Herb was missing in action near Bitche, France. The 7th Army had retreated, and the enemy broke through their lines for 15 miles. For months, that was all the family knew.

A Memorial Special from East-West Legacy

Each year at this time, as Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month closes around Memorial Day, I think of my uncle Herb, the lone military soldier among my close relatives. I know he wasn’t the only Chinese citizen drafted into the U.S. Army in exchange for American naturalization during World War II, but I don’t know how many other newly minted Chinese-Americans ended up as prisoners of war in Germany. Personally, I find his story to be an extraordinary example of the multiracial strength on which this country was built.

This nation is NOT the product of white supremacy. It’s the creation of countless individuals like my uncle, from all races and ethnic backgrounds, who risked everything to defend democracy, freedom, and the other moral ideals that America stood for—right up until the current regime seized office. So I hope you will read this story and join me in honoring the legacy of multiracial sacrifice that is this country’s true foundation.

I honor this legacy by pledging to continue the fight for truth, freedom, and justice for all. It’s our turn now to risk more than we ever thought possible to defend American democracy. We owe that to those who came before us. We owe it to ourselves. And, most of all, we owe it to the generations who will follow us.

Thank you for all you do to preserve democracy now.

We must fight on,

Aimee

“Choice”

My uncle Herb was an American war hero. Except, he was Chinese. The explanation for this seeming contradiction will sound familiar to many immigrants, but it came as a shock to me. Born and raised an American, I took my family’s right to U.S. citizenship for granted until I grew up and learned just how varied and fraught that “right” actually can be. For Herb, it was life-threatening.

Now, I realize that my uncle’s story is far from unique. But that’s all the more reason, it deserves to be told and shared, especially among Americans who believe that patriotism and heroism are in any way dependent on race.

I only learned my uncle’s full World War II story after my father died in 2007, when I inherited Dad’s trove of wartime correspondence. This included letters from family all over the world to my parents, then living in Washington, D.C.

Dad’s little brother Herb, like my father, was born and raised in China and moved to California in his teens. But unlike Dad, who was too old at 30 to be much use to any military force, Herb was just 20 when America joined World War II. That made him a prime target for combat duty. Though still a Chinese citizen, in 1943 my uncle was given the “choice” between securing an American passport by fighting for Uncle Sam, or being deported to China to fight for Chiang Kai-shek.

That choice was more complicated for Herb than it might appear. His father, my grandfather, Papa Liu, was descended from a long line of Chinese officials and devoted his entire adult life to transforming China from a dying empire into a modern republic. Papa remained in China to continue working for the Nationalist government. But Herb’s American mother, Mama to the family, had taken her children and left after 20 years in her husband’s war-ravaged country, swearing never to return. Now settled in Los Angeles, she was constantly pressuring my father to quit his job with the Chinese press corps and apply for American citizenship. I can just hear her laying down the law for her youngest son, telling Herb he’d go fight for China “over my dead body.”

Herb claimed his U.S. passport and packed his bags for Camp Phillips in July of 1944. Two months later, he wrote from France as if on a ghoulish holiday:

Passed by Army Examiner

Sept. 17, 1944

Hello brother,

Had a nice trip across and wasn’t sick at all. The country here is wonderful, all trees and orchards and hedgerows of blackberries! They’ve got apple orchards all over and the people are very picturesque. They are quite poor, as the Germans took most everything out, including young men, young women, and the wine. Some of the villages have been quite demolished and the people are still coming back in from the country. Today is Sunday and everybody is going to church. The bells have been ringing all morning.

Ten days later, Herb’s plucky pretense of cheer was shredding.

Just got your very welcome letter. I haven’t told Mama that I’m up on the front yet as she’d only worry. We’ve had our taste of enemy artillery fire already and it aint good. Our artillery has them pinned down most of the time, thank God.

Most of the villages are all knocked to hell. By the way, we landed at Cherbourg and traveled here by those 40&8 boxcars you hear so much about. Was it uncomfortable! There was frost on the ground this morning. If you want to send me something, a good heavy pair of socks with high tops would come in handy.

I’m glad to hear you’ve got the apartment all fixed up. I’m expecting to visit you sometime and I sure hope it’s soon. This life I’m leading now is kinda hard on you, I teenk!

Well, we’ve got hot chow for a change so I’ll be writing you and you do the same.

By December, Herb could no longer muster enough energy to even attempt his chipper act, though details about his reality remained necessarily sparse.

We’ve been on the front for over 50 days and just came back for a rest. I had my first shower and clean clothes in that time. Also saw a couple shows the last two nights. Almost feel like a human being again.

Am with 7th Army in case you’re interested, in the Alsace sector. Our division was credited, I believe, with taking Salzburg.

Have been receiving packages, are they welcome. If you send anything else, just send things to eat, delicacies and stuff. One of these days soon I hope we’ll be able to get together and really shoot the breeze. I’ve had a lot of experiences that can’t be told in a V-mail.

Ten days later Herb wrote with scrambled Christmas greetings.

Received your last letter with… a slew of packages, most welcome at this time. Received the combat infantry badge with a ten dollar raise in pay. The whole company got it. Also expect to get the Purple Heart for a scratch received. Am OK however. Told Mama not to worry if she got notification. I was lucky, but a lot of worry has been caused by contradicting statements of injuries at different times. Naturally I hope and pray that nothing like that will happen. I guess this sounds kinda mixed up, but I hope you got the idea.

To less serious sounding business, I just hope we’re in a position to have a good hot Christmas dinner and pray that I’ll have the next one with you or the folks.

Can’t seem to think of much to say. Maybe because of the uproar around here.

A family’s anguish

After that, Herb’s messages cease, replaced by rambling letters from my father’s sister Lotus, who lived with Mama in Los Angeles.

We are all very alarmed now that tonight’s news says the Germans are starting an offensive against the 75th army front. In fact I am watching newspapers for mention of the 44th div. as they were mentioned in action some weeks ago after going through the town of Luneville but they are somewhere near the Saar region in Germany now.

Poor little chap he sounds very cheerful in his letter but very tired as they have to march everywhere on foot. Thank God he wasn’t in the 1st Army, which has nearly been annihilated. He says he was staying the night in a perfumer’s house as the place was overflowing with expensive bottles of French perfume.

Then, less than a month later:

We are still stunned by the War Dept. telegram as you must also be, and cannot realize that our little Herby may never come back again.

Herb was missing in action near Bitche, France. The 7th Army had retreated, and the enemy broke through their lines for 15 miles. For months, as the next desperately empty letters attest, that was all the family knew.

Unlike anything my father had ever told me, these letters personalized the war. Soldiers gone missing. Boys in the trenches. Innocents frozen by war. And, for their families, day after day of waiting, silence, frantic speculation.

Herb’s suffering was hardly unique. I know this, and yet the immediacy of these exchanges pulls me like a vortex every time I read them. As far as I know, Herb was unique in our family, at least in the 20th century. Throughout World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, no other Liu fought in battle. Papa certainly endured wartime privations in China, but never as an armed combatant. All the rest, including everyone in my own generation, lucked out of military service.

When the news came that Herb was MIA in Europe, then, how did my father react? Dad was still a Chinese citizen, working for the China News Service, and, as eldest son, he bore his family’s greatest duty of loyalty to his father and his fatherland. By the rules of Chinese heritage, it was also the eldest son’s filial duty to guide his siblings. But here was Dad’s baby brother up to his chin in the mud and ice of European battlefields, while he himself sat out the war from the safety of America.

When that dreaded telegram arrived, what could Dad possibly have said that would comfort his stricken mother, let alone assuage his own baffled guilt?

In March of 1945, contacts of my family managed to reach Herb’s commanding officer, who confirmed that:

Sgt. Liu was one of a platoon that was cut off from a company unit when surrounded by enemy infantry and three enemy tanks. Attempts to relieve these men proved futile. Some of the men were seen being led away toward enemy territory with their hands over their heads, and it is believed that they had been forced to surrender. I trust that this information may prove of some help in relieving the anxiety of mind you are undergoing.

Relief? I can’t imagine that was what the officer’s news engendered. But then, finally, a postcard arrived via the Red Cross:

Am a prisoner of war and am all right. Hope you get this soon so you won’t worry. Send all the cigarettes you can and write often. Hope you are all well. Thanks for the other packages. They were swell. Goodbye for now. Love, Herb

I’d heard some talk about Herb’s wartime imprisonment, of course. What stood out in my mother’s memory was that he lost 40 pounds in less than six months. But Dad was always more circumspect. He’d state that Herb was captured toward the end of the war and suffered as a POW. Never much more than that.

My sense is that my father was deeply conflicted about the whole situation. He revered FDR, who was still America’s commander in chief when Herb “enlisted,” but Dad’s deeper cultural orientation continued to pull him back to the war’s other front. What was his Chinese brother even doing in Europe?

Herb’s own story

For years my uncle had withheld his own story of his capture. But in his later years he told it, finally, for the sake of his kids. I found this account, too, among Dad’s trove of letters.

Herb wrote that his battalion was sent to the front shortly after landing in Cherbourg in September 1944. They joined the southern end of the Battle of the Bulge.

We went into battle after a big barrage by the U.S.… through these German lines there. God, what a mess. They had a lot of horses as well as men, all blown to bits… you learn to move and duck.

On January 5, his company attacked a large farm about 800 yards inside the German border. “They were sitting there waiting for us.”

Herb’s company had to cross a barren field. “We got stuck in the middle. So many of our people were killed, there was no place to duck.”

Pinned down by machine gun fire, Herb lay flat on the ground and watched “this big piece of something coming at me… If I lift my head I’m going to get shot.” Metal shrapnel broke his left ankle, but he survived well enough to hobble forward with the other survivors.

The men tried to shield themselves behind a tank in order to descend a long snowy hill into the farm complex, but after the tank stalled in a ditch, they retreated into a nearby barn to wait in the freezing cold for reinforcements. The Germans soon had them surrounded. Their reinforcements never arrived.

It was either surrender or get killed.

As they were marched away Herb registered dead bodies in all directions. “This was a working farm. There were a lot of hogs around… chewing on the corpses.”

All told, 42 men and two officers were captured. After interrogation, the captives were stuffed into boxcars, each built for 40 men but filled with more than 80. It was so tight, they had to take turns sitting.

I was unlucky enough to be in the last one, so we had 92 in ours. There was no water, no food, no pit stops for three days… On the way we were bombed by our own planes while in a railroad yard. We were locked in. At least one car was hit.

Herb wound up in a labor camp, Arbeit Kommando #1348, on the site of an old Nazi youth camp near the Elbe river. Each day, the prisoners were marched through the woods down the mountain to work on the railroad bed. Amenities included outside toilet pits.

Rations consisted of a cup of ersatz coffee brewed from ground acorns in the morning and 1 liter of weak potato soup with some occasional horsemeat and 350 grams of dark bread of dubious content at night.

The camp was close enough to Dresden that debris from the Allied bombardment in February floated in the air for days. The prisoners could hear Russian artillery getting closer. Then, one day in early May, the guards took the prisoners out on the road. Their orders were to stay ahead of the Russians, but the road was jammed with civilian refugees, and it soon became clear that no one was actually in charge. Herb and his buddies stripped off their uniforms:

I joined up with 24 other POWs of various nationalities. We found a 1939 Chevy panel truck abandoned at an intersection after the Russian tanks went through. We got it running and all piled on. We headed for Chemnitz where the US forces had stopped. In order to get there we had to drive through the Russian Army, who were going the other way. When we got to Chemnitz we met a US jeep with a Lieutenant and driver who took a picture of me with three other soldiers on the roof of our getaway truck.

That was May 10, 1945, two days after V-E Day. The army flew Herb by C-47 to Camp Lucky Strike in France. He had malnutrition, shrapnel in one leg, and sores all over his body. The medics gave him 18 shots of penicillin and ordered him back to New York.

As Herb’s ship passed the Statue of Liberty on June 13, 1945, the loudspeakers blasted The Andrews Sisters singing, “Don’t Fence Me In.”

Coda in China

But that wasn’t the end of this particular story. The war still raged in China, and news traveled slowly. My grandfather, Papa Liu, had been separated from his wife and children now for 11 years. He would never see any of them again, and they would rarely talk about him. Yet here, as a sweet finale, was the letter Papa wrote my father after belatedly receiving the news about his “Baby” son Herb:

My son:

Your letter says that Baby and the three soldiers are good. I was so happy that I couldn’t even sleep for a night —

I suspect Papa was informed of Herb’s capture only after the ordeal was over, when word of his son’s imprisonment could be accompanied by news of his release and that snapshot of Herb and his three buddies on the roof of their 1939 Chevy amid the streaming refugees. What use would it have served to tell the father in China while the son still was missing in Europe? Had Papa even been told that Herb enlisted? That he’d gone to Europe in the first place? That he no longer identified as Chinese?

Such communication gaps perhaps are inevitable in families divided by migration and war. In those days, even the most urgent messages could be lost in transit or translation. Not to mention the ubiquitous warning: Loose lips sink ships.

But Papa’s elation and relief touch me deeply. In the wake of my father’s death I’ve discovered many letters from my Chinese grandfather. He was a serious and circumspect man who rarely leaked any hint of his emotions. This singular reference to his being “happy” betrays his deep and abiding love, no matter how remote he might seem.

Ten years younger than Dad, Herb was born when his mother was 45 and Papa 47. Before that time, Dad once told me, his father was almost always traveling. When I asked what he remembered of Papa’s time at home, my father always said, “Not much, really. He and Mama would sequester themselves in their bedroom for days.”

Whether my grandfather lived at home more regularly after Herb’s birth, or whether Mama simply refused to make any more babies, I have no idea, but I do know that Papa indulged Herb as he never had the other three children. Only little Herb — “Baby” — was invited to join the men who gathered for Papa’s mahjong parties. Herb would sit on his father’s knee and learn to wash and stack the smooth, cool ivory tiles, to wager and play defense.

Of all the children in Dad’s family, only Herb, the future all-American hero, would inherit Papa’s gambling bug. He would never see his father again, but after the war, after earning an engineering degree from Columbia on the GI bill, after marrying and returning to California to work in aerospace, he’d make annual visits to Vegas. And, as he had in Germany, he would prevail.

This essay was first published on Medium, in Human Parts, Feb 25, 2022

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This is the second part of my interview with , who spent three years, from age 7 to 10, at boarding school on Lushan (Mt. Lu), China. Today a UNESCO World Heritage site, Lushan in the early 1930s was the mountain where my family built a home and which I later fictionalized as “Cloud Mountain” in my novel of the same name. [Click HERE for more historical photos of Lushan.]

Ian remained at boarding school in Kuling, the hilltop town center of Lushan, for over a year after the Communists took control of China in 1949. This gave him a child’s-eye view of the politics and transition that drew the Bamboo Curtain shut.

Read Part I of this interview here:

Part II: Leaving Communist China, 1950

Aimee: At the end of 1949, China’s brutal civil war reached its conclusion with a Communist victory. Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalists who had money and high-level connections fled to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the U.S. (Sadly, they did not include my own grandfather, who was stranded inside China, permanently cut off from his American wife and children in the U.S.) But you stayed in China for another year before leaving. What was Kuling like during that time?

Ian: The Communist takeover of Kuling was very peaceful.  As a nine-year-old, I was not aware of these momentous events, but one day at the breakfast table we were informed that overnight the Communist soldiers had taken Lushan, and that the Nationalists had left the mountain quietly on the other side.  

It was not unusual for Nationalist remnants to counterattack after the communists took over, and this happened in Kuling on one occasion, although much to my disappointment, I slept through it. I was informed the next morning that there had been gunshots in the night, and some heard the whining of bullets. How long this went on I don’t know, but by daylight, the rebels had slunk off into the night.

I remember that one day there were a lot of guns shooting very near our compound, but it turned out they were young soldiers, possibly new teenage recruits, who were conducting target practice. A few of us couldn’t resist creeping through the bushes to watch them, and fortunately, we were not discovered – not even by our teachers. (I say ‘we’, but was I really part of this clandestine venture, or did I just hear about it from some other boys? I am not sure, but it seems more romantic, and gallant to include myself in the ‘we’.)

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In general, following the initial takeover of the area by the Communists, things continued as before, although there were some restrictions on our movements off the school property.  I remember one occasion when there was quite a commotion where children and teachers were crowding around two soldiers who had two or three teenage students in their custody. The teachers were communicating with the soldiers in Chinese, but soon it was revealed that the boys were observed somewhere in the bushes, and one boy was cutting down a shrub to make a walking stick. The school was informed that on no occasion were we allowed to cut down or destroy any trees or shrubs, anywhere. These were now the property of the People’s government.  Soon the school made a rule that no one was to leave the property without being accompanied by a staff member.

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Aimee: When did you leave China, and how did you get out? 

Ian: In December 1950, all missionaries were instructed that they must leave China. My brother David and I left several days before Christmas, in a party of about twenty students and a couple of staff.  The only staff person I remember was our Mandarin Chinese teacher, Miss Wu, whom I was not fond of, because she was strict and rather dour.   

A highlight of leaving was that I was finally considered big enough to walk down the mountain rather than ride in a sedan chair. I had no difficulty making the descent. Had I been older I am sure I would have walked down with a great sense of nostalgia, and disappointment, for Kuling was truly a paradise on earth. 

When we reached Jiujiang, the city at the foot of the Lushan mountains, we were taken to the railway station and boarded a train heading south to Canton, today Guangzhou. Although we were on the train for three days and two nights, there were no Pullman cars.  We spent the entire time on hard wooden seats. 

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At one point I remember a fight broke out between two Chinese lads, which was so violent that we all had to move out of the way.  I don’t remember how it eventually turned out. 

At every train stop our baggage was searched by what seemed to be young teenagers, operating with glee. Our baggage was in a baggage car way down the train to which we had no access since the last search, but it was searched again anyway.  And we were all called to walk down the platform to our open trunks and suitcases and told to repack them. It was senseless, and intimidating, which, I am sure, was the purpose— getting back at the repulsive foreigners who had mistreated China for so long.

Another feature of this train trip was the constant swaying of the train, from one side to the other. I remember that when we finally arrived at Canton and walked down the platform to go to a hotel, we walked like little drunken sailors, swaying from one side to the other. It was both humorous to us, but also disconcerting. I remember that we boys talked about being drunk, even though I had no prior experience with anyone who had been drunk. It was also a relief that we knew that tomorrow we would be experiencing freedom, although I doubt that I knew what that meant. 

At the hotel in Canton we were all given inoculations for the usual illnesses and viruses, who knows what for, but for some reason it seemed important to the Chinese officials that we receive them.  Maybe this was the last opportunity to inoculate us with communism. We walked around for a day or two after with painful arms.   

From Canton we boarded another train for a brief ride to what was called the Freedom Bridge, which we walked across, and then boarded a train in British-occupied Hong Kong to Kowloon. As soon as he crossed Freedom Bridge one missionary with us got down on his knees and kissed the ground. Why would he do that? I understand that now.

Two days later, in Kowloon, we were told by our British rescuers that we again needed inoculations.  “Why?” we asked, since we’d just had them in Canton.  “Oh”, we were told, “those were Communist shots.  These are the real ones.”  Another couple of days with wooden arms. Maybe we were being inoculated with capitalism?

Aimee: One might have thought, with all the anti-imperialist destruction, especially in the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, that Kuling would have been demolished. The settlement there was developed entirely by Americans as a resort, and most of the buildings architecturally would have looked right at home in Massachusetts. Yet when we went there in 2007, I felt as if the main part of town, including the Kuling School, had come through all this political upheaval unscathed.

Ian: In the 1950s after all westerners had left China, Mao Zedong, who loved Lushan, decided to build his own villa there. Initially, Mao occupied the vacated Chiang Kai-shek villa while his own was built. But he also wanted his to include places where government meetings could be held, so it became a fairly large complex. 

Aimee: Yes, we visited his villa in 2007. It was in the Lulin valley. I believe it stood roughly where my grandparents’ house had been!  

Ian: Nearby he had a small lake created in the heart of Lulin Valley. 

Aimee: Yes, in the late 30s my grandfather had funded a bridge over the stream that later fed the lake. The bridge is long gone, but there’s still a plaque there dedicated to him today. As we found during our visit, the people of Lushan have long and generous memories. And so do you, Ian! Thank you for taking us on this trip back to your childhood in China.

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Hi Everyone,

My next two posts are going to shift to the East-West Legacy side of this publication. I’ll be back next week with more MFA Lore, but I thought it worth taking a break (especially given this week’s political nightmare) to share ’s extraordinary boy’s-eye view of China after WWII and through the Communist takeover. And for me, this interview is not disconnected from writing, since the setting for Ian’s memories is the very place my historical novel Cloud Mountain was named for: Lushan (Mt. Lu) in Jiangxi Province.

When I was gathering family stories from my father as background for Cloud Mountain, Dad described Lushan, where he summered as a boy, as “a kind of paradise for our family.” This had as much to do with the resort’s social environment as with its natural beauty and idyllic climate. The town of Kuling, today known as Guling, had been developed on Lushan in 1916 by and for Americans, who were far more welcoming than British or French to Chinese and mixed-race families like mine.

My Chinese grandfather and American grandmother had endured brutal prejudice in San Francisco at the start of their marriage, and in European-controlled Shanghai they had to navigate the segregation of Chinese and Eurasians. But on Lushan, they felt free. The kids socialized with the Americans and Russians who summered there. And in the early 1930s my grandparents built a cottage in Lulin, the next valley up from Kuling.

My father’s photographs of Lushan stoked my imagination, and I set much of my novel there. Though I didn’t have a chance to visit before Cloud Mountain was published, I developed a strong sense of the place, in part, from the evocative memoirs of my late friend John Espey, who attended Kuling American School, a boarding school in Kuling for the children of U.S. expats.

Then, nine years after Cloud Mountain’s release, I discovered that the Kuling American School Association (KASA) was planning a reunion trip back to Kuling in the spring of 2007. Though no one in my family ever attended the Kuling School, KASA graciously allowed my husband and me to join the tour, and that’s how I met Ian Grant (fourth from left in photo below).

Ian’s parents were Canadians with the China Inland Mission [CIM], formed in 1865 by Britisher Hudson Taylor. They were stationed in Hebei province, but due to social unrest, in July 1940 they had been moved to Chefoo, today a district within the city of Yantai but then a Treaty Port on the north shore of Shandong province, where Ian was born later that year. The Mission had established a boarding school at Chefoo for children of their missionaries, which Ian would attend. But first, his family returned to Canada, where they waited out WWII before returning to China in 1946. But then China’s civil war forced the Chefoo School to relocate to Kuling, which is how Ian came to be part of the KASA tour.

If that all sounds like a saga, it is! Which is why I was delighted when Ian agreed to let me interview him about his East-West Legacy.

I’m going to present this lengthy interview in two parts. In Part One, we’ll talk about Ian’s initial childhood sense of China and Kuling. In Part Two, he’ll tell us about his experience leaving China after the Communist takeover, when he was 10.

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Interview with Ian Grant

Aimee:  I’m excited to do this interview with you, Ian! Kuling was an important place for my family, and I can think of few people who knew it better than you. Could you start by telling us how the Chefoo School wound up in Kuling?

Ian: Following the Japanese withdrawal from China after WWII, the Communists established themselves in the rural areas of northeast China, and this included Chefoo. They did not permit Western businesses, missionary activities, or institutions to return to these areas, and this left the CIM in search of an alternative site for the Chefoo School.

Fortunately, they were able to acquire the empty campus of the Kuling American School, which had not reopened after the War.  The Chefoo School was moved there late in 1947, and they were ready to commence classes when children returned to school following Christmas vacation at their respective parents’ mission stations. My brother and I happily arrived near the end of January 1948, when I was seven years old.

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Aimee: What an odyssey! War, migration, displacement, homecoming, and then that sojourn up the Thousand Steps to Lushan. What do you remember feeling and seeing during your first journey to Kuling? Who escorted you? Were you used to being apart from your parents already by age seven?

Ian: In China the missionary practice was to have a long winter break, so children could spend this time with their families at their mission stations, and only two to three weeks off in the middle of the summer, when most students, unless their parents lived quite close by, would remain at school.  My general pattern was to be homesick for a week or two when we were separated, but I gradually was able to focus on the life around me. I did not feel sorry for myself because I knew all the other children were experiencing the same thing.  I was happy, however, that my father escorted our contingent back to school.

When we got to Jiujiang, on the Yangtze River, we were taken by truck to the foot of the Lushan mountains.  In those days there were no motor roads in Lushan, so either we walked up the mountain path, or, if small like me, we were excited to be carried in a sedan chair.

Like so many other events I experienced as a child in China, this was a new experience, and I enjoyed the long climb up the mountain.  Especially in the early stages it could be very steep, and at one point there are so many continuous steps that it acquired the name One Thousand Steps.  In China ‘many’ is often described by thousands, such as ten thousand years, or one thousand steps, but I don’t remember anyone at our school claiming that they had actually counted them.

Finally, we were at the top of the mountain and entered the Kuling Valley through a Chinese Village that was known to us as The Gap.  From here we continued on till we reached our new school location. 

I don’t remember arriving at the school, being assigned a bedroom and bed, nor having anything to eat.  But I do remember being told we were going to join some other children for a walk.  I remember meeting these children coming down a pathway and being suddenly enthralled by the beauty of the mountains and the pathways, and all the children seemed so cheerful.  I knew I was going to be happy here. 

Aimee: Your memories are so poignant for me. Before the war, my family built their summer home in Lulin, the valley adjacent to Kuling. There they could escape the grotesque prejudice of the British Shanghailanders against mixed marriages. Lulin was also called Russian Valley, I believe, since many Russians lived there.

Ian: My understanding is that the people who built homes in Lulin were Westerners other than the British and Americans, who monopolized Kuling Valley, along with a few Chinese elites such Chiang Kai-shek.  There were quite a few Chinese houses in Lulin Valley also. 

Aimee: But in 1939, during the war, the Japanese bombed Lulin to smithereens, even though they left Kuling relatively unscathed (probably planning to occupy the gorgeous western villas there if they’d won the war).

Ian: My understanding was that the Japanese purposely did not bomb Kuling because they did not want to anger the Americans and British, who they were not yet at war with. Fortunately, the bombing was relatively brief. After Pearl Harbor the Japanese took Kuling over.

Aimee: My grandparents’ home was obliterated. But when you arrived in 1947, my grandfather still lived in China, and I often wonder if he returned to Kuling around that time. Maybe he saw you when you were out playing! 

Ian: We frequently walked through Russian Valley on our way to the Three Trees, and the Three Graces pool (Black Diamond Pool). 

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Aimee: Did you notice any evidence of the war around you? 

Ian:  As children, we knew nothing about Lulin valley other than what we found, and in general we walked and played there as anywhere else.  I don’t recall anyone expressing wonderment that there were no buildings.  We simply took life as we were experiencing it. 

Aimee: What was the general mood of China toward foreigners at that time?

Ian: I did not perceive that the Chinese resented us being there, but children were another matter.  It was normal for children to follow us, call us names, and even throw stones at us, not to hit us, but to scare us.  We always ignored them and were not fearful of harm.  I don’t remember the parents of these children ordering them to stop, but neither did the parents behave in this unfriendly way.  I think, for the most part, the children just did this for sport.  Foreigners were often not often seen, so we were a novelty for them.

Aimee: How much did you understand about the history between China and the West?

Ian: It has been in my adult years, especially the last 20 years, that I’ve come to appreciate how badly Western countries exploited and humiliated the Chinese. 

Westerners were in many ways not welcome in China in those years because we were seen as the instigators in what China, to this day, considers the 100 years of humiliation.  Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain, followed by the French, Germans, Portuguese, Americans, and then the Japanese relentlessly forced themselves on China so that they could have free access to their markets.  This resulted in outright war on China on two occasions, which led to extraterritoriality, meaning that Westerners could not be tried in a Chinese court. ‘Treaty ports’ were established where Western countries could trade freely, and Westerners were permitted to travel to and live anywhere they could in China. This was, indeed, the impetus for the missionary movement that commenced shortly after the Treaty of Peking in 1860. 

Aimee: Despite all that bad blood, were there any Chinese people you grew close to in China? I ask because I have  photographs of my father’s friends and the people who helped raise him. Dad’s surrogate father was a wonderful man named Yen, who vanished into the ether along with my grandfather after the “Bamboo Curtain” fell in 1949.

Ian: At boarding school, we had no real opportunity to interact with the Chinese. Children who did, like my younger brother, were too young yet to go to school; at their parents’ mission stations the only children to play with were Chinese. My brother’s friends were the landlord's sons in an adjacent building. They became constant companions, so he became fluent in Chinese. 

I have often wondered what happened to my parent’s landlord and his family in Kunming. As soon after the Communists took over, most landlords were persecuted, lost their land, and many were executed.

Aimee: I, too, wonder about those times. My grandfather remained in China, with no way to escape. He’d served in the Nationalist government, but he’d also been a close friend of Sun Yat-sen, so he may have been spared, but for decades we had no idea even whether he was dead or alive. It wasn’t until 1995 that I learned he’d died in 1953 in his hometown of Wuchang, but we probably will never know the circumstances of his final years.

You were lucky to get out after the takeover, Ian. In Part Two of this interview, we’ll talk about that!

Refer a friend

Hello Everyone,

It’s Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month and, given the global climate of resurgent racism and right-wing nationalism, I thought this would be a good time to re-post this essay about the world my Chinese grandfather and white grandmother faced a century ago.

I first published this story when the sweeping Biden victory (by over 7M votes!) was fresh enough to reassure me we could subdue the racism and xenophobia that Trump and his MAGA zealots embody. My grandparents’ experience of bigotry still mostly seemed to belong to America’s distant past (alongside Jim Crow and Arizona’s abortion ban of 1864). Today, I fear this ugly history could well mirror our future.

Too many Asian-Americans tell themselves American racism is a White-Black matter that doesn’t apply to them. Recent immigrants, in particular, often think they can earn, educate, and excel their way to status beyond the reach of prejudice. It’s not their fault, they believe the myth of the American melting pot. But my grandparents’ experience is a reminder that this country’s racism has never been about White and Black, or education or status, either. No, American racism is about White against Other. Period.

All of us who feel Othered by the current crop of bigoted demagogues have a critical role to play this year. We must unite and vote AGAINST racist candidates, policies, and parties. We owe it to our ancestors.

My family’s tale is just one of countless true stories that remind us why.

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The Wedding Party

“Los Angeles Heiress Elopes With a Chink”

That headline still shocks me, though it shouldn’t. Epithets like “chink” and “Chinaman” may have fallen from favor, but as we’ve seen throughout the past decade, anti-Asian hate seethes just below America’s surface. And historically, nothing triggers racist venom like the prospect of “mongrelization.”

To prevent intermarriage between the races, America kept anti-miscegenation laws on the books for three centuries, from the 1600s until 1967. When Liu Ch’eng-yu, my Chinese grandfather, married Jennie Ella Trescott, my white American grandmother, in 1906, those laws were still in effect throughout the West. As a result, my grandparents had to cross five states before they were able to legalize their union.

None of that history is new to me. I’ve spent decades writing about my father’s parents, even basing my novel Cloud Mountain on their epic life together. But until a couple years ago, when a distant relative sent me the actual news clippings about their wedding odyssey, I’d assumed it was a private affair. What shocked me was the discovery that racist hatred had hounded my grandparents every step of the way.

According to this hard evidence, newspapers from coast to coast sent scouts to track and sensationalize this private search for a compassionate minister. Reporters must have ridden their train, because they published updates from each stop, crowing each time my grandparents were rebuffed by local authorities, and lying wildly about their identities.

The truth is that my grandparents met in San Francisco, where my grandfather attended UC Berkeley and edited a pro-democracy newspaper in Chinatown. Though descended from a long line of Imperial officials, he’d dedicated himself to modernizing China on the American model. My grandmother, daughter of wagon-train pioneers from England and Sweden, tutored him in English. When the great San Francisco earthquake struck in 1906, my grandfather saved her life. Within days, they were engaged.

They must have thought the chaos following the earthquake would shield them from public notice as they traveled east in search of a justice of the peace willing to bend the laws against miscegenation. Boy, were they wrong.

By calling my grandmother an heiress, the Denver Post fabricated her status and wealth, and by calling their odyssey an elopement, the headline implied that this Chinese alien was illicitly stealing a prized American gem. Worse, after the desperate couple finally found a cooperative minister in Evanston, Wyoming, Charleston’s News and Courier bastardized my grandfather’s name to stoke the deeper terror: “Miss Dolly Trescott, a white girl, of California, has married a Chinaman whose first name is ‘Sin.’ This should result in something original.”

The headlines might as well have read “From Migration to Mongrelization — Beware!” As one of my grandparents’ “original results,” I’m both thankful and astonished that they had the grit and commitment to persevere. But the hate didn’t stop with their wedding.

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“Dislike Chinese College Graduate as Neighbor”

Back in San Francisco, the newlyweds faced another form of discrimination. Restrictive housing covenants commonly prohibited people of color, including “Celestials,” as the Chinese were called in those days, from living in “desirable” neighborhoods.

My wily grandmother had seen this coming. She’d persuaded her new husband to sign the marriage certificate as “Don Luis,” rather than Liu Ch’eng-yu. On paper, he appeared Spanish. But for the first year of their marriage, they nevertheless bounced from one apartment to another, each lease terminated when the neighbors complained.

Finally, my grandmother found a flat in Berkeley, near the college campus. Her husband, she told the landlady, was out of town. By the time this Chinese husband with the Spanish name turned up, the lease was signed and sealed and the rent paid a year in advance.

That didn’t stop the downstairs neighbors from launching a whole new Asian hate campaign, demanding, the “Chinese must go.”

My grandmother had had enough. She gave her own press interviews, denouncing her neighbors. The Berkeley Daily pronounced this “Celestial’s Wife Wrathy,” but proud Jennie defended her marriage as nobody’s business but her own. She threatened to hire a lawyer. She doubled down on the “heiress” title that the news hounds had given her during her “elopement” and outrageously claimed to be a “blue blood” with roots stretching back to the Puritans. (This strategic move was meant to deflect attention from the fact that she’d been required to surrender her U.S. citizenship in order to marry my grandfather.) She commended the local friends who supported her.

Jennie won that battle but lost the war. Though her racist neighbors initially gave up and moved away, by the following year the Liu/Luis household was living on the edge of the newly rebuilt Chinatown in San Francisco. Like so many Asians and mixed-race families in America, they were caught between cultures, not fully in either world.

In 1911, the Chinese Revolution succeeded in overthrowing the last Imperial dynasty, and my grandfather returned home to become a senator in the first Chinese Republic. Jennie emigrated with their first child in early 1912, and my father was born in Shanghai a few months later. Two more children followed.

But over the 20 years she lived in China, my grandmother never escaped the taunts of racism. The British in Shanghai banned Chinese from their parks, clubs, schools, and churches. They required “Eurasian” children like my father and his siblings to attend separate schools, and mixed-race families were discouraged from living either in the verdant and spacious neighborhoods of Shanghai’s upscale European Concessions or in the old Chinese City. Instead, they were relegated to gritty, crowded, politically turbulent districts like Hongkew — forever straddling east and west.

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By the time Japan attacked China in the 1930s, my grandmother was desperate to take her four children back to the United States. My grandfather, by then an official in the Nationalist government, relented, though he stayed on. He died in China after the Communists closed the borders. Jennie never saw him or China again. As far as she was concerned, anti-Asian hate had won.

I, on the other hand, choose to believe that the “original results” of my grandparents’ union prove we all belong to the same human family and that love will have the final word.

I’m proud of my grandfather’s scholarship and idealism and of my own Chinese legacy. I’m grateful to my grandparents for their astonishing courage in standing up to anti-Asian hate at a time when American law encoded and enforced naked bigotry. And I fervently believe that we must keep telling stories like this one, not only as cautionary tales but also as profiles in courage, to celebrate and to honor.

This story was originally published on May 15, 2021, in #StopAsianHate on Medium.

More from the Chinese-American Legacy section:

This is the second part of my conversation with Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of the new biography about 1930s socialite Bernardine Fritz, Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon (Part 1 HERE).

Susan, like my own grandmother, married a Chinese man from Wuhan, China, and, also like my grandmother, ran into a number of insurmountable cultural road blocks, which she recounted in her memoir Good Chinese Wife. Part 2 of our conversation, then, revolves around the romantic allure of China and the challenges, for women especially, of marrying across cultural boundaries, in defiance of convention.

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When I read ’s recent interview with over at Half-Caste Woman, their conversation rang a lost bell for me. Susan’s new biography, Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon, tells the story of Bernardine Fritz, who was like a cross between Gertrude Stein and the famous DC hostess Perle Mesta, except Bernardine was holding court in Shanghai from 1929 to 1937—the same era when my father and his siblings were coming of age there.

Bernardine Fritz is not a name you easily forget, and I knew I’d heard it during my parents’ discussions of Shanghai and maybe also of Hollywood in the 30s, when Dad briefly appeared in movies featuring Asian actors like Anna May Wong, who was a good friend of Bernardine’s. But I could not pinpoint Bernardine’s identity or find a direct connection between her and my family, so I reached out to Katie, hoping for an introduction to Susan.

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As an aside, this reach felt a little verboten, since Susan had given my last novel Glorious Boy an absolutely gorgeous review in the Asian Rev…

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It’s been awhile since I posted a Legacy piece. Part of that is busyness— launching a new ghostwriting project, planning to lead a Foreword writing retreat in France next month, and tending to the new MFA Lore section of this newsletter for writers. But another important change has involved my plan for the memoir I’m writing about my Chinese-American father’s buried secrets.

After struggling for years to construct a single frame for this multifaceted family story, I’ve realized that it needs to be a collection of linked essays. The silliness of this is that I’ve been chunking the book into essays and testing them here on Substack and on Medium for years! So now, as I review these previously published essays, the challenge is to figure out which of them should stand as is, and which need to be developed further to fully make sense and to work together like a well-oiled machine.

First up, one of the stories that will be a cornerstone of the collection, about the foster sister I never knew.

Thanks for reading, subscribing, and sharing your thoughts, always!

Aimee

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For Josie & my father

I was born three years after my parents gave my foster sister back. As far as my mother was concerned, I replaced her. My father, I’m not so sure. Josie would have been about six by then. My brother, Marc, was seven. I grew up without knowing the first thing about Josie’s existence.

Only as an adult did I trip across the one photograph that my parents seemed to possess of her. There, tucked into some ancient album, appeared a small blond stranger stepping down Fifth Avenue between my equally small older brother and our fashionable mother. Easter, 1949, the caption read. My mother wore a pillbox hat, black gloves, and a fox stole with its jaws biting its tail to loop it around her shoulder. I recognized the fox, which still hung in the coat closet. I recognized my brother and mother, though I’d never known them so young. But who was that other toddler?

“That’s Josie,” my mother informed me. “She was our foster child.”

“We had a foster child?” Every word of that sentence sounded improbable.

I’d always thought of foster parents as souls of generosity, caring people who volunteered at school events, played ball with their kids, and turned up with casseroles at community potlucks. However off base that stereotype might be, it in no way described the parents I knew, who much preferred gala events and cocktail receptions at the United Nations, where my father worked, to anything directly involved with children. I can’t even recall my mother reading to me as a kid. And my father’s commute — over an hour each way from our home in suburban Connecticut — removed him from my foster parent projection almost entirely. But then again, the photo was taken when my parents still lived in Manhattan.

“How long?” I pressed my mother, who was gazing at the photograph with an expression I couldn’t fathom. A certain strain around the eyes, tenderness around the mouth.

She inhaled deeply, suppressing whatever thoughts had formed. “I think it was about two years.”

“Two years?” I bit back the obvious question.

My mother could take offense at the subtlest shift in voice, and her blowback would send me reeling. So instead of asking how she could have simply erased this child of two years, I invited her to tell me the story.

Mom’s initial version went something like this: Josephine Wing was half-Chinese and half-Swedish. In 1948, her alcoholic mother, the Swede, and her ineffectual Chinese father surrendered Josie and her older brother to Sheltering Arms Family Services. My brother’s pediatrician, Dr. Hedwig Koernich (who also took care of the Kennedy children, my mother made sure to add), was on the board of Sheltering Arms. When the Wing siblings arrived, Dr. Koernich immediately thought of my Shanghai-born Chinese father and my Wisconsin white mother, mostly because of their races but also because they had a little boy about the same age as Josie.

“But you didn’t take Josie’s brother?”

My mother dismissed the thought with a roll of her hand. “Josie hated him.”

Josie wasn’t even two years old. I hardly think she had any say in the matter, but my mother’s deflection didn’t surprise me. She’d never take on more than she could handle.

“Two years is a long time,” I said. “What happened? Why didn’t you keep her?”

“Oh, we wanted to.” My mother’s eyes welled up. “I had miscarriage after miscarriage, and I desperately wanted to adopt Josie. Her creep of a mother refused.”

“You know what happened to her?”

“No.”

“Did you ever try to find out?”

“We had no right to. Besides, what would have been the point?”

When I asked my father what he remembered about Josie, he just shook his head.

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In the absence of any pictures of my father with Josie, I imagined them in their apartment on 92nd Street, meeting over what passed for breakfast, the same way he and I used to meet when I was growing up.

1948. My dad 36 years old. Early morning, before he goes to work, dressed in suit and tie, polished black Oxfords tightly laced. He’s lived in America since he came to California for college, but his first 19 years were spent pivoting between his Chinese father’s expectations and his American mother’s demands. His father was a government official, a Chinese scholar and classical poet. His mother, an American wife who lived in China for two decades and never learned the language. Dad split the difference by following the lead of the British who ruled his school and pretty much everything else in Shanghai. That included acquiring a taste for English muffins like the one he’s now toasting and layering with butter and marmalade. Josie hugs the doorway, watching, silent and alert.

My mother, never an early riser, would be sleeping. My brother? Playing with toy cars, no doubt. Models would become his hobby, then rebuilding engines, then buying and selling rehabilitated getaways. So it’s only Josie in the kitchen with Dad this morning as the sun slides in, painting the linoleum orange.

He gives her a piece of his muffin, and she stuffs it into her mouth but chews it very slowly, never taking her eyes off him. Sticky hands now. Bare feet and smocked pink flannel nightgown. Such a funny little thing, Dad thinks. Those blue-black eyes and Dutch boy hair, yet strangers never doubt you’re mine.

Over the years, my mother will say that Josie worshiped Marc. My brother says he doesn’t have any memories of her, but the resurfaced story got to him, and he named his third daughter after her.

That naming spurred my mother to give a richer, darker account of Josie’s delivery to Sheltering Arms. The Wings had evidently planned to move from New York to Florida, transporting their children and all their worldly goods in a beat-up station wagon. Neighbors called the cops when they spotted the parents loading Josie and her brother into a pasteboard box tied with twine to the top of the car.

Was the mother on a bender? Was her coward of a husband just following orders? Or was this his idea of saving space and avoiding the headache of his wife’s complaints about the kids on their long drive south? Maybe the whole thing was one sudden impulse.

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A new installment from the Legacy side of Legacy & Lore*

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In an unmarked manila envelope that smells of mildew, I discover letters from opposite sides of my family’s Chinese-American divide. One is from my paternal great-grandfather Dr. W. Herbert Trescott, the other from Doc’s son-in-law, my grandfather Liu Chengyu. These two consolation notes are emblematic of the divisions within families that so often occur as a result of what I’ve come to call migration estrangement.

Especially in the last century, when one generation set sail for a foreign country, many lost forever the family members left behind. In my family, this estrangement began even before geographic migration, with the crossing of cultural boundaries.

Lost in America

The note from Doc Trescott, penned on stationery labeled “Naturopath Physician, nervous and chronic diseases,” is addressed to his daughter, my grandmother Dolly, in Berkeley, California. It’s dated March 1911, five years into Dolly’s marriage to my paternal grandfather, Liu Chengyu, a.k.a. “Don Luis”.

Read more about "Don"

“Don,” my grandfather, edited San Francisco Chinatown’s revolutionary newspaper Ta Tung Daily and was a protégé of Dr. Sun Yatsen (now recognized as the Father of Modern China). When Sun came to America, Don organized audiences of hua chiao — journeymen and merchants of the Chinese diaspora — to hear him speak of the great democratic revolution happening back home.

In 1911, Dr. Sun and my grandfather worked their way north to Victoria, Canada, and through the nearby mining and timber towns, anywhere Chinese had numbers. They sold $70,000 worth of Hong Kong bonds to fund the next rebel action. All went well until Don and Sun sailed back from Vancouver with a trunk containing $500 in gold donations to the cause. The gold was to be banked in Frisco, but as Papa and Dr. Sun stood waiting on the dock, one of the stevedores “accidentally” slipped on the gangway, casting the chest into the bay (presumably to be recovered on his own watch).

In the aftermath of this debacle, my grandmother must have written to her father for help reclaiming the money. Not that Doc had any strings to pull. A wagon-train pioneer originally from Boston, he’d failed at cattle ranching and gold mining, and was now eking out a living as a naturopath in Los Angeles. This letter was his curt reply:

Dear Dolly,

I received your letter this morning and I think a spanking would do you good. The last I heard from you, you were sick in bed in Frisco. I wrote there and got no reply. I did not know if you were dead or what. You can write fast enough when you want assistance, but not otherwise.

Don seems to be either out of luck or negligent, I do not know which, for he gets it good and hard from all directions you can bet. I would find a way to get them to cough up that $500. If he does not assert himself more he will be always an easy mark. He is no more out of the frying pan than he is in the fire. I guess his seven years of hard luck must be soon over and I guess his hard luck must have commenced with you. Well, tell him I am glad he returned safely and that it was not him instead of the box that went overboard (there was some luck there for him, or was it not).

Love to all,

Dad

Out of luck, indeed. The harshness of Doc’s tone speaks of his own hurt and doubtless guilt over the estrangement from his headstrong daughter, which began in her infancy, when Dolly’s mother died and Doc left her to be raised by trailmates while he futilely sought his fortune. The gulf between them only widened when she grew up and married my Chinese grandfather.

Read more about this forbidden marriage

And yet I’m struck by the mildness of Doc Trescott’s criticism of his Chinese son-in-law. While despairing of Don’s bad luck and negligence, he seems to reserve the real blame for his daughter.

“I guess his hard luck must have commenced with you.” Ouch! Is this a veiled dig at Dolly for marrying across the racial divide? How else could she be responsible for her husband’s mishap?

So much for any “assistance” in covering the lost gold. Still, my great-grandfather’s sympathy for this star-crossed couple ultimately transcends his own injured feelings. “I am glad he returned safely.” Many other white pioneer father-in-laws would have taken a less charitable tack than to close this note with, “love to all.”

There’s no way of knowing if the money was ever repaid, but with or without it, Dr. Sun’s campaign to overthrow China’s Manchu rulers soon succeeded. Just eight months after receiving Doc’s note, Dolly packed up her three-year-old daughter Blossom and sailed to join Don in Shanghai, where my father was born four months later.

Doc would never see his daughter and son-in-law or any of their children again. He couldn’t have known that when he sent his scolding in 1911, but he clearly sensed Dolly slipping away.

That estrangement was common ground he would come to share with his Chinese son-in-law.

Lost in China

Fast forward 32 years to June 30, 1943, the date on the second note in my late father’s mildewed envelope. The calligraphy here bears no resemblance to Doc’s terse penmanship. This hurried brushwork addresses my father in Chinese. Nevertheless, the contents of this message, too, refer to a potentially catastrophic mishap, while speaking to an even larger inter-generational loss looming on the horizon.

Unable to read Chinese, I’ve had to have my grandfather’s letter translated. That in itself reflects the familial estrangement embedded in these lines:

To Jialu:

You have not written a letter to let me know your recent situation since you left last year. I was informed from outside sources that you were robbed on your way back. It happened in a sudden and there were nothing you could do about it. People who went with you sent me letters separately to let me know about your situation, so please thank them for that. Recently, I heard that you resign [from your job] last month. It’s probably because you’ve found another good position. (You were there long time and it was all right.)

Ask to see if you are all right recently.

Your Father

The robbery that my grandfather refers to occurred in the midst of World War II. Having lived in America for ten years, attending USC and working at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles, my dad had finally gotten funding in 1941 to return to China as a documentary filmmaker. He spent six months shooting footage of the Red Cross’s war efforts on behalf of Chinese civilians. He worked in battlefield hospitals and makeshift clinics. He also was reunited with his father, then an official in China’s wartime capital, Chungking. But in March of 1942, Dad left China by military transport, flying over The Hump from Kunming to an airfield in Assam, and on to Calcutta. He made the tragic mistake of checking his film canisters — the entire body of his work — in the DC-3’s cargo hold. By the time he debarked in Calcutta, the film was gone: It happened in a sudden and there were nothing you could do about it.

More about this family in WWII

Dad never told me what happened when he finally arrived back in the States empty handed. “It was nothing,” he would insist. “They were just some Red Cross training films.” Even decades later, he couldn’t admit the magnitude of his loss. Not just the waste of his effort and career prospects as a filmmaker, but also the final link that those films represented to his father. In 1949 the Communists would pull down the Bamboo Curtain, cutting off all contact between China and America. It would be decades before the family here learned that my grandfather had died in Wuchang in 1953.

Dad acknowledged the robbery but not his father’s attempt at consolation. I only discovered this letter after Dad himself was gone, so I can’t account for the blackout that followed his loss. “It’s probably because you’ve found another good position,” my grandfather wistfully rationalizes. Already he seems to concede that the breach between him and his son has widened beyond mending.

Left behind

When I place my grandfathers’ letters side by side, I’m stunned by their parallels.

- You have not written a letter to let me know your recent situation since you left last year.

- I did not know if you were dead or what.

Two hurt and worried fathers left behind. Worlds and eras apart, both struggled in their impotent ways to reconnect with children who’d slid so far out of their grasp they could never be reclaimed. Children whose mishaps had provided one last excuse for counsel and connection but who were destined to turn away and never see their fathers again.

Perhaps I’m sentimentalizing my dead grandfathers, but different as their approaches may be, both men speak to me of the yearning and regret that permeate families riven by migration.

It happened in a sudden and there were nothing you could do about it.

Like waking to the realization that your children are about to vanish forever across the ocean, and you have no choice but to let them go.

This post was originally published here @authoraimeeliu.medium.com

Pardon me for piling on, and excuse me if you’ve already read my family story [below] about yellowface in Hollywood, but in light of last Sunday’s historic Oscars honoring so many Asian and Asian-American artists, I thought I’d re-send you the story of my father and aunt Lotus’s trip through Hollywood history. They were among the many talented actors and technicians who were led to believe that their time had come in 1936, when The Good Earth was supposed to feature an all-Asian cast. Most were simply and brutally dropped, edited out, or cancelled before they even had their promised screen test. Those pictured above were some of the “lucky” ones who retained some minimal association with the film. My father was relegated to “technical advisor,” meaning that he worked with writer Frances Marion (who was, herself, uncredited) to authenticate scenes, cultural details, locations, dialogue. My aunt Lotus got a few seconds as a sing-song girl in exchange for her voice being dubbed over the …

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When I started this newsletter, one of my intentions was to share with you bits of historical lore that I find fascinating but that may be too arcane for general readers. I’d like to return to this original plan now with one of my favorite stories from my grandfather Liu Chengyu, a scholar revolutionary bent on overthrowing China’s Qing (aka Ch’ing) Dynasty in the early 1900s.

I discovered this story in one of two books by my grandfather that I found in the East Asian collection of UCLA. I had to hire a scholar of classical Chinese to translate them for me, but once I could finally read these stories and poems I understood the sense of kinship I’d long felt for this grandfather, who died in China the same year I was born in Connecticut.

Called Papa in our family, my dad’s father was the only other writer in our family. His poetry is gorgeous, filled with meandering paths and mountain spirits, bridges beyond bridges, and myst…

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My mother died one year ago today, yet she remains deeply present in my life —  largely through our dreams together, which seem to be multiplying. Most of these nocturnal reunions skip into oblivion as soon as I wake. When a dream is particularly vivid, though, I try to scrawl its contours in my dream journal. 

Still half asleep in the dark, I’ll write blind before the movie in my mind flickers out. And somehow, these half-conscious scribbles are surprisingly decipherable. Like hieroglyphics, they provide just enough imagery — stairs, foliage, faces, signs —  to bring the mental story right back to me. In this way, the recent dreams involving my mother have re-emerged like prose-poems from the subconscious — or some other metaphysical zone. Consider this one:

I’m back in my childhood neighborhood with Mom as my guide, photographing all the old houses before they’re gone. She reminds me who lived in which glass house. The O’Neils. The Steinmetzes. The Bigelows and Barkentins. All now gon…

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In 1900 my grandfather Liu Chengyu became one of China's first pro-democracy activists when he joined a student-organized plot to blow up an imperial armory near his home in Wuchang. The plot was exposed and several of my grandfather’s young collaborators were beheaded, while he escaped into exile. In today’s New York Times Morning newsletter, I felt as if I was reading about my grandfather through a time warp:

“A college student in the southern port city of Guangzhou… used Apple’s AirDrop feature to send photos of protest messages to fellow subway passengers’ iPhones. He’s so young that when he said his age, my heart ached. (He asked to keep his name and his age private for fear of punishment by the Chinese authorities.) I asked why he risked so much to protest. He said he wanted to end the rule of the Communist Party …

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This is a somber Memorial Day, in the wake of multiple horrific mass shootings, when America seems to be fighting an undeclared civil war and Russia seems intent on declaring WWIII. In this moment, I would like to suggest we pause and consider what it takes to actually win a war. The human sacrifices. The heroic courage and honorable values. And the incalculable complexity of motives, skills, and strategies that go into successful missions on, off, and around the battlefield.

While no historian, I’ve spent years studying the untold personal stories of real life WWII heroes as part of the research for my novels. I’ve also written essays about these stories, which never cease to fascinate me. So, in tribute to these heroes, I thought I’d share three of their stories with you here.

If these excerpts pique your curiosity, please click the button after each piece to read the whole story.

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I suspect that every family keeps secrets. That’s why they’re a staple of family stories. I might go so far as to say they’re the reason we tell family stories at all: to expose and decode those secrets. But when families are divided by migration, cultural differences, and language barriers, secrets take on added significance, especially for those charged with concealing the truth.

If you’ve been following my newsletters for awhile, you know that I’m a little obsessed with the secrets I’ve long suspected my father kept about his biracial family. I’ve written two novels, Cloud Mountain and Face, in an attempt to imagine my way into experiences that my father claimed he couldn’t remember. Before he died in 2007, I interviewed him as best I could and pried a good many photographs from his hoarded archives. Since then, I’ve been working on a memoir based on the additional material I discovered after his death.

The new finds range from scrapbooks from Dad’s teens in Shanghai, to parcels of l…

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This morning I received an email that torpedoed one of my family’s central myths. My father and his siblings always told the rest of us that their grandfather was “the Viceroy of Canton.” Naturally, our extended family took that as gospel— even if we could never identify the specific viceroy whose dates in Guangzhou (Canton) lined up with my grandfather’s birth date there in 1876. Since my grandfather was just a boy when his father died, we had little first-hand information to go on, but I finally deduced that “our” viceroy had to be Liu Changyou, whose name resembled my grandfather’s, Liu Chengyu, and who had been Viceroy of Canton in the early 1870s.

Today, though, I received the first bit of research from My China Roots, the genealogical service I recently hired to look into my family’s Chinese history. Our supposed viceroy was the first casualty of this project:

It turns out that Liu Changyou 劉長佑 on the doc you shared with us was not your great grandfather.

Liu C…

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Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began last Thursday, I’ve been thinking about little but this war. Putin’s unprovoked assault forced an entire country to choose, overnight, between fight or flight. And it turned a whole lot of young Ukrainians and Ukrainian sympathizers into involuntary combatants.

Like many Americans watching from afar, I’m horrified and terrified for the people of Ukraine. The stakes of this conflict are almost unimaginable, not just for them but for all of Europe and for democracies the world over. If they lose, the global imbalance could well put us all at risk.

There have been plenty of other wars since World War II, but the potential consequences at this moment seem graver than any I can recall since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. That, too, was a crisis of Russia’s (then the Soviet Union’s) utterly unprovoked making, threatening countless lives. Unlike that stand-off, however, today’s already involves the suffering of millions, and…

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“Los Angeles Heiress Elopes With a Chink”

That headline still shocks me. It shouldn’t. Epithets like “chink” and “Chinaman” may have fallen from favor, but as we’ve seen throughout the past year, anti-Asian hate seethes just below America’s surface. And historically, nothing triggers racist venom like the prospect of “mongrelization.” To prevent intermarriage between the races, America kept anti-miscegenation laws on the books for three centuries, from the 1600s until 1967. When my Chinese grandfather married my white American grandmother in 1906, those laws were still in effect throughout the West, which is why my grandparents had to cross five states to legalize their union.

None of that history is new to me. I’ve spent decades writing about my father’s family, even basing my novel Cloud Mountain on this epic marriage. But until a couple years ago, when a distant relative sent me the actual news clippings about their wedding odyssey, I assumed it was a private affair. What shocks me is that racist hatred stalked and hounded them every step of the way. Newspapers from coast to coast tracked their search for a kindly minister, published updates from each stop where they were rebuffed, and lied wildly about their identities.

The truth was that my grandparents met in San Francisco, where my grandfather attended UC Berkeley and edited a pro-democracy newspaper in Chinatown. Though descended from a long line of Imperial officials, he’d dedicated himself to modernizing China on the American model. My grandmother, the daughter of wagon-train pioneers, tutored him in English. When the great San Francisco earthquake struck in 1906, my grandfather saved her life. Within days, they were engaged.

They must have thought the chaos following the earthquake would shield them from public notice while they rode the train east in search of a justice of the peace who would agree to bend the laws against miscegenation. Boy, were they wrong.

By calling my grandmother an heiress, the Denver Post fabricated her status and wealth, and by calling their odyssey an elopement, the headline implied that this Chinese alien was illicitly stealing a prized American gem. Worse, after the desperate couple finally found a cooperative minister in Evanston, Wyoming, Charleston’s News and Courier picked up on a bastardization of my grandfather’s name and stoked the deeper terror: “Miss Dolly Trescott, a white girl, of California, has married a Chinaman whose first name is ‘Sin.’ This should result in something original.”

The headlines might as well have read “From Migration to Mongrelization — Beware!” As one of my grandparents’ “original results,” I’m both thankful and astonished that they had the grit and commitment to persevere. But the hate didn’t stop with their wedding.

Back in San Francisco, the newlyweds faced another form of discrimination. Restrictive real estate covenants commonly prohibited people of color, including “Celestials,” as the Chinese were called in those days, from living in “desirable” neighborhoods.

My wily grandmother had seen this coming. She’d persuaded her new husband to sign the marriage certificate as “Don Luis,” rather than Liu Ch’eng-yu. On paper, he appeared to be Spanish. But for the first year of their marriage, they nevertheless bounced from one apartment to another, each lease terminated when the neighbors complained.

Finally, my grandmother found a flat in Berkeley, near the college campus. Her husband, she told the landlady, was out of town. By the time this Chinese husband with the Spanish name turned up, the lease was signed and sealed and the rent paid a year in advance.

That didn’t stop the downstairs neighbors from launching a whole new Asian hate campaign, demanding that the “Chinese must go.”

My grandmother had had enough. She gave her own press interviews, denouncing her neighbors. The Berkeley Daily pronounced this “Celestial’s Wife Wrathy,” but my grandmother defended her marriage as nobody’s business but her own. She threatened to hire a lawyer. She doubled down on the “heiress” title that the news hounds had given her during her “elopement” and outrageously claimed to be a “blue blood” with roots stretching back to the Puritans. (This strategic move was meant to deflect attention from the fact that she’d been required to surrender her U.S. citizenship in order to marry my grandfather.) She commended the local friends who supported her.

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I was cleaning out my father’s office after his death when I discovered the history of his movie years, stuffed into a soft red and gold Moroccan leather folio. This trove of yellowing newspaper clippings and gauzy headshots thrilled me. Here at last was the archive that would help me piece together Dad’s unlikely acting career 70 years earlier.

He’d never wanted to talk about his Hollywood days. MGM’s 1937 version of The Good Earth was the only movie he’d admit to being part of, which was odd because he hadn’t even made the final cut. His appearance as one of the uncles in the opening scene wound up on the editing room floor. He also worked as a technical consultant for the crews that shot in China. Dad had grown up in Shanghai, the son of a Chinese official who’d remained in Nanking after Dad’s American mother moved the rest of the family to California. My father doubtless was very useful to the production, given the various wars and political intrigues th…

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