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Chinese Heritage in the Mississippi Delta: A Grandmother’s Story
As we departed from the church, we traversed the two brief blocks to my grandmother’s home on Elm Street. The night was dark, and the hour was late. My brother steered the rental car into the driveway, shining the headlights on the front door. My mother and I stood in the bright glare while my husband, Ethan, fumbled with the key my uncle had handed him during the fellowship dinner in the church basement after the funeral. To the left of the entrance, the screened-in porch sagged against the house, its fine mesh torn and wooden planks of the floor completely decayed. We could see leaves and dirt below through the large gaps.
Upon entering, we reminded ourselves which lights were safe to switch on, avoiding those my uncle had warned us about due to old, 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 affectionately called Por Por, using Cantonese—had spent much of the last decade away, rotating among her children’s homes. Yet the small, one-story wood-frame house with its pitched roof and towering tree out front, where she had lived for around 60 years, remained the family’s gravitational center. It was the home my mother left behind when she moved to New York City, the place where we celebrated Christmas during my childhood, with six or eight cousins sprawled on the floor at night. Nothing about it had changed.
Por Por would have pretended to scold her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, ranging from seven to 37, if she had seen us huddled around her coffin, slipping handwritten notes, a small piece of jade, a pecan tart, and a crayoned one-way ticket to heaven into the soft satin cushioning. At 87, she would have scrunched her smooth face and puckered her lips at me—her version of “Oh, shush”—if she had known I would stay up all night crafting four single-spaced pages about her to read at her funeral. She would have waved me away with her gentle hand if I had told her that writing four pages was harder than writing 40.
I aimed to convey the truth about her, and I believe she would have appreciated it. Of course, there were the glowing descriptors: She was the kind-hearted churchgoer who baked pecan tarts for church events and birthday cakes for neighborhood kids in the designs of their favorite superheroes. A devoted friend who regularly wrote letters to her pen pal from childhood. The best grandma ever. A Sunday school teacher. A thoughtful neighbor.
She would have taken pride in that list, but I think she would have chuckled, secretly delighted, to hear me tell the packed congregation at First Baptist Church in a deep red state that she was, in fact, a raging liberal who sent me emails filled with typos and random slashes, all written in capital letters, declaring “DUBYA IS AN IDIOT. THESE STUPID MEN ARE SENDING THIS COUNTRY STRAIGHT DOWN.” This side of her would never have been displayed openly, especially not while she was alive.
Yet, I left so much unsaid. I wanted to share with all the cousins, church friends, and even the mayor of Marks everything about her. I wanted to give her what she always wanted and what we all seek: the chance to be truly known. I would have told them she remained angry at my grandfather, Gung Gung, for some unspecified grievance, even 33 years after his passing, and that she was frustrated while trying to find her place in the busy lives of her adult children.
Por Por and I often clashed. I urged her to express her true feelings; she encouraged me to be more considerate. She struggled with the emotional limitations imposed by the era and environment in which she grew up—caught in the sadness of losing her mother and grandmother at just 10 years old but lacking the words to articulate those feelings. She was the young mother who lost her firstborn son at 34, and with him, she felt an irrevocable disconnect from her other children.
I wanted everyone present to perceive her as I did. Por Por and I frequently quarreled. I pushed her to voice her emotions; she nudged me to be gentler. I tried to teach her to assert herself; she aimed to teach me to yield. I insisted Dr. Phil wasn’t a real doctor, and she replied that she didn’t care. I rolled my eyes at her, and she simply grinned back.
Not everyone can say this about their grandmother—and not everyone has their grandmother until they’re 34—but she was my person, and I was hers. We always looked out for one another. In her 70s, I affectionately dubbed her “Grambo” because she was invincible. Standing over her coffin, reading from my neatly typed pages, I remembered all the times she had told me I was the only one who truly understood her. For years, I cherished that bond, but now I wanted everyone else to share in that blessing and burden.
Por Por began her life in Marks—population approximately 1,500—after moving from Chicago’s Chinatown in 1935 to start her married life with Gung Gung. Family lore suggests that upon her arrival, the entire town gathered at the small train station to see her. She often recounted that it wasn’t merely geography that separated her from her previous life as a Chinese girl in the big city; she was just 20 years old.
Marks is the seat of Quitman County. Notably, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the town in 1966 and witnessed a teacher dividing four apples and one box of crackers among impoverished students, providing them lunch for the day, which brought him to tears. In 1968, the year my mother gave birth to my older brother in Los Angeles, Dr. King returned to Marks during the initial stages of his Poor People’s Campaign aimed at combating poverty and racism. In a speech delivered just days before his assassination, he spoke of “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 from Marks en route to Washington, D.C.
It seemed unlikely that Por Por would transition from urban life to settling in the rural South, and it was no easy adjustment. She shifted from streetcars to dirt roads, moving from a city of millions to former plantation lands. While Chicago had its own share of racial tension—she used to tell me that Chinatown and Little Italy were neighboring enclaves, where Chinese and Italians would hurl insults at each other from opposite corners—in Mississippi, the situation was a deep, ugly wound. Nevertheless, she adapted, partly because she found a community.
Numerous Chinese families established roots in the Delta—a surprisingly sensible migration that began during Reconstruction following the decline of plantation commissaries. Chinese immigrants, recognizing an opportunity, avoided the hard labor expected of them by white folks and instead opened grocery stores catering to black customers. My grandfather was one of them. He arrived in America alone from China at 14, joined relatives in Marks, and ultimately opened Wing’s Grocery Store.
I had been visiting Marks from Los Angeles since I was a child, and the low houses, dry, beige lawns, and sagging Main Street—with its short block of empty or sparsely stocked stores—felt familiar yet surprising. The shanties with paper-covered windows and no electricity, where people truly lived, were a stark reminder. Marks consistently reminded me of a back-lot set of a Southern town, complete with character actors in costume.
During one visit to Marks when we were young, my brother and I entered a dimly lit drugstore for a few items. The pharmacist looked us over, paused, then gazed at us again, slowly declaring, “You must be some of the Wings. Are you Virginia Faye’s kids?” At that time, my mother, Virginia Faye, had been absent from the town for over 30 years. It was easy to identify us as “some of the Wings.” We were at least partially Chinese, and the Wings were one of the few Chinese families in Marks. However, the fact that he recognized us as Wings, not Pangs or any others, and identified which Wings, speaks volumes about the town itself. He assessed our genders and ages, performed a quick calculation, and deduced we were Virginia Faye’s children. That’s small-town math, a concept that didn’t exist back home in California.
When my mother was a girl, Marks was a town marked by segregation—separate water fountains, separate schools. She recalls elderly black men stepping off the curb as she walked by, tipping their hats as she passed. Then, as now, the only way in or out was on flat highways flanked by cotton fields, with stray white tufts clinging to the edges of the asphalt.
In Marks, whether superficial or not—something that can never truly be quantified—the Chinese were accepted. Por Por and Gung Gung raised six children while running the grocery store located at the corner of Main Street, where “colored town,” as they referred to it then, began. Eventually, they transitioned from an apartment behind their store to the Elm Street house on the white side of town.
Being Chinese provided them with a slight advantage over being black in the segregated South. Perhaps because they always had someone below them on the social ladder, or maybe because the town exhibited a degree of relative tolerance, my grandparents and their family garnered respect and success. Over the years, their aunts, uncles, and cousins became mayors, employers, landowners, homeowners, and businesspeople. In nearby towns, Chinese children faced expulsion from white schools and were forced to build their own or relocate. But in Marks, whether it was superficial or not, the Chinese were accepted.
The night before Por Por’s funeral, our extended family—including my mother, her four surviving siblings, and all eight of us grandkids with our spouses and children—took over a Comfort Inn in Clarksdale, the “big” town just 18 miles to the west, commandeering the function room. The cousins from Clarksdale prepared catering trays of homemade soy sauce chicken, barbecued pulled pork, strawberry trifle, and reddish-brown chocolate cakes.
We folded funeral programs on the buffet—Por Por had once told my mother she wanted us to sing the hymn “How Great Thou Art” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, at her funeral. We established stations at breakfast tables and formed assembly lines to stuff nickels and coffee-flavored candies into small white envelopes to distribute at the cemetery—a Chinese tradition: a sweet to alleviate sadness and money for luck.
We shared pictures from our bags and luggage, piling them together and passing them around the room before collaging them into frames to decorate the funeral home. Laughter erupted as we reminisced while flipping through the images. Por Por as a young girl, modeling for a noodle factory in Chinatown; Por Por and Gung Gung with two children, then three, and more, in their yard; Por Por with her oldest child, Tommie, who tragically drowned in a nearby lake in 1949; Por Por with each of us grandkids at our births, school plays, and for the older ones, at our high school and college graduations. Por Por on my right arm, my mother on my left, as they walked me down the aisle at my wedding just seven months prior to her passing.
In conclusion, my grandmother’s life intertwined with the rich tapestry of our family and the unique cultural history of Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta. Through her story, we engage with themes of identity, community, and the enduring bonds of family, which continue to shape us as we honor her memory.