Chinese Immigrant Family Stories, Voyage to America

Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

I have written about the American experience, including the Chinese immigrant story: Voyage to America. 

When I was a young girl, a Chinese immigrant's grownup granddaughter described her grandfather to me and showed me a picture of him while recalling details he'd meticulously told her about his life. In my personal journal, I wrote what she said and how the story made me feel as I was growing up during the civil Rights Movement in the American West with my part-Comanche grandmother under Jim Crow laws. 

I have kept notes from childhood throughout my adult life in personal journals, note books, slivers of paper, backs of used envelopes, napkins and even matchbooks. Personal journals have been an integral part of my writing career. In fact, I have taught journaling and published books of elementary school student writing and artwork, discovering a wealth of talent and imagination. I instruct them to write their observations and feelings as I did in my newspaper column and my book. 

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You don't need a fancy journal, but it good to have a permanent place to keep notes, rather than have them scattered in desk drawers and shoe boxes. Today, of course, along with most everyone else who is a professional writer or not, I use laptops, net books and computer tablets, depending on where I happen to be. However, a simple old-fashioned paper journal or Big Chief Tablet will also do the trick, if you are really serious about keeping a journal.

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In a very creative environment today, an electronic journal seems to be a must for most people. Personally, I use them all--computer tablets, net books, note books, laptops and personal audio recorders. I'm sure my mother, being an electronic gadget grabber that she was, would have sprung for one of these new electronic journals for herself, if not for me, although she might have let me use her tablet.

My mother kept many different types of journals in regular note books, each labeled according to its content. Some were daily observations and ideas. Other journals, were devoted to her original songs and music compositions. Still others were drawings, art and recipes.

Because of my mother, we had television, automatic record changer and air conditioning before anyone else on our street, not because we were wealthy. We were not! During the era of Jim Crow laws, no one in our neighborhood had a high paying job. However, my mother's priorities included staying current with developing technology, which she read about in the books and periodical subscriptions.

Take down your memories, observations, thoughts and feelings in a journal and, remember, no one has to see it until you want to share your writing or not.

This memory and journal notes of the Chinese immigrant story remained an entry in my personal journal until I became a syndicated columnist many years later for Knight-Ridder and Hearst newspapers in the 1990s and was assigned columns recalling life in the 1950s and '60s before and during the Civil Rights Movement. As I grew as a columnist, journalist and writer, publishers and editors became interested in my published work and Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s (Texas A&M University Press) was born from a selection of my published collection of articles.`Young readers in Long Beach, California, middle schools read my stories, conducted lively discussions and made drawings to depict their interpretation of the meaning. Here is one of the articles.

Voyage to America: A Chinese Immigrant Story 

Before Fred took the boat from China nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, he had already learned things that people in Brazos County didn't know back then--like fancy fighting with his feet and hands that could break bones or even kill with one blow, and new ways to cook rice other than boiling it and burying it under chicken gravy.

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I knew Fred well through stories I heard his granddaughter tell in the 1950s when I was a little girl. She said that her grandfather called himself Fred because the people in his new home could not seem to pronounce his old name. Once in America, Fred traveled to Texas when it was still the frontier, married a slave woman, and raised a brown-skinned family that would have gone unnoticed in our community if not for Fred's distinctive eyes. I knew people in Robertson County with eyes like Fred's, but their grandfather was from Japan. 

Fred's granddaughter's stories squeezed me under the ship's main floor and into dark, damp, flat quarters where the ceiling was too low to sit up.,Rocking and swaying from side to side, my imaginary ship made me queasy, while imaginary companions threw up on each other. Inside her stories, my own lungs labored as the air in the hole became thick with body odor and heavy with human excrement. I felt myself growing faint from the lack of something fresh to breath. Fred's granddaughter said the vessel ran short of food and drinking water. Before long, everyone who wasn't starving or dying of thirst was ill. Infections caused by unsanitary conditions, and by bites and stings from the ships animals and insects claimed the youngest first, then the elders. My knees weakened as I thought of that little Chinese boy watching the decayed bodies of his family being thrown over the side of a ship in the middle of the night. When he reached the shores of freedom, Fred was herded with hundreds of other into detention centers, concentration camps, plantations, factories and other similar places of servitude.

The Chinese-American West

When I heard my grandmother calling me home for dinner, I stood up feeling guilty for my own good fortune, and walked the short distance to the safety of a home filled with people who took care of me.

As I was writing my book, I realized the Chinese story was not too different from my own, except that our African ancestry was mixed with Comanche ancestry. 

Read more about the Chinese American West: Exploring the Chinese-American West.That's the wonderful by product of writing--we learn how much we share and how similar we are as human beings.

This book, Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers by John Jung, although not the same as my story of Chinese immigrants, is a story of:

"How some Chinese immigrants got to the Mississippi River Delta in the late 1870s and earned a living with small family-operated grocery stores in neighborhoods where mostly black cotton plantation workers lived. What was their status in the segregated black and white world of that time and place? How did this small group preserve their culture and ethnic identity? "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton"is a social history of the lives of these pioneering families and the unique and valuable role they played in their communities for over a century." Review from CdDsBooksDvs.com. 

Even if you do not have the desire to write a book, you may want to document your own ideas and feelings about life as you see it. I found that writing about my personal experiences gave me a great deal of hope and was gratifying in many unexpected ways. I have continued my writing experience in this blog: Sunny Nash - Race Relations in America. 

Jesse Jackson & Rosa Parks

I hope you will take a look at other posts in my blog like. Rosa Parks: Black Womanhood, Rape & Lynching about civil rights advocate and women's rights champion, Rosa McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) who helped all people, including the Chinese, to gain rights during the era of Jim Crow laws in the United States after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  

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Bigmama Didn’t Shop 
At Woolworth’s 
Sunny Nash

Listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s (Texas A&M University Press) is also recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida. Because my family has deep roots in Comanche heritage, Native American collections have begun to use my book to look at the connections it makes between African American and Native American bloodlines and culture.

Robin Fruble of Southern California said, “Every white person in America should read this book (Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s)! Sunny Nash writes the story of her childhood without preaching or ranting but she made me realize for the first time just how much skin color changes how one experiences the world.  But, if your skin color is brown, it matters a great deal to a great number of people. I needed to learn that. Sunny Nash is a great teacher,” Fruble said. 

© 2012 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.