WHAT IS YOUR IMMIGRATION STORY?

My great great grandfather immigrated in the late 1800s as a merchant, which was legal at the time. His son was able to immigrate legally as the son of a merchant, but my grandmother immigrated with her mother and siblings in 1931, and they were subject to the questioning and long detention at Angel Island, even though their immigration was technically legal based on their family ties. They were detained at Angel Island for two and a half weeks, they were interrogated, and I learned recently that they almost got enough questions wrong to be sent back. But fortunately they made it. My grandfather's mother immigrated when she was seven months pregnant in 1923. He was the first in my family to be born an American.

My parents met in Oakland Chinatown where they both grew up. They went to chinese school together and they raised a family during the red scare.The goal overall in their life was to become as American as possible which they did to keep our family safe, to keep us earning money, to build wealth, and for better or worse, we became very american during that time.

WHAT DOES YOUR CURRENT JOURNEY LOOK LIKE?

The way I think about my family's present day life is every year the Lee family has a christmas party and we've done it for about a hundred years and we all get together and we catch up and we all have all different kinds of professions and family structures and goals and dreams and I love it because we just catch up and I think that our family didn't have the typical like, "you need to become doctors and engineers" even though we do have doctors and engineers in our family, everyone's doing something different.

I think the thing that defines this current day primarily is that my grandmother passed away in March of this year, six months ago and she was the last member of our family to be born in China. And so I think recently what all of us have been grappling with is that we're now very decidedly Chinese-American. We're not just Chinese anymore. And for better or worse because our family experienced the Red Scare, because we experienced McCarthyism as a family, we all are very desperate to hold on to culture and hold on to tradition. And it's very important to us because we know how easy it is to lose it. And because we've been in the country for a while, our traditions are kind of wacky in that we like we have you know, Chinese food at Thanksgiving or we celebrate Chinese New Year. This was the first year that I had an aunt who was in charge of preserving a lot of the culture and would run Chinese New Year dinner and we didn't know why we did any of the things she led us through, we didn't do everything that we were supposed to do, we didn't celebrate every day for two weeks doing specific things. But this was the first year we had to run Chinese New Year without her and my cousin rented a book from the library to make sure we were doing everything right and that we knew why we were doing it. Our family has always gathered the week before Chinese New Year and we never knew why we did that but apparently that's the dinner that everyone gets into town and it's called a reunion dinner. It's when we warm the family ties. I think that is how it's phrased in the book that we rented from the library. And so it's kind of funny we try to hold on to whatever we can through food and very basic Chinese things like taking your shoes off at the door and serving tea from the youngest, and the oldest pays very basic things. But we try to hold on to whatever we can whenever we find out that our family used to do something. We try to fold it back in just like any diaspora.

I've been thinking a lot about culture and why it's important as we cling to things such as the way you do things, the colors you wear, the holidays you celebrate. Honestly, it seems kind of arbitrary, but the reason that we hold on to culture is because it is the memory of people that we've lost. And like honestly I've practiced this question and I can't do without crying because I think that whenever I take my shoes off at the door, I think about my aunt yelling at me the one time that I walked in with my shoes on. And the other day I was cutting up cantaloupe for me and a bunch of friends and I started crying because my aunt used to do that and I miss her so much and cutting fruit is something that Chinese people have been doing for ages to demonstrate love and connection. And inevitably, as you pass on, these traditions and these silly arbitrary things that especially being Chinese American kids ask: Why do you do this? Why do you do that? Why do I need to whatever? Inevitably, you end up sharing stories of people you've lost and people who have built up this life in another country to make yours better. I think that whenever you share food together that's specific to the culture you can always remember this was so-and-so's favorite dish or you laugh about eating bitter melon because no one likes the taste of it until you get to a certain age and then you talk about like how some aunt would try to make you eat bitter melon and you hated it.

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