Childhood and Youth: Shaping of the Character

A man's character is his fate.

— Heraclitus

"He hanged himself!"

I ran to the window and with one quick move pulled the shades. I had done it so many times that I didn't even need to think about it. The room became dark and filled with anticipation and uncertainty. My mom always made me pull the shades when something happened in our neighborhood and the town crier brought the latest horrifying news. Because of her fears of Tong, Chinese gang men, and not wanting to provoke them in any way, my mom would not permit us to look outside.

"He hanged himself because of an unpaid gambling debt! He chose to hang himself instead of waiting to be killed!" the town crier continued to scream. His voice was as striking as the sound of a church bell that echoed through the empty street and resonated inside my house.

My mom, younger brother, and I were quietly standing on a cold wooden floor far away from the windows, hiding, as if someone could still see us through the curtains. I felt a small stream of sweat from my temple run like a snake slowly down over my face under the collar of my shirt, making me shiver as it continued its way down my back. It seemed that time had stopped moving.

Footsteps of our neighbors broke the silence — we shared a house with two other families, as well as a small communal bathroom that had a large wash tub that we used as a bathtub, though it was hard to understand what it was made of. That was pretty much how everyone lived in our neighborhood.

Our neighborhood: Oakland, California, Chinatown of the 1920s and 1930s, with poor sanitation and habitations. It had well-organized tribunals of its own to punish offenders when it was in their interest to punish. Indeed, our neighborhood was very isolated with its complex society.

It was a time when arranged marriages were still in practice. In the early twentieth century, the advent of photography modernized traditional arranged marriages in Asia. Photographs and letters replaced face-to-face meetings between families and matchmakers. It became the "picture bride" system. For the first time, prospective couples living in different parts of the world could be introduced. Pressured to get married by his own father, my dad, who lived in California, decided to take advantage of that new technology, since there were not many options due to the very low number of Chinese females in America.

That was how my mother, Florence, came here as a bride of U.S. citizen Henry Quong Joe.

My father had been a Navy man in World War I and served until he was honorably discharged. I was born in 1923. I hardly ever saw my dad; he ran a business back on the East Coast. Nevertheless, my little brother Kenneth was born six years later.

My father's relatives were all here on the West Coast. My dad's father was a very successful businessman. He owned several meat markets and jewelry businesses. I remember my mother playing mahjong with Chinese opera stars at our home. Life was good for a while, but those days ended when Dad left us.

I remember my father telling me goodbye. He paused for a moment as if he were trying not to forget to tell me something that was important. Then he said, "Take care of your mother." He was waiting for the streetcar. I had the feeling that I was seeing him for the last time. I was ten years old.

After that, we lost track of him. But that image of my father jumping on the streetcar and vanishing into the unknown, leaving me alone in the middle of the street, is still in front of my eyes now. The pain is always there. "Why did he desert me?" I wondered. (Years later, when I grew up, I tried to track him down, just to find out that he had died of leukemia at the age of seventy-five and was buried in a Navy cemetery in Florida).

Soon, my grandfather passed away. My mom was struggling to raise us — it was time for me to help my family.

So at the age of thirteen, I learned the meat cutting trade and became a butcher's apprentice. That was my first job; later, I worked as a newspaper boy, but not for long. At sixteen, I moved to Berkeley, where I was given room and board for working in a mom-and-pop grocery store in the meat department. It was then that I became interested in the gymnastic rings and horizontal bars at the James Kenny Park in Berkeley. The bodybuilding started later on, in 1939.

It started with me looking at Health Magazine where I saw a Charles Atlas ad. The ad showed a skinny guy named Mac getting sand thrown at him and saying, "Some bully bullied me!" I remember like it was yesterday: "The Insult that Made a Man Out of Mac!" It promised the seven-day "path to perfect manhood."

The more I looked at the ad, the more I believed its message. It was a story in the format of an American comic book. My attention was immediately drawn to the bully's muscular body, which implied a threat to the skinny Mac. The ad pulled me like a magnet and sucked me into it. All of sudden, I became Mac.

Then Mac's girlfriend Grace informed me of the bully's reputation. The huge bully had humiliated Mac by commenting on the smaller man's size; it became kind of personal to me.

Mac angrily takes matters into his own hands when he decides to order the magazine to start his exercises. I was ready to buy that magazine; with my free hand, I was going through the change in my pocket, not taking my eyes from the ad. The ad's vivid transition then showed Mac posed in a mirror to exhibit his new masculine body; then he returns to the beach, simply waves his fist, and the bully backs off. I was proud of Mac!

Wow, it looked so easy! My problem was solved! That's what I thought, running to the magazine stand to buy that magazine. Yes — it was right there, the solution to my problem — with the fastest health-, strength-, and physique-building system. Without hesitation I paid twenty-five cents. My heart was pumping hard as I scanned through the pages.

The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man, Charles Atlas, born Angelo Siciliano in 1893, developed his body-building program on his own, inspired by the stretching of lions and tigers at Brooklyn's Prospect Park Zoo. He began developing a series of isometric exercises that eventually gave him a classically sculpted musculature. He became "a new man" without the aid of weights or drugs. He was named "The World's Most Beautiful Man" and "The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man." His "Dynamic Tension" equipment-free body-building program used comic narratives to demonstrate its benefits, such as Mac's story — based in part on Atlas' own experiences.

He was a hero and a role model to me because I had been bullied in school, and I didn't have a father to show me what to do. Because of him, I began to think about taking good care of myself,...