I was born in Canton, China. Guangzhou is the real name, the Chinese name for Canton. Actually, I wasn’t born in Canton, I was born in a little village near there, just to simplify it, I say Canton. Canton is the capital city of Guangdong Province; Guangdong is a southern province just north of Hong Kong. By age two or three, my family moved to Hong Kong and stayed there for a few years. We were running from the Japanese at that time; the Japanese were invading China. I was born in 1942, at that time the Japanese were very strong, invading China and China was retreating all the time, retreating. I think I was one year old and we were in the countryside; we were running all the time. One night it was snowing, very cold. I kept saying, “take off my shoe, take off my sock, take off my shoe, take off my sock.” Chui (take off) hai (shoe) chui me (sock). That was the first time, and the only time, my father slapped me. Running away from the Japanese was a really bad situation. We don’t know if we’ll be conquered by them; it was very dangerous.
My father was a provincial government official, so he had to go with the government. The government is retreating, and he is retreating. China is a big country, so we have the land to buy time, fortunately. We retreat, retreat, retreat, and the Japanese advance, advance, advance. If they didn’t, the Japanese would probably kill everybody, and then we’d lose control. So that’s why the provincial government retreat. They moved the government office to a place, like a small village. When they’d hear the sound of guns, and if it sounded distant, everyone would still work as usual. But if they heard machine guns, they would immediately grab everything and start fleeing. Machine gun meant they were pretty close; guns would mean it was still quite a distance. Our lives were hanging in the balance.
Even though I was just two or three, I still remember specifically when there was an air raid and a Japanese airplane dropped a bomb near us. Vividly I still remember. Even the tone of the alarm, which in those days was not like our alarms. Have you ever heard an air raid alarm? In China, it was not only that, but also there was a broadcast. It was always at night, to do the air raid. In those days, the plane was a propeller and they were slow. So they flew quite high. And the way they spot it was they used a very strong torch. Now they use as a decoration! (He’s referring to search lights used for special events in the U.S. – LMcD) In those days, it was the real thing. They used it to detect the planes, so there was a sweeping of the sky. And then they spot it, and they would immediately report it, saying “enemy planes, 35, going south bound,” they’d actually broadcast it. I remember I saw those planes that got spotted by the torch light. Flying very slow. And those guns on the ground, what do you call them? And the light would track the planes because they were so slow. I can remember hearing the low noise of the engines. Then the light would concentrate on that, and we’d hear the guns. I remember very, very clearly. But I never had any fear because I didn’t understand what fear was at that age. It was funny. I don’t remember any fear at all, maybe I was too young. I don’t think I was that perceptive.
The night when America dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, we heard it on the radio. You can imagine, the Chinese were hysterical, so happy. My father was so happy that he grabbed my cousin and put him over his knee and hit his bottom. The atomic bomb dropped on Japan ended the war.
The first image of any house I lived in, the war was over, we were living in Hong Kong, and I was in kindergarten. We lived on the second floor of a four-story brick house. When we got to Hong Kong, we were very poor, the economic condition was not very good. My grandmother took care of me because my mother taught in an elementary school. My grandmother and my mother had some jewelry, so every once in a while, I would see my grandmother take out some gold ring or gold bracelets and ask someone to go to the jewelry store and sell it. Use that for our living expenses. We had a relative whose business was selling eggs. Barrels and barrels of eggs were stored in our living room. So when I wanted to eat an egg, I’d just grab it. There were eggs everywhere.
In 2001, my sister and I went to Hong Kong for eight days, and we picked one day and took the train to Guangzhou to look for the house. I really wanted to go back and see my house because this is where I have my memories. And the house was still there. I recognized it because I remembered the name of the street, Fa Qin Road. That street actually is long and is cut by the superhighway now. And we lived close to the head of the street. I climbed up the hill to the house, but it was completely locked with those iron gates; I think those iron gates were still the same iron gates; they were all rusty. No one lived there anymore; it was abandoned, but basically the house was the same. I took a picture in front of the house. There was no way to walk around it because of the highway. There were other houses adjacent to this house, but they were torn down. So this was the only one left. We occupied the entire floor; it was at least three or four bedrooms. It was pretty big inside. My father’s mother and my mother and my father and my two sisters, and servants lived in the back. I would say at least 2,500 or 3,000 square feet. It was really big. It had a living room, a kitchen, and the servants’ rooms. When I went back with my sister, it was a sentimental trip, because I didn’t expect that I would see the house again. Imagine. I left there as a five-year-old, and now I’m sixty-two (The interview with Dr. Mao was recorded in 2005. – LMcD)
Before I went into kindergarten, there’s a tradition, your family is not entirely poor, then you have this tradition ritual. It means now you go to school, you begin to learn now. It’s called Qi Mong, which means “open up your mind” or something like that. I had a ceremony for that. We didn’t have a garden, but at the end of the street was a garden, I think it previously belonged to a very rich family. So it was a huge garden. We were using that garden to have an outdoor celebration or ceremony for me to have a Qi Mong. I don’t remember the ceremony; I only remember the garden. Very green, had a lot of trees, and we had tables set there. People don’t do the Qi Mong ceremony anymore.
My family was upper class because my father was a high official. Both of my grandfathers were doctors, and my family actually owned one of those herbal pharmacies in Guangzhou. The drawers didn’t have any labels; the people who worked in the pharmacies knew all the herbs and their effects by heart. In those days, human beings were more intelligent because they trained their minds. We don’t use the brain to calculate anymore; in those days we use the mind to calculate. When we came to this country and went shopping, we thought, so stupid, these people. They have to use this (adding) machine. We already know the answer.
In 1949, when the Communists took over China, we moved to Taiwan. And that I have a much clearer memory of. I was in third grade, nine years old, I think. When my father was a government official in Guangdong Province, he held great power. He was very young but held an important financial position - Secretary of Finance. He was appointed; he didn’t want to do that job. My father is a strange person. All his life, he never wanted anything, he never searched for anything. But always people go after him and recruit him to do things. So he never wanted that position, because he knew the government was collapsing, because the Communists were advancing very quickly. The governors almost forced him to take the job. So he became very powerful but with very high integrity, very ethical, incorruptible. Because of this, he was always poor. Very poor. My grandmother had a good word for that. She said, some other family’s son become an official, they are buying houses; my family’ son, when he become a high official, we are selling houses. There was no money. Especially in those days, it was very difficult. No money for traveling. So he has to sell houses. The family owned some houses, but because we had to run away, we need money, we need to cover expenses, so my grandmother had to sell our houses. My father was not able to bring any money home.
By the time we moved to Taiwan, my father was so disillusioned with the government, he became depressed. So he didn’t want to be an official any more and was trying to keep his distance. A lot of people who were in a high position in China tried to get similar positions in Taiwan; my father was the opposite. He was fed-up with it. Can you imagine my father? Used to be so powerful, holding a financial position. He could have as much money as he wanted to if he was one of “those” guys. He was absolutely poor, and he doesn’t mind it at all. Even my grandmother didn’t mind.
So the first house we moved into in Taiwan was a broken-down stone house built when the Japanese occupied Taiwan around the turn of the century. He wanted a house as far from the city as possible. He rode the bus to the end of the bus route, and then he tried to find a house there. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with the government. That house was like a military fort with large stones with openings for guns. The house was a total of 1,400 square feet. Inside it’s muddy. There’s no tile, nothing, no floor, no ceiling. We can see the beams. The roof was tile. When it was a rainy day, the muddy ground was completely wet. Then the earth worms would come out inside our living room. That was fun. In Taiwan, it rains a lot. Outside, the mud would be ankle-high. We slept on a bamboo bed with blankets spread over it, there was a very simple partition to divide the house. There’s no running water. We had to go to the riverside and haul water back to the house. Then we built a filter, because the water quality was very bad. That filter was very primitive. They put rocks first, then pebbles, then coal, then a layer of carbon, then a layer of sand, then pour the water over it and some clean water come out. Grapefruit trees were all over, so when the season came, grapefruit dropped everywhere in our yard. We had a big yard, a huge yard. We put up a bamboo fence ourselves. My father wanted to be isolated. In those days, so many typhoons, so when typhoon season would come, we’d have so much trouble. I’d be in charge of buying ropes, and when we’d hear the typhoon alarm, we’d try to save the fence. So we tied up the fence with the ropes, but parts of it would always collapse. So we’d rebuilt it; it was a lot of work.
My father would walk ten minutes to the terminal, then catch the bus to go to work. We lived there six years, and then we bought a small brick house in another place, probably 1,000 square feet, and we fit the whole family in there. It had a cement floor. In the summer, it was like an absolute oven. So we always stayed in the yard; there was a little yard in front of the house. We’d stay there until very late, to get cooler. In those days, I began to have my own individualism, and I wanted to have my own place. I had always lived with my grandmother in the same room, so I got permission to go to the back of the house next to the kitchen. The roof was slanted; I was barely able to put a small bed and a desk in there. But that was my heaven.
When I graduated from college and decided to come to the United States, my grandmother sold that little brick house to buy my airplane ticket. That place later on actually turned into a golden place. Because the land became so valuable. But at the time we sold the house, the land was worth practically nothing. Note: In the United States, Dr. Mao practiced as a doctor of both Chinese and Western medicine and, as of 2020, has been practicing for over fifty years.
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