Departure and Return: One Family, Two Countries, and a World of Connections

By Denis Wong

Who am I? This question is often asked in youth, as a part of "coming of age".

No longer in his youth, the author asks the question in hindsight, in the form of a memoir not only about individuals - himself and his father - but also about the nations and communities that nurtured them.

Those nations happen to be Britain and China and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tin Gate
• Release date: Oct 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781801000048

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Departure and Return

Published by Tin Gate Books

www.tingatebooks.com

Copyright © 2023 Denis Wong.

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-80100-004-8

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form if binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Departure and Return

One Family, Two Countries,

and a World of Connections

Denis Wong

To my parents

Notes on Chinese Characters and English Transliterations

Naming in this book has used Chinese characters, when known (e.g. 毛澤東), because referents thereby become definitive and usually unambiguous. In a bygone age, Chinese characters could not be easily machine-generated and so English texts might omit them, but nowadays there is no excuse. When characters are needed they can be easily generated and we do so in this book.

English transliterations (e.g. Mao Tse-tung) are both common and popular, both within the literature and within personal communication, but they are not definitive because (i) there are different systems of transliteration, for example Pinyin and Wade-Giles and (ii) there are many dialects of the Chinese language which, although they might map onto standard Putonghua, might also have their own systems of transliteration. Also, they might find themselves transliterated in a haphazard and/or context-dependent way. It was common, for example, for British immigration officials to assign names to individuals according to how they sounded, resulting in many British Chinese receiving a surname that was the forename, the original surname having been stated first (as is the Chinese convention) when when the individual was asked.

Nowadays, the standardised Pinyin transliteration (e.g. Mao Zedong) is available but this book is a memoir spanning four generations. To adopt that throughout would not reflect the lives, as lived, by friends and family, nor even the lives of major figures like Sun Yat-sen, whose transliteration is based upon the Cantonese dialect. As well, there are friends and family whose names in Chinese characters are unknown to me and I can only refer to them as best I can, often based upon how I remembered their names sounded (such that I am not much better than those British immigration officials of generations gone by).

I leave it that – to explain further might over-complicate the situation. A glossary of names is provided with further notes on transliteration.

Foreword

James D. Seymour

Unless we are Tanzanian and came from where the human race was launched, we are all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. If we are Caucasian British or Anglo-American, then we descend from various continental tribes, mainly Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. If we are not Caucasian, then we are of African or Asian descent. The experiences of every immigrant group, and indeed every immigrant family, has been unique. While this book is about the family of a British scion of China, all of us can relate to it.

Denis Wong’s grandfather, Wong Hing 黃廷, emigrated from southeast China to the United Kingdom around 1911. Whereas most such Chinese immigrants were seamen, the resourceful Wong Hing made the trip mostly overland. His descendants would be cultural Britons, with each passing generation being less and less conscious of their ancestral roots. The middle generations, that is Denis’s and his parents’ generations, to a greater or lesser extent had their feet planted in both countries. Perhaps most notably, the soldier William Young (Uncle Willy) died in December 1941 defending British Hong Kong vis à vis the Japanese invaders. Denis himself, after experiencing a fairly normal British upbringing, through family connection, was drawn to his ancestral homeland, travelling widely in the Mainland and Taiwan. At first, the theme of his travel was discovering the places and people that Wong Hing left behind.

Around 1920, with China in the throes of rejecting traditional Chinese culture, intellectuals were debating among themselves about how to fill the void. They came up with the notion of replacing the thinking of Confucius and other ancient sages with what they called Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. Chinese vocabulary did not really support such a discussion; the words science and democracy were at first simply (and crudely) transliterated from English, as sai, and de (賽先生, 德先生).¹ In all likelihood, people’s understanding of the strange concepts was influenced by the literal meaning of the two characters, i.e., competition, and virtue.

While the discourse about all of this took place largely in China, Chinese who travelled abroad played an out-sized role on the domestic understanding of the two concepts, which is to say of what modernisation is all about. The most obvious example was the foreign-based democracy advocate Sun Yat-sen (孫中山), generally considered the father of the Chinese revolution and himself a medical doctor. But other exiles, taken in the aggregate, played at least as important a role as Sun, who, it must be said, failed to effect democracy in the country. Those who went to Japan and the West both provided feedback to China and helped integrate the country into the international community. That is one reason why it is so fascinating to read about the Wong family saga.

Most of the Wong clan were primarily interested in Mr. Science, with Mr. Democracy secondary. Still, they all seem to have realized that the two were linked. Britain’s liberal culture and openness to new concepts and ways of doing things comprised a large part of what gave rise to advances in science and technology. Over decades and centuries, a rather un-Chinese sense of individualism had arisen. As Denis notes, science could not be imposed from the outside, pushed into the thoughts and feelings of would-be scientists and engineers. Within an intellectually boundary-free work environment, especially into the modern age, even though individuals might be employed within competing profit-making businesses, scientists and engineers were able to collaborate across corporate, national, and racial borders, driven by curiosity about elemental nature. To be sure, these people received a push from employers. But there was also the pull of fundamental science and engineering which meant one could be working as an individual and not just as cog within a corporate of hierarchy. The elegance of the scientific equations and the neatness of blue-skies engineering mattered in the quest for solutions to various problems, one of them being global communications. Thus, a man we can call the father of fibre optics was none other than Denis’s uncle-by-marriage. The renowned Charles K. Kao 高錕, won (according to Wikipedia) no fewer than twenty-three awards. There was a bit of a rebel in Kao, which to some extent characterized the whole clan. Denis explains: whether from background and natural inclination, they often declined to comply with socio-cultural norms, which of course were in a state of flux anyway, with science and technology making old ways obsolete. A move towards science may be made by an individual, but also by families, communities and nations within a process that is both structured and structuring.

Finally, by the last quarter of the twentieth century, Mr. Democracy seemed to be moving towards achieving full parity with Mr. Science. Both abroad and within China itself, the feeling was increasingly that while national leader Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernisation (including science and technology) was all very well and good, what the country now needed was a fifth modernization, that is a democracy based on respect for human rights.²

In the 1970s Mr. Democracy gained his due in one place, albeit a hundred miles offshore. Denis himself was one of us foreigners who was involved in Taiwan’s democracy movement. At least in the short run, this effort – Taiwanese-driven – was highly successful. Although we cannot be certain how it will all play out in the future, one can hope that we were on the right side of history.

New York, 4 September 2023

1 Today the normal Chinese term for science is the Japanese-derived kexue (科學). The normal term for democracy is minzhu (民主), from classical Chinese (the previous meaning having been different – ruler of the people i.e., a sovereign).

2 Much more on this in James D. Seymour, ed., The Fifth Modernization: China’s Human Rights Movement, 1978-1979 (New York: Earl M. Coleman Enterprises, 1980).

Preface

There is a genre of literature called Bildungsroman, named after a compound word that combines the German words Bildung, which may be roughly translated as education, and Roman – drama or narrative. The genre is often described in terms of coming of age and involves previously uninitiated youths (traditionally male) growing both inwardly and outwardly as a result of challenges that needed to be overcome in the course of their lives.

This book might be considered to be a Bildungsroman, involving both my father and myself, who in many ways led ordinary lives but whose Bildung, seen in hindsight, depended so much upon the journeys we took.

As such, our Bildungsroman expands beyond a story of our respective individual lives. It draws in the lives of the communities of which were a part and of those nations – Britain and China – to and from which my father and I travelled over many decades.

It is expansive in terms of geography but more importantly in terms of history as well, with my father’s life story affecting mine and with influences stretching back through decades, with Bildung passed down vertically through the generations. But this could hardly happen without those horizontal linkages across communities and nations, each with their own geographies and histories, sometimes separate, sometimes intersecting.

The comprehensive untangling of grand histories and geographies can hardly be possible within a single volume. This book is therefore no more than a modest attempt at understanding families, communities and nations but it has a particular point of view, that of one family which, over decades, maintained links between Britain and China.

…

There are countless individuals I must thank for helping write this book. In the beginning I was encouraged by Gregor Benton, Ian Bryant and Moira Kenny; they commented on early drafts and gave me leads to follow up. Uncle Phil was a major catalyst with his memories of pre-war Liverpool Chinatown; thanks to his daughter (my cousin) Pamela for hospitality during our weekend together. He supplied me with family photographs, as did Terry Too and Jane Montandon. He encouraged me to contact Joyce, my distant cousin, and her husband Norman You whose stories enriched my understanding of Liverpool Chinatown. They led me to Philip in Hong Kong, Joyce’s uncle (as distinct from mine) and he introduced me to Gwen Kao. Thanks to her for stories about postwar London Chinatown and about her husband, Charles Kao. Further Chinatown material and information about Uncle Goo was supplied to me by the descendants of Emily Moitt: Verena Goo, Sherry Lee and Geoffrey Lee. Information about the family village in China, Shatangli, was supplied by Matthew Wong. Geoffrey Emerson advised me on the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong. Help with philosophy and social theory came through Michael Grenfell and Arvind Sivaramakrishnan. Ronald Hsu and Doris McLeod were invaluable in helping me understand their father, Hsu Tao-ching. Thanks to Jim Seymour for reading my manuscript and offering his highly perceptive comments. Throughout, I was helped by Jabez Lam, Don Flynn and Lee Hsiao-wen. Many people supplied tips about publishing including Choo Wai Hong and Hsiao-hung Pai. Particular thanks go to Michael Cannings, my editor and publisher, without whom I could not have got this far. Last but not least, thanks to my wife, Elly, long-suffering and an invaluable support throughout.

Denis Wong

September 2023

SECTION I

An Incident

Prologue

During my second year of an undergraduate degree in physics at Birmingham University in England, I went home to Manchester one weekend to see my parents. Such visits were usually uneventful, occasions to escape a claustrophobic student residence, eat substantial family meals, and sleep comfortably in quiet surroundings. But this time I returned to an erupting volcano.

It began with a request from my mother that I talk to my father about her unhappiness. It was not unusual for her to raise the topic with me, but I believe it was the first time – perhaps because of the age I had reached – that she then asked me to speak to my father about it. It was a bad move because he reacted with such a torrent of invective and abuse that it left me in tears. He called me a bastard, which rationally I interpreted as strange but after the words had been and gone rationality had left me behind and only emotion remained. I had always known and feared the volcano in my father, but never before had it erupted with such venom and violence.

I ran away, distraught, recalling only my request to my mother that we must visit my Auntie Bar. Living close by, she was an obvious refuge, but there was more than just proximity in mind. The family was not isolated – there were others we could turn to – but the choice of an aunt by marriage, outside of the bloodline, was significant. As every physicist knows, only outside can there be leverage; inside, action generates an equal and opposite reaction, and the universe stays the same.

Maybe it was the right decision because my father was remorseful the next day after I had returned to Birmingham. He drove down, smiled and spoke to me as normal, not as the volcano. He did not verbally apologise – of course not – but he left the family car for me to use and returned to Manchester by train. In those days, a student with a car was an object of peer envy. He was symbolically making amends; it was his way of dealing with his volcano.

1

About this Book

This book is about the lives of my family and the events that led up to this incident, seemingly a family affair but over decades becoming much more. Cocooned inside a family there was an experience from within; in the following decades, in contrast, there were experiences that led to an outside to that inside such that – in hindsight – not only was there a family involved, communities and nations were involved as well, each in their own ways volcanic both in themselves and in causing individuals to become so. My hope for this book is that our understanding of family might be broadened because in general for all of us, families have existed within communities, which have in turn existed within nations. Over a period of years, most lives reach outwards through these granular, nested collectives and crises such as the one described above might therefore be understood not only in terms of family but also in terms of community and nation.

We live our lives within a history, within a flow of events. This applies not only to individuals but also to those collectives – families, communities and nations – each having a life of their own. Applied broadly across these collectives, this living within history works in at least two ways: firstly, in terms of individuals structuring those collectives, in other words as components within a bottom-up process, such that the parts (those individuals) influence the whole (families, communities, nations); secondly, in terms of individuals who are structured, products of a top-down process, such that the whole influences the parts. Hence those collectives, themselves constructed by history, play their part in constructing and influencing individuals who might think they are free agents, independent of history, but actually are not. Within my own life, for example, I have made conscious decisions to depart from Britain and then to return. Through an individual choice, I sought new lifestyles and new opportunities within alternative communities and nations where I thought I might have influence (bottom-up). At the same time, however, I have been conditioned top-down, not least because I was fated to be born and educated in Britain to Chinese parents. A lifestyle in Britain, with associated opportunities, was bequeathed to me. This lifestyle provided opportunities to make decisions, seemingly as a matter of choice, but perhaps better described as destined by a prior history.

Which way, we might ask, are the wheels of history being driven – from the bottom up or the top down? Is the individual influencing the collective or is the collective influencing the individual? The answer is both ways, but most times it does not matter because our lives run smoothly and we live from one moment to the next, glad to be able to get through the day without worrying about what happened and why. During times of crisis, however, we are forced to evaluate, to think about those influences that link past, present and future, how they have affected us, and how they might have been different. Following crises large and small, we feel the urge to make sense and seek meaning driven by both practical and philosophical reasons. Thinking is directed outward toward those collectives but at the same time inwards towards ourselves; we are forced to think in terms of how we are both structured and structuring.

...

Thus, knowledge of history plays a part in this book. This includes documented history written into books and papers by scholars looking outwards at other people within those collectives – families, communities and nations; it also includes oral history, remembered by individuals (like me) looking inwards into their own lives and of those close to them. Historical tales of both sorts are told in this book about my father and me, and about those whom we encountered either directly or indirectly.

Within such tales, the distinction between outwards and inwards matters because not only does the nature of (external) evidence differ, the nature of (internal) motivation differs as well. For me whilst writing this book, motivation consisted of an urge to make sense¹ through an inward perspective, based upon family, to then lead to an outward perspective to do with community and nation. My deceased parents constitute objects within such motivation, especially since they perhaps once knew that someday I would have such an urge, maybe because they themselves were at the time wrapped up in a similar process about their own parents and family. Perhaps they felt that they needed to help me before I knew I needed their help and in their wistful moments would therefore talk to me about their memories, such that their memories might become mine, in the way that I am now thinking that my memories become those of my children. Perhaps also they were thinking, as I am right now, that they should add to the cascade of memories which marked out not only themselves, but also their families, communities and nations, which might in turn became mine. What they may not have realised, however – and I am perhaps in the process of making the same mistake with my own children – is that with the weight of generations, memories multiply and start to overwhelm. They become a burden and lead to a tendency to abandon them as relics of a bygone age because the needs of the present are increasingly pressing.

For me, the urge to make sense proved stronger than that tendency and so I persisted with writing this book. That was only possible, however, through an oral history which matched documented history, for example with documented dates matching those personally remembered. A logic linked oral and documented history, enabling history (in its broadest sense) to come my rescue in writing this book, helping to overcome the fragility of personal memory. Fragility remains, however, because both history and memory, adjusted to fit the requirements of the present, can often mislead. I needed another area of scholastic knowledge alongside documented history to help me deal with this: literature.

Literature provides support when history – especially an oral history from those long gone – leaves behind blank spaces which we ponder when we ask about our witnesses: what were they thinking?. Literature comes to the rescue because storytelling – the basis of literature – deals with the relationships between inner thoughts and outer actions which are truthful because a logic exists (psychological, perhaps) between objects that may be concrete (such as family, community and nation) and/or abstract (such as feelings and emotions). It deals not only with hindsight but also with forethought which in terms of my story enables me to expand upon the comings and goings of myself, my parents and my family, using a literary license that extends across the granularity of those collectives and across time. Literature provides freedom in the choice of objects and logic such that a story becomes no longer a list of one damned thing after another but a structured whole² that makes a wider sense. Through literary licence, I might be introducing elements of fantasy into my story but driven by an urge to make sense, I feel entitled because there is a method behind the occasional madness.

This leads to science because scientists, like storytellers, work by filling in the blanks, using their imaginations as a part of solving problems posed by reality. Like storytellers, scientists look for a structure but unlike those of storytellers, these structures are formalised – using mathematics, for example – and are testable against reality. In other words, scientists think about objects linked by logic, but their structures are amenable and shareable both in terms of theory (imagination) and experiment (reality). Through science a relationship is established between what is imagined and what is real and Sir Charles Kao (1933-2018), Nobel Prize winner in physics in 2009, demonstrated this way of thinking. I mention him in chapters below because he was a part of the extended family and therefore shared communities and nations with my father and me.

Of course, the blanks in my story are less easily described and filled than the ones that Charles and colleagues chose to tackle as professional scientists. With witnesses long gone and only archives and memories to work on, a rigorous science of a tale about my family is impossible. For example, how could I know, without asking him, my father’s state of mind when he decided to depart for China from his native Liverpool after war broke out in Europe in 1939? Nevertheless, these blanks are at least partly discernible for two reasons: firstly, because a logic can be drawn between the oral history and the documented history that my father lived through; secondly, because there is a degree of intimacy – still – between my father and me about how we made our respective decisions within our respective lives and historical eras. Hence, as I fill in those blanks I draw upon not only my relationship with others but also my educational background in science, which enables me to remain conscious of the methods I am using, distinguishing details that are at least partly scientific from those which are literary (or perhaps mere wishful thinking).

I am thus supported by three areas of knowledge – history, literature and science. These are convenient because I can draw upon a reader’s common-sense familiarity with them; also, because they are dynamically supported by communities of scholars who not only think about their chosen speciality but also about themselves as historians, literary theorists and scientists. They study not only the objects of history, literature and science but also, in a reflexive manner, the subjects – the practitioners themselves. There is a structure within each area of knowledge that continually extends not only because new objects appear but also because scholars continually renew their view of themselves as subjects. Within the process of knowledge production there is the continual renewal of ways of thinking.

Generations of learned scholars have left behind their thoughts in books and papers. Using their work, I am able to elaborate upon those core concepts – family, community and nation – and to introduce new concepts, as and when required. New concepts might at times appear to over-complicate the narrative, but they are an essential part