"I have to go back to China," my paternal great-grandmother declared in 1939. "I don't want to die here. My spirit wouldn't be able to converse with the local ghosts because I don't speak their language!" Seven years earlier, she had traveled with my father's parents from Fuqing, in China's Fujian province, to Indonesia, then called the Netherlands East Indies.
Despite her bound feet, she had the reputation of being used to getting her own way. So in 1940 she sailed from Surabaya -- accompanied by three of my father's brothers -- back to Fuqing, where my cousins still live.
