The memories of his uncle (his father's eldest brother) focus on his stay in Japan as a student, followed by his return to China just in time to witness the fall of Shanghai to the Japanese.
Taiwan features again later in the narrative. Hu's maternal grandparents, for example, also came over from China and his grandfather helped set up the Pacific Electric Wire and Cable Company here in 1959. The author's father gets a chapter to himself in which he recounts some of the privations of Taiwan's martial law era, visits to the Veterans' Hospital of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and meeting his future wife, then a nurse.
As for the author himself, he travels west as far as Urumqi, is in Hong Kong for the handover in 1997, and in 1998 joins his father at a reunion in Shanghai where former students of the medical school who left for Taiwan 50 years previously return. Here he optimistically comments that the younger generation on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have no wish "to inherit a conflict initiated by their fathers' grandfathers," and even great grandfathers' generation.
This is a surprisingly enjoyable book. Ray Hu may be an oil salesman by trade and this his only book to date, but he remains dogged in his pursuit of a history that's both personal and national. For someone who was initially forbidden to read about China or to speak Chinese, this is quite an achievement. In addition, he dutifully records the published sources that augment his own and his family members' experiences. What makes the result attractive is the author's determination to set down the things he believes his Western readers ought to understand, and to make this information as accessible and as interesting as possible. The happy result is a simultaneous authenticity and charm.
RSS