"Go East!" Steve Huang's Family in US: The Beginning

There is a 19th Century American saying of “Go West, Young Man!” It was a slogan encouraging young folks to explorer the Wild West. Well, Huang family seems to follow the spirit but we “Go East”, as it is from China to Taiwan and then to US.

My dad’s three younger brothers went to US to further their education when I was too young to remember (Uncle Claudio was the exception). When I was 14 years old, after several visits to US in the previous years, Steve moved his family from a comfortable life in Taiwan to US for his children’s education. We landed in LAX on July 1980 and stay in Uncle Hong and Aunt Li-Shun’s townhouse. On August 5th, Jack’s birthday, we moved to our first apartment in Monterey Park. The address was 1902 S. Garfield Ave, Apt D, Monterey Park, CA. It was a two bedroom apartment owned by one of the church member. Soon after we settled down, my dad has to go back to Taiwan to continue operating his import business so his family can continue to live in US. At that time, the living expense was a lot higher in US than in Taiwan and the currency exchange rate was $NT 36 vs $1 US. It was a difficult adjustment for the first year us as we spoke no words of English and we didn’t have a car. Uncle Hong picked us up every Sunday go to church and some grocery runs. The rest of the time we either bike or walk to the nearby Food City (grocery store) for the grocery. It was a trial for both us kids and my parent’s marriage as my dad only come visit us twice a year and each time he can only stay about three weeks or so. As God has in His merciful plan, we had church members close by to help us and Jack and I ran into my old classmate, Willy Chia, from my Jr. High in Taiwan who immigrated from Taiwan a year earlier (what is the odd of that??!!).

The first two years of life in US was not too bad. We got more involved with church and we were able to move around a lot more after we got our first car, a dark blue 1977 Chevrolet Malibu. We made friends and attending church so we have some sense of “belonging”. The problem was that we did not learn too much English; we did pick up some cursing words in Spanish and Vietnamese (LA suburb is a big culture salad bowl; there is no such thing as ‘melting pot’, in my opinion). The high school we went to does not really care if we go to college or not; they just want to make sure we graduate. In the summer of 1983, we bough a house in Huntington Beach, CA, our first house in US. Well, there were not a lot of Taiwanese in HB at that time and so we kids were forced to learn English. On top of that, school made sure that we took the right courses for the college we want to apply (big course requirement different between Cal. State University System and Univ. of Calif. System).

Our emigrating to US from Taiwan was not uncommon in the early 1980s’. There are many kids my age move to US to study. The major different was that my mom was with us, and some of the other kids got only a “baby sitter” (parents paid someone to oversee their kids and come to visit their kids once in a while; many of the sitters were 'taking care' of several kids at the same time). There were many untold tragedy of teenagers gone wild (teenage pregnancy, drug use, gang activities, etc.) due to lack of parental supervision. It was God’s grace that we were surrounded by many church friends that we had a rather “normal” life in those growing up years.