My father’s given name was On Wah. Wah had a generic meaning: “relating to China,” but On meant “peaceful,” “safe,” “a harbor.” Combined, his name could be interpreted as Peaceful China or Peaceful Chinese.
Though the Lam family poem was gone, my Tai Mah remembered bits of it, at least enough to tell my father that the character for his generation was Bong, nation. Bah Ba decided to combine this with Keuhng, strong, for his “adult name”: Bong Keuhng. Literally, it means “strong nation.” Applied to a person, the name could be read as “Strong as a Nation.” Sounded more kickass than Peaceful Chinese.
Though Keuhng means “strong,” under its entry in the dictionary, the character that my father had chosen for himself, also has several additional meanings when combined with other characters, including: “bandit,” “kidnap,” “unyielding,” “rape.”
palimpsests
The use of palimpsests was common during the Middle Ages. Parchment, the standard writing material of the time, would be recycled by using milk, oat bran, and pumice to rub and wash away its text. For Christians, this was also an excuse to efface pagan manuscripts, though faint traces of the original writing remained, hidden underneath scriptures.
Centuries later, modern scholars would use ultraviolet light to uncover the lost text, words that had refused to be destroyed.
graff
I never left the house without a marker tucked in the waistband of my jeans. It might’ve been a marker with an aluminum barrel or one that looked like a super-sized crayon or one that was shaped like a deodorant stick, its tip as wide as a fist.
We’d hop on the city bus and tear off the advertisements that ran above the windows. Blank panels were revealed. We’d tag there, monikers we chose ourselves: LAKE, STEAM, SKY, FUSE, DRUM. Our graffiti names carried a dignity that our birth names, names chosen for us, lacked.
south bronx
KRS-One—his emcee name originally his graffiti name—launched his rap career with the song “South Bronx,” an attack on MC Shan for his song “The Bridge.” Many viewed Shan’s song as a claim that his own Queensbridge projects were the birthplace of hip-hop, not the South Bronx, which had been universally credited.
“South Bronx” in many ways resembles Shan’s song. The chorus on Shan’s song is his neighborhood repeated several times. KRS borrows this idea for his refrain. Shan’s second verse describes a park jam from back in the day, naming some of the hip-hop OGs around his way. KRS adopts the same template for his second verse. If you had listened to Shan’s song several times before hearing “South Bronx,” you’d hear an echo of Shan in KRS’s raps. Heard this way, KRS’s raps on “South Bronx” are even more vicious, evoking MC Shan only to crush him.
writing crews
The first tagging crew I joined was PE, Public Enemy, named after the rap group. I’d imagined kids donned in berets and paramilitary uniforms, my generation’s Black Panthers, but the leader of PE turned out to be a short white boy. Only a month after I joined, the crew died. Most crews never made it past a year. Not due to infighting or a power struggle. Motherfuckers just got tired of their crew name, bored of having to write the same letters next to their tag.
The leader of PE started another crew, TFB, Taking Frisco Back. It was rebranding. Most of the members in PE wound up in TFB. The ones who didn’t had quit writing. It was a revolving-door community. New writers were always being birthed.
Ten months later, TFB faded away, and the core members started KSF, Kings of San Francisco. I was one of the five founding members, though I could only trace our roots back two tagging generations. We were writers who didn’t record our past.
paper sons
One in three Chinese Americans are using a falsified last name, though they may not even know it. Their ancestors, during the first half of the twentieth century, came here “illegally,” but that term’s misleading, suggesting an immoral ethos, when it was the law itself that was immoral. The Chinese Exclusion Act—the name says it all, the first and only time the United States explicitly banned a group based on their race. This law also blocked “legal” emigrants from China from becoming naturalized citizens, yet “illegal” emigrants from Europe were offered a pathway to citizenship. For these white undocumented immigrants, we were willing to grant amnesty, their past transgressions forgotten. Citizenship could be extended or withheld, but this choice had nothing to do with notions of legal or illegal; it had everything to do with affirming whiteness.
Like undocumented immigrants today who can only live and work in the United States by acquiring fake papers, many of the Chinese immigrants who arrived in the first half of the twentieth century also had fraudulent papers. When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed city records in San Francisco, Chinese living here capitalized. Many of them lied, claiming they were citizens who had lost their birth certificates in the flames. It couldn’t be disproved. Now that they were citizens, they could bring over their children—an exception to the Chinese Exclusion Act—but why stop there? For a large sum, they’d pretend to be the father of someone unrelated to them in China, signing affidavits testifying to this. Paper sons, or in rarer cases, paper daughters, would ditch their family name and adopt the surname of the sponsoring “father.” The lie of the paper children would be handed down to their offspring.
The deception, however, didn’t guarantee entry into the country for paper children, only arrival at Angel Island, not far from Alcatraz. Known as the “Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island in reality was more of a prison: armed guards, a tall fence with barbwire. Chinese would be detained
