Phoenix Chinese American Citizens Alliance (PCACA) helped celebrated Chinese New Year of the Rabbit by serving Chinese lunch to Kindergarten and First Grade classes at Richards E. Miller School on Friday, January 28th. Helping serve at the gala event were (L to R) Rudy Yee, Les Gin, Jim Ong and Benny Yee. (Photo by John H. Tang)

On December 10, 2010 over a luncheon at the Great Wall Restaurant in Phoenix, a further important step towards the opening of this new affordable housing for the elderly occurred...for more details. click here.

斐匿余風采堂訊

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Yee Clan Celebrates 22nd Anniversary

On Saturday, April 30th, the Phoenix Yee Fung Toy Family Association gathered at its Clan Hall to commemorate the 22nd Anniversary of its initial opening with a traditional festivity to honor the eponymous ancestor of this patrilineage. In the customary fashion of relatively modern ancestral veneration, which had roots in ancestor worship by the kings of the earliest dynasties for their royal deceased, rites were conducted before the supposed portrait of Yu Feng-tsai.

The salient aspect of those rites was the presentation of six whole roasted pigs (a style of preparation unique to the Cantonese of Guangdong Province), followed by an offering of incense, and a libation with whisky (substituting for the clear rice wine which was of course not very available to earlier overseas Chinese communities). These rites were implemented by Mr. Willie Yee, as Mr. Ken Yee intoned especially to the male descendants gathered in front the call to offer three bows of respect.

Then, the six pigs were offered up both for the free luncheon on site accompanied by other entrees brought/bought by others, and topped off with a variety of desserts, as well as for distribution in generous slices to all Family Association members (with modest dues paid). The operation to butcher, to serve, and then to clean up and restore the Clan Hall to its normal status as a meeting facility involved many hours before and during and after with many hands and a spirit of cooperative unity and familial good cheer.

This year, the record attendance was marked not only by an overfull parking lot at the 16th Street site, but also by the attendance of many business and community leaders of the general Chinese-American community. Their presence was accounted by all the Yee Family as a mark of great honor and was of course deeply appreciated.

This year, the six roasted pigs with their richly seasoned flesh and distinctively crisped skin were the personal donations of:

Mr. & Mrs. Kam Yi Yee, Mr. & Mrs. Doon Yee, Mr. & Mrs. Benny Yee, Mr. Edward Yue, Mrs. Jerry M. Yee and Mr. John M. Yee.

The current President of the Family Association, Mr. David M. Yee, had delivered welcoming remarks at the onset of this occasion, and he had made his donation of a roasted pig when the Chinese New Year rites were conducted to anticipate hopefully the Spring for which that Festival is named in Chinese parlance.

It has been the matter of some misconstruance in certain portions of the contemporary society, abetted by sloppy terminology even by scholarly commentators, not to say the non-specialists, to dub these rites as ancestor worship. Indeed, it appears from the inscriptions on tortoise shells and cattle shoulder blades, especially from excavations of Shang Dynasty sites in north China, that the kings not only worshipped their ancestors, thought (it is believed) to have ascended to Heaven (T’ien), but prepared for their own afterlife with lavish grave goods including the death of slaves and horses. By the Chou Dynasty, those rites had transformed into the offering of “three livings” – a live ox, a live ram, and a live pig – sacrificed to be sure. In more modern times, at the Ching Ming (or Clear-Bright) Festival, 120 days after the Winter Solstice, and thus either April 4 or April 5, when families would head to local hillocks to “sweep” their gravesites, the “three livings” were usually a roasted or boiled fowl (chicken or goose), a slab of roasted/cooked pork, and a fried/steamed fish – all of which would be “whole” in the sense of the first of having both head and feet unremoved. Very practical when climbing uphill…

By the time Roman Catholic missionary efforts were gathering steam in early Ch’ing, after pioneering efforts in the late Ming by the likes of Matteo Ricci, Westerners and Christians had had to try to discern what the customs of ancestral veneration came to mean. In the famous so-called “Chinese Rites” controversy, the Jesuits noted that Christians for over a millennia had well understood themselves that they worship God but they venerate the saints, with whom all Christians are in communion according to the Apostles Creed. These Chinese customs were just the manner by which according to Chinese culture, the Jesuits argued, respect was paid to ancestors by veneration: the Chinese by the 1600s were not “worshipping” their ancestors.

The Dominicans disagreed. Eventually Popes Clement XIII and XIV ruled in favor of the Dominicans and thereby outraged the K’ang-hsi era emperor, for having some foreign religious authority dare to demand that Chinese subjects cease their filial piety, which was a key linkage of familial and imperial order, of social hierarchy and political loyalty. As a result, the effort to convert China by the Apostolic See would wither away, and the gunboats bring opium and Protestant missionaries from the mid-1800s would only add a new and hardly more appealing aroma to the clash of cultures in misunderstanding…

(In 1939, finally, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith set aside the particular Bull of Clement XIII as “not useful” and so, Rome can maintain that no Pope has flat reversed a previous Pope, for Tradition is a key component of that denomination’s claim to exclusive keys to the kingdom – to be the sole route to salvation. Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized this with the return to a grammatical usage: the Protestants do not have churches – ecclesia – but only “church-like” – ecclesial – assemblies.)

Thus, the fate of the last prayer of Jesus Christ on the night before He was betrayed, which Christians remember in the Lenten season now leavened with Easter, that His followers might all be one as He and the Father were one… Yet, indeed, we Chinese are not much behind Christians for division and disunity looking at the broad sweep of history -- for China can be assessed to have been unified for only about 60% of her long dynastic record.

All the more the hopeful note from the Hebrew scriptures – “how pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity” – can at least occasionally be manifested as it was among the Yees on April 30th.

By Yee Moon-cheak

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斐匿（鳳凰城）余風釆堂於四月三十日慶祝購買產業 22 週年

Rep. Kimberly Yee receives the 2011 Representative of the Year Award on June 24, 2011. Photo by Timon Harper.

峽谷勁松余文勁

Mr. John M. Yee (Yu Wenjin), for the decades of his benefiting our Chinese-American society, (as well as for) his warm-hearted services to family/clan, has won many a title. Were these all to be hats he could wear one each day, in a month’s time, he could not don them all (and this is not to enumerate at least three dozen awards and plaques of honor). Instead, however, John Yee would likely have them be as shoes, for he is very down-to-earth [as a person], hard at work, always working. His life journey is one where he has left many footprints of service to our Chinese-American community.

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Autumn Annual Picnic Of Phoenix Yees

On November 6, Sunday, the Phoenix Yee Fung-toy Family Association gathered for our Annual Autumn Picnic. Beginning last year, thanks to the leadership of Association President, David M. Yee, who has served as the chief executive of the Phoenix Koi Club and also on the board of the Japanese Friendship Garden in the City of Phoenix Margaret T. Hance Park, the site for the event proved to be a major underlying factor for its success.

The fenced space includes fixed seating and tables under spacious ramadas; the parking is ample and adjacent; the locale is the heart of central Phoenix, readily reached by expressway and yet in a quiet, long-established neighborhood; the facilities of the Park afford immediately available overflow space that is well-kept and grassy; and, free passes are available for participants to stroll through the beauty and meditative sanctuary of the Friendship Garden with its vistas, statuaries and accents, and even a waterfall to highlight its flowing streams bridged over but teaming with koi.

Another factor adding to the festivity is the invitation to the broader local Chinese-American community to join in – there were leaders from other associations, and from the bilingual media, as well as the personal friends of Yees. It goes without saying that for many years now, the Association has always invited all married Yee women to come, altering the old customary perspective ‘from the Old Country’ that a daughter after her wedding belonged to another household/family/clan and was no longer a Yee. We are, after all, Americans of Chinese descent and our freedoms include the chance to reassess and to improve on the old while not slavishly following the new.

Naturally, every year, the informal setting, plus the advent of a season when the weather reminds us in Arizona of why we love to live here (the summer having thankfully passed), means the real hubbub of happiness emits with the scurrying and screaming kids who don’t have to be cosseted and closed in with formal seats at round tables in a crowded restaurant affair.

Overall, perhaps nearly 300 persons of all ages and provenance enjoyed a Yee event that is now almost as populous as the annual Spring Festival Banquet for the Chinese Lunisolar New Year in March – which achieves its particular synergy and savoir faire by the careful consideration beforehand of whom to seat with whom, so that perennial friends and particular non-friends of varying degrees are appropriately placed for conversation and conviviality. (This is an exercise that is not only Chinese, but Byzantine; fortunately, the convolutions are merely of current time and personalities, and not carryovers from our rural villages of more than a century ago – although the time frame is no barrier for memories in lineage that was established in the late Spring and Autumn [Annals] era [771 to 403 B.C.E.] by Duke Miao of Qin for Yao Yu, and then first used as our current surname by his grandchildren.)

The typical picnic fare of hamburgers, hotdogs, chicken breasts, veggie burgers, etc. with all the trimmings was of course elevated by Cantonese barbecue pork, stir-fry vegetable combination, and an array of both American and Chinese desserts from stores and home kitchens. Even with the ravenous hordes, leftovers remained to be distributed as well as the usual picnic accessories in drinks and coolers and extra tables and chairs to be hauled away. Like so many other events and activities, the adage that many hands make light work was demonstrated yet again on this day. So long as folks bear this in mind, the schedule of the Association, year by year, cannot be daunting but rather inviting for the good time, the good fellowship, and of course the good food that will be all brought together as we celebrate our ancestral heritages and our American blessings.

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