Our Mom Comes to America

Our mom left Bremerhaven, Germany, on April 30, 1954, for Canada on the T.S.S. Canberra. The ship stopped in Le Havre (Normandy), France; Southhampton, England; and in Ireland, arriving in Quebec City on May 13th. 

She was 21 years old, and it was easier to enter Canada than US. The Canadians gave her a 6-month visa and told her she could extend it for another 6 months when that expired. Her plan was to stay one year to improve her English and then return to Germany.

Her ticket was to Toronto allowed a 3-month stopover in Montreal where she disembarked. She had lined up a job as the upstairs maid for a rich English-speaking family in Montreal. (They also had a downstairs maid, and a German cook.) They had 5 little children, and they also asked our mom to look after them when their nanny took a 6-week vacation to England. They also wanted to take her on their vacation to Labrador. But she said it was too much work, her English was not very good, and she did not want to get too committed to them, so she left after only a couple of weeks.

Our mom and dad were pen pals before she left Germany. A friend of hers through the bank she worked at put her name on a pen pal list (which was popular at the time) and she got letters from all over the world. She ignored most of them, and only responded to letters from the US and Canada, including our dad’s letters. They wrote 2 or 3 letters and agreed to meet in Canada. 

(In a slight alternative to that story, our mom once said that a friend of hers from work gave her dad's address and she wrote to him, including sending a photo. She had also written to someone in Canada because she already knew she was going there. Our dad wrote back and they exchanged a few letters before she departed. The girl who gave mom our dad's address got it from a pen pal service. She was supposed to come to Canada with mom, though in the end she did not.)

She said some Irish passengers she met on the ship over helped her get settled in Toronto. They had gotten to know each other because their ship had to circumvent and ice berg. So their 7-day trip took 13 days to cross the Atlantic. She contacted our dad, who was in Toronto, The first time she met him was on a double date with Jimmy and Joan Kee. Jimmy was one of our dad's best friends from San Francisco (as mentioned previously). They arranged for our mom to get a job at the restaurant where Jimmy Kee was a bartender. 

Our dad would show up at the restaurant each evening waiting for Jimmy Kee to get off work. That is how he got to know our mom. On Jimmy's days off, our mom and dad would go on outings with Jimmy Kee and his wife Joan. (Jimmy was a Canadian-born Chinese; Joan was not Chinese.)

According to our mom, our dad's tourist visa limited how long he could stay in Canada, and his mother was coming soon from China (she arrived on November 17, 1954). He knew his mother would want to pick his wife and eh did not want that. So, after dating for about a month, our dad asked our mom to marry him. When he proposed, he said “would you like to marry me and come to California?”

Joan Kee encouraged our mom to marry our dad. Our mom said she was not planning to get married. Joan said it was the best way that she could get into the US. So, our mom said she would try that.

But dad was a paper son, and not a fully legal US citizen. Our mom said that he thought if he married our mom and she became a US citizen, then he could get his citizenship changed through her to become fully legal. She did not understand why he thought that. Our mom said he was always thinking up schemes like that.

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Alan Remembers: As an example of our dad's scheming, Jimmy Kee told me he thought our dad was a millionaire because he saw him once making huge stock market trades. I told him that was because our dad was buying stocks “on margin” (with borrowed money). He was gambling. If he was lucky, he might earn a lot, if unlucky, he would lose a lot. At one point, he was in the hole some for $20,000 (in back taxes, I believe) that he could not pay. Ronnie and Mark Button (who had become a real millionaire) bailed him out. Maybe he stopped playing the markets after that.

Alan Remembers: Jimmy and Joan Kee had 5 kids, like my parents: Brenda, Jimmy, Gary, Deborah, and Tommy. When I was visiting them once in Toronto, I think it was Gary who told me that his and our parents often compared their kids in how we developed over time. I thought that was interesting, though I did not spend enough time in Toronto to sense how similar or different we were from them.

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On one of their outings, before their marriage, our mom, dad, Jimmy, Joan, and two others (6 people) tried to go to Buffalo, NY. Our dad told our mom to not say anything, except “Toronto” when they asked where she was from. She did that, but the border patrol could tell she was not Canadian. They took her into the guard office and asked her where she was from in Germany (because they had fought in the Germany in the war and spoke some German). She said they were very nice, but they would not let her into the US. They told her it would take 6 months to get a visa to visit the US, and they warned her to not try to come to the US again without a visa.

Our parents were married in the Toronto City Hall on July 7, 1954. Jimmy and Joan said our mom looked like a movie star. But she spoke only a little English then. She said when the judge told her to “repeat after me” in the marriage ceremony, she did that, having no idea what she was saying.

Our mom thought our dad was handsome, honest, intelligent, and interesting. They honeymooned and lived in Fort Erie, Canada (near Niagara Falls) for a month after their wedding. They then returned to Toronto and lived with the Kees, who were their sponsors in Canada while they waited for our mom's US visa. During that time, our dad worked as a head waiter at the same restaurant where Jimmy Kee and our mom was already working. 

The restaurant had two bars and was very large, covering the 2nd and 3rd floors above the Lung Kong Family Association. That association is based on the blood-brother who swore allegiance to each other and founded the Han Dynasty in 206 BCE. The association looks after people with the surnames Lew/Lau, Guan/Kwan/Quanlung gong association, Jeung/Cheung/Jung, and Chew/Chiu. Most of the people in that association Lew and Guan from Toisan.

Our mom finally got her visa on January 29, 1955. Our dad bought a new red Buick from Detroit, which they picked up in Cleveland. They took Route 66 to California, stopping in Kansas City, MO, to see one of his friends, and passing through Arizona, they stopped at the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon. They left Route 66 to stop in Las Vegas where our dad lost a lot of money, and in Reno where our dad borrowed some money from friends. 

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Alan Remembers: Growing up, our dad only gambled a little. Every time we went to Lake Tahoe, he would run into a casino while we waited in the car to buy a Keno ticket, which is like a lottery ticket. That was the only gambling I remember him doing, other than playing the stock market.

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They went to San Francisco to see our dad's parents for a day. That probably did not go well as they went to Sacramento that evening, without spending the night in San Francisco. Our mom said that Yeh-Yeh (our grandfather) liked her right away. But Unging (our grandmother) was not happy that our dad did not marry a Chinese woman.

Our mom’s parents were not happy that she had gotten married because they wanted her to return to Germany. Our mom said she was nervous about moving to California, which she knew little about. But she was glad she did, and she did not miss Germany. She became a US citizen in 1958.

As mentioned in the section on "Our Dad", our dad did a sheet metal internship at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento after the Korean War. His cousin, Bill Lau, worked there and that is what brought our dad to Sacramento. He had bought a duplex at 1411/1413 Q Street during his internship and lived in the upstairs unit (1413) with four other guys, including a distant cousin. (That cousin eventually moved to Denver, although Alan does not remember hearing about him or ever meeting him.)  

Our mom said that when she came to Sacramento, the three other guys lived downstairs (1411) and our parents lived downstairs (1413). The FBI came one day looking for one of the four guys and searched the entire house to see if he was hiding there. But he had gotten married and moved out a few days earlier. The girl’s parents (who lived in Denver) opposed the marriage because she was underage and contacted authorities. That is why the FBI came.

Soon after they arrived in Sacramento, our dad remodeled an alley-facing garage behind the main house into a dwelling unit that we moved into (1413 1/2 Q Street). That enabled him to rent out the main house to earn money from it. They were living in that small apartment, more like a studio, when Alan was born. When Jürgen was born in 1956, we moved into 1411 downstairs unit and rented out the other two.

In June 1955, our dad went back to work as the manager for the National Dollar Store's downtown Sacramento branch on K Street. The National Dollar Store was a large and successful national chain (like a small K-Mart). A Chinese immigrant established it and one of our dad’s best friend’s Harry Lew (also from Toisan, but not directly related to us) was a manager for one of their stores in San Francisco.

They liked him because sales always did well for the stores he managed. He said he basically made sure he had all sizes for the products they carried, and that he discounted products they were discontinuing. But it was a lot of work to do that, with many after-hours going over books. 

The National Dollar Store’s founder (a Chinese immigrant) passed away and his son and son-in-law were running it into bankruptcy. (Our dad said they were "playboys", but Harry Lew apparently worked for them for 16 years at one of their San Francisco stores.) So our dad was constantly looking out for openings at McClellan Air Force Base. He was qualified in airplane engine repair, which he did not want to do, and sheet metal work, which he wanted to do. He finally landed a position in engine repair starting in June 1956. He did that for four years until he was able to transfer to sheet metal following a doctor's order that the engine work was damaging his health. He worked at McClellan AFB for 31 years until he retired in 1987, at age 65. 

Our mom did not like Sacramento at first because it was too small and backwards compared to the other cities she had lived in. There was a German Club, but they were mostly from Bavaria and our mom did not care for them. Ursula, from Berlin, was her best friend. But eventually she thought is was a perfect location, with easy access to the Sierra Nevada mountains and the California coast. 

Our parents were proud of their Chinese and German heritage, and they both loved to travel. Our mom said they got along well when they were first married. But they were also very different from each other. Our dad was quiet, like our Chinese grandfather. Our mom was very outgoing. She enjoyed talking to our high school friends, and they liked her. Our parents often argued, mostly because our mom was “hot tempered” (she called it being a “perfectionist”). 

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Alan Remembers: It seemed to me that my mom yelled at all her kids, except for me. I think that was because (1) she relied on me as the oldest to help her out, especially when our dad was overseas during the Vietnam War, and (2) she kind of saw me as a kind of substitute for her dad, who I was named after.

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When Calvin started high school in in 1975, our mom started working at Mervyn’s Department Store (like Kohl’s today). She worked there for 18 years (to 1993?) and eventually became a manager overseeing up to 35 people.

For their 25th wedding anniversary in 1979, our parent returned to Toronto where Jimmy and Joan Kee arranged for them to redo their wedding vows in a church. This time our mom knew what she was saying when she repeated after the minister.

I talked to a psychic in 2020, who tapped into our deceased parents and said that he had never seen two married people who were more different from one another. That may be why we siblings are also very different from each another, although Jürgen and Ronnie were kind of similar, and Monika and Alan have some common characteristics.

As she got older, our mom wrote a lot of poetry. She wrote the following in a Grandmother Remembers book for Skylan in 1993. I think she would say the same to all her children and grandchildren …

My wish for your future is that you always be a thoughtful person.

That you feel respect for others, even if they try your patience at times.

Good deeds will always come back to you in unexpected ways.

Always be yourself, do not pretend affection that you do not feel, it may be

cruel to the other person.

Try to be happy. Many fears come from fatigue and loneliness, so be gentle

with yourself.

May you feel joy in your life. It is really a beautiful world to be alive in.

Love, Grandmother (Oma Inge)