AT Shorts: Proud to Be Chinese, Proud to be Mexican
What was it like to grow up in an interracial, Chinese-Mexican family during the 1950s and 1960s? Lucy Estella Lim talks about identity, culture, growing up in a family-owned market, and... fisticuffs.
VO: Lucy Lim's parents were married in 1944--in Mexico, because Arizona's miscegenation laws had a lot to say about who could legally marry whom. During the 1950s and 1960s, Lucy lived behind her family's multilingual, multi-ethnic market in the Dunbar Spring neighborhood.
LIM: I think all the way around had to have been an adjustment for everyone. The Chinese community looking at my mother and father as not really “us.” He's married to a Mexican woman. And then on my mother's side, the same thing. She's married to a Chinese man. And so as a result of being the product of an interracial marriage, you have to be proud. You are Chinese. You are Mexican.
A brief story about that. I had an upset stomach. Pepto-Bismol first, it's pink, it tastes good. The American medicine. And it didn't really work, so my dad says, oh yeah, I've got to take the Chinese medicine. Pills. They're like buckshot. Then my mom said, oh, no, no, you've got to do the Mexican. It's coffee with pepper in it. That's the kind of childhood when you've got interracial parents that are both trying to look out for your health and safety and welfare. It was a good life.
This is before the 7-Elevens, the Circle Ks, the big box stores that started coming in. It was life in these little stores. Neighborhoods. Neighborhoods mattered. My parents were together in the store working, my mother working the counter, my dad in the butcher department. And our living quarters were right behind the store. So when we came home from school, they were there. 9:00 to 9:00. Those are only the store hours, because my dad was a butcher.
I remember as a teenager, because maybe I'd be up to 12:00 or 1:00 in the morning, my dad would still be cutting meat. We were all introduced to this store life when we were able to help. By about age nine, I could look over the counter. And when the little kids came in with their grubby little pennies and they wanted two-for-one penny candy, I could do that. My brother likes to think that we worked really hard, and he did butchering and he cut meat. He did a little bit, but we got to play at that store.
I was such a little tomboy. I was the little brother my brother never had. One year, he wanted boxing gloves. Well, I did, too. And do you know? Santa Claus brought boxing gloves. And we would have these boxing matches, right? So one of the kids that I always had to box, his name was Peewee. I could win my--matches, are they called?--against Peewee. So one day, a kid from the other side of 6th Street came. And his name was Butch. This is so classic. So they put me in the ring with Butch. Butch proceeded to, like, give me a bloody nose.
And I'm, like, sniffing because I just got punched in the nose and it hurts. [LAUGHS] I'm kind of like semi-crying, trying not to. And my brother took my gloves off, proceeded to give Butch a bloody nose. And at about that time, I might have been 11 going on 12. And I thought, you know, this boxing is not for me.