Wu Qi

Yeh Yeh always made doing the right thing look easy. His face was stern, stoic, hard, shaped like the chinese character guo, for country, and he never seem troubled by choice, priority, values. Every decision in his life seemed very simple for him. Move the family to Taiwan to ensure their safety, bring the kids up, send them to college and let them fend for themselves, move back to China because as he said “people always want to return to their homeland”.
And yet, Yeh Yeh also had a soft heart. He had to spank my dad and his brothers for trampling my Grandmom’s roses, and then felt so bad about it that he gave them money to buy snacks afterwards. Toward his later years of his life after my grandmother fell sick, I always sensed that he felt conflicted between his own adventurous spirit, not being able to see more of China or travel to distant parts of the world and his duty to take care of my grandma. I think the decision to take care of my grandma was easy to make, but the pain and lonliness of caring for someone with chronic deteriorating mental condition like grandma must have been very difficult.

In the end, Yeh Yeh’s values were defined by many such difficult events in life. Events in which he had no choice, WWII, the Chinese civil war, my grandmother’s illness. Through it all, he always stayed true to his moral compass. He believed in sovereignty, self-determination, service, civil society, education for young people, family, responsibility, personal choice. This guided him through some very difficult choices and worthy accomplishments: leading anti-war demonstrations at his school and being expelled then graduating from Fudan at the top of his Chemistry class, inventing an ethanol based alternative fuel for the KMT tanks, building a school in Taiwan, raising a family and sending his sons to university and seeing them settle abroad in America.

On the fifth week of his death (wu qi), he is home now in Shanghai, sleeping in his bed. He is probably tired but knowing him, he will not sleep easy because Nai Nai is also sick and he must be worried. Even in death, Yeh Yeh never left anything for himself. He was always generous to those around him but selfish when it came to wearing new clothes, buying material things for himself or spending money on himself.

Yeh Yeh, welcome home, don’t worry about grandmom, we are trying our best to take care of her and ourselves, go well, we love you and miss you!