After leaving the church, we drove just a couple of blocks to my grandmother’s home on Elm Street. It was late and dark outside. My brother parked the rental car and pointed the headlights towards the front door. My mother and I stood in the bright light while my husband, Alex, struggled with the key my uncle had given him during the fellowship dinner at the church basement following the funeral. To the left of the entrance, the screened porch sagged, with the mesh torn and wooden planks rotting away, allowing leaves and dirt to be seen through the gaping holes below.
As we stepped inside, we reminded ourselves which lights were safe to turn on—those my uncle had warned us to avoid due to old and frayed wiring. It was January 2004 in Marks, Mississippi, and the air inside was cool and slightly damp, tinged with mildew. My grandmother—whom we called Por Por in Cantonese—had spent much of the last decade away, alternating between her children’s homes for months at a time. Yet, the small, one-story wooden house, which she had called home for about 60 years, remained the heart of our family. It was the house my mother had left behind when she moved to New York City, the one where we gathered for Christmases during my childhood, with cousins piled on the floor.
Por Por would have pretended to scold us as we huddled around her coffin to slip handwritten notes, a small piece of jade, a pecan tart, and a crayoned one-way ticket to heaven into the soft satin lining. She would have scrunched her smooth, 87-year-old face and puckered her lips at me—her version of “Oh, shush”—if she had known I would spend the entire night writing four single-spaced pages about her to read at her funeral. If I had told her that writing four pages was harder than writing 40, she would have waved me away with her gentle hand.
I aimed to tell the truth about her, and I believe she would have appreciated it. There were the simple and bright descriptions: She was a warm-hearted churchgoer, the lady who baked pecan tarts for church events and superhero-themed birthday cakes for neighborhood kids. A cherished friend who consistently wrote to the pen pal she had been corresponding with since age nine. The best grandma ever. A Sunday school teacher. A thoughtful neighbor.
She would have been proud of that list, but I suspect she would have giggled, secretly delighted, to hear me tell the crowded First Baptist Church in this deeply conservative state that she was, in fact, a passionate liberal who sent me frequent emails filled with typos and random slashes, all in caps, declaring “DUBYA IS AN IDIOT. THESE STUPID MEN ARE SENDING THIS COUNTRY STRAIGHT DOWN.” It was an aspect of her that she would have kept hidden while she was alive.
Yet, there was so much more I didn’t express. I yearned to share every detail about her with my cousins, church friends, and even the mayor of Marks, crammed into the wooden pews. I wished to grant her what she had always desired, what we all yearn for: the opportunity to be truly known. I would have informed them that she remained upset with my grandfather, Gung Gung, even 33 years after his passing, and that she wrestled with finding her place in the busy lives of her adult children.
Por Por and I often clashed. I encouraged her to express her true feelings; she urged me to be more compassionate. She was grappling with the emotional constraints shaped by her upbringing—a strange entanglement of sorrow stemming from the loss of her mother and grandmother at a young age—but lacked the words to articulate it. She was still the young mother who lost her firstborn son at just 34, a loss that severed an irreplaceable bond with her other children that day.
I wanted everyone present to understand her as I had. Por Por and I regularly disagreed. I pushed her to voice her feelings; she pushed me to soften my approach. I tried to convince her that Dr. Phil wasn’t a real doctor, and she responded that she didn’t care. I would roll my eyes at her, and she would just smile back.
Not everyone has the privilege of saying this about their grandmother—and not everyone retains their grandmother until they are 34—but she was my anchor, and I was hers. We always looked out for each other. In her 70s, I nicknamed her “Grambo” because she was indomitable. Standing before her coffin, I read from my neatly typed pages and recalled the times she told me I was the only one who truly understood her. For years, I cherished that distinction, but now I wanted everyone to share the joy and the burden with me.
The Poorest County in the United States
Por Por relocated to Marks—a town with aspirations of 1,500 residents—in 1935 from Chicago’s Chinatown to begin her married life with Gung Gung. Family lore claims that upon her arrival, the entire town emerged to greet her at the diminutive train station. She frequently reminded me that it wasn’t merely geographical distance that separated her from her previous life as a Chinese girl in a bustling city; she was only 20.
Marks is the seat of Quitman County. It’s reported that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited this town in 1966, witnessing a teacher distributing four apples and a box of crackers to a classroom of impoverished students, providing them their only lunch for the day. This sight brought him to tears. In 1968, the year my mother welcomed my older brother in Los Angeles, Dr. King returned to Marks during the initial stages of his Poor People’s Campaign to combat poverty and racism. In a speech delivered just days before his assassination, he referred to “Quitman County, which I understand is the poorest county in the United States.” A little over a month after his death, a symbolic mule train departed Marks, making its way to Washington, D.C.
It seems unlikely that Por Por would have chosen to leave her urban existence for life in the rural South. The transition was anything but easy: she moved from streetcars to dirt roads, from a million-person city to former plantation land. Although Chicago had its share of racial tension—she used to recount how Chinatown and Little Italy were neighbors, with the Chinese and Italians hurling insults across the street—Mississippi harbored a deeper, uglier wound. Yet, she adapted because she found community.
Many Chinese families settled in the Delta—a surprisingly logical migration that began during Reconstruction, following the closure of plantation commissaries. Chinese immigrants, realizing the potential, avoided the hard labor expected of them by white folks and instead opened grocery stores catering to black customers. My grandfather was among them. He arrived in America alone at 14, joined relatives in Marks, and later opened Wing’s Grocery Store.
Having visited Marks from Los Angeles since childhood, the squat homes, dry brown lawns, and sagging Main Street, with its block of vacant or poorly stocked stores, were familiar, yet still shocking. The shanties with paper-covered windows and no electricity, where people truly lived, were a stark reminder. Marks often felt like a film set of a Southern town, complete with character actors in costume.
On one visit to Marks in my youth, my brother and I entered a dimly lit drugstore. The pharmacist looked us over, hesitated, and said slowly, “You must be some of the Chens. Are you Nina’s kids?” At the time, my mother, Nina, had been away for over 30 years. On one hand, it was easy to identify us as “some of the Chens.” We visibly had Chinese heritage, and the Chens were one of the few Chinese families in Marks. However, the pharmacist’s ability to recognize us as Chens, and specifically as Nina’s children, showcased the nature of the town. He assessed our ages and genders, did some quick math, and inferred our identities. That’s small-town reasoning, something we didn’t experience back home in California.
When my mother was young, Marks was a town of segregated water fountains and schools. She recalls elderly black men stepping off the curb and tipping their hats as she passed. Even now, the only routes in or out are flat highways lined with cotton fields, stray white tufts clinging to the asphalt.
In Marks, whether it was superficial or not—something that can never truly be measured—the Chinese were accepted. Por Por and Gung Gung raised six children while operating their grocery store, which stood at the corner of Main Street, where “colored town” began. Eventually, they moved from an apartment behind the store to the house on Elm Street, situated on the white side of town.
Being Chinese granted them a slight advantage over being Black in the segregated South. Perhaps due to the presence of someone always lower on the social ladder, or maybe because the town exhibited a degree of relative tolerance, my grandparents were respected and achieved success. Over the years, their relatives became mayors, business owners, landowners, and homeowners. In nearby towns, Chinese children faced expulsion from white schools and were compelled to create their own institutions or relocate. However, in Marks, whether it was superficial or not, the Chinese were accepted.
A Family Gathering for Farewell
The evening prior to Por Por’s funeral, our extended family—including my mother, her four surviving siblings, and all eight grandkids with our spouses and children—occupied a Comfort Inn in Clarksdale, the larger town just 18 miles away, and took over the function room. The cousins from Clarksdale set out trays of homemade soy sauce chicken and barbecued pulled pork, along with strawberry trifle and decadent chocolate cakes.
We folded funeral programs on the buffet—Por Por had once expressed her desire for us to sing the hymn “How Great Thou Art” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, during her funeral. We set up breakfast tables and formed assembly lines to fill small white envelopes with nickels and coffee-flavored candies to distribute at the cemetery—a Chinese tradition: a sweet to alleviate sadness, and money for luck.
We pulled photos from our bags, piling them together and passing them around the room before collaging them into frames to adorn the funeral home. We laughed and reminisced as we flipped through the images. There was Por Por as a young, beautiful girl modeling for a noodle factory in Chinatown; Por Por and Gung Gung with two children, then three, and then more, in their yard; Por Por with her oldest child, Tommy, who tragically drowned in a nearby lake one afternoon in 1949; and Por Por with each grandchild at birth, during school plays, and for the older ones, at high school and college graduations. I remembered when Por Por held my right arm and my mother held my left, walking me down the aisle at my wedding just seven months before her passing.
In summary, this piece reflects on the life and legacy of my grandmother, Por Por, who immigrated from Chinatown in Chicago to the Mississippi Delta. It highlights her role as a loving matriarch, her contributions to the community, and the complexities of her emotions shaped by loss and cultural transitions. The story weaves together family history, the challenges of being part of a minority in a segregated society, and the bonds that define familial love.
Keyphrase: Chinese Heritage in the Mississippi Delta
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