Rebecca : After decades of living without family on this side of the Pacific Ocean, making a name for yourself in a career as a pathologist & in neuroscience, when you returned to China to find your relatives, what were your feelings as you discovered their stories & the history of your family?
Dr. Liu : Disbelief at first, followed by awe & an overwhelming sense of relief & gratitude for having the opportunity to know my ancestors & their remarkable lives & to have found the answers to my childhood mysteries.
Rebecca : Coming up in China of the 1930s, with grandmothers with bound feet, how did you & your sisters escape that tradition?
Dr. Liu : In my family, the evil tradition of foot-binding was broken by my grandfather who had studied law & education in Japan, then considered the most progressive country in the Orient. He was an unusual man for his time, a great champion of the poor & women's rights. He would never allow his daughters' feet to be bound. By the time I was growing up in the 1930s, girls no longer had to have bound feet.
Rebecca : Throughout your memoir, microscopes are a motif, which was your favorite instrument, how did it come to you & chart the course of your life?
Dr. Liu : I was first introduced to the microscope by my father when I was about ten. He would periodically take the microscope out of a locked wooden box & say to his assembled children: “This is a microscope your grandfather brought back from overseas. It enables you to see ‘invisible things' and it will one day belong to one of you who will become a doctor.” The image of this shining & golden microscope had been associated with an immense sense of mystery since I did not know anything about my grandfather, nor what those ‘invisible things' my father talked about were. I thought it had to do with ghosts.
Eight years later, the mystery of the ‘invisible things' was solved by a young & dashing biology instructor with whom I had a platonic love affair. It was platonic because he turned out to be a leftist & I was an anti-Communist. That was the reason for the doomed relationship.
I belief this fascination with the microscope was the reason why I chose the specialty of pathology whose major tool is the microscope. Although I spent much of my time in hospital basements cutting up the dead, the microscope allowed me to look inside the brain, & made me appreciate its immense architectural complexity, its beauty & mystery & also its diseases.
Rebecca : When you invited your daughters to add their voices to your memoir, what did you discover that you hadn't known before?
Dr. Liu : Just as my children discovered many things about me & their Chinese relatives in reading this book, I also discovered what it is like to be the children of immigrants, which is totally different from being an immigrant. I now understand why they did not want to be called “Chinese,” & the silent burdens they carried all those years. But as adults, they are interested in their roots & proud of their heritage.
Rebecca : How did you retain the sequences of events, had you kept a diary or journal all through the years, how long did it take you & how did you write it?
Dr. Liu : When I was working & raising a family, I hardly had time to look at a calendar, let alone keep a diary. In the struggle to survive from day to day, I didn't have time to reflect on my life & I found that my memories were so disjointed I was not able to see a cohesive picture of my life. When I retired in 1997, for the first time, I found myself with time on my hands. I was supposed to update my scientic book published 17 years earlier. A second printing of that book had long been sold out in China. But my children encouraged me to write down my memories.
I started out walking on the tranquil beaches of Hawaii talking to a little tape recorder as if I was telling stories to my children. Then I sat down at my desk surrounded by old photographs. I replayed the tapes & typed the stories on my computer, Bird by Bird as Anne Lamott had said. It took about 6-8 re-writes to come up with a final draft. I am not sure if I have succeeded in telling a very complicated human story.
Rebecca : While you knew scientific English, what saved your sanity as a young immigrant to America who did not have the everyday language?
Dr. Liu : In the beginning, what saved my sanity was the man I was married to. He was my first love and the father of my three children. I met him when I was 18, a freshman in college, and he was my classmate. We had a harrowing escape out of China on the same boat. We leaned on each other during the difficult years when we were refugees in Taiwan and later in America. It was a poignant love story and would have made a great chapter for the book. But I had to leave the story out because he would not give me permission to mention him. And I have to respect his wishes.
My daughter has promised to write the story for all to read when the right time comes. After my divorce, my support came from my three children and my career.
Rebecca : Separated early for so many years from your family, what was it like when you reunited? Was it strange to see your sisters as elders?
Dr. Liu : It was not so terribly strange to see my siblings. They haven't changed that much, at least in appearance. It took only half a day for us to feel as though we had never been separated.
But I was heart-broken to see my father so old & frail (the physical change from 50 to 80 is definitely more noticeable than from 20 to 50). It has been the greatest regret in my life that I never had the chance to see my mother again (I last saw her when I was 20). I also wished that I could have stayed longer in China during that last visit with my father. But I had to leave because of the limit of my visa.
Rebecca : What was it like meeting a young student in China who had read your seminal work Biology and Pathology of Nerve Growth?
Dr. Liu : I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my book had been read at all, let alone so favorably received. One woman told me this funny story:
When she went to Japan to study, she brought along only two books: Mao's Little Red Book [no longer available in America--for an idea of its history see: The Thoughts of Mao Tse-Tung
by Stuart Schram] containing the Chairman's quotations which everyone had to carry in his/her pocket & Liu's Little Blue Book, it had a blue cover.
Rebecca : As an immigrant myself, I know well the feelings of being a stranger in a strange world, how do you cope with that particular loneliness?
Dr. Liu : The feeling of being an alien is always there no matter what I do. If I don't remember it, someone else will remind me that I don't belong. That's one reason I love living in Hawaii. There is a large Asian population here & people are color-blind. Here, I am simply a “Kama'aina,” meaning a resident.
But the feeling of loneliness & alienation is not limited to immigrants. I have known white Americans, famous & not so famous people who had the same feeling of rootlessness & of not belonging. People who stayed close to home, such as my siblings, would never know this sense of alienation that we immigrants had experienced. We give up a lot of ourselves in exchange for whatever we gain in our new world.
When I first began my memoir, I did not have a set of goals other than to tell family stories to my children. But as time went by, I realized there is more to my book than just describing my peculiar family, the struggles, the exotic Chinese customs & the Chinese history.
In the most personal sense, my book is about forgiveness & redemption. As a child, I hated my father & my aunt for betraying my mother. But later in life, I realized that throughout human history, “lust” the most potent biological weapon, had ruined countless lives including those of brilliant & good people. So I forgave them & concentrated instead on their good qualities.
Despite war, famine & disease, my highly dysfunctional parents still strove & sacrificed to provide for & educate their ten children. They struggled to keep together an enormous, unhappy family through the most turbulent period in modern Chinese history. They kept alive the dreams of my murdered grandfather as my father blew the dust off the precious microscope to show to the children. My mother would never let us forget her lesson: “Study hard, have a career and eat whatever you like.” that means to have control over your lives.
My aunt, who had disgraced her family, had finally achieved in her old age, something noble. She helped to restore honor to her dead father's memory & made peace with him. Her action made me re-think my opinion of her.
Finally I want to emphasize the importance of family ties, the tradition & the dreams they share. It's what sutains us during difficult times.
My daughter Pamela had this to say about my book: “The lesson that I have learned is that dreams that contain a measure of truth and beauty are always fulfilled, maybe not during the dreamer's lifetime. But the yearning for what is true and beautiful is transmitted through generations and ultimately comes to pass.”
Rebecca : Thank you, Doctor Liu, you have taken us on a wonderful walk into your memories.
Do catch my review of H. Mei Liu's enriching memoir Grandfather's Microscope, you will be fascinated! -- I hope it makes you go out & buy yourself a copy!
Rebecca Brown (Published 05/04/03)
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