Currently my Grandma is retired and living in Ohio; however, she was born in China during WWII. My grandma does not remember the house she was born in as, when she was very young, her family was fleeing away from the front lines of the war around to near Yunnan Province. Some of her earliest memories are of fleeing to caves for shelter during Japanese bombings. Her uncle was a general in the Republic of China Military headed by the Kuomintang political faction and trained troops. My Grandma’s Uncle was not a favored General, so at the end of WWII her uncle was banished to Taiwan. As luck would have it, soon after her Uncle was banished the Communists defeated the Republic of China’s military and created the People’s Republic of China. While in Taiwan my Grandma went to college served as an English translator in a factory. While attending college my grandma was persuaded to take admissions test, which unbeknownst to her was for a full scholarship at Seattle University’s nursing program. Only after getting the highest score on the test did she find out what it was for. Although the scholarship allowed my Grandma to get out of Taiwan, her father had been a doctor and had died from exposure to diseases, so she was not in favor of becoming a nurse. Nevertheless, she had gotten the highest score on the test and had no choice in the matter. Incidentally because, she was rushed out of the country she did not have time to correct her PE grade and did not graduate from the National Taiwan University until much later. Although my grandma did not want to become a nurse, she had a friend in the same nursing program and it gave her more opportunities than she would have had in Taiwan. When she first got to America my grandma had trouble understanding English as it was spoken quicker than she was accustomed to hearing, and for the first three years felt mute and deaf. She was also amazed at how expensive everything was in America since, at the time the conversation rate for the New Taiwanese dollar and American dollars was 36:1. Part way through the nursing program my Grandma went to visit her brother, who was living in San Francisco and never went back choosing to instead live in San Francisco and later go to UCLA.
