In seeking an ethnically Chinese family’s roots, Charles Chiu, a retired U.S. Air Force reservist found that he didn’t have to take an overseas flight to Asia. Instead, he and his wife and adult children took a road trip to the Mississippi Delta.
As I watched Far East in the Deep South, a documentary about Chinese American heritage in the cotton belt, I found this story fascinating because it resolved a curious moment in my teenage.
Many years ago, as a teen working at my parents’ donut shop in the Los Angeles area, a black man stopped for coffee. He asked us if we were Chinese.
Since there weren’t that many people in the shop in the afternoon, he started talking to us. He said he was also Chinese.
We were baffled by this bit of information because he didn’t look anything like us. Our first thought was that could he be making fun of us? Pulling our leg? He gave us his name and that his grandfather was Chinese. He also told us he was from Mississippi.
As I watched this recent documentary about the Chinese immigrants who ventured South, I was ready to take that leap of faith that I couldn’t as a teen. My parents, too, couldn’t quite make sense of his disclosure, knowing only our tiny thread in a tapestry of Chinese immigration stories.
If you are curious about your Chinese roots and need some guidance with understanding the culture, please contact us for consultation.
