Nai nai is 100 years old

A (brief) story of wealth, estrangement, and an escape to a new world. As told by my “uncle” Bill.

My mom is 100 years old, or just about. And to this day there’s a trauma in her. It was really never apparent when we were were growing up. It was not something that was conscious in our heads. But we can see that even at her age now, 100, that was a real traumatic thing that she felt all throughout her childhood, and into adulthood, that she was never loved. She was never loved by her own mother, her own biological mother. Never loved. And her father, the ambassador to Holland, was distant.

You have to understand my biological grandmother’s situation too, in those times. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her own daughter, but it was the pressure that society put on her. Nai nai was the third daughter, and having daughters one after the other…it was just so disillusioning for the people at that time. Even for nai nai who came from a very wealthy family in China — they came from the upper echelons of society.

She grew up with nannies and people who did everything for her. She never knew how to cook or knew how to do anything for herself. Everything was served to her so she grew up like that. And then one day she was given away to her relatives in Shanghai — to her uncle and his wife, who had wanted children but couldn’t have any of their own. But nai nai was lucky — she grew up with a family that was very loving, and also very wealthy. Her adoptive mother raised nai nai as her own. She worshipped nai nai. And that mother is, in nai nai’s heart, her true mother. That’s the picture of the woman that still hangs on the wall in the dining room in nai nai’s apartment in Chinatown.

That mother played an incredible role in nai nai’s life. Just imagine it’s the late 1930s, early ’40s. Her adoptive mother said to nai nai, “You are going to have a college education. You will go to college.” Just imagine those times, a woman going to college? She put up the money for nai nai to go to one of the top universities in China. Meanwhile, nai nai’s biological mother had moved to Holland — we call it the Netherlands now, but back then it was Holland — to join her husband who was the ambassador there. And while she was in Holland, my biological grandmother got pregnant again, and a son was born. Then she got pregnant again, and a second son was born.

One of them is Uncle Viktor, who’s my favorite uncle. He lives in Florida now and he’s now a grandfather. His wife is 22 years his junior. You’ve probably seen him. He met a Chinese woman in Uruguay. She was the most eligible, beautiful Chinese woman in Uruguay. He found her there after his first wife shot him. With a gun. That’s why he’s got a bad leg. He feigned that he died and then she killed herself. She shot herself in the mouth. These stories, it’s like a movie, but that’s what happened. And then he found this girl in Uruguay. Can you imagine what her family thought when she married my uncle? His first wife shot him, and then she killed herself! I just can’t believe it, but they’re still together and they’re living down in Florida now. Their oldest child is 47 years old. Viktor Jr. is married to a Columbian woman, and now he is the president of Cisneros Interactive, or something like that.

And both of nai nai’s sisters passed away young, in their 40s or 50s. She doesn’t talk too much about them. The second sister married a man from Taiwan who was a railroad worker. Terrible gambler. Really bankrupted the family. I remember her second sister had one, two, three, four, five, six children. Six children. My mother had to rescue her second sister from debt when she was already in the West. She was sending money and doing stuff for her sister because of the guy she married. And out of the six children, only the first and the second survived. Everyone else died. The first kid is Uncle Louie, who you’ve met. He lives in Flushing now. Never had kids, but married this beautiful woman who also has five sisters. He did pretty well. And the other one that survived is Manfred. Remember Manfred?

The third kid died of alcoholism. He was an engineer, married okay. Had beautiful daughter. But she was an alcoholic and a smoker, also passed away. Another of nai nai’s sister’s children died of mental illness. Another sister was killed when she came to NYC, only after having been here a year. Somebody either pushed her onto an oncoming subway train at the Rockefeller Center station, or it was a bad accident. Incredibly tragic history on nai nai’s sister’s side. And then there’s Manfred, the second oldest child, who now lives in San Francisco.

Manfred has a son, who got married in 2006. He came to talk to me about his family, all of his uncles and aunts who had mental illness and died. He said, “I just want to know the truth about my family because I don’t know whether I want children or not.” And I said, “I’m going to be honest with you. You have in your family a lot of mental illness. Only your oldest uncle, the first born, is relatively okay. Your mom had mental illness, and all your uncles and aunts, and even the one who died tragically in the subway accident. So I leave it to you.” He decided not to have kids. My mother’s two sisters, both of them suffered. Both of them married badly. But my mother, nai nai — the one who was given away by her own mother — married my dad who was from a prominent family from Taizhou, in China. He pursued her hard, and we ended up in France, and then eventually in NYC.

Anyway, my mother is 100, my Uncle Viktor is 96, and the other brother is 97 but he now has Alzheimer’s and living in China. Nai nai’s last name, her maiden name, should have been Kong. But she had adopted the name Cheng because she took her adoptive mother’s name. I never knew my biological grandmother. She died in her late 40s or early 50s after after having five children, one of whom she had given away.

After nai nai graduated from university, she was able to land a job right away working as a trained accountant for the Chinese government in Tiananmen. But it soon became turbulent in China, during the ’50s and ’60s with the cultural revolution. It was 1949, I was a toddler, and the Chinese Communists were coming into the city to take over. Now, my adoptive grandmother was smart — said to my mother, “We don’t know what the future will bring. You need to join your husband. You can’t stay here.” And at the time, my father had left China to study in France. But can you put yourself in nai nai’s position at the time? She had a great job, living well-off. But the invasion was about to come. She knew nothing about being abroad. Never had been outside of China. She had a one-year-old. What would’ve been your decision?

Nai nai dropped everything. The Chinese Nationalists were already evacuating the country and fleeing to Taiwan. Everyone was looking to get out, and my mother decided maybe it would be a good idea to join my dad in France. The whole country of China was in turmoil, so how do you exit? My adopted grandmother gave nai nai jewelry, gold, everything that could convert to money. And nai nai said to her, “OK, I’ll go first to France and then I’ll come and get my kid later.”

Now, had I been left in China, life would have been totally different, maybe I would have joined the Communists — can you imagine? And remember, nai nai was a college-educated woman, but was still very spoiled having been raised in a family where everybody served her. She basically said, “Yeah, I have a baby, but I don’t know about no babies. I don’t know about take care of babies.” Her original plan was to travel all the way to France, and then maybe come back to China to pick me up. And it was my adopted grandmother who said, “Absolutely not, I will not take responsibility for your child. You have to take your baby with you.”

So here was nai nai, an inexperienced mother bringing me out of China during a time when there’s total chaos all over the place. She used her connections and contacts to escape. She flew out of Beijing on the last military craft from the capital city. The people on the plane were some of her college professors, the creme de la creme in China because the Nationalists and the people who were opposing the Communists were trying to save the intellects. They wanted to move them to Taiwan because the Communists were about to take over.

My mother had gotten a hold of one of her professors, or someone she knew, and that professor gave up his seat and said, “You should go and take your child with you and get to the capital.” The capital is now what we know as Beijing, but for the Nationalists the capital was Nanjing. This professor said, “Get yourself the papers that can help you leave China, and take one of the last planes from Beijing.” Where we flew out of wasn’t even an airport. If you go online, look up the Temple of Heaven, which is a beautiful structure in Beijing. It had been converted into an airport because it has a long runway to the temple, and military cargo ships were using it as a temporary runway.

So you have to think, the Chinese Communists were coming from the North already and enveloping all the major cities, and Beijing was quickly falling to the Communists, too. Chiang Kai-shek, the leader, Mao’s counterpart on the Nationalist side, was already pushed out. It was in that craziness that my mom was able to get out, land in Taiwan, find a little boat that was the size of a bathtub, and travel to Hong Kong, through the Strait of Malacca, to Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka, all the way out to the Horn of Africa, into the Red Sea, past Sudan, past Port Saeed, to Crete, all the way around, in 45 days on the little tugboat all the way to Marseille in France, where my father was waiting for us. It was the incredible adventure of a woman with a child.

My mother has the smarts. It’s always been there, but it’s never apparent. My mom’s the type of person, if you told her, “Mom, do you know that the sun fell down from the sky?” She would not say, “Come on, don’t kid me around.” She would say, “Really? When did that happen?” She’s that kind of person. And when it comes to figures, when it comes to math, forget it. Smart as a whip. I’m just saying that she offers this incredible dichotomy, looking at her as a totally innocent, lovable person. And on the other hand, she’s very steely. She’s very opinionated, she’s very strong. In so many other areas that you would never see unless you push her to that point. So I always see her bargaining; I can always see her going through incredible stress in a very smart way. We ended up in France. She only knew Chinese and Shanghainese, did not know French, obviously. Only knew a little bit of English. It’s unbelievable.

Just think of your parents. It’s the same idea. Leaving their homeland, not knowing English well. Planting themselves somewhere else. It takes an incredible will. I give high respect for my mom and for my dad to have taken that road. Because suddenly, no matter what we think about our places of birth or origins, we’re suddenly in a good place in the United States. You got to be thankful for that. That’s basically the story. You look at her 100 years old, it’s a lot of history. Most of the 20th century has gone to wars, she’s seen the Japanese invasion, seen the Communists come again. I mean, I’ve gone through the United States through an ugly period. The Vietnam War. The Watergate situation. John F. Kennedy being murdered. American civil rights riots. Brown versus Board of Education. All the ugliness. I know that history, but nevertheless, I’ve never gone through a war. I was drafted to go to Vietnam, but my medical exam did not permit me to go. But imagine my mom, what she had to dodge in her lifetime, 100 years of history, right there. Sit down with your mom and dad. Everybody’s got a story. Everybody’s got a history.