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The Family Grandpa used to say that he planted one seed with the wrong label on it, and look what came up. Here is what came up, as of this September. I've left out addresses and phone numbers, because the cousins asked me to.
Aunt Stephanie's branch The oldest, born the year the store opened, and raised partly behind the counter. She taught third grade for thirty years and married Richard Quintana, whose own grandfather came up from Mexico to work the Delta orchards, so their kitchen table is a two-immigrant-story table and nobody ever runs out of things to say. Their son Roderick is a firefighter in Stockton. Roderick says that when he was little he thought "paper son" meant Grandpa had been folded up and mailed. Uncle Gary's branch Gary is a civil engineer, the family's record keeper, and the one with the photocopy of the Angel Island transcript in a plastic sleeve. In 1985 he went with Grandpa to Taishan, Grandpa's first trip back since 1947. They found the village smaller than Grandpa remembered and full of Yuens, including the children and grandchildren of his younger brother, who had stayed. Gary says Grandpa walked the whole village once without saying a word, and then sat down in his brother's house and talked for three days. Gary and Brenda's son Ronald and his wife Renee have a five-year-old, April, who is the first of the next generation and the most serious bower at Ching Ming. Their younger son Byron is a senior in high school and wants to study history, which Uncle Gary takes personally, in a good way. My branch My mother, Deborah, was the one who took the truth hardest when Grandpa told her. She's the reason I went to Angel Island; she'd wanted to go for twenty years and needed company. My dad, Elbert Clinkscales, is an insurance adjuster from Arkansas who met my mom in college and has been eating Grandma's cooking with real gratitude ever since. My brother Patrick works for a software company in San Jose and set up this page's counter for me, then told me I could have done it myself, which was true. Uncle Glenn's branch Glenn is a dentist, the youngest, the one born when the store was already busy, and the one who fought the hardest about the name. When his daughter was born in 1985, he and Aunt Vickie gave her Yuen for a middle name. Grandpa pretended to be annoyed and then had a banquet. So Allison is the only one of us with both names on her birth certificate. Darrell, her brother, would like it noted that he asked for one too and was told he was too late. Should we change it back? We have argued about this at every Thanksgiving since the funeral. Ronald looked into it, and it could be done; you can change your name legally. But Grandpa lived seventy-six years as a Leong and was buried as one, and the Leongs who sold him the slot are part of the story too, and none of us has quite been willing to take that away. For now the answer is the one on his stone: both. If that changes, I'll update this page. The other Leongs The family whose papers Grandpa came on are still in San Francisco. For seventy-six years a card came from them every Chinese New Year, and one went back. Three of them came to his funeral, older men in dark suits, and bowed to Grandma, and one of them told my uncle that his own grandfather used to speak of the boy from the Yuen village who learned the answers better than his real sons had. I don't know if that is true. I've decided to believe it. If your family has a paper name
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