"I could never forget that," Richard says, reliving his bewilderment. "There was a lot of that certainly
in those days." Years later, when Richard did end up marrying a
caucasian woman, her family snubbed their wedding. The only guest
from either side of the family was Sue Ling.
As a girl following a full decade later, Sue Ling seemed to have suffered less racism. She
was a tomboy, popular with girls, feared by boys. Especially the
boys who had the misfortune of being terrorized by her.
"She was a tough kid," Richard recalls, chuckling. "The boys had a tough time with her, boy! She
wasn't afraid of anything. She'd pick up those garden snakes, chase
the boys around. She definitely wasn't a meek little girl that
went around in nice little dresses."
Cantonese. To this day Richard retains some of the Cantonese though
his accent is pure midwestern. Sue Ling speaks even less Cantonese
today than she did as a child. There was little opportunity to
speak Catonese after their father's death. Mrs Gin was a quiet,
reclusive woman who kept mostly to herself, even at home.
"My mother was pretty well sheltered from what was happening in the real world,"
Richard recalls. "My dad did everything for her. She never had
to worry about anything. She stayed home, took care of the kids.
She never was out in that outside world too much. She never had
anything to do with the restaurants or anything like that."
It was 1950 when the elder Gin died of an abdominal
hemorrhage caused by a peptic ulcer, a condition whose treatment baffled
doctors in those days. "Basically he got a hole in his stomach," Richard
says. "He went quick. In a week's time he was gone. A week or less in
the hospital, and it was all over with. I saw him die. I was there."
Sue Ling wasn't there at Copley General Hospital to share her father's
final moments, nor did she ever discuss the subject with Richard.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
At that time Sue Ling was 9 and Richard was 19, a sophomore at Aurora College. His dream of graduating
and going into retail management, maybe even to go work for Sears, the
locally-based retailing giant, gave way to the harsh necessity of supporting
the family. He dropped out and took charge of Paradise In. It was not
a happy time.
"It kinda messed my life up,"
Richard says. "At 19 I wasn't ready to settle down to a business like
that." Unhappy about being tethered to the restaurant six or seven days
a week, Richard sold out within two years to the man who had been his
father's partner. He then bought a laundromat from a couple that was
retiring. He spruced up the place and added new machines. Before long
he had a nice little operation that was generating enough profits to
take care of his mother and two sisters. Contrary to articles published
elsewhere, Sue Ling didn't start working while Richard ran the restaurant
and the laundromat.
The Corean War had erupted around the time
of the elder Gin's death in 1950. By 1954 it had simmered into an uneasy
cease fire but Uncle Sam was taking no chances, not with all the red
Chinese soldiers still massed up in Manchuria.
"I was doing real well," says Richard of the laundromat. "Then they wanted to draft me."
After 41 years he remains disgruntled by Uncle Sam's callousness
in drafting a widow's only son and sole support. "If I knew then
what I know now, I would have fought them tooth and nail. I should
have been exempt." The government suckered him into going by promising
extra support payments for his mother and sisters. Richard was
forced to sell at a firesale price the tidy little laundromat he
had built up with his own hands. His two-year army stint consisted
of 18 months in the Far East, of which 13 were spent in Corea as
the chief clerk of an ambulance company.
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