Some family photos of note

The following Note was first posted on my Facebook personal page on August 29, 2011.

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Living alone I have been terribly deprived of family memorabilia, and so am very pleased when on August 17 Auntie Nina sent me an old photo of my family, apparently taken by some of the extended family members probably from outside the country visiting us in Guangzhou, China.

Courtesy of Auntie Nina, photo of my family sometime in the 1970s. Front row: maternal grandfather, maternal grandmother, mother. Back row: me, sister Ning, father. Background: maternal grandfather’s calligraphy.

I can tell it was taken sometime in the mid-late 1970s, because my maternal grandmother passed away in 1980 and because in the early 1970s I would have been still in elementary school and not have appeared as mature.

It is so nice of Auntie Nina Hooker and my maternal grandfather’s side of the extended family to keep an incidental photo like this for so long — liking Grandpa’s calligraphy no doubt as Auntie Nina says she and Uncle Stephen have some in their house in Vancouver, BC.

In this photo I was at an age when Mother liked to say that I looked like my uncles, i.e., her brothers. I probably look like Uncle Stephen also — a first cousin of hers. But what surprises me is that I actually looked like Grandma — not her “forever look” at around 80 of course. As noted in my first Chinese blog post introduced in an earlier Facebook Note, Grandma had been one of the few young Chinese women of her generation not to have her feet bound as required by the official Chinese custom — for the reason that she came from a Christian family in a region of southern China where a leading American feminist and woman suffragist, Adele Marion Fielde, had been a pioneering Protestant missionary.

From the early 1940s to the early 1950s, Grandpa served as the pastor of the first Christian church in the Shantou (Swatow) region of Guangdong province, which was located in Grandma’s ancestral village. The church was founded in 1849 by Rev. Rudolf Christian Friedrich Lechler, a German and one of the first two missionaries sent to China by the Swiss Basel Mission, in 1847 — the other being Rev. Theodore Hamberg who introduced the first Chinese Christian (perhaps pseudo-Christian) regime, the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom”, i.e., Taiping Rebellion, to the Western world.

The Basel Mission today is known as Mission 21. My sister Ning and her family, i.e., Yuzhuo and Eugene, visited the mission headquarters during their holidays around Thanksgiving in 2009, and Ning took a photo of her family there.

Yuzhuo and Eugene Li in this photo taken by Ning around Thanksgiving 2009, at Mission 21 (formerly the Basel Mission), Basel, Switzerland.

Grandpa was also a noted Chinese calligrapher, whose calligraphies graced the background in the family photo from Auntie Nina, and the cover of the brochure for the Centennial celebration at the church where he ministered on October 2, 1949.

Shantou (Swatow) region’s first Christian church–founded in 1849 by Rev. Rudolf Christian Friedrich Lechler of the Basel Mission–celebrated its Centennial on October 2, 1949, with my maternal grandfather as the minister, who also calligraphed the brochure’s cover.

Some interesting facts have been mentioned in my first English blog post, written in early 2009 and excerpted in my first Facebook Note: for many years now Ning and her family have been living not far from Watertown, NY, hometown of former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose father Rev. Allen Macy Dulles was a Christian minister there and whose grandfather had been an American missionary to India; and also, the internationally known Swatow “drawn” embroidery work — something similar to the famous “Chantilly laces” from a town in France which Chantilly, VA, site of the John F. Dulles International Airport, was named after — had been invented by a working woman from Grandma’s ancestral village with the help of a Western woman missionary.

Then in my first Chinese blog post referred to earlier, written in early 2010, I did more research and found that that Western woman missionary was Sophia A. Norwood, initially sent to China to assist Adele Marion Fielde. That surprised me even more because for the first decade of the New Millennium Ning and her family lived in Norwood, NY.

I have since learned through studying missionary literature that Adele Marion Fielde was born in East Rodman just outside of Watertown, NY, and that she was once offered the presidency of Vassar College, a highly respected women’s college in New York state, only to turn it down to return to the missionary field in Swatow, China.

History is full of little surprises.

Please feel free to browse these family photos and take a closer look.