My grandfather Liu Chengyu was a scholar revolutionary bent on overthrowing China’s Qing (aka Ch’ing) Dynasty in the early 1900s. He was also a poet and author. Alas, in keeping with the custom of humility in Chinese culture, he wrote little directly about himself. His anecdotes instead relate to little-known twists in Chinese history and tales of his many friends, who ranged from notorious warlords to the leaders of the Chinese Revolution led by Dr. Sun Yatsen. Occasionally, though, he dropped personal details that have provided me with extraordinary insights into the history of my biracial family.
My grandfather published his anecdotes in the mid-1940s in books that I found in the East Asian collection of UCLA. I had to hire a scholar of classical Chinese to translate them for me, but once I could finally read his work, I understood the sense of kinship I’d long felt for this grandfather, who died in China the same year I was born in Connecticut.
Called Papa in our family, my dad’s father was the only other writer in our family. His poetry is gorgeous, filled with meandering paths and mountain spirits, bridges beyond bridges, and mysterious gates into a world that seems to me as remote and inaccessible as the Middle…
