By Becky Chan
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Yes! I am going to Girls State!
It’s April 1975, the students and teachers at Brattleboro Union High School, in Vermont, picked me, one of six girls in our junior class, to represent the school in the Girls State weeklong convention. Sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary, Girls State attendees participate in mock government and learn about citizenship and leadership. Classmates nominated each other and voted for six. For me, it was a popularity contest. Did they like me or not?
I felt like a prom queen, the Chosen One, but I was more excited about the week away from home, away from the trailer park where we lived than being groomed as a future leader.
My heart sank when I read the welcome packet from the Auxiliary—Girls State attendees must be U.S. citizens. At that time, I’d been in this country for only four years, one year shy of citizenship eligibility. My summer escape plan vanished, I plodded to Headmaster Bert Lark’s office. He looked over the rules and called the Auxiliary.
“Rules are rules,” the Auxiliary replied. I couldn’t go. Their reason was that saluting the flag was mandatory at the convention. As a non-citizen, I could refuse to do so. I never knew not saluting was an option.
Growing up in Hong Kong, I learned to venerate and fear authorities. One such force was my elementary school teacher, the bespectacled Empress Dowager Mrs. Yu. Often in her uniform of dark traditional cheongsam, covered from her chin down to her ankles, Mrs. Yu looked like a huge question mark with hyphens as eyes. She hid in her sleeve a wooden ruler, which she flicked on misbehaving students’ palms like she was trying to kill a fly. She’d killed many. As students, we stayed put in the classroom while the teachers roamed. We stood at attention and greeted the teacher in unison with “good morning” or “good afternoon.” On my first day of American school, I was flabbergasted to hear students bantering without any order with our homeroom teacher, Mr. Sleath, who had blue eyes and looked like Roger Moore in James Bond. My mother would have clicked her tongue, “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” and said disapprovingly, “Aiya!”
“Rules are rules” didn’t allow me to question the Auxiliary’s decision. But my classmate, Frances Fairchild, who played Mother Superior in the school’s production of The Sound of Music, and a few others, from the Yearbook or Drama Club, started a petition that circulated past every PB& J sandwich and chocolate milk in the cafeteria. In one day, they gathered 500 signatures and asked the Auxiliary to reconsider. No deal.
The students then demanded a town hall meeting with the Auxiliary where I sat silent and pretended to be invisible. Still no deal. My classmates went to the press. They sent a letter to the editor of the Brattleboro Reformer, a countywide newspaper. They cited my A-student, well-rounded qualities—in track, basketball, and Future Business Leaders of America. They cried discrimination. I was their cause, they were my voice. Their passion inspired me but their defiance intimidated me. No riots, please!
In the 1960s, the British colony Hong Kong was undergoing much turmoil. Riots and demonstrations were common. The local Chinese were despondent on being treated as non-subjects by the British with unequal pay and benefits. The colony was bursting with those fleeing Communist Mainland China. Many had braved the shark infested two-and-half-mile swim across the bay seeking a safe haven, away from the full-on Cultural Revolution at home. Rationing and famine rumors caused much anxiety among the masses who had left their relatives behind. Still, some remained loyal to the Communists and fought those sympathetic to the Nationalists, who fled China for Taiwan. Together, they demonstrated against the British government; apart, they demonstrated against each other. My family’s favorite, outspoken radio host was targeted and killed in a bombing. There were curfews. Seeing grief and hearing anger from my father frightened me.
Did he leave Hong Kong and us out of frustration for himself, or out of love for us? In Hong Kong, our family of six squeezed into a one-room flat the size of someone’s bedroom here. We had no private bathroom. The communal one, lit with a bare incandescent bulb dotted with tiny, dried moths, was in the center of every floor of the building. My mother cooked our three meals on a single kerosene burner in an alcove. There were times the government would turn on the water only for a few hours every four days. My brother and I simmered under the burning sun, waited at a public spigot to fetch two bucketfuls, for a family of six. We were into grey water way before it was trendy. In our flat, we had two sets of green, metal bunk beds against the walls. Sometimes I slept with one of my sisters, sometimes with my mother. At night, my father unfolded a white canvas cot in the middle of the room. That’s where he slept.
My father was the best wicker and rattan craftsman in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Who else could weave a 12-foot dragon with undulating curves, a life size roaring MGM lion, or a trophy moose head out of rattan? Frank Wilson, owner of Basketville, the world’s largest basket store, went to Hong Kong to hire my father to work at his store in Putney, Vermont. In 1968, my father, at 47, not knowing a word of English and had never flown, left everything behind including us and left for the U.S.
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My father with his creations at Basketville in Putney, Vermont in the late 1970s. (Photo provided by Becky Chan)
Three years later, he saved enough money and he wanted to send for us. He put a downpayment on a brand new mobile home in a trailer park as our new home. The yellow and white Fleetwood single-wide had Harvest Gold appliances that we didn’t know how to use. For the first time in our lives, we had bedrooms and a bathroom.
Putney, a picturesque New England town of 2,000, with a white steeple church just off Main Street and a babbling brook running through it, had no traffic light, no grocery store, and no high school. I went to high school 10 miles away in the big city of Brattleboro. I was almost 15 when I arrived. I spoke 4 words of English in a heavy Cantonese accent, “HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?”
I was amazed that Captain Kirk spoke such good English. Back in Hong Kong, my Captain Kirk spoke only Cantonese.
When my father arrived in Putney, the Brattleboro Reformer put his picture on the front page showing him weaving the lion, both exotic. This was in 1968 or 69. There weren’t too many Chinese in Vermont then. Six years later, the Reformer interviewed me for a story on Girls State.
Once the paper published the article, there were more letters to the editor. One letter referred to the Auxiliary’s action as its own Chinese Exclusion Act, but erroneously called it “The Oriental Exclusion Act” because the writer thought Japanese were also excluded in the 1882 law that prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers. The paper’s editorial noted non-citizens could join the military and the Auxiliary was “obviously more fussy than the government…” It also stated saluting the flag was “an exercise which the Supreme Court has said cannot be required of anyone.” It continued that self proclaimed patriotic Americans “have made personal fortunes and political careers by combating various threats to the nation.” The paper hoped I would compare the actions of those involved and “draw valuable conclusions about democracy, patriotism, and Americanism.” I didn’t know I was a threat.
The Auxiliary relented and let me attend Girls State as a guest. I observed the mock government in action. I couldn’t vote. I didn’t salute the flag, which was awkward because normally I would. But after what my classmates had done for me, the least I could do was exercise my options. It was a fabulous escape hanging with old friends and making new ones. Citizenship and leadership lessons? Not sure.
In 1982, I became an American citizen, six years after being eligible. Why the delay? I was working to pay for college so becoming a citizen wasn’t a priority. Besides, the application read like a Russian novel, the process daunting. At that time, the only difference to me in being a permanent resident and a citizen was the right to vote. Politics did not interest me. I didn’t see how my one vote could affect the outcome of any election. I didn’t care.
Luckily I outgrew my passivity after years of observing and listening. Assimilation brought me the realization that my own voice is important—my high school classmates were no longer around to speak for me. Exercising the First Amendment rights, like they did back in 1975, is quintessential American. They knew it, but I learned from the journey they took and others took, not by being at the destination—the weeklong Girls State.
The Auxiliary would be proud to hear that I served 22 years as an FBI agent with the U.S. Department of Justice. Finishing a four-year assignment at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong, I prepared for my return stateside. The Marines Detachment at the Consulate presented me with a parting gift—an American flag that was flown above the Consulate, the same Consulate where years before my family stood in line “yearning to breathe free,” awaiting the opening of “the golden door” as described by Emma Lazarus’s poem below the Statue of Liberty. Once again, I was embraced into the fold of the flag. This time, it was my flag.
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My flag from the Marine Security Guard Detachment in Hong Kong that was flown at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong. (Photo by Becky Chan)
Becky can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.
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