Inspiration & Acknowledgments

May 2018
THANK YOU'S
        I owe huge thanks to Mary Gee and Heling Huang, without whom this history would lack all first-hand savor. Somewhat older than my father and his siblings, by sheer happenstance they were on the scene in a more mature way. But more importantly, they both share my interest in revisiting the past and understand that larger truths turn on small details. 

       ​Mary has been a bottomless font of memories. She filled critical gaps in my understanding of my grandfather's two marriages. She's also provided recommendations of quite a few ever-riveting Chinese family memoirs. Heling shares my sleuth's interest in uncovering more information about the Huang family, and paved the way for a trip to Amoy where I met more Huangs, than I could have imagined, both closely and vaguely related. He has been an energetic Shanghai guide.
       I extend special thanks to Julian Suez of the How family, who has generously embraced me as an "almost niece" and shared memories and photos; and to my uncle and aunt Philip and Kathy, professional historians, who provided information and materials that I was unlikely to dig up on my own.

       I thank my father and other relatives and friends for patiently allowing me to bombard them with questions and updates. I thank my cousin Heather for being a game fellow traveler, with a big heart for people's different stories. I thank my son for enduring what he calls the most boring trip of his life. I thank Alec and Kalyani for giving me the time to work on this project by feeding and taking care of me so well. Lastly I thank my husband for not only being our family's inspired chef, but also my most encouraging fan and sternest taskmaster.
INSPIRATION
       This family history was sparked by a project about my maternal Quon side, but has become an entirely different animal.

       In 2008 to mark the wedding of a Quon cousin, I put together an album of twelve letters preserved from a summer of great family drama in 1954. It paints a hilarious and sometimes saucy picture of bourgeois Chinese life in 1950s Los Angeles. It was a finite project with no aspirations to tell a complete family story since that side of the family is chatty, relatively cohesive, and abundantly documented in photos. 

       For the 2010 wedding of a Huang cousin, I thought to do something comparable, and planned to have the Huang genealogy translated and to then add a few other miscellaneous documents gathered over the years. Well, I have yet to find anyone to help translate the genealogy, although I did find some kind souls who transcribed it and added pinyin.  

      Serendipitously, a 2009 Google search undertaken during the week that The New York Times unlocked its online archive led to details of Carolyn Knowland Hyde…which in turn prompted me to write to Princeton University, which forwarded my grandfather's alumni file, which contained the name of and date of his marriage to Mo-li How, which pointed the way to a whole other level of fact-finding. ​
​        Thank you to the Princeton librarian who tracked down Carolyn Knowland Hyde's photo and opened the door to a whole new level of detail, and to all the librarians and archivists who did their bit along the way.

​       Eight-plus years later, this website has become a greatly expanded and rather different version of the print album presented to my cousin in 2010. Because it's online, I have become more mindful of copyright, so the photos are rather different from the original print album. Another serendipity has been the University of Bristol's launch of its "Historical Photographs of China" site; while a vast number of China photograph archives have come online in the past decade, this site makes access and use particularly easy.

        Now that this site is more or less complete, I suppose I will need to turn a more comprehensive eye back to www.quonquon.com.
BOOKS
       ​A number of books unrelated to Chinese history have been formative:

  • Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes – De Waal  captures the detective-like thrill of tracking down a family story, but also inspires envy for his artist's eye, refined observations, and good fortune to have works of art lighting his way and the end of his quest. (For a moment, I harbored the hope that Great-grandmother Yu Koon's portrait by Chiu family 7th Uncle would become my true quest.)
  • Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello – From Gordon-Reed's meticulous work, I learned a lot about standing in other people's shoes, truly seeing the world through their eyes, and then taking a complete 360-degree view of each subject from other people's perspectives. I also learned to give credence to hearsay.
  • Jill Lepore's Book of Ages: The Life & Opinions of Jane Franklin – Lepore's book gave me ideas about how to bring balance to a dual-biography of man with a documented public life and a woman with scant paper trail – as well as the importance of doing so. Her style also encouraged me to be bolder and snappier in my speculation and conclusions.
  • Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton – Chernow's description of Hamilton's childhood on the island of Nevis gave me new ways to think about Han Liang's childhood on the island of Amoy/Xiamen.
  • Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark – Deane's book is a work of fiction with the vividness of memoir that also captures the recursive path of uncovering family secrets, albeit with more immediate, gritty and painful urgency than in de Waal's work.
Banner caption: Kaiyuan Temple, Quanzhou, Fujian, founded by Huang Shougong (author's own photo, 2012)