The middle child of a large immigrant family, Jasmine Lim spent her childhood in New York City and Long Island. Jasmine just celebrated the 100th anniversary of her late father, a WWII veteran, arriving in the US as a Chinese immigrant. She has lived in Parsippany for 36 years, has held a variety of city management positions throughout New Jersey, is currently retired, and volunteers on the board for Habitat for Humanity.
“But [illegal immigration] has arisen over the past ten years or so and it really brought to the forefront my father coming here as an illegal immigrant and how, you know, we wouldn’t be here if we, if he hadn’t come here, we wouldn’t have had the opportunities that we’ve had. That there is a bright, positive side to opening up our borders and, um, and that our country can be better.”
ANNOTATIONS
Annotations coming soon.
TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by Dan Swern
Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey
June 6, 2023
Transcription by Allison Baldwin
0:00
Today is Tuesday, June 6th, 11:07am. This is Dan Swern conducting an oral history here at the Parsippany-Troy Hills Public Library. I’m here sitting with
Jasmine Lim
Jasmine, thank you so much for taking the time today to do this interview. Whenever you’re ready just please feel free to start from the beginning.
Okay. Well, actually, I think my first memory was when my brother was born. Although I probably would have only been a little over a year old, so I don’t know if I’m just, um, recalling stories that were told. He was actually born in the tenement apartment that we lived in at the time and, um, I think I actually recall it pretty vividly because it was a very significant event, um, but, so we lived in that tenement for about two years, um, it was a very typical New York City tenement and we moved into the Baruch Housing Project when I was about 2 or 3. And, um, it was a public housing project. It had just been built. There were probably about ten buildings all together in the complex, and so my next memory, and a very vivid memory, was when my brother was born when I was 3.
And what I remember is, my aunt was taking care of us, and when my father brought my brother home, he drove purposely to the back of the building so that we could look out the window and see them when they came home, and we were on the twelfth story and we were yelling out the window “Di, Di, Di Di,” which means little brother. And, um, waving wildly. And so that’s my next very vivid memory.
Most of my childhood, in New York anyway, is a bit of a blur, but it was a very happy childhood. I, you know, I, um, I’m trying to think of some of the other non-structured times that I remember. I remember, I was too young to know what a dream was and my brother and sister were talking about their dreams and I was like, “Oh, I had a dream too,” and they were like, “Oh, what did you dream about?” and I repeated what one of them said. Almost verbatim. I just made it up because, so that was kind of funny. I remember building tents in my parents bedroom, out of– because we had two cribs in the bedroom, so stringing the blankets across the cribs and between the cribs and my parents bed.
And I remember playing out in the playground. Very typical New York City playground. Not concrete but asphalt. And going to the movies with my parents in Chinatown and then going later with my brother. We were significantly older when we started going to the American movies on our own.
My oldest sister did not speak much English before she went to school, so we spoke Chinese pretty exclusively, um, until she went to school. Once she started school. She’s four years older than I am. Yeah. Once she started school, we started speaking more English. My father would speak to us in English, but my mother, she didn’t like that. She wanted us to learn Chinese and speak Chinese, so she would try to talk into, speaking to us in Chinese instead. But we pretty much, by the time, I don’t remember exclusively speaking Chinese because, well, by the time I started speaking my sister was already in kindergarten, so we would have started speaking English.
Do I just keep going? So, I had a really good childhood. The school that I went to was– the elementary school that I went to was maybe the equivalent to– of two to three blocks away from our building and, um, I really enjoyed school. I went because I was the fourth child, I saw my siblings going off to the school and really wanted to be a part of that. So, when my father dropped me off at kindergarten, he was expecting me to start crying and he waited a little bit because I guess the other three had cried when he dropped them off, and I just turned around and said bye and went right over to the jigsaw puzzles to play with, but I– I really enjoyed school.
6:00
So, when we were living in Manhattan, we all went to Chinese school after regular school. The Chinese school was from, I think, 4:00 to 7:00. So, my mother would take us to Chinatown on the bus and we would go to Chinese school. We would come home and have dinner and it would basically be bedtime after dinner. Um, we, um, when we were in Chinese school, uh, my sister and I were part of the– there was a fife and bugle corps, and we were both part of that, and it got to march in some of the parades in Manhattan, some of the big parades in Manhattan. That was pretty exciting. So, we lived– I went up to fourth grade in Chinese school and fifth grade in regular school, in public school, before we moved to Manhasset Long Island and, um, so I started in Manhasset in sixth grade, which, at that time, was still elementary school. It was the last year of elementary school.
So, um, my, um, my two younger brothers and I did fairly well in the Manhasset school system. Manhasset is a very wealthy, upper middle-class town. Um, so we did fairly well because we started in Manhasset in elementary school. Because I think kids were a lot more oblivious to differences, whether that be socio-economic, racial, ethnic differences, and my three older siblings probably did less well, you know, in terms of having fewer friends and being less involved in school activities. So, I graduated from Manhasset high school in 1970 and I did very well when I was there, was very active.
In high school I was a cheerleader. I was on the tennis team. I was on the girl’s athletic council. I was involved in our class government. I was, um, after graduation I attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. And graduated there with a degree in an independent major in urban studies, um, and that was in 1974 that I graduated. After graduation, well, during Wellesley, I did enjoy Wellesley very much. It really gave me a lot more self-confidence than I had previously. I still think of myself as being a little shy, but people laugh when I tell them that. Because I have pretty much outgrown my shyness, but I am still relatively quiet. But, um, it just gave me so much confidence in my abilities and, but during my time at Wellesley I met my now ex-husband Stan Young.
10:00
And, um, we started dating the spring of freshman year. And we were married right after graduation and we moved to Seattle, Washington where he was accepted into a doctoral program in Chemistry. We lived in Seattle for about five years. While we were in Seattle– when we first went to Seattle I was, it was during 1974, so it was during the recession, so I had a hard time finding a job, so I ended up doing clerical work for about a year and a half, two years before I started a graduate program in Urban Planning at the University of Washington. While I was at the UW for graduate school, I had an internship, uh, with the city in Everett in the Urban Planning department, so I worked part time for them, um, for a year and a half before I finished my studies and started working full time with Everett. I was there for three years as the– I was a planner but I was in charge of the housing community development division. And that was my last, I think, year and a half with Everett. My boss had resigned to take another job and I was given his position. That was a really, really great job. It was probably one of my favorite jobs.
And I learned a lot. I achieved a lot, and that also gave me a lot more self-confidence in my abilities and, you know, just really working with a group of people. And having to get up in front of the city council with sometimes 200 people in the room. And, you know, I still struggle, even now I struggle with that a little bit. But, you know, if I was regularly in front of a mic I started getting better and better at it.
After Stan got his Ph.D. he got a postdoc at Cornell, so we moved to Ithaca, New York. And we were only there for, I was only there for a year and a half. Stan moved before I did. Probably six months. He, um, he, um, I stayed in Seattle because I wanted to finish up a very large grant application for the city, so we did that and we– so I, when I moved to Ithaca, I already had a job waiting for me. It was probably, almost the only possible job I could have had in Ithaca, um, as a housing community development planner.
But, um, I was only there for about two years. It was probably two years I was there, and again, Stan left before I did. Stan moved to New Jersey for a job that his best friend from MIT had started. It was a genetic engineering company. So, again, I was trying to finish up a grant application. It was the same grant application, and so Stan left first and then I moved down.
I was already pregnant when Stan left. And I moved down about a month before my son was born. And, um, we lived in Nutley, New Jersey for just about a year, not much longer than that, and bought a house in West Paterson, which is now Woodland Park, New Jersey which was, the house was probably five miles from where Stan worked.
15:03
So, when my son was born, my son was born, I had stopped working and I had moved to a new location, and so it was not going to be easy to find a job, so I stayed home until Matt was two and half and, um, then I started working part time for a consulting firm. And that was hard. It was hard for two reasons. When I first started, I was working from my house primarily, and it was hard to, it just wasn’t something that I was used to, just being alone and working, and, you know, of course we didn’t have videos then. We, you know, we didn’t, I don’t think we had conference calls then. We may have but I don’t think so. So, it was– it was lonely. I enjoyed the work, but I didn’t enjoy working by myself at home. And then my boss started asking us to come into the office to work, and unfortunately the office was outside of Trenton so it was a very long commute. So, I started carpooling with someone else who worked for the same company. But it was hard. I frequently wouldn’t get home in time to pick Matt up and it created a lot of friction because, you know, you would run into traffic and it was not easy.
So, um, my consulting– one of my clients, when I was with the, uh, um, when I was with the consulting firm was Parsippany, the town of Parsippany, so, um, at one point the mayor, Mayor Priore asked me if I would consider coming to work for the town. And I jumped at that opportunity. So, I worked part-time initially and then as, um, uh, I guess it was housing planner. I can’t remember what my title was. It was some strange title like laborer because that was– supposedly that was the only way they could slot me in as a part-timer. So, um, I did that for a couple of years, working part-time, and then I went full time. And then eventually over the years I became the Business Administrator for Parsippany. I left Parsippany when we adopted our daughter. I had actually been looking for an opportunity to leave Parsippany for a number– I would say for as much as a year before, and her coming was kind of a great opportunity to save face all around. It worked out well and it was a good time for me to leave. And I was able to spend a year and a half with my daughter after we adopted her. She was two when we adopted her. From Hong Kong. And I went, I actually went to Hong Kong to pick her up, which was really great because I got to see the orphanage where she was and got a sense of what her life would have been like before I picked her up, and I really loved Hong Kong. It was a really great city. So, I stayed home with her for a year and a half and then I started applying for jobs. Well, after about a year I started applying for jobs. I was kind of ready to go back to work. And she was doing really well. She adjusted incredibly well. To the United States. And so I started applying for jobs, which was not easy, and it seemed like there were not a lot of jobs available in– that were nearby. They were in other counties, counties that I was not familiar with, Union County, Mercer, which would have been fairly significant commutes for me, which I was not looking forward to.
20:00
But at the time, you know, I probably would have taken a job just to have a job. And so I did end up going to Vernon, New Jersey as the town administrator. And that was a forty-five minute commute, but it was a very steady forty-five minutes. It was reverse commuting and it never varied. There was never such a thing as rush hour traffic and/or accidents on the route so it was a relatively easy commute. So, I was in Vernon for three years, and I left Vernon to become the manager of Randolph township where I stayed for three years before I left. I left Randolph because the council asked me to leave, so rather than having kind of a drawn-out fight I left, and to this day I don’t feel like I did anything wrong but– and I don’t have any regrets about what I did there, but they had the majority of votes to– it was– it was not a unanimous vote at all and that was probably another one of my favorite jobs. The staff there was really great. We had really great volunteers on boards that were very committed to the town.
And I– it was a just a town that in my, in the field of public administration in New Jersey, was very well-respected for being well-managed and well-governed. So, it was a very prestigious position. After I left Randolph I– actually even before I left Randolph I was approached by the township of Montville. To ask whether I would consider coming as the assistant administrator there and, um, I did go there as the assistant administrator, and it was a pretty easy job for me, and one of the reasons I took it was, um, because my husband and I had separated with the intention of getting divorced. It was not a trial separation.
And I, he was moving to Colorado, so I was going to be a single parent and I needed to make time for my kids. Matt was 14 and Jana was about 8 at the time that he left, so I was in Montville as the assistant administrator for eight years. And, you know, it was an okay job. It wasn’t great. I liked the one administrator that I worked for the longest, and I enjoyed working with him. And I had one other really good friend who, that I met in Montville, who considers me to be his mentor. And I’m still very good friends with him. Um, and he also became an administrator and is doing incredibly well. So that’s kind of a rewarding thing for me.
While I was in Montville I was getting kind of antsy to be an administrator again and, um, a couple of times even before, while I was in Montville, Mimi Letts who was the mayor at that time, asked me several times whether I would consider being the assistant administrator in Parsippany and I said no. And the last time she asked me I said to her, “You can’t afford me,” because I was getting paid well in Montville for being the assistant.
25:00
But when, um, uh, Michael Luther was elected Mayor of Parsippany he was looking for a new business administrator, and I think he had some other people actually in mind before he actually met with me, and he– turned out he was by far my favorite mayor. Very, very smart. Very dedicated to the community. His father had been mayor at some point, but Mike only lasted one term, which was really unfortunate. I think he was, I think he was a great mayor but maybe not a great politician, which was really unfortunate. So, when Jamie Barberio was elected, he thought about keeping me on, and I know that he had some advisors that were advising him to start with a brand new slate and to not consider hiring me, but I know there were people on staff who had his ear who were encouraging him to keep me on. So, at one point we– we did finally meet and it was a really, really great meeting, um, and he offered me the job provisionally, and I said I wasn’t willing to accept that because it would indicate to the public that he didn’t have confidence in me. So, we talked about that for a while and he did appoint me. So that was four years.
All eight years of my time in Parsippany were very, very difficult because Mayor Luther was a Dem with a Republican council, so there was a lot of fighting and a lot of politicking, and then when Jamie was elected he was a Republican with a Republican council, but it was a little bit divided and it was, you know, it was, and, um, and I had to sit at all of the council meetings and I felt like we were constantly targeted for attacks, um, so it wasn’t– it was very, very difficult and very stressful. When– before I left Montville, I had started seeing John Caldwell, and he had already retired before I met him, and he was really pressuring me to retire because I was just so stressed. I was basically being non communicative with him because I just didn’t feel like talking about work.
And so I finally retired after being back in Parsippany for eight years and, um, it’s been a really great retirement. When I first retired, I really kind of floundered a little bit. I became a couch potato. I watched a lot of tv. Ate a lot of snacks. But eventually I ended up on the board of Morris Habitat for Humanity and that provided some structure to my life. And, um, I– I kind of fell into volunteer work and I didn’t spend all of my time volunteering but enough that I had something to do with my life.
And then my granddaughter was born two years after I retired, so I started babysitting for her and that’s– that’s been a really wonderful relationship. The one other thing I actually did before she was born was I was taking care of my mom. My brothers and I were splitting some responsibilities with my mother.
30:03
Before she actually needed care, we– I was able to because I was retired. I was able to spend much more time with her than I had before, even more so once we started caring for her. I’m just very grateful for that time that I had with her. It’s time that I would never have had and I didn’t have prior to my retirement. So, that’s– that’s the short of it.
Jasmine, thank you. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to share a little bit about how your parents came to this country.
Sure. My father came in, um, 1922. He came as a paper son, what is referred to as a paper son. Both my parents are from China. From the same region of China. And, um, in 1882 the United States enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was actually the first ever immigration law passed in the United States. It limited the number of Chinese who could come to the country, who could come into the country to fifty a year and to merchants only.
So, in 1906 there was, I’m pretty sure it was 1906, there was the earthquake in San Francisco that devastated San Francisco, and I think almost all the buildings were wood, so almost 80% of San Francisco was destroyed because, following the earthquake, there were also fires. So, when– with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Chinese merchants who were already in the United States could/would record any sons or children that were born. Um, they– when the merchants would go back to China, I don’t think they were allowed to bring their wives, so the wives would stay in China and the merchants would go back to China, and they would have children and they would record the children, because the children would have been allowed to come to the United States. Or at least the boys. So, with the San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires, all of those records were destroyed, and so I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of Chinese from China. Mostly Cantonese from Canton, um, claim to be sons, and there’s no way to disprove it. So when they– what would happen was they would find somebody who they could claim to be their father. And they would have to come up with the same story and they would have to memorize basically a life history and, um, they would have to, you know, the description of the house had to match the village, the layout of the village, um, so they were grilled when they came. So my father came, um, through Ellis Island in May of 1922. And I guess he passed his oral exams and he– he did have a brother living here and a cousin. The cousin may have come later, but, so he lived with my uncle.
My father was actually, I thought he was 19. I think on paper he was 19 but he was actually 15 going on 16. So, he lived with my uncle for many years. My uncle was a half a generation older than my father.
35:00
And so he had, um, his children were a half a generation younger than my father. So we actually have a– a formal family picture of them, and my father is included in the picture with all of the children, and so my father was here in the United States for a long time. He worked in the restaurant business. And eventually became part owner in many of the– of the original suburban restaurants in the tri-state area. Um, when World War II broke out, China was actually an ally of the United States, and my father fought in World War II, um, in the Pacific. He actually lied to– to fight, because to join the army because he would have otherwise been too old. He lied about his age. His service in the military was one of the proudest things for him. He– he– his army air force ring was one of– it probably was his proudest possession. But he never really talked about it. We knew very little about his service, and I think that’s pretty typical of World War II vets. Most of them just do not talk about it.
And when he was in the army, he was actually naturalized, and the army knew that most of the Chinese men in the United States were paper sons, and at the time that he was naturalized, um, he was allowed to go back to his, revert back to his real Chinese name rather than his paper son name. He elected not to and I’m not sure why. What he told us was that he always saw his American name as– as his American name and his Chinese name as his Chinese name and that his friends knew both names and he didn’t see any reasons for changing.
But he was, because China was an ally, he and many other Chinese men were able to go back to China and bring back a wife, so my father went with the thought of marrying someone else, but he met my mother before and decided to marry my mother. So, she was brought here. She was 18 at the time and her papers say 19. I was told it was because she would not have been– I think Hong Kong would not have allowed her to leave the country, um, unless she was 19. It might have been she was not allowed to get married, but that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me. Um, so she came here, didn’t speak any English, started having children right away, and she– her– she didn’t really speak much English until we moved out to Manhasset when I was 11 because we lived among many Chinese people and we lived close to Chinatown so she really didn’t have to learn English.
But once we moved out to Manhasset she did, she, um, she needed to use English a lot more. Oh, I know, what I wanted to say was my mother actually was in Hong Kong when my father met her and it was because her father was a– a landowner, and so the Communists killed a lot of the landowners, and he was killed by the Communists, so the rest of the family fled to Hong Kong and I really don’t know how many years she spent in Hong Kong. Before my father brought her here.
40:00
Thank you. I’m wondering if you could speak a little to your memories of your father’s business, how and where it intercepted with your childhood.
Okay, um, my father was– he was– he had shares in several restaurants but he was a one-third owner of a restaurant in Manhasset called Leong’s[1] , which is our Chinese name, and our uncle and our cousin wanted to sell Leong’s and my father did not, so he bought them out and Leong’s was located on what’s referred to as the Miracle Mile in Manhasset. A string of pretty exclusive shops. Lord and Taylor, B. Altman’s, I’m trying to think of some of the other stores, Bonwit Teller, and so the business was, it was a thriving business. It did very well.
In order to buy out our cousin and uncle, he sold, I think, all of the shares he had in the other restaurants. And, um, unfortunately my father was a terrible businessman and he ended up losing the business. He sold it to Bruce Ho, who had a restaurant in Manhattan, so it was pretty well known and, um, most of the staff was the same, especially the cooks, so the restaurant really did not change, aside from the name change, did really not change in terms of what it offered and the quality of the food. And the clientele. That stayed.
It was one of the early Chinese restaurants, and I have friends who grew up on Long Island who know the restaurant and have spent, you know, who have many fond memories of it. I don’t know if a lot of restaurants did this at the time, but we always had postcards of the restaurant that people just took, and matches, so my brothers actually started collecting them, finding them on Ebay. We don’t have a lot but my brother probably has maybe five postcards and maybe three, what do they call them? Matchbooks. And I actually had a glass tumbler, a water tumbler from Leong’s and I finally gave it to my brother because I decided he should be the holder of the Leong’s collection, and one of the things that’s interesting was the Lee-Ong’s was an Americanization of the name because it’s actually Loeong, which is very different but the restaurant was always called Leong’s. [Editor’s Note: The pronunciation of Loeong's was Americanized to Lee-Ong's. The Chinese pronunciation of the surname is Leung]
The reason we moved to Manhasset was because my father was a one-third owner [and the house came with the restaurant]. The restaurant had purchased a house for the employees, and so the employees and my father lived at this house. Five days a week. Some lived there, I think, seven days a week, they didn’t have another home. So, my father would come back to New York and spend two days with us. And when he bought the restaurant, the house came with the restaurant because it was owned by the same corporation, so we moved out to Manhasset and that turned out to be a really good move for the family.
Do you mind sharing about what your childhood was like growing up in Manhattan culturally, what you and your siblings would do, who your friends were, things like that?
I am very grateful for having grown up in Manhattan. It was very diverse. I felt safe there.
45:00
We would go out to the park by ourselves and there the neighborhood that we grew up in was very, very diverse. A lot of immigrant families. And the school, well, I think all of Manhattan schools did this but the grades were very heavily tiered, so we were always in the top class and we– it seemed like the best teachers also taught those classes so we really, um, as much as people complain about the public school system in Manhattan, I think we got a really great education there. Our friends were very diverse, um, the friends were mostly from school and, you know, I don’t remember making arrangements to get together. Somehow we, I don’t know if we met in the park, I remember there were very few, we almost never saw each other’s apartments. I remember one friend, we saw their apartment and there was really no need to because we all had the same apartment basically and, but, you know, we had friends from Chinese school, but not many. Probably in some ways my closest friend was actually my cousin. And they lived down the hall from us. She’s not my real cousin, very, very distant cousin. They lived down the hall from us when we were in the projects and then they moved to Chinatown, so when they moved to Chinatown I kind of followed them. I spent a lot of weekends with them and went to church with them, and my aunt took me to a lot of different places, um, and she’s, I think that she’s probably the biggest influence, um, for my family and my mother especially who acculturated us.
And it was– I really– I was kind of a sponge for adventure, and I think it was because of the time that I spent with her, and she just took me to so many different places. My sister, who was four years older, was almost like a second mother to me, and so she took me to a lot of places too. She was, when she was in high school, um, she would have assignments and, um, it’s such a different time now, so we would hop on the subway and go to the Museum of Natural History or the art museum and, um, and I remember once, we got out of the subway and she said, “Uh-oh,” and I said “What?” and she said we got off at the wrong stop and it was in Harlem, I think.
But she was young, she was probably 14 or 15 at the time, but she was able to navigate the New York City subway system. And so she was a big influence in my life also.
What did you– what did you in the siblings do just to have fun? Where in the neighborhood would you go?
The playground. There were two playgrounds. One was the little kids’ playground and it was on the way to the big kids’ playground. But we would play, there’s a game called Skully and I don’t know if you know what that is. It’s bottle tops on the asphalt and you would, um, and you would click your finger and push the bottle top, and I think they actually had an outline of a board, and it just had four corners marked out. But we played that, we were on the swings. I don’t remember being on the slide that much, I just remember they had a low slide. They had a lot of swings. And sometimes we would just, oh, hopscotch, of course, jump rope. I don’t think we played any ball games. We may have.
50:00
We may have played, what’s it called. The game where you play against the wall, you have a ball and you play against the wall. But we didn’t play stick ball. We didn’t play the typical suburban games, so we didn’t do kick the can until we moved to Manhasset. We didn’t play softball until we moved to Manhasset. I was going to say we didn’t ride bikes, but I did learn to ride a bike in second grade. My boyfriend then [laughs] taught me how to ride his bike. That’s actually a pretty vivid memory, too, is when, we were in the parking lot where my father used to park his car. So, um, uh, so that was the only place we really played. At night a lot of times people would sit out in front of the buildings. There were benches, so we would run around, but I don’t remember– there was no play equipment, so the adults would sit and the Mr. Softee truck would always come in the summer, and so maybe that’s why we were sitting there [laughs] waiting for Mr. Softee to show up. But that’s, uh, we did that very frequently.
Did you want to talk about your ex-husband, how you and he met?
Um, sure. Stan. First, he’s Caucasian, despite his name. We met at a mixer at MIT. Stan’s best friend Warren and my best friend Karen had both graduated from Teaneck High School and grew up in Teaneck, so Karen and I were walking into the mixer and Stan and Warren were standing on the steps, so we stopped and talked to them for a little bit and kind of just went into the mixer.
A few months later, we, um, in the dorm, um, they would make announcements over the PA and they called for a friend of mine Anahid [unclear], and I knew that she wasn’t around so I said “Well, she’s not here,” and they said, “Well, she has a visitor,” and so I went down stairs and they said “oh, we’re here to see Anahid, and it turned out to be Stan and Warren, and I think one other of their friends and I said, “Oh, okay, well, she’s not here and I’m not sure when she’s coming back.”
And so I said, “If you want to come up, you can come up,” so they came up and we talked a little bit and then when Anahid showed up it turned out it was the wrong Anahid. There’s an Anahid in the dorm next door. But, um, shortly after that Stan and I started going out.
But, so, we were married for twenty-three years before we got divorced. We had Matt and Jana. We had a nice life. It was a two-income family, so we were able to do a lot of nice vacations, um, our first house was nice for what it was as first time homeowners, and the house that we bought in Parsippany, I’ve lived in for thirty-six years, so, uh, I was actually a little bit surprised when he said he wanted to get divorced.
We had gone to marriage counseling for probably less than a year and it didn’t really work. So I guess that was my first sign. But when he actually said he wanted to get divorced, I was pretty shocked. And, um, but I didn’t fight it. And it was– it was the divorce was hard only because of the financial issues. We were fighting over the finances and he was, I’m trying to remember if he even had a job to go to when he went to Colorado. By the time we were divorced, or we were getting divorced, he did have a job, and it was– the pay was significantly lower than what he had been making in New Jersey.
55:03
So, um, I know I could have gotten a lot more money from him in terms of childcare. But it just wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t worth the fight for me. It was, the fight was taking its toll on me. Um, we– Stan has continued to live in Colorado all of these years and has remarried. Remarried actually pretty shortly after we got divorced. And we are, after we had our last– our last financial fight, we actually have become friends again. I don’t see him a lot. I only see him when he comes to visit the kids, but we are on very good terms.
I wanted to ask, professionally, what does a town manager do? A town administrator.
A town, uh, they’re actually a little bit different. The town manager is the CEO of the town and a town administrator works as, is, the chief administrative officer. So, they both oversee the various departments. In Parsippany’s form of government the mayor is full time and so he is the chief executive and so, um, ah, the business administrator has almost a lesser role because the ultimate decision maker is the mayor in terms of administrative issues.
But, um, ah, you’re responsible for basically carrying out either the mayor’s policies or the council’s policies and, you know, um, but the biggest job is always the budget. Working on the budget, preparing the budget and then overseeing the budget in terms of expenditures against the budget, and making sure that they are in line with the budget. And, um, there’s a lot of involvement in legal issues, a lot of interaction with the town attorneys and the special attorneys and other, a lot of labor, getting involved in a lot of labor issues. Civil Service. And just generally providing guidance to department heads and direct reports.
What might you point to as a moment in your career that was particularly joyful or successful?
Um. Hmm. I think maybe all of my going away parties (laughter). Not because I was going away, but because they were a celebration of my time there and an affirmation of how appreciated I was by those who came to my parties. So, for example, in Randolph where I was asked to leave, um, the staff had a party for me, which was very well attended, but they specifically told the council that they were not invited and not allowed to attend. So, um, but it was– it– I had a lot of friends in Randolph and it was so, it was bittersweet, I, you know, but all of the going away parties I’ve had have been really, really wonderful.
What about a particularly challenging experience?
Well, I’ve already talked about how difficult it is to work in a political environment. And, you know, as the administrator you can’t get away from it.
1:00:00
I really loved the work itself, but the battles with the council were just, you know, even a friend of mine used to say you have to learn how to dodge those bullets, and sometimes I felt like I didn’t dodge fast enough and I would get caught in the middle, um, you know, I can’t think of any one incident, um, certainly when I was asked to leave Randolph that was a very difficult time for me. I felt somehow that I had let myself down. And, you know, and, you know, it’s– it took me a really long time to recover from it. It really did a lot of damage to my self-esteem.
What was the issue at the center of–
You know, I’m not sure, I think, my predecessor had been manager of Randolph for twenty-three years. He was a very strong personality and a very strong manager, and I think the– several of the council people did not appreciate his management style. I think they would have preferred a weaker manager, and when I was hired I was not their first choice, but I became their second choice, and I think they thought they would be able to manipulate me more than they did. I’m pretty good at standing my ground.
And doing, I mean, one of the reasons I went into administration was because I’m such a strong believer in good government and so, and, you know, I’ve always done what I thought was best for the town. And, you know, ultimately, and I tell this to some of my younger administrative friends, is that, you know, it’s up to the council to adopt policies and you have to, you know, you make your best argument for or against, and let whatever– ultimately it’s their decision and you have to go along with it.
And I think I did. But there were many ways. Probably one of the things that hurt me was that they, um, they were not happy with several of the department heads and I defended them. Vigorously. And they would have liked to see me fire at least one and I didn’t. I felt he was good enough to give him a chance to improve. And it was mostly, a lot of times residents– they don’t get their way they complain to the council and the council is, the Randolph council in particular, did not have a great appreciation for the staff. And it really was a great staff.
The person they wanted me to handle some issues, but it was mostly a personality issue not so much competence. There were a number of people who were like that on staff but they were really good at what they did. I’m not sure what the council wanted me to do with the others where they had less of an issue, um, but, um, I know they got tired of hearing complaints about some of the staff.
Do you want to share a little bit about your kids?
Oh sure. My son Matt is 40, he will be 42 this year. He’s an attorney. He went to UMass Amherst, um, and he was– in high school he was very active in marching band and actually joined while he was still in high school, the Hawthorne Caballeros, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. It’s a German Drum corps for all ages. And so when he went to UMass he was also part of the UMass marching band.
1:05:05
And that’s really been his pride and joy. My husband left when he was 14, and I think that if he didn’t have marching band and the marching band family he could have gone astray very easily. So, that was really a great lifeline for him. And he, so he, um, he went to Seton Hall Law School and he’s an attorney. He worked for a small law firm for many, many years, and about three years ago, two years ago, became a public defender and he works out of the Sussex County office.
Matt married Diane in 19– um, 1908 [edit: 2009] and they have a daughter, Claire, Claire, who is 7 now. So Matt and Diane continue to be involved in marching band. They met through the Hawthorne Caballeros and they are both instructors for the Madison High School marching band. Matt was actually at one point paid staff to the Hawthorne Caballeros, but doing that and the high school marching band was too much so he gave up the Caballeros, but, um, so, um, that’s it for them.
Jana is– we adopted Jana in 1991 and she is very different from Matt. She is very, very outgoing. Very rambunctious, And she very nicely settled down as she got older. And she went to the University of Maryland and then went, when she graduated she became an Americorp volunteer in Chicago, worked with a clinic associated with the AIDS Foundation, and after her Americorp stint was over she continued to work in the AIDS field, and while she was in Chicago she earned her Master’s in Public Health Administration, and while she was there, she decided she would rather be a practitioner than an administrator, that she wanted to work directly with clients. So, she went to Yale Nursing School and got her Master’s in nursing. She actually got, her first year, it was a three year program. Her first year she got her RN and the next two years were the masters in nursing. And she is, so she is a nurse practitioner, still in New Haven. Doing very well. She has a partner whom I like very much. I’m very proud of my kids.
One of the things I said is that sometimes I think back and I think maybe our marriage was never meant to be, but then we have these two great kids and I know it was meant to be.
1:09:00
And how is your relationship with your siblings?
We are very, very close. We have– I have one brother who’s somewhat estranged from the family, but not, with only certain members of the family. But growing up we were very close. When we were in Manhasset, as we were getting older, my brother had already, was, um, working as a landscaper, and he would talk about some of these estates that he would work on, and we used to talk about, and he actually became very interested in real estate, and I’ve always been interested in real estate, which I was why I think I became a housing planner, but, um, and we used to talk about having a family compound together on one of these big estates. And we all played tennis, and they frequently had tennis courts, and so we just thought it would work out really well if we did that.
And, you know, as adults we are very close, especially the sisters. There are four sisters all together and the four sisters are especially close, and we– almost all of the sisters have a brother that we’re close to. It is kind of interesting how we paired up and it isn’t necessarily by age. So, um, I have one brother who is super quiet. One brother who is super talkative. Well, actually, two brothers who are probably super talkative. And then my sisters, I am by far the quietest of the family and probably of the sisters. The sisters tend to be a little bit more quiet than my two brothers, but.
So, I have one sister in Italy, one in South Carolina, and one in California, and then, um, my brothers and I have stayed relatively local in terms of the New York metropolitan area. My oldest brother also has a place in Florida, so he’s spending, he’s starting to spend about half of his time in Florida and half in Flushing, New York.
How is the board work with Habitat for Humanity?
Oh, it’s great. It’s a wonderful organization and it’s easy to do good work in a good organization. You know, it’s– the staff is wonderful, the board members are wonderful, you know, we work as a team really well. There’s– I’ve never seen any controversy. And the dedication to the mission is so inspiring, we have a really great executive director, who is retiring at the end of this month, but there is one person in place that could probably take over. You know, because I’m a housing planner, I have always been involved in affordable housing, and Habitat just does great work in that regard for providing affordable housing for– affordable housing opportunities and home ownership. It’s not a model that’s going to work for every family, but they are very careful in selecting the families that eventually buy the houses that are built by Habitat.
And then, do you have a relationship with anyone in China? Is there any connection, family connection?
Um, my– our closest cousins live in Hong Kong still. Well, I take that back, one actually lived in South America for a long time and then Toronto, um, and he has moved back to Hong Kong. He’s older than I am. And his brother has always lived in Hong Kong, as far as I know. That’s the cousin on my father’s side that we were closest too. And other than that I don’t– I mean we probably have more relatives, and some actually in mainland China, but, um, we’re not close to them. At all.
My father’s side, we don’t really know much about any of his relatives who lived in China. I only know about the one uncle who moved to the United States, and, unfortunately, we are only in touch with his kids now if there’s a funeral. I would like to see them more, except they are the ones that are half a generation older than we are, and a couple of them have already passed away, which is very sad. [Edit: this cousin is on Jasmine’s mother’s side]
1:15:15
[End of Recording One]
[Beginning of Recording Two]
0:00
Jasmine, is there anything you want to share that I haven’t asked, in your story?
Well, I think the way I ended up our first conversation I would like to say– so my father was an illegal immigrant. All paper sons are illegal, they came into the country under false pretenses. And, um, it’s a part of our family history that we did not talk about, except among ourselves, until the issue of, um, I don’t want to say illegal immigration. But it has arisen over the past ten years or so, and it really brought to the forefront my father coming here as an illegal immigrant and how, you know, we wouldn’t be here if we– if he hadn’t come here, we wouldn’t have had the opportunities that we’ve had. And, you know, I think my family is a very successful immigrant story. And I think there are many undocumented immigrants who are, who will, um, who came here for the same reasons my father came here and who can become very successful contributors to our society and are looking for opportunities to do well and especially to give their children a better life than they themselves had.
And so, I started speaking up a lot more about my father’s history when immigration became an issue just to let people know that– that there is a bright, positive side to opening up our borders and, um, and that our country can be better if, you know, I mean I know a lot of people in the restaurant business and nail salons and landscapers who I am sure are undocumented and they do great work and are good people.
One question you did remind me of is, um, in relation to your father’s story, do you know how he sort of put his first few dollars together when he came here? How did– how he started working before he got into the restaurant business?
No. I think he probably started in the restaurant business. I am assuming that my uncle may have already been established in the restaurant business.
Jasmine, thank you so much for all of your time today.
Oh, you’re welcome.
I really appreciate it.
3:25
[End of Recording Two]