Grandfather's Microscope
H. Mei Liu
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2002 XLibris Corp
ISBN: 1401078303

Born in 1929 in Hunan, China Mei Liu's childhood was filled with family secrets & plagued by Japanese occupation & then Communist revolution...until she escaped to college on Taiwan & eventually to America.

I want to tell the world about this enriching, exciting memoir. Woven into this scientist's stories of who she is & where she came from are the voices of her daughters, telling of their memories of their mother & their life in America.

Despite the odd turns of phrases & the occasional strange tenses, even with obvious gaps:- her first view of America as she travels from the West Coast to the East, or who she married, which is explained in her Interview, Mei Liu's Grandfather's Microscope is riveting.

It will open your eyes to the everyday details of the customs & beliefs of another people in another time & place. You will learn of the legacy of this scholarly young explorer in the rarified field of pathology & her immigrant life in America; of her mentors, both ancient & modern; her love of poetry & opera; the yearnings & terrors of a young woman alone in new lands, learning to survive hunger, disease, revolution, war & the isolation of not having the language of her adopted land; of fortunes told long ago & the concepts of fu & qi; kung fu & wu shu; feng shui & zu sheng; little houses & house ghosts; “struggle meetings” & the anatomy of the body, as seen through the lens of a natural storyteller.

H. Mei Liu has indeed seen interesting times & lived to tell of them, from her idyllic youth in the bosom of her family with her father as the patriarch--in southern China, beside the great Dongting Lake, where the old lifestyle of foot binding, arranged marriages & polygamy were fading, & the rumble of revolution & war could be heard on the horizon. There her sister Lan & she attended school run by Catholic nuns, even after her father was transferred to the northern coastal port of Weihai. Then the second Sino-Japanese war began & with it came loss of family status, wealth & their comfortable lifestyle.

In 1945, even as the Japanese marched out of town, the Communist Red Army came through with much the same results. The family moved on to Quingdao & eventally Mei Liu entered Shandong University. Then as China was closing its doors to the world, she was one of the last to slip out, open her wings & land on the Island of Taiwan.

This is not a memoir of great battles & political upheavel, rather it is of the intimate family details of how they all lived together, their illnesses & triumphs, the melange of religions within one household (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam & polytheism), the mixture of old ways & modern interests, of affection & civility, of herbal treatments, incantations & secret histories obliquely mentioned, & of children growing up in a dangerous world.

All through Grandfather's Microscope the motif of legacy is repeated until Mei Liu sees in sharp focus from where her fascination with that intrument came:

“I would sit in front of a microscope for hours on end entranced by the architectural perfection of the living tissues. After staining with dyes, the cells lighted up like the stained glass windows in a medieval cathedral. The sight would fill me with a religious feeling and a sense of mystery...when the organs were attacked by disease, the cells would become alive and speak to me in a secret language...I felt awed and privileged to witness, at close range, the miracles of life and death.” Page 143.

Amid all horrors the grown-ups visited upon each other, unrepentant interrogations, brutal burials, quashing of individual inspiration, genocide, Mei Liu's sense of humor occasionally bubbles through, as too her philosophical explorations:

“Of all the human organs, the brain fascinated me the most. The first time I watched a brain being taken out of the skull of a dead person, I felt an acute anxiety and pain. Her was the essence of a human being, the reposity of his life experiences, intelligence, personality and the very soul. Now it had turned into a white, lifeless mass like tofue. What happened to his thoughts and emotions? Where did his spirit go?” Page 144.

Of her decades in America, Mei Liu's memories seem one dimensional--almost hurried, except when she speaks of her scientific research & her connections with friends & colleagues across the seas. She also knows that she kept herself separated from other Chinese immigrants, in hopes her children would have the best shot at being good Americans.

Then when they are grown & flown off about their own lives, Mei Liu takes the opportunity to fly back to China, to close the circle of her wanderings in the wilderness...only to find, as so many of us immigrants have...you cannot go home. Yes, you can stay a while & teach, yet after so many decades of personal freedom it is hard to go back behind the Bamboo Curtain. Yes, you can say goodbye to contemporaries who have not fared as well, knowing that the plenty you found on the other side of the ocean may have kept your body well even as your spirit ailed. Yes, you can wander through the places of your childhood, of your spirit...only you don't belong anymore. You are neither Chinese nor American, neither Taiwanese nor Rhode Islander.

Grandfather's Microscope is a remarkable effort at the telling of a complex social, private & scientific history over the course of 70+ years of the cultures on both sides of a vast ocean. Now, in her wisdom years, Mei Liu leaves her children the legacy of her story well-written, entertaining & thought-provoking.

Dr. Liu is the author of Biology and Pathology of Nerve Growth, a seminal work on neuroscience, & served on the faculties of Chicago, Northwestern & Brown Universities. She has also taught at Cheng Kung University in Taiwan & Hunan Medical College in China. She now lives in Hawaii.

Do catch my Interview with this remarkable American!
(05/04/03)

Rebecca