Part 2: Beginnings in Syracuse
Syracuse, New York. Blessed with eight months of winter a year and a perpetual vying for title of snowiest metropolitan area in America, it can be a shock for any newcomer not accustomed to the blistering cold and relentless snowfall. I wonder how my parents first encountered it–a Syracuse comprised of sprawling suburbs and a dense downtown area, passionate Orangemen basketball fans, and generational locals fiercely proud of their local Wegmans or favorite dine-in serving chicken riggies. I wonder how two young immigrants–my mother at age 15 when she first arrived with her family, my dad by his lonesome 24-year-old grad student self–acclimated to a largely white population armed to the teeth with snow shovels and car de-icers, ready to bear a 3-foot lake effect snowfall from Lake Ontario without batting an eyelid.
Syracuse is where my mom, fresh from Taiwan, rode the school bus amidst a 79% minority but predominantly African American student population at Nottingham High School. Syracuse is where my dad, young and bright-eyed coming out of prestigious National Taiwan University (NTU), found and met my mother later on in life at my grandfather’s fellowship outreach to overseas Chinese students at Syracuse University. Two different diasporas. “They treated us very well,” my grandmother recounts of the American church that welcomed and lent space to the fellowship my grandfather was invited to join, Syracuse Chinese Christian Assembly. I am still collecting bits and pieces of their stories.
Syracuse is where I have the most vivid memories of my grandmother’s antique three-story house at 940 Lancaster Avenue, playing hide and seek amongst the cardboard boxes of picture frames, musty-smelling bound books my grandfather hoarded, mothball tainted clothes from a different time and era tucked deep into my grandmother’s closet. That house is where I posed for pictures in colorful Mickey Mouse t-shirts next to my brother and cousins as we slowly grew up in competition for height, where we doodled rocket ships in chalk in the driveway, where I have my first recollection of earnest tutoring from my dad: “This a shape with four sides, repeat after me. Square.” Unable to connect the first syllable, “guare, guare,” I would reply.
Syracuse is where my parents met, got married, raised two young boys, and named them with similar prefixes. Chia-Leh and Chia-An.
Syracuse is where Fulbright Ho passes away in 1993, where tensions between founding member Brother Feng and other elders splinters a Chinese congregation. My father, Shou-Chang Lee, who was once passionate about serving the church, gradually loses the relationship and camaraderie of other Taiwanese-Chinese like him. My parents decide to worship at Eastern Hills Bible Church, attending Sunday service but always withdrawn from the wider church, lead-tongued and shy of socialization with the white world around them.
Andrew Chia-An Lee, the second born, is born at Crouse Hospital. He grows up going to Eastern Hills Bible Church with only his mother. He has no recollection of his father at church, or of any Chinese congregation growing up.
