Chai Ruth Tsao - The girl from purple mountain: love, honor, war, and one familys journey from china to america

We have decided to tell this story in two voices, that of my father, Winberg, and myself, May-lee. Originally we thought we could write this memoir in a single voice, that of my father, as he was a participant in and witness to many of the events we describe. However, we discovered that his voice alone was insufficient. My father experienced the wars in Chinathe Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Civil War (1945-1949)in his childhood, which was highly traumatic and resulted in the repression of these memories for most of his adult life. As we began work on the memoir, I came to discover that the story of my family, and my grandmother, was not only what actually happened to them in China, but also how these events were later both remembered and repressed in America. No one else wanted to recall the wars or the family fights that accompanied them, yet my grandmother refused to let anyone forget. As a child, I found this tension between remembering the past and ignoring it extremely frustrating. Why couldnt my family just tell me what had happened? But now, as an adult, I realize that there is no single version of the past in a family history.

For example, after the 1937 invasion of Nanjing by the Japanese Army, the family was forced to flee to Hunan province where they lived in a village in the countryside. These years were terrifying to my grandmother because of the precarious nature of their lives, never knowing when the Japanese would arrive. However, to my father, living in the countryside from the ages of four to nine was terribly fun and exciting. He found country living to be filled with more adventures for a boy than his structured life in the city had ever allowed. He could run barefoot all year round. He remembered seeing the traveling folk performances that visited the village. If we were to tell the story of our family, I realized, we had to encompass both perspectives, as these differences accounted for the confusion in the way these stories were passed down to me, and to my brother and cousins.

Ultimately, we decided that I would have to tell part of the story as well. My frustration at not understanding was, in part, the impetus for writing this memoir. In college I started studying Chinese so that I could translate family documents, as if they might tell me what had happened during the war years. However, I discovered that the answers I sought were more complicated and the documents only raised more questions. I have spent more than ten years researching this memoirtraveling to China frequently, living in Nanjing for nearly two years, and also convincing my father to return to some of the cities and sites of his familys wartime experiences. By describing my efforts to understand the past and my father, I am trying to show how these stories pass imperfectly from one generation to the next yet how important it is to make the attempt to understand them.

We have benefited from the research of numerous scholars and the assistance of many individuals in writing this memoir. Their names follow at the end of the book.

Finally, we want to explain the romanization system that we have used. The Chinese names in this book reflect several spelling systems, including the Wade-Giles system, which was popular before 1949 (including Yangtze River, Chiang Kai-shek); the pinyin system, currently in use in mainland China (such as Nanjing, Zhou Enlai); and Americanized spellings that no longer use diacritical marks (such as Tsao instead of Tsao and Chu instead of Chu). Names of historical figures are spelled as they are best known in America. Some names of nonhistorical figures have been altered for privacy reasons.

May-lee Chai

Winberg

My mother was buried alone, surrounded by strangers, the way she wished, in a New York mausoleum auspiciously bearing the name of her college dorm. Ferncliff. She had changed her burial plans secretly, with the help of my youngest brother. A decade earlier, my parents had bought side-by-side plots. My father had thought the matter was all settled.