The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, also known as the Lugou Bridge Incident or the Double-Seven Incident, a July 1937 battle between China's National Revolutionary Army and the invadingJapanese Army in China, was an event of far-reaching consequences for the Chinese nation, with repercussions all the way down to our province (Shanxi), my prefecture or county (Pingding) and my village (Xisuohuang) as well as to my clan and family.  As a result of the Incident, I had to leave my home village and seek livelihood far from home. In the midst of the earth-shaking changes I weighed my options, often torn in various directions; but I eventually came to the conclusion that I couldn't have everything I desired; when one came to a crossroads, one had to decide on which road to take.

After I fled south, I made up my mind not to return to my home village as long as it was under Japanese occupation. With my fiery temperament and my intense dislike of the Japanese occupation troops, it would be inevitable that I would run afoul of village folks who acted as the Japanese occupation's cat's-paws if I had gone back to my village. The dire consequences for my clan and family and for myself would not be hard to imagine. 

Three years into China's war of resistance against Japanese aggression (1939), I found a job in Chongqing (of Sichuan province) at the age of 31. The pay was paltry but I could manage. It was at the time impossible to communicate with my home village or send money to my family there. There was no way of finding out how my folks were faring. After a time I received several letters from my folks, which was a great relief and prompted me to think of returning to the village. But the road home would after all be long and any such undertaking would be fraught with difficulties, the greatest of which was money. It was unsafe to carry cash, and remittances were out of the question. Public transport had ceased to operate and I would have to cross enemy lines. On the way home from Sichuan, I would certainly be reduced to asking for alms along the way and even if I could reach home I would be a penniless person of no great use to my folks. The yearning to go home to my village did not come to fruition as 1939 soon passed amid the continuous bombing runs of the Japanese warplanes.

In 1940 I briefly held a job in Chengdu (of Sichuan province) but returned to Chongqing later that year. Since the idea of returning to my home village was not practicable, I gave up on it. Mail communication again was interrupted; the war raged; I had no way of knowing how my folks were doing and soon the war of resistance went into its fourth year. I was for a time taken ill in Chongqing, with no kith and kin around; I was filled with self-pity and eagerly longed for China's victory in the war. I found it untenable to be alone and unable to go back to my home village and with the advance of my years I started to be bothered by the fact that I still had no issue (children) at my age. Given the fact that my communication with the home folks was severed and I was in the dark about their fate under Japanese occupation, the decisions about my marriage had to be made by myself.

Early 1939 I came to know Ms. Xiao Bangjie,  a colleague of my future wife's. Through her I met my future wife, with whom I got engaged in 1940. On February 19, 1941, we got married in a collective wedding event in Chongqing, an economizing measure encouraged by the government in the hardship years of the war. We moved into a small apartment in a corner building near Erlang Temple in Chongqing's Qiansi Gate neighborhood. The building was razed in a Japanese bombing raid a few months later, at great loss to us. We later moved into a small house in the Dongjia Xi village on the bank of Jialing River. That winter I was hired by the Disaster Relief Commission after passing its examination and we moved to the Liao Jia Yuan compound in the county of Jiangjin (of Sichuan province), further upstream on the Yangtze river. On May 2 on the lunar calendar in 1942, Xiaojun (Lee Weizong, our first son) was born.

In the summer of 1942, I was appointed by the Ministry of Finance to the Gansu Bank as supervising auditor. We set off for Gansu province in the north, arriving in the provincial capital Lanzhou two weeks later, and moved into the bank's provided lodging in Xizhou New Village compound. At the time the Auditing Office of the Ministry of Finance accredited to the Lanzhou area was located also in the compound, where its chief auditor Nan Yinggeng had his lodging too. The office had a large staff, and I was at first just one of the junior auditors. Liu Qingyu, a commissioner of the Office, and Guo Mingji, a fellow auditor, were on excellent terms with me; Gao Zhongyu, another auditor, his wife Wan Dihui, and my wife were on the staff also.

After being appointed supervising auditor, I resigned my post as auditor of the Auditing Office and started attending the weekly board meetings of the Gansu Bank as observer. The director of the Board was a certain general secretary of the provincial government (and acting as chief of the Civil Affairs Department); he later died on an inspection tour in south Gansu to oversee the prohibition of poppy planting. His successor as Board director was General Secretary of the Gansu Provincial Government Ding Yizhong. Other board members included Chen Jianglie, Wang Luzhou, a Mr. Wang, who was chief of the Finance Department of the Gansu government, Zhang Xinyi, who was chief of the Construction Department, Hong Ren, from the Department of Education, Zhao Longxi, from the Civil Affairs Department, Zhang Wei, who was Speaker of the Provincial Senate, Wang Tinghan, who was Chief Accountant of the Gansu government, Pei Jianzhun, a prominent citizen, and associate director Sun Runan. The agenda consisted mostly of business matters of the bank. The supervising auditors' job was focused on the review and approval of loans. As Gansu was a geographically remote region with special circumstances, I adopted a more or less laissez-faire attitude and did not choose to be too fastidious about the details. Besides I was the only supervising auditor assigned to the Bank and was therefore had my hands full. Over half of the shares of the Bank were owned by the Finance Ministry, which appointed Cui Weiwu as chief executive of the Bank, but he was removed from the post a few days later by a decision of the Board and had to return to Chongqing.

The Auditing Office of the Lanzhou area was closed shortly after the victory over Japanese aggression, but the auditors attached to the Gansu Bank kept their jobs until early 1946 when the positions were removed by the Finance Ministry. At first I thought of returning to my home province Shanxi, but gave up the idea when I received a letter from Feng Shangwen, president of the Zhongnan Match Manufacturing Company in Xi'an (of Shaanxi province), offering me a job there.  I soon got a ride on a vehicle of the Gansu Bank and arrived in Xi'an,  where I started my new job at the Zhongnan Company.

Come to think of it, I was fairly well adapted to life in Lanzhou, where I lived and worked for three years, except for a temporary discomfort in my throat (soreness from the extreme dryness of the weather) in the early days when I had just arrived from Chongqing. After a while I came to like the mild weather. I also found that the grains, fruits and vegetables produced locally were not very different from those we had in my home province of Shanxi, and the local people were honest and unpretentious. But the grinding poverty was real, and most of the girls at the age of 15 or 16 in the rural areas still had no pants they could wear to go out.

Lanzhou was famous for its zuigua (literally 'intoxicating melon", kind of cantaloupe) and pears. The bigger zuigua weighed about 5 or 6 jin. They were sweet and juicy. People ate the pears sometimes after boiling them or keeping them frozen. There was also a soft variety of pear that tasted like banana. Lanzhou also produced a lot of watermelons, grapes and shaguo (literally "sand fruit", a kind of pearl-leaf crabapple). Local Uighurs grew bādām almond, with savory fruit and seed (nut).

When we lived in the Xiyuan Village compound, we had Wang Luzhou and Qu Xianggang, chief of the Economic Research Office of the Gansu Bank, as neighbors. There was at the time a kindergarten in the compound and we sent Xiaojun (our oldest son) there. On January 2 on the lunar calendar in 1945, our second son Xiaoyuan was born. About that time my wife developed acute mastitis, and underwent a surgical procedure which failed to heal the sores. Her condition gradually improved only after a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner gave her acupuncture treatments. We later moved to the Daosheng Lane neighborhood and returned the rickshaw assigned to our family by the Gansu Bank during my tenure there. Shortly after, we left Lanzhou for Shaanxi (province to the west of Shanxi province).

I had a job in the accounting division of the Zhongnan Match Manufacturing Company. In May 1946 I was sent by the company to Hankou (of Hubei province) to buy land for building a plant there. At the time the company had not yet built its plant in Tianjin but had already set up an office in Shanghai and registered the Qinghua Enterprise as a corporation. Mr. Feng, the president of Zhongnan, traveled to Beiping (now called Beijing) to take care of the matters of a branch there, and he was at first very enthusiastic about building a plant in Hankou. Through the intermediary of Zhang You, a friend of mine, I bought for Zhongnan a tract of land about 60 acres on the left bank of the Han river and was getting ready to have a fence build around it, when news came that the construction of the plant in Tianjin had already started. The plan for building a plant in Hankou was as a result scrapped. I had traveled to Hankou in mid-summer to purchase land for building a plant and took the train back to Shaanxi in winter after it started snowing, deeply disappointed at the scuttling of the plant-building project.

In the spring of 1947 I traveled to Lanzhou to market Zhongnan's matches and lodged at the Fengxian commercial house in the Nanguan neighborhood. The following year I was able to market our matches as far as Xinjiang province. Our matches sold particularly well in Gansu province, due in no small measure to the fact that in the four or five years I spent previously in Lanzhou I had built a rapport with people in the government and among businessmen, which greatly facilitated my marketing efforts. By 1948 our sales there topped all previous figures. Unfortunately the infighting typical of office politics combined with my frankness which offended co-workers without my meaning to, I was accused by the company of deliberately withholding telegrams about price rises for my own gain. Besides I did not have an office in Lanzhou and receivables and payables were processed according to set forms. There was also a problem in the fact that I dealt directly with the Fengxian commercial house. The company decided to send Zhu Jiasan to replace me and upon my return to Xi'an I was sent to Hankou to pick up the deed for the land purchased there.

Early in the summer of 1948 (July on the lunar calendar) I arrived by plane (operated by the China National Aviation Corporation) in Hankou and discussed the matter of picking up the deed with Zhang You. It was done without delay and the deed was sent to Mr. Feng, president of Zhongnan, in Shanghai. In the middle of September I stayed in a hotel in Wuchang (the airline office was located in Wuchang) to wait for my flight back to Shaanxi and left for the airport when notified by the airline that the flight had been confirmed. While on the plane I saw the shadow of its tail cast on the left wind of the plane at first but moments later the shadow of the tail was seen on the right wing, which told me the plane had changed its course to fly southward. It was learned later that when the plane hovered above the Laohekou airport it received a telegram from the airport that the airport had been flooded after a rain storm and could not allow planes to land there. The plane was diverted back to Xujiapeng airport and there was nothing I could do but wait in Wuchang for my eventual flight back to Shaanxi.

Several days later I went to the airport after being notified by the China National Aviation Corporation that a flight to Shaanxi was now available. Moments before boarding,  I heard on the PA system that there was a phone call for me, so I went back to the waiting lounge to take the call. The call turned out to be from Zhang You, who told me that he had been instructed by Mr. Feng, president of Zhongnan, to send me to Shanghai to take up a job there. I had my luggage unloaded from the plane and tried to resell my plane ticket, without success. I then returned to Hankou to wait for a boat to Shanghai. It was very hard to get a berth on the east-bound boats at the time due to a large demand. I was able a few days later to get a berth in first class on the boat JIangtai bound for Shanghai. The downriver voyage took a short time and soon I was approaching the banks of the Huangpu river. As we approached Shanghai, before arriving at the pier, we could see a huge building looming ahead, which had the shape of a square vase, wrapped in fog. It was the famous building with the name of "the Parliament." After the boat moored, I went to the office of the Zhongnan Company in the Wong-ka-shaw Gardens apartment complex to meet with Mr. Feng. At the time Xiao Qifeng, Pu Sixiang and Xie Xudong were also in the Office. Mr. Pu took me to see some warehouses and to meet other staff members, to discuss the matter of shipping fluorspar to Japan from Jinhua.

A colleague, named Wen Shijin, arrived from the Tianjin plant in preparation for travel to Taiwan to bring back the wife of Zen Xiangwu of the office of Zhongnan Company in Taipei, who had recently died from liver disease. Mr. Feng, president of Zhongnan, had already sent Jia Ziheng, a vice president, to Taipei to tend to the matter. A plan to build a plant to manufacture MSG in Taiwan was in the works at the time, and Mr. Xu Guangqing had been dispatched there to oversee its execution. I accompanied Mr. Wen on the boat Taiping to Taiwan. We arrived in Keelung port on October 29, 1948, and headed straight to 57 Dali Street in Taipei, the site of the office tasked with the launching of a plant to manufacture MSG, where I started working once it was built.

As the civil war raged and the future appeared bleak, people started fleeing south in China. The Longhai Railway connecting Lianyungang of Jiangsu with Lanzhou of Gansu had been cut off west of Ezhou of Hubei province. Baoji and Xi'an of Shaanxi province were captured and held by the Red Army for a time and people panicked. I said to Mr. Jia, the president of the MSG company, that if we didn't quickly ask the Zhongnan Company to evacuate our two families to Taiwan, they might never have a chance to get out. Mr. Jia wrote to President Feng about the matter. Shortly after, our two families flew from Xi'an to Shanghai, where they boarded the boat Jiangqian bound for Taiwan. At the time Sanmao, our third son, was still in swaddling clothes. Our families were temporarily lodged at the Dali Street location in Taipei.

Previously, in the summer of 1948, before I departed for Hankou from Lanzhou, on the anniversary of the Double Seven Incident, Sanmao was born in the staff housing of the Zhongnan Company. Moments after his birth, his eyes started looking curiously hither and thither, evidencing great intelligence. As my trip to Hankou was impending, I could spend little time with my family before flying to Hankou, then traveling on to Taiwan, via Shanghai. When I got to see the newborn son again in Taiwan and reunited with my family, I was filled with an ineffable joy.

Soon after the Spring Festival of 1949, the entire staff of the new company moved into the premises of the plant built in Hsinchu to manufacture MSG and soy sauce. In subtropical Taiwan, it felt like the spring in northern China for half of the year, during which time people only needed a light jacket to stay warm; in the other half of the year it was like the height of summer in northern China. For that reason most of the middle-aged people coming to live in Taiwan gained a great deal of weight; and their children often developed painful sores on their skin. All year round the mosquito net proved indispensable; insects ensconced themselves in nooks and crannies in the walls and survived the winters and came out for food as soon as it got warmer. There were not so many ticks, fleas and bedbugs in Taiwan, but cockroaches, termites, ants, mosquitoes and flies ran rampant.

We lived in the quarters assigned to us on the plant premises for 3 to 4 years. During that period my wife, who was in mesopause, suffered grievously from gastrointestinal ills and rheumatoid heart disease. She was so weak that a maid had to be hired to help with household chores. The doctor recommended that we move to a lodging with higher ceilings, more natural light and better ventilation to facilitate her recovery. We eventually settled on a house at 485-1 Zhonghua Road in an alley, with a backyard verging on a stream and large enough for planting flowers, trees and even a grapevine. We took a lease  on it and completed our move in early summer in 1953. After the change of living quarters, my wife's condition gradually improved and she regained her health with injections of Vitamin B. She got well enough to obviate the need for a maid and was able to get back to the kitchen to prepare meals again.

Sometime in 1955, I came down with the so-called "two-week Taiwan fever," i.e. paratyphoid fever, and was hospitalized at the Provincial Hsinchu Hospital. I was discharged two weeks later. After the discharge from hospital, physical and emotional malaise lingered, and I was especially bothered by recurrent tachycardia particularly in autumn. When I came home from the local market under the blaze of the summer sun after grocery shopping I would feel a debilitating fatigue. 

One day in 1958, coming home from a bout of unrestrained drinking at our friends' the Hus, I was racked with vomiting and was laid low. I was later diagnosed with a liver infection and gradually recovered after months of treatment (starting from 1956, my pulse often raced to above 100 per minute, causing great discomfort. Injections administered by Dr. Zhuang did not bring noticeable benefit. EKGs done at Hsinchu Hospital indicated poor circulation through ventricles and atria). I was put on a diet banning fat and alcohol and I took supplements (such as Fromin made by Takeda Pharmaceutical Company of Japan); I was also give medicine to prevent arterial sclerosis. Luckily I did not suffer weight loss and cold symptoms such as a runny nose that used to bother me in winter disappeared.

Ever a green thumb, I planted a magnolia and four oleander trees in our backyard, which flourished; a grapevine I planted bore copious fruit. My children were growing up. Xiaojun was 19 at the time of writing, and was graduating from the Provincial High School of Hsinchu in the summer, ready for college. Xiaoyuan was 16, in the first year of high school. Sanmao, at 13, was due to graduate from the elementary school attached to the provincial normal school, soon to go to junior high. In the summer of 1960, Xiaojun was admitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Taiwan University upon waiver of the entrance examination, while Xiaoyuan was in the second year of high school and Sanmao was admitted to the First County  Junior High School of Hsinchu and assigned to class No. 8 of the first year.

At the time of writing both my wife and I enjoy relative good health. I am now 52 (on May 25, 1960), and my wife is 45. I do not believe in aggressive health maintenance, but I believe thorough physical exams necessary. As long as one is able to eat and sleep well and does not suddenly lose weight, then one need not worry too much.

The above chronicle began with China's war of resistance against Japanese aggression and ended at May 14, 1960. I did not include any accounts of my private life before the War, as there was nothing much to write about. But memories from my childhood and impressions in my then puerile mind had a particular redolence that I would be hard put to explain to my children who now live in an atomic and space age.