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CHAPTER 1
South Scandinavian Minneapolis
The bones of Chinese girls' feet, as young as two years old, were broken and bound in lengths of cloth to stop their growth. Three-inch feet were deemed sexy, thus poor women with lotus feet could possibly marry into a wealthy family.
The practice of footbinding ended in 1949 (although it had been outlawed as early as 1912), the year the People's Republic of China was founded by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China — I was one year old.
Once upon a very long time ago there was a princess, Quan Lee, born 1948. She was no ordinary princess. Her kingdom was a house on a hill with a white picket fence in South Scandinavian Minneapolis. She lived in a world of make believe.
I am dressed in Chinese silk pajamas with tiny frog closures. The Mandarin collar is choking my smile. I am looking away from the camera. Down the street. Past the Lutheran church. Past the homes of the little blonde girls who attend the Lutheran church Sunday school with me. Past the family I don't know. The family that does not recognize me. My family.
–Black White Chinese Women Got the Beat, performance by Sherry Quan Lee and Lori Young-Williams
She was Cinderella awaiting her prince. She loved her shoes. She sang to them. Hugged them. Loved them. Loved every pair of fake Capezio flats her dollar a week allowance allowed her to buy. Maybe it was the black patent leather shoes her mother, raising her on welfare, managed to buy for her every Easter that began her obsession for pretty footwear. Maybe she knew that beauty was bound in binding a young girl's feet, that somehow history had whispered to her it's always about finding the prince, no matter how painful the journey, no matter how many pairs of shoes it would take.
Recently my friend Carolyn challenged me about my use of the term South Scandinavian Minneapolis, where I grew up. As a writer, I know it's important to be specific. Specifically, I grew up in a house on a hill on 26 Avenue and 39 Street, two blocks west of Roosevelt High School, the Roosevelt Public Library, Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, The Ritz Grocery Store, and Herman's grocery store.
East of Roosevelt High School, on Hiawatha Avenue, was Beek's, "the king of pizza." South of Roosevelt High School was Scott's Pharmacy. A couple blocks farther south is Lake Hiawatha Park.
North and west of where I lived was Folwell Junior High School. My sister, various neighborhood friends, and I walked the mile to school every day even in frigid Minnesota weather. On the way home from school we would pass the Nile Theater on 23rd Avenue, then walk down 38th Street where we sometimes stopped at the soda fountain in the Nile Pharmacy, or stopped at Little Tony's Italian Restaurant for french fries and a cherry coke. Sometimes we ran past the shoe shop to Harper's Variety Store on the corner to buy trading cards.
Five blocks west of where I lived was Miles Standish Elementary School. We walked to school, home for lunch, back to school, and home again. Two blocks west of Standish is Sibley Park where, in junior high school, we went to the Friday night dances (my sister was Sibley Park Snow Queen one year; I was never a queen, only a wallflower).
According to the City of Minneapolis I lived in the Standish Neighborhood:
The Standish neighborhood on Minneapolis' south side, is bound on the north by 36th Street, on the east by Hiawatha Avenue, on the south by 42nd and 43rd streets and on the west by Cedar Avenue. This neighborhood was named after an area elementary school, which had been called Miles Standish after a work by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The area was considered the outskirts of the city until immigrants, mostly Swedish and Norwegian, began building their homes here early in the 1900s.
My grandparents and my mother and her siblings grew up east of where I grew up, bordering the Longfellow neighborhood on 25 Street, near Snelling Avenue (not the Snelling Avenue in St. Paul). From what I know they attended Longfellow grade school. The railroads in the area provided employment for Black men; Grandpa was a porter for one of the railroad lines running into Chicago.
Aunt Grace wrote: "We did not live in a Black ghetto. Our home was the lower left apartment on East 25 Street. It was rented, at that time, to colored tenants only." She also wrote that her mama and papa were "highly respected by [their] white neighbors. The only trouble that I can remember, we had at the hands of the Black people in the tenement." This was because a neighbor had told their friends they were "passing for white." They weren't. But later, my mother and her children living in South Scandinavian Minneapolis, were.
My friend, Carolyn, was right. Carolyn, a Black woman, lived in South Minneapolis too. She went to Central High School. My cousin, both parents Black, went to Central High School. Carolyn had a crush on my cousin. (Other cousins went to North High School.)
My friend, Carolyn, my Aunt Marion (my mother's youngest sister) and her son (my cousin), lived in South Minneapolis, but they lived with Black folk, unlike me who lived east of whatever line divided us.
I didn't know much about geography when I was little, but I did know my mother's family could only visit at night, when it was dark, and our neighbors couldn't see them.
CHAPTER 2
North Minneapolis
Aunt Grace, third in line of the Franklin sisters (my mother was second in line), lived in North Minneapolis in a Duplex on Emerson Avenue North. This is where Grandma, my mother's mom, also lived, perhaps after Grandpa died, I'm not sure. It must have been sometime after Grandma died of self-inflicted poisoning, when the cancer was more painful than she could bear, that my Aunt Grace and her family moved farther west, trespassing into the Jewish neighborhood, 16 and Vincent Avenue North between West Broadway Avenue and Plymouth Avenue North. Streets and Avenues don't change, but people coming and going do.
I remember we visited Aunt Grace, my mom, my sisters and I. We took a bus down Broadway, stopped to shop at thrift stores, and then walked to the most beautiful home I had ever seen.
Another aunt and her children lived for a time in one of the north side housing projects off Olson Memorial Highway (Sumner Field, Glenwood, Lyndale and Olson public housing developments). Since then, the projects have been torn down, and in 2005-2009 the modern Heritage Park Community which includes a park, apartments, for-sale homes, and a senior center was created, due to a law suit claiming segregation in public housing.
When I turned nineteen, I brought my childhood friend, Annie, to visit my Aunt Grace in North Minneapolis. Annie remembers my mother being quite angry with me. But Annie knew, despite my mother's passing jones, that I was Black. She said everyone in the neighborhood knew. Everyone except me.
Despite my mother's angst, I wanted to know her family. So over the years I continued to integrate myself into the Black family I had been segregated from for too many years.
After my mom and dad divorced, my dad eventually moved with his new Bohemian wife and Chinese/Bohemian children to the Camden area, upper north side of Minneapolis, near the Weber Park swimming pool, where my mother's sister's son lived close enough to walk to school with my father's children.
In the 1980s I participated in writing workshops, and taught a writing workshop in North Minneapolis at the Pillsbury Oak Park Community Center. My first public poetry reading was at a North Side coffee house.
Flashback: when I was in high school, 1963-1966, Mother didn't allow me to go to Roosevelt vs. North football games played at North High School. She said there might be a race riot. I didn't know what she was talking about.
CHAPTER 3
The Personal is Political
I am sixty-three years old. I wear white tennis shoes, black leather flats, red cowboy boots, and pink high heels. Pairs of recycled Stuart Weitzman, Joan and David, Marc Fisher, Nine West, and Steve Madden shoes line the shelves of my bedroom closet. Each pair calling me to attention. Each pair soliciting happily ever after. Shoes, the sensuous, seductive icons of the twenty-first century.
No man gets to glimpse my menagerie of seduction. No man is allowed in my bedroom, or my writing room — not any more, or at least not today.
My hopes and dreams, yes, I still have them, are no longer an open book, but a little girl's diary locked until someone appears with the only key.
However, today I am reminiscing; I am writing. I am allowing myself to be vulnerable. I am imagining what has been locked away for so many years. Locked away like my Black relatives who could only visit the house on the hill in South Minneapolis at night when the neighbors couldn't distinguish them as anything more than shadows, as secrets climbing the red brick stairs and entering the stucco house, lights off, blinds closed.
I am imagining my Chinese father who, unlike my Black relatives, slithered out the door instead of in, disappearing in the night as if again taking on another identity as he did when he left China, a young boy slipping into a foreign culture, the USA, to earn money to send home to his mother because his father died and he, being the eldest child, was responsible for his family's welfare.
It is not easy to write my story. For years I wrote my story in fragments of not so poetic lines. I spit out anger and revenge, sharp knives cutting through every other line with just enough sass to bear my wounds. I couldn't stop incriminating just about everyone and every institution — schools, churches, places of business, etc., calling out injustices with every harsh word, hoping my poems would birth me, and make sense of who I was and why I wasn't happy.
There are moments I am still not happy. The absence of love debilitating. The need, not only to be loved, but to love someone. The fear of being alone. Being alone. Poverty of the spirit. Poverty.
Maybe it was the chokecherry tree in my childhood backyard that is the metaphor for my writing life. Ripe berries seducing birds to eat, then shit white; droppings scattered like my poems. A professor, reading between my lines, asked if magnolias in my poem "Wintergreen" represented Black men lynched, or if the chokecherry tree in my poem "Chokecherry" signified the tree on Sethe's back (Color Purple by Alice Walker). She assumed they were conscious choices. They weren't.
Wintergreen
Minnesota is not compatible to my growth, it is too cold.
The Ice Age made it clear Magnolias, you can live here in SE China, here in Georgia.
My ancestors oppose the heat.
Here I am, a Minnesota mutant.
Like a magnolia, I am not white. It is only light passing through. Mama cooked tuna noodle casserole and daddy ate it.
Like a magnolia
Sherry Quan Lee, Chinese Blackbird
Memory resides in the body, in the mind, and appears when I'm not looking. I believe my physical body and the body of my poems unconsciously uncover a history I didn't know.
I believe the personal IS political, as many before me have claimed. I believe that a mixed-race child passing for white, growing up in the sixties was more than bell bottom jeans and psychedelic music. That the freedom my peers sought was different from the freedom I ached for. I wanted what they had, the Ozzie and Harriet life. They ran from it, I ran toward it. I ran towards love.
CHAPTER 4
Write About Your Chinese Father
In 1940 there were not enough Asian and Pacific Islanders in Minnesota to count as a percentage; in 1950 0.1% were APIs. 2012 data shows Asians as 4.4% of Minnesota's population (this does not include Asians who reported being of more than one race).
–U.S. Census Bureau
Write about your Chinese father, a friend said to me. Write about your Chinese father, your Chinese father, your Chinese ... what I heard: Asians are in, Asians are exotic, Asians are a commodity.
It wasn't that I wasn't interested in knowing my father, even though he left my mother (when I was five years old), or my mother kicked him out (who to believe) because he came home, again, in the wee hours of a Sunday morning as neighbors headed for church. Knowing my father wasn't a priority because I was allowed to be Chinese, if necessary, if the neighborhood kids didn't believe I was white. I was allowed to eat chow mein and play Mahjong. Black was a secret; Chinese was, when necessary, just an exotic admission.
My father had many names. His obituary reads "William (Theun) Wing, age 85, born March 3, 1909 in Canton, China." The Manifest of Alien Passengers on the S.S. China dated November 22, 1919 records my father's name as "Quan, Wing Theun." His senior class yearbook records his last name as Billy Quon.
I know him as Billy Quan. His "life story" as told by him with handwritten stories, photocopies of his family in China and a few relatives in the United States, and documents from World War II, that he gave to me a few months before he died, is how I know him; yet, mostly what I know of him is the absence of him. (Stories from my father's journal have been transcribed precisely as he wrote them, honoring that English was his second language. I do not know how old my father was when he wrote this journal.)
MY FIRST TEN YEARS OF MY LIFE WAS SPEND IN CHINA IN THE VILLAGE OF HAI PING. I WAS TOO YOUNG TO REMEMBER TOO MUCH. THE VILLAGE WAS CONSIST OF ROW OF HOUSE — EIGHT TO TEN IN A ROW RUN NORTH TO SOUTH. THERE WERE ABOUT TEN ROW. AT THE HEAD OF THE VILLAGE WAS A SCHOOL HOUSE. MY GRANDFATHER WAS THE PROFESSOR....
MY FATHER PASSED AWAY WHEN I WAS SEVEN. WHEN MY UNCLE (HO) WAS HOME FROM UNITED STATES TO VISIT HIS FAMILY THEY DECIDED TO HAVE ME JOIN HIM WHEN HE RETURN TO THE STATE, I BEING THE OLDEST WAS THE HEAD OF FAMILY HAVE TO MAKE MONEY TO SUPORT THE FAMILY. I WAS ONLY TEN AT THE TIME. WHEN WE LEFT FOR U.S.A. I LEFT MY MOTHER AND YOUNGER BROTHER AND SISTER. NEVER TO SEE THEM AGAIN. THE TRIP FROM THE VILLAGE TO HONG KWONG — WAS ONE DAY. WHERE WE BOARD THE STEAM SHIP S.S. CHINA. IT TOOK US TWO WEEKS TO REACH THE STATES BY THE WAY OF HONOLULO AND SAN FRANCISCO.
WE STAY IN SAN FRANCISCO ABOUT A MONTH AND THEN WE HEADED FOR LOS ANGELES WHERE MY UNCLE HAD A JOB WAITING FOR HIM. HE WAS A COOK AND A VERY GOOD ONE. WHILE IN LOS ANGELES I STAYED AT MY RELATIVE WHO OWN A CHINESE HERB STORE. MY UNCLE'S JOB WAS AT A SMALL TOWN FROM L.A. HE WAS ALWAYS WORKING — SO I NEVER GET TO SEE HIM TOO MUCH. I WAS AT MY OWN FOR A ELEVEN YEARS BOY. I LEARN MY ENGLISH AT A SMALL MISSIONARY SCHOOL. THE ONLY TIME I HAD TROUBLE-WITH UNCLE-WAS I WENT TO A MOVIE AND STAY AND SAW THE MOVIE THREE TIMES. IT WAS A COWGIRL PICTURE.
My dad graduated from Santa Anna High School in 1932, where he was on the yearbook staff, and was on the football team, basketball team, baseball team, track team, and wrestling team. (He never got to know my sons, so he never knew they too were athletes. They ran track and cross country, played hockey, played tennis, and one son is now an avid baseball player.)
But after a year of attending Santa Anna Junior College, my father, along with a friend who was visiting his aunt in Santa Anna, rode the rails to Chicago to see the World's Fair. My dad said he was worried because there were bums all over the place and he was the only one with money. When he got to Chicago his friend took off.
Dad got a job as a dishwasher for a ladies' cafeteria. His salary was $5.50 a week and he worked from 5:00 AM until 6:00 PM. After three or four months he got a job at the Stanley Café making $6.50 per week. He could buy a meal for ten cents and he could see two features at the burlesque show for ten cents!
In Chicago Dad met the Kim Loo Sisters who were playing at the State and Lake Theatre. They were from Minneapolis. Their father is Chinese, their mother Polish. My father moved to Minneapolis in 1933 when the Kim Loo sisters' father invited him to chauffeur the sisters to their dance events. For five years he chauffeured the Kim Loo sisters while working part-time at the Nankin Café as a busboy. The Kim Loo sisters' father worked at the Nankin as a waiter and he got my father the job:
The Nankin Café, which opened in its first location in Minneapolis in 1919, was for many years the center of Minnesota Chinese cultural life. In 1948, Nankin owner and Chef Walter James — with the help of his friend Stanley Chong — converted part of the Café into clubrooms for the growing Chinese community. James and Chong founded the organization that eventually became the Chinese American Association of Minnesota (CAAM).
At a time when Chinese-American entertainers were a rarity, the Kim Loo Sisters shared top billing with such stars as Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Ann Miller. And though the prevalent media stereotype of Chinese women was either Dragon Lady (femme fatale), Suzie Wong (sexual plaything) or Madame Butterfly (submissive spouse/dutiful daughter), the four sisters personified not one but two all-American icons of the 40s — the girl next door and the pinup girl, albeit and improbably in Chinese dress. (Leslie Li)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Love Imagined"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Sherry Quan Lee.
Excerpted by permission of Loving Healing Press, Inc..
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