Soo Ho Shee (Po Po)
Interrogation, Re-connection, Family and Freedom in a New Land Pt II
“Wind and thunder: that is Enrichment. Using it, the noble-minded recognize wholeness and perfect it, recognize trespass and transform it.” I Ching d hinton.
I imagine happiness and relief. An anticipation of a greeting between husband and wife, and two of their children, one who would be known for the first time in Evelyn by her father.
In the old tradition of Chinese marriage convenience and compatibility for family expansion and prosperity over love took precedence. I wondered if love could see it’s way through a crack of faithfulness: Growing a bond through a three and half year absence between our grandparents. Would it (re) manifest and grow in a new land, together.
There are assurances of loving moments in their relationship by these statements from Grace and my mother California:
“I can recall one hot summer’s day mother and father jointly giving us baths in two large galvanised tubs. That was one of the rare times that I can remember where there was a happy time that was shared by my parents.”
“I can recall also… Mother looked up at him and smiled and father laughed.”
My mother would say, “Once, I saw mother and father smile sweetly at each other in the living room where we children were playing. I can remember father lifting me to slide down the back of the bathtub, mother and father laughing with us.”
Mary Lou: “I vaguely remember mother in the kitchen with a baby on her back. He was wrapped in one of those long swaddling sheets”
Grace also noted a trait of her mother that made me think about the class and culture in China. She noted, “Mother use to give us daily inspections before we attended school. She wanted to be sure that we had combed our hair, washed our faces, even checked behind our ears, checked to see whether we brushed our teeth, had clean fingernails and shoes removed to check whether we had worn stockings with holes in them.”
Being born into and married into a merchant class meant that certain mores were to be followed. It was once seen as part of the lower social hierarchy. It began to slowly change with the fall of the Celestial Shang Dynasty (1746-114- BCE). This period reflected the spiritualistic culture to a humanistic, more earthly existence to the Chou Dynasty, (1122-221) The Chou Hou or “August Lords”, changed this notion of celestial rule to mandates through heaven and instituted a rule by ethic and its social structures and political mite were separated from its religious entities. Confucian thought for self cultivation and social responsibility to the community built a form of responsibility from this philosophical relationship between a parent-child, ruler-subject, friend-friend and merchant class-customer. Thus, this metaphysical geologic shift from a celestial orientation ( Shang Ti) of governance to a more humanistic connection created strife in the lords and Prince’s and the Imperial courts. It would be one of the most chaotic moments in Chinese history but it bore the Golden Age of Wisdom through intellect and the Hundred Schools of Thought. K’ung-Fu-tzu, or better known by his latinized name Confucius, became the first great thinker of that time. He would straddle two epochs of tremendous upheaval and violence and infighting amonsgt the warlords and barbarians on the borders. In part because of a new social order and the clan warring these times required new avenues of resources.
To finance their growing kingdoms outside of pillaging other empires, taxation of goods became a means of creating wealth to expand their small kingdoms so the merchant class began to rise in favour both socially and economically. Fast forward some 1400 plus years and another moment in Chinese history that would cement the merchant classes higher standing came in 1842 with the opening of the treaty ports where free trade began with the West. It stood in high favor for the development of China’s infrastructure and many merchants became wealthy, moved to Nations where trade through the ports was a large part of the economic expansion in the mid 1800’s and early 1900’s. Prosperity.
When I look at her photo above and others that I have collected I see strength and beauty and a clarity in her “shen”, her spirit of heart and mind together seen through the sharp and sparkle of her eyes and assuredness in her visage.
She appeared to have a life laid out ahead of her, a home in a rural area where other Orientals congregated. Moments of connection and family duty, of instinctive nature to care for and surround a house burgeoning with life of family and community and work reins to keep order and direction.
From 1917 to 1931 approximately every 14 months except for two intervals between Evelyn and Grace (42 mos) and Henry and Francis (34 mos) she gave birth to a child. Eight children on the soils of American prosperity-push to be “Western” in dress and speech, religion and all mannerisms and predilections that would make any American proud. By the images in their formative years it is apparent that style and a sense of class and dignity permeated this family. The many photos of them together rather than apart was indicative of the sharing life, the woven common fabric of their familial ways to stay together, play together.
Auntie Mary Jane remembers, “Mary was a 'toughie”. Once Bill (Lee) put boxing gloves on us and Mary gave it to me…a bloody nose.” They would play “battle” (card game called war) with” three or four decks that went on forever for days.”
For Po Po though, it was tenuous. Her natural proclivities of child rearing and running a household were shoe horned into unnatural and unfamiliar surroundings. The barriers to the language, the necessity for cultural assimilation from the ideology of the descendent’s of European Colonizers-American life, and the dearth of Chinese women for friendship, kinship and village support, may have paved a path in struggle for a healthy, normal assimilation.
To add to the rocky transition, was the bleak relationship to her father in law, the patriarch of the family, who’s intimidating mannerisms would rule with wordless dissent and disdain and carryover onto his grandchildren.
“Grandfather with a stiff upright posture, there wasn’t much conversation, they (Gong Gong and his father) rarely ever spoke to each other, just passed each other as if they were invisible” (mary jane)
“It was years of living in the same house and never speaking to each other.” (grace)
The normal growth of relationship of father to son was largely non-existent. A gap of 21 years without ever seeing each other, knowing each other. Hom Gim becomes a widower from his first wife who he left in China, had another family, a concubine in tow named Tom Yook Kim that would become his second wife. By all accounts he was not available for the growing Tom clan that Po Po and Gong Gong began together. He would find an adoptive child in Florence Ruth Tom and focus his loving support in her. His abandonment and rejection would leave scars that lasted a lifetime for his grandchildren, for his daughter-in-law and son.
Po Po was an artist-curious and she gifted that to her progeny. She sketched and embroidered, sewed, cooked, made Chinese pastries. She married two merchant class families together. She arrived on these shores alone with two hands full with her two children. She wore gold, brocade jade, silk, hemp and cotton tunics- non-nomadic civilized fabrics much in the manner of Confucian thought: “Never unbound or have garments that wrapped to the left.”
Where would a woman of independence in thought and action find her ways with a father-in-law who lived a higher class in standing in a paternalistic reality of that time. She would come to be seen as defiant, disrespectful and disempowered. Lost was a matriarch who kept respect, humility and integrity as a hallmark of her teachings to her children, teachings to kinder, civil mannerisms.
credits: Po Po’s bao qiang is courtesy of Monica Lee Rapp, daughter of Mary Lou