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Lessons My Grandmother Taught Me: Learning From a Great Depression SurvivorBy Ava ChinMy grandmother tells a story of how her mother, an immigrant from Hong Kong in turn of the century New York’s Chinatown, met John D. Rockefeller. At that time, one of the richest men in the world had earned the unsavory reputation as being a money-grubbing oil baron, so at the prompting of his publicity agent Ivy Lee (aka “Poison Ivy”), Rockefeller had taken to handing out dimes to ordinary citizens in one of the first great public relations acts in American history. He gave dimes to everyone: children outside church, caddies, a teen golfer, police officers, the gatekeeper outside the Nyack-Tarrytown ferry where Rockefeller often crossed in his automobile. And on that day when Great-grandmother went for her English lessons at the YMCA (or was it church?, my grandmother cannot remember), she met the oil tycoon and like all the other Chinese immigrants in the room was rewarded with more than just a lesson in "How do you do?" “It was a brand new dime—so bright and shiny,” my grandmother tells me, smiling as she remembers. We’re sitting at her kitchen table, the radiator whistling under the window. “She was so proud, telling us about how this wonderful, rich man gave out money to the Chinese immigrants.” “He told her,” my grandmother says, pointing with her finger in the air, as if she had been there to witness it, “‘If you can’t save a dime, you will never be able to save a dollar.’” Even though the dime has been lost in the folds of my grandmother’s filial history, it’s a story she has lived her life by. 
My grandmother is just like me. She’d kill me if she heard me making such a statement, You mean, you are just like me, she would say, and she’s right. Only I mean to say that she is just like us. She was born in Manhattan and sometimes speaks with an old-timey New York accent that you hear in classic movies. She is also perfectly fluent in two dialects of Cantonese, and can even understand Mandarin if someone speaks slowly enough, which isn’t bad for a woman who has only ever lived in the Continental U.S. She has never been to China—not even once, not even to visit. All of her family was here, after all, and as she likes to say, “There are so many great places to visit in the U.S., why would I want to go anyplace else?”
As the daughter of a banker, she’s a staunch, cut-the-fat Republican, and sometimes, I expect her to order freedom fries to go along with her burger. Our political differences aside, when I look at her, I see myself as if through a telescope to the future: white-washed-out hair, little round glasses, a shortie with a cane, constantly poking at things. She orders her adult children around like a drill sergeant, and will stand there scrutinizing you to make sure you’ve screwed the light bulb in correctly. At 91, she has reached that age where race and gender are becoming slowly erased, so that at times strangers confuse her for a white person. “I’m a Chinese!” she’ll proudly say. I’ve been picking her brain for ages now about finances and living on a budget, both when I was an artist, and now that I’m gainfully employed (thank you City University of New York). As the economic crisis has come crashing down around us, I wanted to know: How did she and her family survive the Great Depression? After marrying my lovely but philandering grandfather, how did she keep the family together on her book-keeper’s salary? Now as a nanogenarian, how is she surviving the worst economic recession to hit this country since the Depression of her childhood? To make things difficult, my grandmother sometimes refuses to talk to me. “You aren’t going to write about this, are you?” she’ll ask suspiciously. “Of course not, Grandma,” I say, wincing as I lie. Luckily for me, her vision is not too good. My grandmother was born in 1917 on Mott St. in New York’s Chinatown, making her twelve at the start of the Great Depression. Her father, a merchant from China, was one of the select few to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act and bring his wife Too Jun legally into the States—and he did well enough, my grandmother insists, that they never felt the pain of the economic crisis, even though men were jumping from buildings only a mile or so away. They lived four-five to a room in a tenement apartment when she was small, and at some point she slept on a cot in the kitchen, so the youngest could be closest to their mother. In New York City apartments, rooms, and even furniture provided double functions—a kitchen was a bedroom, its sink a bathtub, the dresser drawer a crib. “We didn’t have a lot of money back then,” my grandmother says. “There were so many of us, we really needed to stretch the dollar.” 
Her father, Wu Doshim, was a stoic businessman who had been sponsored to the States by his banker uncle Dek Foon—called “one of the best known and most highly respected men in Chinatown” by Louis Beck in his 1898 book New York Chinatown—who had gotten around miscegenation laws and married a white woman from Brooklyn (who insisted my grandmother & her siblings call her “Nana”). Like Dek Foon, the young Doshim with his burgeoning family blithely navigated both white and Chinese realms before the Depression, including working for James Hill’s Great Northern Railway (essentially today’s Amtrak). There’s a photograph of Great-grandfather in the office with his coworkers, his suit unbuttoned in the middle, as if he just gotten up from his desk and rushed in. Behind him, on the wall, a calendar reads 1925, along with framed photos of the great men of the Northern Rail, including founder Hill in semi-profile. Great-grandfather stands slightly apart from the white men of his office, like he’s uncomfortable just being there.
Like any daughter who really wasn’t close to her father, my grandmother can only speculate on what he did for Great Northern. At the time, it was unusual that a Chinese businessman could work that high up for a prestigious white company. All Grandma knows about his work was that in the community in which she grew up, the locals went to him when they wanted to send money back home to China. (Much later, he became the New York President of a Chinese bank before it became Communist-run, but that’s a story for another time). “People had to trust him—they were giving him their money. Don’t forget, there were no wire transfers back in those days,” Grandma says. 
At some point, before the Wall St. crash in October 1929, he started doing well—well enough so that there was extra money to burn. In summers, he hired a car and driver. My grandmother remembers Mercedes and BMWs arriving in Chinatown to take them to Coney Island, Brooklyn or Greenwich, CT. One time, for a month they rented a professor’s home in Greenwich so that the kids from Chinatown could play hide-and-seek in the library, pantry, and sewing room, marveling at the deer head over the fireplace, the appearance of a back porch. There was a cherry tree in the front yard, and they played there, eating cherries all afternoon.
When I ask my grandmother about how she learned to stretch the dollar and live longer on less, I expect a story on how her financial father taught her how to balance money or gave strategies on equities, or how her mother budgeted the household during the lean years, before all the trips and the long drives in expensive cars. Or maybe a tale about learning mathematics at Hunter College when it was an all-girls school in the Bronx (she was the first woman in our family to attend university). I figure she will tell me stories about how what she learned as a child of the Depression had carried her through into the boom Reagan and then Clinton years. Instead, she shakes her head and points to my grandfather. My grandfather’s gambling habit in our family is legendary. Horses, cards, dice. He started taking me to the track before I could talk, and taught me to play blackjack when I was five. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely his fault: his first job was working in his cousin’s gambling parlor in Seattle in 1939. His grandfather had worked out West on the railroad, and after it was completed in 1869, moved to Boise, Idaho and opened up a gambling den for Chinese miners. So the Chinese penchant for gambling ran in my grandfather’s blood. Once they were married, Grandpa entered the restaurant industry, but he never gave up the habit. Even after I was born and he’d stopped smoking and drinking, Grandpa still loved the horses. He could read a racing form faster than he could dole out the drinks to customers, and derbies were always an excuse to have the entire family over. I grew up knowing that Secretariat and Seattle Slew were Triple Crown winners before I could identify Roosevelt or Rockefeller. They relied on my grandmother’s skills as a book-keeper during the War, and even when she started having children, she still had to work. “Grandpa never brought home anything—he spent his money as fast as he made it,” Grandma says. “So I had to learn how to maintain the household on my earnings alone.” That means simply: never spend more than you have; keep a little from paycheck to paycheck; and never, ever tell your husband where all the money is. Page 2 |
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