My story is a legacy story about my mother and father. My mother was born in China in 1922, the daughter of missionaries in Fuzhou, a port city across the strait from Taiwan. While my grandparents were there, they helped run the mission’s hospital, agricultural station, girl’s school, and university. Sometimes their mission work took them upcountry. There were no roads in those days, so the only way to get there was by taking a sampan up the Min River. You can see a picture of the tiny sampan and one of my grandmother with her four children, two in diapers, crouched under the sampan’s low bamboo roof. That tiny 4’ x 8’ space was where the family, all six of them, cooked, ate, and slept. My grandmother said it was like living under your dining room table for ten days.

In 1937, the family was evacuated as the Japanese Army swept through Korea and into northern China, taking control of their port cities. The next year my grandfather returned to China to try to save the missions’ medical equipment and books from the Japanese by shipping them up the Min River to their upcountry station. Once the Japanese took control of Fuzhou, he was trapped in place with no way out. Soon the Japanese controlled the whole coast of Asia from Korea to Burma, modern day Myanmar.

In the meantime, my mother and her family had settled in California. My mother went to UC Berkeley where she met my father. He was two years older and when he graduated he enlisted in the army and was sent to Illious to learn airplane maintenance. Eventually my mother joined him there where they got married. They were only together for a month before my father was shipped out. It would be three years before they saw each other again.

My father was stationed in Dinjan, a small military airport in Assam, India, one of the wettest places in the world. His job was maintaining C-47 cargo planes flying military supplies over the Himalayas (aka The Hump) to the Chinese city of Kunming. The supplies were used to build the Burma Road and to fight the Japanese. As you can imagine, flying over the Himalayas was treacherous. Even experienced pilots had trouble. They’d leave the base in 90% humidity and forty minutes later there’d be two inches of ice coating their wings, lightning striking all around, and zero visibility. The pilots as well as the planes were pressed beyond endurance. With painful regularity, they crashed into the jungles of Burma or into the sides of the Himalayas. So many planes went down, their remains could be seen from the air. The pilots called this grim vestige of lost lives and planes “The Aluminum Trail.”

In 1944, my grandfather, sick with typhoid fever, finally headed home. It had been six years since he’d seen his family. The only way he or anyone could get out of China was to hitchhike the 2,000 miles across the country to Kunming. From Kunming, he flew over The Hump in one of the cargo planes from my father’s airport. Well, you can guess the happy ending of this story. And it was there, in hot humid India, my grandfather met my father, his new son-in-law, for the first time.