During the past two weeks I have been asking my mother about whether there were any stories there were to share. Unfortunately, she told me more about her history and what her family in China was like. She told me that her family were farmers and how she had to struggle in her younger years of her life.
When she was still a child, my mother would be working on the farm to support her family while the rest of her older brothers and sisters would be attending school. She didn’t go to school yet because she thought that supporting the family would be more important than and education. At home, she would do chores around the house and cook for the family. At age 8, she had finally attended school. She was a clever student and was one of the first students in the family to attend college at China. She was ranked number eighth when she graduated from college. After graduation, she became a teacher at a school near home.
Nevertheless, my mother didn’t explain much to me. Then, just two days before the rough draft was due, I asked my father whether there were any stories about previous generations. Within a few seconds, he began talking about my great grandfather. Turns out, he was an important member of the family. All this time, I was asking my mother when I should have been asking my father. I never knew that he would tell me something that I was curious about.
My great grandfather was an important person, but not so important that he made it in the history books or in a museum. Throughout his lifetime, he had a wealthy lifestyle. He owned a share of a large vessel that transported people from Hong Kong to Canton. He started two Chinese herbal drug stores, one in Hong Kong and one in Oregon that are still in existence today. The drug store in Oregon is currently owned by my father’s second cousin. My great grandfather was a businessman at some times of his life. He had a job in Hong Kong where he had collected money from other people sent from foreign countries to pass out to the people that the people originally wanted send them to. The family received a minor share of the money given but there was a lot coming in daily so that it began to build up daily. Much of this delivering was done by horseback riding since there weren’t any cars back them except when my great grandfather had to cross the body of water between mainland China and Hong Kong. This was the reason to why my great grandfather owned a share of the boat because he had to constantly travel back and forth between mainland China and Hong Kong. My great grandfather had also owned a lot of farmable land. A lot of that land was rented to farmers so my dad’s family profited greatly from the monthly payments.
In this section, I thought that this was the most interesting part of my great grandfather’s life. My great grandfather, while he was alive, owned a four story building with 5,000 square ft. on each floor. A person could just imagine that as a huge mansion. My father told me that back in the 1930s (when my great grandfather was alive), there were a lot of thieves since that police didn’t do much back then because the government didn‘t really support them. As a result, a lot of the thieves would come every night to our home to steal the belongings. Nevertheless, my great grandfather established a system to eliminate the sneaky thieves. The house contained a room storage filled with guns, mostly rifles. At night when the thieves came, a watchdog would sound an alarm alerting the family that there were thieves approaching in the distance. Within minutes, the family and possibly some servants would camp somewhere and aim and shoot at the thieves even if it meant killing them. If the thieves had common sense, the gun fire would drive them away and prevent them from coming back.
During World War II, Japan was in a great war with China. My great grandfather moved back to his family in Taishan province in Canton, China. The Japanese army was moving closer and closer to the South with everyday that passed by so he wanted to spend his moments with family rather than serve in the war. My father explained to me that many people including my great grandfather had done this as well. No one really wanted to separate from their family to go to war.
In 1951, about six years after World War II, my great grandfather passed away but not because of natural causes. After the world war, Communism was on the rise in China and Mao Zedong became the first chairman of the communist party of China. During his rule, one of his terrible actions is that he ordered the imperial army to arrest all of the wealthy people, in which one of them was my great grandfather, and placed them in jail to rot. The jails had horrible living conditions and eventually, my great grandfather died of starvation because the food there was unbearable. The family wealth was never returned and the family had basically dropped from the elite class to the poor class within a few years.
I think that this story has survived in my family because it was a tragic point of time within my father’s side of the family. This was the first time that I have heard any stories from my father. I thought that it would have only survived because it was not so many generations ago. My father knew about it even though he wasn’t born yet. If I had not asked, this story might have been forgotten and never to be told again unless there was some important event that came up or some tragedy. Before ever hearing of this story, I had always thought that my family were always farmers because of my mother’s stories. As mentioned before, I had never heard of any of my father’s stories. Finally on Monday, March 15 of 2011, my father has told me his first story about the legacy of my great grandfather. From this story, I basically learned that a part of me came from a family that was robbed by the Communist government and that all of my families‘ suffering were because of that government. My family had basically turned poor because of it.
Although my great grandfather’s story had been tragic, there were also some upsides. This is why I am here today; in America. If my family had never known that Communism was such a horrible sight, my family would most likely to not have immigrated here. As a result, I would be born in China and the family may still not have immigrated here. To think further, if my family had not been robbed, my family may have not been together. In other words, my father may have never met my current mother because of the class difference. My father may have married a woman that was in the wealthy class. I would have been born but I would be a different person.
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