Ching, Chong, China Doll!
“Chink! China Doll!” they yelled. Through my tears and the quickening pulse of my heart, the animosity pierced my 7-year-old soul. “You can’t use the swings,” they screamed. “You can’t play on the merry-go-round,” they taunted. “You’re a chink!” I felt so alone. So incredibly vulnerable. Every day during recess, through 2nd and 3rd grades, I endured their hatred. “China Doll! China Doll!” they taunted, pulling the corners of their eyes back as far as they could. “Ching, Chong, China Doll!”
When I went to the teachers, with tears streaming down my face, they would look down at me, shrug their shoulders, and mutter something about kids being kids. No one talked about bullying back then. When I went home after school and sobbed to my mother, she’d reply, “Oh this used to happen to your brother, too.” And then she’d go back to her ironing, ever cheerful and ever oblivious to my pain.
It’s not that she was uncaring. But, as a blonde, blue-eyed southern belle from Oklahoma, my mother had no relevant life experience from which to draw upon. As helpless as I was toward the bullies, she was equally helpless in offering advice or intervening with the school. No one made waves back then. We simply endured and moved on.
You see, I’m the youngest of five baby-boomer children born to a White mother and a Chinese father. We lived in White society, with upper middle class privilege in predominantly White neighborhoods in the Northeastern U.S. Our family stood out, but we never acknowledged it. There was always an air of, “If we don’t discuss it, it didn’t happen” in our household.
Up until those hostile playground incidents, I was a relatively happy kid. I played with my friends, rode my bicycle, made mud pies and cherished my Barbie dolls. But when the name-calling began, I started to ask myself, “Why me? What do they see in me that’s different?” So, I looked at myself in the mirror and really studied my features. “Wow,” I thought. “I really don’t look like my blonde mother . . . And I don’t look like my father either.” (He had black hair, but mine was medium-brown.) “Maybe I’m adopted?” “Of course you’re not adopted,” my mother would say. But I wasn’t entirely convinced.
From that day forward, I began to take notice of the ways in which our family wasn’t like my best friend’s family down the street. We ate Lo Mein and steamed whole fish, which my mother expertly whipped up in our kitchen. We used chopsticks. But we also ate Coq au Vin and lasagne (with forks). We drank Coca-Cola, and we went to Episcopal church service every Sunday, where my father sang in the choir. We spoke only English at home, and we celebrated only the “usual” holidays: Easter, Christmas, Lent, Thanksgiving and Halloween. We watched the “Carol Burnett Show” and the “Wide World of Sports” every Saturday.
Twice a year, we drove to Chinatown in New York City, where we gathered with our cousins, aunts and uncles for a sumptuous Cantonese banquet at Port Arthur, one of the last remaining authentic Chinese restaurants of that era. My mischievous cousins would take the chicken head off the Bok Jam Gai and put it in the teapot spout. The waiters would berate me for being left-handed (which apparently is bad luck according to Chinese superstition). And we would listen to the family elders reminisce about the old days - in Chinatown.
Once in a while, a relative would pass away, and we would meet at the funeral home on Mulberry Street to memorialize them. The ushers would hand out paper-wrapped nickels so that we could buy something sweet to wash away the bitter taste of death.
Mine was a childhood of mixed messages. Inwardly, I felt American; outwardly, people saw me as something else. It was that dichotomy that informed so much of my life journey. Studying Chinese at college, working in Chinatown as a young adult, marrying - then divorcing - a Chinese man who came here on a student visa, locating my ancestral family village in the Toisan region of China, and eventually adopting a baby from - where else? - China.
No matter how hard tried, I never felt Chinese. And yet, even today, I’m listed in company EEOC data as “Asian.” It all comes down to my eyes, I suppose. Eyes that have been misunderstood all these years but that never fail to comprehend.