To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing
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explained that with a name like “Billy Joe,” they were expecting him to be African American.
Little League baseball meant ballpark food. Even before I played Little League, much of the fun of going to the games as a kid was in the small concession stand where I could buy hot dogs, corn-on-the-cob, burritos, and tacos. End of the season all-star games were particularly rewarding because our local Little League parents’ group always budgeted money for meals after regional and state games. After one Little League all-star game played twenty miles away in Miami, Arizona, we returned home victorious to feast at my favorite restaurant in town, the Triple X Café, a Mexican restaurant. Coincidentally, the Senior League all-star team that my brother Johnny was on was also celebrating a victory at the Triple X. I recall a friendly argument between our coaches over which Hing kid was the better ball player. The Triple X was owned by the Nuñez family and one of the sons in the family, David, was one of my best friends. Whenever I ate there, I got the royal treatment.
Summer also meant horseback riding for my brother Johnny and me. Although we never owned a horse, Johnny had a knack for talking horse-owning neighbors and local ranchers into lending us theirs. One of my mother’s store customers—Tony Banda—used to ride his pinto horse to the store when he needed to pick up a few items. He gave me my first real horseback ride when I was two or three years old. My brother Johnny was a great rider. After we moved into a bigger home, on the main highway through town, he often rode in our yard and in front of our house. I remember coming out the front door one hot summer afternoon to find four carloads of vacationers parked in front of our house (probably traveling to or from Phoenix). Cameras were clicking and the kids were screaming, “A real cowboy! A real cowboy!” The subject of their excitement was my brother Johnny, with a cowboy hat, grinning widely, horn-rimmed glasses and all, showing off on one of our neighbor’s horses.
I received the best lesson in how to present a book report from another of my Little League baseball teammates, Manuel Silvas. Manuel had a tough-guy side but was always very nice to me. Until our freshman year in high school, he was a mediocre student. But our freshman English teacher, Rudy Burrola, and Manuel seemed to make a connection. Burrola recommended Catcher in the Rye to Manuel for an assigned book report. When it was Manuel’s turn to present an oral presentation in class, he absolutely blew everyone away. He read a moving passage from the book as part of his presentation, and acted out another scene. In the end, the entire class understood Manuel’s interpretation and we were all quite affected. This was a stressful time in Manuel’s life, to say the least. A year earlier, his father—who had murdered his former girlfriend—was executed in the Arizona gas chamber (the last death sentence execution in Arizona in almost thirty years). I can never forget Manuel’s grief. He is now a lawyer in the Phoenix area.
High school also provided opportunities for a number of extracurricular activities. I played freshman basketball and four years of tennis. At the beginning of my sophomore year, there was a good deal of excitement over the fact that the girls’ tennis team was getting two new members, both immigrants. Both were attractive and blue-eyed, with light brown hair, one from Canada, the other from Spain. While the hair of most of my Mexican friends was dark brown or black, many also had light brown hair. Among them were Marcella Rodríguez, whose father Leo also owned a grocery store, and Carol Woods, who had sisters with dark brown hair.
I also played the guitar in a couple of rock-and-roll bands in high school. One band, which we named “The UNs” for the United Nations, became quite popular in Superior and a couple of other little towns in the area. We decided on the “UNs” because of our composition: a Chinese American lead guitarist, a Mexican American singer and saxophonist, a rhythm guitarist of Scandinavian descent, and a drummer of German extraction. Our music ranged from Chuck Berry and the Beatles, to some Motown, Richie Valens, and many Spanish-language Mexican songs. We performed mostly at high school dances, but also got hired at weddings, birthday parties, and civic and social club dances. After high school, the lead singer Armor Gomez performed as a lounge singer in Las Vegas for many years.
Most families in Superior had someone who worked for the copper mine, then owned by Magma Copper Company. The mine was open twenty-four hours, with three eight-hour shifts a day. The work was dangerous, containing the deepest shaft mine in North America. People were killed; there were fires. You could hear the loud whistle blow once, long and steady, at the end of each shift. When the whistle blew differently, my classmates would look worriedly at one another. This sound meant that an accident had occurred; friends and classmates who realized that their father was not working that particular shift looked relieved; the others could not calm down until they went home to see if things were all right. The mine-mill labor union was active. My parents extended grocery store credit to union members during lengthy strikes, thus earning their loyalty, even though my parents also traded with wealthier management families.
One of my brothers was an elementary schoolteacher for a while in a small agricultural town in Arizona named Eloy. He was also the school’s track coach. But he gave up teaching after a few years in order to manage a small grocery store in another small town nearby named Coolidge. When he went on vacation he needed someone to help run the store in his absence. I did this a couple of times for him when I was in high school, and I recall these occasions with great fondness. His customers were mostly agricultural workers: Mexicans, Native Americans, African Americans, as well as Anglos. His three or four employees were generally Mexicans, African Americans, and Anglos. They were a lot of fun to be around; after-hours I met their families and they showed me around Coolidge and took me to parties.
My whole family was exposed to and embraced these multiple cultures. My mother ran the grocery store, and spoke with customers, employees, salesmen, deliverymen, and repairmen in both English and Spanish. Unlike my mother, neither of my two aunts was fluent in Spanish or English; yet both worked in their own family stores and interacted with our non-Chinese neighbors and customers.
My family celebrated a variety of holidays—American, Chinese, and Mexican—and sometimes even traveled to Flagstaff for summertime Native American festivals. Similarly, we ate a variety of foods at home, mainly Chinese, American, and Mexican. My sisters still cook great Mexican cuisine. Our Mexican customers and neighbors often brought us dishes to sample and my mother reciprocated with some of her own. Every day with dinner, we ate Texas Long Grain rice especially ordered from a distributor. Another of our customers, a Syrian American family, did the same. A German immigrant couple who were also customers often spoke of their native culture and foods. When I was in high school, they even offered me their own homemade concoction for acne. Occasionally we would drive to Phoenix (about sixty miles away) for Chinese wedding banquets or Ong Family Association get-togethers. (As a child I learned that my family surname is Ong, not Hing. When my father immigrated, he stated his name in customary Chinese fashion—last name first—as Ong Chun Hing. The clueless immigration official wrote down Hing as the family name.)
Many of my high school classmates went to college. Others stayed in Superior and mined copper like their parents. Two of my nephews did not go to college, instead staying in Superior to run a large grocery store. The support of my parents (my father completed high school in China, my mother a few years of grammar school), my siblings, and our next-door neighbor Mr. Gonzales, motivated me to go to college. Mr. Gonzales was the most distinguished person I knew. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he worked for Senator Carl Hayden, but he came home a few times a year to visit his Mexican-born mother. When in Superior, he took the time to tell me about his work and encourage me to study hard and go to college.
Superior was in many regards a typical close-knit small town. High school sports were a central focus. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Knights of Columbus, and Rotary Club all had active chapters. My father was the first president of the Superior Rotary Club and during World War II served as the town sheriff. There was an active union. We attended the predominantly Anglo Presbyterian Church (without my Buddhist mother), although most of our friends and customers were Catholic. In fact, two of my sisters were christened as Catholics. Superior had other churches as well: Baptist, Episcopalian, Spanish-service Presbyterian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormon. At nineteen my brother Johnny married his high school sweetheart, a Mormon.
Although I left Superior after graduating from high school to attend college at U.C. Berkeley, my early life in Superior