THE EIGHTH PROMISE by William Poy Lee PRESS SYNOPSIS “Suddenly, my toes, my feel, and then all of my skin began tingling with some extraordinary energy. I started to effervesce, as if I were showering in a bubbling champagne. I felt like I would explode with the joy, the deep, hearty joy of coming home, of belonging, of being recognized and accepted fully. Was this a religious experience? I don’t remember any traces of religiosity to any of this, just that my two legs were firmly planted upon my Clan’s homeland - the tuning fork of my being and spirit - and I was feeling just so completely right.’ In 1983, the author, then an international banker and lawyer with Bank of America, was the first of his family to visit Suey Wan, an unmapped farming village in China’s Pearl River delta, since 1949, when the new Communist government’s imposition of a “bamboo curtain” around China terminated emigration abroad and access to returning migrants alike. He had not expected much from this little village, which not even have electricity or running water in the early 1980s, as he was soon to discover. And yet he had this extraordinary and peculiar energetic experience that stayed with him for days afterwards. The Eighth Promise chronicles two lives -- that of Poy Jen, the author’s mother, who was born and raised in China’s fertile Pearl River Delta, and of the Toisanese people, those early pioneers who settled American’s west coast in the 1850s and created Chinatowns throughout America. Poy Jen spent her childhood reared in the traditional ways of the self-sufficient Toisanese who had lived in one place for a millennium and rarely moving more than fifteen or twenty miles from their place of birth. From the village’s Clan Sisterhood, she learned how to make the Chi’ soups, medicinal soups to ward off or cure illnesses, to help a new birth mother to rebuild a body ravaged from childbirth, and to keep the elderly healthy as their bodies age. The book describes how as a child, Poy Jen survived the Japanese attacks against her farming village and later as a teenager, how she escaped the Communist advance by marrying an American citizen of Toisanese ethnicity, named Fook Toon Lee, and escaping to America. And that is where the the author’s voice begins, born on January 16, 1951, in San Francisco, California, with one foot in the traditional Chinatown community of Confucianism and its right wing political orthodoxy and the other foot in the North Beach district, of the heady music of jazz and later psychedelic rock, of rebellious political thinking, and of the countercultural Beatnik and Hippie lifestyles. In alternating chapters, William Poy Lee and Poy Jen tell of their family’s challenges -- in chapters humorous and others downright heartbreaking -- as they both seek to assimilate into America and later, protect themselves from the author’s father, who despite his many good qualities as a provider and parent, becomes emotionally abusive. Together, the author as a ten year old and his mother devised a phonetic call-and-response method so that she, although she did not speak American, could and did pass her oral Citizenship test. This was so Poy Jen could fulfill one of her eight promises to her own mother, to become a US citizen and sponsor the application for immigration into the US of her mother and brother. In an interesting dance, the author as a child fashions arguments to avoid a local Chinese language and culture school that followed American school every afternoon. His most formidable position - that Chinese school would cut into the time he needs master American school subjects in order to earn a college scholarship - fails one summer’s end as Poy Jen and other mothers force march and then enroll their gaggle of children into Southern Garden Chinese School. Life takes a more serious turn when at the age of seventeen, when inspired by Dr. King’s Southern civil rights movement, the author joins forces with Chinese American civil rights activists in an Equal Rights for Chinese Americans demonstration along Chinatown’s famous Grant Avenue on a sunny, Saturday afternoon and in a rally that openly attacked the community’s Jim Crow sanctioned establishment, the Chinese Six Companies. But it is Poy Jen’s eighth promise, that gives the book its title, a silently made and almost spiritual promise of compassion towards all beings and to maintain compassion before the onslaught of life’s ten thousand sorrows, that strengthens both this formidable matriarch and then by example, her intrepid son, then a third year student at UC Berkeley, as they face the biggest challenge to their family’s well-being and happiness -- the wrongful conviction of the family’s second son for first degree murder during a tumultuous and violent power struggle in the local Chinatown community where over thirty people were slain and many more wounded before it reached its bloody apex at the Golden Dragon Restaurant Massacre over Labor Day weekend 1977. Five people, including two tourists, were slain and eleven others seriously wounded. As the author spends his days spearheading a campaign for a new fair trial for trial or his brother and other Chinese American youth railroaded during this period of citywide shock and hysteria, Poy Jen spends her time focusing on saving her second son’s spirit and soul. She does so through time-tested Toisanese rites that have taken her own predecessors through so many of life’s sorrows for a millennium in way of life and in a place that was far from government and its emergency safety nets. The author witnesses and chronicles both the legal battle, which was lost, and the personal battle, which ultimately was won -- by both sons. He concludes that this was the deeper battle and at memoir’s end, is able to fuse both his mother’s ancient Toisanese wisdom and ways and his upbringing as a modern American. “For Toisan was once only a place, but now it is a state of being, an interior sensibility of home, no matter where I may reside in this world.”

THE EIGHTH PROMISE by William Poy Lee

PRESS SYNOPSIS

“Suddenly, my toes, my feel, and then all of my skin began tingling with some extraordinary energy. I started to effervesce, as if I were showering in a bubbling champagne. I felt like I would explode with the joy, the deep, hearty joy of coming home, of belonging, of being recognized and accepted fully. Was this a religious experience? I don’t remember any traces of religiosity to any of this, just that my two legs were firmly planted upon my Clan’s homeland - the tuning fork of my being and spirit - and I was feeling just so completely right.’

In 1983, the author, then an international banker and lawyer with Bank of America, was the first of his family to visit Suey Wan, an unmapped farming village in China’s Pearl River delta, since 1949, when the new Communist government’s imposition of a “bamboo curtain” around China terminated emigration abroad and access to returning migrants alike. He had not expected much from this little village, which not even have electricity or running water in the early 1980s, as he was soon to discover.

And yet he had this extraordinary and peculiar energetic experience that stayed with him for days afterwards.

The Eighth Promise chronicles two lives -- that of Poy Jen, the author’s mother, who was born and raised in China’s fertile Pearl River Delta, and of the Toisanese people, those early pioneers who settled American’s west coast in the 1850s and created Chinatowns throughout America. Poy Jen spent her childhood reared in the traditional ways of the self-sufficient Toisanese who had lived in one place for a millennium and rarely moving more than fifteen or twenty miles from their place of birth. From the village’s Clan Sisterhood, she learned how to make the Chi’ soups, medicinal soups to ward off or cure illnesses, to help a new birth mother to rebuild a body ravaged from childbirth, and to keep the elderly healthy as their bodies age. The book describes how as a child, Poy Jen survived the Japanese attacks against her farming village and later as a teenager, how she escaped the Communist advance by marrying an American citizen of Toisanese ethnicity, named Fook Toon Lee, and escaping to America.

And that is where the the author’s voice begins, born on January 16, 1951, in San Francisco, California, with one foot in the traditional Chinatown community of Confucianism and its right wing political orthodoxy and the other foot in the North Beach district, of the heady music of jazz and later psychedelic rock, of rebellious political thinking, and of the countercultural Beatnik and Hippie lifestyles.

In alternating chapters, William Poy Lee and Poy Jen tell of their family’s challenges -- in chapters humorous and others downright heartbreaking -- as they both seek to assimilate into America and later, protect themselves from the author’s father, who despite his many good qualities as a provider and parent, becomes emotionally abusive.

Together, the author as a ten year old and his mother devised a phonetic call-and-response method so that she, although she did not speak American, could and did pass her oral Citizenship test. This was so Poy Jen could fulfill one of her eight promises to her own mother, to become a US citizen and sponsor the application for immigration into the US of her mother and brother.

In an interesting dance, the author as a child fashions arguments to avoid a local Chinese language and culture school that followed American school every afternoon. His most formidable position - that Chinese school would cut into the time he needs master American school subjects in order to earn a college scholarship - fails one summer’s end as Poy Jen and other mothers force march and then enroll their gaggle of children into Southern Garden Chinese School.

Life takes a more serious turn when at the age of seventeen, when inspired by Dr. King’s Southern civil rights movement, the author joins forces with Chinese American civil rights activists in an Equal Rights for Chinese Americans demonstration along Chinatown’s famous Grant Avenue on a sunny, Saturday afternoon and in a rally that openly attacked the community’s Jim Crow sanctioned establishment, the Chinese Six Companies.

But it is Poy Jen’s eighth promise, that gives the book its title, a silently made and almost spiritual promise of compassion towards all beings and to maintain compassion before the onslaught of life’s ten thousand sorrows, that strengthens both this formidable matriarch and then by example, her intrepid son, then a third year student at UC Berkeley, as they face the biggest challenge to their family’s well-being and happiness -- the wrongful conviction of the family’s second son for first degree murder during a tumultuous and violent power struggle in the local Chinatown community where over thirty people were slain and many more wounded before it reached its bloody apex at the Golden Dragon Restaurant Massacre over Labor Day weekend 1977. Five people, including two tourists, were slain and eleven others seriously wounded.

As the author spends his days spearheading a campaign for a new fair trial for trial or his brother and other Chinese American youth railroaded during this period of citywide shock and hysteria, Poy Jen spends her time focusing on saving her second son’s spirit and soul. She does so through time-tested Toisanese rites that have taken her own predecessors through so many of life’s sorrows for a millennium in way of life and in a place that was far from government and its emergency safety nets.

The author witnesses and chronicles both the legal battle, which was lost, and the personal battle, which ultimately was won -- by both sons. He concludes that this was the deeper battle and at memoir’s end, is able to fuse both his mother’s ancient Toisanese wisdom and ways and his upbringing as a modern American.

“For Toisan was once only a place, but now it is a state of being, an interior sensibility of home, no matter where I may reside in this world.”