Cranes Among Chickens: Chronicles of an Immigrant Family

By James J. Ong

Cranes Among Chickens is a compelling memoir about a Taiwanese family, with tales of immigrants and pioneers, of ambition and rebellion, of three generations spanning one hundred years, two continents, five countries, and three wars. This family saga mirrors a tumultuous period in history as Taiwan transitioned from a 19th century backwater to a 21st century economic powerhouse. These collected stories drawn from diaries, letters, oral accounts, and the authors recollections of his own journey to American citizenship and professional acclaim provide a candid portrait of a remarkable family that has endured great change and overcome numerous challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469153841

James J. Ong

James J. Ong, M.D. was born in Taiwan and moved to southern California with his family as a young teenager. He did his undergraduate work at U.C. Berkeley, graduated from U.C. San Diego School of Medicine, and now practices as a cardiologist. Dr. Ong lives in Los Angeles with his wife Linda and their three children, Christina, Tiffany, and Alexander. His hobbies include world travel, music, genealogy, history, and collecting antiques, rare stamps, and coins.

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Contents

Author’s Notes

Prologue

Book 1 Ah-Chim and Ah-Suat

Chapter 1 Girl from a Salt Water Town

Chapter 2 A Prosperous Clan

Chapter 3 Pigtails and Bound Feet

Chapter 4 A Thousand Pieces of Gold

Chapter 5 Wedded to a Stranger

Chapter 6 Falling in Love in Kyoto

Chapter 7 As Different as Two Could Be

Chapter 8 Living on Borrowed Time

Chapter 9 Missing Mother Home

Chapter 10 Life as a Sen-Si-Niu

Chapter 11 Terms of Endearment

Chapter 12 Making Ga-Li Red

Chapter 13 New Doctor on Bo Street

Chapter 14 A Shoulder to Cry Upon

Chapter 15 Knowledge Is Priceless

Chapter 16 The War Draws Near

Chapter 17 When Bullets Rained Down

Chapter 18 All a Woman Could Ask For

Book 2 Ah-Ly-Ah and Ah-Tong

Chapter 1 The Day She Left Us

Chapter 2 Cheating Death

Chapter 3 Eagle and Chicks

Chapter 4 Being Nonki

Chapter 5 A Dog Named Hitler

Chapter 6 Hunger

Chapter 7 Bullets Do Not Have Eyes

Chapter 8 Kagoshima on Fire

Chapter 9 Kamikaze Uncle

Chapter 10 My Birthday Underground

Chapter 11 Spam and Cookies

Chapter 12 Back from the Dead

Chapter 13 Into the Arms of the Motherland

Chapter 14 Hungry Ghost

Chapter 15 Glass Ceilings

Chapter 16 Homecoming

Chapter 17 Are You a Communist?

Chapter 18 Father and Son

Chapter 19 Picking up the Pieces

Chapter 20 House Calls

Chapter 21 Letters from Papa

Chapter 22 National Taiwan University

Chapter 23 Teacher’s School

Chapter 24 The Tatami Room Incident

Chapter 25 Paying My Own Way

Chapter 26 A Glimpse of the West

Chapter 27 Matchmaking

Chapter 28 A Visit from Dr. Ngo

Chapter 29 Monkey King

Book 3 Chu-Ly and Ming-Tong

Chapter 1 A Month of Spoiled Chicken

Chapter 2 Chicken Poop for a Suzuki

Chapter 3 Living in Otousan’s House

Chapter 4 Yo-Ma Seedling

Chapter 5 Life as a Young Bride

Chapter 6 An Inconvenient Truth

Chapter 7 The Perfect Storm

Chapter 8 Leaving My Father’s House

Chapter 9 Our New Home

Chapter 10 A Farm of Our Own

Chapter 11 Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Chapter 12 Crossing the Black Ditch

Chapter 13 I-Tong Street

Chapter 14 An Unexpected Opportunity

Chapter 15 Sojourn in Bangkok

Chapter 16 A Visit from Otousan

Chapter 17 Because She Is My Mother!

Chapter 18 The Passing of a Legend

Chapter 19 Cold Winter in Taipei

Chapter 20 Prodigal Son

Chapter 21 Garden in the Sky

Chapter 22 The Moon is Rounder Abroad

Chapter 23 A Gift from Ah-Chim

Chapter 24 Green Cards

Chapter 25 The Kindness of Strangers

Book 4 James

Chapter 1 Star Wars and the Sound of Music

Chapter 2 I Want To Be an American

Chapter 3 Home Alone

Chapter 4 Alaskan King Crab Tail

Chapter 5 Flying Parents

Chapter 6 FOB vs. ARC vs. ABC

Chapter 7 Pineapple Pie

Chapter 8 Reaganomics

Chapter 9 Neither Here Nor There

Chapter 10 P = MD

Chapter 11 Med Students Are Like Undescended Testicles

Chapter 12 Five-Year Plan

Chapter 13 Roots

Chapter 14 Roots II

Chapter 15 Around-the-World

Chapter 16 Ming Ong Was Here

Chapter 17 Ten Years by the Cold Window

Book 5 James

Chapter 1 The Intern Survival Manual

Chapter 2 A Blessing in Disguise

Chapter 3 Hospital to the Stars

Chapter 4 The Bikini Syndrome

Chapter 5 Call Her

Chapter 6 Bending in the Wind

Chapter 7 Fish, Rocks, Trees, Wind

Chapter 8 The Business of Medicine

Chapter 9 A Penny Saved

Chapter 10 From Getting Shots to Giving Them

Chapter 11 The Neurosurgeon and the Plumber

Chapter 12 Legal Poker

Chapter 13 Hua Tuo Zaishi

Chapter 14 Second Place Is First Loser

Chapter 15 Hua Tuo Zaishi (II)

Chapter 16 Hua Tuo Zaishi (III)

Chapter 17 Midlife

Chapter 18 Daddy, Will You Play with Me?

Epilogue

Chapter Notes

Appendixes

Historical Overview of Taiwan

Ming-Tong’s Life in America Essays

Eulogy for Otousan

History of the Ong Family

History of the Wu Family

Ah-Chim’s Return

Letter to My Newborn Son

For my parents, whose unwavering courage, tenacity, and adventurism—even in the face of adversity—taught me how to succeed in life;

For Ah-Chim, my illiterate and bound-foot grandmother, whose fascinating life inspired me to delve into my family history;

And for my wife and children, Linda, Christina, Tiffany, and Alexander, for whom this book was written.

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Alternative Names for Main Characters

Commonly Used Family Titles

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Author’s Notes

There are more important things passed down through generations than DNA.

—TV advertisement for PBS

This is a story about a Taiwanese family, about immigrants and pioneers, about ambition and rebellion, and about three generations spanning one hundred years, two continents, five countries, and three wars. Within a single century, many dramatic social, political, and economic changes took place on the small subtropical island that is known today as Taiwan, changes that forever altered the fates of my ancestors and millions of other people. The story of my family thus takes on a broader significance, in that it mirrors a tumultuous period in history as Taiwan transitioned from an untamed nineteenth-century backwater to the colony of an ancient empire to a twentieth-century economic powerhouse.

In 2002, I began interviewing and videotaping my parents in an effort to preserve my family’s oral history. The process of gathering additional data was a monumental challenge, as my family’s entire older generation is now dead. Other than some skimpy written records, I had essentially nothing that documented my ancestors’ personalities or life experiences. I had to rely on my parents’ memories to fill in the numerous gaps, which in itself presented considerable challenges—namely, different recollections of the same long-ago events. It felt like a confusing game of Generational Telephone at times, as I pieced together second- and third-hand accounts of things.

Fortunately, gathering data about my mother’s side of the family was greatly facilitated by the prolific writings of my maternal grandfather. He had written his own family history in novel form and kept a detailed diary all his life, both of which were strong inspirations for me to write this book. Capturing the stories on the paternal side of my family was much more problematic. Aside from a detailed eulogy delivered at my grandfather’s funeral, I had to rely almost entirely on oral accounts.

As far as format is concerned, I initially focused on three women from two generations to serve as the central voices for these stories: my paternal grandmother, my maternal grandmother, and my mom. I thought this would provide a unique vantage point, especially since human history has largely been written from a male perspective. Throughout China’s long history, for example, most of the names recorded for posterity belong to men. Women made it into the history books only on extremely rare occasions and are invariably depicted as she-devils and troublemakers who interfered with politics and destroyed dynasties. Such one-sided storytelling is evident even within my own family tree, a collection of hundreds of names that are predominantly male. It defies logic to suggest there was not a single girl born to the Ong family for eleven generations; rather, the names of the girls were simply left out because historians (read: men) didn’t consider them important.

I also thought these particular women could provide better insight into the family aspect of this family history. My grandmothers and my mother were all housewives, not major political figures or noted historians or agents of social change; nonetheless, they are excellent examples of women who possessed great resourcefulness and inner strength, defiant women who made an impact on the world in their own behind-the-scenes way. In addition, each one was a Sen-Si-Niu, or a doctor’s wife. Both of my grandmothers married physicians, and my mom married a man who studied veterinary medicine, so I suppose she qualifies as a Sen-Si-Niu too. Apart from this, these women had completely different backgrounds in terms of their educations, marriages, careers, and personal ambitions and thus present three completely different portraits of early to mid-twentieth century life:

• My paternal grandmother, Ah-Chim, was born just before the turn of the century into a traditional Taiwanese family. She grew up illiterate, endured bound feet, and eventually entered an arranged and loveless marriage to a highly educated and progressive young doctor.

• My maternal grandmother, Ah-Suat, was an educated, worldly modern woman born during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. Her marriage to an outspoken and avant-garde young doctor was a true love match.

• My mom, Chu-Ly, was born just prior to World War II and represents Taiwan’s pre–baby boomer generation. Intelligent, ambitious, and independent, she witnessed great wartime atrocities and various economic booms and crashes. Her pseudo-arranged marriage to a rather rebellious and entrepreneurial-minded man (my dad) also turned out to be a genuine love match.

As I delved ever further into my research, I realized there were a number of incidents within this family history that weren’t personally experienced by any of these women. In these cases, I wrote from my own perspective or that of my father, so that by the end, the balance between female/male voices was about fifty-fifty. Although this wasn’t my original intention, I think it ultimately provides a more holistic, compelling, and accurate account of this multigenerational family saga.

I used imaginative speculation to fill in any gaps in the storyline, taking into consideration the context of the time and place and the personalities involved. This was especially true with my paternal grandmother’s story. My memories of her are somewhat limited, and nothing whatsoever was written about her except for her birth date. I had her father’s name, however, and my research on him helped fill in the missing pieces.

Readers will find a comprehensive section of chapter notes at the end of this book, with more detailed information on Taiwanese history, culture, language, and many other references alluded to in the main text. Some chapter notes also contain quotes, names, and place-names written in their original Chinese form. There is also an appendix section with more in-depth research on historical context, my family’s ancient origins, and additional essays.

I’ve also included a map, a family tree, and a name chart to cross-reference personal names in all their different versions: Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, and American. This is a very helpful guide, in light of the fact that many people of Chinese descent, especially those with advanced degrees or working in literary fields, have multiple names. My maternal grandfather had no less than ten names (!), some of which were pen names. Things are further complicated by the fact that the pronunciation of names (and in some cases even the names themselves) were changed over the course of time, in response to fluctuating political and social situations. In respect to the names used in this book, I tried to select pronunciations that most reflected each narrator’s historical context. Therefore, names from my grandparents’ generation are in Chinese with Taiwanese pronunciations; those from my parents’ generation are either in Japanese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin; and those from my generation are either in Mandarin or are Anglicized. Readers will also find a sprinkling of Japanese names, as nearly all my family members depicted in this book were Japanese citizens until 1945. These rules for pronunciation also extend to the proper names of places, except in cases where the modern-day names are so well known that it would be odd to call them otherwise. For example, I don’t refer to the city of Taipei as Dai-Bok or Taihouku, as my grandparents would have done.

It should also be pointed out that Chinese and Taiwanese people place their family name before their first name. My great-grandfather was known his entire life as Ong Kai, so it would be odd, and rather disrespectful, to start calling him Kai Ong in this book. Taiwanese also frequently use nicknames with each other, usually by placing the word Ah in front of a person’s first name (e.g., Ah-Tong, Ah-Suat). They often refer to older family members by their status titles (e.g., Big Sister or Third Brother). I’ve tried to be consistent in my usage of names to eliminate as much confusion as possible.

One final but important note: The most cherished and significant woman in my life, my dear wife Linda, is not a central character in this book because of her relatively late arrival in the story. But this doctor’s wife (who is herself a doctor) was instrumental in the completion of this project, providing patience, guidance, and encouragement. I also owe a great deal to my three children, as the time spent on this book ate into my already limited time with them. I hope they will understand better when they become parents themselves someday and perhaps find new interest in the origins of their family.

Prologue

A single beam cannot support a great house.

—Chinese proverb

Standing amid piles of rubble, I looked around in disbelief at the rotting remains of the house my grandfather built more than sixty years ago.

My grandfather was a famous ear, nose, and throat surgeon in the town of Giam-Tsuy in southern Taiwan. His given name was Ong Jong-Ngo, but my dad and his brothers (who grew up during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan) called him Otousan, Japanese for Honorable Father. My brothers and I were raised in Taiwan when it was under Chinese rule, so we called him Ah-Gong, or Grandpa in Taiwanese. I’m not sure how my grandmother addressed him. As my family knows all too well, my grandparents hardly spoke to each other.

No one had lived in the house for decades. It was in an advanced state of decay when my wife and children took a trip to Taiwan in early 2007. My middle child, Tiffany, wanted to see the house where her dad was born. When they returned home, they showed me their photos of the house, which I found appalling and completely unrecognizable. But nothing prepared me for what I saw with my own eyes later that year, when I went back in Taiwan for a family reunion to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of my maternal grandfather. This was the first such gathering on my mother’s side of the family in over twenty years. After the event, I suggested that our family visit the hometown of my other Ah-Gong, my paternal grandfather, and we eagerly made arrangements to do so.

Like a salmon swimming upstream to its birthplace, I once again made this pilgrimage to the house as if driven by a primitive homing instinct. It is a journey I’ve undertaken many times in my adulthood. Growing up in Taiwan, I spent every winter and summer vacation at Otousan’s house. In fact, I lived in that house for the first two years of my life, and it was the first place I ever knew as home. After I moved to America, I tried to squeeze in a visit to the house whenever I traveled back to Taiwan. On that unforgettable November day, our family entourage, ranging in age from ten months to seventy-nine years, piled into two taxis for the journey to Otousan’s house. Some of us had not been there in over twenty years, and some were going there for the first time. It took several wrong turns to find the place, as things had changed and memories of landmarks had faded. We eventually located the house only because we recognized the drugstore next door, which is now run by Otousan’s former apprentice.

My mom stayed behind in one of the taxis. She hadn’t set foot inside Otousan’s house for twenty-five years, not since she attended my grandmother’s funeral. To this day, she refuses to enter the place, the setting of so many unpleasant memories for her, memories that even now she is reluctant to share with me.

The rest of us climbed out of the cabs and stared at the sight before us, utterly stunned. This once stately house, so rich with history, the place where my grandfather built a successful medical and political career, where my parents hosted a wedding reception for over one thousand guests, where innumerable family members and friends had lived over three decades of active use, was now a complete ruin. Most of the roof had collapsed, exposing the interior to the subtropical elements. The front yard was so overgrown with vegetation it was beyond recognition. What used to be a driveway flanked by a beautifully landscaped garden was now covered by a thick layer of dirt, weeds, and debris. Adding salt to the wound, neighbors had turned our front yard into a makeshift dog kennel. Several caged and uncaged canines feverishly barked and growled at us as we walked past them into what was—and still is—our ancestral home.

Heavy vines and thick vegetation covered everything on the front side of the house, concealing the home’s former grandeur. Built at the apex of the Pacific War, the house was constructed with top-quality materials from a dismantled local mansion, whose original owner had it shipped over from China long, long ago. Painstakingly put together by renowned artisans, the house had ornately carved wooden panels, towering wooden pillars, and a living room with a cathedral ceiling, a rare sight in traditional Taiwanese architecture. It was mind-boggling to see how much damage sixty years of neglect and Taiwan’s hot, muggy climate could inflict on such an architectural showpiece. I dragged my eyes from the crumbling shell of the house and anxiously glanced over at my father. His face looked grim.

This looks like the ruins of Angkor Wat, he muttered, referring to the vast ancient temple complex in Cambodia.

We pried open the jammed door to the family room. The floor was covered with about twelve inches of broken tiles and plaster from the collapsed roof. Tangled vines and gnarled tree roots had taken over everything, giving the room the appearance of a terrarium on steroids. The once-small fichus tree in the courtyard that I remembered climbing as a child was now taller than the house, its monstrous branches stretching across the courtyard and invading the family room through the shattered roof. My dad and I gingerly waded inside, taking great care where we placed our feet. Every footstep was accompanied by loud cracking sounds as shards of glass and pieces of the tile roof snapped under our weight. If a house could weep, this is what it would sound like. It was the sound of neglect and loss and heartbreak.

I took the hand of my five-year-old son and led him to the back of the house, where a row of small rooms lined the central courtyard. This is the place where Daddy was born, I said as we peered into one of the rooms. I pointed in the direction of a small tree where there had once been a bed, or what passed for a bed back in 1962—a built-in wooden structure about three feet off the floor, covered with thin straw mats. Little Alexander looked puzzled, perhaps envisioning his father being born among the branches of the tree.

I looked around, thinking of everything that had happened within the fallen walls of this house, the memories the place held, both good and bad. I tried to absorb its energy and let it take me back, all the way back to the very beginning. I imagined what it must have been like during its heyday, the sounds and images of children playing, men arguing over their pipes, women cooking. I made up my mind that I would never allow the history of this house and its memories fade into oblivion.

The theme song from the movie Titanic began to play in my head.

Book 1

Ah-Chim and Ah-Suat

Chapter 1

Girl from a Salt Water Town

Ah-Chim

This much I know for sure. I was born in the small town of Giam-Tsuy in southern Taiwan. Exactly when I was born is hard to say, because I actually have more than one birthday. It depends which calendar you’re using.

For hundreds of years, we Taiwanese used the lunar calendar to guide us on everything—when to plant crops, when to get married, when to open a business, or when to move to a new house. My birthday was February 14 on the lunar calendar but March 6 on the western calendar.

The year of my birth is also confusing. Around the time I was born, the flags of three different nations flew over my homeland. My birth year kept changing for the first fifteen years of my life, according to whoever was in power at the time. I was born in the twenty-fourth year of the Chinese emperor Guang-Shu. After the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895, we went by a new calendar, so I was said to have been born in the thirty-first year of Emperor Meiji. When I turned thirteen, the Chinese emperor was overthrown by the Nationalist rebels. My birth year changed yet again, to minus fourteenth year of the Republic of China. See how confusing it all is? In my opinion, it’s best to stick to something more eternal. Let’s just say I was born in the year of our Lord, 1898. At least that will never change.

My father’s name was Wong Ching-Hok, but I called him Ah-Ba. (Ah is the title we use to address family and close friends.) My ba knew traditional Chinese medicine and operated an herbal shop in downtown Giam-Tsuy. He made quite a name for himself during the 1918 flu epidemic, when many people around the world got sick. Ah-Ba and other doctors worked long and hard to save countless lives, and grateful patients remembered them long afterward.

That episode of influenza wasn’t the first time a major sickness hit Giam-Tsuy. Back in the nineteenth century, nearly the whole town was wiped out by another epidemic. People were convinced it was because the gods were unhappy with them, so the inhabitants of the town held a huge fireworks display to appease the gods. The gods showed their mercy, so Giam-Tsuy still celebrates the passing of the epidemic with a terrific fireworks show every year around the Chinese New Year. The Giam-Tsuy Beehive Firecracker Festival is my hometown’s best known claim to fame today.

My father genuinely loved Giam-Tsuy, which was a very scholarly place in its heyday. Poets from all over Taiwan would gather at the Dai-Jong Temple, reportedly built by the famous Ming Dynasty general, Koxinga. The poets would sit in the cool shade of the temple and create beautiful poems. I was never able the read them myself, of course, but my father would sometimes recite them aloud for us. When the temple and its pagoda were on the verge of collapse, Ah-Ba donated money to restore them. He was a very generous man that way, as well as a scholarly man. But he could be a fighter when he needed to be. During the 1895 Huan-Ah-Huan, the Barbarian Rebellion, when the Japanese invaded our island, he stayed in Taiwan to defend his homeland. He didn’t run back to China as so many others did—a big gamble when the future of Taiwan was so uncertain.

I should also say a thing or two here about the name Taiwan. My homeland is also known to the west as Formosa. Centuries ago when Dutch sailors exploring the world first saw the green and lush island amid the beautiful blue water of the Pacific, they exclaimed, Ilha Formosa! which means beautiful island. The people who lived on the island had always known it as Dai-wan, the Taiwanese pronunciation of Taiwan. Today, the term Formosa is synonymous with Taiwan.

When the Japanese soldiers ravaged our homeland, Ah-Ba and the other young men of Giam-Tsuy bravely fought against them with little more than shovels and sickles. Our people were mostly farmers without weapons or combat experience. They put up a good fight but were quickly overpowered by the superior Japanese troops, who marched into Giam-Tsuy, looting and burning everything in sight. Everyone fled for their lives, but five hundred unlucky souls were rounded up and killed right there on the spot. The bodies of eighteen of those villagers (and a dog) were later buried in a mound that eventually became a temple of worship. That wasn’t uncommon in our culture. Humans could become gods if they did something extraordinary in their lifetimes or died a heroic death. I never knew if the story about the dog being buried there was true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Animal worship wasn’t that uncommon in our culture either.

Anyway, my father was one of the lucky ones. He ran back to his house and hid inside a haystack. The soldiers came looking for him and stabbed into the hay with their bayonets. One of these sharp bayonets went right through Ah-Ba’s throat, slashing it open from ear to ear. Amazingly enough, he somehow managed to stay perfectly still and didn’t utter a sound. The soldiers eventually gave up their search and went away. It took many months for my father’s terrible wound to heal, and he had a gaping hole in his neck the rest of his life. Oh, it was a horrible, horrible story. I could scarcely bring myself to tell it even years later. My children and grandchildren, however, never tired of this story and would beg me to repeat the tale again and again. It’s a wonder they didn’t have nightmares about it.

When peace returned to Giam-Tsuy, Ah-Ba’s herbal shop was the only one left in town. His competitors had all fled back to China, so his practice became very successful. He and the other villagers picked up the pieces of their lives and went back to what they were doing before the war. But the fighting spirit of the Taiwanese didn’t end with the fall of the Republic of Formosa, a loosely organized government formed to resist the forceful Japanese takeover. These brave Taiwanese rebels kept their new foreign occupiers busy by staging one rebellious uprising after another for the next twenty years. In the process, tens of thousands of Taiwanese people were killed. My people are survivors, proud and willing to fight for our beliefs. These lessons would serve me well during the many difficult years ahead of me.

***

My brother and three younger sisters and I loved Giam-Tsuy as much as my father did. The town used to be called Guat-Din, and the word Guat meant moon. Long ago, two rivers came together at my hometown’s port and formed the shape of a beautiful crescent moon. Years later, the name was changed to Giam-Tsuy, or salt water, because seawater would flow upriver during high tides and make the water salty. The town was once a very important seaport, and all kinds of merchant boats came there from China. How I would have loved to see those wonderful boats! Sadly, centuries of silt washed down the muddy river and filled up the port, pushing the shoreline farther and farther to the west. Today, there is no more salt water in Giam-Tsuy and not much fresh water either. The port has completely vanished, and the ocean is now many miles away.

Even after the port disappeared, however, Giam-Tsuy had a chance to make a comeback. When the Japanese took over Taiwan, they built a railroad from Keelung in the north of the island to Da-Gao in the south. Giam-Tsuy was briefly considered as a possible train depot, but the town elders thought it might bring bad luck. They feared a train would destroy the earth dragon that was the source of the town’s wealth. Most people in Giam-Tsuy had no idea what a train even was back then, but they dutifully voted against the depot. The neighboring town of Sin-Yan got it instead. Well, you can probably imagine what happened next. The fearful monster machine ended up bringing lots of passengers and money to every town it stopped at. Tiny Sin-Yan soon became a bustling city, while Giam-Tsuy dwindled in size and importance.

So that’s the story of Giam-Tsuy’s rise and fall. The town today is better known by its Mandarin pronunciation, Yen Shui, but in my heart, it will always be Giam-Tsuy. I suspect most people living there now do not even know that the town was once a proper walled city with four city gates, one for each point of the compass. Over the years, the wall and the gates have been destroyed, and few remember the town’s colorful history or the respected place it once held in this part of the world. That’s a great shame. We need to remember the past or it will be forever lost. But what can an illiterate woman like me do about it? I can only tell these stories to my children and grandchildren and hope that someday they will tell these stories too.

Chapter 2

A Prosperous Clan

Ah-Suat

My name is Suat, which means snow. I’m not sure why my parents named me this, but my father, Mao Wui-Lim, always had a particular fondness for the pristine look of freshly fallen snow. Snow also symbolizes innocence and purity, and perhaps that’s what they hoped for me.

I was my parents’ fourth child, born in 1912. That was the same year the reigns of both the Japanese emperor Meiji and the Chinese emperor Pu-Yi ended and the reign of Emperor Taisho and the new Republic of China began. I liked being exactly the same age as the new republic, as it was easy for everyone to remember how old I was. I had two sisters and four brothers, until my uncle adopted one of my brothers. After that, I had only three brothers, technically.

My family lived in Lok-Ga, where our people had been for several generations. Lok-Ga was a small rural village in the hills of the county of Tainan. When people first established homes in our neck of the woods hundreds of years ago, they named their villages for the number of land units (or ga) they had available for farming. Lok-Ga had six units of farmland. The next town over, Chit-Ga, had seven units, and so on and so forth. Not a terribly romantic way to name a town, perhaps, but it did give an indication of one’s place in the world.

My family was quite well-to-do, thanks to that uncle of mine and other wealthy ancestors. One of our most famous ancestors was Mao Su-Tsuan, who passed the imperial exam during the Dao-Guang period of the Qing Dynasty and became an important government official. He came to live in Lok-Ga after he purchased several parcels of good farmland and built a house for himself and his brothers. After his death, his large fortune passed to his son, Mao Pu-Lo, an accomplished fighter and local militia leader. Pu-Lo was someone we’d call a playboy today. Known locally as Bei-Gong, or eighth granduncle, this brash, colorful character was famous for never going anywhere without his servants trailing behind with jars of fine wine so that he could drink whenever he wished. He got into real trouble one day when he stopped a wedding procession of the Lau family, who lived in the nearby village of Liu-Yang. No doubt he was drunk as he teased and lifted the cover of the palanquin in which the bride sat, a highly inappropriate and disrespectful thing to do. A major battle broke out between the Mao and Lau clans and their respective villages. In those days, a wealthy clan was powerful enough to act like a local warlord, with its own small militia for self-defense in times of conflict. The war between the two villages ended in a draw, but the two clans were staunch enemies for the next hundred years and forbid any intermarriage between them.

My granduncle Bei-Gong died of a gunshot wound, probably during a foolish brawl with another villager. He left his huge fortune to my uncle, Mao Geng-Dong, but it indirectly benefited my own family as well. A one for all, all for one mentality was very typical of our culture; if one person prospered, his entire family benefited. We believed in helping out our fellow family members, both in good times and in bad. For example, if a family couldn’t afford to educate all of its children, the eldest son might volunteer to take this financial responsibility upon himself—even if it meant quitting school and getting a full-time job to do so. With any luck, his personal sacrifice would pay off, and at least one of his younger siblings might become successful enough to support the rest of the clan. As we like to say, what is good for the hive is good for the bees.

Family members had other responsibilities too, such as carrying on the family fire. If a man wasn’t lucky enough to have a male heir, he might adopt one of his brother’s or his cousin’s sons. This is what happened in my family. After years of the bloodshed and rebellious uprisings, my Ah-Ba and my wealthy uncle were the only two surviving males of their generation. Since my uncle had no son of his own to carry on his family fire or to inherit his huge fortune, he turned to his cousin, my Ah-Ba, who had been more than blessed with four sons. My third brother, Jiao-Gang, soon found himself officially adopted into my uncle’s household.

This might sound like an odd solution, but this sort of interfamily adoption was quite common, and it really was in name only. My uncle’s house was literally a stone’s throw away from ours. The only thing that changed was that my brother was given a large room all to himself and enjoyed an endless supply of toys. Despite all these luxuries, he’d often sneak out in the middle of the night to come home to sleep with us. All the toys in the world can’t replace the bond between sisters and brothers. His adoption changed absolutely nothing as far as regards to his relationship to my family. I remember one night when Jiao-Gang came home in tears because he had wet his bed. This in itself wasn’t a big deal, except that this time it had soaked through his new red comforter and left big splotches of dye on his underpants. He was too embarrassed to let his adopted father know and came crying to Mama for help.

Jiao-Gang was the third boy in my family, but we called him sixth brother. In a Taiwanese family, boys and their first cousins were often lumped together and numbered according to their age. In my case, the scarcity of males in my Ah-Ba’s generation meant we had no first cousins, so we included all our second cousins instead to increase the size of our clan. Thus, my first brother and second brother were actually my second cousins, designated as such by their order of birth. My oldest brother Jiao-Tsuan was considered my third brother, my second brother Jiao-Gui my fourth brother, and my third brother Jiao-Gang my sixth brother. Kun-Jiu, my younger brother, was my seventh brother. (Girls like me and my younger sisters Peg-Ha and Peg-Mui were not numbered, because we weren’t heirs like the boys.) A clan’s status and influence were determined by its wealth and the number of male heirs, or ding, that it had. Men were more highly valued because they could work the farm in times of peace and defend the family in times of war. Counting the number of men in one’s immediate and extended family inflated a clan’s number of ding, which was especially helpful for those short on male heirs. My extended family was considered a large and prosperous clan.

Being from a prosperous clan was a big deal because it determined a person’s social status, especially when it came to marriage. A man from a good family was typically matched with a woman with a similar background, so that neither side would be at a disadvantage in terms of inherited wealth. All my brothers eventually married women from wealthy families. My fourth brother’s wife came from the Shim family, which was very well known in Tainan. They lived in such a grand estate that many Japanese dignitaries visiting Taiwan stayed at their house rather than the local five-star hotel. The Shim family owned a bus company that monopolized a very lucrative route, transporting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to the Nam-Kun-Seng temple during one of Taiwan’s most important religious festivals. One of the Shims later became the mayor of Tainan.

As for my family, the entire Mao clan lived together on a large piece of land in a huge compound built in various styles over the years. On the north side was my rich uncle’s imposing baroque-style two-story home, where he lived with my brother Jiao-Gang. The house boasted a large garden that my uncle had carefully designed as homage to the famous gardens found in China. With its hills, ponds, and winding creeks, it was a favorite playground for the children of the family. Behind the garden was a horse ranch, and next to that was a tennis court—something that was rarely, if ever, seen elsewhere in Taiwan. On the south side of the property was a Japanese-style house, and on the east side was our ancestral Taiwanese home, with its classical square formation around a central courtyard. Believe it or not, the walls around our family compound once had small watchtowers with gun ports for self-defense. In those days, local bandits often raided wealthy households, so we essentially lived in a self-contained armed fortress!

Sixteen years before I was born, my homeland was forcibly overtaken by Japan, the beginning of a long and brutal foreign occupation. By the time my generation arrived on the scene, however, things were increasingly peaceful. There were fewer armed revolts against the Japanese, the economy was turning around, and most Taiwanese had finally come to accept colonization, at least on the surface. My uncle Mao Geng-Dong was not one of them. He had a tremendous sense of national pride and truly loathed Taiwan’s new rulers. He had his wealth long before the Japanese arrived and was very fortunate not to lose everything to them. Not that they didn’t try to get their hands on his money—they did, by imposing heavy taxes on his land. My uncle was insulted and infuriated by these taxes, but he was also a rather reserved and scholarly man. Armed revolt was not his cup of tea. Instead, he hired a Japanese stable hand to clean up after the horses he kept on his large ranch. As he liked to say, the Japanese might rule over Taiwan, but he had a Japanese national shoveling his shit. He had to pay his stable hand 60 yen a month, a considerable salary that was more than what a local Japanese government official earned. It would have cost much less to hire a local Taiwanese laborer to do the job, but some things in life are worth the expense.

Peaceful or not, the Japanese occupation definitely had a major impact on all of our lives. I was fortunate enough to be born after our new rulers introduced dramatic cultural and social changes, such as banning foot binding for girls and pigtails for boys. I was very happy to have escaped bound feet, but my eldest brother continued to wear his hair in a pigtail in defiance of the Japanese ban. One day, he came home crying and clutching his shorn off pigtail, which his law-abiding teacher had snipped off for him. Even so, most changes were for the best. Within my family, everyone in my generation—both boys and girls—were allowed to receive a modern education, and all the boys went on to prestigious colleges and universities.

I attended the Lok-Ga Public School, the only elementary school in our village. Very few girls were enrolled, as most families did not yet believe in the value of education for their daughters. After graduation, I went on to the Tainan Second Girls’ Middle School. In every city of significant size, the Japanese built two middle schools, a First School for the children of Japanese nationals and a Second School for Taiwanese children. Each school had vastly different funding and quality of education. This two-tiered system was designed to favor Japanese nationals, who were guaranteed spots in the more elite First School. In later years, Taiwanese children could also get into a First School by passing an entrance exam, although the test was rigged in favor of the Japanese students.

Despite the unfairness of it all, the Japanese rulers did introduce modern education to Taiwan, and for that I was profoundly grateful. I was one of the first students to attend my school, and my classmates included some of the brightest girls in the county. Some were from wealthy clans like mine, while others were from ordinary families. Education was our ticket to success in the new twentieth century, and public schools leveled the playing field for everyone in Taiwan. Our foreign occupiers also understood that to maintain rule and order, everyone in Taiwan had to learn to speak Japanese. They wisely started with the children. We thought it was fun to study Japanese and pass along what we learned to our parents when we went home.

After graduation, most of my middle school classmates were quickly married off to suitable young men. Getting married before you were out of your teens was quite common then. If you didn’t, the only other thing to do was to enroll in a teachers’ school. Teaching was practically the only career option for girls in those days, aside from becoming a seamstress. Since I was a nice girl from a good family, I too was expected to forgo any thoughts of a career and get married right after middle school. I had no desire to do so and frantically formulated alternative plans for my future. I didn’t get very far. Just at this most critical crossroads of my life, disaster stuck our family, and everything in my world ground to a complete halt.

Chapter 3

Pigtails and Bound Feet

Ah-Chim

Within a few years of colonizing our homeland, the Japanese began to instill their way of life on us. They figured the best way to quell resistance was by dismantling everything we knew from the ground up, including our religion, education, and cultural traditions. Everything familiar was suddenly taken away, and my world was turned completely upside-down.

Shinto shrines sprang up in every major city on the island. But when the shrines failed to unseat our deeply rooted Taoist and Buddhist beliefs, the new rulers decided to reform our educational system instead. In the olden days, a traditional education meant reading thousand-year-old Chinese manuscripts and memorizing the Four Books and the Five Verse Treatise. Overnight, this way of doing things was replaced by the Japanese way, and students were now taught Japanese, science, and mathematics. Many Taiwanese families resisted these new regulations by keeping their children out of school. Some boys didn’t go to school until they were sixteen or seventeen years old.

The transition wasn’t easy, especially since the Japanese language was very difficult to learn. Although Japan had borrowed its written language from China, the spoken language bore no resemblance whatsoever to Chinese or Taiwanese. To help their new colonial subjects learn Japanese, our new rulers established National Language Learning Centers in cities across the island. The Japanese also set up two elementary school systems: Public Schools for Taiwanese children and Little Schools for children of Japanese descent. The two systems were quite different and often gave Japanese children an unfair advantage over the Taiwanese. This separate and unequal policy lasted throughout the fifty-year Japanese occupation.

In my case, it didn’t matter much. My father was a very traditional man and didn’t believe in educating girls. In our culture, girls were often seen as a drain on the family pocketbook, only to be married off when we grew up. Boys were much more important as they were the heirs who would keep the family line going. The Japanese tried to do away with this way of thinking too. They wanted everyone to be educated, boys and girls. Before long, all children were required to go to school, except for those living in the most remote villages. My youngest sister was one of the first girls to be educated, and she did very well in life. She ended up becoming a doctor that delivered babies. I was very proud of my sister’s accomplishments. Unfortunately for me, I was born at the wrong time and totally missed out on what the new century and the new Japanese Era had to offer, just like my hometown had missed out on the train depot. I never learned Japanese, and I didn’t know how to read or write Chinese either.

Other changes also didn’t come quickly enough for me. For instance, I was one of the last girls in Taiwan to have bound feet. This was an old, old tradition among my people. For centuries, every girl born to a respectable family had to endure this miserable ordeal. Only working-class girls were spared, as they had to be on their feet all day working in the fields or as housemaids. Ever since I was a child, I’d been told over and over again that if my feet were not bound, I’d never find a good husband. This is why my Ah-Nia (Taiwanese for mother) had her feet bound, and her Ah-Nia, and her Ah-Nia’s Ah-Nia, and countless others before that. What a sacrifice to make, just to be looked upon as pretty and respectable! The smaller the feet and the smaller the shoes, the better, and our ultimate goal was the three-inch golden lotus. But when the shoes came off, and you looked down at your own twisted, broken feet . . . well, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could ever consider that beautiful.

When I turned five, it was my turn to be made beautiful. Ah-Nia hired someone experienced with such things to come wrap my feet the first time. An old lady from the countryside showed up one day and started sweet-talking me. I was shy in front of strangers and kept my head down the whole time. As I stared at the floor, I noticed that the lady didn’t have the three-inch golden lotus herself.

I don’t remember how she finally talked me into letting her do the evil deed, but it eventually happened, probably in the same way that it had for generations of Taiwanese women. Basically, foot binding deformed the feet by forcing the bones into three sections, like an S curve with a ninety-degree angle at each bend. Making these bends required curving the feet around a small clay jar, forcibly bending and cracking the bones in the process. The lady from the village wrapped my feet so tight that my bones felt like they were slowly being snapped, one by one; the pain was unbearable. Someone suggested that soaking my feet in urine could ease the pain, but it didn’t work, and the horrible stench made things even worse. But looking back, I have to consider myself luckier than others. Some families were so desperate to achieve the tiny three-inch lotus that they used large stones to crush the bones in their daughters’ feet.

I cried myself to sleep on many nights. Sleep brought some relief, but never for long. The pain would wake me up, and my suffering would start all over again. I found some relief by dangling my legs over the edge of the bed. My Ah-Nia would climb into my bed to comfort me. Sometimes, when she thought I was asleep, I could hear her softly sobbing. Seeing my pain no doubt reminded her of her own experience, and it must have broken her heart to see me in such agony. But I wasn’t asleep. I was simply too exhausted to cry. It was horrible. I remember one time when I was so desperate I fumbled with a pair of scissors, trying to cut the bindings loose. But I was only a little girl and not coordinated enough to succeed.

This pointless torture at last came to an end. Ten years after Japan took over Taiwan, our conquerors began to enforce new rules—no more foot binding for girls and no more pigtails for boys. In some areas of Taiwan, however, many families continued to torment their daughters with this cruel practice until as late as 1915. As for me, after several years of constant pain, I was finally allowed to remove my foot wrappings. The damage was already done, and my poor feet were deformed forever, but at least my younger sisters were fortunate enough to be spared. There were many times when I wished I’d been born just a few years later. That was not my lot in life, I guess.

While girls like me rejoiced to be freed from foot binding, boys were very distressed by the order to cut off their pigtails. Before the Japanese arrived, young boys would start wearing their hair in a pigtail around the time they began school. The tradition had become a male rite of passage and a source of national pride. Few realized that the pigtail actually was a Manchurian tradition, forced onto the Chinese when Manchuria successfully overtook China and established the Qing Dynasty in the seventeenth century. Regardless, the pigtails had become a symbol of the revered past, and many Taiwanese men refused to comply with the new order, even years into the Japanese occupation. They considered it degrading to have to cut off their pigtails.

My father resisted amputating his own pigtail for many years. He was trained as a traditional Chinese doctor and was old school in every way. He didn’t like change. But when all the other men in town began doing away with their pigtails, Ah-Ba had no choice but to do the same. When I saw him coming home one day with short hair, I hardly recognized him! He was so embarrassed that he hid inside the house for many weeks, refusing to be seen in public or by his friends and colleagues.

As I’ve said, the educational reforms put in place by the Japanese didn’t have much of an impact on my life. Ah-Ba preferred that I spend my days doing chores and learning how to be a good wife and mother. Ah-Nia spent half her time helping out Ah-Ba in his herbal shop and the other half at home, teaching me things like cooking and sewing. Cooking was an especially important skill to have. Meat and seafood were scarce, and we had no refrigerators back then, so we put a lot of time into preserving vegetables and small fish and shrimp. I learned how to pickle these foods by packing them into glass jars with big handfuls of sea salt. After a few weeks of fermentation, they could be stored for a whole year without refrigeration. They were so salty that a few shrimp could flavor two large bowls of rice porridge.

I also learned to clean house, take care of babies, and make handicrafts. Making handicrafts was an important source of income for some people, but for me, it was more of a hobby. One of my favorite crafts was sewing small toy animals known as fragrant beanies or tiger beanies. This was an old Taiwanese craft that very few people know how to do anymore. Taiwanese parents gave the beanies to their children to wear as a means of keeping evil spirits away. I also became quite skilled at tailoring. I’d make a quick sketch on a piece of cloth and cut out a pattern with a sharp pair of scissors, no measuring, no planning, just judging things with my eyes. In half an hour or less, I could turn out a new shirt or a pair of trousers on my little sewing machine. Later on in life, I made toys and clothing for my children and grandchildren, and long hugging pillows the length of a child’s body.

So you see, I wasn’t without smarts or talent. But what good did it do me, in the end? My birth year determined my fate in life. I was born at a strange time, caught between an old empire and a new world power, tangled up in old traditions and new beliefs. I entered the twentieth century with partially bound feet and no education, with the skills of a Taiwanese homemaker but unable to read or write. How was I ever to succeed in the modern new world?

Chapter 4

A Thousand Pieces of Gold

Ah-Suat

A devastating 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan on August 25, 1927. The epicenter was about twenty miles from Lok-Ga, hitting us at two in the morning. The shaker rattled the entire house and knocked everyone out of their beds. We scrambled to reach the front door, but it was jammed, and everyone began to panic. My father kicked the door open to let everyone out, severely injuring his leg in the process.

The whole family ran outside and huddled together for warmth and comfort. I could hear children and women crying. It was a pitch black, moonless night, and no one knew where to go or what to do. We couldn’t find any candles or oil lamps at first, and when we finally did, we discovered that my father’s leg was soaked with blood. We wrapped his wound as best we could, but that was all we could do until the sun came up.

With the first rays of sunlight, we were better able to survey the damage from the earthquake. Reality hit us hard. Our beloved Taiwanese house was completely mangled and shattered. Ah-Ba was as bruised as the house, and his spirit seemed broken by the sight of the destruction around him. We helped him cleanse his wound and sent for the doctor, but the man was nowhere to be found.

The entire village was in complete chaos. My father’s injuries worsened, and his leg wound became infected. We considered sending him to Tainan, but it was a long distance to drive, especially in the aftermath of a major quake. He developed tetanus soon afterward, and it eventually took his life. It was a tragic turn of events, and I can’t say any of us handled it too well. We were devastated by the loss of our dear Ah-Ba. Ever since that terrible day, I suffered from a severe phobia of earthquakes and was traumatized every time I experienced another one.

My Ah-Ba and his cousin were the only male heirs in their family line. They were the last generation in our family born during the Qing Dynasty, before the Japanese occupation. Despite the immense wealth of the Mao family, my Ah-Ba valued education, honor, respect, and hard work, and he brought us up to do the same. He had studied under the old traditional Chinese system but was quick to learn Japanese once he realized our foreign occupiers were there to stay. He eventually became a staff officer of the Tainan Prefecture government and was a tremendously influential leader in Lok-Ga.

My Ah-Nia was from the nearby small village of Zu-Long-Mio, sandwiched between Ga-Li and Mua-Dao. Like most women of her generation, she had tiny bound feet and little education, and was brought up with the same time-honored Taiwanese values as my Ah-Ba. She was traditional, but she wasn’t old-fashioned. In fact, she had enough foresight to spare me the ordeal of foot binding. Some girls my age, especially those in the more remote villages, weren’t so lucky.

In the years following the earthquake, major changes occurred in my life and in the Mao family. My Ah-Nia—or Mama, as we preferred to call her, a much more modern term—became the head of the household, managing the finances and shouldering the responsibilities of our upbringing. Under her watch, every one of her children completed their middle school educations and went on to higher education in Japan—all but me. In the 1920s, higher education for women was unheard of. I was fortunate to have completed middle school, which was in itself a rarity among girls my age. My two sisters, who were more than a decade younger, were later sent to Japan to continue their studies after middle school. All four of Mama’s boys graduated from top universities in Japan, where they’d studied medicine, economics, law, and dentistry.

I must admit that I grew up in a fairly pampered environment. We had our own automobiles long before anyone else in our area did. My favorite driving excursion was our annual summer trip to the remote coastal village of Bok-Meng. This was a trip that would otherwise take half a day and require several forms of transportation (horse carriage, ox carts, small train, big train, and a small man-powered rail cart) via the villages of Zi-Diong-Gang, Ga-Li, and Lim-Hong-Yang. With a car, we made the same journey in a fraction of the time. Ah-Ba was a well-known person in the government, so we would often see local government officials giving him a full military salute as we drove by.

On our vacations in Bok-Meng, we’d hire a junk and sail to a small island just off the coast. We would picnic there and swim in the ocean, activities so western and avant-garde that local villagers were flabbergasted just watching us. These are some of my most cherished memories of Ah-Ba. After his passing, we continued this summer tradition until the Pacific War broke out.

The Mao family owned a lot of land. We leased the parcel of land next to our house to a theater company that put on traditional Taiwanese opera performances. The shows were always free to anyone who walked in and declared, I am a Mao. We were probably the first family in Taiwan to own a home movie projector. My family owned a large brick factory too, the biggest business in Lok-Ga. Uncle Geng-Dong, the one who adopted my brother Jiao-Gang, also played a vital role in the local economy. During the First World War, when metal was hard to come by and there was a shortage of coins, the Japanese government allowed my uncle to issue temporary currency bearing his own name. My brother vividly remembered printing this money as a young boy, stamping the paper currency with his adoptive father’s seal.

In Taiwan, as it is elsewhere in the world, wealth begets wealth. All my brothers eventually married women from well-to-do and politically influential families. This was as commonplace in Taiwan back then as it is today. Such unions between powerful families further solidified and strengthened their political and financial strongholds.

So this was the environment I grew up in. There were few things my family had to worry about, and money was not one of them. I was someone whom people would call a maiden of a thousand pieces of gold, a term that implies wealth but also to some extent dependency and fragility. But I definitely wasn’t fragile. I was brought up to be independent and to have my own way of thinking. Unlike many girls of my generation who were married off to strangers by age fifteen, I wanted to explore the world and experience everything life had to offer.

The tragedy of Ah-Ba’s death put some key parts of my life on hold. It also taught me several important life lessons. I realized that everything in life must pass eventually; a lifetime is but a flash in the grand scheme of the universe. I could only hope that during my brief time on earth I would do something significant enough to make this world