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.
Return to "Historical Roots
of the Tong & Yan Clans"