Author's Note: A version of this essay was previously published in a series of essays for the ezine EAST WIND: Politics & Culture of Asian America, under the general title of “Sounds of Struggle.”1
During the 1960s and 1970s, my mother singlehandedly raised my brother, my sister, and me in Palo Alto, a quiet, predominantly white middle-class suburb about 35 miles south of San Francisco. Today, the area is famous as the heart of Silicon Valley, but at the time it was known simply as the home of prestigious Stanford University. It was a difficult adjustment for our mother because she grew up in a completely different world—as part of a Chinese immigrant working-class family in segregated San Francisco's Chinatown during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
After my father died in a commercial airplane collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956, my mother wanted to live...
