LOS ANGELES >> Growing up as an honorary white person in the deep south, John Chen, who speaks only English, said he didn’t feel very Chinese-American when his family moved to the Bay Area in the 1950s.

His well-educated, divorced parents initially couldn’t speak Cantonese, which was the majority Chinese language in San Francisco at the time. They didn’t own a restaurant, laundromat or truck farming business. They hadn’t made money from the Gold Rush. Dad was a medical professional who specialized in acupuncture research. Mom had a bachelor’s in chemistry and worked for places such as Gerber and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Back when the deep south still practiced racial segregation, Chen was allowed to be the only Asian student in an all-white school. He pointed to a picture of himself in the first grade — a Chinese boy in a bow tie smiling in the front row.

He doesn’t remember being targeted because he was a minority. “My mother told me one time one boy was calling me ‘Ching Chong Chinaman.’ I complained to the teacher about him, and he says, ‘Well, you just call him a big, fat Irishman,’ ” Chen recalled. “But I have no memory of (racism). I actually have no memory of that incident.”

For years, Chen had no memory of many things that happened to his family. But then in his 40s, he began to dig into his roots. And on Thursday, more than two decades later, Chen opened “Ties That Bind: A Transnational Family from China to the U.S.” at California State University, Los Angeles. The exhibit showcases a tale that spans 143 years, from the first Opium War to today.

Chen, of Alhambra, said many of his family members were reluctant to share their stories. In fact, his mother refused for years to give him her oral history.

“My father was quite willing to talk to me, and my mother was not. It took me seven years to get her to talk to me. She said, ‘Talk to your father. He’s the famous one,’ ” Chen recounted. “She had a lot of these traditional views that women weren’t just as important.”

A dozen display cases stand in a corner of the campus’ University Library North. While people in such places are generally silent, more than 40 Asian-Americans and other people were not interested in being quiet any longer.

Susan Sing, a member of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, said that although Chen’s story is unique, she and other Asian-Americans share some of the same experiences — paper names and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

“You will not find this in the history books — the Chinese-American history. We have to carry it on by ourselves,” Sing said. “I think it’s important to know our roots because we have a story. This is a country of immigrants, and this is our story.”

Chen’s family became Seventh-day Adventists, and the religion’s focus on education enabled his parents to come to the United States as scholars. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, they couldn’t bring their daughter, but they always intended to return.

Then China’s Communist Revolution turned his parents and about 4,500 others into a generation of “stranded scholars from China,” he said. He wouldn’t see his sister for the first time until he turned 36.

His parents kept in touch with family through aerograms — letters that folded into an envelope because sending mail overseas was expensive. After they passed away, Chen collected those missives even though he can’t read Chinese.

When he was 8, his father gave him a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia. He gobbled up information about the 1 percent, as he calls them — the kings and monarchs. But Chen is more interested in stories about the common man. After all, he asked, aren’t there enough books about Abraham Lincoln?

“I would urge everyone to talk to their families and try to find out their information. It took me a long time partially because you’re supposed to respect your elders,” Chen said. “You’re not supposed to ask certain things that’s not your business and things like that. So I really wasn’t talking until I was in my 40s. But try to get these stories. Once they’re lost, they’re lost forever.”

“Ties That Bind” runs through Aug. 28 at Cal State L.A.