I've had a great trip and learned a lot in these last two weeks: about the island of Taiwan, about my father, about my relatives in Taiwan, about my Taiwanese mother who passed away a few months ago, and about myself. Some of these things I've shared in this blog, and some of it I'll still keep to myself to think about some more.
My father was born in 1937 in a village in Shandong, in northern China, the third child of a wealthy landowner. My grandfather was a colonel in the Kuomintang army, and in 1949, the family gave up everything they owned to flee the Communist regime. In 1949, they settled in Taichung, Taiwan, and began scraping a new living for themselves. Today, Ba has an older sister who lives in Taichung, Taiwan, an older brother who lives in Toronto and a younger brother who is the primary guardian of their 100-year old father in Taipei.
My father lived 14 years in Taiwan, mainly catching up with his education, before moving again, this time for Canada, in 1963. There, he learned English, taught thousands of students to appreciate math, raised a family and became a Canadian. It is now Canada, where he has lived for 48 years, the major bulk of his life, that he calls home. Here in Taiwan, he often introduces himself as being from Canada and once, a lady even commented that his Chinese was not bad. I had always thought of myself as Canadian despite being Chinese "on the outside", and it was only when I came to Taiwan with my dad that I realized that he felt the same way about himself. Displaced from his homeland of Shandong, never feeling at home in Taiwan, he now identifies most strongly with Canada. Taipei and Taichung are now unrecognizable to him, which is probably a good thing, because life back then was poor and harsh. But even though Taiwan has prospered to become a developed country and an economic success story, Ba is still glad to be living in Canada. He is in fact, envious of me, because after two weeks, he is ready to go back too, to his home in Montreal. But he will stay one more week, to visit with his father and to get in touch with a couple more old friends.
I can see that it's an effort for my dad to be in Taiwan, from his forgetfulness with names of people and streets, from his constant fear of getting lost, his growing weariness with tourist activities, his struggle to remember how to write Chinese, and his frequent use of English, with the locals, when he can't remember the Chinese.
Last night at the hospital, I told my father to tell my grandfather that I enjoyed my visit to Taiwan and that I had learned a lot about my father. "You mean Yeh yeh," said my dad. "No, about you," I told him. He turned to me in surprise, totally unaware that this trip was such an eye-opener for me.
Growing up with my "traditional" Chinese parents in Canada, I had always thought that we suffered from a generation gap, a cultural gap and a language gap. And I did nurse a small chip on my shoulder about it. But I now see where they were coming from, literally, and can now understand a lot of things, and it has even helped me to see where I want to be going to.
My grandfather is still in the hospital. I saw him about three or four times in total, each time, he was lucid and in good spirits as he chatted with my dad. I'm not entirely sure what he is suffering from, but it may simply be his 100 year old body finally slowing down. The doctors are worried that his lungs may be getting filled with liquid, which will lead to pneumonia. My dad is very pragmatic about it. He loves his father, but, he says, sooner or later, my grandfather is going to die. I never got to ask my grandfather a lot of the questions I had in mind, but that's okay, along the way, I did find the answers I was looking for.
