contributed photo
My family’s early years were filled with refugee flight – first from the Japanese during the second Sino-Japanese war from 1937-1945, and then during the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists from 1945-1949. My parents and sisters fled Shanghai to Hong Kong in May of 1949, just weeks before Mao’s troops marched into the city. Elaine, the eldest, remembers seeing people being taken away to be shot.
In 1951, with me in utero, my mother traveled from Hong Kong to Shanghai to tell her parents and siblings that she and my father had placed the family names on the immigration list of the United States. Mother returned to Hong Kong, wondering if she would ever see her birth family again. She would not know for the next 27 years if anyone had survived Communism and the Cultural Revolution.
We came to the United States when I was three and a half years old, thanks to the Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals (ARCI) program, established in 1952 by the Truman Administration. The program allowed U.S.-trained scientists and scholars to bypass the regular immigration process; the goal was to prevent “brain drain” from Communist China to the Soviet Union. Father, a physical chemist, had earned a Ph.D. from Brown University, and one of his best friends in graduate school, “Uncle” Jerry Schmidt, was able to offer him a post-doctoral position when one of his postdocs chose to go elsewhere. We were lucky; in those years, only 105 ethnic Chinese were allowed to immigrate to the United States.
So in August 1955, my parents, sisters, and I boarded the U.S.S. President Cleveland and sailed across the Pacific, landing in San Francisco in early September. We visited family in California and then made our way to Bloomington, Indiana, where Father, with a 23-year career as a professor and research scientist in China and Hong Kong behind him, assumed his duties as a postdoc in Uncle Jerry’s lab. Mother got a job working at the Indiana University library, and my sisters, Elaine and Daphne, went to high school and elementary school respectively. I went to nursery school.
During those first weeks at nursery school, as soon as my mother turned to leave, I would fall to the floor and wrap my arms around her knees wailing, begging her not to leave. I had just lost my amah, the Hong Kong maid who took care of me while my mother worked. My amah had probably said goodbye to me somewhere in Hong Kong and then left, never to be seen again. My three-year-old self was scared that the same thing would happen with my mother. But after a few weeks, because Mother kept coming back and taking me home to be with my father and sisters, I was able to relax a little and began to settle into my new life.
Still, it was a difficult year – or years. Mother had had a wonderful career in China and Hong Kong, and during the Hong Kong years had founded the Mencius Library, the first public library in the then-British Crown colony to have an all-Chinese collection. She would never again achieve such professional, or personal, satisfaction. While Father told many stories about his family, most of whom had emigrated to the U.S. or Australia, I knew nothing about Mother’s family. In keeping with her culture, age, and class, Mother never spoke of who – and what – she had lost, choosing a silent stoicism over expressing emotions.
Father, happily, was not silent. He was loquacious and circumspect, kind, with a generous spirit and strong sense of justice and fair play. Unlike Mother, he was not burdened with heartbreaking, irredeemable, incomprehensible loss. Thus, despite the disruptions and turmoil of the war years in China, and his wife’s unhappiness in the United States, Father was able to retain – or perhaps recapture – an innate sense of whimsy and capacity for joy. Sometimes he was downright silly. And though as an older child I often found his silliness rather embarrassing, I knew I could trust him because he always talked to me… to us, his daughters… as responsible human beings. He taught us to trust our instincts, and to do the right thing.
Thus loved, and not burdened by sorrows I could not understand, my own struggles with depression and volatile behavior abated as I became more comfortable with life in the U.S. But a family conflict that involved my middle sister (and her husband of now 51 years) caused the depression to return in my mid-teens, holding me in its grip for more than a decade and a half before I began actively hearing voices (more on that in a future blog post). Ultimately, with love and support, and a lot of talk therapy, I re-found myself and reached the place where I could full-heartedly choose the world.
The thing that moved me to choose the world – or rather the person who did – was my son. His innocent presence literally saved my life in 1990, when I was filled with such despair that I was ready to abandon it. His presence in my life as he was growing up, and possibly even more in his full independence, has provided strong affirmation of who I am, who I come from, and what, within the context of the whole of my life, I can still become even as I move inexorably toward my dotage (more on that too in the next post).
But what about my legacy of silliness? Throughout my life, whenever I have been troubled, or inspired, or just needed to make my ideas and presence known, and because I have been inordinately shy, I have turned most often to writing – both journaling and poetry.
Sometimes my writing has been woebegone and filled with anger and resentment, and venting on paper helps enormously. Other times, I am filled with such a sense of wonder and joy, or mission and purpose, that I write what I think and feel and desire for myself – and the world – in hopes of moving and inspiring others. But I can’t seem to sustain the earnest crusader persona for very long. Especially when I’m writing poetry, because I inevitably start writing verses that rhyme. And somehow, as the words tumble out, so does the whimsy, as in this recent piece, “What a Wonderful World for Arthropods” (also, of course, by Bob Thiele & David Weiss and originally sung by Louis Armstrong). Verses one, three, five, and seven are the original; verses two, four and six are my own.
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.
I see spiders spin gossamer threads
To weave their delicate, intricate webs
That catch the evening’s dewfall and shimmer in the sun
And fill a sense of wonder in almost everyone
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.
I see steaming lobsters at pounds in Maine
Slaw, corn on the cob, and healthy whole grains
And sailboats in the harbor, musicians at the hall
And each and every one of us at home in nature’s thrall
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They’re really saying I love you.
I hear crickets sing in the basement at night
Filling their housemates with utter delight
Some say that those who keep them will have luck their whole lives long
So let’s keep our crickets singing, loud and clear and strong
And all think to ourselves, what a wonderful world.
I hear babies cry; I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself what a wonderful world.
A sense of whimsy and capacity for delight has been enormously helpful during these past 19 pandemic months. In April, I wrote these lyrics – “In Days When Covid-19’s Our Lives Redefining” – for the theme Earth Day. It’s largely sung to the tune of the traditional Scottish air, “Flow Gently Sweet Afton.”
In days when Covid 19’s our lives redefining
And we and our loved ones are at distance repining
Last year we did gather on screens and in gardens
Till late autumn when Jack Frost the earth it did harden.
Did we beat our retreats to the safety of shelter?
Chat on screens and through windows or just wave to each other?
Resigned to our lots, though we’d so loved our outings
In backyards and parks and at seasides and mountains?
Nay our best social selves treasure time spent together
In beauty of nature and DARN the cold weather!
So we donned our mukluks and warm woolen sweaters
And continued enjoying our sweet time together.
The vaccines have been made and many are now vaccinated
Still the viruses’ dangers have not yet abated
Cause the variants that jump from live host to live subject
Force continued mask wearing to th’aerosols deflect.
Now winter is gone and once again springtime weather
And vaccines are allowing us more time together
In backyards and in parks, and in living-room houses!
And we’re hugging more people than just children and spouses.
But our dreams of vacations to lands far off and sublime
Will for many fond travelers still take some more time
Though maybe next year we can board those big jets
And assuage our consciences with carbon offsets.
But this precious blue planet that has brought us together
Needs protection from more than just vagaries of weather
Our encroachments on earth and on wild habitats
Are destroying the green earth, folks those are the facts.
The days of Covid will not last forever
In time herd immunity will the virus grip sever,
But the earth and our lives now so gravely unraveled
Won’t heal without our help, let’s join in the battle.
For this precious blue planet that to us gave our lives,
We must all do our part to ensure it survives
So the earth that we love’s here for eons to come
And you know in the doing, we can also have fun.
Portions adapted from “Citizenship and Psychosis: Crossing Boundaries of Mind and Heart,” American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation, Volume 22, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer 2019, pp. 114-123, University of Nebraska Press [content declared free to read by the publisher during the COVID-19 pandemic.]
To reach Claire directly: clairebien1128@yahoo.com