I will start with my Mom. My great-grandparents from my Mom's mom's side immigrated to Malaysia from China at the tail end of the Qing dynasty because of China's deteriorating economics and job opportunities. Wai-poh (my grandmother) was barely two at that point. As my Mom put it, this move was mostly "out of the frying pan and into the fire" for Wai-poh's family, because World War 2 began and Malaysia was occupied by the Japanese. Because Wai-poh's father was very educated, he was targeted and their family was constantly on the run. Wai-poh was pulled out of school because she was 1) the oldest child, and 2) needed to help her mother run the house. When the war ended, Wai-poh went back to school to acquire an occupation. She learned sewing and tailoring, and soon started up a successful business. My grandpa, Gong-Gong, had immigrated to Malaysia before Wai-Poh had come, and worked at a grocery store. Wai-Poh's mother had a coffee shop that Wai-poh helped in, and it just so happened to be across the street from Gong-Gong's grocery store. Gong-Gong often came over to the coffee shop to buy coffee and flirt with the barista. And thus Wai-poh and Gong-Gong get married.
Wai-poh and Gong-gong moved in with Gong-Gong's three brothers, and Wai-Poh was way overworked with triple her usual household duties. Wai-poh proposed to move out, which irked the relatives, but Wai-poh was adamant. Gong-gong supported her, and the couple offered to compensate the move by visiting the relatives every weekend. These weekend visits became a routine that made up my mom's childhood.
The 1960's were a relatively stable period for Malaysia, and my Mom tells me she had quite a peaceful childhood. In between school (which goes year round in Malaysia, only stopping to celebrate Chinese New Year) my Mom spent her time going on her weekly family visits, reading Peanuts in the funnies, and pulling the tails off of lizards that wandered into the house. There was one hullabaloo when the Malaysian and Chinese economies were skirmishing with each other, and what with riots in the streets, the city was put on curfew and my Mom and her sisters were boarded up inside. But besides that, there wasn't a whole lot of drama. Communist China did not have a huge direct effect, although the Malaysian-born Chinese were often very wary of other Chinese.
My Mom couldn't get into a Malaysian college because she was Chinese, and priority was given to native Malays. In 1978, at age seventeen, she moved to Canada to study biochemistry in the University of Toronto. I imagine she was pretty scared, but fortunately she had become proficient in English growing up in a Catholic school, and she was a pretty smart cookie. When she graduated, her friends recommended her to go to graduate school so she could come out with a good job. My Mom felt a little intimidated by graduate school and was reluctant to go. Then she heard of a one-year business school program in computer science in San Francisco, and she took the bait. That's where she met my Dad, which leads us to his side of the story.
My Dad's grandparents immigrated to America from Czechoslovakia because work wasn't good for them. They started a farm in Texas, where my grandpa Papa Raymond was born. Papa Raymond's story has some similarities to Wai-Poh's. He was the oldest child, and when his Dad died he was forced to quit high-school and take over the farm. He was fourteen at the time (Wai-Poh was sixteen). Unlike Wai-Poh, he never got a chance to pick school back up. When World War 2 struck, he chose to enlist in the marines to provide for his family. He served on a supply ship en route to Europe and Russia. Because he spent most of his time in the Atlantic, he never had any contact with the Japanese, but they did get fired at once or twice by a German ship. Fortunately, it was just a supply ship (not a combat ship) so they weren't as heavily targeted.
After the war, Papa Raymond got a job at an oil company and moved up the ladder as a self-educated engineer. He met my grandmother (Nana) at his church in Dallas. Nana originally grew up in Oklahoma on a strawberry farm as the daughter of an Irish father. Her mother was an orphan, so we have no record of her ancestry from that line. Nana moved to Dallas to get a job as a secretary. She married Papa Raymond in 1950 and had my Dad in 1952.
My Dad didn't get any help with his college education, as neither of his parents had any college experience. He started in Dallas Baptist University and transferred two more times before transferring back to Dallas. Not knowing what to do next, he signed up for the G.I. Bill in the Navy to pay for graduate school. My Dad tells me that in retrospect, he didn't need to enlist in the Navy to go to graduate school, because his grades were good enough and he could have gotten a scholarship. But he didn't know that at the time. After getting his master's in philosophy at Western Kentucky, he took a vacation to California with his grad buddies to reorient himself and rest. He was planning to get a P.h.D. and had applied to Princeton and some other schools, but then he went to the San Francisco computer school and met my Mom. After casting one last wistful look at that shiny P.h.D. on yonder distant shore, he married the girl and never looked back.
The story goes on (featuring a special appearance by yours truly) but I think I'll stop here.
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