Tiger Babies Strike Back Read Free

from two black-and-white photos of my grandpa as a young man, standing between an elderly white couple, everyone smiling and proud.
    My grandpa spoke a lot about playing football and being such a fast runner that he was known in school as “Chinese Lightning.” When he asked the coach why he was never put in any games, this man whom my grandpa claimed had great fondness for him gave him the news straight. “I wish I could, Lem. But I can’t on account of you being Chinese.”
    After earning a political science degree from George Washington University, my grandpa looked for a job, but encountered much discrimination. So he went back to China in search of work. He was a newspaperman in Shanghai when he met my grandmother. It was the early 1930s and Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East, with colonial-style buildings on the Bund and fancy dance halls. Of course, there also existed extreme poverty and people dying in the streets, but as my mind conjures the family lore, these unsavory truths are expunged. Sticking with the Chinese American fairy tale, Lemuel Jen spotted a young woman named Lucy Chow, thinking she was a rich debutante. My grandmother told me many years later that she was actually wearing a borrowed dress the night she met Gung Gung. Her family had once been rich but her father had been killed fighting for Sun Yat-sen’s Republic in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. Her mother remarried, to a “fat, old man” who would not have accepted a woman who’d been wed before, so my grandma was forced to pretend she was her mother’s niece, not her daughter. Her mother had begged the new husband to allow her niece to work in the house as a maid. My grandma Lucy, Pau Pau, would tell me these things as she nibbled Pepperidge Farm butter cookies in her Russian Hill apartment, over commercials during Bonanza .
    Eventually my grandpa Lemuel got a job with the U.S. government in the Lend-Lease program. Before the United States officially joined the Allied Forces in World War II, it was “lending” military supplies to other countries and needed people like him to translate and work as liaisons.
    In 1949, they left Hong Kong on USS General Gordon and landed in San Francisco, my grandpa’s adopted hometown. They scrambled for money with odd jobs such as peeling pounds of shrimp for local restaurants, delivering newspapers, and helping out in Chinese-owned grocery stores and curio shops. They eventually started a travel agency on Clay Street in Chinatown. Meanwhile, in addition to my mother and aunt, my grandparents also had five other children. In pictures from those days, Pau Pau looks elegant with her perfectly coiffed hair and tight cheongsams, the Chinese-style dress with a high Mandarin collar, side zipper, and slit up the side. Her style and aplomb combined with Grandpa Lemuel’s chutzpah epitomized for me the can-do attitude that propelled them toward the American Dream.
    And that was how I came to be walking down Grant Avenue with them as a wide-eyed four-year-old. I felt safe with them. At the time, I was just a content little kid, and surrounded in the ethnic cocoon that was Chinatown, I made no distinction between myself and the other Chinese I saw around me. After that year with my grandparents, I started kindergarten and didn’t go to their office as often, but throughout my childhood, I still visited Chinatown every Saturday morning. My parents would help Gung Gung and Pau Pau with travel agency work, and my brothers and I would goof around on the streets, hanging around our cousin’s grandpa’s grocery store. It was the first market in Chinatown to carry both Chinese and American products, so you could get your dried cuttlefish and Cap’n Crunch all in one stop. We would run in the aisles as Yeh Yeh watched us bemusedly in his greengrocer’s apron.
    My brothers and I were American kids for most of the week, Chinese kids on Saturdays. We