You should leave, Kiu Kwan insisted to her son. If you can’t make it in Hong Kong, you should go to America.
After he graduated from high school, Wing Shek did not score well on the college entrance exam, as he put it, so he worked as a draftsman for an electric company. Five and a half days a week, he mapped out where cables needed to be laid throughout buildings in Hong Kong, and eventually found another job as an administrative assistant at another company. It was 1968, and a year earlier, a labor dispute at a flower factory catalyzed demonstrations, which later morphed into protests against the colonial British government, as well as clashes between pro-Communist factions and Hong Kong’s government.
My father did not join any of the protests. He thought they seemed dangerous.
I didn’t want to cause a big stir, he said. And in his view, no amount of protest would quell the Communist fervor or ease the British colonial hold.3 All he could do was take it day by day, he tells me. He went to his job, then returned home for dinner with his mother and grandmother. Sometimes, when the summer heat was especially thick, he went with friends to see movies like Doctor Zhivago, seeking a reprieve in the air-conditioned theater.
You can’t stay in Hong Kong, his mother insisted every week. It was too precarious here, Kiu Kwan was certain. She had a relative whose son had recently left Hong Kong for America, which had started admitting immigrants from Asia with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law opened the door to family members of U.S. citizens and to people like him—who had in-demand professional backgrounds that the government deemed “highly skilled.” Kiu Kwan had heard about this, and began to save up for my father to leave. She embroidered clothes for a small paycheck. She rented a room in their apartment to another family and learned to manage the buildings they had purchased with her dead husband’s remittances from Cuba. In the absence of a husband, these properties afforded them some stability. They would also help buy her son a plane ticket to America.
But I want to stay, Wing Shek said. He had an easy life in Hong Kong and, according to him, was not a particularly good student. I was lazy, he says—though I can’t tell if he is being self-deprecating or just blunt, both tendencies I also see in myself.
Just going to the U.S., people’s life will greatly improve, you know, my father tells me. People working overseas, they will make a lot of money—that’s usually the belief.
But there was the question of what would happen with his mother. Two years, eight months. My uncle, Wing Chong, had encouraged his oldest son, Denny, to apply to universities in Canada; Wing Chong could bring his other children that way. And my father had decided that once he was settled in the U.S., he would send for their mother. They had assembled a loose plan.
In 1969, Wing Shek enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied nuclear engineering. People would always need nuclear power, he figured, but the University of Wisconsin was also the most northern school that accepted him. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed the year my father applied to universities. He read about the assassination in the newspaper and saw the occasional headline about the civil rights movement in the U.S. As he put it, he knew that America was “not nice” to Black people, especially in the South. He thought that maybe Wisconsin might be better to Chinese people like him, as though that “not nice”-ness was contained to a single region, and racism was as simple as being “not nice.” This was the depth of what he knew, or at least acknowledged, on these matters.4
Wing Shek arrived in Los Angeles a few months before classes began. One of his friends worked in the kitchen at a restaurant there, and my father washed dishes for cash. Eventually, he traveled to Madison and meandered his first afternoons around campus. He met with academic advisors to argue about his schedule.
I don’t think I should be required to take this introductory drafting class because I worked as a draftsman, he insisted to a counselor. She pulled out his record.
You went to a technical school, she said.
If you give me a test, I can do everything those students can do, he insisted. He and the counselor debated this way for a few minutes. In his professional life, he had already put classroom theory to use, so there was no need for him to waste time or his resources. The university just wanted his money, he suspected. Wing Shek increased his volume in case this woman was having trouble hearing him. In case that was why she wasn’t listening.
You can do it if you work hard enough, he always heard. He was trying to project confidence. After all, America—as he believed it then—was a meritocracy.
Three years later, Wing Shek finished his undergraduate degree. The university did not offer help with job placement for international students, he tells me, and so, unable to find work, he decided he had two choices: return to Hong Kong, or remain in America and earn a graduate degree. He chose the latter.
* * *
That summer, before he enrolled at MIT to study nuclear engineering, he worked for a month as a porter at a resort in Wisconsin Dells and roamed the golf course and water park carrying luggage for guests and cleaning toilets. He was flattered when his boss there told him that if he returned next summer—and all the subsequent summers of graduate school—he could train to be a manager.
Hearing his story, I grow defensive and suspicious on his behalf. But you would’ve had a graduate degree, I think but do not say out loud, not wanting to dampen his memory. Did they think you weren’t capable of getting a job?
They like me, he says. He is proud all these decades later. He knew he wouldn’t take the offer because there was no reason for him to return to Wisconsin, but there was flattery in being wanted.
Afterward, he slowly made his way to Massachusetts. He stayed with extended family in Chicago, where he worked at a print shop and occasionally helped at his cousin’s restaurant. As the summer ended, he boarded a plane to Boston, where he would begin graduate school nearby at MIT.
It was well into fall when Wing Shek found a rhythm with school and work. He had spent his first few months in temporary housing and had finally moved into a more permanent spot. Only then did he reach out to his relatives in Chicago to give them his new address.
How is the restaurant going? he asked a cousin.
We didn’t know how to get ahold of you, she told him instead. Your mother is dead. Died a few months back in August.
Wing Shek called his brother, who by now was living in Toronto with his children. Wing Chong was almost three decades older than my father, their lives so separate.
According to my father, my uncle had done the cursory work of trying to reach him. But when Wing Chong was unsuccessful, he decided that since he wasn’t returning to Hong Kong to attend their mother’s funeral—the costs of traveling too high—my father probably wouldn’t have wanted to, either. Their mother’s funeral carried on without them.
My father says his mother went to the hospital because something was wrong with her throat. Cancer, perhaps. He isn’t sure.
One of my father’s nephews, who was in Hong Kong when my grandmother passed, tells me she had a bad stroke. That’s what killed her.
When I ask my father to confirm this, he frowns.
I don’t know, he says slowly. Possibly.
I feel the need to apologize for surfacing another uncertainty. I am struck by how few details my father knows about his parents, in their lives and in their deaths. And how for so many years, I have been this way, too.
* * *
In later years, when I ask him if he has any records of his own father, he shakes his head. After I prod a few more times, he finally tells me this anecdote. About a year after my grandmother’s death, my uncle called my father to ask if he wanted any of her belongings. My uncle was staying in Toronto and needed to do something with their mother’s clothes and valuables, which included letters from my grandfather in Cuba.
You can just throw it out, my father said. I don’t need you to send me any of that. His rationale was that it was too expensive to mail a box of nostalgia across the world. But as my father tells me this, there is regret in his voice, followed by a clamorous silence.
This is what my father is left with—six details, including three indisputable facts: His mother was sick and she may have had cancer. She may have had a stroke. Either way, on August 16, 1972, she died in Hong Kong. She was only sixty-six.