My father's daughter

My father passed away suddenly on December 5, 2009. The news came to us over a phone call from Lodi, China from a good friend of his. My initial reaction was complete shock and disbelief, then overwhelming grief and sorrow. My father had been active and healthy the last time I saw him in April. A couple of months earlier he had complained of losing his voice possibly due to a burst blood vessel in his larynx, but nothing else was visibly wrong with him. My mother and I took the first available flight back to Taiwan with the idea of flying to Changsha airport (a 2.5hr drive to Lodi) the following morning. It would be the first visit I make to China, the first visit to my father's birthplace, the first time I meet my relatives on my father's side. I'll be returning to the roots of my father; something that's familiar, alien, dear and frightening.

It's difficult to explain the complexity of these feelings without going into my father's life. My father was born in 1930 or 1932, the only son of the second wife of a Kuomintang general. The first wife had died and left behind four sons and a daughter before my grandfather married my grandmother who gave birth to my father and his little sister. As a child my father stayed with relatives while his mother traveled with his father leading troops all over China. He was beaten badly while staying with one of his older brothers. It was explained to me that the resentment toward my grandmother, being the second wife, was the reason for the beatings. As a result my father went to live with his mother's younger brother's family, the Liu clan. He became very close to his Liu cousins, aunts and uncles.

When my father was a teenager somewhere between the age of 14 and 18, the Kuomintang lost the war and began a massive retreat to the island of Taiwan. Knowing their ill fate as the immediate family members of a Kuomintang general, my grandmother told my father to follow the retreating groups out of China as soon as possible. In his hurry, the only item my grandmother managed to hand to him was a valuable pocket watch which later was stolen from him. My father made his way to Taiwan  nearly dying of starvation on the boat over the strait after not having food for three days. Once he arrived in Taiwan the mainland China borders were immediately sealed off. What followed was nearly forty years of complete silence between the two sides. My father did not know the fate of his family back home and my grandmother did not know what became of her only son. My father was the only one in his family who made it out of China.

My father did what he could to stay alive and build a future for himself in Taiwan. He never forgot his family back home; especially close to his heart was his mother and his little sister. When the borders started to open up on the two sides in the early 1980's, my father immediately wrote a letter to his home in China. It was 1982 and my grandmother was on her deathbed. They read the letter to her. She cried. Then she died. My father couldn't make the trip home until 1983, a year after her death. While it was sad that my grandmother and my father never got to see each other before she died, we found comfort in that she at least had the answer to the question she must have asked everyday for the last forty years: what had become of her only son?

My father stayed in close touch with his extended family back home. Visiting frequently. But it had been several decades since they had seen each other. It's now a different time, different generation, different upbringing, ideology...everything. They were poor village folks, and as far as they're concerned my father was the rich Taiwanese with money to spend. There was never a lack of relatives with a hand out. Some more aggressive than others. Some even resorted to scams and extortions. My father, filled with feelings of 'survivor guilt' and responsibility to help his less fortunate relatives, could never say 'no'. Growing up, I heard him telling my mother these stories and I was filled with both distrust and curiosity toward my kin. I deliberately kept myself from having any communication with them. Part of it was not trusting them to not take advantage of me; part of it was how frightened I was of getting up close and personal with a part of my father's history that was so painful and so much the core of his being. My father never hesitated in sharing with me his longing for his roots and the sorrow that ate at him. It also became my sorrow, which I was too young for, and which I was terrified of revisiting as an adult.

Then he died.

While in Taiwan we came to find out that I needed to apply for a special permit to enter China. The soonest we could get it was three days. So by the time we were on a plane to Changsha it was a week after my father's passing. During this week my father's friend Wang Wen-Da, who had made the dreadful call to us, stood watch over my father's body with his wife Liu Shao-Rong, translator Zou Nen, driver Yu Hua-Huang and my cousin from Fu-Jien, Pon Li-Feng. Li-Feng is the only daughter of my father's little sister, the one he said I look a lot alike and the reason he always called me 'mei-mei' ('little sister' in Chinese). When I saw her in the airport I did not recognize her. She burst into tears and held on to me. Her mother, my aunt, had died nearly a decade earlier of lung cancer, the result of working for years in a horrible environment. I remember my father traveling to her hospital to be by her side and paying for all of the medical expenses. He was heart broken when she died. I came to find out that he had been in frequent contact with Li-Feng all these years, often chatting for an hour on the phone. I got to know my dear cousin during this trip and just fell in love with her. Her mannerism and personality is a carbon copy of my father. I couldn't help but laugh at the things she would say and marvel at how much she reminded me of my father. She's the sister I always wished I had, and wondered how I could've allowed all these years to fly by without getting to know her.

The trip to China was not a simple one. My father was very specific in his wishes on how he wanted to be taken care of when he died. He instructed that his body be cremated and the ashes be scattered on his mother's grave. After over sixty years since leaving home, his mother was still in the center of his heart and mind. The grave was situated on a mountain that has been used by the Chou clan in the village for many, many generations. The graves of my ancestors dating back four centuries can be found on that mountain. When my grandmother died, my father sent a large sum of money to his relatives so they would construct a large grave site for her. Both my name and my brother's name are carved into the head stone.

We were in China for four days. During that time we had to deal with difficulties and unpleasantness just to carry out his wishes: opportunistic relatives, corrupted government officials, unethical businesses...and so on. But we also spent hours everyday talking and laughing over cups of coffee, tea and incredibly delicious Hunan cuisine. Remembering all the things that made us love my father. I never knew any of these people, yet their affection for my father was deep and evident. We told stories of him, laughed at his mischievous nature and cried at losing someone so uniquely smart, funny, genuine and loyal. We came to know even more of my father. It was a wonderful experience to share the love we all had for him, and to heal together.

Before my father was cremated, I took some of his hair and put it in a locket to wear around my neck. I don't believe in an afterlife. When someone dies what's left behind is his essence, what others remember of him. The locket is a symbol of my love for my father, but I don't need it to remember how much he's a part of me. I don't need photos or videos to remember the twinkle in his eye when he's about to play a joke on me, the grunt he made after a satisfying meal, the way he shuffled around the house in his long john, the way he slurped his tea or the way he complained of my cold hands and rubbed them between his big, warm hands. I can still feel the warmth of his chest as he read me the stories of the little monk when I was a child lying on his belly, smell the scent of the oil he used to comb his hair, hear the sound of him calling to me at dinner time, and telling me how much I was just like him, a little tigress with big eyes who left home at fourteen.

After everything was done, we went our separate ways back to our lives. We took down each other's contact information and promised to meet up again for a trip across China. We still have a house in Lodi that we need to sell, so I know I will have to go back at least one more time. All these years my father urged me to go to China, to meet my relatives, to get to know his roots, to understand where he came from. All these years I stayed away, too afraid. It would seem that he finally got his wish.