First Creative Response about Family Migrations

Friday, October 2, 2015.

1:00 pm

Sitting in my car, on the phone, with rain coming down outside.

“Mom, can you talk?”

One of the few times I have to schedule a phone conversation with her.  Usually I just call whenever I feel like it.

We begin.

“What year did Grandpa arrive in Taiwan?”

1950.  This was after the Communist takeover in 1949.  Most of Grandpa’s peers who worked for China’s Nationalist Government had fled prior to that.  He stayed on, not convinced that things were going south just yet.  Quickly, he realized he had to get out of there.

“How exactly did he get to Taiwan from China?”

He went to Shenzhen, a coastal city in the South, crossing a bridge to Hong Kong, then taking a boat to Jeelung, Taiwan. 

That bridge.  Memorialized in my mind as the threshold into Grandpa’s new life.  That bridge.  Where soldiers tried—but failed—to stop Grandpa and Grandpa’s brother from escaping into freedom.  Hearing about the bridge as a child, I created a silent movie scene in my head.  Two young men, running across a bridge, pursued by men and rifles.  I’ve often superimposed myself into that scene as one of the runners.  It’s been years since Mom and I have talked about the bridge, but immediately the scene replays in my head.

“How old was Grandpa when he arrived in Taiwan?”

He was 29 years old—the age I currently am, Mom points out.  Now that definitely strikes a chord.  His younger brother fell sick and died shortly thereafter—Mom can’t remember exactly when. 

Grandpa keeps a framed black-and-white photo of his brother in his room.  I remember seeing that picture—about 10x20 inches large—during one of my earliest trips to Taiwan in 1992.

We move forward a few decades.  I already know that Grandpa met Grandma, ten years his junior, when he was 32.  They worked at the same company.  After over 60 years of marriage, Grandma learned that Grandpa had been previously married back in China.

“When did Auntie Chunhua first contact Uncle Charles?”

Mom’s knowledge of this part of the story is fuzzy.  Apparently, my step-aunt, her half-sister, had contacted one of my uncles in the 1980s—or was the late ‘70s?  Apparently, Uncle Charles did not tell the others about this—certainly not my grandma.  Eventually, in 2008, Auntie Chunhua visited Taiwan.  She came as soon as she could—when direct flights from China to Taiwan opened up for civilians in 2008.

Meeting Auntie Chunhua was an interesting experience.  I was 23 at the time, had just completed my first Master’s degree.  Mom, who had always wished for an older sister, did not exactly click with my aunt.  How does family become family when separated by decades of historical distance?  Grandpa, whom I had always thought to be a man of honesty and integrity, had his secrets from the past.  Perhaps he did not mean to conceal anything from Grandma.  Perhaps he just wanted to move on with his life.

I switch the subject again.  I don’t want to trigger Mom into thinking about Grandpa’s past and how it still sometimes haunts him—and her too, to an extent.  Mom remembers hearing Grandpa cry out for his mom in his sleep.  Grandpa never went back to China or heard from his parents after arriving in Taiwan—but years later he learned that his own father, who had been a wealthy landlord under China’s pre-Communist feudal system, had died in prison under Communist punishment.

“So you and Dad came to the U.S. in 1980?”

After marrying, my parents came to the East coast to pursue graduate education.  After my Dad got his Ph.D, they moved to California, where my dad taught at the University of Southern California.  They became citizens in 1994.

I remember that day.  I was memorizing my multiplication tables while Mom reviewed her U.S. history facts.  After that day, it was as if Mom realized she could not simply be a long-term visitor in this new land.  She was inescapably American, and she didn’t necessarily see that as a good thing.

Mom always fought to instill a Chinese identity in my brother and me.  We visited Taiwan about every three years, and she made sure we could speak, read, and write the language.  She wanted her mother tongue to also be one of ours.  And yet, she herself did not possess her mother’s mother tongue, the Taiwanese dialect.

“When did Grandma’s family arrive in Taiwan?”

Grandma was born and raised in Taiwan.  Her ancestors most likely went to Taiwan 300 years ago, from China’s coastal province of Fujian, during the Ming Dynasty.  Fujian was one of China’s poorer provinces, so those who could migrated to Taiwan for a better life.  Mom mentions how at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Manchus were coming to take over China and start the Qing Dynasty.  A Fujianese leader with the last name of Zhen (and whose first name is a homonym for the Chinese word for “success”) brought a group of people to Taiwan, unwilling to succumb to Manchu rule.  Taiwan was ruled by the Dutch at that time, but Mr. Zhen, true to his name, successfully drove them out.

Mom and I review together what we know of Taiwan’s history—how it passed from the rule of one country or dynasty to another (Spain, Holland, the Manchu Qing Dynasty).  How it was “given” to Japan after China lost the Sino-Japanese War.  How the Nationalists fled there in 1949, with every intent of using Taiwan as a base from which to take China back from the Communists.

“Back to Grandpa.  He moved around quite a bit even before migrating to Taiwan, right?”

Grandpa was born in Hubei Province, attended middle and high school in Jiangxi Province, left for a college education in Japan at 17 and spent eight years there, and then lived in Shanghai for 4 years after that.  Shanghai is where he met his first wife.  Shanghai is where he realized he needed to leave China, because he was working for the Nationalist government, the losing side.  He never got to say goodbye to his family.

I feel bad neglecting my dad’s side of the story.  “Their ancestors went to Taiwan with Mr. Zhen, 300 years ago, right?”

Mom thinks so.  There’s not much drama with that side—the story is more straightforward, she says. 

Drama is one word for it.  These narratives are all-to-familiar, but I never tire of hearing about family history, something I don’t get to talk about with anyone but my mom.  There is so much more that could be said, but this will do for the purposes of my course assignment.

Oh, and one more thing, Mom remembers.  (I think she’s been Googling as we speak).  “The Dutch left Taiwan in 1662.”

I look outside my window again.  Here I am, parked on a street corner in Connecticut, talking to my mom across a 3-hour time difference about relatives who live an ocean away, with a 12-hour time difference.  There are so many layers of emotion, memory, and trauma that interweave this family history.  “Facts” are like the points on a loom from which threads are stretched.  They can’t entirely be trusted, but we still need them to make sense of the story.

So, the Dutch left Taiwan in 1662, and that’s about when Connecticut was chartered as a British colony.  I’m back to reality now—to this New Haven of mine—and my thoughts switch from Chinese back into English.  The rain is still coming down, and I turn on the engine and drive on to the rest of my day.