From Sea to Sea: A Personal Journey

Copyright © 2022 Min-Hwa Cheng Kennard.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-1459-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1460-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021922825

Archway Publishing rev. date: 12/22/2021

Contents

My Mother’s Wedding

In Search of the Childhood Homes

Reunion

Mother’s Illness

Journey to the Sea

Two Rochelles

The Long Road to Recovery

Sweetest Love, Do Not Go

Two Paintings

Dajie and Me

Seven Lunch Boxes

Grandmother’s Food Wagon

Tiny Tears

He Is the One

The Little Red House and Other Things Too

I Cast a Last Glance from #2210

The Project

Letter from Jakarta

Out of the End of the World

Pakistan Diary

In loving memory of my parents

My Mother’s Wedding

It is a well-known family secret that my mother married my father against her family’s wishes.

My parents met during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), when my mother lived with her older brother and his family in Lanzhou, a city in Northwest China. After a brief courtship, my parents were engaged to be married. For some reason, my father did not get along with his future brother-in-law. Nevertheless, my mother married my father.

As a child growing up in Taiwan, I loved to retrieve the photo albums from my mother’s private closet and browse family photos from a bygone era. The only wedding picture of my parents was a yellowing black-and-white photo, a bit smaller than half a page in landscape orientation. The bride and the groom stand in the middle of a small group of guests in front of a restaurant. She is in a dark knee-length Chinese dress, and he wears a formal Zhongshan suit. Both look solemn and reserved, which was probably typical for photo posing in that era. I once asked Mother who those people were. Before she uttered a single word, her eyes turned red. I never asked the same question again. Instead, I managed to find out what had happened: no one in my mother’s family attended her wedding, and she and her brother never met again after she was married.

When my mother died, I was fifteen, still too young and immature to share an intimate rapport with her. I knew very little about her beyond her being our mother. Decades later, having lived beyond her age, I realized what a loss it was not to know more about my mother’s tragically short life. What kind of life did she live before her marriage? Why did she go to the northwest of China from her hometown on the east coast? Why did she marry my father despite her family’s objections?

During the transition leading up to the Communist takeover of the Chinese mainland in 1949, my parents moved our family to Taiwan. My mother’s maternal family remained on the mainland. For thirty years, all exchanges between China and Taiwan were cut off. I thought I would never find the answers to my questions, and that my mother’s past had been long buried in a different world.

Then China opened its doors to the world.

In 1982, twenty-two years after my mother’s passing, her brother, whom we referred to as Da Jiujiu (Big Uncle), visited his daughter (my cousin, Ming) in San Francisco. The timing happened to coincide with my father’s trip to Los Angeles, where my brothers and sisters lived. Urged by all of us, Father phoned his brother-in-law at Ming’s. According to one witness, their conversation went well. Father asked about his half-brothers-in-law: Kui, Jia, and Lo. Yet this episode brought Father a renewed sense of loss and emotional turmoil. Struck by a sudden surge of grief and anger, neither Father nor Big Uncle took the initiative to meet with each other. Later that year, Father died.

After that initial contact, I looked forward to keeping up with the renewed family connection that had been broken four decades earlier. A year later, my husband and I went to China on a lecturing tour. We met Big Uncle in Xi’an and had a good time touring the ancient city and, more importantly, getting to know each other. He mentioned my brothers and sisters, whom he had met during his last visit to San Francisco.

I asked my uncle if he saw our mother in any of us. Without hesitation, he replied, Your mom spoke with poise and reserve; you guys talk like shooting rifles. He then added, Your mother and I both had curly hair, the unique feature of the Qiu family. What a pity that none of you got it! Oh well, I thought, in Big Uncle’s eyes none of us was worthy of his sister, and deep down inside he still has misgivings about her bad choice. On the contrary, it always struck me how proud my father was of our resemblance to our mother. When he met my children for the first time, he said, Look! Your baby girl has her grandma’s ears; the boy’s eyebrows are as straight as a pair of swords, typical of the Qiu family!

Apart from that, Big Uncle talked about my mother’s horsemanship with high praise. I had never seen my mother ride a horse. For us, she was a housewife all her life. It was impossible to conjure up an image of her as a young girl in Western riding attire, galloping over the causeway across the West Lake. But that was her, my own mother. Now some of the stories my mother had told came back to me: One time, as I was riding by an empty field, my horse refused to proceed, no matter how much I cajoled her. Later I found out that area had been used for executions during the late dynasty. You know, horses have special senses and can see things we humans can’t. Through my uncle, I was beginning to see my mother as a different person.

Unfortunately, only a few years after that trip, Big Uncle in China and Cousin Ming in San Francisco passed away. My mother’s story remained in the deep recesses of my mind, like an unfinished piece of music.

In the spring of 1994, during a business trip to China, I had a chance to visit my mother’s hometown in Hangzhou. There, I met Cousin Mao, one of Big Uncle’s three children. From him I learned a great deal about the family. I also met three of my mother’s half-brothers. With each additional acquaintance, I collected more information that helped me sketch a basic account of my mother’s early life.

Grandfather and Big Uncle

When I was growing up, my siblings and I were told that our maternal grandfather, Qiu Ji Shen, was a renowned doctor in traditional Chinese medicine. In my childhood house, there was a set of medical encyclopedia that had been compiled and edited by my grandfather. The entire set consisted of twenty-four volumes, all covered with faded blue-gray cloth. It was first published in 1936 in Shanghai, and then went out of print during the eight years of the war (1937–1945). By sheer luck, my father came across a complete set in a used book shop and bought it. The books stayed with the family as we moved from Shanghai to Taiwan as part of the essential household belongings. Later, in Taiwan, my father donated the copyright to a local publisher in honor of my grandfather’s aspiration to benefit the public with his medical work. The entire set of my grandfather’s work was reissued in 1961 in recognition of its intrinsic and historical value. When I visited Taiwan in 1989, this twenty-four-volume encyclopedia had long been out of print. I managed to find the only copy left in the warehouse of the publisher and brought it back to the States. Since then, I have taken it with me to wherever I lived, even abroad.

My grandfather didn’t start his career as a medical doctor. Instead, he had dedicated his early years to the revolution to oust the monarchy. My maternal grandmother had two children, Da Jiujiu (Big Uncle) and our mother, Qiu Shi Fu. Big Uncle was born in northeast China when my grandparents were still involved in the revolution. Grandfather was one of the founding members of the Alliance League, the predecessor of the Revolutionary Party led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. My grandmother (née Chen) befriended the famous revolutionary martyr, Lady Qiu Jin. Grandmother was the one who removed Qiu Jin’s body after her execution to escape any posthumous retribution by the Qing monarch.

After the republic was founded, the family moved back to their hometown of Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, where Grandfather started his medical practice. As the only daughter of an elderly couple, my mother was adored like a shiny pearl in the palm. Before she started school, the family moved to Hangzhou, where Grandfather founded San San Hospital.

I saw my mother’s childhood home on a trip in 1994 when I visited Hangzhou for the first time. Cousin Mao took me to the compound that used to be the hospital. Located on the southeast side of West Lake adjacent to the city center, it was a U-shaped two-story Western style building with a tower. Standing on top of it was a bronze stork. At the time of my visit, the entire building was used as a day care center with dorm rooms for the staff. Cousin Mao and I managed to get into the building and saw my mother’s room on the second floor facing the cobblestoned courtyard. In the left wing of the building, we also found the original stable that had housed the family carriage and horses decades earlier.

As a child, Big Uncle loved horses, and he and Mother took riding lessons. During that trip, Cousin Mao gave me a copy of a picture of them in their handsome riding suits and boots walking their horses up an alleyway. I could almost hear the horses’ hooves click-clacking on the cobblestones of yesteryear.

My maternal grandmother died when my mother was not yet eleven and her brother seventeen. Her brother’s wife, four years older than her husband, took on the responsibility of caring for my mother; such was the usual arrangement in a household where three generations lived together. After Grandfather remarried, the household split into two: one under Grandfather and the other under my uncle, the son of the family. Cousin Mao said, "Niang Niang (a nickname for aunt) was an integral part of our early life. There was not a single day when I didn’t have her around."

Unfortunately, Big Uncle’s wife died after giving birth to three babies in three consecutive years. Though my uncle soon remarried, my mother stayed in his household as her brother’s most trusted friend and personal assistant. For his three children, Ming, Mao, and Hui, she played a dual role of an aunt and a big sister. Cousin Mao recalled, Niang Niang was always there for us. If we got sick, she would spend all night with us. When school started, Niang Niang would make book covers for our new books, and she made sure that our lunch boxes were properly prepared. If we needed anything, we would go to her first. As short-tempered as my father was, he was always gentle with his sister. When Big Uncle moved to Shanghai for medical school, my mother went along as part of the family.

After completing his MD and requisite medical training, Big Uncle and his family, including my mother, returned to Hangzhou, where he joined Grandfather’s practice as one of the medical staff. My mother didn’t continue her formal schooling; instead, she worked with Grandfather as one of his assistants. After several years, she was knowledgeable enough to treat common illnesses. My grandfather spent most of his time compiling the medical encyclopedia, and my mother was part of his editorial team on nine of the subjects in his voluminous work.

Before the war, Grandfather’s medical practice was thriving,