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.