My Connection with UI (University of Illinois)

My connections with the University of Illinois really defined my life, although it is certainly late to mention it at this stage of my blog! Primarily it is because I took this fact for granted and I did not feel it's importance until I was recently thinking about it!
I went to the University of Illinois, specifically the Chemistry Department, mainly because the President of National Taiwan University, Chiang S-Ning, received his Doctoral Degree from that University. He was frequently involved with the Chemistry Department in Taiwan personally. The picture below was taken in 1961 when we graduated. We had a dinner to thank our teachers and he was there, sitting in the front row,  fourth from the right:

 

 And most inmportantly, he wrote a recommendation letter for me! Later, when I went to ETSU, it turned out that the chair of the Chemistry Department,  Dr. D G Nicolson, was also a graduate from Illinois. He was the one who later offered me a position at ETSU at the time when I was teaching at the University of Kentucky. He not only taught me but he also hired me back to the University, to which he had dedicated his whole life! The following picture was taken in 1978.

Finally, and most importantly, I met Janice, my wife there. You all know that part of my story, you just do not realize how important a simple folk dance could start the life story of two people from the other ends of the world!

More about my high school teachers

I finally found a few pictures of my "ChengGu" High School teachers who were very important for my education. They were all female teachers. The top four teachers all taught me mathematics, chemistry and physics. The fifth teacher was one I did not have in class. I do not know who wrote on my school books (the banners in yellow). He was trying to identify who taught what. Below are some pictures from my yearbook, some of which include students in their classes!

They were our favorite teachers, including one who even brought her daughter to take a picture with the best students in her classes! All the teachers names are printed in the book! You certainly could see that taking pictures were a very serious business matter, we were ALL in our uniforms with our hats on! 

"Bridge" is more than just a game!

During our first year in East Tennessee a group of eight women, mostly wives of new faculty members at the University, decided to form a "bridge" group to meet one night a week, so that they could share their experiences. Who could imagine that this group would continue for nearly fifty years, as of today! (Two of the original members left in the early years, as their husbands accepted positions at other schools.) The women certainly shared a lot of stories about raising their children, about the the frustrations of not having family living near-by, and, of course, about their husbands!  "Bridge" may have been their starting point, but everything in their lives was shared, one way or another. From new born babies, boys and girls, their children's marriages, and their grandchildren, to the death of beloved family members, every part of life was included in many different ways. Sadly, one passed away recently because of illness. And, two members have lost their husbands, which has affected all of them greatly. I have chosen four pictures to give you a glimpses of this amazing group!

This is one of the first pictures of the group:

Yes, they were very young!

The second picture was taken slightly later, showing the eight members who belonged to the group for the last 40-some years:

This is a more recent picture, taken a long time after 1971! The husbands frequently joined the group to celebrate the holidays!

This most recent picture was taken in January 2020. A new member was added for the first time since Janice and I moved out of the East Tennessee area.

 

Achievements by My Siblings

As a result of the deaths of my two siblings, my family was divided into two groups which were about a decade apart. Dean and I were in the first group, while Edmund and Kai formed the second.  Our move to Taiwan after the communists occupied mainland China in 1948, affected the older group quite a bit. For one thing, we were very poor for a few years after the move. Dean and I shared those experiences and hardships. However, the family conditions, both financial and environmental, improved quite a bit by the time our 2 younger siblings were old enough to notice them. So my parents raised two groups of siblings, with very different conditions, a decade apart. But, amazingly, in the long run, there were some common results which nobody could have predicted. Let me tell you the story.

It was very difficult to enter National Taiwan University during that time, especially as it was considered the best university on the island. An applicant for college was required to take an Entrance Exam which covered 6 different subjects and lasted for 2 days. Only the people with the highest total grades could be admitted to the department of their choice in the university of their choice. It was very fair; even the grandson of Chiang Kai-Shek could not get into any university.  When I graduated from Cheng-Gong-high school in 1957, I was given the chance to go to another University without having to take the Entrance Exam. However, I decided to take the exam and believe it or not I was admitted to the Chemistry Department of National Taiwan University(NTU). Two years later, Dean passed the Exam to be admitted to the Chemical Engineering Department at NTU.  Ed graduated from high school in 1966 and he was admitted to the Chemical Engineering Department of NTU. There was then plenty of pressure for Kai in 1968 when she took the college Entrance Exam. She did pass the Exam and was admitted to the NTU Biochemistry Department. All four of us Huang Siblings got into NTU Chemistry-related Departments. You could say this was "lucky" or that it represented major accomplishments!

Another Chapter of our accomplishments is summarized below:
       Thomas Huang, PhD, University of Illinois
       Dean Huang,      PhD, University of Illinois
       Edmund Huang  PhD, Iowa State University
       Christina Huang PhD, University of Kentucky

So we all four got PhDs from Four Universities in the USA in Chemistry-related fields!

Our pictures are collected below:

  most recent

  a decade ago

   1960

1950

Extra Ordinary Events

There are always very extra ordinary events which occur for an ordinary Chinese! For me, there were quite a number of them and it is time now for me to describe some of them in more detail, so that they will not be forgotten. In my last blog, I mentioned that I had two siblings who both passed away during the year and a half period when we were trying to escape from the communist invasion. I am now going to add, in this blog, some details about them and about our lives during that time -  especially since I found another, better picture which was taken during that time and which has inspired me to tell more about ALL that I remember. This picture is below:

          A family picture taken in Nanking in 1947 at a famous resort area near Jiming Temple

Pictured, in addition to my parents, are myself, my second brother, Dean, our two younger siblings, and my older cousin Fusan Je. I was able to extract a better version of this picture which shows these two siblings  more clearly:

My mother was holding the boy and Fusan Je was holding the sister. This is the only picture I have with their faces exposed!

At the end of the year 1948, our family took a boat to Taiwan. Our plan was to return "home" to Hubei after we visited my mother's brother, who had been assigned to Taiwan as part of the force that took over the island afer the Japanese had been defeated. (We assumed that the communist movement would diminish and peace would return to China.) However, shortly before we left, my younger brother died as a result of a re-occuring disease of the stomach called "intussusception", which was recognized too late for the doctors to operate. Before he became sick, he had been a very active baby!

Fusan Je was in Medical School at that time so she did not go to Taiwan with us. My father went back to Nanking to work, after we had arrived and been settled at the home of my uncle in TzoIn, Taiwan. Less than a year later, my sister also died. She was less than 6 years old. She had what started as a lung infection, which then spread to her brain and other places. She could have been cured by antibiotics, but there was no medicine available. When I went to her "funeral", she was lying on the ground beside the hole which had been dug for her, because the coffin which had been bought was too small. I remembered the funny feeling I had. I was not sad, not happy, but it affected me a great deal - now more than ever before!

I did not see Fusan Je again until I was a visiting professor in Wuhan University in 1985, which was
close to twenty eight years later. She was then a physician in Shangtong, China. and she remembered the boy's death vividly when I talked with her about him!

I once had two more siblings!

Up to this point, I have not mentioned anywhere that I had two additional siblings. They both died before I was ten, and I really do not remember them very well. Just a couple of days ago I found a picture which I took at my cousin's Taiwan home at 2011. It is a copy of one in their family album. I realized that both of those siblings were present in this family picture taken in Nanking, most likely in 1947! And this may be the only picture ever taken of the boy, born in 1946, who died before we left Nanking and moved to Taiwan in 1948. His image is not clear in the picture, but I could recognize him. He is in front of my father. I was the oldest boy in the front row of children, first from the right side. The sister who died in 1949 was next to me and in front of my mother. The boy next to her is my brother (now called Dean). The four adult men standing were my four cousins with the oldest in the center of picture. The center one of the three adult women standing is Xiaoji, sister of the four brothers. The other two were wives of the male cousins. And I am not at all sure about the identity of the two young girls in front on the left side.

 The picture below was taken in Nanking with two of mother's relatives. Hwei Ge (on the left) was the daughter of one of my mother's sisters, and Fu San Je (on the right) was the daughter of another sister. My mother was helping to raise both girls. The child is my younger sister who died in Kaoshung shortly after we arrived in Taiwan, because of the lack of medicine to cure her infection, My mother felt that girls needed to stay together for one reason and the others, so they took this picture before they separated. (Hwei Ge moved to Taiwan with my parents and Fu San Je chose to stay in the mainland.)  :

Good bye, old Friend !!!

It was very difficult to say good bye to an old friend from Banqiao Junior High School this past summer. 孫乃競 Naiching Sun died on July 2nd in New York at 80 years of age. The funeral was held on the following Sunday, which turned out to have very bad weather. Our class leader, Chen, and another classmate, Lee, who were supposed to represent our class at the funeral, could not make the trip as their flights were canceled. At the last minute, another classmate, Warren Gao, drove there from Philadelphia to represent us. Sun was the first person to die in our class after we started to have class reunions in the USA. In 2016, he invited all of us to New York to have a class reunion and we had a group picture taken:

This 19 "boys" in the class took a picture together in 2016:

 
Sun was famous in the class for his skill in investment and his know-how about the stock market. He gave many lectures and wrote many pamphlets for  the class. Most inportantly, he donated quite a big amount of money to National Taiwan University, to be used for scholarships for those who needed the support! A major achievement of his early life was that he did not take the senior high school entrance exam, preferring to study at home on his own for three years. He then passed the college entrance exam and went on to National Taiwan University to get his degree in Economics. This was an extremely unusual accomplishment! Sun will always be remembered by us for his generosity and kindness. He kept a low profile but shared his knowledge and experience freely. We bid you farewell, old friend!

Family Trees

Over the years, Janice and I have often talked about many of the relatives in both our families. They certainly played a role in all our lifetime events. We often marvel that I, an "Ordinary Chinese" person, born during the Japanese War, survived without a scratch and miraculously married into a very old American family (dating to the late1600's) which gave birth to Janice. And, often, what seemed at the time to be ordinary events changed, in retrospect, into very unusual and quite rare happenings. As both Janice and I grow older, the family structures become more difficult to remember and even more difficult for the younger generations to sort out. Janice decided to tackle a plan to plot out the family trees that both she and I are familiar with and, hopefully, get at least some clarification of the relationships within our two families. It took quite a bit time for her to work this task out and she finally plotted two family trees showing what we know about each group. These are printed below. She had, as her main goal, the identification of many of the individuals who are directly linked to our children and grandchildren, so that they will have some knowledge of their ancestors. We realize that there are many "branches" of the trees which are not developed due to the space allowed. Perhaps we will try to create much larger trees in the future,
 using tabletop-sized paper! But that is for another day.

Chinese Family:

     
American Family:

We know that these diagrams are not very clear if you look at the blog-size. However, we hope that you can download the pictures of the family trees and see them on the computer screen in the larger, original sizes. The Chinese names are spelled out as clearly as we could, with apologies to Chinese scholars!  Hopefully, these two trees can be used by whoever is interested and we hope that they will provide some accurate information.

My "big" Investment!

In 1977, we made a big investment. After reading in a newspaper advertisement that a parcel of land was for sale, we contacted the owner and went to see the property. The owners, who were retiring and moving to Florida, agreed to extend us a loan for the sixty acres, more or less. At the time, we imagined building a log cabin there to use as a get-away. At one time there had been a farmhouse on the land, as you can see from the picture below. It was really a pretty place - with a steam flowing down from the mountains behind, which, over the years, had created a "hollow".

After a few years of monthly payments, I do not remember how many, we were the proud owners of the land.  It was not until the end of last year (2018) that we sold it - after more than forty years! Everyone in our family, including my father and Janice's parents, visited there on different occasions. Of course, our friends and office mates did, too. They all enjoyed walking up the trail toward the mountains.

Early on, I cut down a pine tree and Janice debarked it. It took us an entire day and we were both exhausted! After that,  the idea of building a log cabin using the trees on the land was totally dismissed! We took quite a lot of pictures at this place, but to find them is almost possible. The only one I could find is this picture of the chimney, which had been part of the original farm house! That was the only evidence we had that someone had once lived on this land!

Some Side Stories about the Civic Chorale (III)

This story is about Kenton Coe, an internationally- known composer, who came to live in Johnson City and was active in many aspects of the arts and music in the city. The Civic Chorale performed some of his works and I am giving you one example below. The top picture appeared on the cover of our concert program. You can see that "The Light in This Room" was the featured part of the concert. It was written by Kenton Coe and performed on October 19, 1986 by the Chorale. The complete program for the concert is in the second picture below; the chorale performed Coe's piece after the intermission. The third picture contains the Notes by Kenton Coe concerning the music.