On Dragons, Lions, Icons and Bruce Lee

Being a Half-Breed on Chinese New Year

Gung hei fat choi!

It is Chinese New Year, the Year of the Dragon. I was born in 1952, so this is my year. It comes around once every 12 years according to the Chinese lunar zodiac calendar.

For the record up front, I’m not a believer in astrology. If someone asks me, “What’s your sign?” I always say (with a straight face), “I’m a Feces.” (I’m actually a Leo, if you must know.) On the other hand, as much as I’ve looked at astrology as somewhat benign superstition I’ve discovered that Zodiac calendars are “Orthodox” and even enshrined in our iconography in church domes.

And at Christmas we sing “those who worship the stars were taught by a star to adore Thee, the Sun of Righteousness…” Notably, we DON’T sing, “those who worship the stars are heretical pagans doomed to hell”. So, welllll… maybe astrology is kind of a mystery that points humanity to the True God if people really pay attention to it, or it’s good enough for God to use to point people to Himself and perhaps we could do the same. Just a thought.

Anyway, I’ve read enough Leo astrological stuff to know that one can find things that fit your “sign” if you try hard enough. But with the Chinese signs I don’t have to try hard, or even a little bit to see that the personality description of “Dragons” eerily fits me almost exactly… even down to my ex-wife (a “Dog”) and my current marriage to a “Monkey” (late in life is best according to the sign, which we did). It doesn’t make me a believer, it just makes me a somewhat intrigued skeptic who is somewhat uncomfortable even being intrigued.

But… astrological prognostications isn’t really the point of this blog post. It’s really more about being Chinese. Or, in my case, Chonky. Half-Chinese, half Honky. My Mom was full Chinese. Her family immigrated from Canton to Hawaii in the 1920’s. My Father was full blooded English/Irish/Scotch European White Bread, raised in rural Arkansas.

When I was a child, I did not know that it was too soon after World War II that my father married my mother, Nellie Kim Yuen Ching. He was in the Navy and met my Mom while she was bar tending at her uncle’s bar in Honolulu. They married after a short six month courtship and with the blessing of my Wai-po (great-grandmother) and Popo (grandmother). But then again, my Popo was a prostitute at Pearl Harbor and liked the sailors. Perhaps her blessing was even more blessed if she saw some purity in my Dad’s interest in her daughter. My Dad always boasted that Wai-po and Popo liked him and told my Mom “he’s a good one”. He knew the value of their approval in the Chinese culture even if my Mom was trying to distance herself from it at her age then.

At any rate, when my father took her home to meet his parents in Cabot, Arkansas (just north of Little Rock), my grandmother looked at my mother, then at my father and said, "We sent you over there to kill them, not to marry them." Their first few visits were chilly and awkward. My Mom’s childhood had prepared her well for awkward and adversarial. She was born out of wedlock to her prostitute mother who gave her to her sister. My mom spent her childhood thinking her aunt was her mother and her mother was her aunt… until at her eleventh birthday party when a family member got drunk and revealed the family secret. She went to live with her real Mom, then things got REALLY dysfunctional. When her step-father came in to her bedroom late one night and started touching her, she told him, “If you don’t get the hell out of my room I’m going to tell my mother and she will kill you…” He left and never tried again. But she was soon shipped off to her “father” and step-mother where she became the family maid, servant and babysitter for her half-sister…. and decades later she found out her biological father was actually her “father’s” brother. Anyway, her life was an Amy Tan novel that I might write some day.

But back to Arkansas… I was their first grandchild. So, like all first time grandparents, my Grandmother warmed up to my Mom, perhaps because my Mom was a “no-bullshit” person and Gan knew she better play nice if she wanted to see her grandson. I spent some time with them in my early childhood while my Dad had sea duty and when we lived in Memphis.

When I was a teenager, my Mom told me that when I was two, they would drive to Little Rock to shop and Gan would put me on her lap in the front seat as my Grandfather drove around downtown and they’d have me yell out the car window "HEY JIGABOO!" to the Black people. They thought it was hilarious. My Mom told me she hated it… but they were always good to us kids and to her, they were just ignorant.

My Dad was stationed in Hawaii from the time I was three to five. We spent a lot of time with my Mom’s family while we were there. I remember getting a small red envelope with a silver dollar in it from my Popo on Chinese New Year. Then we moved to Millington, TN, where my Dad worked at the Navy Base just outside of Memphis. I spent first through most of fourth grade there. Every year Popo would send me a letter with a small red envelope and there was always a silver dollar in it.

Memphis was not Hawaii. I was called "Chinky-loo" on the playgrounds in elementary school. I learned quickly who to stay close to at recess and who to avoid. I never said anything to my parents about any of that. Looking back I’m not sure why not, but I think even back then I kind of took things pretty “Zen”, much like my Mom, and didn’t see much point in spitting into a tidal wave if I was navigating the storm.

When I started fifth grade my Father was transferred to Taipei, Taiwan in 1960. I went to a Dominican Catholic school that was half Chinese nationals who spoke English and white military kids. I quickly realized that I was a half-breed there too. The Chinese kids saw me as "White", the white kids saw me as "Chinese". It was just weird to both of them that I brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch in a brown sack and not rice in a rectangular tin box with chop sticks.

By the time I got to high school in the mid-1960’s in Phoenix we were far enough removed from the War that only the reddest of the rednecks would make fun of me. There was one Black guy in my high school and I was one of less than a half-dozen Oriental kids in a school of 5,000. Cheech and Chong put out their first album and Bruce Lee became popular. For once in my life, I was actually racially cool. For the last 40 or so years I've not experienced anything like my childhood. Here in Phoenix people sometimes ask me if I'm Mexican, or Indian (casino Indian, not tech support Indian...). Some guess Chinese. But it’s pretty rare these days to have a conversation about one’s race because we’re a pretty racially diverse city.

Perhaps because it was more comfortable to be non-descript I kind of forgot about “being Chinese” for a long time. Like my great-grandparents who immigrated, I tended to blend in rather than accentuate my difference. It was easier to exist like that but there always seemed to be a part of me that was like some old pictures and souvenirs of a nearly forgotten time and place pushed far under the bed in a shoe box. You know its there, you even know what's in it, but you only think of it at odd times, and you never take it out to look at it or show anyone.

I became Orthodox and learned about all the great Saints of the Middle East, Russia, the Balkans, and even America. There were hymns, feast days, commemorations and icons. But they were all Greek, Arab, Romanian, Russian or Aleut (etc. etc). I was a stranger of race once again. I knew China had been evangelized but there were no hymns, no names, no commemorations, no icons of any “yellow saints”.

Then I saw an icon of the Saints of the Boxer Rebellion.

Chinese Orthodox Christians, martyrs. One of my kids bought it for me for Christmas in 2005. And it drew me in.

At the supper table my wife saw me staring at the icon and said, "It’s time to cut your beard." So I did.

I’m almost 20 years beyond this picture now. Sometimes I’m tempted to cut my beard again. But at this point of my life beard maintenance and fashion statements (even in the service of race relations) are more of a bother than wrestling with personal existential race issues.

I was 53 when I figured out that I'm Chinese. I'm white bread American. I'm Orthodox and Christian. And finally, I was at home with it all.