Personal Narrative: An Interview With An Immigrant

United States usually known as the “melting pot” and it is a typical immigrant country. In the past 400 years, United States has become a mixture of more than 100 ethnic groups. Immigrants bring they own dream and come to this land, some of them looking for better life for themselves and some want to make some money to send back home or they want their children to grow up in better condition. Throughout the history there’s few times of large wave of immigration and it is no exaggeration to say that immigrants created United States. For this paper I interview my neighbor and his immigration story is pretty interesting.
My neighbor is 87 years old and he been here for 75 years. He has experienced a lot of things and changes. He told me, when he was young, he lived in a small village in Guandong China. There is no electricity, so the place is dim and dark. His mother pass away, when he was 4 years old. He was raised by his grandmother. He didn’t have any sense of his father, because his father left for America before he was born. He told me the only thing that kept his family in China together was his father was making $25 a month working in a grocery store in Texas and he sent $15 of that home to China. It was a lot of money back then. He said the reason he

wanted to leave China was the Japanese war. The Japanese were marching down pretty close to Guangdong at the time. So he came on over on almost one of the last steamships that left Hong Kong. He came with his grandfather. His grandfather was here in America in the early 1900s, on a business visa. After the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906, his grandfather was smart enough to go to the cemetery and claim that a certain person is his mother, therefore making him eligible for citizenship. His grandfather reported his father, which is a true relationship, as one of his sons. He registered his father and his father came over on that piece of paper. But his father also registered him as a son. That’s a true case, so he didn’t have to buy any papers.
The ferry arrive in Angel Island, San Francisco. When he getting off the ferry and he was going with maybe 50 to 60 people. He said, they put us into a place where they said, “Okay, you’re going to sleep here and eat here.” There was wire mesh all around the building. He was 12 years old. While he was at the Angel Island Immigration Station, he went for interrogations several times. He is not use to the food in Angel Island, because he never have American style food before. He didn’t interact much with the other people, because others pretty much have their own group. They only kept him for 27 days. They put him on the ferry, and his father met him in the San Francisco pier. He didn’t know him. His father had his picture to recognize him.
After that, his father and he stayed at hotel for a couple of days. Then his father had to go back to Texas, so they rode on a train. This was 1939. He told me it was a long ride and they didn’t have much room. They were sitting on the floor, rather than a seat, because it is still under the Chinese Exclusion Act during that time. The train was crowded with soldiers. The place that his father worked in Texas had a grocery store downstairs. Upstairs, it’s like a hotel. Everybody had a room. They lived in a small room.
Later his father send him into a grammar school in first grade. He was 12 years old with no English. He need to attend grammar school, because there is no way they can put him in somewhere else. The students there were mostly Mexican, he was the only Chinese. He was the oldest one in there, so the teacher tended to focus a little more on helping with him. As a result, he graduated. In 1941, they move to California and they open a small grocery store in there. He graduated from Berkeley in January 1951. He was 23 years old. He accelerated in college, because he took summer classes. Graduating from Berkeley took him three and a half years. He finished grammar school, high school, and college in a little more than 11 years. He said it’s because he picked up English pretty fast.
Discrimination was a big challenge during that time. It was in the engineering material class. He said the professor known around the campus for being an old crazy kind of guy. In the first class, he looked around and there were about half a dozen of Chinese in there, out of a class of 40-something. He said, “I want to be clear that you Chinese will not get an A or a B from me.” In the end of the semester, no Chinese student got an A or B, some of them got C, but he got D. But he said he got A’s and B’s in other class. He told me there were some subtle cases of discrimination too. Whenever they chose something, they always don’t choose Chinese, like for some presentation.
There’s a lot other discrimination.

Such as it is hard for him to buy a house, most of people don’t want to sell their house to Chinese during that time. When he graduated, he looked for a job and he went to maybe half a dozen interviews, but nobody hired him. After half a dozen of these rejections, he was just kind of kicking around. Finally he hear someone said, “California Department of Transportation is hiring.” It is in 1951 and it was Eisenhower’s idea of national defense, so a lot job opens up. He went for an interview. It turned out that the guy who interviewed him was a Cal Berkeley graduate, so he got the job. When he was 70 years old, he move to New York, because he children is lived in New

York.
Immigrants’ life in here is not so easy. Most of them need to work hard and endure discrimination or unfair treatment. Because of their hard work, the next generation can have better live. Just like my neighbor, his children all have very good job and their family life was great. I also feel more grateful to my parents.