Don Tow's Website

The U.S. is known as a country where if you are willing to work hard, and especially if you are willing to study hard and work hard, then you will have a good future:  A good education, a good job, and a good life.  The U.S. is a country full of opportunities, and they are there for your taking if you are willing to work toward it.  This reputation is what attracted so many millions of people from all over the world to come to this country during the last 200 years, especially during the last 60 years when the U.S. became the most powerful and richest country in the world.  People come in the form of legal immigration and sometimes in the form of illegal immigration.  The ability to have a good future if you are willing to work for it, definitely for your children if not also for yourselves, is known as the American Dream.
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During the winter of early 1956, a group of members from the El Dorado County Federal Church (a Methodist church) visited our house in Placerville, California to welcome our family as recent immigrants to the U.S. and new attendees of their church.  The outside temperature was in the 20’s or 30’s.  The inside temperature was in the low 50’s, because we did not have a furnace in our house at that time and the house was poorly insulated.  Not being accustomed to such a cold house, our church visitors stayed for only a few minutes.  This article recollects selected incidents from a life involving two cultures and two countries.

How did our family end up in Placerville, California, a small town between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe with a population of about 3,000?  Placerville was formerly known as Hangtown because it was so lawless during the gold rush days of the 19th century that lawbreakers were first hanged singly and then in pairs.  In the center of town today, there is still a replica of the hanging tree.  If it weren’t for my father continuing to exchange Christmas cards with his former dormitory roommate at Brown University, we would have settled in Providence, Rhode Island when we immigrated from Hong Kong to the U.S. in October 1955.

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