it should have started with this photo

A photo I only found recently.

It should have started with this photo. My grandmother; my mother’s mother, Lao Lang Fang, and the general’s wife. He died fighting valiantly with his men in a battle. She was left holding the baby, literally, and some. 

Her acts to protect and enable her family to survive the fall of the Kuomintang, with its mass exodus to from China to Taiwan in 1949, were superhuman. I’m sure she like many women before and after her thought they were just doing what they had to do, nothing extraordinary. Her health suffered and she died an untimely death,  just two years after my grandfather, leaving my mother and her siblings without parents. 

But why is it that it’s my grandfather’s portrait that has become the fulcrum around which I work with my mother’s memories? Because throughout history, it is the recorded facts that carry on through to the future. Conflicts, war, battles, these are the things that get recorded. The families behind what gets recorded are too often forgotten.