But in My Case: An Immigrant’S Life Story

By Andrei Rogers

This book tells the eighty-year story of the authors life in America and abroad. He attended local schools in Berkeley and, upon graduation from Berkeley High School in 1955, enrolled at the University of California, graduating with a degree in architecture in 1960. He then obtained a PhD in city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and returned to Berkeley in 1964 to join the faculty of its department of that name. After an academic career of some fifty years in departments of planning, engineering, and geography, he retired from teaching in 2008 at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and became a senior research scholar in the Population Program, which he directed for twenty years at the universitys Institute of Behavioral Science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532050503

Andrei Rogers

The authors parents were part of the massive emigration of White Russians who left their country at the very end of the Civil War that engulfed Russia after the Communist Revolution of 1917. They first lived in Harbin, then moved to Shanghai, where the author, who was born in1937, grew up. Shanghai was under Japanese occupation during World War II and in March 1949 was surrounded by Mao Tse Tungs communist troops, prompting a departure for San Francisco on the ocean liner S.S. Cleveland of the American President Lines in 1950, beginning the familys odyssey in the United States.

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BUT IN MY CASE

AN IMMIGRANT’S LIFE STORY

Copyright © 2018 Andrei Rogers.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-5049-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5050-3 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 05/18/2018

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Foreign Beginnings: Vladivostok, Harbin, and Shanghai

The Buergins

Vladivostok and the Naval Battle of Tsushima Straits, 1905

The Rojdestvenskys

Life in Vladivostok During the Allied Intervention

Harbin

Shanghai Between the Two World Wars

Shanghai’s Foreign Community

My Life in Shanghai: Apartment, School, and Church

Major Events: 1937, 1941, 1945, and 1949

Chapter 2 - Growing up in Berkeley During the Fifties

Family Life

The Teenage Immigrant

The Young College Student

Maria

St.Croix Island

The Junior Planner of Marin County

Marriage and Honeymoon

Chapter 3 - Graduate School: Chapel Hill, 1960 - 1964

Graduate School

Family Life

Teaching Experience, Dissertation Research, and Job Search

Chapter 4 - Becoming a Professor: Berkeley, 1964 - 1970

The First Year: 1964-1965

Research

Teaching

Family Life in Our First Home

Academic Life

Travels and Life Abroad

Yugoslavia, 1967

Brazil, 1969

Publications and Conferences

Promotion to Full Professor

Chapter 5 - Building an Educational Program: Northwestern University, 1970 - 1975

The First Year: 1970-1971

The New Urban Systems Engineering and Policy Planning Program

Teaching and Research

My Students and Research Assistants

Conferences, Consultancies, Travels, and Publications

Maria and the Family

Moving to Vienna, Austria

Chapter 6 - Building an International Research Program in Austria: IIASA and the HSS Area, 1975-1983

The Institute: An Introduction

Developing the Research Program of the HSS Area

Directing and Managing the Area’s Research Program

A Representative Research Task: The Migration and Settlement Study

Memories and Reflections

Chapter 7 - Family Life in Austria

Life in Vienna and IIASA

Maria and the Kids

Maria

Mike

Chris

Kevin

Laura

My Aging Parents

Chapter 8 - Family Travels

Summer Excursion: England and Scotland, 1976

Home Leave: 1977

Summer Excursion: Scandinavia, 1978

Home Leave: 1979

Summer Excursion: England and Wales, 1980

Home Leave: 1981

My Travels with the Kids

Chapter 9 - Separations

Mother: 1908 - 1980

Letters from Stanford

The Move to Maria Enzersdorf

Turbulence at IIASA Motivates a Job Search

Our Move to Boulder

Chapter 10 - Building Both a Research and an Educational Program in Boulder

The First Year: 1983-1984

Father: 1904-1984

IBS and the Population Program

My Research

My Teaching

Teaching in Shanghai

Academic Life in Boulder Resumes

Chapter 11 - Family and Academic Life in Boulder

Maria

Health, Anxiety, and the Road to Cancer

Vladivostok

Marriages, Kids, and Grandkids

Chapter 12 - A Turbulent Decade: 1997-2006

Maria’s Final Battle With Cancer

Last Days and the End

Grieving: Life Goes On

Becky: A Transitional Relationship

The Dating Life at Age 63

Life with Mary Ann Begins

Mary Ann

Chapter 13 - The Aging of a Senior Scholar: The Road to Retirement

Academic Life : Teaching

Academic Life: Research

Family Life: Kids and Grandkids

Family Reunions

Family Life: Mary Ann’s Kids and Grandkids

Heart Surgery

Retirement and Plant-Based Nutrition

Travels

Chapter 14 - Reflections on a Full Life

Turning 80

Life’s Lessons

Perseverance

Accommodating to Change

It is Always Now

If I Live to Be 100

Epilogue

Bibliography

PREFACE

This memoir is a story of my life set against the background of the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am an immigrant American, who was born in China to White Russian parents, who had escaped the Bolsheviks during their teenage years, and became a part of the emigre population living in Shanghai. It was their bad luck to have to leave China twenty seven years later, when the second major Communist Revolution of the twentieth century drove us out of the country. I wrote this book because I wanted my children and grandchildren to understand how these events shaped my life and led my parents and me to begin a new life in a new country, America, in 1949.

A retrospective review of one’s life helps to put it in perspective, bringing insights and acceptance that are beneficial. My life was different enough from that of most Americans and this motivated me to share it with family members, relatives, and friends.

The title of this book comes from my father. Dad was a bit of a hypochondriac in his late years and was wont to respond to the health-related complaints of others by announcing ‘But in my case and then launching a detailed description of his particular ailments. The rest of the title comes from my immigration status.

My mother came from a family of fourteen; my father had four siblings. I, on the other hand was an only child and was unhappy not to have brothers or sisters. So I insisted to my wife that I wanted no less than four children, who in turn had 13 children of their own.

It has been said that the greatest gift a grandfather can give his grandchildren is a memoir. Since three of my grandparents were gone by the time I was born, I especially have wished that I could have received such a gift. With this in mind, I dedicate this book to my grandkids so that perhaps later in life they can understand their roots. I hope that they will enjoy the story.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like most book authors, I am grateful to the people who helped me produce this book. I could not have completed my memoirs without the help of my son Chris, who reformatted my badly typed manuscript and readied it for the publisher. I also have received generous help from a number of people whom I wish to thank here: my grandson Kevin for his detailed and extensive corrections and identification of typos, my sons Kevin and Mike for catching additional errors, and my wife, Mary Ann, for several valuable suggestions. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.

PROLOGUE

The bulky, black microbus rumbled down the two-lane highway from the airport into the city of Vladivostok, the most eastern major settlement in the then Soviet Union. The date was Wednesday, July 14th, 1993, a year after the closed city was opened up to tourists. With me in the taxi were my mother's sister, Aunt Jenia, her son Andre Starrett, his wife Liso, and their teenage son, Nikolai. We came to find the Buergin family home. I had with me three old photographs, taken in 1921: an aerial view of the part of town that included the Buergin compound, and two of the principal family residence. As the microbus drove past one ugly apartment building after another, I kept thinking that if the Russian Revolution of 1917 had never happened, I might be living here today. ... a scary thought.

The taxi brought us to the Hotel Vladivostok, one of the very few passably respectable hotels in the city. Despite its ranking as the best hotel in this city of some 800,000 residents, the hotel looked like a relic of dull Stalinist architecture. Primitive elevators, worn furnishings, and a generally serious lack of maintenance greeted us upon our check-in. And worst of all, the hotel had no water. It was 6 pm. and dark outside. We were tired and shortly went to bed.

We were up and early the next morning and ready to launch our effort to find the the Buergin family compound. I showed my three photographs of the houses to several staff members in the hotel and asked them for help in locating the house my mother and my Aunt Jenia were born and raised in. The lady with the room keys on our floor (the dejhurnaya) mentioned that she thought she walked by the house on her way to work. Incredibly, we found it, after about an hour of searching. It was in the old part of town on Uborevitch Avenue.

As we approached the old house, we discovered that it was locked. So we went next door to the house that my grandfather rented out to the American consul and others. That house was now occupied by a fisheries institute. We walked in and my aunt and I spoke in Russian to a number of people, who were visibly incredulous. Since Vladivostok was a closed military city for years and only very recently allowed tourists in, we probably were the first American family they met, and my aunt and I spoke Russian! My aunt was excited to have found the house that she was born in 87 years ago and had to leave in 1921 (72 years ago). She was noticeably agitated, as was I.

The people who greeted us were at first somewhat skeptical about our story. But after I showed them my photographs and spoke to them in Russian for an extended period, they realized that the story was true. Others strolled in and joined the conversation, and when my aunt pointed to the room in the other house in which she was born in, one woman started to tear up. Others wanted to call in television crews to record our visit for the evening news. After about an hour, we left and walked around the old neighborhood and the city center, spending some time at Aunt Jenia's school and the railroad station that brought my Swiss grandfather to the city in 1886.

The next morning we flew to nearby Khabarovsk, my dad's birthplace, toured the city with an Intourist guide, and then caught an afternoon flight to Harbin, China — my birthplace. In one memorable day we spent time in three birthplace cities: my mother's, my father's, and my own. Amazing. What historical events combined to bring this about? I begin the story with my grandparents and parents.

CHAPTER

1

FOREIGN BEGINNINGS: VLADIVOSTOK, HARBIN, AND SHANGHAI

Vladivostok (Rule the East in Russian) is where it all began. It was there that my maternal grandfather, Rudolf Buergin, met and married my grandmother, Elena Schkolnikova, and sired 17 children, 3 of whom died in infancy. Vladivostok also was where my mother Tamara Rudolfovna Buergin and my father, Boris Nikolaevich Rojdestvensky, lived as teenagers, and from where they emigrated to China, when the Bolsheviks finally took control of the city on the 25th of October, 1922 — five years after the start of the October Revolution of 1917.

Vladivostok was founded in 1860 and officially became a port two years later. In 1880 it achieved city status and became a separate administrative unit, populated by just over 7,000 residents. Construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad that ends in the city was started in 1891 and completed in 1903, attracting both Russians and foreigners.

The Buergins

My maternal grandfather Rudolf was born in Bubendorf, Switzerland on May 5, 1856 and died in Harbin, China on July 20, 1934. He studied mechanical engineering in Zurich at what now is known as the Eidgenosishe Technische Hochschule (ETH), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and got a job designing and building semaphores for the local part of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which in 1905 linked Vladivostok to Moscow.

Soon after migrating to Vladivostok in 1886, he met and married my 17-year old grandmother on September 23, 1887. Two years later they had their first child, Konstantin, who died in 1891, and then Ekaterina (Katia) in 1890. She was followed a year later by Lydia, who died that same year. Then came 14 more, one of whom, Michael, died at age 8 in 1903. Thus a total of 14 children survived to adulthood, with my mother, Tamara, being the twelfth.

At one point, the extended Buergin family, including the married members, consisted of twenty-two persons, raised in a very patriarchal and matriarchal atmosphere, according to my Uncle Dana. Dana Wilgress was a distinguished Canadian diplomat who ultimately rose to high foreign service positions, representing his country as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, and the Permanent Representative of Canada to NATO. But in 1918, at age twenty-five, he migrated to Vladivostok to open Canada's trade commissioner's office there. In his memoirs, he describes his first contact with the Buergin family.

The flat belonged to Mrs. Buergin, the Russian wife of of a Swiss engineer, who had become a Russian subject a number of years previously on account of the law that prohibited foreigners from owning land in Vladivostok. They had a very large family, of which seven sons and seven daughters were then living…. I got married on June 4, 1919 to Olga Buergin, the fourth daughter of my landlady. (Wilgress, 1967, p.50 and p.56).

Vladivostok and the Naval Battle of Tsushima Straits, 1905

On February 8,1904 the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise torpedo boat attack on the Russian Far East Fleet stationed in Port Arthur, initiating the Russo-Japanese War, which was to last until September 5,1905. Russia's strategy was to gain time until reinforcements and supplies could reach the front. In particular, the Russian Baltic Fleet had to sail 18,000 miles to reach Port Arthur. The length of the squadron's sail from the Baltic Sea to the Far East was an unprecedented distance in the annals of naval battles. The ships would need to be supplied with food and fresh water along the way, as they circled Africa, passing Capetown on the way. The squadron's leader was Rear Admiral Zinovy Petrovich Rojdestvensky (the same last name as my father's but apparently no relation).

Port Arthur fell to the Japanese by the time the Russian fleet reached Madagascar, so Admiral Rojdestvensky's only alternative was to head for the only other Russian port in the Far East, Vladivostok. The admiral decided to follow the shortest route passing through the Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan.

Despite a dark, misty, and foggy night, navigation lights aboard one of the Russian ships alerted the Japanese fleet and the battle began. The Russians proved to be no match for the Japanese and lost almost their entire fleet, effectively ending the war and forcing the Russians to sue for peace. Admiral Rojdestvensky was wounded, captured and taken to a Japanese hospital.

Long before the battle took place, a jeweler in Vladivostok was commissioned to produce an 84-place setting of silverware to celebrate the widely expected victory by Admiral Rojdestvensky. When disaster instead of victory ensued, the jeweler was stuck with the silverware. A friend directed him to the large Buergin family, as a potential buyer. In the end the collection was equally divided among the seven sisters, with my mother receiving a 12-place setting, which I inherited and still use on special occasions.

As the war heated up and Vladivostok was shelled by the Japanese my grandparents were advised to leave Vladivostok, because of the danger of being cut off from the rest of the country. So they decided to take the whole family and a Chinese nanny to Switzerland. My mother and Aunt Jenia, as well as Uncles Rudy and Jura, were not born yet, so there were 13 persons in all. When they arrived in Moscow it was difficult to find lodgings for such a large family. Eventually a flat was found and they ended up living in Moscow for 9 months. It was then that Grandmother decided it would be safer to continue on to Switzerland, where they stayed several months until the end of hostilities.

The Rojdestvenskys

My paternal grandfather, Nikolai Rojdestvensky, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on May 19, 1878, came from the officer class. Upon marrying my grandmother, Alexandra Mihailovna Lastovchenko (born April 29, 1878 in Starodub, Ukraine) he was posted to Khabarovsk, near Vladivostok. Postings to Siberia and the Far East were common among military men who sought permission to marry.

Grandfather Nikolai was a colonel in Tsar Nikolas's army and so, not surprisingly, my father was enrolled in a military academy when he was nine years old in 1913. He graduated from the Imperial Military High School in Khabarovsk in 1921. Khabarovsk sits at the junction of two important rivers: the Amur and the Ussuri Rivers. Together the two define the border between Russia and China. The city is close to the site of the last major battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Volochaevska. Ian Frazier describes the battle:

By 1922, Bolshevik forces had secured all of Russian territory except out here, where a White Army resurgence had recently recaptured strategic points, including the city of Khabarovsk. The victorious Whites, led by General Viktorin Molchanov, continued west along the Trans-Siberian until they reached Volochaevska, where they were crushed by the forces of the People's Revolutionary Army under the command of General Vasily K. Blyukher. (Frazier, 2010, p.318).

My father had three sisters: Ludmilla, or Mila (April 28, 1905), Nina (January 27, 1909), and Alexandra, or Sandra, (April 24, 1916), all born in Khabarovsk. A later addition to the family came on July 18, 1924, with the birth of my uncle, Walter Alexandrovitch Clements, born in Vladivostok, because by that time my grandmother had divorced my grandfather, moved to Vladivostok, and married Alexander Gregorievich Clements. By then my father had escaped the oncoming Bolsheviks by moving to China, first to Shanghai for a year and then to Harbin (1924-1931). My grandfather, however, was arrested by the Bolsheviks and sent to a gulag (probably on the Soloveki Islands, north of St. Petersburg), disappearing from my father's life. Alexander Clements also was arrested and was jailed for six months, delaying my grandmother's move with her daughters and Uncle Walter to Harbin to join my father.

Life in Vladivostok During the Allied Intervention

The final years of the October Revolution that began in St. Petersburg in 1917, ended in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok in 1922. Vladivostok possessed a fine harbor and an impressive main street, Svetlanskaya Uliza, that stretched along the entire length of the city along Amur Bay. Established institutions of learning and culture, together with fine private mansions, gave it a particular architectural distinction.

Soon after the start of the revolution the town experienced several years of transition. Japanese, American, and British cruisers lined the shores of Golden Horn Bay and what became known as the interventionist period began. Also present were Canadian, French, and Italian troops, as well as a significant number of freed Czechoslovak prisoners of war who were organized into a small army that, for a while, attacked and beat back the Red Army that was advancing toward Vladivostok.

The interventionist forces supported the White counter-revolution, as part of a concerted plan to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. In his memoirs, my Uncle Dana describes an early engagement.

Shortly after they landed in Vladivostok the Middlesex Regiment and Japanese forces moved out to meet a Bolshevik force that was operating on the railway line which led north to Khabarovsk, where a Communist government of sorts had its headquarters. The Middlesex Regiment held the centre of the line with the Japanese on each flank. The Bolshevik forces attacked the centre; the British did not yield and then the Japanese on each flank finished off the engagement by putting the enemy to flight. (Wilgress,1967, p.51).

On the night of 16th July 1918, fearful of a rescue attempt by approaching White and Czechoslovak troops, the Red Guards executed Tsar Nikolas Romanov and his entire family and accompanying retainers in the basement of the Ekaterinburg house that was their prison. By the summer of 1919, the interventionist forces in Vladivostok were being reduced. World War I had been over for almost two years, the Allies were weary of war, and interest in the city's future waned. Moreover, after initial successes, the White Russian Army in the region, under the leadership of Admiral Kolchak, began to experience reverses. General Denikin's army in southern Russia also was encountering strong resistance. Residents of Vladivostok, fearing that the end was near, were leaving for nearby Harbin, China. After coups and counter coups, one government following another, Vladivostok fell to the Soviets for the last time on October 22, 1922, when General Uborevitch's army captured the city. (Recall that the street on which the Buergin compound fronted, when we arrived there, was Uborevitch Avenue.)

When the foreign interventionist forces started to leave Vladivostok in 1921, the young Japanese lieutenant who was living in my paternal grandmother's house prepared to return to Japan and proposed to my Aunt Mila. Grandmother did not permit this, citing her daughter’s young age of 16 years as the reason.

Some twenty years later, a married Aunt Mila was living in Harbin, at that time a Japanese controlled city in Manchukuo, Japan's new name for its puppet state of Manchuria. One day her husband, Boris Johansen, was arrested on trumped up charges and disappeared, which unfortunately was not an uncommon occurrence among the stateless White Russians living in Harbin. After a few days, Aunt Mila went to see the local Japanese commandant to plead for her husband's freedom. Amazingly, the commandant was her former suitor in Vladivostok. Her husband was promptly released.

Harbin

The Trans-Siberian