Music has always been an essential part of my life!

In 1980, I was singing in the Civic Chorale and directing the adult choir of Our Savior Lutheran Church. You could say that I was busy enough with all these musical activities. However, the truth is that I felt that I knew very little about music and that I needed to learn more. So I started voice lessons. First I studied with Betty Fleming who was teaching voice in the Music Department. Later, I switched to working with Bob LaPella who was, at the time, the Director of the Chorale, as well as teaching in the Music Department. While once a week was not much time to devote to lessons, I was certainly involved with music as much as I was to my professional life in Chemistry. Furthermore, Janice was involved in hosting parties after many concerts or choir picnics. I will show you some pictures of these activities. First let me show you today one of our parties after a Chorale concert. We certainly had a great time together!

Electronic Reports

It was quite a big thing in 1980 to return to China to teach. Not only my parents and my friends were very interested, many strangers were also curious about China. The US government, including the FBI, were interested to know more about the trip. I was interviewed by one of their agents for quite some hours and was asked to summarize all the activities I had attended there, to identify all the people I had encountered there, and to describe the organizations I had come across during the period when I was in China. In 1980, there were no blog or webpages I could use to report my activities electronically. It was not until 2001 that I could report my activities in African on a weekly schedule using the internet. As you can see, what we take for granted today was only developed in the last sixteen to twenty years. I did post my 1980 China trip and many later ones, which took place over more than fifteen years and gave me opportunity to see the whole of China, on our webpage as part of our whole collection of memories to be found at jat.esmartweb.com. The jat stands for "Janice and Tom's" world. It became our way of recording many things and includes all the activities of our grandchildren and all our travels after our retirement.

A very unusual event!

The iron curtain was referenced in the western world during the period of the Cold War, from 1945 to 1991. However, China had the so-called "bamboo curtain" during the period between 1949 to about 1978, at which time Nixon went to China and opened China in a dramatic way. My trip to China was actually as a result of this "opening". With the help of the United Nations, some funds were shifted to China to help with those opening steps. Technical people were invited to China for a variety of reasons, and apparently I was somewhere among those steps. It was, of course, a big event in the East Tennessee Area. Almost every newspaper carried some story of my trip and every TV station  reported my visit to my homeland. I am posting below a local newspaper report with a picture of my visit to the Great Wall of China.

Quilin(桂林), China

One of the perks included with the invitation to lecture in China was the offer of a trip to a place of my choice. The choice I made was Quilin, as it was the place which I had heard had the most beautiful Chinese scenery. There is an old Chinese saying, " 桂林山水甲天下", which translated means that "Quilin has the best scenery under the sky". After Wuhan, I took a train to Quilin. It was a very strange trip. First of all, I found out that I was the only passenger in that section of the train and during meals time, then later in the hotel, I was also the only person eating my meals in the foreign section. There were just no other foreign guests during the time! Although I was assigned a personal guide who accompanied me at all times, I had a good time anyway. The pictures below were taken then. After the trip, I flew to Hong Kong and then back home having completed my first China trip!

Wuhan

As I told you before, my parents were from Huang Pi, a town in Hubei, and Wuhan is the largest city in Hubei. They both went to Wuhan for their education. Wuhan is really three cities combined. It includes Han-Ko, Wuchang, and HanYang along the Yangtze River. When the Sino-Japanese war was over, I was there for a brief stay as a child. The year 1980 was really the first time that I was in this city as an adult. I went for the reason that, as the Chinese say, "it is where my roots are"! Yes, I do have relatives from both my parents' sides in Wuhan. I had only met two of them earlier, when I passed there at 5 years old. In 1980, my mother's brother was there with his daughter's family. They wrote their names down, along with those of their entire family, plus some other family members who lived in Huang Pi. That list is posted below:

 

Besides visiting Wuhan University, I did get a chance to take some pictures with family members:

Parties and a gift for the Department

There were several informal get-togethers with the Chemistry Department, as well as one formal party, during my stay in Beijing. On one occasion, I was asked why I had not taken a banana on the table to eat. I told them that the banana was pretty over-ripe. They had assumed that I would appreciate their effort to get the fruit from southern Canton, especially as they thought that all bananas in Taiwan were shipped to the USA and that the Taiwanese people could eat only their peels! That statement was absurd, just as the statement that was said in Taiwan that on the mainland, children were taught to love not their father or mother, but only Mao Tze-dong. I did bring a gift for the Chemistry Department which was officially given to the Chair with a hand-shake. The gift, a scientific calculator, was donated by the company Monroe Calculator, as it was then a popular desk-top machine. Other pictures were taken during some get-together times!

News Release

In 1980, there were very few visitors to China from the western world. China had been closed to outsiders for many years, while, at the same time, prohibiting their own people from traveling abroad. Everything I saw was strange and very unusual, such as a horse- or mule-drawn wagon on the streets of Beijing. While we knew that everyone rode a bicycle for daily transportation, we did not expect that the people who transported goods in the city still made use of animals to carry them. Another interesting point was that, in order to buy anything, you not only needed money, you also needed  permission in the form of a paper to prove that you were allowed to buy oil, rice, cloths, etc. Everything was distributed by the authorities. Of course, where you traveled or stayed was also controlled by someone in the government. Since I was in China at the invitation of the University, my transportation and travel were arranged by them. As my visit was an official UN-approved one, it was reported in the China Daily News, the official newspaper of the country. I stayed at the Friendship Hotel, which provided me with a private car for daily use, together with a permission paper (a copy of which is included below). My travel, after the short course, to places which I had requested, including Wuhan and Quilin, was also arranged by the University. One ticket is shown below.

Relatives in Beijing

During my visit in Beijing, I did have a cousin whose family lived there. My father had two siblings, one older brother (Fu-Ming, 福民)  and a younger sister (unfortunately I have forgotten her name). Huang Fu-Ming had nine children. One died early in life. However, his third son, (道煊), was then living in Beijing. His wife was from Beijing and they had a son and a daughter living in the eastern part of town. I got in touch with them and visited them a couple of times. The University gave me a private car with a driver and he took me wherever I wanted to go. The driver also waited for me the whole time! I had a dumpling dinner with my cousin's family a couple of times, too. I had met him earlier, in Nanking, before I was ten, as he was attending a University there. When I saw him this time, I could still recognize his face. We took quite a number of pictures together! His daughter had one child. She and her husband did not live with her parents at the time. He was very thin when I was with him, as he apparently had beensent to the country and had a rough time there for ten years. He would never tell me where he was during that period!

Evening Programs

I was very busy during the daytime while the workshop was in progress. When I was not lecturing or reporting, I was talking with some participants about the US, all day long! During the evening hours, they usually made arrangements for me to go out for dinner and/or a show. Occasionally, they let me make my own arrangements to visit relatives or friends, if someone was available. I will talk later about this.
Some dinners were planned ahead, so that the menu could be specially prepared, either by using beautiful calligraphic writing, as shown below:

 

or by being printed for that unique meal as seen here:

I went out for several shows, as well. It was unexpected that they let me go to ALL the shows by myself without anyone to accompany me. I enjoyed all of them very much, as they were brand new to me and very interesting. The top two listed below were historical stories which were quite familiar to me, but had not been presented to me before in the way of a play with dialog and dancing music! The programs are listed below:

Beijing Scenic Spots

This was the first time I came to Beijing, of course, my hosts tried their best for me to visit the best and most famous spots. I went to Tienanmen Square, Forbidden City, Beihai Park all in one day, then I went to the Great Wall and Summer Palace in separate days. Of course, we had gone to eat at the famous Beijing duck place to have a meal there as well as walking in the Temple of Heaven. The schedule was full and I was definitely treated with their careful and very considerate planning. All those spots were visited with different people from the Department, sometimes even with their family members. I had seen pictures of great wall before, but when you got there personally for the first time, you still would be just amazed by its enormous dimension in these rugged terrains and were built by human hands two thousand years ago! Somehow you would feel absolutely necessary to take a picture there, to prove that you there for sure! Of course, I took a picture of my host, Prof. Hu,  too.

The pictures included in this Blog were taken at outdoor scenic spots in and around Beijing.  These spots really include many places which I mentioned earlier. This old city certainly has a lot to offer! You can not possibly learn all there is to know about it in just a few days of touring around. In the following pictures, I am giving you an idea of the places I visited but also an introduction to the people who were with me during this, my first trip to China as an adult!