In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ★ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . After I pushed that Chinese bully off the bus in Hankou, Lin and I went off to do our separate shopping. Later that same day when we again ran into each other, she asked if I knew my way back. I actually did, but I told her I had no idea how to find the bus stop. She told me, “Well, I will show you, but first I have to go home and pick up some things.” Her family lived in a nice apartment in the center of Hankou. Her Aunt Yee Ma, who was actually a cousin to Lin’s mother, and her younger brother Liu Li Quin lived there. Her older brother Liu Li Yueng also happened to be there that day. He was a college professor and a civil engineer. He and I immediately hit it off because we both shared the same passion for alcohol and laughter. I have always said, people who drink make better friends, and he was a heavy drinker. On many of my later visits, the two of us would take a washbasin to this little shop around the corner, get it filled with a rice whisky called bai ju, and then drink the whole thing. Unfortunately, the government never really trusted him because he was the eldest son of a well-known general and landowner, and he had also worked for Americans during the Chinese civil war. During the Cultural Revolution, the government sent him to the countryside and literally worked him to death. Lin also had an older sister, Liu Shu Sen, whose husband taught at Wuhan University, but I did not meet her until later. Lin had lost both her parents when she was still a child, and she and her younger brother were raised by her older sister and Yee Ma, whose name literally translates as “Aunt Mother.” Yee Ma would later help bring up our two children, as well as the children of Lin’s younger brother. c h a p t e r s e v e n Marriage and Family When I first met Clarence Adams during his student days at Wuhan University, I liked him because he was a very strong person. He was very muscular and good in sports, but more important, he liked to study and wanted to acquire knowledge. He clearly wanted to improve himself. I also discovered that he was a very kind person, with a good heart, who treated the common people just like everybody else. —Liu Lin Feng, wife of Clarence Adams Marriage and Family : 85 Lin’s father, Liu Zuou Loon, had been one of China’s most powerful warlords. In the 1930s he surrendered his army to Chiang Kai-shek, who was then in the process of defeating all the warlords and unifying China. Chiang Kai-shek made him governor of Hubei Province, the capital of which is Wuhan. Like many powerful Chinese men of his time, Lin’s father had two official wives plus several concubines. Lin’s mother was his second wife. One of the sons from the general’s first wife attended a very prestigious military academy in Japan, and the Japanese also used one of his mother’s family residences as a headquarters during their occupation of China. Lin’s mother’s family, however , had been pro-American during World War II, and even after Mao and the Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, the pro-American side was initially spared because the United States had been China’s ally during World War II. During those chaotic years of World War II and the Chinese civil war, Lin never neglected her studies. In 1949 she entered Wuhan University, where she majored in Russian, after which she taught Russian at Wuhan Polytechnical University. After that first memorable day with her family in Hankou, we started seeing more and more of each other. We’d take walks with the Korean students, and we gradually got to know each other. We were all older than the Chinese students, who were just coming out of high school and seemed almost like children to us. Some of the Koreans had been soldiers, even high-ranking of- ficers. Their government had sent them to study and learn Chinese language, history, and culture, so they were very serious students. I got along with them because we were about the same age. We spoke Chinese to each other because they spoke no English. Their Chinese, of course, was...

Share