Toisan Boy

First, an acknowledgement to the late actor/writer/producer Dave Landsberg, who was a regular at a place where I (used to as of the pandemic) DJ, and once asked me for a dance lesson. We ended up talking about me for most of that lesson, and after hearing some of my story, told me I should write about it. It took a while for that encouragement to take root. I'm sorry Dave won't be around to read this and critique it. 

Secondly, an explanation of the title: Toisan, also known as Taishan, is a peasant Chinese dialect. It's the dialect my family speaks. It's spoken only in a small region of southern China just west of Macao. This region was a (if not *the*) primary source of the first Chinese emigrants to America, resulting in Toisan being the lingua franca of US Chinatowns for decades, even though today, Toisan speakers (~3 millon) make up less than .2% of the entire mainland Chinese population (~1.4 billion). In relation to other Chinese dialects, Toisan might be best described as a rude form of Cantonese;  Cantonese tend to look on Toisan speakers as country bumpkins. Growing up, i recall we Toisan taking a somewhat perverse pleasure in embracing our identity as such. My (fellow Toisan) chinese friends used to get a kick out of my chosen (and since discarded) email address: Toisan_Boy@*.com. Think "White_Trash@AOL.COM".

Thirdly, this is MY story. While many details will resonate with other children of Toisan/Cantonese immigrants (or even immigrants from other cultures) and quite possibly prompt them to identify with my experience, I would consider this to be a dismal failure if a reader were to think afterwards that they fully understand "the asian immigrant experience" as a consequence of having read this blog. Perhaps I should change the title of the blog since I can't presume to speak for all toisan boys. 

So this is MY heritage: my parents came to the US from southern China via Hong Kong, having fled there after the Communist Revolution. I never heard much detail about that part of their lives, and now I never will; my father passed away last year at the age of 96 due to Covid, and my mother now suffers dementia as a result of Parkinson's disease. I know little of my father's life aside from what I learned from my mother: he was born into a large poor family, who 'sold' him to a rich family in the village to replace an only son who had died. He and my mother met on the day of their arranged marriage and my mother moved in with his family. My father's adoptive father was emotionally abusive. According to my mother, he would constantly remind my father: "You're not my real son! I only bought you!" and my father would go into another room and cry. So the bar wasn't exactly set very high in terms of my father being a good parent. While I can't say we were ever really close, my father cleared the bar set for him by a pretty good margin. My mother's father was the village schoolteacher who died during WWII. Times were hard for her; she once told me that she had to keep food inside her clothing and take out only one bite at a time; if she tried to take a bite, someone else would take the food out of her hand.  It's clear to me that those experiences shaped a lot of her behavior and some of that fear rubbed off on me. More on that later. 

As I mentioned earlier, my dad's family escaped southern China and moved to HK where my sister was born. She stayed in HK with my mother while my father went to the US to work for his (adopted) sister who ran a Chinese-American restaurant in Cleveland. (Many people think "Cleveland? Why Cleveland?" and the reason is that at the turn of the 20th century, Cleveland was the sixth largest city in the US and as a consequence, used to be referred to as the Sixth City. By 1950, Cleveland was still the seventh largest city in the US. Now it's down to 53rd as the Steel Belt became the Rust Belt, and during the 70's the boy mayor Dennis Kucinich crippled Cleveland's ability to convert to service industries by driving many big businesses out of the area with his tax initiatives. As a consequence the average salary was about $15k.)

Still, not that many Chinese immigrated to NE Ohio. By the time I was born in 1960, Chinatown consisted of the northern side of Rockwell Ave between E 24th & E 26th, where I lived until I reached school age when we moved to E 33rd between Payne & Superior Aves. to be a couple of blocks away from my elementary school.