Laura

Rocky came back today! CJ also came back from his home in Zhuhai. Still waiting on an incoming intern named Tony Wang from Beijing who’s going to come back later tonight. He’s an international student at University of Virginia. I think he’ll speak Mandarin with everybody but he’ll have to speak English with me! 😭

There is a girl named Laura who also speaks English! She arrived from Hong Kong with Rocky. She is a Ph.D. student in archaeology at Stanford, and she’s currently taking Cantonese at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. She’s also an overseas Chinese, second generation, I think! Her family is from Taishan. She lives in LA!

She gave me an egg tart from KFC. They apparently have those.

Laura’s really cool! She cooked Japanese fried chicken and we all had dinner together: Grandpa Deng, Nana, CJ, Laura, and me. And then Shionyi will come back in a couple of days. She went back to Wuyi University to graduate, and she’ll visit her home village for a couple of days before coming back to Kaiping.

很快就很热闹啦! It’s soon going to be very lively again!

But Laura showed me some really cool websites this afternoon. She showed me this internet archive of papers by a man named Him Mark Lai. Here is the website: (himmarklai.org). It’s super awesome, because he wrote a lot of papers on Guangdong history and Chinese-American history IN ENGLISH!

She also showed me this website that organised all these Chinese cemeteries. (List of Overseas Chinese Cemeteries by Terry Abraham of the University of Idaho) Nana and Laura and I were talking about Chinese festivals and holidays, and how some overseas Chinese may have lost some traditions. I had said that our family doesn’t celebrate Qing Ming, and Laura had asked, “you don’t have a Chinese cemetery?” I had said, “No, I don’t think so.”

It’s funny because all three of us spoke in both Cantonese and English, with none of us being total masters of both, but each of us knew enough of both Cantonese and English to hold a pretty robust conversation amongst each other.

(And later, when Laura was in the kitchen with Grandpa Deng, it was even funnier, because Laura speaks pretty well the Taishan dialect (she speaks her county accent better than I can speak mine!!!), which is a dialect similar to the Kaiping dialect, and Grandpa Deng speaks to her in the Kaiping dialect, while she speaks to me and Nana in English and Cantonese, and Nana and I speak to her in English and Cantonese!)

Laura then explained to me and Nana in her halting but accurately accented Cantonese (sprinkled with some English) the history of Chinese cemeteries. “In the beginning of Chinese migration in America, white people didn’t want Chinese people buried in their cemeteries. (They also discriminated against prostitutes, Jews, Russians and many more.) This forced early Chinese immigrants to create Chinese cemeteries.”

She then looked up Bakersfield, California on that Idaho website. We actually have two Chinese cemeteries!