May Quan Tsang, My Grandmother's Journey

I loved my grandmother so much.  From the day I was born, I remember her as being much much smaller than me.  Petite, tiny, grey-haired smoker. May Quan Tsang.  Mama.  Her bouffant hair-do bigger than her face.

I never imagined her life prior to NYC.  Seemed like she lived in NYC all her life, in the Chinatown enclave.  Only she didn’t. 

She and my grandfather immigrated to New York sometime in the early 1920’s.   My father, Robert and his four brothers and sisters were born in New York.  After my grandfather died in 1930, (my father was only 3, and his youngest brother, my Uncle Herbert, Sing Sok, was just a baby of six months), they moved back to China, then to Hong Kong.

This is the story of how my grandmother got back to NYC.

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When we were kids my mother and father always told us to wear our slippers.  Keep your feet warm, and prevents any sharp dirty objects from sticking in to your feet.  My father once told us his father died because he didn't wear slippers.  Once he told us my Grandfather stepped on a needle and it went in to his body, the germs causing some great infection then he died.  Another time he told us my Grandfather caught a cold because he didn't wear slippers, and died.  Who knows what the truth is.  In those days you could have died of anything.  This perhaps is how I formed a life-long habit of wearing slippers.

My Grandfather had a bakery on Mott Street, across the street from Transfiguration.  My grandmother and grandfather came to NYC in the early 1920’s and left a daughter behind in China.  She later died, in those days, lots of kids died at an early age.  I always wondered what that was like.  Losing a child, so far away no less.  How do you grieve?  Who buried her?  Was that commonplace, do several children born afterwards lessen the pain?  Or was that just something that happened to everyone?

My father returned to the US on his own at about the age of 9.  He stayed with his uncle on Elizabeth Street, who seemed pretty mean, or just strict from the stories we’ve heard.  I remember him as Kow Gung, neither nice nor strict, just my father’s Uncle.

When you ask my father why he wanted to come back, he just says he missed NY.  Don’t blame him. 

This is part 1 of a several part story.  More tomorrow.