American Name (the very rough draft begins)

“Lucky, is that your Chinese name?”

I’m used to the question, but I’ve never had a snappy answer as in “No, it’s actually Albanian” or “I was named for Lucy Ricardo, my grandmother’s favorite tv character. The person filling out my birth certificate was either dyslexic or improvised a way to save me the indignity of a girl’s name.”

Instead, I assure them that “Lucky” is an American name. It’s not a transliteration of “Lew-Chee”, “Lu-Qui”, or “Liu-kee” and not some odd variation of “Luke,” the sort of Biblical name all too popular with the missionaries and their associated organizations. My parents were both born in California and thus were not misguided immigrants confused by the conventions and occasional mysteries of American naming customs. Even if the circumstances of my birth were peculiarly Chinese, they chose my name for American reasons. While I was born well before California families started naming their kids Zen, Harmony, and Spiritwalker, I sometimes like to think that my parents were just a bit ahead of their time.

In 1956, my father attended the River God Festival held in Hellenville’s hundred and thirty three person Chinatown. He was twenty seven years old and had been married to my mother for five years. As the oldest son of Y.P. Tang, the most prominent Chinese man on the Delta, my father felt the pressure of expectation throughout his life. At this point, he was specifically feeling the pressure to produce a grandchild. For two years since their return to Paperson from my dad’s Korean War service in Augusta, Georgia as a clerk typist for the Signal Corps, my parents had been discreetly visiting fertility specialists, both medical and herbal in and around Sacramento.

In general, these celebrations existed for a simple reason - they were an opportunity to gamble out in the open. The Cantonese who came to the Sacramento Delta as laborers enjoyed two forms of recreation, eating and gambling. Eating is perfectly legal and remains a central part of Cantonese identity no matter how removed one is from southeastern China. Gambling has been a different matter in the state of California. Horse races are legal. At various times, low ball poker has been legal. Currently, the state runs its own lottery for the benefit of the public schools and a corporate gaming company. Real estate speculation remains very legal. For whatever reason, traditional Chinese games like fan tan and pai gow have never been legal.

My Grandfather saw the ethnic snobbery of the California legislature as an opportunity to build his own fortune in the Sacramento, Delta. My Grandfather had come to Sacramento as a common laborer just after the San Francisco Earthquake. By 1956, he was so prominent in the underground Chinese gambling industry that even the organizers of this River God festival some seventy five miles from his home in Paperson, understood that it had to cut Y.P. Tang in on at least a token percentage of the gambling take.

This normally meant a brief appearance at the festival, a visit to the pai gow tables to play a hand or two, a few words of advice, an exchange of handshakes and an envelope from the organizers, then the drive home. This weekend, however, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco had called a meeting of its representatives. My Grandfather’s proudest accomplishment was the fact that he had been elected three years earlier to a body known as the Control Yuan as the representative for Overseas Chinese of the Western States.

He voted by proxy, was never asked for or expected to offer opinions, and his single obligatory visit to Taipei once every four years essentially consisted of attending banquets with the other Overseas Chinese representatives. Even those who had long been active in the Koumintang knew little about what the Control Yuan did or how it operated. The position largely existed to ensure a continuing flow of contributions from the millions of overseas Chinese. My Grandfather had won the position by being more than generous. Given a choice of being the big man in Hellenville’s Chinatown or an unimportant though respected attendee at the Chinese consulate, my Grandfather went to San Francisco.

As a result, my father went to Hellenville to help out my Grandfather. Although my dad’s involvement in my Grandfather’s gambling interests had always been minimal, he was quite excited to take on this responsibility. He borrowed my Grandfather’s white Lincoln, put on a blue suit with a handkerchief folded into the chest pocket, and drove the seventy five miles and two hours to Hellenville. Over the years, as they told the story of the events that led to my getting the name “Lucky”, sometimes she witnessed it sometimes she just heard about it. It depended on her mood. She did, however, play a prominent and more certain role in my conception and birth that fall.

Having slipped the envelope into the money belt hidden between his pants and sports jacket and having promised seven different elderly men that he would convey their respects to my Grandfather, my father decided to stay to watch the mid-afternoon dragon dance. The boom of drums, the clang of cymbals, the firecrackers accompanied the undulations of the seven man dragon. Was this what festivals were like in China?

Although he had spent his entire life being identified as “Chinese”first by others, my father had never been to China. With the takeover by Mao, it seemed that he might never go. It didn’t necessarily bother him. Since he could remember, China had been either at war with Japan, in the midst of a civil war, or was being plundered by communist bandits. A visit to the ancestral village in Guangdong held little appeal. Besides, my Grandfather rarely talked about the place of his birth and childhood.

Nineteen minutes later, a pile of green, gold, and red silk lay folded on the ground next to the sidewalk beneath a still open-mouthed dragon head that was roughly the height of a nearby fire hydrant. Seven men roughly his own age dressed in white t-shirts and black pants smoked cigarettes and chatted with wives and girlfriends next to the remnants of the mythical beast and the open bed of a blue pickup truck. The truck would take the dragon back to storage for the next three hundred and sixty four days unless there was a banquet, parade, or some other demand for its reappearance. A four man lion had both the New Year’s and the Moon Festival celebrations to itself. The smell of spent firecrackers lingered in the air and my father’s ears were still ringing.

“Tally, what are you doing here?”

My dad turned to see that the shortest of the dragon dancers was also a friend from the Chinese Students Association at San Jose State.

“Just helping my dad.”

“Wow, so you’re doing pretty well.”

“What are you up to Donnie?”

“I’ve been helping my father supervise the olive picking. I’m still on the waiting list for a state job in Sacramento.”

“Well, good luck. What department?”

“The Secretary of State.”

Did anyone Chinese work there, even as clerical staff? My father chose not to mention that he was serving as the assistant manager for one of my Grandfather’s legitimate businesses, a small take out restaurant on the wrong end of Sacramento. The small crowd around them began to head towards the temple.

“Tally, you going to try to catch a ring? Maybe it’ll help at the tables?”

I should probably mention that my father’s American nickname of “Tally” may sound rather like “Lucky” in that it clearly happens to be an English word with an actual meaning yet is rarely to never used as an actual proper first name. My Father’s Chinese name was Wei Lan Tang which became “Wellington” easily enough. That became his legal American name, but schoolmates shortened it to “Tally,” as in the very British “Tally Ho.” To be clear, my father never went fox hunting either as a child or an adult.

In any case, this is how Donnie Woo played a critical role in my life even though we would not meet for another forty three years.

The ring catching portion of the River God Festival was simple enough, but it had begun to cause controversy. Towards the end of Saturday afternoon, the festival organizers set off a series of small fireworks. Each of the fireworks or “bombs” looked like small sticks of dynamite glued fuse up to a small block of wood. A ring bearing a silk ribbon was embedded near the top of the cylinder. Twenty four bombs were lined up along the middle of the street fronting the River God’s temple. Local police kept the crowd at least twenty five feet from the bombs. A member of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce bearing a three foot long glowing punk stood prepared to light each bomb in order. Most years the mayor of Hellenville would join him in lighting the first fuse.

The tip of the punk would make contact, gold sparks would dance along the fuse, and then the sparks would stop for a fraction of a second and there would be that odd silent pause that comes with all good fireworks. If things went right, the moment of silence would end abruptly with an explosion, smoke, then a ribbon-tailed metal circle would fly hundreds of feet into the sky above the temple. Catching any of the rings was supposed to bring good fortune. Catching the fifth ring, which bore a purple instead of red ribbon, was supposed to be especially portentous.

Gambling and the luck that the rings might bring may had too much of a natural affinity. Cantonese peasant culture which for so many generations was constantly at the mercy of weather, bandits, floods, earthquakes, and bad government had coped with the inevitable sense of helplessness with a strong faith in all forms of omens. They created superstitions around everything. For instance, my grandmother always took care to pick up the telephone with her left hand even though she was right handed because she feared that it would bring bad news if she used her dominant hand. Oddly, it was fine for the rest of us to use either hand. That particular superstition applied only to my grandmother’s use of telephones.


Not surprisingly, gamblers began paying for the rings. In 1951, someone reportedly paid a hundred dollars for the number five ring then won thousands (no one ever seemed to know exactly how many thousands nor did anyone seem to know who the gambler with the ring had been) at the tables that weekend. Unlike American style gambling, Chinese gambling is not at the mercy of a hot run against the house. The players in pai gow rotate turns as the “dealer”. The house share comes off the top of the pot. They only care that people bet and play. The organizers of the River God Festival thus publicized the link between the ring and the subsequent “killing” at the pai gow table. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences, something that seems to exist both in American and Chinese lore (in the Chinese version it usually takes the form of the Monkey God in America it usually involves either the Democratic party or the San Francisco Giants) appeared center stage.

Instead of contributing to the quaintness of this celebration of the River God and the Chinese invention of gunpowder, the rings became the source of scuffles and even fights. While this did not reach Tolkein-like heights, the scene changed from being a group of happy celebrants hoping that the ring would drop near them like some lazy pop foul at a baseball stadium to a frenzied circus of testosterone, money, and children pushing at the edges of the crowd hoping to see a fight. By 1956, only young men and a few hardened gamblers dared to venture into the drop area. Donnie Woo persuaded my father to join him in the drop zone that day anyway.

“Donnie, you don’t even gamble. Why would you want to get beaten up over a circle of metal?”

“I want that job with the Secretary of State’s office. There’s no work in Helenville for a college graduate.”

My dad nodded as he pictured what his life might have been like with different parents.

“Come on Wellington. Help me out here. You’re bigger than I am. If I catch a ring, you can scare some of those kids off.”

My dad shrugged and took two steps inside the circle of bystanders.

“Okay, but I’m not getting in any fights.”

“You sure you want to keep your jacket on? One of my friends can hold it for you.”

My dad remembered the money belt and the envelope around his waist. It did occur to him that he shouldn’t venture into the drop zone at all, but if he changed his mind it would look like he was chicken.

“I’ll leave it on.”

My father then stepped into the middle of what looked to be a Chinese rugby scrum, the only blue jacket in a swarm of young men in white Brando t-shirts. None of them looked anything like Stanley Kowalski. The first two rings landed well away from them. The third bomb was a dud. How did that affect figuring out which one was number five? If number five was the big one, why did they fire off nineteen more? It seemed like white people would never do it that way.

The Chinese chamber of commerce rep with the three foot punk had a sense of drama around number five. He made a little show of pointing to the bomb itself which instead of having a red paper jacket was covered in red and blue. He waved the punk like a wand, did a little dance, the crowd grew quiet, and the swarm of young men in the center of the drop zone swelled. My father noticed that there was no space to move in any direction. He saw the sparks, heard the sound of the explosion, then looked up towards the sky. He spotted the ring arc upwards as it tumbled across the sky. Much to his surprise, it was right above him.

He felt the bodies press against his then pulled his own arms close to his money belt. It takes about four seconds for an object to fall from a height of two hundred feet. It felt like forty. In his peripheral vision, my dad noticed that the other young men around him had gotten too excited. They were jumping too early. For an instant, my father decided to forget about the money belt and jumped himself, his right hand stretched upwards. The number five ring fell into the flat of his palm, he squeezed it, landed, then thinking quickly acted as if nothing had happened. The men around him had just landed from their second jumps. They were looking around for some sign that the ring had hit the concrete. My father had already stepped away from the scrum, the ring and ribbon in his front pants pocket. He shook his head in mock disappointment as someone in the crowd pointed towards him. He didn’t even tell Donnie Woo when he ran into him again later that day well away from the crowd.

“Tally where did you go?”

“Sorry, Donnie, I forgot I had to check on something for my Pop,” he lied.

As bombs seven, eight, and nine went off, my father found an empty phone booth at the back of a nearby restaurant. Once there, he slipped the ring into a second pouch inside his money belt. Certain that no one had noticed, he decided that he might as well use the luck that had fallen from the heavens a few moments earlier. He went back to the pai gow table, much to the surprise of the elders who first thought that he had returned because he was dissatisfied with their envelope. He then, in his turn as dealer, won seven hundred and fifty dollars on a distinctly mediocre hand, which was three times his monthly income from the restaurant. The ring either worked or the elders had been afraid to let Y.P. Tang’s son lose that weekend.

My father drove back to Paperson with the three prizes from his quest, the envelope, the ring, and seven hundred and fifty dollars worth of folding money packed in his money belt. Despite the valley heat, he left his jacket on even during the drive. He didn’t care that he was sweating. He stopped for gas on the way. While the attendant was looking at the highway traffic, my father impulsively took fifty extra dollars and slipped it into the envelope that he had received from the members of the Hellenville Chinese Chamber of Commerce. He thought that my Grandfather would think he had done an even better job if he brought home more money from the trip than expected.

He slipped in late that night, told my mother the story of his day, then pinned the ring above the headboard of their bed. They treated themselves to a weekend in Monterey. And took the ring with them. I was born late that year, a healthy boy, the first son of an eldest son in a Calfiornia-Chinese family. My parents insisted that “Lucky” was the only name that fit.

As I grew up, my mother and father would tell me variations on the story of my name. Sometimes my mother would be there with him. Sometimes she would slip out of the story. Oddly none of the versions specifically mentioned the presence of Donnie Woo. Eventually, my father framed the ring and ribbon and covered it in glass. Until we moved out of my Grandfather’s house in Paperson in 1961 for the Strawberry Creek subdivision in Sacramento, the framed ring hung over my parents’ headboard in their bedroom on the second floor of my grandparents’ house. Once in the suburbs, it felt too Chinese to keep on the walls. Regardless of the version of the story, it made me feel special. I was the product of fate and the fact that my father had played forward on the Lincoln Junior High basketball team.

I was thirty years old before I realized that there was a problem with my parents’ story of the ring. I was with my friend Grover and his friend Yale. We were sitting at dinner in a dining hall at a college even though none of us were students at the time.

“So Yale, did you get your name because you were conceived in a patch of ivy?” Grover asked.

“No, it’s an old family name and no, I never went to Yale, never even applied…Speaking of odd names though…”

“You mean why was my family named for a powdered orange drink consumed by astronauts?”

“No.”

“I got the name Lucky because my parents had spent the first five years of their marriage trying to conceive. My dad caught a lucky ring at a Chinese festival and I was born not long after that.”

“What kind of festival was it?” Yale asked.

“You know it never occurred to me that Tang is a Chinese name,” Grover, who isn’t Chinese, added.

“Chinese food in space?” Yale shook his head as he said it.

“Did you ever try eating that powder straight up? …. The only thing grosser was trying to eat Fizzies without adding water. Do you remember that stuff?”

Both Yale and Grover made lemon-sucking faces.

“To answer your question, it was celebration of the River God in a little town called Hellenville. I think there were some Greek families who settled there.”

“So when do they have it?”

“In the spring some time.”

Grover looked up and to his right. “Lucky, Isn’t your birthday in late September?”

It had never occurred to me that my mother had to be either two months pregnant when my father caught that “Lucky Ring” or that I was born some twenty months after the event.

So, why had I never counted the months? I guess the answer is simple enough – I wanted to believe in the power of my own name. It still doesn’t seem right to me that a couple months should get in the way of a really good story. I guess that’s something of a family trait.

At that point, my father had already been gone for eight years. He had a sudden heart attack behind the bar at his restaurant when I was twenty two. My mother was remarried despite the fact that she had deeply loved my father. I was already worried that I was doomed to do less with my life than everyone had expected or was it demanded? I had managed to go to the right schools, but never had quite found the right jobs. My first marriage had just ended after just two years. Even then, I hardly felt lucky.