Unbound: Memories of an Immigrant Daughter

By Peggy Tang Strait

A story that could only happen in America. A tale of riches, to rags, to... something more important. This is the memoir of Peggy Tang Strait, born Won Yuen Tang, the middle child of Doris and Paul Tang and the sister of Ruthie, Harry, Helen, and Andrew Tang. Follow their journey from the aristocracy of pre-War China to working class poverty in rural Arizona and, eventually, to the attainment of the American Dream. This is a story of perseverance that transcends cultures and generations. Please share the Tang family with your family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483618036

Book preview

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Part I

The China Years (-1939)

Part II

The Young Family in America (1939-1942)

Part III

The Grocery Store Years (1942-1952)

Part IV

An Enduring Sense of Family

About the Author

The Story of My Family

In memory of my parents, Doris and Paul Tang

(1902-1982)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sometimes you just have to be lucky. Having a friend like Ilsa Cowen and a niece like Mary Quon Murphy made all the difference. They took the first draft of this book, made suggestions to improve the wording and structure of sentences, added and deleted commas, colons, and semicolons, changed tenses of verbs, and generally removed embarrassing traces of English as a second language. Thank you, Ilsa! Thank you, Mary!

Without the Writing from Life Experience group, this book may never have been written. I thought I had a story to tell—don’t we all? But what was there to compel me to organize my thoughts into a string of words on paper? Luckily for me, I had an invitation from my friend Rebecca Rikleen to join this writing group of seniors who met regularly at the Morningside Gardens Cooperative to read their writings. I joined the group. I wrote a first chapter and read it to the group. They cheered me on. After twenty-nine chapters and a lot more cheering, I completed this Story of My Family. Thank you, members of Writing from Life Experience! Thank you, Susan Willerman, leader of our group!

Twenty-nine chapters, neatly typed and held together in a binder, is not a book. My sons, Paul and David, came to the rescue. They took over, did whatever was necessary, and transformed the pages into what you are looking at now. Paul and David, I cannot thank you enough! I love you both so much!

Peggy Tang Strait

PART I

The China Years

(-1939)

My Mother (1902-1982)

One day, when my mother was seven years old, her mother watched her play in the courtyard of her family’s home by the Pearl River in Canton, China. My mother was limping, painfully, trying to keep up with her older brother. As was the custom of the time, my mother’s feet were bound in gauze and squeezed into silk slippers smaller than her feet. My mother recalled that it was painful when her maid unwrapped the gauze to wash her feet, and it was painful when she wrapped them again, always a little tighter than before. My grandmother had watched this scene every day—every day since my mother’s feet were bound. But that day, she could not stand the sight any longer. She resolved that she would go against tradition; she would not allow her daughter to grow up crippled. She pulled her little daughter to her knees. She untied the gauze and set my mother free.

When my mother, at age eighty, was in a coma after a stroke, I rubbed her feet. They were so smooth, without a blemish, as though they had always been wrapped in silk. But they were deformed, pushed in at the toes, and forced into a high arch so that they could never fully stretch out. The world could not see this part of my mother, but the story of my mother is in those feet.

As the second child and first daughter of a wealthy family, my mother was born into the most privileged position that was possible for a Chinese female of her day. If she had been the first child, she would have been a disappointment to her parents for not being a son. But even though sons were the favored progeny, a daughter as second child was treasured among the wealthy because she would be the vehicle for the display of wealth, in her dress, her jewelry, her refined bearing. She would bring joy to the family. My mother fulfilled this role for her parents. She was gracious and refined. Her portrait as a young woman hung in the local gallery.

When my mother’s youngest of three brothers died in infancy, her father took in a concubine in hopes of replacing the dead son with another son. But the concubine produced only a single child, a daughter. My mother always told this story with a certain unspoken sense of pride and satisfaction because the failure of the concubine to produce a son meant that my grandmother, the mother of the only two living sons, remained steadfastly the female head of the family.

Perhaps because my grandparents had already taken a liberated position toward women—my grandmother in unbinding my mother’s feet and my grandfather in permitting her to do so—my mother was sent to the best school in Canton for her education. While there, she converted to Christianity. She was touched by the verses on love and charity. She would become a doctor, she thought, and combine the caring for those in need with the challenges of a medical career. This did not seem an impossible dream. After all, her older brother was already at Columbia University in America, studying for a doctorate in chemistry, and her younger brother was making plans to attend the University of Paris. Money would not be a problem since her father, an exporter of tea and dye from the region, was one of the wealthiest men in Canton. My mother set her sights on stretching out beyond the limits of what a Chinese woman of her time was allowed to do. She would become a doctor.

My Father (1902-1982), My Paternal Grandfather,

My Paternal Great-Grandfather

My paternal great-grandfather was one of five sons of a peasant family. (No one counted the number of daughters.) When he was growing up in our ancestral Tang village in the outskirts of Canton, he heard stories about a strange people in a strange land the Chinese called Gold Mountain. No one from the Tang village had ever been there. But the news from Canton was that men from China had gone there, and some had sent back money for their families. Still in his teens and filled with a desire for adventure as well as a chance to lift himself out of the modest financial circumstances of his peasant family, my great-grandfather went down to the docks in Canton harbor one day, signed on as a dishwasher on a cargo ship leaving for San Francisco, and sailed to America, the Gold Mountain. The gold rush was over then, but there were still demands for cheap labor provided by Chinese men. My great-grandfather was eager to be one of those men.

In America, my paternal great-grandfather washed dishes, waited on tables, lived an extremely frugal existence, and saved his earnings. He was obsessed in his determination to become prosperous in the face of the harsh reality of extreme hard work for meager pay. But penny by penny, over a long period of time, he saved enough to return home to buy land in his village. He married. He was not content, though, to have just a small plot of land. He journeyed back to America to work in low-paying jobs in restaurants. Again and again he would save and return home to buy land in his village. Eventually, he owned so much land that it took him a full month to walk his land on each round that he made to collect rent from his tenant farmers.

My paternal great-grandfather was the first member of his village to leave China to work in America. But as time went on, each member who came helped another to come, and eventually, children of every one of his four brothers came to America. Some of these family members settled in Phoenix, Arizona, and formed the nucleus of an ever-expanding Tang family. By the time of my parents’ fiftieth anniversary, there were so many Tangs in Phoenix that it was necessary to invite more than four hundred guests in order to include all our relatives.

My paternal great-grandfather had two sons. The older son was my grandfather. By the time my grandfather was a young boy, his father was already a prosperous landowner. My grandfather was educated in the village in the traditional way of preparation for the state examinations.