Lu Chi Fa - My Good Fortune: Memoir of a Chinese Orphans Success in America

Copyright 2019 by Lu Chi Fa

PRINT ISBN: 9781644386095

EBOOK ISBN: 9781644386118

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

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First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lu, Chi Fa

My Good Fortune: Memoir of a Chinese Orphans Success in America by Lu Chi Fa

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Cultural, Ethnic & Regional/Asian & Asian American | SELF-HELP/Personal Growth/Success | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/ Entrepreneurship

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019903748

Acknowledgment

I have to thank many people for my good fortune. Big Sisters counsel when I was a child encouraged me to be strong and helped me face the difficulties I confronted later in life. The Morro Bay Chamber of Commerce welcomed me to the community and has encouraged me over the years.

Karen Grencik urged me to tell the story of my childhood, transcribed it, and found the writer, Becky White, who so skillfully shaped that story into a book, Double Luck: Memoirs of a Chinese Orphan. I am deeply grateful to these two women for adding so much value to my life. Azul Hull generously donated copies of the book to several Chinese libraries.

Customers at The Coffee Pot, members of my Friday Supper Club and the readers of my memoir suggested that I continue the narrative. Margot Silk Forrest served as a research and editorial consultant in the early stages of My Good Fortune. My good friend Milt Carrigan has handled innumerable tasks over the years. Dr. Lorin Lee Cary interviewed me a number of times and wrote the final manuscript. Milt, Craig Dahlberg, Vicki Leon and Joy Cary critiqued the draft at different points.

Table of Contents

Morro Bay, California, where Ive lived since 1990, is about mid-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a lifetime away from my childhood hell. Orphaned at the age of four, I survived brutality and starvation in China during and after World War II. At one point a relative sold me for two sacks of rice. In 1951 I fled to Hong Kong for a better life and begged on the street to survive. I eventually made my way to Taiwan and in 1969 immigrated to the United States. I told that story in Double Luck: Memoirs of a Chinese Orphan, which in 2001 won a gold award from Parents Choice Foundation.

The central message of this second memoir is that despite poverty and hardship we still can succeed. Even if we lack education, we can fulfill our dreams by setting aside negative excuses and working hard. Setbacks will occur in our lives, but how we react to them, through our actions and attitudes, can lead to joy and eventual success.

This book adds details about my life before I immigrated to America. It follows my quest to create good fortune, the culmination of a childhood yearning to escape poverty and hunger and live in a country where no one had to swallow sorrow to survive. In the United States, I believed, I could be a success. And that has happened, in spite of multiple problems and the lingering effects of childhood abuse. Today Im a respected citizen of the community in which Ive owned a restaurant for nearly three decades.

I was barely three years old in 1944 when my parents died within a few months of each other. A careless herbalist poisoned my father. Malnutrition took my mother, though perhaps it was really grief. These were crushing events for a little boy. It was a time of war, starvation and homelessness in China. Japanese troops occupied our country even as a civil war raged.

For a while I lived with my big sister. She loved me and always encouraged me to be strong, but her husband abused me and considered me a burden. To protect me she often hid me in a dark storage room where I huddled, sad, lonely and fearful, between layers of prickly straw crawling with bugs. That early experience scarred me for the rest of my life.

None of my fathers kin or even my own three other adult brothers and sisters could or would take me in for more than a few days or months at a time. They had families of their own and not enough food, or in some cases compassion, to feed another soul. No arms comforted me when I was sad, lonely or fearful. And I was painfully hungry almost all the time. So were a lot of other people in China in those days, but I believe a childs hunger hurts more.

When I was five my sister-in-law sold me for two sacks of rice to a Communist village leader. My Oldest Brother assumed I would have a good life with this man. His wife just wanted to get rid of me. Looking back, I know they desperately needed the food and the money the rice would bring when they sold some of it. At the time I hoped that at last I had found a family of my own. I could not have been more wrong.

My new father, a middle-aged man, had just married a woman with a twenty-year-old son and he wanted a younger boy he could train to be obedient to him. Since he now had two sons, he said he was twice lucky. That was how I got the nickname Double Luck.

Yet I was anything but lucky. For over a year I was my adoptive parents slave. I slept on the cold kitchen floor and had little to eat. Hunger filled my days and nights, even when they took me with them as they confiscated food from slightly better off folks in the village. I tried my best to do all that they asked of me, but they complained that I was lazy bad boy. They punished me harshly.

Terrified and alone, I comforted myself by recalling that Big Sister had told me I was a good boy and that I needed to be strong. I chanted these words to myself, and when the opportunity finally arose I got word to Big Sister of my horrible conditions. When I was six she found and rescued me.

This did not end my problems. For the next several years, as the civil war raged and the Communists ultimately triumphed, I bounced from family to family, person to person. There was no stability, no calm. It was a terrible time. Being hungry, even starving, was the central fact of my childhood. I drank a tea made from dried lima bean shells sprinkled into warm water and often ate scraps wherever I could find them, even rotted food that made me ill.

In 1951, two years after the Communists had ousted Chiang Kai-shek, I fled with Oldest Brother and his family to Hong Kong and then Kowloon city for a better life. We joined thousands of other refugees in crowded camps. Although now free and safe from the Communists, my trials were not over. My brother could not find work and I supported the family by begging.

Thats when my dream of going to America began. When an old man in our refugee camp urged me to give him some rice, I hesitated. And then I remembered that once someone who had saved me from starvation said that caring for others served heaven. It turned out that the man had sons in America, a place, he said, where people were well-fed and didnt need to swallow sorrow in order to survive. When his sons sent him a ticket to join them he told me he would never forget my kindness and that someday I too would see America. I cherished the idea of living where food was not a problem.

For the next two years I continued to beg for the family, but the dream of America never left me. In 1953 we, along with thousands of other Chinese, managed to make it from Hong Kong to Taiwan. Although poverty was widespread there, things were better and I attended school for the first time. My oldest brother taught me the characters I would need for that, and beat me harshly when I made mistakes. Now twelve, I was the tallest boy in second grade. I did well in class although the other kids teased me about my size. A target in school and at home, after only a few months I quit and went to work.