AARP Highlights American Stories for AAPI Heritage Month
Two families, two histories, one shared nationality
by Robert Love, AARP, April 30, 2021 |
Comments: Courtesy Daphne Kwok
The family of Daphne Kwok, an AARP vice president, on vacation in Georgia in 1970. Kwok, second from right, grew up in northern Virginia, after her parents emigrated from China.
This essay appeared as an editor’s note in the April/May issue of AARP The Magazine.
I am an Anglo-Irish American emphasis, please, on the third part of that description. My forebears came to the United States in the 19th century, uninvited and unknowing of their fate. They worked as laborers and, later, as civil servants cops and firemen mostly until opportunities arose to compete for jobs as accountants, managers, executives in large corporations. Today a few of them run their own businesses. Three generations after my great-grandfathers landed in New York City and Boston, my older brother, Walter, rece