Older Generation Fears Young Will Let Roots Slip Away

In the heart of Orange County, in a typically stylish Irvine home, but in a ceremony as old as China itself, Tze-fan Deng will be there to honor her ancestors.

This family observance Jan. 26, the eve of Chinese New Year’s Day, will be led by the tiny 78-year-old matriarch herself and held in her son Eh Deng’s residence.

Many of her children and grandchildren will attend. The incense will be burned. The traditional wine, fish and meats will be meticulously arranged.

As it should be. As members of this clan have done on each ancestral ceremony wherever they lived. Shanghai. Taipei. Singapore. Montreal. Dallas. Irvine.

“We cannot forget the old customs, the old ways of respect,” the matriarch said during a recent visit to the home, also in Irvine, of her daughter, Ping, and son-in-law, Hon Yow.

Clearly, Tze-fan Deng has not forgotten tradition. She still prefers wearing the traditional Chinese dresses, speaks only in the Mandarin and Shanghai dialects and remains unfailingly polite to outsiders, especially those who speak only English.

But the matriarch, born in China’s Jiangsu Province, an exile for years in Taiwan and now an American resident, still has a commanding aura, unflinching eyes and fierce ethnic pride.

And the mission now is to pass on the Chinese heritage, even here in America, even though she is all-too-mindful of the enormous erosion to her native culture.

Asked if she felt the younger Chinese-American generations are becoming too Americanized, too forgetful of their Chinese past, Tze-fan Deng replied--with politely terse but sweeping understatement:

“Yes, I think so. A little.”

Hon and Ping Yow already fear that their daughters, Loraine, 8, and Rowena, 6--both American-born and American-raised--may be losing too much of their Chinese-ness.

So, like all the other parents affiliated with the Irvine Chinese School, the Yows have taken certain precautions. They speak only Chinese to their children. They impress upon them the importance of traditional Chinese obligations at home and exemplary performance in the schools.

And each Sunday morning at the Irvine Chinese School, the Yow girls join the other children, practicing spoken and written Chinese, being told about Chinese cultural and scientific achievements.

However, the Yows, like the other Chinese school parents, said it is “wrong” and “a misunderstanding” for others to contend--as some “English only” American advocates do--that this kind of bilingual, ethnic-pride activism can perpetuate Asian isolation.

Besides, this issue, the Yows suggested, is not really so simple. For one thing, no one is questioning the obvious fact that English “is America’s language.” And Hon said their belief is strong that “America is the best place in the world in so many ways--the best democracy, the most stable system, the most opportunities for our children.”

Indeed, Hon added, Chinese immigrant parents “believe we can be proud of being American citizens and still be proud of being Chinese.” Most of the parents in the Chinese school, including the Yows, are U.S. citizens.

“America is famous as a multicultural society, where other people--from Europe, from Latin America, from other countries--also want to preserve the languages and heritage,” said Ping, who was principal of the Irvine school in 1988-89.

“For us, the old language is the key to preserving the old culture,” she said. “For many (immigrants), it is the way we communicate.”

The Yows’ most personal goal--their “Chinese dream,” they said--is to return sometime in the next few years to Taiwan or Singapore with their daughters.

Asked if bringing their children back to live in Asia might be resented by some Americans, Ping, who was born in Shanghai, replied:

“It would be the same as American students, those in college, who go abroad to study or work to learn about a second culture,” she said. “Only, we want to give our children this same opportunity while they are younger.”

“It would be for only a few years,” she added. “It would not be forever.”

“Books are fine, and we are grateful for having a Chinese school” in Irvine, said Hon, who was born in Malaysia, his father an immigrant from China’s Guangdong Province.

But, he added, “this is not quite the same. Our children should have the chance of direct experience, of being there in the old society.”

The Yows themselves have engaged in this kind of global mobility. Hon, 45, an engineer, was schooled in Singapore and Bangkok and studied at Taiwan National University. Ping, 42, a graduate of the same university, went on to study sociology in Canada in the early 1970s and hold jobs in Houston and Boston.

And after they were married in Taipei in 1978, Hon’s line of work took them elsewhere on the international circuit--first to Olympia, Wash., back to Singapore, then finally to Irvine in 1985.

Such a plan for their children would greatly please the family matriarch. After all, said Tze-fan Deng’s daughter, the issue, as always, comes down to passing the torch.

“We know what can happen to the children,” Ping said. “They go through a period of doubts. They are not proud of our heritage.”

Ping, her voice subdued, then added: “We don’t want that to happen. We must do our best to avoid it. It would be a very terrible loss.”

Like the other Irvine Chinese School parents, the Yows feel an immense loss over the martial-law crackdown in China.

For decades, a return to the mainland was unthinkable, particularly for such families as Ping’s, who fled to Nationalist-governed Taiwan in the late 1940s and have their own stories of Communist persecution to remember.

Ping was barely 2 years old when her father--Jack Deng, a Shanghai textile entrepreneur--had to bring the family to Taiwan, just as the Communist armies were sweeping closer to the Yangtze River delta.

When her father returned alone to Shanghai in early 1949 to find a sister and recover some textile machinery, he was captured by the Communists and imprisoned. Later, the new regime allowed him to run his old factory. But in 1962, he managed to flee to Hong Kong, where he eventually rebuilt his business. In 1977, he died of a lung ailment, the result, his family said, of his Communist imprisonment.

By the late 1970s, when the Beijing regime was opening the mainland to more tourists and foreign ventures, Chinese from outside regions began returning to see aging relatives.

Hon Yow, then working for a Singapore corporation, in 1986 made a hotel-development business trip to the mainland--his first visit ever there--that included a meeting with relatives in Guangzhou.

And Ping’s 78-year-old mother, Tze-fan Deng, in 1986 traveled to Shanghai for a reunion, the first in 38 years, with her sister and other relatives there.

Ping did not go.

“Before (last) June 4, I thought I might eventually go. I felt there was some hope there,” Ping explained. “But no, not after Tian An Men (the massacre). People are scared to go now.”

Neither she nor Hon plan to return. “All of a sudden, any hope is crushed. It makes us feel so angry, so sad, so helpless,” she said.

Then Ping Yow added, softly: “I don’t think there is any more hope for democracy there. Not in my lifetime.”