It’s always a special event for my kids when a free calendar comes in the mail. They pore over the photos (typically featuring birds, other wildlife, or California State Parks), and my daughter likes especially to check which photo accompanies each person’s birthday month.
The annual Sierra Club calendar goes on a special nail in the wall in the kitchen. I can never quite bring myself to throw away any of the others, so I keep them until they’re clearly out of date, and then I recycle them with a sigh of relief.
I probably get that from my parents, who have never said no to a free calendar. Based on holidays past of nosing around their house in Virginia, their annual collection of free calendars comes courtesy of local insurance agents, local real estate agents, an out-of-state donkey rescue organization (my mother insists I made a donation a long time ago; I have absolutely no memory of doing so), and Asian grocery stores.
My dad is always happy to hammer more nails in the walls to make room to display them, and so the lucky calendars get to fufill their destinies, hanging even in guest rooms (as a courtesy to guests, of course) and the first floor bathroom—which, I imagine, comes in handy when you’re going about your business and suddenly wonder which week in the month it is already. Or maybe you’re curious about the phase of the moon (always a nice touch, I think, for a free calendar to include that information), or an upcoming U.S. holiday. Or maybe it’s soothing to look at a field of flowers that reminds you of an old-fashioned Microsoft desktop photo.
Or maybe it’s just nice to see the friendly headshot of your realtor friend at the bottom right corner and know that he was thinking of you when he addressed this calendar to you.
But it’s the free Asian calendars that are always the catch. Sometimes, they’re so fancy and three-dimensional that they come in their own gift box for giving to others. These are the ones my parents somehow acquire at least two of, to save for giving one to me and one to my sister. (They have always prided themselves on being fair.)
The calendars tend to be bulky, red and golden, heavy, rigid things that invariably require rearranging of luggage prior to departure. But I appreciate these Asian calendars because they have something no other free calendars have: lunar calendar dates. Which I need every year in order to look up when my mother’s birthday is.
(It was only during the pandemic, when I was no longer visiting my parents to pick up my annual fancy Asian calendar, that I realized you can, of course, look up Gregorian-Lunar date conversions into eternity on-line.)
My mother, the post-war baby of her family, was born in 1947 on the first day of the third lunar month, which the Internet confirms would have been April 21st that year.
This continues the story where I left off last time.
My grandparents and my mother’s two older siblings had just survived World War II and everything that had led up to it. They were alive and finally feeling at home in the newly constructed government dorms where my mother was born, in the Sanyuan district of Nanjing. All the “freeloaders” were gone. At last, they were enjoying some family alone time.
My aunt remembers that when she and her older brother went to school that morning, the midwife was hurrying in. When they came home from school—voila, a new baby, born around 7:00 that morning. It was the year of the Pig. My grandmother predicted that my mother would be xiong, for pigs born in the morning are fierce.
My grandfather was 36 and my grandmother was 32. My mother was their third child, but she was the first baby they were actually able to raise in peace under a safe roof, together.
(She still feels a little bit guilty about that; and the guilt perhaps set the stage for some messy sibling disputes several decades later, after my grandparents died.)
The peace was short-lived.
The Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-Shek—the government my grandfather was working for, which many people in China had grown to mistrust deeply—and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by Mao Zedong, had reignited almost as soon as WWII ended. With no common enemy, they no longer had a reason to cooperate.
At some point, my grandparents moved from Nanjing to an apartment in Shanghai. My grandfather was a “small government employee,” my mother says, but working for the KMT made him and his family suspect in the eyes of any Communist sympathizer, which included all of his cousins.
While they were living in Shanghai, my grandmother was pregnant again and gave birth to a little girl. My mother’s only memories of the little sister she briefly had are what others in her family told her: that the little baby girl was very pretty; that my mother didn’t like her; that my mother was mean to her and would go to her crib when she thought no one was around and pinch her.
“I’m a nice person. I never pinch people!” My mother is still a little hurt by these accusations. “But everybody kept telling me over and over how mean I was to her, until I was in my 30s.”
Sadly, the baby had a heart murmur and died, presumably of her heart condition. Heartbroken and ridden with guilt, my grandmother vowed: I will never have another child.
She stayed true to her word.
My aunt is the one who remembers that my grandmother put the little body in a wooden box and then lowered the box by rope from the apartment window to the street below. “People in Shanghai were very superstitious back then”—it would have been taboo to transport the body down the elevator or the stairs.
“I don’t know where they buried her,” my mother says. “No one told me.”
The baby’s death validated one of my grandmother’s own superstitions, gleaned from an accumulation of loss: if my grandfather was present when she gave birth, the child would survive; if not, the child would not survive. My grandfather had been in Taiwan when this last baby girl had been born. And when my grandmother first stepped into the Shanghai apartment with the new baby in her arms, her heart fell when my mother took one look at her and started crying. It seemed like an even worse sign.
That story explains, my mother says, why my grandmother was always very particular about how to enter the house with a new baby. (It explains, too, why my mother has also been very particular about it.) When my sister, Mary, was going home from the hospital for the first time, my grandmother insisted that my mother be first to enter the house to greet her adoring nephew (my aunt’s son). My grandmother followed after, holding Mary in her own arms.
My grandmother was also the one to carry me into the house after I was born, so that my mother could walk in alone to embrace my older sister.
I told my mother that this approach is actually completely aligned with modern-day advice to avoid sibling jealousy, which I researched at rabbit-hole length when I was pregnant with my second child: The baby should not be in your arms when you first see your older child after having the baby. Have your arms free to fully welcome and embrace your older child.
Back to Shanghai: the Nationalists were losing and the Communists were winning in the civil war. My mother, just around two years old, caught pneumonia. She was dying, but there was no medical help or medicine to be found. A friend of my grandfather happened to know a German doctor in Shanghai who knew how to treat pneumonia with penicillin, which had only just begun to be available. My grandfather paid in gold bullion (money was almost worthless at the time) for a shot of penicillin that saved my mother’s life, and he would be grateful to this friend for the rest of his days.
When the Communist army arrived in town, this same friend told my grandfather, “You don’t have to leave! This time, it’s Chinese people managing Chinese people. How bad can it be?” He stayed. He lived, but lost everything he owned. My grandfather helped him and his family get back on their feet when they were finally able to escape to Hong Kong in the 1970s.
My grandparents could imagine all too well what might happen to their family under Communist rule. There would be no sympathy, given my grandfather’s government affiliation. They had to escape. But how? Their upstairs and downstairs neighbors were already watching them.
In November of 1949, when my grandfather was away for work, my grandmother left the apartment with her three children in tow.
I wonder what she felt and thought as she closed the door behind her, knowing she would never open that door again.
She carried a shopping bag. My mother’s two older siblings each carried a messenger bag. To anyone watching, they looked like they were going to school.
Instead, they went to a hotel and stayed there, waiting for my grandfather. He arrived one week later. From the hotel, they went straight to the airport to board a plane for Taiwan. The sounds of gun-fighting were all around them.
And so they joined what came to be called the Great Retreat, the chaotic and desperate mass exodus from mainland China to Taiwan of more than one million civilians, refugees, and what remained of the Kuomintang government and its ROC troops.
There in Taiwan, once more, they started their lives over.