The lost legacies of Those Who Came Before Us
Why remembering the past is essential to our own futures
No one in my family can explain why my father’s father was called “Lamb” in English. Was it a nickname? Did his parents give it to him before he journeyed to America? Was it his favorite food?
Mao Te Tsao received his masters degree in Business Administration from Washington University in St. Louis in 1919. He then traveled between Shanghai, Tianjin, America and Canada over the next two decades on business trips. His parents were a young couple from Soochow, a city of graceful canals about two hours west of Shanghai.
He made his way to Hong Kong in 1916, then to Washington University. He eventually settled in Taipei, Taiwan and died there in 1952. His wife, Yin Tang, lived on as a widow until 1991. She was the grandmother I saw during my time in Shanghai with my mother after my father had died.
I would have liked to ask him what ambition drove him to venture from the heartland of China to the United States and beyond. He made his way through the world during WWI and WWII as well as during the Chinese civil war that brought the Communists to power. I can only guess there was some combination of opportunity, talent and adventure that made him want to brave being a stranger in a strange land in his early years. Certainly he must have had as strong command of English as well as Chinese in order to move so easily between east and west.
Digging into the family archives, I found photos of him in college associations at Washington University. A fraternity, a graduate society and a class photo. In each his is the lone Chinese face. His wears spectacles, and looks appropriately somber and serious. He also looks intelligent and savvy. He would have to be. I try to see myself in his eyes, but he remains a mystery to me. Both he and my father sought something here in America they could not find in their homeland. It is clear they both cherished America in some profound way.
Mao Te Tsao’s father and my great-great grandfather Tsao Tse-Zeh was born in near Shanghai, where he died in 1902 at the age of 55. Little did I know then, but the first trip I took to Shanghai with my mother had a significance beyond my understanding.
I was a leaf from the family tree that had been blown back to the main branch by history, happenstance and duty. Now, around 125 years since Tsao Tse-Zen’s time on earth I am tracing a circle back to him and beyond if I can, through writing their histories. What it means for those who follow me remains unknown.
On my mother’s side, there is a rich legacy of rumor, influence, politics and fame. The surname Soong is recognized as a name that contributed to the shape of modern China in a fascinating manner. Charlie Soong’s three daughters each married perhaps the most influential men in China’s early twentieth century. Ai Ling married H.H. Kung, China’s wealthiest man.
Ching Ling married Sun Yao Sen, the father of the Chines republic after the fall of the Ching dynasty. Mai Ling married Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shen, the leader of the eventually exiled Republic of China in Taiwan. My mother was a Soong, as her father was a cousin of the patriarch Charlie Soong.
I recall the stories my mother told me of visiting Madam Chiang Kai-Shek over the holidays in New York City. My mother was attending boarding school in Boston. A car came to collect her for the Christmas break. She was driven to a luxurious building on Park Avenue. She was given a room in the palatial penthouse and spent a week with Madame Chiang as well wishers, relatives and the like came and went. Dinners, parties and social gatherings packed the calendar.
After the festivities, my mother was driven back to Boston to resume her schooling. Her recollection of her time at Madame Chiang’s was limited to general impressions of glamour, glitter, celebrities, politicians and other important people she was politely introduced to. A young teenage relation, my mother was welcome to be seen and not heard.
After all, Madame Chiang held a position not unlike Jacqueline Kennedy in those heady days following the Chinese civil war. She was very young at the time, so the memory of those days was general to her as she related them to me decades later.
These legacies are now lost, as the generation of my family on both sides who lived these realities has now departed this world. My generation can only experience their lives as faded and distant legends that are slowly fading from existence. Soon their stories will be forgotten, which perhaps is why I continue to write about them here.
Since the vast majority of us living now in America are from immigrant families, it is worth trying to preserve their experience so that we might better understand our own. Their hopes, their dreams, their fears; and their shame, their struggle and their triumphs.
The spirit of the immigrant is the spirit that forged what we call America, for better or for worse. It is a shared legacy for most of us today. Native peoples and slaves obviously experienced vastly different legacies of which I am unqualified to speak of. Suffice to say that the combined experience of those who came here of their own free will and those who were either displaced or forced to come here is a shared experience of shock: movement, violence, upheaval, struggle and change.
I am an unyielding advocate for remembering. For those who choose to forget the long and difficult history of their forebears are in danger of forgetting who they are and why they are here. To that end, we all have much more in common than we currently believe, and stand on a common ground of history that teaches us to seek our similarities rather than focus on our differences.
