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Growing up Chinese-American was not easy, but it wasn't particularly hard either. Then again that's growing up in general, I suppose.
I was born in Hong Kong and came to this country at age three. I'm not absolutely sure when my identity congealed in my consciousness. I suppose it was kindergarten when I began to suspect I was a Chinese kid instead of just any old kid.
I remember thinking to myself in Cantonese: ``Hey! They're not calling the horsey by the right name.'' I had a hard time trying to tell the blond-haired kid that he should share the plastic horsey with others.
The identity thing didn't quite make itself felt, though, until I was old enough to go to Chinese school. For me, Chinese school was a pain. My family was then living in a housing project in the South Cove area adjacent to both Chinatown and South Boston.
My daily routine consisted of going to second grade at the Abraham Lincoln School in the morning and Chinese classes at the Kwang Gow School in Chinatown during the afternoon.
There were two things that made Chinese school tough for me and my brother.
One was the the unholy coincidence that the pickup spot for the school van was located in front of the house of the neighborhood bullies. The twin Yee brothers did a thriving trade in ``protection.'' I think they've since become cops.
The other was afternoon Hanna Barbera cartoons. We felt deprived as Americans because we had to go to Chinese school while other kids were enjoying Magilla Gorilla and Snagglepuss.
I don't think the act of learning was so hard. We already spoke fluent Cantonese and calligraphy is actually a lot of fun for younger children who, I think, find it easy to associate a pictogram with a meaning or object. But the atmosphere was different back then. There were a lot of incentives not to learn. Magilla Gorilla was only one of them.
In the seventies, it just wasn't all that fashionable to be Chinese, especially immigrant Chinese. The jook-sings, or American-born Cantonese, would beat us up for having that fresh-off-the-boat look. There was no cool Chinese person on TV other than Kane of ``Kung Fu'' (and Kane looked funny for a Chinese and spoke funnier.) People would say ``egg foo yong'' or ``egg roll'' to us as a matter of course, which made me feel bad even though I liked egg rolls. All our dads were restaurant cooks and all our moms were seamstresses which is kind of depressing to a kid who wanted to grow up and be like GI Joe or Speed Racer (which is a futile dream since it well known that Chinese people can't drive.)
And there was always someone to make fun of us when we did speak Chinese in public. You know, the familiar ``ching chong'' routine. As an Asian comedian once said, ``you should never do the `ching chong' to an Oriental because it really confuses him.''
On top of everything, you could throw in busing. My brothers and I were shipped as tender grade-schoolers to Charlestown in police-escorted yellow containers. They told us busing was for our own good.Anyway, all this had an effect on our studies at Chinese school. We took to reading comic books in class, copying other people on exams (which didn't work because sitting in the back of the class, we were copying off of kids who were copying off of other kids and somewhere along the line all the right answers got screwed up) and daydreaming.
It all came to a head when both my brother and I were kicked out of Chinese School in the winter of '76. I came home with a note written in Chinese stating that I had lived up to my Chinese school nickname of Sek-tow, ``rock-head.''
My dad was very upset at this. A slightly neurotic electrician and spray-painter who became a restaurant cook (what else) in America, he got so mad that he decided to punish me with whatever he had on hand at the time. I believe I was the only Chinese child ever to be beaten on the behind with a Christmas tree. I was glad it wasn't the wok.
I really excelled at regular school after being kicked out of Kwong Gow. I got into advanced classes in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades. Under a great teacher at the Clarence Edwards in Charlestown, I was prepared for and entered Boston Latin School. I blazed my way through honor classes in that exam school before running into the stone walls of teenage malaise and ``chick'' problems during my junior and senior years.
It could have been the bite of the Christmas tree that drove me to academic success after being thrown out of Chinese school. But I think it could have been the easing of pressure that happened when Chinese school was no longer a factor in my young life.
Actually, my schooling at Kwong Gow had lasted two years during which I learned to write my name and a few other words in Chinese such as one, two, three, mountain, person, mother and horsey. But as the years have gone by, I've regretted never having learned how to read and write Chinese. Although I can speak my native Cantonese fluently, I wish I'd made more of an effort back then to learn the Chinese characters.
This really struck me as as I was going through a phase of intense interest on the history and culture of my homeland during high school and college. I realized as a person of Chinese descent that I could only read about Chinese history from books written in English.
The world was different then, I suppose. But sometimes I want to turn back the clock for a moment and go back to a day at Kwong Gow when I was giving Dick Wong a hard time.
``How come you actually do well in these classes?'' I yelled at him. ``It's making me and my brother look bad.''
Dick yelled back: ``Because I want to know some Chinese when I grow up.''
Dick was blond and blue-eyed. He, incredibly, was the only full-blooded Anglo child I ever knew who was adopted by Chinese parents. I thought he was nuts for actually liking Chinese school. Now, I'm pretty sure he wasn't.
Cheong Chow is a reporter for The Boston Globe._