I love the article. Both for the food and the history.

This reminds of a book "Snow Falling On Cedars", set among Japanese-Americans in the Pacific Northwest shortly after WW2. It is a mystery, reflective and atmospheric. I'd highly recommend it.

It's interesting to see that my Chinese immigrant family assimilated, in some ways, like the Japanese family in the article did after the war. We lived through WW2 and then escaped China during the Communist Revolution, going first to Taiwan and then to the USA, around 1950. We were basically war refugees, which seems so topical today.

My grandfather and his oldest son came first, then the younger kids including my dad, then my grandmother with their youngest child. They settled in New York and then moved to the suburbs of New Jersey, to a ranch house with a Chevrolet.

When my generation was born, the family didn't encourage us to learn the Chinese language or about China or even our own family history in China. The emphasis was on succeeding in the USA.

My cousins and I each visited China just once during our childhoods, although I was also sent to live in Taiwan for a year when a toddler.

The part of our culture that was actively passed on and preserved was the food. Just like the Japanese family in the article, the aspect of Chinese culture that we grew up with most was the family cooking, when everyone got together to make dumplings and bao, steam fish, cook chicken necks and prepare holiday feasts.

Now my kids are more interested in their "Chinese identity" and my dad and aunt are working on a family history which I'm eager to read.

What a fascinating read, thank you for sharing, jakkom. And you, too, John ... I enjoyed reading your family’s history.

I read Snow Falling On Cedars a long, long time ago, and remember how good it was. It might be time to read it again! :)

I know so little about my family's history but hope to learn more soon.

My mother's family also fled China to escape the Communists, but they were wealthy and influential. My maternal grandfather was a senator in the Nationalist Government, so the whole family was part of the government's relocation to Taiwan. He remained a "senator" for the rest of his life, even though the province he supposedly represented was under Communist rule from 1949 on. His wife, my maternal grandmother, founded a home for crippled children (orphanage) in Taipei and ran that for the rest of her life. I remember her as a small, round, old woman who worked every day managing her orphanage and talking care of the children. There isn't (wasn't) much social safety net in Asia; those kids would have died as street beggars.

The eldest son was an officer in the Nationalist Army and stayed in China fighting the Communists until he was killed around 1949.

The rest of the kids either stayed in Taiwan or, in my mother's case, came to the USA to study and met my father in graduate school. When I was born they were both working on PhDs so I was sent to live in Taiwan for a year, from age 2 to 3.

In the mid 1990s the Red Cross got in touch with my mother's family in Taiwan and said their eldest brother was trying to reach them. Turns out he had survived the war but been imprisoned in a Communist labor camp for 40+ years. When he was too old to be a "threat", he was released on to the streets. The family brought him to Taipei but he couldn't adjust to modern Western life. Imagine going to prison in 1949 and then not seeing the outside world until 1995 (ish). They got him a small apartment in Beijing where he lived until his death. He would have inherited everything and become the family patriarch, had fate chosen differently. Instead, number 2 son took that role.

My grandfather and grandmother, after coming to the USA, initially lived in an apartment in New York. I don't know which borough. (Edit: Manhattan, W 103rd x West End, very close to Columbia University.)

My grandfather was a senior electrical engineer in China, in charge of major power plants. He told me stories of being bombed by enemy aircraft, hiding in the ditches by his power plant. In the USA, his degrees and experience were not recognized, so he found work as a junior draftsman at an engineering company. He went to college as he worked and eventually got his US electrical engineering bachelor's degree, graduating with my uncle who got his EE masters on the same day. By then his company had long since promoted him to a position closer to his experience level.

(Edit: after working in the US for about a decade, he had saved enough to buy our family house in New Jersey. He loved owning a big house in the suburbs, mowing the grass with his riding mower, planting cherry trees and vegetable gardens on the large lot. His favorite TV was basketball, and his team was Philadelphia. I remember the championship series between the 76ers and the Trailblazers, my grandparents glued to the screen cheering on Dr. J.)

Back to the New York apartment. When young Chinese came to New York from Taiwan, many were referred to my grandparents through connections back in Taiwan or China. They'd come to the apartment and my grandparents took them in, taught them English, helped them figure their way around New York, dress like Americans, find jobs, find a place to live. When my grandfather died, a thousand people came to his funeral, including many people of my father's generation. I didn't understand how they knew him until I asked some of them and learned that they'd come through my grandparents' apartment in New York back in the 1950s (edit: and early 1960s.)

My father also remembers being attacked by enemy aircraft. When the family was traveling southward in China to escape the war, my grandmother was in charge of the four children as my grandfather had gone ahead to find a way out of the country. They rode on trains sometimes, other times they got rides on trucks. Imagine hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the fighting, all trying to go south and find an escape, among soldiers headed for the front and other soldiers deserting.

My grandmother came from a wealthy family in rural China. Her family was rich enough that her feet were bound as a young girl; she wasn't supposed to do anything but be served. She would visit a more modern friend who secretly unbound her feet, so she retained the ability to walk although she had foot problems her whole life.

She had money and connections, but with the country at war sometimes they had to walk and sometimes they couldn't find a place to stay, so they had to sleep in the fields. One day enemy aircraft tried to machine-gun them in a field. My dad remembers they ran and hid as the planes dove and strafed.

30 years later, I used to watch her cooking and cleaning in their New Jersey house, and think how different her life had turned out than, as a young girl, she might have thought it would.

John, yours is yet another amazing story of immigrants, coming to a nation of immigrants, and leaving behind another life, one that their children and grandchildren can hardly imagine. In this holiday season, let us all welcome new immigrants and refugees as the Statue of Liberty welcomed our forebears.

"Send these, the homeless tempest tossed to me/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door."