Growing Up Asian

Tribute to Ancestors

   When I was young I was fairly insecure. English was a second language to me, and when I attended first grade my teachers couldn’t understand me. I remember being sent to speech class to recite “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall…” Eventually, I learned how to make friends and my anxiety over being Chinese became manageable. 

   When I was 16, I picked up both the guitar as well as a camera. I became proficient at both. I decided to major in music but went into photography to make a living. Because of an experience with my father that I will not get into, I went to work for him when he asked for my help. I wanted to prove to him that I was a better person than he thought. My mother, incidentally, warned be about this. She said to me, “Are you sure about this?”

   It didn’t take more than 4 years before I became as good or better than my father was in the darkroom, and he was one of the best. It wasn’t long before the customers were asking for me instead of him. My ego began to grow in an alarming fashion. I began to establish my own way to balance film exposures – different from how Eastman Kodak recommending it. Perhaps the height of my self-importance was when, at a large photo conference, a lab owner went up to the microphone and asked the Kodak representatives why three Hall brothers could come up with a software that worked when Kodak, after working on the same software for 2 years, couldn’t accomplish the same?

   By then, I had already started my own lab (in competition with my father’s), and I was building my own list of customers who required high quality color photographs. I was regularly completing orders of 300 to 500 large murals.

   I recall being upset when Fuji failed to deliver 30 rolls of photo paper in order for me to meet a deadline. I was so big headed that I called them to complain. Eventually their field representative called me back to apologize. He said that the main office was closed at the time but that he would do whatever he could to help in the morning. Then he said, “I’m sorry but I, too, am out of the office. I’m up here in Seattle where I took my wife for medical treatment, and she just passed away. So now I’m a single parent with 2 children and dealing with that. But I’ll do what I can for you.”

  It was a seismic shift moment for me. All of a sudden, I was put in my place and my problem seemed so small. I immediately told him not to worry about me and to take care of his family. I told him that I would use larger sized rolls of paper and cut them down to size in order to make my deadline.

   In 2012 I, too, lost my wife to cancer and I was left with 2 teenage children to raise. I had spent so much time building my business that my children were almost strangers to me. The next 2 years were very difficult. Running the lab and caring for my kids became almost impossible.

   But I had told my wife to not worry. I would take care of our kids and they would be alright. It’s been 10 years since then, and thankfully, they are fine and we are doing okay now. But here’s the thing. When you’re young, you are mainly concerned with your own life, your own success. If you’re lucky, eventually you begin to measure your success and well-being on the tangible results stemming from the welfare of your family, and you stop being self-centered. My high school friend, Vimal, says it this way. “Our happiness only goes as far as our children’s happiness,” or something like that.

   These photographs depict a series of experiences of living in this country. Many are simply a glimpse into a particular time experienced by an Asian family. The earliest photograph dates to the late 1890s, when my grandfather was sent here to run the family business. After 42 years, the business was shut down due to the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. The opening photograph to the show was taken in the newly built building at 734 Jackson Street in Chinatown. My grandfather is situated in the center.

   The most recent photographs in the show were made in 2021, during the Covid 19 pandemic, shot at Portsmouth Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The giveaway clues are the masks worn. So, the photographs in this show span the years 1890 to 2021.

   There’s a backstory as to why I started on this photographic project. While visiting Uncle John, my father’s eldest brother, he would often ask me to go through his collection of old photographs. He would ask for one in particular. It depended on his mood. It might be something from his military past or a photograph of an old friend. It was always something that brought back fond memories. Sometimes he’d ask me to copy the photo and to make it larger so that he could see it better. In all cases the photographs were small little things, about 3” square, and they were often faded. I doubt that they were carefully made, just snapshots. He never asked me to bring out photographs that brought back bad memories.

   This may be an indication on how to best live one’s life. To remember only the best of times, to recall those feelings that accompanied those times. And why is it that when a house burns down or is destroyed by a storm, the residents look feverishly for the old photographs? Could it be that the best of our lives can somehow be contained within a simple photograph?

   Conversing with my uncle, there were times of turmoil though. My great grandfather came to this country in 1852, and he started the first herb shop in Chinatown in 1864. The federal government shut it down in 1957 because it became illegal to do business with “red” China. According to him (he did the yearly inventory control), we lost $750,000 in inventory when the government shut us down.

    The store had been operating, by that time, for over 93 years. The ownership of the store was spread out among many family members, and it constituted the livelihood of many. Overnight, the family was bankrupt.  All the employees (many were stockholders) had to find another way to make a living, and my father was among them.  My mother told me he had to work three jobs in order to make enough money to support his 4 children. 

   Understandably, my uncle was upset for many years. He was the last surviving member of my father’s generation, and he passed away at the age of 99 in 2019. He asked me to take him to the Chinese Historical Society so that he could tell the story of his family. He always felt that this country did his family an injustice, and he even asked me to sue the government more than a couple of times. I made these series of photographs in order to show them at the historical society, but they have been closed due to the pandemic. Consequently, I am showing this portfolio at the Art Gallery at Skyline College, and I thank them sincerely for their support in allowing me to display the prints that I have made.

   My maternal grandmother was kidnapped from the city of Canton when she was a young girl… probably about 5 or 6 years old.  She was brought to San Francisco to be raised to be a prostitute. An elderly gentleman saw her in the house where she was sold to, and he purchased my grandmother.     

   He brought her to his home where he raised her until she was 15 years old, and he made her his wife.  She bore him 9 children – 5 boys and 4 girls.  My mother was the ninth child and was born in 1920 in San Francisco.

   I included a photograph of my mother’s family after my grandparents returned to China.  My mother is about 1 or 2 years old, and since she was born in 1920 this photograph is just about 100 years old.  Every one of her siblings were born in America which allowed them to come back to the US when the family ran out of the money they had brought back to China.

   All 9 children came back to the United States and my mother returned during the invasion of China by the Japanese.  My eldest 3 uncles were allowed to bring their wives with them when they returned to America.  My 4^th uncle had married too late; the laws had changed, and it was forbidden to bring Chinese women to America, even when married to an American citizen.  My 4^th aunt was kept on Angel Island for over a year’s time; she was sent back to China where she lived in our village until she passed in the late 1970s.  My mother went back to China twice to visit her sister-in-law, and when 4^th aunt passed away my mother told me that there was no longer any reason to return to China.

   So, my family history is an interesting one. Yet, it probably is not too different from the many immigrant stories of families that came to this country in order to make a better life. The hardships and the injustices our ancestors faced were, most likely, not unlike those of the immigrants that came to America from all over the world. And that is the point.

   Against the backdrop of the current violence shown towards Asians there is, in these photographs, the reminder that all those who came from another land eventually became Americans. What I wanted to convey is that we, as Asian Americans are as American as any other immigrant group in this country. I included photographs that dealt with the many normal activities that all Americans share, bike riding, camping, music, and a section that highlights a practice wholly welcomed by America, a form of marital arts, Tai Chi Chun.

   While preparing this show of photographs, I came across a third, and rather interesting, reason why this collection of photographs became so meaningful.

   I thought back on the stories behind these photographs. It was only by asking questions while looking at old photos that my aunts, uncles, and my own parents relayed the information that they had never been prepared to tell. The stories came almost like an off handed remark, and I would say, “What was that?” The relevance of their stories found their way to an understanding that came from unknown questions that I had had for many years. And things began to fall into place.

   It occurs to me that our DNA carries, with it, an unknown amount of historical residue that affects our lives, whether we know it or not. Our genetic predilection carries a sort of prediction of our lives. Not that we are predestined in any specific way, but we have an inclination to be affected by the consumption of alcohol, or recreational drugs, or to be deficient in certain vitamins which could result in all manners of illnesses. And these “inclinations,” so to speak, are not the same for everyone. That we all have our own inborn “weaknesses” to overcome in our lifetime, is a fact of life. Perhaps one of the reasons for living is to deal with these challenges. You might even call this our own specific “original sin.”

   In any case, much of our historical DNA, for the lack of a better word, is unknown to us. I began to see that our family stories are, in a sense, similar to our (unknown) DNA. But the difference is, we can know more of how our family’s group experience can influence our current and future lives. We have only to speak with the senior members of our families. This, as it appears, does not happen often enough.

   When I thought about it, many of the conversations I have had with my aunts and uncles provided surprising information that I had not heard before, and as a matter of fact, I was given information that I had previously assumed incorrectly. For example, Auntie Rose told me that my grandfather had three wives and not two. The first wife passed away and he took on a second wife. I thought that my grandmother was his first wife. But in fact, my grandmother was his 3^rd wife. There was an unknown wife that died earlier. I never would have known this had I not spoken with Auntie Rose.

   I also assumed that my 2^nd grandmother was brought to this country by my grandfather, and she lived in a house that was purchased by him. She lived in Oakland while my grandmother lived in San Francisco. But I was wrong. Uncle Bill told me that this 2^nd grandmother was brought to this country by Uncle Donald, and it was he who purchased a house for his mother in Oakland. Uncle Donald, you see, was born from the 2^nd Grandmother. 

   Why was this important? Well, for one thing, I had to ask myself why my grandfather left his 2^nd wife in China, and why did he not care for her when she finally did come to this country. That was a major question for me. As it turned out, that 2^nd wife was somehow “disowned” by my grandfather for reasons I’ll not go into. Suffice to say that that “disowned” experience had an immense effect on both Uncle Donald and Auntie Jane; they were the son and daughter of my 2^nd grandmother. I am unsure of how much Uncle Donald knew of this “dis-ownership” but I am pretty sure that Auntie Jane knew nothing of it.

   Nevertheless, the way that Auntie Jane grew up… imagine your own father not spending time with you. Perhaps she thought it was simply because she was a girl and not a boy. In any case, today, I feel sorry for Auntie Jane. I do think, as I look back, that my mother knew something was amiss, because she always tried to include Auntie Jane in the family functions when she could. I know now that my mother must have noticed how Auntie Jane was not recognized nor accepted by her own father. Yet, I have in my possession, my grandfather’s will which I inherited when my father passed away in 2012. In it, he writes a check for Auntie Jane for $500. So, although many Chinese fathers did not leave anything for daughters back in the day, he did leave $500 for Auntie Jane. And I have the cancelled check with Auntie Jane’s signature on the back. So, she must have known that somehow, her father did remember her, and I hope that brought her some sense of “belonging” when her father died.

 ­­  I think about Auntie Jane’s kids; Josie is the oldest daughter. How did this “dis-ownership” of her grandmother affect her sense of self while growing up? She, obviously, saw very little of her grandfather, but witnessed our relationship with him when she, herself, had none. When I say “our” I mean my brothers and cousins born from the children from the 3^rd wife. Do you see what I mean?  

   Whereas our ancestral DNA has an unknown effect on our real lives that we may never know about, we can know some things associated with our actual family history that has had a real effect on our mental and psychological health. We just have to speak with the older members of our families to find out about our history. There is much there to uncover.

   In closing I have to add that when my father lost the family business he would one day say that it was the best thing that ever happened to him.  At the time, it didn’t seem that way. Overnight, my mother told me, my father had to find a way to support his family.  She said that he took on 3 jobs at the same time.  One of them was as a photographer, which was what he wound up doing until he retired.  He shared with me the craft, and I would one day also open my own photography business with my brothers.

   In life, everything is an opportunity.  When tragedy strikes it may not seem that way, but if you approach everything that happens as an opportunity, then you will find that everything works out in the end.

   This country has been a real blessing for us.  Except for the Native Americans, we are all either immigrants or children of immigrants.  It seems that seniority plays a great part in our perception of ourselves, that is, whoever comes to this country earlier than the next, has seniority.  And the newest immigrants have to suffer the most. They get the lowest paying jobs and work under the worse conditions.  Their children do better and on it goes.

   The irony, of course, is that the original occupants of this land never get the benefits of seniority, and they often have the worse conditions that this country has to offer.

    Nevertheless, from my perspective, my Great Grandfather gave me and my family the greatest blessing when he came to this country to find a better future for himself and his family.  

   A final note. My grandfather and my father were both photographers. Both had darkrooms and made their own photographs with the use of light and chemistry. I represent the third generation of film photographers. I say film because, nowadays, it seems most are satisfied making photographs, or I should say, capturing images from a digital camera. Film and a darkroom are no longer necessary.

   Still, it is my hope that film photography survives and begins to find relevance again. At the very least, I hope that the significance of the photograph is recognized again. It can lead to a real understanding of self and where one came from.

          What we do for our children is what we do for ourselves. What my ancestors did for us is what they wanted for us. It’s what they lived for. I’m not the first son or daughter to say, “My mother did everything for us.” And I mean everything. When I look at the portraits of their faces, I can feel their dedication, their love. The photographs are not equivalent to their love, but there is a trace of it, and these photographs are my attempt to capture that.