The Secret Lives of Mr. Chao

I’ve seen my grandparents fewer than ten times than each, and they’ve never been prolific storytellers. But if I could choose one family member or story to write about, it’d center on the secrets of my paternal grandfather, whose tales were told to me by my father. Grandfather was alive for the whole time I was a child, but his mainland accent was too thick for the grandchildren to understand, and his ears were too damaged from war to hear our words.

            My grandfather was born in the Shandong province of China in 1916, right in the midst of World War I. He suffered what were thought to be fatal hot-water burns and was nearly buried alive at five years old, but awoke in his shrouds, and in his mother’s arms, with a cry.

He grew up, married, and had three children with his first wife.

When the second World War began, my grandfather left his family and joined the fight against the Axis with seven friends. Six of them were killed in action; my grandfather survived and found himself now fighting against the Communist Party of China.

The Chinese Nationalist Party lost, and my grandfather, refusing to be made prisoner, and much too exhausted to fight in the Korean War, escaped China with his unit’s medic. He posed as a mute in Vietnam so he wouldn’t have to speak, and stopped in Hong Kong for some time before finally reaching Taiwan. There he undertook a new identity, changed his age to two years younger, and realized that as an escaped CNP soldier, he would never be allowed to return to China.

So he became a businessman and married my grandmother, twenty years his junior. She was very young and photos of her face decorated the local portrait studio’s windows; she’d left school at eleven years old. He did not tell her about his first wife or three sons.

They had their first child in 1959, so I suppose my grandfather did not wait long before taking on a second wife.

Though my grandmother did not learn of her husband’s past until thirty or thirty-five years later, he told my father when he was a little boy.

“You have three brothers,” he said, “in another country, and they are much older than you.”

What I consider strange is that my father had no urge to tell his mother their secret; he was simply intrigued.

In the 1990s, my grandfather’s ban from returning to China was lifted, so he had to tell my grandmother about his other family. They were still alive, a friend had written him. He was going to visit them, and my grandmother became so angry, it is difficult to put into words.

My grandfather reunited with his three sons, now all middle-aged, and his original wife, who had since turned blind. She had stayed faithful and never remarried.

Grandfather spent the rest of his life flying back and forth between China and Taiwan, though the family in China mostly took money. He freely gave, because he had left them to fight in the war fifty years ago, and this only seemed right.

When Grandfather died in 2011 in a hospice in Taiwan, my grandmother did not tell his first family of the news. “They wouldn’t care anyway,” she said. I wonder if they had known, would they have flown over to his funeral?

At the time of his death, my grandfather was deeply arrested by Alzheimer’s. He thought he was a young, wounded veteran, and I wonder which family he remembered, if any.