A man's head with eyes still open rolled past to the amusement of laughing soldiers...
My wife's great-great-great grandmother's harrowing flight from her burning compound during the Taiping Rebellion (1853-1868)...
The mistress (an upper-class Chinese wife), arms laden wrist-to-elbow with gold bracelets and her young sleeping daughter secured to her back by silk scarves, froze. Spotting a half dozen soldiers chasing a screeching couple down the roadway, she quickly ducked into the closest darkened doorway. Holding her breath, she navigated the best she could by the glow of a city on fire to reach the city gates. Unbeknownst to her, their perilous escape was only to intensify as she...
It looked like WWII would break out within a year, so my father took an educated gamble and bought 500 pounds of sugar in early 1941, "Before all those damn hoarders get it." He also acquired 300 cars (with good tires, of course) which he put into storage. Perhaps an unpatriotic act but certainly a prudent investment as cars became a unbeatable commodity two years later when he, as the only one in town who...
People milled around the gate of the stalled Pan Am Hong Kong to San Francisco flight questioning its unexpected delay. My wife, then 18, panicked, convinced she would miss her flight back to school as boarding time had long passed. Under her uncle's insistent urging, she reluctantly picked at her breakfast in a private dining room at the far end of the terminal. He neglected to tell her he was on the Board of Directors of Pan Am and...
My father in-law was a translator for Dr. Sun Yat Sen at 16. At age 17 while classmates were preparing for their final year of high school, he was preparing college lesson plans in chemistry, English, math-not as a student but as a professor. The following year, he advanced to...
In 1904 the judge found it convenient to appoint himself executor, which made it easier to embezzle a substantial portion of the girls' estate. Because the judge's wife hated children, my six-year-old mother's and her two older sisters' vacations from their Catholic boarding school were spent in hotels and...
My 23-year-old mother-in-law, the newly appointed director of the entire Shanghai orphanage system, called in a favor from the top mobster to provide protection to all childcare workers in the city. A few days following Pearl Harbor, she led seven family members on a perilous journey fraught with near-death encounters across Japanese-occupied China for four months to reach the safety of free China where...