HM was a Teaching Assistant in our department in the early 1970s. Sometimes she invited students to her home. Her family had come to Taiwan from Central China in the chaos after WWII. Her mother died from food poisoning when HM was little. Her sister had died a few years before in an accident. She lived with her father.
Her father was a gentle, affable man who loved company. Whenever HM brought friends or students home, he dived into the kitchen, and loaded the table with delicious food from his hometown. If you could stand up from the table, you hadn’t eaten enough, so pick up your chopsticks and eat! eat!
A couple years after I graduated, HM married a Christian. Her father gave the happy couple traditional gifts, including a gorgeous red blanket embroidered with a dragon and a phoenix, sure to bring good luck all around.
When her new mother-in-law saw that red blanket, she shrieked and raced for her sewing kit. She sewed a piece of white cloth over the dragon, telling HM that the dragon stands for Satan, and a good daughter in law had no business bringing Satan into a Christian household.
When HM had been married for about five years, her father died peacefully. HM collected some keepsakes from the old home, including a beautiful porcelain teapot her parents had brought with them from the mainland. It had probably been made in the early 20th century.
It was decorated with a carefully hand-painted dragon and phoenix. When she took it home, her father and mother-in-law ordered her to smash it because of the dragon: a good daughter in law should know better than to try to bring Satan into a Christian household.
HM couldn’t bear to smash the beautiful pot. Instead, knowing that I was a hardcore tea freak, she entrusted it to me, along with some cups and a slightly cracked pot her family had brought to Taiwan in the 1940s. Her husband had earned a scholarship to do graduate work in Georgia, Georgia Tech I think it was, and they planned to put some distance between themselves and his parents.
He was intelligent and worked hard, and did so well in graduate school that he quickly found a good job in Georgia. His parents decided to visit. Visiting the USA was no small undertaking in those days, but they boarded the plane and set out for the Land of Freedom.
They were appalled by what they found. They discovered that the state of Georgia was a godless pit of iniquity, that the people of Georgia had betrayed Jesus and strayed from the True Path and were living lives of sin! They decided that it was their holy duty to help the poor sinners. They returned to Taiwan, sold everything, and set forth to preach the True Word of Our Lord Jesus Christ to the benighted heathens of Georgia.
HM wrote to say that she and her husband had both found good jobs in California, so they were fleeing to the West Coast, as far as possible from Georgia.
Keeping in touch in those days before email was not easy. I never heard from her again. Every time I use the dragon phoenix pot, I send good thoughts to HM, hoping that her husband’s parents never visited California, and that they are living their lives in peace and quiet.
🦍
I have changed some details about HM to keep her unidentifiable. Everything else is the truth. The gospel truth, you could say.
