the ravages of war-torn China, and how American GIs introduced the neighbourhood kids and him to the game of baseball and gave them bubble gums and chocolates. My fondest memory was when he took me to visit the Cui family ancestral home at the industrial city of Shenyang in Northeastern China during August of 1995. He remembered vividly his grandfather working at a munitions factory near the city’s main railroad station during the 1930s. From him, I learned that the Cui ancestors were salt merchants originally from Shandong province, who migrated north to Liaoning province eight generations (200 years) ago. My other fond memory was visiting Chongqing with him in 2001, where we experienced the Sichuan customs and savoured it’s hot and peppery cuisine.

I was amazed how much my first uncle resembled my grandfather, who served as an UN advisor and university lecturer in agricultural economics. Born in 1908, he was only 17 when my grandmother, born in 1901, had first uncle. Years later, I learned that the traditional betrothal arrangement in northeastern China was where the bride would be much older than the groom. In contrast, I was impressed how much my second uncle resembled my grandmother, a Manchurian belonging to the Jin clan represented by the Plain Yellow Banner.  She courageously and capably managed all domestic affairs during wartime and ran a tailor shop after they moved to Hong Kong. The one regret that she and her sons shared was not being able to reunite again after their separation. 

The silk embroidery of the Shanghai Bund. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

Bund of the 1930s, as a memento of a long maritime career in the “Paris of the East.”  Alas, I can only bid you both adieu from afar, dear uncles!  May the warm, swift trade winds of the China Seas be at your backs in your voyage to the next world to reunite with my grandparents and first aunt.

Dancer Jessie Tai Sing (of the Tai Sings) on a program cover (ca. 1942). (PC: Forbidden City, U.S.A.: Chinatown Nightclubs, 1936-1970 by Arthur Dong and Lorraine Dong).

While working as a Collections Intern for CHSA the summer of 2019, my main task was to digitize the VCR collection and create a Finding Aid for them. I watched a lot of film, ranging from minute-long news clips in which CHSA programs were mentioned to full-length documentaries such as Curtis Choy’s The Fall of I-Hotel (a true must-watch!). It may sound boring on the surface, but I truly enjoyed what I was doing. I was learning a lot about Chinese American history from diverse perspectives, and contributing to a cause I was passionate about, both as an East Asian Studies major and a Chinese American.  

There was one documentary I watched that has stuck with me to this day: Forbidden City, U.S.A. At the time, like many people, I was only really familiar with the less “glamorous” sides of working in Chinatown, like working at laundries or in Chinese restaurants. What this unique film explored, however, was another side of Chinatown: its history as the center of San Francisco nightlife in the 1930s and 1940s.  

One of the most popular clubs was Forbidden City, known for its premier all-Chinese cast. There were singers and dancers advertising themselves as “The Chinese Sinatra” and the “Chinese Sally Rand” who performed jazz songs and burlesque—a stark contrast to Chinese American stereotypes. Of course, part of the allure for the white audience was the fetishization of Asian women, but the performers themselves were very clear about the fact that there was no sexual exploitation against them. I was especially interested in the accounts of female performers like Noel Toy, who was famous for her bubble dance—particularly accounts of how they wrestled with conflicting cultural upbringings and racism to pursue their passion. I found it very inspiring how they held autonomy over their bodies and owned their sexuality in an industry notorious for taking advantage of vulnerable young women and also lacking Asian representation.

Noel Toy lifts bubbles and business for the Forbidden City, as in this article from Carnival Show magazine (March 1941) (PC: Forbidden City, U.S.A.: Chinatown Nightclubs, 1936-1970 by Arthur Dong and Lorraine Dong).

What drew me to the Forbidden City performers was just that—their bodily autonomy in a world that has denied it to them. For me, and I believe for many young Asian American women, it is difficult to be comfortable with your own body and sexuality without running up against rigid cultural standards about how women can comport themselves or against the response at the other end of the spectrum, the fetishization of Asian women in Western culture and the male gaze. As a young Asian woman, I have never felt totally confident looking at myself in a mirror or posting cute pictures on Instagram. “Guys only like you because you’re Asian,” my brain tells me, or “You’re not as skinny as the girls in K-dramas” or, to bring up the pervasiveness of the Model Minority myth, “Good Asian girls aren’t supposed to stand out.” 

Mary “Butchie” Ong, Jessie Tai Sing, Kim Wong, and Helen Kim are featured in Beauty Parade magazine (November  1943). (PC: Forbidden City, U.S.A.: Chinatown Nightclubs, 1936-1970 by Arthur Dong and Lorraine Dong).

Beyond my own experience, the gross fetishization of Asian women has far more insidious consequences. There are so many published statistics from dating apps in which white males overwhelmingly answer that they  “prefer Asian females” over all demographics (a sentence that grosses me out even as I type it). The fetishization of Asian American women is further normalized in film and television, where it often becomes the butt of jokes in everything from  the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket's now notorious line from a Vietnamese prostitute, "me so horny, me love you long time,” to Kim Anami's 2021 “Kung Fu Vagina” music video, rife with cultural appropriation and stereotypical portrayals of Asian women as hyper-sexual “dragon ladies.” These stereotypes remain so pervasive that when I heard about the terrible hate crime against Asian women in Atlanta, I knew that the sense of sexual ownership white men so often claim over Asian women was the obvious motive. 

As Asian American women, when one culture objectifies us and the other shames us, it is so difficult to love ourselves and take back the power over our bodies. We should be able to express and be ourselves fully no matter what the world tells us to be—just like the performers of Forbidden City.

In front of the second gift shop, where we lived above, early 1970s. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

My father, Frank Lee (1925-92), was the second of six siblings to a successful merchant and his second wife. The family had moved from their hometown of Zhaoqing, Guangdong to Tientsin and Qinhuangdao to embark on various businesses, including a night club and general store in the early 1930s. After my paternal grandfather passed away in the late 1930s, he and his oldest brother were responsible for running the family’s affairs until Frank left for an extended visit to Formosa (Taiwan) in 1948. While touring the island, he received word from my grandmother that the Chinese Communists were poised to defeat the Nationalists (Kuomintang) and govern China in 1949. 

Alas, he dared not return to the mainland, and settled in Taipei for the interim. After working at various odd jobs, he enrolled at the National Taiwan Normal University to train as a teacher. Upon graduation, he instructed at an elementary school in Taipei in the mid-1950s, before being reassigned as vice-principal at an overseas Chinese middle school in Tahiti in 1958. He realized, however, that this was a dead-end posting and left for America to seek his fortunes a year later.

In Polynesian sarong, 1958. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

Frank arrived in San Francisco on a tourist visa, but quickly changed his visa status to student after enrolling at John Adams Adult School. Through a mutual classmate, he met Virginia (nee Tsui), his future wife and our mother, in 1960. After a brief courtship, they wedded in January, 1961, followed by my arrival later that year. Frank taught Mandarin-Chinese at the Army Language School in Monterey during the early to mid-1960s. 

In 1965, he resigned this teaching position to operate a retail stall inside the Chinese Cultural Center on Grant Avenue, selling colourful batiks painted by himself. The following year, he closed the stall and opened a gift shop next to the renowned restaurant, Shanghai Low, selling his artwork, imported handicrafts from Taiwan, Japan and Thailand, and sundry souvenirs of San Francisco. Three years later, a second shop was opened on the other side of Shanghai Low. Virginia helped run the businesses, while also employed as key-punch operator at several firms downtown. 

Family portrait, 1963. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

Throughout the late 1960s to the early 1980s, my parents raised my brother, Oscar, and me, all the while operating the shops, which evolved to selling jewelry and higher-end merchandise in the 1980s. Frank was active in the Chinatown Merchants Association during this time. He instilled within us the importance of industry and self-reliance when we were old enough to help out. He also home-schooled me in written and spoken (Mandarin-)Chinese during after-school hours and on weekends. 

I remember him as a firm but fair parent, an innovative entrepreneur, and engaged in the local community, who had various self-taught talents (besides painting, he played the erhu and snare drum), and was physically fit until the end. Regrettably, he did not live to know of his extended family, including grandchildren Nerys, Kaeden and Kendra.

“America is a melting pot.” One of the most common cliches about our nation’s immigrant history and present diversity -- and perhaps one of the least accurate. 

A romanticized depiction of the American “melting pot” for the 1908 play of the same name by Israel Zangwill. (PC: Wikimedia Commons). 

As someone who immigrated from China to America when I was 11 years old, “America is a melting pot” was a saying I lived by every day. Integrating into elementary school was hard for an 11-year-old who didn’t speak the same language as everyone else. Going by my favored communication method from those early years in America, I’m surprised I never considered a career as a mime. 

To make up for it, I tried falling back on a language I did know, performing my Mandarin for my band of wide-eyed classmates. Everyone seemed to enjoy my best attempts at translating their English names into Mandarin, but more often than not, I could only guess. I’ve always felt a sting of regret for mishearing ‘Robert’ as ‘rubber,’ then mistranslating ‘rubber’ as ‘eraser’ (橡皮 Xiàngpí) based on British English. The unlucky Robert then went around mispronouncing his mistranslated name as Cinnamon Bark (香皮 Xiānɡ Pí) for the entire school year. 

As funny as these gimmicks were, each one of these cultural exchanges, each attempt to ‘please’ was part of an endless battle to belong. I knew there were unspoken lines, so I simply took cues from the people around me. When they laughed, it was a cue to laugh. When they looked flustered, it was a cue to appear concerned. I was a mirror, a reflection of my surroundings with little of my own to share. Everything I had learned from my upbringing in the People’s Republic of China, I packed up and dumped into the melting pot behind the mirror. Chinese proverbs and poems I had memorized, memories of home, proficiency in Mandarin, everything I didn’t use in my American school, dissolved in the melting pot like overcooked potatoes. 

In recent years, the melting pot analogy has faced its fair share of criticisms for not embracing diversity. Its’ ‘healthier’ alternative, the salad analogy, appears more inclusive, but in fact supports the assumption that people of different cultural backgrounds coexist but share little in common, held together only by a salad dressing of shared ‘American’ values. 

As a 1.5th generation Chinese American, I would prefer the hotpot way of bringing people together. Hotpot in Chinese culture is as much a social practice as it is a dish. It is rarely eaten alone. Especially on cold days, the hot steam from the pot provokes a sense of comfort and closeness among family and friends. 

Hotpot starts with a pre-prepared soup base into which ingredients, including everything from meat, vegetables, and root vegetables to tofu, fish, and mushrooms of all different kinds, are added. Their variety also means balancing different cooking speeds and flavors. Some foods absorb more flavors, while others engage with the broth in creative ways. 

A typical hotpot spread and broth, including different sliced meats, tofus, noodles, mushrooms, vegetables, and mixed sauces. (PC: the Woks of Life). 

Take sponge tofu vs. sliced meats, for example. Sponge tofu maintains its shape and texture and soaks up the broth for a juicy bite. Sliced meats cook quickly, absorb tons of flavor, and leave a legacy of taste for the rest of the flavors to come. One way or another, the ingredients are all immersed in the hotpot together, changing themselves, changing each other, and the broth they leave behind. 

Culture is dynamic and ever-changing. Unlike what happens in the melting pot, no one will melt away into nothingness. Unlike what happens in a salad bowl, we are all connected by more than a drizzling of vaguely defined shared values. The image of a cooking hotpot allows us to see our entanglement with one another in its totality, the connections between us that transcend time and space. Hotpot encourages us to see every ingredient as capable of change and capable of causing change. It values alternative embodied experiences of immigration that don’t strictly follow the worship of the American Dream. Some of us will assimilate and take up the broth’s accumulated flavor in all its glory. Others of us will hold onto our shape and texture in new environments. Regardless, all of us will leave our taste that will last long after we are gone. 

Whether you identify as an immigrant or not, please look through your fondest memories and consider all the people with whom you have crossed paths. Consider how, whether the changes have been big or small, temporary or permanent, we have all changed one another. 

If I could sit at a table with my 11-year-old self, I would encourage him to take his belongings out of the melting pot behind him to share a meal of hotpot with me.

Clara Elizabeth Chan Lee registers to vote in California. (PC: Wikimedia Commons). 

Let’s begin with her hat: large, white, wide-rimmed, feather-bedecked. The sight of a Chinese woman walking into an American courthouse in 1911 wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. She knows it; that’s the reason she amplifies her presence by pulling on that hat. She wants to be seen. 

On November 8, 1911, just a month after California women win suffrage, Clara Elizabeth Chan Lee enters a Bay Area courthouse and registers to vote, making her the first Asian woman in the country to do so. She was born into—and, in 1911, lives still—in a world that prefers her, and those of her "kind," to be, if not gone, then invisible. 

This is not a new or subtle erasure. At that very moment, as she takes up a pen, there are signs everywhere in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area that read: No Chinese Wanted.

Thirty-six years earlier, in 1875, Chinese women were banned from immigrating to the U.S. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act had blocked all Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. Thirteen years after Lee casts her vote, the 1924 Immigration Act will pass, barring immigrants from all but the thinnest slivers of Northern Europe. Not until 1965 will America begin to see people like Lee as worthy of entry, much less the vote.

For Lee, this November day in 1911 is a beginning. She will become an organizer and activist. She will dedicate herself to helping other immigrants and Chinese Americans. She will live a long and memorable (if not always noted or remembered) life, dying in 1993 at the age of 107.

But let’s go back to that day, when she stands in that courthouse in her enormous feathered hat. You can see it, can’t you? The vision and determination that have brought her to this moment, that infuse her from the tips of her shoes up to the top of her hat, that guide her hand as she writes her name.

The six siblings, with the youngest and first aunts in the front row left side, accompanied by my cousin, extreme right. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

Among my earliest recollections are those of Aunt Wen Fan and Uncle Jen-Da, when I was 3-4 years old. They lived in Taipei near their parents, relatives and close acquaintances. As the oldest of four sisters, she was quick to express warmth, and placed the welfare of others before her own. Her husband was the eldest among four siblings, and shined as the trailblazer of the family. The couple appeared to be settled and content, with my aunt at home raising three children, and my uncle at Taiwan University embarking on a promising career as associate professor of accounting.  

In 1977, the couple’s future transformed overnight after moving to the US for the sake of their children’s education and career futures. They were courageous to embark upon a fresh path in an unfamiliar landscape, while fiercely determined to make the journey successful. After settling in San Francisco, they operated a gift stop in Chinatown, in partnership with her youngest sister, Aunt Jane, and her husband, Uncle Joe, located across the street from my parents’ two gift stops. A year later, the Chao family sold the retail business interest and relocated to a township in New Jersey, around the same time my uncle’s siblings were also establishing residencies in nearby communities. The couple struggled to obtain suitable jobs with their limited English fluency and skill-sets. The travails of the Chao family are typical of the experiences among immigrants, but perhaps weighed more heavily in light of the creature comforts they gave up after leaving Taiwan. Over the years, my aunt and uncle faced many challenges beyond the financial, notably bridging the cultural and lifestyle differences between East and West, and ensuring that the next generation would become productive contributors in their adopted country.

Internment of the remains of my aunt and uncle. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

Their lives serve not only as testament to how a couple persevered during the best and worst of times, but reveal the depth of their sacrifices for their loved ones. Aunt Wen Fan and Uncle Jen-Da are nothing short of heroic role models for their descendants!  Whenever I contemplate the trials and tribulations they endured in this Brave New World, the haunting, poignant passages in Emma Lazarus’ New Colossus (1883) hearken:  

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she 

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

My grandfather at his office in Taiwan, early 1960s. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

My maternal grandfather, Tsui Young-Chi (1908-85), was the first in our family to have studied and worked in America. A native of Mukden (Shenyang) in Northeast China, he completed his master’s in statistics at Washington State University (1933), then continued doctoral training in agricultural economics at Stanford University, while also moonlighting as a newspaper editor in San Francisco’s Chinatown (1933-6). Young-Chi was compelled to return to his family in Mukden before finishing his degree and just prior to the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). 

After returning to strife-torn China, Young-Chi was a staff economist at several banks, and following the Communist take-over (1949), moved with his family to Hong Kong, Taipei and Bangkok, where he lectured at several colleges and consulted for both the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, and the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Kentucky, Lexington (1961-2), where his most widely known paper was presented and published. Through his teaching and research, Young-Chi’s influence on a generation of academics and policy-makers in the area of rural development/reform at Taiwan and other South-East Asian countries is incalculable.

My grandfather and I in front of our residence in Taipei, 1964. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee).

I am grateful to have stayed with my maternal grandparents from three to five years of age and to have later uncovered Young-Chi’s legacy, that is now my honour and privilege to share some years after his passing. 

Young-Chi’s papers are listed in the link (Google Scholar does not include his Chinese language articles, which were mostly published in Taiwan): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ztq22WUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Mike Kranzke, our homeroom teacher, instructed EST meditation in class. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee from Evelyn Sacks, posted on Facebook, May 31, 2016).

Our Class of ‘76  witnessed and were affected by major societal changes during and after attending St. Mary’s on Stockton St. In 1921, Paulist priests founded the school and invited the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange to run classes. When we first met in 1967, the modernization movement of Vatican II had not completely taken hold: the sisters were wrapped in medieval black-and-white habits, and catechism was rote-taught. By the late 1960s, however, their attire was replaced with modern white blouse and knee-length skirt, and religion class covered a broad range of topics.

The biggest charge was the staffing of lay teachers to replace most of the sisters in the early 1970s. Wendy Dorband taught us Judaic beliefs and customs, including hosting a traditional Passover supper. Michael Kranzke practiced EST and instructed us meditation techniques. He led the Mass choral strumming a guitar to Cat Stevens’ Moonshadow. Don Papa brought youthful vitality and a free-spirited teaching style, encouraging us to discuss and debate current event issues, very much like Mr. (Mark) Thackeray in ‘To Sir with Love’.

Wendy Dorband, our grade 6 homeroom teacher, instructed English, history, geography, as well as sex education and Judaic customs. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee from Evelyn Sacks, posted on Facebook, May 31, 2016).

The counter-culture movement of the late 1960s encouraged teachers and students to question traditional values and attitudes held by mainstream establishment. Wendy covered sex education, including birth control and legal abortion, which were taboo topics prior to Vatican II. In the 1970s, territorial squabbling among the Chinese youth made for headline news and spilled into the classrooms of St. Mary’s and other schools. Perhaps as counterbalance, William Coward, our sixth grade math teacher, played “What the World Needs Now is Love” in class one day! Our cultural-ethnic awareness and identity strengthened after the introduction of Asian-American Studies at SF State, and media exposure and popularity of Bruce Lee films, both in the early 1970s. 

The optimism experienced in our final year at St. Mary’s was reinforced by the patriotism and pride of the Bicentennial celebration. That feel-good afterglow was short-lived. The Golden Dragon massacre the next year was a cataclysmic financial and psychological blow to Chinatown. Concurrently, the International Hotel protests lay bare the economic disparity and injustice many immigrants living in or near Chinatown endured, which continue unabated today. In the forthcoming years, ethnically-motivated mistreatment and violence, such as the Vincent Chin slaying in 1982, have become bellwethers of race relations in SF and other American locales.

At our 2016 reunion, teachers seated (left to right): Mary Tan (homeroom 8th grade), Johanna Pendleton (homeroom 3rd and 4th grades), Michael Kranzke (homeroom 7th grade), and Don Papa. (Courtesy of Raymond Lee from Corinne Cho-Beaulieu, posted on Facebook, July 9, 2016).

At our 40th class reunion in 2016, my classmates and I expressed sadness and frustration over the gradual erosion of the Chinatown neighbourhood, including the eventual shuttering of our alma mater due to revenue shortfalls. Ironically, a few years earlier, the school had moved into newly built facilities at the very site of the demolished International Hotel. The pandemic lockdown and retail closures have, once again, drawn attention to the plight of the most vulnerable in Chinatown, whose children and grandchildren our school once taught and supported. The community void will take all our collective determination and effort to fill.