Day 375: Lost & Found

Shihezi, China

In Shihezi, I stayed at my elderly aunt’s home. She’s the wife of my mom’s elder brother. This was the first time I met her and I had only met my now deceased uncle once 15 years ago in Taiwan.

My uncle was the first child and the only son of my grandfather. During the Chinese communist revolution, my grandfather was amongst the nationalists who fled China to Taiwan to form the Republic there. He left behind a wife and had brought his only child then, my uncle, with him.

My grandfather later on had another wife, who bore him 8 more children, all daughters. My mother is the 7th.

Although living quite comfortably in Taiwan as my grandfather was a governor, my uncle missed his birth mother in China. At 18, he made his way back home to visit, never expecting that he wouldn’t be able to leave China again.

During that time, communists had taken hold of mainland China. Leaving the country and communicating with Taiwan were rendered impossible. Just like that, my uncle was lost to the entire family for the next 30 years.

In 1978, a year prior to his death, my grandfather had written a letter for the long lost son, handing it over to one of his daughters to somehow deliver it.

It was quite a task. In order to do so, my aunt brought the letter with her to the States, which with the help of a friend, had it brought to mainland China and posted within the country. All they had was a rough address of a village in Hunan where my grandfather’s first wife resided. By then, the wife was deceased and my uncle had long moved away to Xinjiang. Luckily, prior to his move, he was a teacher. A former student recognized his name and knew that he had relocated. Same as before, the letter was forwarded to a town in Xinjiang without a full address. Miraculously, somehow, the letter reached my uncle’s hands, after being passed around in China for half a year.

Thus, the connection was made again after 30 years. My cousin, Xiaoyun, told me how his father had never talked about having any siblings, and all of a sudden, she had 8 aunts spread all around the world in Taiwan, America and Indonesia.

Since then, all the siblings had been writing each other nonstop. It wasn’t until 1998 that most of them were able to gather in Taiwan and finally reunite. It was a complicated  and almost impossible procedure for my uncle to be able to visit Taiwan again from China due to their political relationship.

It was then that I met him for the first and last time. He passed away last year, leaving behind a wife and two children. I’m glad they had insisted on my coming here to Xinjiang or else I’d never had met this part of my relatives, and would never had learnt this fantastical nature of our relationship.

Note: More old photos to come when I receive the files :]