My maternal grandfather, Kai Zhi-Ming(蓋治民) was born in 1911 in Lai-Yang (萊陽) county, Shandong province(山東), the same year the Republic of China was born. He had a brother who is two years older. When he was 10 years old, his father died and he was forced to dropped out at third grade, and that was all the formal educations he had. The Kai family originated from YuenNang(雲南) area in south-western China, they were resettled by the Ming dynasty to Shandong province in the north after the civil war in 1400 AD decimated the population in this area. He was the 16th generation of Kai after the resettlement. The Kai’s live along the banks of Five Dragons River. The river would flood every three years and dry up every 5 years, and devastated the nearby villages in the process.
According to my mom, my great-grandfather was kidnapped by someone in his village in connection with some bandits. My great-grandmother prepared the ransom but unfortunately it was delivered to the wrong address, and as a result my great grandfather was killed. His body was discovered when a fellow villager saw a belt protruding from the river bank. The death of my great-grandfather must have put my great-grandmother in great distress, since she had to raise two young sons by herself. Not much was known about their sufferings because my grand father never talked about it. Eventually he grew to be 6 feet tall, very athletic and also very intelligent, I know because I could never beat him in Chinese Chess, and he could do math in his head and taught himself how to read newspaper. After he and his brother grew up, one night they went to the home of the villager who orchestrated their father’s kidnapping and killed him. This is how people at that time lived. Life was raw, it was Darwinian, and without the entitlements we take for granted today - there were no electricity, no free educations, no hospitals, no governments, and no justice. All you have is your family, and only a strong son can guarantee the continue survival of the family.
Grandfather worked hard and became prosperous. He rotated his crops to maximize yields and to hedge risks. He never grew the same crop in consecutive years, and always grew different crops than his fellow villagers. As a result he often fetched better prices for his products and the crop rotations kept the soil productive. He would also grow peanuts and press oil for cash. He married my grandmother, Sun Shu-yin(孫淑英) who was three years older. They had five children but only two survived: my uncle, Kai Jung-Wen(蓋永文) 1936, my mother, Kai Jung-Hwa(蓋永花) 1938.
In 1949, Chinese communist’s campaign reached the Shandong province. My grandfather was the wealthiest man in his village. Despite he always tilled the land himself and never used any tenant farmer (he owns three acres* of land with his brother’s family, total 15 people), that was enough to get him in trouble. He was arrested by the local communist guerrillas (KMT controlled the cities but the countryside was controlled by the communists). One night a guard him set him free because grandpa had helped his family during a previous famines. He took off and ran all the way to Tsingdao and never went home again.
*To put the three acres in perspective, in 1900, average acreage per US farm was 100 acres. In 1850 an immigrant who landed in California could get 150 acres of farmland with squatter’s right.
When my grandpa was at Tsingdao, he made a living as a construction worker, and my uncle, at that time a teenager, was able to join him. My grandmother was determined to take my mom and joined him in Tsingdao a hundred miles away. However, she was illiterate and had bounded feet so she never left her village before. Because of her husband’s escape, she was already under house arrest. According to mom, the Communist guerrillas would torture grandma by tying her up with ropes and hang her from the cross beam of their house and force her to confess her ‘crime of oppressing the poor’. My mother was 10 years old and would beg them to put her down. Somehow they survived the ordeals and escaped their captor and set out on foot to walk 150Km to join my grandpa. Once during the trip they were completely lost, my grandma prayed and prayed and before long a small whirlwind appeared, they followed it eventually found their way again. In 1949 the family finally managed to unite in Tsingdao, except there was one problem - the Communists are about to capture the city and KMT was leaving for Taiwan. They couldn’t afford the transportation because boat tickets can only be bought by gold bullions and they had lost all their possessions.
One of my grandpa’s friends came up with a brilliant idea - at the time many KMT troops had abandoned their uniforms and weapons while fleeting the communist troops. They decided they would gather these uniforms and weapons and formed a crack KMT unit, and hopefully can take advantage of the chaos and get into some troops transport ships. The plot worked and soon they were scheduled to ship out, except their ranks were so low that their families were not allowed on board. Then another miracle happened - in Tsingdao my grandma came to befriend an old lady and took care of her, turned out the old lady’s son was a high ranking KMT officer and was able to get the entire family on board! Without these miracles, mom often said they would have opted for the last option - at that time communists was recruiting people to joined re-settlement to JiangXi province. She didn’t realized until many years later that many refugees who went to JiangXi were subsequently persecuted and perished. Out of the 400M Chinese people, only 4M, or 1%, fled from China to Taiwan in 1949. By extreme lucks and miracles, my mother’s family not only was able to escape, but unlike most other families, escaped as a whole. My father who also fled China to Taiwan in 1949 as a teenager barely made it out himself and left his parents behind, whom he would not see again until 1983.
At age 38, grandpa started over again in Taiwan. His family lived in tent city set up for the refugees in Taichung(台中) and he found work as a construction worker. Every morning he got up around 4AM, walked up to 10 miles to the construction site, and got home around 9PM, and repeat the cycle again. After WWII Taiwan was short of means of transportation, and because grandpa was 6 feet tall and very strong, he was used as a human mule to haul the construction materials using a wheel-brow. Credits were not available at the time and transactions were often settled by cash. Overtime grandpa earned enough trust of his employer so he would get the cash from his boss in the morning, went to the supplier’s warehouse and paid for the material that day, then haul these materials to the construction site. One day after he paid the materials and was half way to the construction site, he realized the vendor had given him the wrong change - the exact amount is unclear, but something like a $10 bill was mistaken for $50 and he got $45 instead of $5. He hauled the materials back to the vendor’s warehouse (this was after WWII and you cannot simply leave stuff by the roadside unattended) and tried to explained what happened, since he speaks only northern China’s dialect and the vendor only speaks Taiwanese, the vendor thought grandpa came back and asked for more money. He was ready to gather his employees and beat up grandpa when a passers-by who happened to know both dialects clarified the confusions. The vendor, Mr. Chen, was so impressed with grandpa’s honesty, that he told grandpa to start his own construction business, and he would advance him all the materials on credit until his customers pay him. That’s how grandpa started his own construction business with no money to his own. Because he always deliver on budget and on-time, from 1949 to 1969, his business grew from a one-man operation to become one of the largest contractor in Taichung. After WWII the catholic church were expanding in Taiwan and became his main client through word of mouth. One of his job was Viator High School, the largest private Catholic school in Asia that both me and my cousin later attended. Another job was Providence University, a girls-only private catholic college my mother attended. He also built the Catholic church right across the street from my alma mater - Tunghahi University.
My grand mother was a traditional women with bounded feet. She didn’t have formal education. Her often told us stories filled with mysteries. She told me when my mother was young, she once got very sick. One night grandma had a dream that she was fetching a jar from a high shelf and it cracked. The next morning grandma found mother was not breathing and thought she was dead, but while they were preparing for the funeral mother came back alive. Grandma believed that had she broken the jar in the dream instead of cracking it, mother would have been dead. Another time someone in her family got very sick and was almost dead, and a mysterious traveling medicine man came to the village and advise the patient to drink some brew from snake skin, the medicine man refused any payment and left, the next day the patient completely recovered. There’s also the story when they were trying to escape to Tsingtao when mysterious whirlwind appeared and guided them to safety. Her world view is that there are many mysteries in life, and one must always do the right thing in order to build good karma.
From 1949 to 1966, thanks to the steady catholic building contracts, my grandparent had become one of the wealthiest in the city of Taichung. One of his refugee friend was jealous of him and turned him in as a Communist spy. He was arrested by KMT but was later released after paying large sum of money to someone in the government.
At around 1966 grandpa decided to expand his operation from Taichung to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Grandma did not want to move because she was quite content with their lot, but grandpa was very ambitious and wanted to expand his business further. There was also a story of one of grandpa’s best friend, who had died during the chaotic years of 1949 but his spirit had ‘stayed and took care of grandpa’ because they were such good friends in life, according to grandma, the friend’s spirit had ‘guided’ him through many decisions but finally told grandpa in a dream that he was very happy to see his friend had prospered, and he would leave him and go to heaven in peace. In spite of the protests from his wife and the departure of his ‘guardian angel’, grandma still decided to move his business to Taipei. He took on another catholic project that would prove to be his demise. The Chinese cardinal at the time, Yu Bin(于斌樞機主教), wanted to build a junior medical college to train nurses
康寧醫護專科學校. Grandpa got the contract and went ahead with the constructions. But when he completed the school, he did not receive the payment. It was never clear what happened, and when grandpa went to the court he lost his case. After Nixon went to China in 1972 Taiwan became isolated diplomatically, the government did not want a scandal to destabilize the fragile relationships with the Vatican. In the grand scheme of cold war politics he never stood a chance and lost all his money.
Grandpa never liked my dad. When my father was dating my mom in college, he was serving in Taiwan air force. He didn’t graduate from the Air Force Academy and graduated from the Air Force Mechanical School instead. According to dad he wasn’t good enough to become a fighter pilot so he chose to become a mechanic. I suspect he probably was kicked out of the Academy because disciplinary problems. He was famous among his Academy classmates for rebelling. Mother was in the last year of college when she married my father. Their economic status could not have been more different, she was the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in Taichung, and he was an air force lieutenant who had no career future. After they got married in 1963, my mother got a job teaching English in a public junior high school. With my grandparent’s help, they purchased a plot of land and dad opened a restaurant with his friends and made a lot of money. In 1976 they torn down the restaurant and on the same spot built a 5 story building and rent it to a hospital(三民醫院). That hospital and building(台中市北區三民路三段124號) is still there in 2009 when I visited.
Throughout her life, my mother worshiped my grand father. In her eyes grandpa embodied the best qualities of Chinese man - honest, hard working and disciplined. I’ve lived with my grandpa every summer from 9 to 12, and we lived together for 1 year when I was 15. We were not close at all. In fact, I don’t think grandpa was ever closed to anyone. He was the typical Chinese man of 19th century who are loathed to reveal their emotions and affections, and probably made worse by his harsh upbringings. The only occasion when he would talk to us was playing Chess, when my cousin and I were trying to beat him (and never succeeded), he would say ‘watch your rook’ or things like that. He never talked about the past. I didn’t even know he built my high school until I went there, and he never mentioned anything about the Catholic. I do remember he was a man of extraordinary disciplines and always followed the same routines - he got up very early, like 4:30, ate breakfast, read newspaper, had lunch, took a nap, dinner, and went to bed around 8:00.
Grandma’s temperament was the opposite of grandpa. She was one of the most loving and affectionate person I’d ever known. She was also the one that told us all the family stories. When my family immigrated to Canada in 1981, I lived with my grand parent for one year. At that time grandpa was 70 and grandma was 73, and both had long since settled into a regular patterns of simple living. One year later because our family ran out of funds and in order to reduce our living expense, I moved into a school dormitory, and they moved back to live with my uncle and his family. On weekends I’d joined them in uncles place and return to the dorm on Monday. In the 1980s, Grandma was able to visit Canada a few times but somehow grandpa never made the trip. I left Taiwan in 1991 to attend graduate school in Columbia University, when Adrianne and I got married in 1997 we went back to Taiwan to see grandma. She kept saying how happy she was that I married a tall wife (Adrianne is 6 ft).
In 1990, while I was serving in Taiwan army, my grandpa passed away. He was 79. Mother told me that when she was comforting grandpa at his bed, one day he told mom that he’s ready to go to the next world because a newly opened public office awaits him. The next day he passed away. Grandma passed away in 2001 at age 93. Both times mother flew back from Canada to Taiwan and was at their sides.
That was the life of my grandparents. Their life from 1908 to 2001 was the most chaotic times in China, and it requires the fortitude of characters that I’ve rarely seen in my own lifetime. I still vividly remember the one year in 1981 when we lived together, and the simple daily routines we followed - no TV, no radio, no distractions, just simple family meals. I lived a whole year with this man whose escape from China and rise from refugee to prosperity was simply astounding, who built my high school, who once owned an entire city block,, who was wrongfully en-prisoned, who owed his fortune to honesty and lost it because of loyalty, and yet he never spoke one single word about these. The grandpa I know played chess with me and the only thing he ever told me was “your credit is as good as your life(信用比生命重要)”.
According to my mom, my great-grandfather was kidnapped by someone in his village in connection with some bandits. My great-grandmother prepared the ransom but unfortunately it was delivered to the wrong address, and as a result my great grandfather was killed. His body was discovered when a fellow villager saw a belt protruding from the river bank. The death of my great-grandfather must have put my great-grandmother in great distress, since she had to raise two young sons by herself. Not much was known about their sufferings because my grand father never talked about it. Eventually he grew to be 6 feet tall, very athletic and also very intelligent, I know because I could never beat him in Chinese Chess, and he could do math in his head and taught himself how to read newspaper. After he and his brother grew up, one night they went to the home of the villager who orchestrated their father’s kidnapping and killed him. This is how people at that time lived. Life was raw, it was Darwinian, and without the entitlements we take for granted today - there were no electricity, no free educations, no hospitals, no governments, and no justice. All you have is your family, and only a strong son can guarantee the continue survival of the family.
Grandfather worked hard and became prosperous. He rotated his crops to maximize yields and to hedge risks. He never grew the same crop in consecutive years, and always grew different crops than his fellow villagers. As a result he often fetched better prices for his products and the crop rotations kept the soil productive. He would also grow peanuts and press oil for cash. He married my grandmother, Sun Shu-yin(孫淑英) who was three years older. They had five children but only two survived: my uncle, Kai Jung-Wen(蓋永文) 1936, my mother, Kai Jung-Hwa(蓋永花) 1938.
In 1949, Chinese communist’s campaign reached the Shandong province. My grandfather was the wealthiest man in his village. Despite he always tilled the land himself and never used any tenant farmer (he owns three acres* of land with his brother’s family, total 15 people), that was enough to get him in trouble. He was arrested by the local communist guerrillas (KMT controlled the cities but the countryside was controlled by the communists). One night a guard him set him free because grandpa had helped his family during a previous famines. He took off and ran all the way to Tsingdao and never went home again.
*To put the three acres in perspective, in 1900, average acreage per US farm was 100 acres. In 1850 an immigrant who landed in California could get 150 acres of farmland with squatter’s right.
When my grandpa was at Tsingdao, he made a living as a construction worker, and my uncle, at that time a teenager, was able to join him. My grandmother was determined to take my mom and joined him in Tsingdao a hundred miles away. However, she was illiterate and had bounded feet so she never left her village before. Because of her husband’s escape, she was already under house arrest. According to mom, the Communist guerrillas would torture grandma by tying her up with ropes and hang her from the cross beam of their house and force her to confess her ‘crime of oppressing the poor’. My mother was 10 years old and would beg them to put her down. Somehow they survived the ordeals and escaped their captor and set out on foot to walk 150Km to join my grandpa. Once during the trip they were completely lost, my grandma prayed and prayed and before long a small whirlwind appeared, they followed it eventually found their way again. In 1949 the family finally managed to unite in Tsingdao, except there was one problem - the Communists are about to capture the city and KMT was leaving for Taiwan. They couldn’t afford the transportation because boat tickets can only be bought by gold bullions and they had lost all their possessions.
One of my grandpa’s friends came up with a brilliant idea - at the time many KMT troops had abandoned their uniforms and weapons while fleeting the communist troops. They decided they would gather these uniforms and weapons and formed a crack KMT unit, and hopefully can take advantage of the chaos and get into some troops transport ships. The plot worked and soon they were scheduled to ship out, except their ranks were so low that their families were not allowed on board. Then another miracle happened - in Tsingdao my grandma came to befriend an old lady and took care of her, turned out the old lady’s son was a high ranking KMT officer and was able to get the entire family on board! Without these miracles, mom often said they would have opted for the last option - at that time communists was recruiting people to joined re-settlement to JiangXi province. She didn’t realized until many years later that many refugees who went to JiangXi were subsequently persecuted and perished. Out of the 400M Chinese people, only 4M, or 1%, fled from China to Taiwan in 1949. By extreme lucks and miracles, my mother’s family not only was able to escape, but unlike most other families, escaped as a whole. My father who also fled China to Taiwan in 1949 as a teenager barely made it out himself and left his parents behind, whom he would not see again until 1983.
At age 38, grandpa started over again in Taiwan. His family lived in tent city set up for the refugees in Taichung(台中) and he found work as a construction worker. Every morning he got up around 4AM, walked up to 10 miles to the construction site, and got home around 9PM, and repeat the cycle again. After WWII Taiwan was short of means of transportation, and because grandpa was 6 feet tall and very strong, he was used as a human mule to haul the construction materials using a wheel-brow. Credits were not available at the time and transactions were often settled by cash. Overtime grandpa earned enough trust of his employer so he would get the cash from his boss in the morning, went to the supplier’s warehouse and paid for the material that day, then haul these materials to the construction site. One day after he paid the materials and was half way to the construction site, he realized the vendor had given him the wrong change - the exact amount is unclear, but something like a $10 bill was mistaken for $50 and he got $45 instead of $5. He hauled the materials back to the vendor’s warehouse (this was after WWII and you cannot simply leave stuff by the roadside unattended) and tried to explained what happened, since he speaks only northern China’s dialect and the vendor only speaks Taiwanese, the vendor thought grandpa came back and asked for more money. He was ready to gather his employees and beat up grandpa when a passers-by who happened to know both dialects clarified the confusions. The vendor, Mr. Chen, was so impressed with grandpa’s honesty, that he told grandpa to start his own construction business, and he would advance him all the materials on credit until his customers pay him. That’s how grandpa started his own construction business with no money to his own. Because he always deliver on budget and on-time, from 1949 to 1969, his business grew from a one-man operation to become one of the largest contractor in Taichung. After WWII the catholic church were expanding in Taiwan and became his main client through word of mouth. One of his job was Viator High School, the largest private Catholic school in Asia that both me and my cousin later attended. Another job was Providence University, a girls-only private catholic college my mother attended. He also built the Catholic church right across the street from my alma mater - Tunghahi University.
My grand mother was a traditional women with bounded feet. She didn’t have formal education. Her often told us stories filled with mysteries. She told me when my mother was young, she once got very sick. One night grandma had a dream that she was fetching a jar from a high shelf and it cracked. The next morning grandma found mother was not breathing and thought she was dead, but while they were preparing for the funeral mother came back alive. Grandma believed that had she broken the jar in the dream instead of cracking it, mother would have been dead. Another time someone in her family got very sick and was almost dead, and a mysterious traveling medicine man came to the village and advise the patient to drink some brew from snake skin, the medicine man refused any payment and left, the next day the patient completely recovered. There’s also the story when they were trying to escape to Tsingtao when mysterious whirlwind appeared and guided them to safety. Her world view is that there are many mysteries in life, and one must always do the right thing in order to build good karma.
From 1949 to 1966, thanks to the steady catholic building contracts, my grandparent had become one of the wealthiest in the city of Taichung. One of his refugee friend was jealous of him and turned him in as a Communist spy. He was arrested by KMT but was later released after paying large sum of money to someone in the government.
At around 1966 grandpa decided to expand his operation from Taichung to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Grandma did not want to move because she was quite content with their lot, but grandpa was very ambitious and wanted to expand his business further. There was also a story of one of grandpa’s best friend, who had died during the chaotic years of 1949 but his spirit had ‘stayed and took care of grandpa’ because they were such good friends in life, according to grandma, the friend’s spirit had ‘guided’ him through many decisions but finally told grandpa in a dream that he was very happy to see his friend had prospered, and he would leave him and go to heaven in peace. In spite of the protests from his wife and the departure of his ‘guardian angel’, grandma still decided to move his business to Taipei. He took on another catholic project that would prove to be his demise. The Chinese cardinal at the time, Yu Bin(于斌樞機主教), wanted to build a junior medical college to train nurses
康寧醫護專科學校. Grandpa got the contract and went ahead with the constructions. But when he completed the school, he did not receive the payment. It was never clear what happened, and when grandpa went to the court he lost his case. After Nixon went to China in 1972 Taiwan became isolated diplomatically, the government did not want a scandal to destabilize the fragile relationships with the Vatican. In the grand scheme of cold war politics he never stood a chance and lost all his money.
Grandpa never liked my dad. When my father was dating my mom in college, he was serving in Taiwan air force. He didn’t graduate from the Air Force Academy and graduated from the Air Force Mechanical School instead. According to dad he wasn’t good enough to become a fighter pilot so he chose to become a mechanic. I suspect he probably was kicked out of the Academy because disciplinary problems. He was famous among his Academy classmates for rebelling. Mother was in the last year of college when she married my father. Their economic status could not have been more different, she was the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in Taichung, and he was an air force lieutenant who had no career future. After they got married in 1963, my mother got a job teaching English in a public junior high school. With my grandparent’s help, they purchased a plot of land and dad opened a restaurant with his friends and made a lot of money. In 1976 they torn down the restaurant and on the same spot built a 5 story building and rent it to a hospital(三民醫院). That hospital and building(台中市北區三民路三段124號) is still there in 2009 when I visited.
Throughout her life, my mother worshiped my grand father. In her eyes grandpa embodied the best qualities of Chinese man - honest, hard working and disciplined. I’ve lived with my grandpa every summer from 9 to 12, and we lived together for 1 year when I was 15. We were not close at all. In fact, I don’t think grandpa was ever closed to anyone. He was the typical Chinese man of 19th century who are loathed to reveal their emotions and affections, and probably made worse by his harsh upbringings. The only occasion when he would talk to us was playing Chess, when my cousin and I were trying to beat him (and never succeeded), he would say ‘watch your rook’ or things like that. He never talked about the past. I didn’t even know he built my high school until I went there, and he never mentioned anything about the Catholic. I do remember he was a man of extraordinary disciplines and always followed the same routines - he got up very early, like 4:30, ate breakfast, read newspaper, had lunch, took a nap, dinner, and went to bed around 8:00.
Grandma’s temperament was the opposite of grandpa. She was one of the most loving and affectionate person I’d ever known. She was also the one that told us all the family stories. When my family immigrated to Canada in 1981, I lived with my grand parent for one year. At that time grandpa was 70 and grandma was 73, and both had long since settled into a regular patterns of simple living. One year later because our family ran out of funds and in order to reduce our living expense, I moved into a school dormitory, and they moved back to live with my uncle and his family. On weekends I’d joined them in uncles place and return to the dorm on Monday. In the 1980s, Grandma was able to visit Canada a few times but somehow grandpa never made the trip. I left Taiwan in 1991 to attend graduate school in Columbia University, when Adrianne and I got married in 1997 we went back to Taiwan to see grandma. She kept saying how happy she was that I married a tall wife (Adrianne is 6 ft).
In 1990, while I was serving in Taiwan army, my grandpa passed away. He was 79. Mother told me that when she was comforting grandpa at his bed, one day he told mom that he’s ready to go to the next world because a newly opened public office awaits him. The next day he passed away. Grandma passed away in 2001 at age 93. Both times mother flew back from Canada to Taiwan and was at their sides.
That was the life of my grandparents. Their life from 1908 to 2001 was the most chaotic times in China, and it requires the fortitude of characters that I’ve rarely seen in my own lifetime. I still vividly remember the one year in 1981 when we lived together, and the simple daily routines we followed - no TV, no radio, no distractions, just simple family meals. I lived a whole year with this man whose escape from China and rise from refugee to prosperity was simply astounding, who built my high school, who once owned an entire city block,, who was wrongfully en-prisoned, who owed his fortune to honesty and lost it because of loyalty, and yet he never spoke one single word about these. The grandpa I know played chess with me and the only thing he ever told me was “your credit is as good as your life(信用比生命重要)”.
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