Panda Gifts, Chapter 1, Part 6

From Taipei to Queens to Mt. Vernon

We moved into our house in Mt. Vernon just in time for me to start first grade at Pennington Elementary School. Mom got work as a punch card operator at the Esso offices not far from our house. She had never finished high school and did not have proper immigration papers, but there she was, with a full time job with a multinational corporation. The keypunch operators were all women. They sat at desks in a large room and placed the cards in machines and punched little rectangular holes in them: these cards were fed into slots and read by room sized mainframe computers. Mom told us that even though her day at the office began at 8:30, there was a company tea break at 10 am for half an hour, lunch at 12:30 for a half hour and another tea break at 3:30 for half another hour.  Keypunch operators got off work at 5:30 pm. To Chinese workers inured to twelve to sixteen hour work days, the office schedule was heaven. Dad commuted to the UN on the Harlem railroad line, getting on the train each morning at Fleetwood Station and alighting at Grand Central. From there, he walked five blocks to the imposing United Nations compound on the East River. Puopuo took care of baby Helen, David and me. She cooked and cleaned. Eryi had just gotten married herself, but she was incredibly competent and energetic and managed her household and my grandparents’ with ease. Eryi expected to join us the United States very soon. My parents paid Puopuo a small salary that she sent to Taiwan when we heard some one was travelling there. Puopuo’s preferred means of transporting goods and money transport was to hand off a wad of cash to someone traveling to Taiwan, getting Mom to write a letter to the receiving end describing the exact amount of cash in the envelope, which was then delivered on the honor system by hand to the other side.