The Hon. H. I. Hwang (1911-2007)

At waning days (1911) of the Qing Dynasty, before summer got into the full swing, a baby boy was born in AnDong （安東）(nowadays 吉林) in Manchuria. H. I. Hwang is my dad’s name. His Chinese name is 黃雄毅. Usually, Chinese with the same surname as ours would translate 黃 to Huang in English. Only Koreans spell it in Hwang. Dad never told me why, but my guess is this might have something to do with the place he grew up was but a stone-throwing away from the Ya Lu River（鴨綠江），which divided China and Korea for thousands of years. Actually, the family came from Chong-Ming （崇明）, an island at mouth of the Yan-Zi River（長江）, now part of the greater Shanghai（上海市）. My grandfather was a successful developer in the timber business. Where else in China save Manchuria had richer forest at turn of the 20th Century? That's why we had this southern family translated in the Northern China, speaking Mandarin. The family was growing. In a few years, my father had three more siblings, including my uncle, Col. H. S. Hwang（黃雄盛）.

Came October that year, Dr. Sun Yet-Shen （孫中山先生）, founding father of modern China, finally succeeded in leading the revolution to overthrow Imperial China, hence ushered in the Republic era of new China. Unfortunately, peace and unification didn’t come right away. Thereafter, twenty years of civil war between the war lords ensued, compounded by the aggression of Japanese military government, leading up to the Mukden Incident（九一八事變）in 1931 resulted in Japan overtaking the entire Manchuria. Around the time of 1920, anticipating the coming of upheavals, my grandfather sent all the children back home to continue study in the south. Before they even settled down, however, the sad news came. The children learned their father collapsed and died suddenly just before he himself was ready to rejoin them in Chong-Ming.

My dad lost his father at the tender age of ten.

The young lad was thus primarily raised by his Mom, who, according to my Mom was an extremely nice lady and a caring mother, whom she met while my parents were dating. My Mom and Dad were married a few years after WWII. It might be the war, or could be the careers or something, they both got married a little bit late relative to their contemporary. The picture shown here was scanned in by my son Truman from the original photo, which was taken on their wedding day at Shanghai in 1948.

I was born in the summer of 1949, the first child in the family. This is the earlies picture I've collected that has my dad and me. We lived in Taipei on YongKang Street (永康街). I think when this picture was taken, I was merely a few weeks old and it was on the street of YongKang. For the namesake of the street, my Chinese middle name is Kang 康. For a while, my God-parents, Pans 潘家, and their family stayed with us. Later, my uncle (dad's younger brother) and his family moved to the house after we left Taipei.

When I was almost two years old, due to my dad's job transfer the family moved to southern part of Taiwan (PingDong 屏東) and lived there for couple of years. My memory for that period was as hazy as the hot weather there. By the time I was four, we moved back to Taipei. This picture I believe was taken in PingDong. How do you like that little suspenders I was wearing? After the move, we first shared a big three-story house with two other families, Gus 顧家and Hes 何家. They were very nice to us. Gus even became by God-parents. By 1954, the remoldering of our house on Taishun Street was ready for us to move in, and it's become our home sweet home until January 2006 for over half a century.