THE EIGHTH PROMISE: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother by William Poy Lee

In 1997, I left behind a very busy and lucrative livelihood to contemplate what to do with the rest of my life. One day, as I was preparing to type up a report for one of my clients (in the interim, I had become an independent contractor serving the booming Silicon Valley), a force seized control of my fingers and promptly typed out a short story instead. This short story--a vignette from my San Francisco childhood-evoked a timelessness, joy, and safety of place that I obviously hungered for. The next day yet another childhood vignette shot out of my fingers and onto the screen.

Over the next several months, many vignettes tumbled out like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I organized them, at first, chronologically from 1955 to 1960 and then again by locale--our village-like apartment building, the many friendly neighborhood merchants, public school, Chinatown, and finally, nearby historic Portsmouth Square Park. One vignette from this collection, entitled “Portsmouth Square Stories,” was published in the local Sunday paper reaching a readership of over a million.

And that’s when readers and friends advocated a larger story, a deeper story, and a much more difficult story to write. As I grappled with their feedback, I realized that my unassuming immigrant mother had quietly exerted a much greater influence on my life than I had realized, despite my resistance to what was known as “staying Chinese,” and despite my father’s successful pressures on me to become completely American. Yet, mother’s subtle, yin-like ways were ultimately the greater influence – and had helped to carry me through some very rough periods of my early adult life as a very yang-energy civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activist, and finally through the wrongful but successful prosecution of my younger brother on a charge of murder in the first degree.

I wasn’t interested in writing another bicultural coming-to-terms-with-identity account, but to really delve into the source of this power embodied in my mother and then transmitted to me; to uncover the universals inherent to all people who once lived in marriage to one region, in allegiance to the movement of the seasons and stars; and who lived in this way generation-after-generation.

I interview my mother in our first language--Toisanese--to glean what wisdom had she carried forth from our ancestral home, a one thousand year old peasant farmer’s village in the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong. Toisanese is a rare country dialect, a variation of the Southern Chinese dialect of Cantonese, and the tongue of most of the first Chinese immigrants to America. At first mother was hesitant, because she didn’t like to talk about the past, and especially would not talk of tragedies—and there had been many tragedies in her life. But also because Toisanese people were considered too “country” to rate a mention—so why was I, an American-born Chinese, so interested in a people that even China as a whole dismissed or was happily ignorant about? I was convinced that it was those very underrated Toisanese qualities that made us so formidable, compassionate, and life-affirming.

I spent a good six months interviewing her, and mother opened up about her recipes for the chi-soups that had strengthen our immunity systems, the ways of the old Clan Sisterhood especially their council-like speaking-round-and-rounds, her lifelong romantic triangle with another man, and the spikes and valleys of her own personal emotional traverse during the period of my younger brother’s conviction and prison term.

And so I came to love my mother in a new, fresh way. I regained an ancient land-based wisdom that has continued to enrich my life. Beyond renewing our bonds as mother and child, we became friends. Becoming friends with your mother—as one might unexpectedly with an engaging stranger—is startling. Suddenly she’s not your mother at all, and yet she is more completely your mother. By the end of those interviews, I also recognized her as my greatest wisdom teacher.

In 2000, we both journeyed to our little village to celebrate Chinese New Year’s with our clan. This was remarkable journey—and with all the changes in China, I was pleased to find that our village has remained more-or-less intact, much as when mother left it over a half-a-century ago, and authentic in a way that eludes so much of modern society. There too I connected with the legacy of my forbears, my lineage, and realized that the Toisanese wisdom that was formed and nurtured in that faraway village over a millennium, isn’t necessarily conjoined with staying there, but can be part of me no matter where I may live in this world.
 

About the author

William Poy Lee graduated with a Bachelors of Architecture, emphasis on urban design and planning from the University of California in Berkeley and completed his juris doctor degree from Hastings College of the Law, University of California. He has been a licensed California attorney since 1979 and has enjoyed a career as an international banking attorney with Bank of America and as an advertising co-principal serving Fortune 100 corporations. He now lives in Berkeley, California. This is his first book.

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