East Meets West Meets East

Both my parents were born just before World War II. My mother’s family fled to Macau and stayed there for several years. My dad was five or six years old when the Japanese were going to occupy Hong Kong. Ye Ye 爺爺, my paternal grandfather, escaped to China to avoid being drafted into the Japanese army. During this perilous time, everything was in short supply, and they would have rice with a little sugar for dinner, if anything. My Maa Maa 嫲嫲, my paternal grandmother, took my father and his siblings to a small village in Guangdong province, where they lived with another Hong Kong family in a small house with water from a well and no electricity. Living conditions there weren’t much better than they had been in Hong Kong, but at least they were safe. They would sometimes eat stir-fried worms when rice was scarce.