My Great Uncle

My mother likes to tell stories of my great uncle Yiji that we are proud to hear. She tells how he was a college classmate of President Jiang Zemin, and how at the graduation, Jiang refused to exchange his future address and arrogantly told great uncle to look for him in the government of Shanghai City. She also tells how great uncle was once a supervisor to the later infamous Prime Minister Li Peng and how he thought Li was incompetent at the job. In my young years, these stories added various shades of glamour, humor, and adventure to the distant image of great uncle. To me, he had always been a legend.

I saw great uncle only a few times when I was a little girl. He was our only relative in China whose work allowed him to travel around. Every couple of years when he came to Beijing, he would pay us a visit. Not like other relatives who had to stay with us for days, he made his brief appearance and was gone again. Usually he was in Beijing attending conferences, or flying back to China from a trip overseas.

Great uncle was also the only scientist I had met. Graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University, he was an expert on power and energy. Once he told us that he was working on a project to study the health effects of high-voltage power lines on people who lived nearby. The concept of scientific research was so new to me and secretly fascinated me. And to what a noble cause! I was always proud of him for being a well-known expert. In those years, it was almost impossible for anyone from China to go abroad. Great uncle must have been so important in his field that he was invited and allowed to attend international conferences and speak to scientists from all over the world. He was the most impressive person I had known.

My great uncle Wang Yiji was my mother’s father’s brother-in-law. Like all my maternal relatives, he was Cantonese and always preferred to speak Cantonese. He was very tall and slim, had a long face, short hair, dark skin, and smoked excessively. He was extremely near-sighted, and his glasses were thicker than the bottoms of beer bottles. My mother always used him as an example to lecture me about the importance of eye protection. She many times threatened me—“Don’t hold the book so closely! Turn on the light or stop reading! If you abuse your eyes, you will be like your great uncle. Can’t you see his eyes are so bad that his eyeballs are about to fall out?! Look at you! Your eyes are already sticking out like goldfish! See how ugly your great uncle looks with bad eye sights!” Unfortunately I had to start wearing glasses when I was ten, and ever since, I was living in the eternal fear that one day I would look like great uncle.

Yet I was very fond of him, with great admiration. I loved his voice, deep and resonant, with each word distinctively articulated. I still remember the nasal way he pronounced my name, full of fondness and life. He always had a genuine smile on his face, and when he laughed, his countenance flared with joy. Unlike most other adults I knew, he was neither solemn nor thoughtless. He had just the right balance of authority and liveliness. Every time he talked to me, he was fully attentive and treated me as if I were an adult. I trusted him and absorbed all his words intently. When I was young, my parents liked to engage other adults to remark my accomplishments and to make me demonstrate my various talents, putting me on an unbearably embarrassing spot. Only great uncle never joined their vicious scheme. When he was around, I never felt the pressure to act as a prize that my parents could show off with. I didn’t feel I was someone very special, and that made him very special to me.

Great uncle brought me rare gifts from foreign countries. The first one I remembered was a set of Olympic Games stickers from America. Another was a portable checker game from Switzerland. He taught me how to play it and I was always looking forward to his visit to play a game with him. My favorite gift was a toy model of a giant construction machine he brought me from Germany. There was no toy like that in China, and I had seen pictures of the machine in magazines. The model was made with sturdy metal that would not bend, and colored in yellow paint that would not rub off. I loved how precisely the wheels turned, the arm extended, and the little doors fitted snugly. I often fantasized myself standing on the basket at the end of the arm and being raised higher and higher, maybe to fix a damaged high-voltage power line. It was many years later when I first saw a real cherry-picker just like that, with the same yellow paint, and I was overwhelmingly excited.

Great uncle took me to my first “western meal” when I was six. There was only one restaurant in Beijing–the “Moscow Restaurant” near the zoo–that served western food to Chinese people. We had to line up for hours before getting in. In a large hall with glaring marble floor, high ceiling, and wall-to-wall windows, rows and rows of tables were crowded with people trying to manage forks and knives on plates. I was given my own set of knife and fork, and a small square of single-layered napkin folded in a triangular shape. Great uncle showed me how to butter my bread, how to hold a fork, and how to cut with a knife. I don’t remember what I ate, but probably everyone there was served with the same courses of dishes. I only remember that I kept my precious tiny piece of napkin for a few weeks before its much missed final misplacement.

Apart from these few brief visits, I had very little contact with my great uncle, and I knew almost nothing about him. From overhearing the conversations between my parents, I gathered a few facts about him. It was told that he had to go through hardships during the Cultural Revolution because of his intellect. His only child, my aunt, had to live in a separate city from an early age. Although coming from Guangdong where all the Cantonese people preferred to live and work, he and his wife were relocated to Wuhan, a steaming hot industrial city, to work. The government would not approve them to move to Guangzhou until after their retirement.

I visited Guangzhou in the summer of 1986 when I was 15, and stayed at my great uncle’s apartment for two weeks. It was the first time I was not under the supervision of my parents. I was eager to enjoy my freedom. As a wishful teenager, I was completely absorbed in my pursuit of self perfection and my self-assigned mission and responsibilities to change the world. Guangzhou is the origin and hotbed of modern Chinese revolution. On sunny days I went into the city visiting historical monuments and sites, and feeling my blood heated with the blood shed by the revolutionary heroes. When it rained I stayed in and read books from great uncle’s bookshelves. I read a lot of communist novels plus Anna Karenina. I also attempted my first forbidden thing—I stole a cigarette from great uncle and tried to smoke, which fortunately choked me to disgust. I wrote long letters to my friends and diary. It was only a short period of two summer weeks, but it was the first time I felt like a grown-up. I could see no boundary when I looked into the future. I had a glimpse of the freedom and the danger and the inevitable contradiction of being an independent being.

Everyday, great uncle and great aunt would play mahjong with friends at home. To my refining taste and my yearning for high cultures and communist ideals, mahjong was a most deteriorating pastime. And they bet money! And they laughed so coarsely! In the evenings great uncle and aunt would cook supper, and at the dinner table they would have detailed discussion of the day’s mahjong games. Then they would watch TV! Some days great uncle would take me with him to the market to buy live chicken and fresh vegetables, or to pick up their three-year-old grandson from the kindergarten. Together we would stroll along the dirt-filled roads in the hot humid summer mid-days, passing by reckless bicycles and cars and screaming Cantonese people, with me feeling utterly isolated and displaced and incapable of speech.

During those two weeks, great uncle’s unstructured and aimless lifestyle was in such a complete clash with my youthful idealism that I was disappointedly ashamed of him. I did not seek to talk to him, especially not since he was speaking Cantonese all the time, for Cantonese always seemed to me as a symbol of capitalism. Instead I hid from him as much as possible. Although it was the longest time I ever stayed with great uncle, I never got close to him. I felt a deep sense of betrayal that my childhood favorite grown-up had turned out to be just another ordinary aging man with many common and distasteful vices, corrupted by a loud heavy wife.

(I am sorry great aunt to have ever thought that way of you. I was very ignorant and unsympathetic when I was young. I do love you! Maybe your memory is failing now, but I remember you fondly. The next time I saw you, you came with me to Las Vegas for the first time. The first few quarters you ever put into a slot machine returned more than 80 dollars of coins. You were overloaded with ecstasy for the next few days. Do you know, my dear great aunt, that your childlike laughter brought me such genuine joy, and your winning has always been my most treasured memory from that fascinating sin city?)

A few months after that visit, I left China and moved to Hong Kong. I was surrounded by opposite forces to disarm my idealism, and I began to embrace the possibilities of the world. A few years later I went to college in California. From time to time I heard news about great uncle. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer and suffered several serious operations. Eventually he and great aunt moved to Vancouver to live with their daughter. Ever since they moved so close to me to the same coast of a continent, I had been planning to visit them. Because I was a student of physics, I wanted to go and show my great uncle that I had become a scientist too, and I understood the principles of high-voltage power lines. And as I grew older, I began to appreciate him and who he had been in my life, and I longed to seek his wisdom. Yet time and again I postponed the visit.

Great uncle passed away before I made my trip. The news grieved me with devastation and remorse. It was then I realized that I had forever lost my chance to see him, to talk to him, to know him, to play checkers with him, to learn from him, to share with him, to understand him, to love him, and most of all, to tell him that he had been the first and still the only hero in my life.


First draft: Pasadena, September 2, 2001
Revision: Pasadena, September 23, 2001
Next revision: Ann Arbor, April 30, 2003
Latest revision: Ann Arbor, April 8, 2004