Mak Shui Ka

Interview Description

Oral History Interview with Mak Shui Ka

Mak Shui Ka was born in Naahn Sehk Village, in China's Guangdong Province, to a wealthy, prominent family. She grew up with servants and attended the country's most prestigious schools. Her family's fortunes reversed during the opium suppression effort, which drove the family business into the ground, and the Communist "liberation," which repossessed her family's estate and brought persecution to her father. Ka relocated to America and eventually settled with her husband and three children in New York City. In Brooklyn, Ka took on odd jobs and experienced poverty for the first time. She persevered and joined the Seamstresses' Union, the Coalition of Women, and became a community organizer; championing the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn's Chinese community and pursuing antidiscrimination activity. At the time of the 1993 interview, Ka lived happily in Sunset Park with her husband; her three adult children lived nearby.

In this interview, Mak Shui Ka discusses her life's history in Communist China; upbringing, schools, her family, and persecution, as well as her successes as a conscripted cadet. Mrs. Ka describes her life in America, which brought her first experiences with poverty and grave anti-Chinese discrimination. She describes an extensive anti-Chinese pogrom waged by the Italian members of the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. In response, Ka helped organize a community protest event and delivered a speech that vowed constant vigilance. She details extensively another incident of discrimination in which police stormed an apartment in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan, then beat the family inside; including a pregnant woman. Ka was called as a community first responder; taking photographs and witness testimony, and helped prosecute the police members. In relation to Sunset Park, Ka also references her real estate transactions, the rent prices and taxes, and neighborhood crime. Interview in Cantonese conducted by Ka-Kam Chui.

Brooklyn Historical Society collaborated with the Chinatown History Museum (now the Museum of Chinese in America) in order to conduct a series of oral histories with residents of the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The Cantonese, Mandarin, and English language interviews focused on what was then a new presence of Chinese and Asian immigrants concentrated along Eighth Avenue. Among the topics that are explored in the interviews are tensions between different groups of Chinese immigrants, crime and safety in the neighborhood, Sunset Park's relationship to Manhattan's Chinatown, and how long-term residents of Sunset Park had adjusted to the area's "newcomers."

Citation

Ka, Mak Shui, Oral history interview conducted by Ka-Kam Chui, November 13, 1993, New Neighbors: Sunset Park's Chinese Community records, 1994.007.15; Brooklyn Historical Society.