High Tides is a small series of non-fiction short stories based on my mother’s personal experiences and memories, as a working class Chinese American immigrant womxn in San Francisco, hailing from the small farming villages of Southern China. The name of the series, “High Tides,” derives from my mother’s name, Yue Ming, which roughly translates to ‘moonlight,’ or, a clear shining moon. Shaking Earth is the first to come, rooted in a personal mission to keep a promise made to my mother in 2006: “Tell my story. Let the world know I was here.”
Shaking Earth
In the thick of July summer heat, Yue Ming was eight months pregnant with her second child, while raising her 6-year old daughter and navigating U.S immigration. By 1989, Yue Ming became a naturalized citizen and petitioned her parents’ immigration to the U.S from China with minimal English skills. When she first arrived to San Francisco in 1981, at the age of 21 with her new husband, she wept every night thinking of home, a farm that was oceans away in a small village in Toisan, missing her siblings and her parents. She could not speak a word of English, nor could she read the street signs. She memorized walking routes and bus routes along Geary Boulevard, counting the number of blocks, and memorizing buildings and landmarks. Over the years, she took on her own learning with a small pocket-sized Chinese-English dictionary that was covered in matte red plastic, and took notes of words that she could not pronounce or understand. She had her first daughter, Yola, in 1983, and by August 1989, she was ready to burst with a second daughter on the way.
Successfully facilitating her parents’ journey from Toisan, to Guangzhou, to Hong Kong, Yue Ming’s parents finally arrived to SFO on August 9th, only ten days before her second daughter was born. Without much of a maternity leave, and with the presence of her parents, her newborn would be in the care of full-time grandparents while she worked as a seamstress during the day. In the meantime, they lived altogether in the steep hills of the Outer Mission, where Yue Ming and her husband rented an in-law studio behind the garage of a two-story home.
Two months after birth, the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 struck in October, decimating the Bay Area to piles of rubble. Yue Ming was working in a basement sweatshop around the corner of the old International Hotel in Manilatown. When the quake struck, the old ceiling of the basement began to crack, crumbling into pieces, crashing down in chunks of old clay and clouds of dust. Sparks flew from electric sockets. Piles of unfinished coats and shirts slid down from tabletops, and chairs skidded along the shaking ground. Hanging lights flickered and swung violently overhead before giving into a complete blackout. Terrified, Yue Ming took cover under a stairwell as the other seamstresses quickly scrambled out of the basement. When she peeked out from under the stairs, everyone was gone. Crouching in the dark, she came to realize her surroundings and her thoughts immediately jumped to her children. Is the baby okay? Where is Yola? She felt her way through the darkness, hands moving over piles of dust and debris for a phone. Yue Ming’s mother was watching her two-month old newborn at home and Yola should be at her mother-in-law’s flat in the Tenderloin. She picked up the phone and met a dead line. No dial tone. In disbelief, she hung up the receiver and tried again.
With landlines down, she headed out on foot, flying through the chaos that befell the streets of San Francisco. Cars stopped on the road, honking, unable to move. Yue Ming ran, from the edges of Chinatown to the Tenderloin. She ran past the Chinese elderly nervously shuffling in and out of the Chinatown parks. She ran through a startled crowd of shoppers that spilled out of Macy’s into Union Square. She ran down Geary Boulevard, racing past the Curran Theatre. She ran up the narrow, twisting stairs of the five-story Taylor Street apartment building. Bursting through the front door, she would find Yola, safe and sound with her paternal grandparents.
Barely catching her breath, Yue Ming picked up her mother-in-law’s cherry red rotary telephone. No dial tone. Forced to wait hours before she could see her mother and newborn, Yue Ming shuffled towards Union Square with Yola and her in-laws, where they were picked up by her husband, quickly heading home in their white 1987 Toyota Camry. When Yue Ming finally returned to their studio behind the garage, she was greeted by her newborn, asleep in the arms of her anxious mother. Her mother recounted the events, initially unaware of the earthquake as she was feeding the baby when the walls began to shake. “Ai-ya! I thought the upstairs people we’re just vacuuming!” her mother exclaimed, “The vases shook and flew off the wall. Absolutely shattered.”
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Three generations of women, from infant to elder, shook by the earth; standing still in a shaking, changing, and chaotic world will topple you like the vase on the shelf. Now in her 50s, Yue Ming tells this earthquake story with enthused animation, dressed in a long powder-blue nightgown, holding her fists and swinging her elbows as she demonstrated running through the streets of San Francisco. As she recalled memories from her 20s, I sat across her, at a gray marbled counter in her new kitchen, in a house in the quiet suburbs of San Diego— far away from the Chinatown basement sweatshop, far away from the Taylor Street apartment, the both of us very far away from the studio behind the garage.
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Hip Hop x Asian America 