William Ferris quoting Shelby Brown:
One thing about Chicago, people told me that money was even growing on trees there. I went and got me two sacks to carry with me for that money tree in Chicago. I went there and my brother, he saw me with two sacks. He say, "Shelby, what you carrying them sacks for?"... He grabbed the sacks and throwed them in the garbage can and said, "Don't do that. You let the folks make a fool out of you. Chicago is a free place, but don't come looking for money on the tree. They'll know you ain't nothing but a country fool."
The story of migrating people from the Mississippi Delta into Chicago at the promise of prosperity reminds me of how my parents ventured into the city and to the United States, eventually getting me here. In 1960, my mother moved on her own to Taipei to attend junior high. She was coming from the country side in Miaoli where my grandpa worked for an oil company and my grandma ran a grocery store. In the country, they had a house with three rooms for two large families. The floors were made of compacted, swept ground, and everyone had tatami mats to sleep on. Everyone got enough water, rice, vegetables, and sometimes, the oil company would host film screenings for the neighborhood. When Christmas came, Western missionaries would visit the neighborhood and give out food and treats. My mother recounts getting used Christmas cards with beautiful prints of Western families on them enjoying Christmas and words written in English.
My father's side also ended up in Taipei. My grandpa sold lunch boxes at the Taipei train station as a child, and my grandma was a maid for a Japanese family. In 1960, my father had made it through high school and entered a college for technology. He eventually became an engineer for Fairchild, a prestigious American company, and was the first one to afford a car while giving the majority of his income to his mother until he was married in 1976. My parents moved to Fresno with my brother in 1980 with ambitious hopes to make it rich, followed by ups and downs, and me, here, wondering why I became a gardener and why my brother became an auto mechanic.
My parent's story is vastly different from the Mississippi-Chicago route, but at the heart of it may be a hope for a better life, for money or freedom, and an eventual sequence of reality checks of sorts that are grounded in one's relationship to a place, home, and history.
Taipei in 1960 -
