it should have started with this photo

A photo of my grandmother that 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 from China to Taiwan in 1949, were superhuman. I’m sure she, like many women before and after, thought they were merely doing what they had to do to get on; nothing extraordinary. My poor grandmother held everything together until she could hold no more. Her health suffered, and she died an untimely death,  just two years after my grandfather, leaving my mother and her siblings orphaned 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? Throughout history, recorded facts are what get carried through into the future. Conflicts, war, battles, these are the things that get recorded and remembered. The people, the families, the women, the children behind the recorded stories are too often forgotten.