Chi-Am Chats – random
reflections of a Chinese American
THE TONGS 
OF BOSTON, USA, and GIMGAI, CHINA
By E. Y. Tong, Seattle,
USA
IN
THE MELTING POT
Completed May 31, 2005, revised September 28, 2005
Throughout the history of China,
it was said, there were frequent wars large and small, and armed conflicts of
all kinds, which from time to time led to droves of people seeking refuge away
from danger and famine. In addition, for two or three millenniums China had a
national examination system that produced magistrates and government
officials who were an elite class and who were placed in all corners of the vast
nation as part of the imperial administration. There was also migration due to
regional and national commerce. Rural people had always looked to the capitals
and the cities and towns for their fortunes and for a better life. These were
some the engines that had driven internal migrations of people in
China.
In the early ages, the centers of
the Chinese civilization were located in the northern regions around the “loop”
of the Yellow River (or the Huang), wherefrom different individuals, clans and
groups migrated. The chosen refuges were usually the plains
and valleys where there were
abundant water and fertile soil, that is, along and to the
shores of the Yangtze River (or the “Long
River”) that cut west to east through the middle section of this vast land mass.
One of the prime regions for such migration was what is now known as Guangdong
Province in southern China that has been abundantly nurtured for millenniums by
the Pearl and its many tributaries. With the importation of the culture and
production technologies from China proper, this region became a very large and
productive piece of land, supporting a continually growing
population.
In time, the Han people from the
Yellow River Loop, having a highly developed culture, and the less-developed
indigenous peoples merged into a single, more or less homogeneous people,
although different groups were able to retain some of their original ethnic
characteristics. For example, there was a large group who is known today
as the Kejia (or “Guest People”, or Hakka in Cantonese) whose subgroups were
scattered in almost all parts of China. The Hakkas were able to maintain their
distinct ethnic identity to the present day, but without a central place to call
home (therefore were known as “Guests” or sojourners). Deng Xiaoping, known as
the chief architect of the present economic “openness” in China, was a Hakka;
and the fortress-like round wooden houses of Fujian Province that are
multi-family dwellings are attributed to Hakka builders who needed strong
defenses against their indigenous neighbors. Other smaller groups and clans,
upon settling in the southland, grew their roots deeply on the new land. After
several generations, their ancestral homes became culturally and ethnically very
remote, and contacts with the home regions became greatly diluted, just like the
Jews of Kaifeng who had long lost their links with world Jewry. These Jews of
China are another story that needs to be told.
THE TONGS OF KAIFENG, HENAN
PROVINCE AND GIMGAI, CHINA
The Tong clan (see note 1 below)
was one of these groups which, according to its recorded genealogy, can trace
back to Kaifeng Prefecture in Henan (pronounced Ho-Nahn, “south of the river”)
Province in northern China, not too far from present-day Beijing. In 1992, my
brother Ling Tang got possession of an old genealogy chart from our home village
in Jinji (or Gumgai, in Cantonese, and Gimgai in the village dialect), Kaiping
Prefecture, Guangdong Province, and proceeded to update the document, completing
it in February of that year, and revising it three years from that in January,
1995. According to this document, the Guangdong Tongs originated with the
four brothers who migrated together from present-day Kaifeng in the Song Dynasty
(some 800 years ago), and my generation is the 23rd after the
original settlement. The eldest of the four brothers, named Gang, settled
in Huaxian region; the second brother, named Zhi, settled in Zengcheng, the
third brother, named Tung, settled in a place called Taishan (Toishan in
Cantonese, Hoishan in the village dialect), from which the American Tongs of the
clan derived. The fourth brother, named Ji, after some years, returned to
Kaifeng, I assume he just couldn’t take the southern heat and humidity. Perhaps
he was just a true Confucian and considered himself to be “a leaf on a tree that
at the end must fall back to it roots”. Together, these four brothers
represented the first generation of Tongs in Guangdong Province. The descendents
of these Tongs had a loose clan association in both Guangzhou and later Hong
Kong whose function is to keep the clan together, so it seems to me, but most of
the time merely to conduct an annual memorial ceremony in honor of their common
ancestors, and after the ceremony, to distribute chunks of the roasted pigs to
all the members. I imagine this tradition remains today. It seems to me,
particularly in recent years, however, that such clan associations have somehow
outlived their usefulness as we urbanized and Westernized. The fact remains the
Guangdong Tongs, as far as I know, have completely lost contact with any of
their cousins from Kaifeng, like the Chinese Jews with world Jewry. However,
recent information from the Internet has revealed that in addition to the Gimgai
Tongs that have spread from Boston, there are Tongs from Taishan who have
settled in Chicago and the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada. In time,
more will be said about these kin, when additional information comes forth. The
present appearance of “chauvinism” in ignoring the Taishan Tongs is not
intended, but it has come from my own ignorance, that is all. I will of course,
try to remember a former colleague and fellow meteorologist named Wen Tang, PhD,
from Taipei and originally from Nanjing. And, there is also the accomplished
Chinese-American writer named Maxine Hong Kingston of California. Perhaps Maxine
is directly related to the Taishan branch of the Tong tree.
The family apparently fared quite
well in the new land because Tung came south with a royal appointment from the
Song court, or from some other high authority, and became the commissioner of
roads for the Guangzhou region, which included the present-day provincial
capital of Guangzhou. His descendants, through the subsequent years, spread to
neighboring prefectures from Taishan. One branch of the Taishan Tongs
eventually in the Qing Dynasty moved to a village called Xintun Village, Jinji
Township, in Kaiping Prefecture. That is the home village of the Tongs who
came to the U.S.A. and Canada, and perhaps also others who spread to other parts
of the world such as the Philippines, and in the South Pacific. When I was
a kid, I remember hearing a story about a husky, tall and strong Tong (with
“fingers the size of a small banana”) who was good with the pistol and became
something like a bouncer in one of the South Sea Islands (maybe it was New
Zealand). When he finally came home to China after many years abroad
living with White people, so they said, his eye color had turned to blue. It
must have been one of those environmental tricks performed by the Russian
scientist named Trofim Lysenko, who had advocated the dominance of the
environment over genetics. Lysenkoism had dominated the world of
Soviet science from the l930’s to the l960’s. Of course, it became the laughing
stock of science at the end, but the Red face did not even blush.
THE TONGS OF BOSTON
In the mid and late 1800’s, as it
turned out, China was again beset by chaos due to all kinds of natural and
man-made disasters such as droughts and the Celestial Uprising. Needless to say,
the economy was in shambles, and the people of southern China, being too far
away from the Qing courts up north to receive remedial assistance, were facing
real famine. Around the Gimgai Township where the Tongs have derived their
livelihood from the land, the soil had become quite depleted after centuries of
crop production without nutrient replenishment. Life was becoming very hard.
Just at this time, Western imperialism, as represented by the presence of
Britain, Holland, Portugal, France, and other nations had opened up many areas
of the world for exploitation and development. In Malaya and Singapore, for
example, the British colonialists needed eager laborers that were more reliable
than the tropical natives who, so they say, lacked both the appreciation for
wealth and the desire to prosper. Further, so they also say, the tropical
climates were just too conducive to napping at all hours of the day. This opened
up opportunities for the “Celestials” – as the Chinese were called – whose basic
cultural orientation contained a tenet for the support and protection of the
family, and therefore the home village. The thousands of Chinese who went
abroad to make money to feed their starving families at home were indeed
highly motivated by the misfortunes and dangers all around them. In fact,
southern China became the prime source of export labor for many parts of the
world: Southeast Asia, Australia/New Zealand, the Philippines, and
elsewhere, even Panama and the Spanish and Portuguese Americas.
The California Gold Rush of 1849
added much heat to the fever, and it was said that shortly after its onset the
Chinese population of California increased by over 100 thousand, mostly Argonaut
gold-diggers looking for quick wealth. They were, of course, quickly
excluded from the “American Dream” due ironically to the Confucian virtue of
diligence above all, a virtue that most Whites could not match but wished
dearly to eliminate. Certainly, there were other reasons that most Main
Stream historians were reluctant to mention, and that is the dark fact that
“heathens are subhuman and must be wiped out all together”, and “if
you ain’t Christian you are heathen”. It was also ironic that the exclusion
of the Chinese from the USA was made much more effective by an Irish immigrant
named Dennis Kearney of the Workingmen’s Party, whose people had also suffered
many years of British bigotry. For example, one recruiting poster in
Boston contained the words “Irish need not apply”. To make a long story shorter,
it suffices here to say only that the Chinese Exclusion Act and its subsequent
extensions effectively stopped further meaningful immigration from China.
Furthermore, it was a sad historical fact that the Chinese immigrants, by and
large, did not bring their women to America with them like the Polish or the
Irish or the Italians, so that those who were already here were unable even to
increase their lot with native births, not to mention the extreme loneliness
that beset them all. It must have been like hell in those Chinaman days, in a
weird community made up of only men.
______________________________________________________
DRIPPINGS FROM THE TONG SOUP
BOWL
The Boston Tongs, like most
Chinese in America, were in both the laundry and restaurant businesses.
Harry, William, and William’s nephew Tommy, and Doo-Park and occasionally I were
working in the Charlie Mun Hand Laundry until well into the 1960’s, while
Herbert and Albert had long switched to the chop suey endeavors. Albert became
the co-manager of the Cathay House, which for many years was the No. 1 joint in
Chinatown, due primarily to high management standards laid down by Albert.
For example, before the opening hour of 3:00 p.m., all waiters and headwaiters
had to line up for dress and fingernail inspection, while none of the other
restaurants had this kind of institution. As a result, their evening dinner
line, especially on Fridays and Saturdays, was frequently an hour long. Herbert
was working as a waiter there and in the 1950’s his monthly pay was well over
$300 while the average was somewhere around $200. The Cathay House was a
first-class eating establishment in Boston. In the late 1960’s, however, a
rumor started in Italian North End that Cathay was caught by the City Health
Department for putting cat meat in the chop suey, just at the time when the huge
neon sign out front went out of order and the lower half of the sign (the “H A
Y” in CatHAY) went out. Business was never the same afterwards and the
restaurant was finally sold. Competitors would laugh at the place as being a
house of prostitution. The saving feature was that President Nixon in 1972,
bless his soul, “introduced” real Chinese food into this country and
suddenly there were Hunan, Sichuan, Shanghai, and Beijing cuisines, and the
Chinese restaurant business had its renaissance, delicious indeed. The
old Cathay became a tea house, business bloomed once again.
______________________________________________________
However, the Chinese were like the
little guy in a cowboy movie being bullied by a big bad guy. In a fist
fight, the little guy was knocked to the ground time and again, and blood was
oozing out of his nose and mouth. Self pride made him get up and swing, or
attempt to punch, time and again without making any significant hits The big,
bad, six-footer was playing along and just laughed with glee at his own ease of
success and mindless animal cruelty. The little guy in an almost vain try,
finally found an opening in the laugh and gave one last kick, and this time the
kick landed with some force right between the legs, nearly making the big bully
a non-man. Well, perseverance under adverse conditions is indeed another one of
the tenets of the Confucian teachings, and by hook or by crook, some Chinese
kept on coming to the land of the Gold Mountain. Subsequently, many were able to
indeed support their families at home with their blood and sweat working on jobs
that the Whites were unwilling or unable to take: jobs like cooking chop suey or
laundering clothes, or picking low-lying vegetables, and the
like.
To properly put Harry the
Patriarch in the whole scheme of things, we need to go one generation earlier,
in Generation 21st. Harry’s father, Hong (local village
pronunciation, see Note 1 below)Yui Chi, had three brothers, from him and the
brothers had derived all of the American Tongs. Harry Toy Tong, who passed away
in 1968 at the age of about 85, was a member of the 22nd generation
of the Guangdong Tongs. He was the first-born son of Hong Yui Chi, who was the
eldest of the four brothers. Therefore, being first born of the eldest brother
had placed Harry at the top of his generation, as existing tradition had
required. Harry became “the head” of his generation of brother and cousins,
offspring of Yui Chi and his brothers. In the Chinese scheme of things, first
cousins, and sometimes second cousins as well, with the same surname are
considered brothers and sisters. Such a concept of brotherhood had indeed a
meaning of special and understood blood relationships perhaps akin to what some
American Indians or Mafiosi might hold by a force of culture. It was not easily
explainable, but was just so, that is all.
______________________________________________________
DRIPPINGS FROM THE TONG SOUP BOWL
Drippings
1.
When I was in the Army
stationed in Fort Meade, Maryland, some of the troops would often go to McGuire
Air Force Base, next to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to catch a free ride to Europe
with the Military Air Transport Service (MATS). All one needed was the proper
identification and a pass from the home unit. It was that simple. My pay
at the time was $93 a month which was about enough for personal expenses, but I
had saved up about $300 for such a trip from cutting hair at 50 cents a head on
Thursday and Friday nights in the barracks latrine for the Saturday morning
dress inspection. Business was quite good, actually. So I consulted Uncle Harry
about such a fun trip because I did want to see Europe. Under normal
circumstances, a trip to Europe would be beyond my reach. But Uncle Harry
disapproved of such a frivolous expenditure of funds. “You got the money?” he
asked. “Yes,” I replied. “Let me have it. Hand it over,” he said. I did.
He took my $300 and put it in the bank for me. I needed every penny of that $300
later when I returned to college. Very practical wisdom with patriarchal
authority, Uncle Harry had. I did subsequently get to Europe(Switzerland,
England, Benelux, Germany, Austria, Croatia/Slovenia, Greece, Italy, and
Bulgaria) several times and enjoyed it greatly, of course, but
several decades later.
Drippings 2.
As a good immigrant boy, of
course, I took every opportunity to make money. About two months before
Christmas, the U.S. Post Office would announce the recruitment of temporary
workers for the upcoming rush. In the 1952 season, I think, I applied and got
the job as a mail bag handler, working upstairs on the third floor of South
Station where the mail bags came in from the trains and then redistributed to
different other destinations. My job was to pull and drag the heavy bags
to the appropriate holes on the floor and drop them in according to the marks on
the bags. It was a pure labor job requiring no brains, so I thought. I was
okay after the first night of work, but after the second night my fingers began
to bleed around my nails, and the skin on my hands began to crack, even after
the heavy application of some ointment. This had gone on for a whole week
and in great pain before I found out that I could go to the supply room to take
out a pair of heavy gloves that were specifically designed for work with tough
and rough canvas bags. I worked through that Christmas season in
reasonable shape on the job that I had thought requiring no brains.
______________________________________________________
Birthright leadership certainly
does not automatically make a good leader, as Chinese classics have long
lamented on family tragedies arising from misplaced and under- qualified
authority. Harry had to learn on his own through various avenues such as from
his village elders and from self-education. I don’t know what formal education
he had received, but when I finally met him in Boston, he was literate enough to
read the New York Times each Sunday to review the stock markets and to catch up
on the week’s news. Among his other laundry friends who gathered customarily in
Chinatown on Sundays, he was often the one to enlighten the group, and of
course, in Chinese. From that one may safely surmise that he was a translator as
well. Perhaps by this time, having lived on American soil for some years, his
friends had also become proficient in a brand of Chinese abundantly embedded
with English words, just like the cacophony among other immigrant groups, so it
must have seemed to outsiders. These casual Sunday gatherings served an added
purpose, that is, to exchange information on opportunities and strategies for
bringing in worthy younger people back home that might be eager to come.
Directly and indirectly, Harry was responsible for bringing over several
cousins: Doo-Hok (Jackson), Doo-Liam (Albert), Doo-Ying (Herbert),
Doo-Foon (Bing), Doo-Hem (William), Doo-Ting, and Doo-Park. Today, of course,
Harry and all of these cousins are no longer living, but these people, in turn,
had helped bring over others to settle in this new land. When Uncle Harry was
buried in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, I chose and had engraved these
words on his headstone:
“Hehad a selfless life in
settling the displaced in this new land”.
“Displaced” here includes those in the realms of
politics, economics, and the freedom of pursuing opportunities and
education. I am happy to sketch here the tree of these North American
Tongs and those derived from them. (For the direct motivation behind this
writing, please refer to Note 3 below.)
_____________________________________________________
DRIPPINGS FROM THE TONG SOUP
BOWL
Work in a Chinese restaurant in
Boston as a waiter was a bit hard, but then when you were young hard work never
seemed to have any lasting effect. What hurt was the fact that the twelve or
thirteen hours on the job were lacking any degree of intellectual stimulation:
it was just an exchange of time and physical labor for money. I do
remember a period when I worked weekends at the China Sails in Salem,
Massachusetts, where on Saturday the hours were from 10:00 in the morning until
2:00 the next morning with the usual pay of five dollars a day plus tips, but no
overtime pay. I was about 20 years old then, weighing about 140 pounds,
and physically quite fit. Still, when I came home on Sunday morning I
would be almost dead, cursing this “capitalistic exploitation of the
common worker” and the evil boss named David Wong. At the end all I could
do was to pour some Epsom salt in the tub and soaked my stiff body in it for
half an hour, once or twice even fell asleep in the water. Uncle Harry
sometimes would wake up and purposely asked if work was especially hard that
night. When he heard an affirmative answer, he just laughed out loud in
deep appreciation, for he did truly believe all young men should have the
benefit and opportunity of training by fire. He himself had been
brought the truth that hard work hurts nobody.
_____________________________________________________________
NORTH
AMERICAN SETTLEMENTS
First, Uncle Harry was married to
Wong Shee (see Note 2), with whom he had a daughter, Mei Yuk (Jade), who passed
away in New Rochelle, NY, in January of 2005 at age 93. She was survived by a
son, Tom Tam Siedule of Ottawa, Canada, two daughters Margaret Yu and Cecilia
Yu, of New Rochelle. Tom and his wife Ivy have a son and a daughter;
Margaret and husband Tom Yu have two sons, Sherman and Raymond, both of whom are
married and settled in the New York City area. Cecilia and her husband Suen have
a daughter, Jennifer, a lovely young lady in college and destined to succeed in
whatever she does, I am sure. These Yu kids and other kids off-shooting
from the Tong tree seem to be so much smarter in accessing their world than we
in our time. Harry and Ahmoo (Aunt Wong Shee) also had a son who died in
infancy, and subsequently adopted a son, Sau-Shan, who immigrated to Brazil in
the 1950’s. Brother Sau-Shan had married a German-Brazilian lady there and had a
son who some years ago tried to locate his Aunt Jade while he was in the
Brazilian Navy or Merchant Marines. Little else is known of the Brazilian Tongs,
except that Sau-Shan had passed away several years ago.
Harry had brought me to this
country with the aim that I might be smart and diligent enough to make something
of myself. I was the luckiest among all my peers here as I was the only one who
did not have to pay back by “piggy body”, meaning the expenses involved in the
whole journey: the plane ticket, the paper expenses, etc., etc. I had once
calculated that if I had to repay that debt at the prevailing wages of the time,
it would have taken me 15 years of full-time work to do so. I do gratefully owe
my opportunities to my uncle Harry for a debt-free life here, which had enabled
me to complete college with a Master of Science degree, the first one in my
immediate family to attain that educational level. I am now in the autumn of my
days in retirement, and often think of my past with many thoughts of him.
Even Jing, my second son, says he has thoughts of thanks for him each morning,
although they had never met. Harry had died two or three years before Jing was
even born. In my branch of the tree, there are my first-born Darren and my
second-born Gregg (Jing), both are now grown and are productive members of this
society. They live happily in Boston.
In line with the one-bring-one
tradition of the Tongs, I did find an opportunity in the late 1970’s and placed
my brother Ling’s second daughter, Virginia, in the Boston University language
program. She quickly became proficient in English and successfully
completed her education, married a citizen and, some years later, brought her
parents and sisters to this country. Virginia is now an administrative executive
with the Boston City Hospital and Medical Center. All together, eight persons
got settled here, all in a legal way. They are now apparently happy with life
here, at least I hope so. I believe they do greatly appreciate what the
difference is between here and there.
Jackson, Albert, and Herbert were
brothers who had gone through the sweat-shop years with Harry in the Charlie Mun
Hand Laundry at 88 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, with the steamy workshop
located on Dudley Street in Dorchester. When I first came over, Herbert and
Albert had spared no effort in telling me what life was like during their early
years. They all had to work six days a week and 15 hours a day. Uncle
Albert related that the most precious thing for him was sleep. As they
started work at five in the morning ironing shirts, by breakfast at eight, they
were beginning to doze off, exchanging food for a few moments of sleep. On
Sunday, the day of rest, they had to attend English lessons at the church. The
classes were taught by some kind-hearted old ladies full of missionary zeal.
They, and others later, all seemed to hold very fond memories of that
experience. In their day, strange as it may seem, that represented the only
significant exposure to the America that they had come to live and to make a
living. It was for some reason difficult for them to even touch the main stream
of America. Life for these Chinamen was indeed very isolated. The melting pot
did not exist for them. Their big family of father, two mothers, and twelve
brothers and sisters back in Hong Kong had depended on them for support.
So when one day Jackson, the eldest, decided that he had had enough, and left to
go back to China, I was told that Albert just wept for the heavy load about to
be placed on his shoulders. That was back in the mid 1930’s. Life, of course,
went on somehow and everybody survived. In the 1970’s, Jackson came back to
Boston, this time with his two wives and six children, who are now grown and
have families of their own. All of these branches and twigs are well and living
mostly on the East Coast, one in New Jersey and the rest in the Boston
area.
______________________________________________________
DRIPPINGS FROM THE TONG SOUP
BOWL
During high school, and before
I promoted myself to restaurant work, I worked summers in the laundry workshop
in Dorchester. It was always hot and steamy no matter what the ambient
weather was, due to the steam shirt presses. Cousin Tommy was usually the cook
for our two meals a day, lunch and dinner. He was quite a cook, although
he had no formal training in the kitchen, and he often prepared a cold bitter
melon soup with a little pork, and chilled tomatoes directly out of a can with
sugar added. In the heat, these two dishes went super-good with rice, believe it
or not.
_____________________________________________________________
Jackson, Albert, and Herbert have
three sisters, Shui Lin (Aunt Five, as we customarily call her), Bik Ha (Aunt
Nine), and Lai Shan (Aunt Ten) who grew up in Hong Kong. Breaking the old Tong
tradition of male-exclusivity, all three ladies in their respective ways and
means, took up the American trail and settled in North America. Aunt Shui Lin,
back in 1948 or 1949, had married a U.S. citizen, and with her son, Peter,
eventually and happily settled in Fremont, CA, where Peter, a PhD, was an
independent and successful computer consultant. Aunt Bik Ha and her
husband, Bing Yiu Lam, with their four children succeeded in settling in Boston.
They had a happy life here and three of their children completed college, and
all are productive members of society. Aunt Ten and her husband, Kwok
Leung Tang, retired in Hong Kong, then joined their children Victor and Beatrice
in Toronto, Canada. They seemed happy with their Canadian retirement, as
we have visited them two or three times during the last few years. I frequently
think of Aunt Ten and her sisters with great affection, a sentiment which arose
from their care of me in my youth.
______________________________________________________
DRIPPINGS FROM THE TONG SOUP
BOWL
Bachelor Uncle Herbert liked to
have his coffee and liked to talk, so we often had aimless conversations from
time to time on his day off and when I want to take a break from school work. I
think he felt particularly good about me being a college boy. Another
“hobby” that he had was to take me to the well-known Filene’s Bargain Basement,
especially in the Fall, to buy me a winter jacket. As I often walked across the
Massachusetts Avenue Bridge over to Cambridge to school, the wind-breaker
jackets he bought me came in real handy in many a wintry morning and
evening. I have memories of great Tong warmth and my gratitude remains
today.
_____________________________________________________________
During the period just after War
World II, Albert and Herbert were supporting a brother, Doo-Wui in Guangzhou,
China, who was able to complete middle school and went on to complete Lingnan
University Medical College. He is the first and only doctor in the Gimgai Tong
clan. Dr. Tze Wai (Doo-Wui) Tong eventually came to the U.S. as a refugee, after
squeezing through a very small crack on the border with freedom in Hong
Kong. He managed to obtain medical licenses from several states and became
a board-certified radiologist as well. He and his wife, Sandra, are living
in Detroit where he had contributed a lifetime of service to the Veterans
Hospital there, and raised a family with three boys, Alan, Wilbur and
Andrew. Sandra is an accomplished concert pianist from way back in her
Hong Kong days, and when we visited them in September, 2004, we learned with
great pleasure and admiration that she was able to, while raising her children
and caring for her aged mother, grow her tree of pianists, some went on to prime
music schools and the concert circuits. These Michigan Tongs are doing fine in
their corner of these United States: treating war-damaged men and women, saving
lives, promoting product design, and doing fine art – all to the good of this
great society that we now call our own, thousands of miles from that ancestral
home in Gimgai, China, about which some of us urbanized and Americanized Tongs
unfortunately know very little, even to this day. (The above was completed on
January 28, 2005. On this 20th day of May, 2005, after an
absence of over three months for treatment of nasopharyngeal cancer in Taiwan,
my health has returned almost completely, and the writing resumes
herewith.)
During September and October,
2004, YC and I, and brother Shouqi, visiting from Guangzhou, China, took a
long-planned trip around North America. We drove for five weeks over
13,000 miles across Canada to the Atlantic Coast, then came back to Seattle
through the American South and West. It was the journey of a lifetime. We were
glad to be able to reunion with family and friends along the way, even just for
fleeting moments. The trip was to be my “last hurrah”, having reached the age of
almost 70. At any rate, in Toronto visiting Aunt Ten and her family, we learned
of some new immigrant Tongs that have settled in Canada. My father’s cousin,
Hong Doo-Yiu, who is no longer living, had settled in Edmonton, Alberta, to join
his married daughter, Joanna Tong and her husband Albert Yu. In addition, Tong
Sau-Hong of my generation, who had also passed away, had settled in Calgary with
his three grown children. I have not met these Tongs, but will endeavor to look
them up one day when wanderlust strikes again. They are not really too far from
us in Seattle.
In addition to these people, there
were also a mother and her children that belong to another of the Brazilian
Tongs and had settled in Toronto. They lived a little far from Aunt Ten’s home
in Scarborough, and we were in a hurry to get on the road that day, so we did
not get to meet them, even though brother Shouqi had met the mother years ago in
China when she was just a teen-aged girl. This cousin who belongs to the
generation below mine, is the daughter of brother Tong Sau-Pang who had in the
1950’s emigrated to Brazil along with brother Sau-Shan. In the early 1980’s when
I was stationed in Hong Kong, brother Sau-Pang had come through and we had a
nice dinner together. It is sad to note that I never saw him again as
shortly after his return to Brazil he too passed away, prematurely at about
60.
THE
BIGAMISTS
Although as some learned scientist
would say, the human male is by nature a polygamist, just like some of the
animals in nature. Perhaps primordially it was true, but I would like to
believe that we have been behaviorally modified by cultural and environmental
factors as well. But, if one only looks at the Chinese society of perhaps
half a century ago, one sees cases after cases of bigamy and polygamy all over
the place, and within our own families and clan as well. I heard in those
tolerant days, the husband who desired a second mate could just find himself a
willing woman, and after some degree of domestic turmoil, just offered some
incense and candles in front of the family ancestral shrine to finalize his new
acquisition and enrolled her legally into the family, oftentimes after the fact
of cohabitation. It was that simple. I also understand that in the Muslim world
similar tricks could be pulled as well by the men. Modern feminists would
no doubt flip their lids hard, unfortunately only against the stubborn male
concrete wall. Be that as it may, bigamy is a fact in a good part of this world.
I only wish to be honest here in telling my story. Besides, the bigamists in my
story are all dead now, so no unusual judgmental hurt can result, I hope. But,
if the truth hurts, so be it, and I am sorry I had to tell it to set the record
straight.
For those of us who grew up in the
relatively modern world, or in modern America, it is of course illegal and/or
immoral (or psychiatrically too strenuous) to have more than one wife at any one
time. Throughout Chinese history, of course, we have often heard of the emperor
having in the “back room” (the “rear palace”, that is, and it must have been a
huge place) something like “three thousand beauties” who made up his one bona
fide empress and the rest concubines. To me these poor women could probably
and properly be called royal sex slaves, or perhaps a little bit more legal than
that. Everybody took that to be a fact of life and whatever the emperor did was
certainly legal, even if by force of authority. However, that system did cascade
down to many, many layers below the imperial court, perhaps down to the
individual village merchant with a little bit of money. My maternal grandfather,
whom I had never met, had two wives and he was only a street peddler of Shunde
Prefecture in Guangdong Province. His first wife had produced four
children but only a girl survived, therefore no heir. His second spouse had two
boys and three girls, my own mother among them. But as it would frequently beset
agrarian communities in China, this family was desperately poor and all the
children had to leave the village to make a living. My mother was, I
think, sold to a family in Shanghai to be a domestic servant. She somehow had
worked herself out of that deep hole in the ground by paying off her debts
eventually and married my father who was a civil servant.
My maternal grandfather and my own
father were the first bigamists that I know, but there were more, of course. As
it was apparently customary in our home village, a man about to go to the city
to seek his fortune was often arranged to get a wife who would join the family
more to be a replacement worker than a wife - wife in the modern sense of the
word. My Uncle Harry had this done to him before he left for America, and
he was home only long enough to beget a daughter, sister Jade, and had never
returned to China, for various reasons. He had accepted his brokered marriage as
a matter of course. But one of the reasons that he was willingly separated from
his family was probably that he felt he was obligated to support his brother (my
father, who had lost his father at age three) who was about ready to pursue his
education in Hong Kong. At any rate, my father Doo-Yet had his arranged
wife, had a daughter, and left the village. He eventually completed his English
middle school education and passed the examination for the Chinese Customs
Service, which, for some very strange reason, was at the time administered by
the British, while the name of the service was indeed “Chinese Customs
Service”. Shortly after he took the job, he was sent to station in Shanghai,
where he met and by deceit married my mother. But I know that marriage was full
of deep mutual affection, and likely also great love.
Of course, no details were ever
discussed in the family as to the romance between Mother and Father, but I think
I know for quite sure that my mother was never told that she was Number Two.
When she later found out, the situation was such that she had no choice but to
accept that fact (for divorce was never an option in those days, especially for
a woman with children, I suppose). And, from her subsequent actions, I am quite
sure that she felt both she and Father’s first wife, who remained
a virtual widow in the village, were victims of an unjust male-dominated
society. My mother, bless her kind Buddhist heart, took the responsibilities of
managing two families with my father’s salary, even through the eight very
difficult years of the War with Japan. Actually, Uncle Harry’s wife Ahmoo and
daughter Jade and son Sau-Shan also came under our immediate family as custom
and tradition would dictate. My mother, therefore, became a resource for three
families (wholly or partly) for most of her married life. Again, bless her kind
Buddhist soul, indeed.
When brother Ling and I had
finally reestablished contact after two decades of Red rule in China, and he had
successfully settled in the U. S., we were able to occasionally talk about our
childhood days in China. After sister Jade’s funeral this past January, we had a
few free and easy days together in Boston. He remembered to me how sporty Jade
and Sau-Shan were in their youth in Hong Kong. Brother Sau-Shan did not do
particularly well at school but was dressed quite stylishly with all-white
shoes, shirt, and trousers with suspenders. Jade was particularly good at
tennis in the late 1930’s. In fact, she was something of an international star,
and an object of a few romantic pursuits by young men. One of her suitors
named Longo Tam was particularly memorable, who came courting in a
flashy-fashionable motor car. In order to befriend any of the Tongs, Longo
would offer rides to the kids and Ling was always looking forward to that fun
and thrill. Eventually, that courtship led to a shotgun marriage, to the
great dismay and sadness of Harry in America and my father in China. But, what
had to happen happened, and apparently nothing could be done to stop that
romance. However, as it later turned out, Longo already had a wife with three
daughters somewhere and his bigamist marriage to Jade at the time was not
reversible. Harry and Ahmoo had to accept that fact. And, Father, although
serving as “deputy patriarch” after Harry, could not honestly and righteously
say or do anything, as he was a bigamist himself.
______________________________________________________
DRIPPINGS FROM THE TONG SOUP
BOWL
I am, of course, not a
bigamist, but I did have two wives at two different times. My first wife,
Mayling Soohoo, and I did not get married in the old village brokered
style. I met her at a picnic and was greatly impressed by her fluent and
pure Toishanese, very rare for an American-born. That marriage came out of
free courtship without any family duress of any kind, but it failed for eventual
incompatibility of the worst kind. The divorce was a bit painful but was
concluded in a friendly, no-fault way. This goes to show that not all
marriages out of free courtship are failure-free, but can and often get on the
rocks in the apparently normal course of events. On the whole, however, brokered
marriages have a better chance of tragedy, for example, my father’s first
marriage, Uncle Doo-Park’s marriage, and Uncle Harry’s marriage did not, to say
the least, bring happiness to the men involved, not in the long-term sense. They
had, however, created three virtual widows. I am very glad that I am finally
blessed with a lady in Yeuching, who will walk down the long beach with me in my
twilight and hand in hand.
________________________________________________________
Luckily for Longo and everybody
else, the two halves of the Tam family were able to co-exist without any
discernible problems, and in fact, they at times did live together under one
roof. Everything was not, however, peaceful and heartache-free. Further
events continued to show that Longo was still chasing other women, and Jade and
the first wife had to on occasion get united in joint efforts to combat (but
only vainly) Longo’s womanizing endeavors. Somehow, Longo and his first
family were successful in settling in the San Francisco area after failed
attempts at promoting construction projects such as a large-scale desalination
plant for thirsty Hong Kong. And after dabbling in some other projects, he was
reportedly able to gain fame by introducing a fast-growing tree to China after
Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” campaign had nearly completely deforested the nation.
I heard he was subsequently given a patriotic medal of some kind by Deng
Xiaoping himself. Unfortunately, he passed away during one of his trips to
China. Later, Jade’s daughter Margaret went to China to take care of some
unfinished business and found an additional hitherto-unknown half brother,
offspring of her father’s by an unknown lady.
From what my mother had told me,
Longo not only was good at convincing women of his love, but also in convincing
others about his business ideas. My mother, even as discerning as she was, had
invested several bars of gold from her hard-earned life’s savings, and saw that
investment evaporated with Longo’s departure for Hong Kong, just ahead of the
advancing Chinese Liberation Army in 1948. Even the nice western-style
house that Longo deeded to her as “collateral” had indeed been previously
already deeded to other debtors in the chaos-induced deceits of the time and by
Longo’s super-salesmanship. Longo was indeed a man of ideas and dreams and
abundant sexual passion, but perhaps he had lived at a time when morals were too
loose, and success required real substance. Eviction of my mother and her family
brought sadness and great anger, even to a kind Buddhist heart.
There were of course other
bigamists still in the clan. Beginning with two generations above mine,
one of my grandfather’s brothers named Tong Yue Kwon became a businessman in
Hong Kong, probably quite successful at the time. In the old days having a
large family was considered a source of pride. In fact, one of the New Year’s
greetings was to wish someone prosperity and more children, as if the latter
were a commodity like money. After all, Confucius had for a couple of
millenniums taught the Chinese that filial piety was one of the top rules of
life, so having a lot of children meant a prosperous retirement for the
parents. Granduncle Yue Kwon, probably desired a large family, had
taken in two wives, one Seeto Shee and one Leung Shee, who produced a
total of twelve children, among them were Jackson, Albert, Herbert, Tze-Lop,
Tze-Wai, and their sisters. Jackson followed his father’s footsteps and had two
simultaneous wives as well (Kwan Shee and Shiu Shee), even in the law-governed
United States, with a total of six children, all are well.
Yue Kwon’s older brother, Yue
Heng, also had two wives, Lee Shee and Deng Shee, who gave him two daughters and
two sons: Doo-Ting and Doo-Park. Doo-Ting served in the U. S. Army
honorably and fought in Germany during World War II, and passed away during the
early 1970’s as a lonely and lost soul in New York City. I suspect he had
somehow been psychiatrically wounded in the war. Doo-Park gave a good part
of his life serving the Boston Redevelopment Authority until his death in 2004,
from emphysema and a life long indulgence in cigarettes He was outgoing
and always helpful, but died also as a lonely soul without a normal family of
his own. His brokered wife in the village finally settled in Toronto,
Canada, with her adopted son, but husband and wife never did meet again, sadly
neither in person nor by phone. How do we now, as descendents of that village
culture, make a judgment of that marriage custom in this day and age? Luckily,
that custom seems not to exist any more, not with us in America anyway. Parts of
us all are going into the Great Melting Pot and in a way have
become a lot more enlightened regarding love and family.
IN THE
MELTING POT
The saga of the Tongs in North
America would be incomplete without a “sequel” about their offshoots in this new
land. First, after over a century of Chinese settlement in this part of the
world, we have finally left the bottom of the well that is Chinatown in which
the sky was only a little circle as one looked up. As we ascended towards
the mouth of the well, the horizon indeed had expanded into a vast world.
Thanks to the principle of equal opportunity, flawed as it has often been, many
of the offspring had finished their higher education and gone forward into the
professions: we have produced a doctor, a meteorologist/air pollution
specialist, an industrial product designer, a medical center comptroller, a
hi-tech products educator, a computer systems infrastructure manager, a
doctor/optometrist, a pharmacist, two computer applications consultants, two
Wall Street money managers, an economist, a social worker, two postal
workers, etc, etc, plus a chef, a restaurant manager and a dish washer. I am
sure I have not listed them all. The cultural and racial integration of
the past decades have made the melting pot a lot more real to my
generation and those that are following. At least in the pot things,
including opportunities, are a little more equal.
So, when people are put in an
equal environment such as schools, the workplace, the buses, the armed forces,
etc, the close associations among people generate sentiments and often affection
and love in a natural way. Perhaps raw genetics in the pot are sneakily
arranging marriages for the production of healthier and smarter kids. This
has been so obvious to me when I looked at the younger set. First, my first born
Darren married Sarah Prince, of English and other European stock. As far
as I know, Darren never had a Chinese girl friend when he was younger.
Same can be said about Jing, my second-born. Cousin Tommy and his wife
Lucy have five daughters, one married an Italian, one an Irish, one a Chinese,
and the rest married outside our race as well. Wilbur Tong in Detroit married a
Hindu girl, and had, from the wedding pictures, a very interesting and unusual
ceremony which took hours. The Yu brothers of New Rochelle, Sherman and
Raymond were also gobbled up by the hungry pot. Sherman, a JD, married a
girl of German descent from Texas, a beautiful woman and an accomplished CPA,
and has two beautiful children. The boy is extremely active; and the girl is
just peaches and cream. Raymond married a very beautiful Korean-American
girl, who was trained as a lawyer, and they now have two equally beautiful
children, a boy and a girl.
I want to someday be able to vote
for anyone of these children when, not if, he or she runs for the U.S. Senate or
for a higher office. That desire, although not likely to materialize in my
lifetime, is after all what this great country and this melting pot are all
about.
Believe
me.
(EYT053105)
This essay is dedicated to
the upcoming generations of the American Tongs who, while growing roots in this
beautiful, new land, will inevitably want to remember their Chinese roots as
well.
______________________________________________________
Note 1. The Chinese surname
Tong has several meanings, among them SOUP, HOT WATER; and in Japan, they refer
to a hot spring as Tang (pronounced as “T’ahng”), a Mandarin pronunciation of
the word. In Cantonese the word is pronounced as Tong, a spelling adopted by the
Boston Tongs as they had for a couple of generations undergone some urbanization
in the City of Canton and Hong Kong. Back in the home village, however, the name
would be known as Hong, following the local dialect.
Note 2. Feminists will
flip their lids at this Chinese custom. In all genealogies that I have
seen, wives are referred to by their maiden last name followed by the word Shee,
meaning something like “clan”. Never have I seen a given name for a woman,
as if she was nameless. Furthermore, in the familiar address, an older woman is
referred to as Moo or Sim, something like “aunt, wife of so-and-so”. For
example, a person out side of the clan would politely call Harry’s wife Doo-Toy
Moo (or Sim), but never her given name of Fon Tai, or Aunt Fon Tai. In official
documents, she would be known as Wong Shee, roughly translated: “Woman of the
Wong clan” (or, in a more polite form: “Lady of the Wong clan”). That flips your
lid, too? Oh, well, okay.
Note 3. In January of
2005, I attended the funeral of sister Jade, Harry’s only daughter, in New
Rochelle , NY, in bitter, windy cold. At the warming dinner afterwards, her
grandson Sherman Yu had asked if I would tell him more about his grandmother and
great grandparents on the Tong side. Out of this request has come this discourse
of what I know about the American Tongs and their derivatives. What I say
here may not be completely true, but true to the best of my recollection. This
piece is written specifically for Sherman and those branching off of the Tong
tree interested in their roots.
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Roots of the Tong & Yan Clans"