After leaving the church, we drove a couple of blocks to my grandmother’s home on Elm Street. The night was dark. My brother parked the rental car, directing its headlights toward the front door. My mother and I stood in the bright light while my husband, Tom, struggled 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 porch sagged, the fine mesh torn and wooden boards rotting beneath our feet, revealing leaves and dirt through the gaps.
Once inside, we reminded ourselves which lights were safe to switch on, avoiding those my uncle warned us about due to their outdated wiring. It was January 2004 in Marks, Mississippi, and the air inside was cool and damp, tinged with mildew. My grandmother—whom we affectionately called “Nai Nai” using Cantonese—had spent much of the last decade away from this house, alternating between her children’s homes. Yet this small, one-story wooden structure, with its sloped roof and towering tree out front, remained the heart of our family. It was the house my mother had left behind when she relocated to New York City, and where we celebrated Christmas as children, surrounded by cousins. Everything felt the same.
Nai Nai would have pretended to scold her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, aged seven to 37, if she had seen us gathered around her coffin, slipping in handwritten notes, a small piece of jade, a pecan tart, and a colored one-way ticket to heaven. She would have wrinkled her smooth face at me—her version of “Oh, hush”—if she had known I stayed up all night composing four single-spaced pages about her for the funeral. She would have waved me off gently if I’d told her that writing four pages was harder than writing 40.
I aimed to speak the truth about her life, and I believe she would have appreciated it. There were the glowing descriptions: she was the warm-hearted church attendee, the lady who baked pecan tarts for church events and crafted birthday cakes in the shapes of children’s favorite superheroes. A devoted friend who continued to write letters to a pen pal she had kept in touch with since she was nine. The best grandma, Sunday school teacher, and considerate neighbor.
Yet, she would have chuckled to hear me declare in front of a full First Baptist Church in a conservative state that she was a passionate liberal who sent me emails filled with typos and random symbols, all in caps, proclaiming, “DUBYA IS AN IDIOT. THESE STUPID MEN ARE DESTROYING THIS COUNTRY.” This was a side of her she would never have showcased while alive.
There was so much more I wanted to share. I wished to tell the cousins, church friends, and even the mayor of Marks everything about her. I longed to grant her what she always wanted: the chance to be truly known. I would have revealed that she still held onto resentment towards my grandfather, Gung Gung, for some unresolved issue, even 33 years after his passing, and the frustration she felt in finding her place in her children’s busy lives.
Nai Nai and I often clashed. I urged her to express her true feelings; she encouraged me to show kindness. She was perplexed by the emotional constraints dictated by her upbringing. The sadness she carried from losing her mother and grandmother at the age of 10 lingered, yet she lacked the words to articulate it. She remained the young mother who lost her firstborn son at just 34, severing an irreplaceable bond with her other children that day.
I wanted everyone to perceive her as I did. We had frequent debates. I tried to teach her to assert herself; she tried to instill the importance of humility in me. I would tell her that Dr. Phil wasn’t a real doctor, and she’d respond, unfazed. I rolled my eyes, and she simply smiled.
Not everyone enjoys such a relationship with their grandmother—especially not until age 34—but she was my confidante, and I was hers. We always looked out for each other. In her 70s, I dubbed her “Grambo” because she seemed invincible. Standing before her coffin, I read from my notes, remembering how she often said I was the only one who truly understood her. For years, I cherished that connection, but now I wanted to share that blessing—with its accompanying weight—with everyone else.
The Poorest County in the United States
In 1935, Nai Nai moved to Marks—a small town with a population of about 1,500—after leaving Chinatown in Chicago to begin her married life with Gung Gung. Family lore suggests that the entire town turned out to welcome her at the train station. She often recounted that it wasn’t just the distance that separated her from her old life as a Chinese girl from the city; she was just 20.
Marks is the seat of Quitman County. It’s noted that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited this town in 1966, witnessing a teacher dividing four apples and a box of crackers among a group of impoverished students, providing them with lunch. He was moved to tears. In 1968, the same year my mother welcomed my older brother in Los Angeles, Dr. King returned to Marks during the early 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 as “the poorest county in the United States.” Just over a month after his death, a symbolic mule train departed Marks en route to Washington, D.C.
It seemed unlikely that Nai Nai would leave her urban existence behind for the rural South. The transition was challenging: she shifted from streetcars to dirt roads, from a bustling city to former plantation lands. Chicago had its share of racial tensions—she recounted how Chinatown and Little Italy were adjacent, with the two groups often clashing—but in Mississippi, the divide was more profound. Still, she adapted, bolstered by the presence of a community.
Many Chinese families had established roots in the Delta, a migration that began during the Reconstruction era when plantation commissaries collapsed. Chinese immigrants, spotting new opportunities, turned to grocery stores catering to black customers, thus avoiding the labor that was expected of them. My grandfather was among them. He immigrated from China at 14, joining relatives in Marks to eventually open Wing’s Grocery Store.
I had been visiting Marks from Los Angeles since childhood, and the low-slung houses, dry lawns, and sagging Main Street with a handful of understocked stores were familiar yet astonishing. The shanties with paper-covered windows and no electricity, where people truly lived, were a stark reminder of a different reality. Marks often felt like a movie set of a Southern town, complete with characters dressed for the part.
During one visit, my brother and I entered a dimly lit drugstore for supplies. The pharmacist scrutinized us, paused, and then said, “You must be some of the Wings. Are you Virginia Faye’s kids?” At that time, my mother, Virginia Faye, had not lived there for over 30 years. While it was easy for him to identify us as “some of the Wings”—given our partial Chinese appearance and the limited number of Chinese families in Marks—his knowledge of our family lineage spoke volumes about the town’s close-knit nature.
When my mother was a girl, Marks was a place of segregated water fountains and schools. She remembers older black men stepping off the sidewalk as she passed, tipping their hats. Now and then, the only access to and from the town was through flat highways flanked by cotton fields, with stray tufts clinging to the edges.
In Marks, whether genuine or not—impossible to quantify—the Chinese were accepted. Nai Nai and Gung Gung raised six children while running their grocery store just at the edge of what was then known as “colored town.” They eventually moved from their apartment above the store to the house on Elm Street, situated on the opposite side of town. Their Chinese heritage gave them a slight edge above the black community in the segregated South. Perhaps because they consistently had someone lower on the social ladder, or maybe due to a degree of tolerance in the town, my grandparents and their family achieved respect and success. Over time, various relatives became mayors, employers, landowners, and businesspeople. In neighboring towns, Chinese children faced expulsion from white schools and were forced to build their own or leave. Yet in Marks, they were, to some extent, accepted.
A Family Gathering
The night before Nai Nai’s funeral, our extended family—including my mother, her four surviving siblings, and all eight of us grandchildren with our partners and children—took over a Comfort Inn in Clarksdale, the larger town just 18 miles away. The cousins from Clarksdale prepared trays of homemade soy sauce chicken, barbecued pulled pork, strawberry trifle, and rich chocolate cakes.
We folded funeral programs on the buffet—Nai Nai had expressed a wish for us to sing “How Great Thou Art” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, at her service. 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 meant to sweeten sorrow and provide luck.
We shared photos from our bags, piling them together and passing them around before collaging them into frames to decorate the funeral home. We laughed and reminisced as we flipped through the images. Nai Nai as a young girl, modeling for a noodle factory in Chinatown; Nai Nai and Gung Gung with their children in the yard of their home; Nai Nai with her oldest child, Tom, who tragically drowned in a nearby lake in 1949; Nai Nai with each of us grandkids at birth, school plays, and for the older ones, at graduations. I remembered Nai Nai on my right arm and my mother on my left as they accompanied me down the aisle at my wedding just seven months before she passed away.
In conclusion, my grandmother’s life encapsulated the journey of a Chinese immigrant who adapted to the complexities of Southern life while maintaining her heritage. Through her, I learned the importance of family, community, and the nuances of identity.
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