And so I always grew up knowing that we had this connection to this apparatus that, you know, really meant something, that unified the country from coast to coast. So, so, so, so that's how much pride we had in, in, in the building of the railroad. And in fact, actually, his first words in English were the names of the railroad companies that built the railroad. And my grandfather loved telling stories about his grandfather working on the railroad. So, um, her husband my grandfather, was the grandson of a Chinese railroad worker who worked on the nation's first transcontinental railroad, which unified the country after the Civil War. Um, did you get a sense that things were being shielded from you, or hidden, or a certain family story was getting told to you and you knew there was more?ĪC: Yes, absolutely. So when you were, you know, going through these photo albums, um, and asking her all these questions, I mean, I feel like I always used to, with my grandmother, um, the line I used to trot out, which in retrospect was quite offensive, is I used to say "Tell me about the olden days," and then she would like, you know, have a, have all these stories she'd go to and she'd tell me the same stories over and over again. LA: So you said that she didn't want to air the dirty laundry. Sometimes she didn't wanna talk to me, but other times, um, you know, she would open up, and that was always nothing short of marvelous. Growing up, there were my grandmother's photo albums, giant photo albums as thick as Bibles, and I would sit there and pore over them on Saturday afternoons, and ask her, "Grandma, who's that person?" Um, and, "Oh, who's that white woman who's sitting next to your uncle?" Right? Um, and, "Tell me about your father and your mother, and how she came over." And so, um, you know, my grandmother was raised as a proper Lutheran, and she didn't like to air the dirty laundry. But I had absolutely no idea that the side of my family that I was estranged from, my father's side, a side that felt very shadowy and elusive, was right there the entire time. So New York's, Manhattan's Chinatown was where we went to go grocery shopping. Flushing wasn't, and Queens wasn't the multicultural mecca that it is today. AC: So back then, it felt enormously different.
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