Submitted on March 21, 2009 to the Chinese Historical Society of America

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Uncle Toisan

By Charlie Chin

Submitted on March 21, 2009 to the Chinese Historical Society of America

Word count: 12,144 Pages: 21

“Uncle Toisan” is a History Alive Museum Theater piece performed in the Chautauqua format which has three sections.

1. The presenter as the historical character gives a monologue in the first person about their life and times.
2. The presenter takes questions from the audience and answers them as that character.
3. The presenter steps out of character and discusses the times and circumstances of the character and things the character that could not have known.

This script is written as a continuous monologue for a solo performer. There are no detailed stage directions as the presentations will take place in a wide and varied set of venues that may vary from small classrooms to full scale theater stages. The monologue is composed of four parts;

1. Coming to America and the Angel Island Experience.
2. Chinese Americans serving in the United States Armed Forces during World War Two.
3. Works stories of Restaurants and Laundries.
4. Old and New Chinatown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A presentation that includes all four sections in their entirety may take more than two hours to present. Therefore it is assumed that most presentations, for example in school classrooms and in libraries, will focus one or two parts of the whole monologue for an hour or less.

The character is a composite and representative whose life accounts and anecdotes were collected from senior members of the Chinese American community. While some are popular urban folktales of the Chinese American experiencethat been heard and passed along in a social context, in laundries and in restaurants, in fact many are first person accounts of incidents and experiencesfrom extended family members and friends.

Toisan ( Putonghua:Taishan, Cantonese:Toisan, Toisanese:Hoisan.) is a small district that borders the South China sea, in Guang Dong Province about 100 kilometers southwest of Guanzhou (Canton) and 80 kilometers west of Macau. It is one of four districts or Say Yup which include the districts of Enping, Hoiping and Sunwui. The combination of overpopulation, natural disasters, and social upheavals, led to repeated waves of immigration from the tiny area in the nineteen and into the twentieth century. Before the normalization of quotas for Chinese immigrating to the United States in 1968, the Toisanese, depending on the city and state, represented 60 to 80 percent of the Chinese American community. In their home province of China, they were simple famers, fishermen, shopkeepers, and common laborers. Their reputation was that of a clannish, loud, roughedged, rebellious group of country folk who tended to be more loyal to their villages than to the national government of China.

The character called “Uncle Toisan” is born in Guangdong, China in 1923 and enters the United States as a 17 year old “paperson.” These were the Chinese men who had bought identification papers from other Chinese who had lived in the United States, and then use these papers to impersonate the sons of legal residents to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He is detained at Angel Island Station in 1940 and then later drafted to fight on the Allied side in World War Two.

He returns to America to face discrimination as a labor in the Chinese restaurant and Hand Laundries. From the Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 to the Civil Right Acts of 1964, “Uncle Toisan” is a witness to the changing attitudes, demographics, and laws of the United States.

The scene opens with an elderly Chinese man sitting on a chair and playing the Er Hu (Chinese violin). He stops a couple of times as passing tourists drop a coin or dollar into his plastic bucket. He thanks then out loud and then after they pass inspects the bucket and makes an aside comment about them before going on to play again.

“Thanks. Have a good day.” “Jerk!” “God bless you Sir. Have a nice day.” “Rockefeller just called, he wants his quarter back.” “Thank you Madame, you are very kind.” “Now I’ve got enough money to last the rest of my life, unless I want to eat and sleep under a roof.”

The character stops, stands, places the Er Hu on the chair, stretches his limbs and begins to speak.

“I’m telling you things haven’t been the same since the 1989 Quake knocked down the highway entrance to Chinatown. Me, the shopkeepers around here, they call me Uncle Toisan. I’m here, right on Grant Ave, everyday, as long as the weather is good. I make a few bucks playing in the street, to help out my nephew and his family. They live with me over there on Pacific Street. It’s just temporary until they get on their feet. I’m down here playing the Yee Ying, they call it a Er Hu in Mandarin. I’m not very good at it. Only been playing for a couple of years, but then the Er Hu is one of the few instruments that sounds the same whether you’ve been playing for two days or twenty years. I’m telling you on a cold day, the sound of this fiddle could take the paint off of a Toyota.

Always like to play a little, only sometimes when it’s too damp or rainy, my left arm acts up. Old war wound. You know, the big one, WW ll. I got the Purple Heart for that. But I don’t wear it. Too many boys got one for wounds much worse than mine.

Well it’s a long story. See, it started back in the village in China. That’s where I was born, Hoisan district Guangdong province, China. When I reached about 15 years of age, my father started thinking where he wanted to send me to work overseas. That’s when my uncle came back from Vietnam. He had worked as a houseboy for a French family for twenty years. Back then the French used run Vietnam. That’s why they write with Western letters, when the French came in, they couldn’t understand the Chinese characters they use to use, so they made everybody there use a western alphabet.

In our village, cousins my age were planning to go overseas or had already left. Oh yeah, back in China things were so bad in Guangdong Province, most healthy men went overseas to make a living. That’s why there are Toisan and Cantonese people everywhere. When I was a boy back in the village, my father told me that between 1856 and 1908, Toisan had fourteen big floods, seven typhoons, five famines, four earthquakes, four plagues, two long droughts. On top of that, we had a kind of Civil War of own. The Hakka and the Punti War. That’s what they called it. The war started between the Hill People, that’s the Hakka, it means the “Guest People.” That’s cause they only got to Guangdong province about five hundred years ago, sort of looked at as “foreigners,” and the Punti People, who lived mostly in the valleys.

You know what happens in these things. The war started over something but after 12 years of killing, massacres, burning down villages, and revenge, mostly everybody forgotten what the war was about in the first place. When all was said and done, about 30 thousand people died and another 100, 000 people were left homeless. That’s why most able bodied people left to go someplace else. If you stayed home Guangdong, you couldn’t survive.

We used to have a saying, “Starve at home or drown at sea. What’s the difference?” Going overseas to make money was dangerous but you could get lucky and come back after twenty or thirty years with enough money to buy a little land and retire.

Anyway, I had an Uncle who made his money working as a house boy and labor contractor for well-to-do French families in Saigon. The French ran Vietnam before World War Two. He came back to the village to retire and told my father it would be a good idea to have me get ready to go overseas to Vietnam. He had contacts and I could make some money. So from the time I was fifteen until I was seventeen, every two or three days, my Uncle would come over and give me a lesson in how to speak French. Une, der, twa, and so forth. Bon jour, bon soir, au revoir, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, like that. I always had a knack for languages. So after a while, I could parle the Francais enough to get a job.

Well, meanwhile the world situation was getting worse and worse. By 1939 Japan and Germany were trying to take over the world and by the time I should have been going to Vietnam my father told me, he had changed his mind about where he would send me. A cousin in the next village had some papers for sale, the kind of papers you needed to get into the United States. You became somebody else, see. You have to pretend to be somebody else. Why?, because the US didn’t want Chinese people here. Back in 1882, the United States put up something called the Chinese Exclusion Act. That’s a fancy name for “we don’t want Chinese people.” Sometimes I think they’re still not too happy us being here, believe me.

My father bought these papers that said that I was the son of a Chinese who had been in the USA before. The law said Chinese weren’t allowed to become American citizens, no matter how long you were here. All you could be was a “resident.” I still get the “Willys” when mail comes to me marked, “Attention Resident.” It reminds me of the old days.

Anyway, what Chinese men, who worked in the States, maybe restaurant or laundry, would say is, I’m going back to China for a year to take a vacation and then, I’m coming back. So when this Chinese guy came back to the America a year later, the immigration guys would ask, “Did you have any children in China?” So the Chinese guy would say, “Oh yeah, my wife and me have make a son.” So they would give you a piece of paper saying “the bearer of this paper is the son of a Chinese resident who was here before.” This was so your son could get in later. The Americans didn’t want any Chinese women here, so Chinese men would say, “We have make a son,” if they had one or not. Didn’t matter if you did or not, or if you had a daughter, you always said you had a son. Because 17 years later when you wanted to retire, you could sell the certificate to somebody who wanted to come to America.

That reminds me of story I heard when I first got here. Seems there was a big earthquake and fire in San Francisco back 1906. We heard about it in China. I think the Empress of China tried to send some money to help the American people out, but the President refused to take it. Didn’t want to take charity from foreigners I guess. Well, San Francisco city hall burned down to the ground and some Chinese guys who were here realized that all the birth records were gone too. See, if you were born in the United States, there weren’t many, but if you were born in the United States, you could be a citizen, but not if you just came by boat. So these Chinese men started saying they had been born in San Francisco back in the 1800’s, and the Americans could disprove it one way or the other.

So my father bought the papers, and they came with a coaching book. He gave me the book and said, “Now you have to study this.” I asked, “Why?” He explained, “The Americans don’t want Chinese people. So they gonna ask you lots of questions. If you don’t answer the question the right way, they gonna send you back to China.” Well, I was young and smart. So I studied that book until I knew it heart. How many steps from the house to the main road? How many windows in your house? How many sisters and brothers do you have? Where is your village duck pond? How many people live in the house across the road from your house? All kinds of stupid questions like this.

So I’m busy studying this coaching book when my father gave me another surprise. He said to me one day, “Get up and come with me. We’re going for a walk.” Now my father never asked me to take a walk with him so I knew something was going on. We took a long walk to the next village, a place called “Swallow Hill,” about a couple of miles down this dirt road, and then we went into a big house with a large gate. On the gate was written the family name, “Wong.” Inside a servant saw my father and shouted, “The guests have arrived. The guests have arrived.” Other servants came out of the back of the house. They asked us to sit down, offered us tea and cigarettes. I didn’t smoke then but my father took one, lit it up and then put another one in his pocket for later. My father still hadn’t said a word. Just when I was getting up the courage to ask what was going on, a middle-age couple came out to greet us. With them was a young girl, maybe 15 or 16, just a kid. As my father and the couple went through all this formal talk, it dawned on me that I was going to be married. My father must have arranged a quick marriage for me before I was to go overseas.

Well, a lot of old timers did this. Some people worried that if you sent the boy overseas, he might find a new life, and forget his family in China. So to make sure, even if you didn’t come back, that you would always send money back home, they would marry a boy so he had a family in China. His obligation was to always send some money back.

This kind of thing was rough on the girls. They would only be a teenager, and the next thing they know, their married to some boy they never met before and they have to leave their own family and go live with the husbands family. If they were lucky, they had a son to raise and got some respect for that. But if they had only girls, or they couldn’t have babies, they would just be treated like a servant in the husband’s house. She would just be a slave to his parents. I know several families where the wife was left in the village for seven, ten, maybe twenty years or more while the husband worked overseas. Sad, really.

Well, like all young men, I was interested in having sex, so I thought, “Why not?” And I guess I went along with the whole thing because that what people did back in those days. I didn’t know any different. The girl’s name was Autumn Jade, nice name. She wasn’t beautiful but she wasn’t ugly either, so I didn’t care one way or the other.

Usually it takes about of months to do all the rituals but because I was leaving soon, they sort of pushed everything up real fast. The families exchanged the regular gifts, a goose, a whole roast pig, that kind of thing. And then a small wedding banquet for just the near family. The custom of those days was for the husband’s family to sort of “oooo” and “ahhh” over the girl when she first came to the house, and then later at the banquet to make fun of her. Well, after all the rituals and customs were over, she and I were taking to a room that was going to be ours from then on, and the family closed the door behind us.

The room had a bed that the women of the family had made up with fresh linen and pillows. Everything had little flowers sewn on in design, and a big quilt that was our wedding present. We were just kids, so we didn’t know what to do. But we figured it out. And the next morning, my aunts came into the room and grabbed the sheet on the bed right away. They were busy looking for something. When they found it, a little bit of a blood stain, they broke into laugher and make lewd jokes to me and my new wife. We had about two weeks of happiness before I had to leave.

Finally, the day came when I was going to the ship to America. My father walked me down to the little ferry boat that would take me to Hong Kong. He was so nervous. “Don’t forget, the papers say you’re 21 years old, so stand up straight, try to look taller. Don’t forget, when you get to San Francisco, find the streets of the Chinese people, and go to our family association. Don’t forget, when you can see the land, throw the book over the side of the ship. They find you with that book, they’re going to send you back to China.” I told him, “Alright, alright don’t so nervous guy. I know what to do.” So I said good-by to my father. When I got a little bit down the road, I stopped to look back. I didn’t know that would be the last time I would ever see my family and the rooftops of my home village in China.

We traveled on the ship, it was a steamer in those days, for about almost three months. You had to take the long way around, not just straight across. One day, I was down stairs talking to somebody, when upstairs a Chinese boy started shouting in Chinese,”Loy ya, Loy ya,” Come, come, I can see the land. Everybody got excited and ran upstairs. Yeah, we could make out coast line. Everybody was so busy looking at San Francisco, I realized this was a good time to get rid of my book. So I took it to the other side of the ship to throw it in the water. When I looked down over the side of the ship, there were maybe twenty or thirty books floating in the water. Then I knew, many of those boys were just like me. “Paper Sons.” We all thought we were going to San Francisco right away but first they put us on a place called Angel Island. Right in the Bay, it’s still there. I don’t know why they call it Angel Island, it’s not like heaven.