Just less than five days ago, I finally obtained the chance to do a photo tour of this house where my father stayed for three days in the summer of 1982.
Between 1981 to 1983, my father was among the very first batch of visiting scholars sent by the Chinese government to North America. Even though he was academically trained in the top aviation engineering school of China to build jet engines, he was assigned to study the community college systems in Canada and America.
He managed to pay a visit to a remote uncle of my mom’s who lived in San Francisco.
That three days had a profound mental impact on my father.
It could have been his own house, he wrote to me, it could have been yours as well. He added.
Yes, it could have had been his alternative youth and adult years in San Francisco, only if my father’s father decided to follow the invitation of Chiang Kai-shek to go to Taiwan in the summer of 1949 near the end of the bloody civil war. Instead, my grandfather chose to stay behind, desperately wanting to see through his grand blueprint plan on how to turn his significant geological discovery of the rare earth into one of the most crucial infrastructure building blocks of high-speed rails of modern China. That had been his dream for his whole life.
That fateful decision brought endless sorrows and tragedies to my grandparents and his four children in the years to come. He and two of his children had attempted failed suicides in the political turmoil years of the ’50s and ’60s.
However, what my grandfather sacrificed for did happen, and he died in satisfaction knowing that was coming. In the end, that was all that counted.
You should come to North America. This is a place that belongs to you. My dad continued in his letter.
Dear dad, did you write that last sentence on this table while overlooking the beautiful Golden Gate park of San Francisco?
Or did you script it in this posh guest bed of Grandpa Lew’s?
You mentioned Grandpa Lew was a prominent architect, an avid sailor, owned a small boat, loved fishing, and brought you sailing out of Golden Gate one evening. And how Grandpa Lew was impressed with all the Boy Scout knots you made on his boat, the techniques that you recalled from your childhood memory.
I bet in the alternative life of yours, you would have had been an avid sailor too.
You two took walks in the nearby park in the evenings. I almost could see how you rushed down the stairs with your usual light gaily steps and smiled your heart-warming smiles towards Grandpa Lew and there you two went.
You said you were in heaven.
Once upon a time,
A man left his heart in that beautiful house of San Francisco.
He asked his daughter to go to fetch it.
And, almost 40 years later, here she finally found it.
Dear dad, do you know how much I am still missing you?
