Asian Heritage Month: My Grandfather's Story

--By Nikki Sasso Mitchell, EDID Coordinator

With Asian Heritage Month coming to a close, I wanted to share what this month means to me. I am a mixed kid. Meaning, my mom is Jamaican-Chinese and my dad is also Jamaican, but with European ancestry. I just completed my 23 and Me test, and I already knew this, but I am 37% Chinese. What I didn't know was that my ancestors came from southern China, and from what I can tell, (up until my grandfather) there were no other ancestors who had left China before. Learning this really made me pause.

Backstory: My great-grandfather is from China and he had a daughter with my great-grandmother who was a white Jamaican lady from the country. One thing you might not know about Jamaica is that it is a country with many cultures. Its motto is: Out of Many, One People. My grandmother was raised in the St. Anne's parish of Jamaica, and she married a Chinese immigrant named Thompson HoSang. I realise that Thompson is not his real name and it makes me sad that I do not know what his real name was. Here is what I do know. From the looks of his passport photo, he was really young when he came to Jamaica. I'm a history nerd, and I know that Jamaica took many indentured servants from China in the early 1900s, around the time my grandfather would have left. Which means that he was the first in his family to leave China. Ever. He was a teenager looking for something new and he left his family and the girl he was promised to for a new land. 

When Thompson came to Jamaica and paid off his debt to the person/company who would have paid for his boat ticket, he opened up a shop. It was very common in Jamaica for Chinese immigrants to open shops throughout the country, especially when they were finished paying off their debt. Somewhere in his story, he met and married my grandmother. They ran this shop together in Kingston, Jamaica where they raised their two girls, and later, their first son (or "one son" as my grandmother would say), who arrived 11 years after my mom. My mom recalls the huge party they threw because my grandfather finally had a son, and this was a big deal to my grandfather and all of his friends.

Throughout the 60s the success of the shop was good enough to purchase them a nice house in Kingston, but there was pushback and turmoil brewing. My grandmother told me what politicians were saying, the Chinese problem. Politicians were telling Jamaicans that the Chinese immigrants were taking jobs from them. That they should have those shops and their profits. Violence began, and some angry people began targeting these Chinese-run shops by burning them down. They came for my grandfather's shop one night. My grandfather was woken up by his neighbours, telling him that his shop was about to be burned down by these radicals. When he arrived at his shop he saw his community standing there in front of it. There was an argument and his community would not let this shop burn down. They stood there telling them, not this one. Thompson is a good man. The little Chinese-run shop survived and continued to prosper throughout the 60s.

So what does Asian Heritage Month mean to me? It means resilience, hope, and to flourish. I feel very proud of where I come from. I come from a rich culture and background that is complicated and beautiful all rolled into one. I want to honour people like my grandfather, the travelers who went abroad to find something different across the ocean. Who settled and were able to find their community in a land so far away from their own.

In 1971, my grandfather left Jamaica and finally went back home to visit the family he had left so long ago. He never returned. My mom suspects he knew he was sick. I've heard that your roots will remain even when you leave China. Their children always find their way back home. My bucket list item is to visit the town my grandfather is buried in and pay my respects to the man I never met, who changed our family's trajectory.