Notes from the Abyss

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Originally written: May 25, 2021; Revised: March 21, 2025) — Now that we have Donald John Trump, empowered by the spineless eunuchs of the Republican Party, back in the White House for another disastrous term as president, we have found one of Trump’s priorities trying to wipe out recognition and study of those traditionally discriminated against: women and racial, sexual, and religious minorities. He does this in the guise of “ending” discrimination by eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Trump’s supporters applaud his effort. Legions of insecure white men and the white women eager to be subservient to them proudly wear and display Trump’s MAGA drivel. If ignoring diversity, equity, and inclusion once made America great — at least in their intellectually challenged minds — mandating the end of DEI now should restore this nation to its prior greatness. Right? What’s the point of understanding others’ history and perspectives if all those others should do is be white as God intended?

Maybe, assuming there is a God who created us all, we should make note of the fact that he created a damned diverse world full of people the MAGA crowd consider “other.” Our civilization was not created solely by dead white men — they just had the most effective flacks promoting their product. Many rivers lead to the sea that comprises our world.

To better understand the diversity of ingredients added to the human gumbo, let us consider the following questions: Why do I study (and enjoy) African American literature? Why is study of African American Literature—and, by extension, other minority literature—important for all, including the MAGA minions?

My answers to both questions have a lot to do with the two women in the above photo, and with one man who died before the photo was taken.

The young woman on the left is my grandmother, Yut-Seul Yee[1]. The older woman on the right is my great-grandmother, Myrtle Mae (Robinson) Yee. The missing man in the photo is my great-grandfather, Yee Jock Leong.[2]

My great-grandfather is Chinese. His family name is actually 余, which is typically pronounced like “Yee” in Taishanese and “Yu” in Mandarin. He was born in San Francisco in 1884, just a couple of years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Even though he was an American citizen according to the Fourteenth Amendment, he constantly had to justify his right to live in the United States to the white majority who didn’t want him here—and who, through the powers vested in the white majority via the Chinese Exclusion Act and its successors—prevented him from bringing his original family over here.

In time my great-grandfather gave up and started a new family in Dayton, Ohio, with my great-grandmother. They had three children, two of whom died in infancy. He died in 1936 from complications of tuberculosis. He and the two children are buried in unmarked graves in Dayton.

My grandmother was the only child to survive. Shortly after she graduated from high school, she was wooed by a man who got her pregnant. He was not at the time interested in the responsibilities of fatherhood and was soon out of her life—and never in my mother’s life. When my mom was born, she was born into a very confused environment. I might have had a chance to clear up some of the confusion had my grandmother not died in 1979 before I knew there were many questions that needed to be asked.

This is where my great-grandmother comes to the fore. My great-grandmother seemed inclined toward alternate histories. When my great-grandfather died, she burned much of his belongings, which—unfortunately—destroyed pretty much every shred of evidence my mom and I could use to find family in China or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora. When my great-grandmother remarried—to an Irish World War I veteran named Patrick Mitchell—she presented herself to the world as white. (More later.) When my mom was born, she launched a scheme to tell my mom that she was the mother and that my mother’s actual mom was her sister.

Now, my great-grandmother, like some of her aunts and uncles and their children, in time told others she was white.

She told my mom she was half-Chinese and half-Spanish, and that she was born in Santa Barbara, California.

My mom, not knowing any better, in her DD-398 (Statement of Personal History) for the U.S. Air Force in 1959, repeated the Chinese-Spanish-Santa Barbara story.

—

OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem here …

At this point in the narrative, we’ve had many problems. With more to come.

My great-grandmother was not white … well, maybe a little.

She is not Chinese.

She was not Spanish.

She wasn’t even born in Santa Barbara.

My great-grandmother did not just destroy evidence of my great-grandfather’s past, she went to great lengths to conceal her own.

—

I’ve been interested in my past since I was a kid. (Yes, that goes back a ways.) When I was in junior high school and high school in the 1970s, I started trying to learn about my family’s history. There was a lot—not all accurate, but mostly accurate—on my dad’s side. On my mom’s side, what we knew of the Chinese ancestry was short. We had no idea who her father was.

I had a chance to start investigating some of that in 1987 or 1988 when I was sent for some training in Cincinnati. Dayton was not that far away, so I headed up there while on a break to track down vital records of my mom. I did not discover who her father was, but I got some strong hints that a lot of what my mom and I thought we knew about her family’s past just wasn’t so.

There were no records of my mom’s birth—long a bit of a thorn in her side—but there were birth and death records for her mother, aunt, and uncle. And none of them said anything about my great-grandmother being Chinese and/or Spanish.

The words I found that described my great-grandmother—written by the family doctor—were “negro” or “colored.” Her birthplace was listed as either Indiana or Michigan.

—

OK, Houston, I have a problem here.

I didn’t have a problem with being “colored” or “negro” myself. As a Chinese American, I was already not white enough for not-so-polite society. I knew what it was like to live on eggshells for fear that some white idiot would take his frustrations out on me because of my Asian heritage—and anti-Asian sentiment was widespread and openly expressed in the Vietnam Era in which I grew up. (Racists are rarely selective in the targets of their venom.)

My problem was that the information I found in Dayton did not jive with the story my mom and, ultimately, I was raised with. I knew from photos that my great-grandmother was somewhat dark-skinned. But she had prominent eye folds like Asians and frankly reminded me of Filipina women—which, had she been one, would have explained her proclaimed Chinese and Spanish heritage.

So I concluded the doctor didn’t really know or care what she was, and that hypothesis seemed to work for my mom and I for a number of years.

That hypothesis seemed defensible until I, being a trained biologist and former biology professor, started doing genetic testing to help find out who the anonymous grandfather might be.

Done right—and that means using proper sampling and analysis procedure—DNA does not lie. It may not answer all questions, but of those questions it answers, it almost always answers decisively.

In my case, DNA told me the family doctor in Dayton knew exactly what he was talking about. My mitochondrial DNA—my direct maternal line of inheritance—points directly, and rather quickly, to Africa.

In time I filled in more holes in my great-grandmother’s history. In the 1900 U.S. Census—before she was old enough to make up an alternative past for herself—she was living with her parents, William A. and Hannah Robinson, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was listed as having been born in Indiana. Her state of residence and birthplace are consistent with the vital records I found in Dayton. (I can allow some confusion of the state one grows up in with the state one is born in.) William A, Hannah, and Myrtle Robinson are all listed as of the “Black”.

Hannah (I think her family name was Woods) and her parents were from Kentucky—one of the slave states, and one with strong Confederate sympathies despite sticking with the Union in the Civil War. William Robinson was born in Canada, but his parents were from Virginia and they were part of the migration of African Americans fleeing the United States for Canada via the Underground Railroad before the Civil War.

Even for African Americans who were free, the United States was not a friendly place for African Americans. Even in a place like Boston, and even with an almost unintelligible Down East accent, any free Black could—just for the mere crime of walking while Black—be kidnapped as an “escaped” slave and sold into slavery down South, and there would be damned little one could do to prove he or she wasn’t “escaped.”

Whether slave or free, John Robinson and the family of his eventual wife, Harriet Ann Taylor, left for Canada to avoid enslavement and persecution. They did not go there for the long winters, short summers, and massive clouds of black flies and mosquitoes.

John Robinson’s family returned to the United States after the Civil War, but not to the South. In a move that presaged the Great Migration of the twentieth century, they settled in Michigan. Michigan might have been one of the states that sided with the Union and fought the war that earned African Americans’ nominal freedom, but it wasn’t exactly easy to be Black up north—as recent headlines can attest.

—

Time for more genetics! John Robinson’s parents were both identified as “mulatto” in various U.S. Censuses in the decades before they died. In the race classification schemes of the day, a mulatto was often legally defined as half-Black, half-White—with, of course, more emphasis on the Black bit for discrimination purposes. (Just ask Homer Plessy.) Now, if no one knew your ancestry and you didn’t look all that Black, you could identify as “white” and others, such as your local Census taker, would never know the difference. Some of John Robinson’s siblings did just that. If their skin was light enough and their hair straight enough—or able to be straightened enough—they could pass as “white.” Otherwise, they had to identify as the obvious—Black—and “enjoy” all the benefits of white racism that being Black brought with it.

I never had the chance of meeting my great-grandmother, but I am absolutely certain she dissembled about her heritage so as to avoid discrimination or, worse, the stigma of being “black.”

But she never entirely escaped discrimination. My mother remembers some lovely “gentlemen” burning a cross in their yard in Dayton.

—

I study African American literature because I want to understand my history … and, frankly, my anger. I am damned tired of seeing my family (close and otherwise) suffer because they don’t fit someone else’s notion of a “proper” human. I am damned tired of feeling like I can never entirely trust white people—even those in my family! For some people (like Ku Klux Klan recruiters who distribute material loosely called literature in Hanover County from time to time) I am a symbol of all that is wrong with the world. I, and my mom and my children, are likely targets in some idiot’s fantasy race war.

On a more positive note, my forebears survived much worse than what I fear now. Many just like them survived, and they contributed mightily to the building of this nation. My great-grandmother tried to hide their lives and thoughts and contributions from me, but I will not be denied my heritage. Writing this essay is one of the ways I hope to reclaim it for myself.

Everyone in the United States should be required to study minority history and literature. One, it adds unique spices to the American style of the human gumbo. It should be celebrated, not suppressed. (Would I try to outlaw North Carolina-style barbecue because it is, unlike the Texas-style barbecue that I prefer, vinegar based? No!) Studying minority history and literature is also a corrective to the push by Trump and his MAGA faithful to dismiss the minority experience as irrelevant to the perfect story of white American exceptionalism that some state textbook boards (like in Texas) repeatedly try to foist upon our naïve children.

If the United States of America is to become the “more perfect union” the Founders imperfectly envisioned, we have to face our full history squarely and unflinchingly, admit our mistakes, and resolve to make amends for our nation’s wrongs. Learning to see our society through a minority’s eyes is an important step in that direction. It gives us a broader perspective from which to appreciate and understand everyone who is a part of our society, our world. It gives us a solid foundation upon which to build a better world together rather than an excuse for us to tear this fixer-upper of a world apart.

If the majority insists on remaining blinkered, then we, the United States of America, will become—if we aren’t already there—a nation full of blowhards and idiots, telling tales full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing of benefit to anyone else.

Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on May 25, 2021. The lede has been updated to reflect the current political situation in the United States in early 2025.

[1] Her family name is Yee. Traditionally in China, the family name comes first, but she followed the Western practice of given name first and family name last.

[2] His family name is Yee, and he generally followed the traditional Chinese practice of family name first. However, one of the variations of his name was transliterated as Yee Jack-son, and—at least in the few American records in which he is found—he is identified as if his family name is Jackson rather than Yee.