My memories of my father began in a small row house in Chengdu, China.
My family shared two rooms with dirt floors and an outdoor kitchen. We had no plumbing or heating, and we had to share a single water pump and a hole in the ground (as a bathroom) with eight other families.
My father worked hard to provide for our family during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but he soon learned that his refusal to bend the knee to Mao’s Chinese Communist Party would cost him.
The CCP party bosses conspired to get rid of him by relocating him to a work site 19 hours away, but he refused to leave my mother, a sickly woman, and his three children.
His refusal led to a permanent early retirement, putting our family's future at risk. But he refused to accept that, so he illegally served as a bicycle taxi at night to keep food on our table.
Dad certainly could have made our lives easier, but it would have required obedience and submission to his immoral masters. Instead, he persevered honorably so that we could survive the brutality of communism.
After I escaped Communist China, I brought my parents to the United States, where my father worked in a local restaurant for a few years, and later became a U.S. citizen in 2005.
