Heritage Project

<div style="text-align: center;">[//Pool of Memories//] [[Dive In|Melanie's Intro]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Da Nang, 1968</span> <div style="text-align: center;">''The Rockets Red Glare'' <iframe width="728" height="410" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uL0RCp1Hujc?start=8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> When I was 11 I went to live in Da Nang with my grandparents. One night, the city was under attack with rockets and I remember the sound of a rocket as it tore through the air and we would all duck underneath the bed. And then the next morning we saw a house had been hit about a block away from our house. And all I remember was the wall was splattered with blood, so that image is still in my head. We were also close to a large hospital where they brought casualties from the war in on helicopters and I remember sometimes being able to smell the burned flesh. A really awful smell. (text-colour:orange)[[Fish prison.|Terminal Island]] [[Next in Hong's timeline|BV2 Escape]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Hong Kong, 1967 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Soup'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/gUJrEFi.jpeg" alt="Airport" width="600" height="422"> </div> I rolled over on the bamboo mat outside the room I shared with my siblings. It was mid-morning and they were all at school, so it was time for me to drag myself into bed so I could get a real sleep for the day after another fitful night in the hallway. The small room lined with three bunk beds was meant for the six of us, but nightmares I kept having woke both myself and my sisters and brother with screams, so to the mat it was for me. For a long time, I couldn't concentrate in class, even sometimes coming up to my chair and circling it a few times before planting down on it. The nuns at St. Mary’s shook their heads. Everyone thought I was misbehaving. Only my mom wondered, “I think something’s wrong. I don’t think she’s doing this on purpose.” At apartment 308 in Hong Kong, there were no elevators, so my parents would take turns, their arms hooked under mine to help lift me up our four flights of stairs when I had trouble walking. My parents took me out of school. So home, my mom tried to keep me learning my times tables and a Chinese poem or two after she took me home from antibiotic shots at the doctor’s. When we got back, it would already be time for her to start prepping dinner for the family. Mom’s soups simmered in each of the kitchens we lived in, from Hong Kong to everywhere we moved in San Pedro, California. A large pot of various chicken broths on the stove meant a home open to friends, friends of friends, anyone who needed to come over and have a comforting meal. The worst though, were dark, medicinal soups made from a base of herbs from the medicine shop. Wincing through a bite of dried fruit would barely erase the bitterness in my mouth. I wouldn’t end up returning to the Catholic school that fall. My oldest sisters Josie and Anna were almost college age, and then Dad said it: we were moving to America. [[Dumping money into the river?? |BV2 Escape]] (text-colour:orange)[[Next in Nancy's timeline|The Van]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Somewhere on the Saigon River, 1975 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Abandon'' [<img src="https://i.imgur.com/zoq9ZrM.jpeg" alt="Floating Money" width="500" height="500">] </div> I remember going through the Saigon River on a ship. The captain was afraid of us being shot at, so they gave the men guns to shoot back. Once we got into the South China Sea we heard on the radio that Saigon had fallen into communist hands. People on the ship started dumping the Vietnamese money into the sea. I’ll never forget that. To see all that money floating on the water and to know that it was all worthless now. (text-colour:orange)[[Out of Chinese groceries? Have to drive to Chinatown.|Yee Sing Chong Market]] [[Next in Hong's timeline|BV3 Fort Chaffee]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Fort Chaffee, 1975 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Fort Chaffee'' <iframe width="700" height="394" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w2OFubG0dPo?start=28" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> We didn't know where we were going once we got to the US. We ended up in Arkansas at an army base and they were interviewing people to see where to place them. I remember that in the office where the interview took place, there was a big poster of the Chicago skyline. At that time, Chicago's Sears tower was the tallest building in the world and there was a really popular song playing all the time on the radio at that time called The Night Chicago Died. Plus we had heard of Al Capone and when we thought of America we thought of the big cities with skyscrapers like New York and Chicago so when we got to choose anywhere, we chose Chicago. It's kind of funny, because where we ended up going was not the Chicago we thought of at all. We were sponsored by the Lutheran Church of West Chicago. And West Chicago is this rural bedroom community an hour train ride from downtown Chicago. We were pretty disappointed really, because in our mind we were going to the big city, but then we get there and it’s fields and mushroom farms and a brutally cold winter. (text-colour:orange)[[Pile in, we’re driving down the highway. A road trip christens the American life.|The Van]] [[Next in Hong's timeline|BV4 Cup Factory]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">West Chicago, 1975 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''The Cup Factory'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/v5bgD08.jpeg" alt="Drowning in Cups" width="500" height="500">> </div> You know those white styrofoam coffee cups? My job was packing those. There was a machine that just spun out rows and rows of these cups and we had to pack them into boxes. It turned out to be really awful because these machines couldn’t be stopped. If you’re slow or something you start getting a mountain of cups and a yellow light comes on and you get in trouble from the supervisor who has the big office with glass windows above, looking down on you. If you had to go to the bathroom you had to see if your supervisor could step in for you. It was just non-stop all day. I just wanted to get out of that, because I knew there was no future there. (text-colour:orange)[[OMG I can’t wait for soup.|Chins' Garden Chowder]] [[Next in Hong's timeline|BV5 Ford Capri]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Seattle, 1978 </span> <div style="text-align: center;">''Ford Capri'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/cVmdjWk.jpeg" alt="Orange Ford Capri" width="500" height="500">> </div> I ended up in Seattle because thats where my sister was, and when I needed a car I was somehow able to buy it brand new. My sister and I went to this Ford dealership, and they had an orange Ford Capri, brand new. They thought that we were a couple so the lender trusted us and gave us a loan to buy the car. I remember I only had to put down like less than $200 and we drove off the lot with a brand new car. I thought, //Wow, what a country//. I didn't own anything. No credit history, no nothing. And they sold me a car, trusting me that I would pay it back with the money I was earning at a factory making ski sweaters. It felt like an American miracle. (text-colour:orange)[[The case of a missing $900|Interest Deposit]] [[Next in Hong's timeline|BV6 IBM User Group]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">UCLA, 1983 </span><div style="text-align: center;"> ''PC User Group'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/n5WBoBa.jpeg" alt="IBM PC" width="500" height="500"> </div> When I was getting my MBA at UCLA, I started a PC User Group. We had a regular meeting with all the members. Anyone from the community could join, so a lot of small business owners, faculty, anyone who had bought a PC, which was brand new at the time. I would get up there and answer Q&A, and turned out I was pretty good at that, remembering commands and figuring out all the tips and tricks. There was no point and click or icons. You had to read the manual and memorize text commands to do all the basic things like copy, paste, save, open. I was motivated to learn everything because I realized that this was a brand new thing, so no one would have a leg up on me. I could know more than the guy with the computer science degree. I knew I would have a chance to be the one answering the questions. <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="https://i.imgur.com/vVfjq0y.jpeg" alt="HongUCLA" width="800" height="524"> </div> (text-colour:orange)[[Congrats, it’s a…Valley Girl!|Home to the Valley]] [[Next in Hong's timeline|BV7 Return to Vietnam]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Hanoi, 1999 </span><div style="text-align: center;"> ''Red Carpet Return'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/EcaCtV7.jpeg" alt="Plane on runway" width="500" height="500"> </div> My most memorable business trip was when they asked my team at HP to go back to Vietnam to open HP Vietnam. It was my first time back to Vietnam, and I remember flying into the airport in Hanoi and seeing those red flags with the yellow star. All my life, I always associated that with war and death. It was terrifying to see those flags everywhere. But when we landed they gave us red carpet treatment. The Hanoi government greeted us and they literally had a red carpet out with flowers and everything and put us up in the nicest hotel. At that time Vietnam was trying to attract foreign companies for investment, so they pulled out all the stops. [[Acknowledgments|Acknowledgments]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Somewhere on the 101, California, 1967 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''The Van'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/xTjWsOu.png" alt="The Van" width="500" height="333"> </div> The canvas sacks of clothing wobbled underneath my legs as I leaned against Betty; Winnie, David, and me bouncing in the back of Cousin David’s van in the dark. Josie and Anna were older and bigger so they sat in the front. It was nighttime, so we all tried our best to get some sleep. Cousin David drove up from San Pedro with his handyman to come pick us kids up from Sacramento to take us and our belongings down to meet our parents in Los Angeles. We had been staying in Sacramento with his stepmother, our dad’s older sister: Gu-Ma. We were happy to be beyond her reach. After three fruitless months of searching for work in Sacramento and S.F., my parents had found work in L.A. Cousin David had hired my dad to do accounting for his restaurant, Chin’s Garden. When we awoke in daylight, we piled out of the van to the house on Palos Verdes St. in Los Angeles. A whole house, just for us. It was rented, but it was ours. We traced bicycles across its cement yard, could play badminton and would fling open a pair of doors to a basement we’d play hide and seek in. [[Owning a piece of the American dream, putting down new roots|BV5 Ford Capri]] (text-colour:orange)[[Next in Nancy's timeline|Chins' Garden Chowder]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">San Pedro, 1969 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Chins' Garden Chowder'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/v8CITjr.png" alt="Chins Garden" width="650" height="467"> </div> “Okay, I’ll come get you.” Anna, who was 19, hung up the phone to put on a jacket and pick up my dad. At 10:00 p.m. we were still doing homework, but Dad was just getting off of work on a Friday night. Chin’s Garden served chop suey, trucked luau catering to parties, and fed working San Pedro locals Chinese and American alike a popular burger and fries combo. There was corned beef; there was prime rib. Cousin David’s restaurant was a Chinese-American restaurant. On Sundays we would go visit Dad as his morning work hours ended, and join for lunch for whatever the staff meal of the day was. Friday nights were clam chowder nights. Dad worked from 3:00 p.m. to 10 or 10:30 p.m. If there were leftovers, he’d bring them home. We scrawled math equations in anticipation. When they returned, Dad opened the door. “I have clam chowder!” he’d smile, raising two tubs he’d brought home, that would be poured into red and white ceramic rice bowls, with crunchy oyster crackers. We’d eat it then since it would be nice and hot. It was our //siu yeh// (midnight snack). [[What happens when you drop some teenagers straight out of Vietnam in America and ask them “Where to next?”|BV3 Fort Chaffee]] (text-colour:orange)[[Next in Nancy's timeline|Terminal Island]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Terminal Island, 1968 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Terminal Island'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/1slhkeg.png" alt="Fish" width="500" height="343"> </div> My mom wanted to leave America the moment she arrived. There was no discussion but no argument when my dad announced we were leaving H.K. for the U.S. where we would be sponsored by his older sister Mary to immigrate. At least I don’t remember any. Mom was submissive, and would go with what her husband said. My dad’s dream was for all of us to go to college, and since all schools were private schools in Hong Kong, it would have been impossible to put six kids through. Josie and Anna were nearing college age, so it was time to go, and in America, my stay-at-home mom would need to find work to make sure we had healthcare. Mom woke at 4:00 a.m. to catch the ferry to Terminal Island, for her job at Pacific Cannery. The other women who worked there were immigrants, Chinese, German, Italian, Hispanic, and severe and unfriendly under their own harsh disappointments and jealousies. Fishermen brought the day’s fresh whole tuna and mackerel for the workers to break apart. Then it was a race to deconstruct the most fish for a better position in the next step, preparing the meat for cans. Competing against the gruff, crowded assembly line would end with my mom’s sobs in the bathtub at home. The dry rubbing alcohol smell of Hexol she poured into the hot water to eradicate her skin of the smells seared my own senses in our living room in San Pedro. [[Stacking cups, not bread|BV4 Cup Factory]] (text-colour:orange)[[Next in Nancy's timeline|Yee Sing Chong Market]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Chinatown, LA, 1979 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Yee Sing Chong Market'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/GcBzL7A.jpeg" alt="YeeSingChong" width="800" height="534"> </div> Mom pushed the shopping cart down the aisle at Yee Sing Chong Market, eyeing what sauce bottles we might need to replenish. I brought a bag of choy over from the produce section to load in the cart. Dad had found Mr. Lee and they were chatting. Jack Lee always greeted customers in his market. “I’m starting a bank!” he told my dad. It was a big deal. First Public Savings was going to be a savings and loan bank. Jack wanted to help Chinese-Americans get the financing they needed to buy their first homes. “Well you know, my daughter Nancy is actually just graduating from Cal State Long Beach in accounting. Got any jobs open?” Parents always brag about their kids, but I caught the last part so I turned around and smiled. “Yeah, you know what I do. I’ll ask one of my guys to call her. We open in January.” Winnie groaned. We were going to hit traffic driving home from Chinatown and hadn’t even picked up the roast duck for dinner. Then we’d have to go back to hitting the books. Since it was 4:00 p.m. we’d probably stay in the area now and just eat at the restaurant so Mom wouldn’t have to cook. And I’d get to have wonton noodle soup sooner if we ate it here rather than took it home… [[A red carpet return to Vietnam|BV7 Return to Vietnam]] (text-colour:orange)[[Next in Nancy's timeline|Interest Deposit]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">First Public Savings Bank, Chinatown, LA, 1980 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Interest Deposit'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/yggIeRu.jpeg" alt="NancyBank" width="800" height="555"> </div> Normally, Johnson was the chattiest of the tellers at First Public Savings Bank in Chinatown, annoying the others. On this Monday, he was silent, in a panic. At the end of his Saturday shift, he was balancing his receipts and kept coming up short. How was nine hundred dollars missing? He counted. And counted. No check. No extra cash in the safe. Albert, the operations manager, counted. Peter, the president, counted. Our tellers were trained well. If $5 or less was missing, it wasn’t something to stress searching for, but $900 was a big difference. If Wing was managing instead of Albert, he would have chopped Johnson’s head off. Johnson sweated in the back room, banished to filing. When I came in on Monday, Peter tasked me with fresh eyes. I counted the safe: nothing to be found. But when the courier from Dataline came in, I rushed over to see the day’s delivery of reports. I rifled through the long rolls of paper, leafing down the square holes of perforated edges. The Exception Report might filter a large item deposit… but the threshold was $5000. I went back where everyone else started, Johnson’s teller station, to look at his logs. Hmm… Ah! Nine hundred dollars coded as a regular deposit, but with no deposit slip attached that would have been prompted by a cash or check deposit. This item should have been marked as an interest deposit for a customer’s CD account. “Oh good, that’s why we need you,” Peter said. When Albert freed Johnson, he insisted on taking me to lunch. “You don’t know how guilty I felt!” Johnson panted as we walked back from Sam Woo. “Everyone treated me like a criminal, like the plague!” [[Tip from a hungry immigrant: read the manual|BV6 IBM User Group]] (text-colour:orange)[[Next in Nancy's timeline|Home to the Valley]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Los Angeles, 1994 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> ''Home to the Valley'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/juByprC.jpeg" alt="Parents" width="600" height="600"> </div> I held the beige curl of the landline’s wire in my hand over my belly. Anny was on the other end as I laid on Jimmy’s side of the bed where the phone was. “If you’re not there, they’ll have to figure it out,” she said. Every day during my medical leave, someone from work would call with questions: how to do something, where to find another. When Peter would call, he would say, “If you need more time, we’ll keep the job open for you. Just let us know how much time you need.” But I didn’t know how much time I’d need past April. The start of my pregnancy had been rough. I had taken a few sick days to get tests run, and when everything read normal, I resumed my Metrolink commute into Chinatown. But things still didn’t feel right, so the doctor recommended bed rest for three months. I was 37. Anny knew our office: “If you return, you’re a problem-solver. They’ll be at your desk. If you’re at home, you can take it easy. Here you’ll have to perform for your work. That emotional pressure? You can’t control that.” On the Metrolink, I’d see Judge Ron Lew, who had encouraged me to take the train after I’d had a car accident last August, close to my first wedding anniversary. In November, I learned I was pregnant. In January, there was an earthquake in Northridge. If I just returned to work for the three months before birth, I wouldn’t have to worry about switching doctors, or… “Do you have enough money to cover those three months?” Anny asked. “Then I see no problem,” she said. I called Peter back. That week, Ron helped carry my plants and boxes from my office, and drove me home to the Valley. We had Melanie on August 6th. [[Acknowledgments|Acknowledgments]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Long Island City, 2024 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> (text-style:"bold")[Brandon] </div> I stepped through the door and the first thing to greet me was the smell of pork buns. I grabbed a nametag and notebook and joined the others who were sipping coffee and nibbling on baos. There was first-day-of-school energy. During our free write, I followed a train of thought that led me back to my 5th grade Heritage Project - my first real big kid assignment, complete with laminated title pages and a table of contents. The task was to trace our family's ancestry by interviewing relatives and combing through old documents and memorabilia. How did we decide a 10-year-old would have enough maturity to appreciate the process of a multi-generational deep dive into ancestry?? I remember calling my grandpa on my Mom’s side, a WWII vet, and putting him on speaker phone while I frantically scribbled notes like a miniature investigative reporter. //Grandpa, how do you spell Blitzkrieg?// With my Dad's side, my limited Vietnamese and their confusion about the assignment created its own challenges. Ancestry has been on my mind again lately. Maybe it's a natural curiosity that comes with watching our parents age. Maybe it’s my own spiritual journey showing me that more than eye color and facial features get passed from generation to generation. Looking around the studio, I felt kinship with fellow children of immigrants, each carrying their own Heritage Project. How many anecdotes of joy, stories of loss, and recipes of food had been lost or forgotten in the journey from East to West? Meeting my writing partner Melanie deepened this connection - we both came from LA and discovered we'd been pondering the same questions about ancestry during our free write. After some wrestling with the theme and our curiosities, we landed on an intention: explore our roots by tracing the paths of our immigrant parents, hopscotching through the distinct moments in their lives that define their heritage – and our own. You know the Pensieve in Harry Potter? Consider this a journey into that little pool of memories. <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="https://i.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExNm1lM3Z3NXR5cGF6MnEweHFpMHV4dGhjM2owcHczaDB4YmVkYmM0cCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/1BdrmMkllI1e2gdPaS/giphy.gif " alt="Pensieve GIF"> </div> ''Instructions for the //Pool of Memories//:'' Our two main characters are: * Melanie’s mom Nancy, who came to the US from Hong Kong in 1967 * Brandon’s dad Hong, who came to the US from Vietnam in 1975 An orange link will take you to a story from Nancy. A blue link will take you to a story from Hong. (text-colour:orange)[[[Dive into Nancy's journey|MV1 Soups]]] [[Dive into Hong's journey|BV1 Da Nang]]

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', monospace; font-style: italic; font-size: 20px;">Long Island City, 2024 </span> <div style="text-align: center;"> (text-style:"bold")[Melanie] </div> I plopped into the Lyft for a short ride. It would be ten minutes to get to Peach Studio, for the launch event of Blank Page Revival. It was the first time the team behind Slant’d, the Asian-American literary magazine, was bringing together a group of writers from around the country for a day-long gathering of community and co-creation. Rain sprinkled on that gray morning in Long Island City. What was I getting into, besides facing a creative calling I had been struggling with and largely ignored the past few years? This felt like a past life: writing, traveling solo, meeting strangers. I was fresh from weeks of back-to-back family trips, from San Francisco to Hawaii and back to L.A. Definitely a bit of family time overload by then, squeezed together with parents, siblings, juggling everyone’s quirks and preferences. Now it was just me, needing to put on some RBF to brave both N.Y.C. and my dormant writing dreams – with 30 people I had never met, all brought together by a Google Form we completed. Slant’d was hosting its first incubator program as a nonprofit indie publishing house, in an effort to brew new creativity and community for AAPI creatives. I was standing between two cliffs: having left the burnout of one job and awaiting high season for my painting work during the holidays. “Is this the right place?” My Lyft driver asked, pulling alongside a brick building. I think so, I replied. What was going to get me out there besides some small measure of confidence? Up the spiral stairs inside, I found the hum of everyone warming up to each other with pastries. The light from outside shone through a wall of windows, as I passed a note on the door welcoming us: “You made it!” [[Enter Brandon...|Brandon Intro]]

<div style="text-align: center;">''Acknowledgments'' <img src="https://i.imgur.com/F6lAleI.jpeg" alt="Plane on runway" width="408" height="535"> </div> Thanks to Slant'd for empowering AAPI writers and for all the thought and care that went into organizing Blank Page Revival. Thanks to Dani for being incredibly generous with his time, and being a sounding board, project manager, coach, and cheerleader for the past month. Finally, we (Brandon and Melanie) want to thank our respective parents (Hong and Nancy) for opening up about their memories and trusting us to bring them to life. They will live on in this Pool of Memories. If you missed any of the memories in your journey, below is a complete list: ''Hong's Memories'' [[Rocket's Red Glare|BV1 Da Nang]] [[Abandon|BV2 Escape]] [[Fort Chaffee|BV3 Fort Chaffee]] [[Cup Factory|BV4 Cup Factory]] [[Ford Capri|BV5 Ford Capri]] [[PC User Group|BV6 IBM User Group]] [[Red Carpet Return|BV7 Return to Vietnam]] ''Nancy's Memories'' (text-colour:orange)[[[Soup|MV1 Soups]]] (text-colour:orange)[[[The Van|The Van]]] (text-colour:orange)[[[Chins' Garden Chowder|Chins' Garden Chowder]]] (text-colour:orange)[[[Terminal Island|Terminal Island]]] (text-colour:orange)[[[Yee Sing Chong Market|Yee Sing Chong Market]]] (text-colour:orange)[[[Interest Deposit|Interest Deposit]]] (text-colour:orange)[[[Home to the Valley|Home to the Valley]]]