Two drifters, off to see the world
There's such a lot of world to see
We're after the same rainbow's end
Waitin' 'round the bend
“Moon River”
By now, you are wondering about my mother: what was her history? What was she like? It wasn’t until I had to write her eulogy that I realized how little I knew about her apart from the isolated anecdotes that she had related to me over the years. In fact, I’d add that my knowledge of her family history and life is very sparse—partly because five of her eight siblings lived in Taiwan and my limited fluency in Taiwanese didn’t help either (more on that later).
Born on February 27, 1932, a birthday shared with Liz Taylor in that very year, Mom—or Cecelia, as she was later named on her way to the US—was the second oldest child and eldest daughter of a physician and his wife in a small town, Fong-shang, in the southern part of Taiwan. Both branches of her family were relatively well-educated and well-off, while her relatives were similarly wealthy: or so I’ve been told. According to Dad, she was a vivacious and friendly girl who had few airs, with friends from every class. This was in spite of their considerable wealth; as Mom loved to tell me over and over again, each of the nine siblings had individual bedrooms in a house that occupied an entire block while the three oldest ones—including Mom herself—had a suite consisting of several rooms.
Though she was never one to complain about wealth, she didn’t like going to school in a limousine. Instead, she preferred walking a mile to the train station with her friends. One of the few stories she told me at least twice was a lesson in class snobbery. She mentioned that when another child asked what her friend’s father did for a living, she answered “pig farmer,” whereupon her friend looked so hurt and ashamed. My mom—who was around 9 or 10 when this happened—felt deeply embarrassed and sorry that she blurted this so carelessly: which I believe may have influenced her ideas on class, and may possibly have informed her rebellious decision to marry Dad, whose family was far beneath hers socially.
Mom’s recollections also included the realities of World War 2–the sirens and air raids after the US declared war on Japan. Because Taiwan had been occupied for some decades by Japan, Taiwan was as much a target for the US as Japan. The air raids were so frequent such that Mom and her siblings nearly got used to it; the only thing they didn’t relish was stepping out of the shelter and seeing bodily parts strewn everywhere—like an isolated bloody leg hanging over a telephone wire. The only person in the family who continued to be severely flustered by the sirens was her father; some of Mom’s younger siblings would imitate the sound of a siren just to watch him panic. However, I say that Mom “nearly got used to it” because it is one of the reasons why she came to oppose the subsequent wars waged by the US—and why she always urged me to participate in anti-war demonstrations. “Americans simply don’t understand the pain and horrors of war because they’ve never suffered one on their homeland,” she would say right after the US declared war on Iraq in 1991.
At any rate, Mom was not a particularly attentive student—even if she pushed me like crazy when I was growing up, no doubt in order to compensate for her own past. She liked hanging out with friends and playing tennis whenever she had the chance. She enjoyed designing clothes too and would always bring her designs to the local seamstress to sew for her; as Dad put it, she dressed so differently from others and was naturally elegant to boot. At home, she played the piano and was able to make a side career out of giving lessons in her 20s. But school learning was not for her, perhaps with the exception of chemistry which was her favorite subject—and one which she would encourage me to enjoy albeit to little avail. Many decades later, she would joke about how she and her siblings dreaded report card day; that was the day when everyone who received bad grades got spanked. But on the day after the spankings, they would quickly resume their usual sports and activities. There was only one sibling who took his grades more seriously than the others: and that was Mom’s eldest brother who was expected to pursue medicine, just like his father.
This is where my father enters the picture. Despite his impoverished background—neither of his parents had more than a middle school education—he managed to become a stellar student from grade school through graduate school, especially in the sciences. By the age of 13, he was interested in airplanes and was already determined to become an engineer. And by 16, his academic prowess was so well known that he was hired to tutor Mom’s older brother in algebra and trigonometry.
It must have been close to love at first sight for Mom. When she had her first stroke and was asked what year it was, she kept saying 1948: this happened to be the year that she met Dad for the first time as he told me days before her memorial service. As she puts it, he was so smart and handsome. Looking back at some of his early photos, I can see how she must have been smitten with him.
According to Dad, their early relationship was a passionate one that they hid from their parents for some time. Having fallen in love with her, he would secretly re-enter her house in the evenings after he was done tutoring her brother. Dad would sneak to the back of the house and climb the surrounding wall whereupon Mom’s younger sister would open the door for him. In time, Dad would even attempt to write a romantic narrative about Mom (something which genuinely surprises me given his poor literary skills). All went smoothly for nearly a year until Mom’s mother caught him in her suite one night. Oops. Not surprisingly, there was hell and fury; Dad was ordered out and never to return. He would tell me after Mom’s passing that he was distraught that her mother also tore up his romance.
At some point, though, they reunited. That Dad graduated summa at National Taiwan University, the most prestigious university in Taiwan and notoriously difficult to enter, was probably a mollifying factor. This served to balance his family history and circumstances somewhat. Dad’s father, though poorly educated in comparison with the men in my mother’s family, was not stupid: as a police officer, he quickly advanced through the ranks to become a chief given his expert sleuthing skills. In fact, he was well known locally by his mid-forties (the toughest SOB in town, Mom used to say in Taiwanese). But Mom’s family still looked down on him, possibly because of his perceived lack of moral values rather than his lack of formal education per se. Certainly, his philandering was no secret and it was said that he cheated on his sickly wife, formerly a schoolteacher. Not long after the latter’s death, he would remarry—a woman who started life as a geisha-type hostess (“little better than a prostitute,” Mom sniffed) but wound up as one of the first women representatives in the town. Dad’s family was fond of conspicuous consumption, having then moved from a very shabby flat to a large, splashy three-story house with 2 large rooftop gardens in the middle of town which my mother castigated as “low and vulgar.” Only uneducated people, according to Mom, enjoy showing off their wealth when they go from rags to riches.
Yet, despite whatever contempt Mom and her family had for Dad’s family background, Mom herself still admired Dad. If her father’s early death at 54 led to what she called a dire depletion of family wealth when compared to the families of her aunts and uncles, it made it possible for Mom and Dad to reunite—even if her mother was still fiercely opposed to any notion of marriage between them. (There’s a Taiwanese saying which her mother believed: “Ne’er do wells can only produce other ne’er do wells.”)
(Cecelia Han in 1957)
Not long after, Dad decided to go to the US to pursue a doctorate in engineering. He would start off at the University of Kansas probably around 1955. I can’t imagine this was easy for him—or any of his fellow Taiwanese students. Jim Crow laws were very well intact; in fact, because the barbershops didn’t know if Asians were Black or white, they refused to cut their hair. So the students would give each other haircuts. Another anecdote he’d often recount was of the Protestant family with whom he and two other students lived: every Sunday, the family would bring these students to church, hoping to turn them into good Protestants. The conformist in me always wondered why Dad did not want to join the church; as I saw it, those who belonged to Christian churches, especially Protestant ones, were much more highly regarded. (More on that later.)
For whatever reason, Dad decided to transfer to another university, this time Carnegie-Mellon. (I like to joke that he probably got sick of attending church.) And after about a year, he headed up to Princeton. It is said that he was immediately offered a job with only a Master’s because he was able to solve a math problem on the spot that no one else could. But he refused it, wanting to go to pursue a Ph.D.
In the meantime, Mom kept working at a bank where she got rapid promotions while applying for visas to the US and getting turned down, year after year. Far from being terrified, she was eager to go—not only to marry Dad, but because America seemed like such a wonderful place judging from the Hollywood movies she’d seen: look at those immaculate homes! Women wearing high heels in the kitchen! She couldn’t understand why she got turned down again and again but she was most likely unaware of the continued near-exclusion of Asians even after the Magnuson Act of December 17, 1943, which allowed 105 Chinese to enter per year, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which removed direct racial barriers. When Dad told his fellow American graduate students at Princeton about this, they helped him write a letter to a NJ state senator—and voila, he arranged for my mother to come. She arrived in late 1959 and my parents were finally able to marry on February 7, 1960. It must have been a special occasion for them, being at least a twenty-year romance in the making. No wonder they looked so happy in their pictures, whether at Princeton or other states they toured. It’s as such that these pictures remind me of one of Mom’s favorite songs, “Moon River.”
I
(Their visit to Virginia shortly after their marriage)
(Princeton, 1962)
However, the early 1960s were still not an easy time for my parents. For one thing, they didn’t have much money: Mom likes to say that not only did she give money to my father to study here, but she had only two small trunks. She had to learn to sew since American clothes were expensive. But it wasn’t just their relative poverty. Whenever I complained about racism—and that was frequent, as you’ll see—Mom would tell me about their challenges in a town and a state that was 99.99% white: this was something my father never addressed in our conversations. People stared at them like they were animals. When they went to a hotdog stand, they got the worst and most misshapen hotdogs. When they went to the movies and found themselves one penny short, they were not allowed in. (In Taiwan, people will just waive such a tiny difference, Mom would always say.) Not least, phone calls to Taiwan were prohibitively expensive, so she couldn’t just call up her mom and complain about the people and the food. (The only American food she enjoyed was pizza. It would take her years to appreciate other foods—like hamburgers and steak.) I can only imagine what it must have been like for her to suffer three miscarriages before becoming pregnant with me and not being able to discuss it with a more knowledgeable person in Taiwanese.
Yet, she did as best as she could as Dad completed his PhD in aerospace engineering in 1962. She learned English while enrolling in Westminster Choir College and was on the verge of completing a college degree when Dad got hired at NYU—after turning down a job paying $25,000 at Boeing. (What an idiot, I thought.) I suspect this decision had much to do with his Confucian indoctrination, as I would call it. For much of my life, I really couldn’t understand why a husband and father would take a lower paying job: and particularly when he would try to steer me towards more lucrative professions—which ultimately did me more harm than good. Wasn’t that hypocritical of him? Mom, however, did not seem to mind; to her, Dad’s decision showed that he was not vulgar and “money grubbing.” If his family was uneducated, HE was a scholar.
It was not before long when all three of us headed to the Kingsbridge area of the Bronx: I always jokingly say that I was born three months too early because I’d rather be born in da Bronx than Princeton.
Your mom's photos are strikingly reminiscent of you; lovely.