Reflecting on Rich and Poor Around the World

byRosanaHart

1.4K followers

4 years ago

I expect others here are also following the story of what is going on in China, both health wise and with factories shut down. My take on it goes into my family backstory.

My father's father was a judge in the Philippines during the era when the U.S. occupied it, roughly the first half of the last century. At some point, he decided to go to China. He did, and he told Dr. Sun Yat Sen that China needed a western adviser and he was there to be that person. I never met this grandfather--he died a few years before I was born--but he wasn't shy. Here he and my father are on a postcard made when my father was a child

Another grandfather story for a short digression: On his deathbed in 1939, he told my father: "Son, I don't think I have any illegitimate children, but if any turn up, please be generous with them." None ever did.

So my father grew up partly in China, where he learned to speak Mandarin with an American accent that even I could notice years later. He became a political scientist specializing in Far Eastern matters. (He also wrote science fiction under the penname Cordwainer Smith.)

I grew up with Chinese friends. When I was in college at the Stanford campus in France, my dad bought me a ship ticket and I went from the south of France to Hong Kong, where I met up with him, my stepmother, and my sister. (I've written about that era in my memoir Around the World at 19: Explorations and Romances.) We went from Hong Kong toTaiwan for a month. This was in the early 1960s and life throughout the region was more impoverished than I was used to in Washington, D.C. and its suburbs.

That made an impression on me, and I've never lost it. I went on to spend the next summer on a workcamp in West Africa, where I doubt my physical skills really helped much in the school we volunteers built, but I did make some African and American friends I still have. I developed the ability to be at home anywhere in the world. I don't travel much any more, now that I'm in my late 70s, but I enjoy the international flavor here at WA.

Fast-Forward to The News Now

When I recently began reading about the coronavirus and the Chinese city of Wuhan, my mental pictures were not so much like the large city I've since seen in news pictures. No, my visual memories of my own travels in the 1960s and stories my dad told me from earlier came flooding in. Beggars sitting on the edge of streets, their hands waving in the air above them. Kids wearing clothes in tatters. People close to starving. Things have been better than that in China nowadays mercfully.

Anyway, my life events give me such a strong feeling that we are all one. Nobody knows yet just how the coronavirus Covid-19 will affect the rest of the world, but I for one am watching the unfolding events with my heart as well as my mind.