Richard Perkins Hsung - Reconnecting with your heritage

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[00:01:13] Hi and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled and I'm joined today by Richard Sone who's

[00:01:19] sitting in front of me and I think we're going to have a fascinating conversation.

[00:01:26] Isn't that so Richard? First of all, hello!

[00:01:28] Hello, thank you for having me.

[00:01:30] Pleasure, and where in the world are you?

[00:01:34] Currently I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, in the middle of this big country, right in the

[00:01:41] smack in the middle.

[00:01:43] I'm guessing from the accent, that's not your... you're not originally from there, right?

[00:01:49] Tell me a little bit about yourself.

[00:01:52] Yes, so I was born in China. I spent my first 14 years living there before my mother and

[00:02:00] I immigrated to the US in 1980 and so I can consider myself growing up perhaps in Boston,

[00:02:13] Massachusetts. And so then I went to junior high, high school and college and so on.

[00:02:21] And I spent about... depending on how I counted, I spent about somewhere between 25 and 30 years

[00:02:29] in chemistry and I recently retired.

[00:02:32] Right, so you've retired now?

[00:02:35] Yes, in part because I was trying to complete a book my mother was unable to finish.

[00:02:42] Right, and so the book itself... I know we're getting straight into the book but let's talk a little bit about it.

[00:02:49] So what was the idea of it? Because you've got quite an interesting name, haven't you?

[00:02:54] You've got the name Perkins in the middle, interspersed around the many names.

[00:02:59] So I'm guessing there's something about different names which talk... which alludes to a different sort of life. Tell me more about that.

[00:03:06] Absolutely. So my mother was born in 1931 during one of the most catastrophic natural disaster in only the 20th century.

[00:03:15] So Yangtze River flooded. And then I guess to make a long story short, she was adopted when she was about 11, 10, 11 months old,

[00:03:26] adopted by American medical missionaries at the time, I mean China.

[00:03:31] And so she was renamed... Springflower translated into the name of the book, translated into Chinese,

[00:03:39] would have been my mother's Chinese name. But she was renamed the Jing, of course, taking after the family last named Perkins.

[00:03:47] And so I get that as my middle name or middle initial, P.S. Middle initial.

[00:03:53] So I literally have a Chinese side of family and of course an American side of family, absolute names.

[00:04:01] Chinese and actually a real English name. So originally I guess Perkins is a French.

[00:04:09] Do you link back to... do you stay in touch with your original Chinese culture in any way?

[00:04:15] Oh, great question. After I immigrated to the U.S., I think I spent most of my life until fairly recently,

[00:04:24] only cared about the Western American culture. And so I more or less lost my ability to speak Chinese and understanding of its cultural history until recently.

[00:04:35] I had to relearn some of that.

[00:04:38] So have you been to China?

[00:04:41] Yes, many times. Many times in the past 10, 15 years.

[00:04:49] In part, for the book, I had to make many trips to retrace my mother's past in some ways.

[00:04:57] And also my own family lineage, Chinese side of the family lineage.

[00:05:03] So is the book... I'm guessing the books are sort of a homily to your mother's life because otherwise your whole family would be forgotten by the adoption?

[00:05:16] Yes, I think the impetus for writing this memoir for my mother and then later on for me is to remember some of these extraordinary people,

[00:05:27] namely her parents are American grandparents and all those missionaries.

[00:05:34] Even when some were not missionaries or teachers and doctors and nurses who at the time at the earlier part of 20th century,

[00:05:45] were in China helping out many Chinese people who were in dire poverty.

[00:05:50] And my mother's biological family was one of them.

[00:05:54] So yeah, I think these people sacrificed their life.

[00:05:58] I'm talking about these medical missionaries. Sacrificed their life for the sake of Chinese people.

[00:06:04] So my mother wanted to write a book to remember them.

[00:06:07] And of course later on years when she was living in China for about 30 years before returning to the US,

[00:06:14] she encountered more people, extraordinary people.

[00:06:18] So the book is about remembering these people. Yes.

[00:06:22] That's an interesting thing.

[00:06:23] And it's interesting you talk about that and the degree to which that spirit of openness, internationalism, all those different things,

[00:06:34] you know, when America was very much on the up as it were.

[00:06:39] And it's interesting to contrast that with the political situation today.

[00:06:44] I think it seems very different over there.

[00:06:47] Is that wrong or is that would that be your reading as well?

[00:06:51] No, you're absolutely right on that.

[00:06:54] But things change every 20, 30 years.

[00:06:58] It's either east or west or up or down or left or right.

[00:07:02] So, yeah.

[00:07:04] So just pinpoint when my life sort of changed and switched, when my mother brought me to America,

[00:07:13] I had no idea about my mother's past at that time, at that very moment, up to that very moment.

[00:07:19] And I literally was Shanghai down to America.

[00:07:24] And on the plane my mother started explaining about her past and her life stories.

[00:07:29] And at that time, China and America are trying to become friends again.

[00:07:35] We do reestablishing the diplomatic relationship.

[00:07:38] But if you rewind back 30 years earlier, the Korean War, that was a proxy war between America and China.

[00:07:45] So now you fast forward 40 years.

[00:07:47] We're now back to this.

[00:07:49] So it's like this is back and forth and back and forth.

[00:07:51] So no one can predict and no one actually cared to look back on through the history and say, let's not do this anymore.

[00:07:58] But yeah.

[00:07:59] So China also, I mean, it's a political system.

[00:08:02] I mean, I'm American now so I don't look over that side as much as maybe perhaps I should.

[00:08:11] But I don't know what they're doing and what they think is a good idea of where they want to lead China to.

[00:08:18] As a Chinese American, I'm just hoping there will be peace between the two countries.

[00:08:24] And then China will exercise everything in caution and moderation.

[00:08:30] But there is a sort of resilience about Chinese culture, isn't there?

[00:08:33] And it's based on this sense of very long patterns, isn't there?

[00:08:38] So you look at...

[00:08:39] So I've spent a bit of time in China myself.

[00:08:41] And you get the sense of ancient cultures which sort of grow.

[00:08:46] They assume there's a huge amount of power, then they sort of collapse and then they sort of rebirth and they grow.

[00:08:52] And I assume this is very similar to the Egyptian cultures and such like it is.

[00:08:56] It is actually quite interesting the inherent resilience of culture and the humans within that social construct.

[00:09:06] Because we often think about resilience as being an individual thing.

[00:09:09] But it is interesting how we actually are situated within that social context.

[00:09:13] And your point about the 30 years thing is quite interesting, because we sort of forget that.

[00:09:18] Don't we? Forget these patterns which history shows us, don't we?

[00:09:22] Right. History repeats itself because we don't tend to remember history.

[00:09:28] But you're extremely perceptive, right?

[00:09:31] So yes, China has endured what depends on what the actual recording began.

[00:09:40] But thousands of years of this repetitive cycle of every few hundred years, right?

[00:09:45] In terms of resilience, yeah. I think Chinese people are very resilient.

[00:09:49] But I think humanity is. Humans are.

[00:09:53] Yes, because that's why ultimately I think you were asking about China, what's going on.

[00:09:59] Ultimately I think it doesn't really matter what political system anyone is under.

[00:10:03] Humanity is what prevails. History has shown that time again.

[00:10:08] And if we didn't, we wouldn't be having massive increases in population all the time.

[00:10:12] Because obviously it shows that we thrive irrespective of it.

[00:10:15] So obviously your mother started to write this book.

[00:10:19] What was her motivation for the beginning of this story or the memoir?

[00:10:26] Yeah, great question. So as soon as we settled down in Boston,

[00:10:32] so my mother is American cousin Evelyn Brookens-Aims, author and poet herself.

[00:10:40] And kind of convinced my mother to record all these stories of her childhood

[00:10:45] and the experiences that she endured during the 30 years living in China, communist China,

[00:10:52] into a book. And then we attended many of these gatherings sponsored by Americans

[00:10:58] who were just fascinated with mainland China because mainland China had just reopened to the West.

[00:11:05] Starting maybe around 1978.

[00:11:09] So my mother would say, well, everyone's life is potentially bookworthy,

[00:11:15] but not everyone sits down and tries to judge out the past.

[00:11:18] So what would mine be interesting enough to today's readers?

[00:11:24] Maybe readers in 1980s. And then she realized that throughout her life,

[00:11:30] she is an ordinary human being, but she encountered a serious of an unordinary historical events.

[00:11:38] Natural disaster or manmade ones like war or genocide.

[00:11:42] And then in that process also, she had a fortune meeting up with, again, extraordinary people

[00:11:51] or people who lived extra-arnored lives.

[00:11:54] And so she thought maybe those two are great elements to write a book about.

[00:12:01] And later on, she had always been pretty poor in history.

[00:12:06] So she told me that I'm going to try to stop being a terrible historian.

[00:12:10] I'm just going to focus on people.

[00:12:12] So the book will allow the historical events, sort of percolate a bubble in the background, give a backdrop.

[00:12:19] But main focus will be people she had encountered or met.

[00:12:25] Yeah, and what's fascinating is we'll talk about your website in a little while,

[00:12:30] which has a spectacular name, Yangtze River by the Hudson Bay dot site.

[00:12:34] I mean, that is a spectacular name.

[00:12:36] You're going to show it and I'm hoping.

[00:12:38] But that aside, what's fascinating about the site is the hundreds and hundreds of photographs.

[00:12:45] And of course, it was very much the tradition of the times to take physical photographs.

[00:12:52] And then of course we went on to film and then now we did it and such like.

[00:12:56] But what you see today is people are consuming huge numbers of photographs.

[00:13:00] But the ones which were disposable and have become precious, haven't they?

[00:13:06] Because if they're not captured on sites and become digitized, we're going to lose our social history.

[00:13:12] Because people don't value physical photographs anymore.

[00:13:17] Right, and they're fading.

[00:13:19] Even those I posted online, they had been fading.

[00:13:24] And so I'm very fortunate because my American grandmother, Georgina McDonald-Philip,

[00:13:33] she was a Scottish migrant born and raised in Edinburgh.

[00:13:39] And she was actually an amateur photographer.

[00:13:43] And you know, in those days it's hard enough to own, not too many people own a camera,

[00:13:50] let alone operating one, right?

[00:13:52] And also operating at the speed, speed meaning how many photos she took.

[00:13:58] So when we settled down in Boston, so the Perkins site of family gave us a huge suitcase

[00:14:06] with photographs of my American grandmother left behind, a couple thousand of them.

[00:14:11] And really they are just real live sort of live documentations of era that will soon be forgotten

[00:14:20] if we weren't for these photos or other photos that are floating around online these days.

[00:14:26] So to get the chronology right, it seems to be, so forgive me if I got this right or wrong,

[00:14:31] it sounds like your mother was born in China, came to America,

[00:14:36] and then during the Korean War they went back to China.

[00:14:40] Is that right?

[00:14:41] Yeah, so please allow me to give you a chronology here.

[00:14:45] Maybe I will start from my American grandparents.

[00:14:48] And so my American grandfather, Dr. Edward Harder Perkins, born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut.

[00:14:57] And again I told you my American grandmother was raised in Edinburgh,

[00:15:02] Scotland before migrating to the US and lived in Yonkers, New York.

[00:15:07] Yeah, so two of them got married in 1916 and they decided that one way ticket to China

[00:15:12] was a good idea for their honeymoon.

[00:15:15] And my American grandfather had already visited China several times and he knew what he wanted to do

[00:15:22] after he got his MD degree and became a surgeon.

[00:15:25] So two of them sailed for China and in 1916 they had to stay in Nanking at the time

[00:15:31] it was a capital city of China.

[00:15:33] And so they needed to learn Chinese language so they can communicate because we're missionaries,

[00:15:40] right?

[00:15:41] And their mission is to spread gospel and Christianity in addition to doing their medical missions.

[00:15:47] And so in 1918 they settled down in this rural fishing farming village on the southern banks of Yangtze River

[00:15:55] directly across from the town where my mother was born.

[00:15:58] And so they established a hospital, a clinic.

[00:16:04] And so that was 1918 and then by 1931, 13 years later the Yangtze River flooded terribly.

[00:16:11] That was a flood that killed upwards of 4 million people altogether from drowning, post flood starvation

[00:16:21] and also spread of infectious diseases.

[00:16:25] And so my mother's biologic parents row across the river which had a widened significantly because of flood

[00:16:33] and somehow managed to land in one of the refugee camps that my grandparents and other American missionaries

[00:16:41] had set up for these flood refugees.

[00:16:43] And so my biological grandmother was trying to find milk and food for my mother

[00:16:49] and learned about this couple, Dr. Perkins and Mrs. Perkins.

[00:16:55] And they insisted on just give my mother away or my mother would die.

[00:16:59] And those were the years for China, maybe even today the whole wide world.

[00:17:06] Well of course anyway China did not value baby girls.

[00:17:11] They were useless. They were just going to be left on the roadside to die or whatnot.

[00:17:16] And so my 1931-32 my mother was adopted by these fine American missionaries, missionary couple.

[00:17:26] And so then during World War II when Japanese invaded the southern part of China and ultimately Pearl Harbor

[00:17:35] and then of course the war was declared between America and Japan and also England too,

[00:17:41] England and Japan as well.

[00:17:43] My mother and my American grandparents part of this historical exchange,

[00:17:49] the W exchange between Japanese and so-called prisoners shipped from America

[00:17:54] and all the American diplomats and business people and other missionaries were shipped from Asia,

[00:18:02] Southeast Asia at that time became Japanese colonies or occupied places.

[00:18:10] And so my mother actually ended up in Yonkers, New York for three years and attended junior high and high school.

[00:18:21] And so after war they headed back to China but China was still at war with Japan.

[00:18:27] The Pacific War wasn't over.

[00:18:28] So my mother spent one year in India and attended a British boarding school in the Himalayas called Woodstock.

[00:18:36] And after one year so then formally in 1946 my mother returned to China and her parents or my American grandparents

[00:18:45] continued their medical mission and lo and behold three years of civil war, Communists took over in 1949.

[00:18:52] But they stayed because Communists didn't have time to deal with these American missionaries at the time.

[00:18:57] But Korean War broke out in 1950 and that was end of it.

[00:19:03] So my grandparents had to flee China and my mother was 300 miles away in college as a freshman.

[00:19:11] And so she couldn't catch up with them. She was left behind.

[00:19:15] That was amazing.

[00:19:17] I'm sorry if I went fast and remover.

[00:19:20] No, no, that's fascinating.

[00:19:22] And it's that thing about the resilience of traveling and moving onwards with your life and just like.

[00:19:29] And so the memoir is interesting. It's in three parts so far, I'm guessing.

[00:19:36] And so did she start to dive in your completing it? Is that the plan?

[00:19:40] Yes. So she spent about 11 or 12 years on it until she came to a crashing halt in the early 1990s.

[00:19:50] And she left the trails of completed chapters all typed and then half written chapters on finished stories.

[00:20:00] Sometimes just a note and sometimes it's like photographs, duct tape to a piece of paper in the middle of a pile of notes and say,

[00:20:08] please talk about that person.

[00:20:10] It's like, who was that person?

[00:20:12] So that was how that was a state when I took over about 10 years ago.

[00:20:17] I too spent about nine years.

[00:20:19] So it's a real passion of love and linking you to your past past and all these amazing people that have been met.

[00:20:27] So why is the site called Yantzi River by the Hudson Bay?

[00:20:34] I was struggling to find a suitable name at the time, except I realized Yantzi River was where my mother was born.

[00:20:46] And of course the flood led her to my American side of family.

[00:20:51] And the Hudson River was where she spent time during the war time during the war.

[00:20:58] And that was a significant period in her life because it completely affirmed her identity as American.

[00:21:07] And English was her first language, essentially.

[00:21:10] And then that sort of mixed the two rivers.

[00:21:15] So therefore a tale, two rivers for the subtitle for the first book.

[00:21:21] That's where that came about as well.

[00:21:24] And to use both rivers names as a website title is essentially to signify, I guess, two cultures.

[00:21:35] So for people who'd like to get their hands on this amazing memoir, which I understand is in three bits, how would they do that?

[00:21:45] They're now all available on Amazon.com, Barnes Noble.

[00:21:50] Very good. And from your site?

[00:21:55] Yes. Okay, great. And to be able to find the book on Amazon, you need to type in Jean Tranhua Perkins.

[00:22:03] So the links will be in the show notes and Springflower was her name.

[00:22:08] Was that right? Did you say that earlier?

[00:22:10] Yes, Springflower is a transliteration of a Chinese name.

[00:22:13] Fantastic. And I think what you said there is, you sort of said this, I think in a pattern way, but it's actually got quite a lot of significance, which is, we often think we've read

[00:22:24] and remarkable lives, but often we've seen remarkable things we've lived through remarkable times that we've met remarkable people.

[00:22:30] And our own story is a reflection of the people around us in the events that we've lived through.

[00:22:36] So that's quite interesting because sometimes we diminish our own existence, don't we?

[00:22:40] But sometimes we have observed remarkable things.

[00:22:45] Yes, I think most of us, myself, definitely an ordinary person, right?

[00:22:51] When we actually observe remarkable events and encounter extraordinary people, we're a witness to history.

[00:22:58] And many of us at a certain age have lived through moon landings, we've lived through the rise and birth of the internet, technologies that have never been seen before, flights, you know, all this.

[00:23:10] And apparently having experienced all of this amazing technology, the Earth is flat.

[00:23:15] We have this amazing coexistence of profundity and mediocrity at the same sort of time.

[00:23:21] So in the same way that the human race moves forward, it's always pinned by this sense of fantasy as well, which is part of the human condition, I think.

[00:23:28] So it's quite fascinating.

[00:23:30] Absolutely, yeah.

[00:23:31] Brilliant. Oh, I think that's absolutely fantastic.

[00:23:35] I'm going to get my hands on one of the episodes and see what it looks like.

[00:23:38] But I'm on the site actually, so I'm cheating somewhat.

[00:23:40] So I'm going to look at all the pictures of show. Absolutely remarkable.

[00:23:44] I didn't know anything about that. The Yangtze River floating and I have been there and I have been on the Yangtze River so.

[00:23:51] Ah, OK.

[00:23:52] And of course it's very different today because of course it's all dammed up so the whole level has risen to say the least.

[00:23:59] Right.

[00:24:00] So I don't know if you've seen that recently. It's quite strange thing.

[00:24:04] But there you go.

[00:24:05] It's been a joy to talk to you, Richard.

[00:24:08] Thank you so much for spending time today. Good luck with the book and is there a plan for a yes another volume or are you done at three?

[00:24:16] We're down at three.

[00:24:18] If I'm going to write another book, it'll be something else.

[00:24:22] Well good luck with the next book.

[00:24:24] Thank you.

[00:24:25] Thank you so much for having me.

[00:24:27] Oh, it's been a pleasure.

[00:24:29] Thank you for spending time with us today. You take care.

[00:24:32] Thank you.

[00:24:35] Hi everybody.

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