who came from a wealthy family and was known for his generosity. His favorite child was my mother, who, for as long as she could remember, had her own maids and servant girls. The family sought temporary refuge in Hong Kong when China fell to the Japanese.
My mother was named Hung U-Lan (delicate orchid). Tutors came to the home — she never had to go to a school, take an exam, cope with due dates, or face pressures from anything related to school. The learning regimen was constructed around her comfort level. My mother learned the proper manners befitting a young lady, developed an exquisite taste for fabrics, and was renowned for her tailoring abilities. The Chinese did not have access to Butterick or Simplicity patterns, so my mother learned to cut fabric without a pattern to make any clothing item we needed. It is a skill I never picked up.
We always thought that my mother was four years younger than my father until, after her death, we learned the long-held secret: they were the same age. For her generation, my mother married late because, the story goes, my grandmother did not find any young man worthy until she met my father. Since Chinese marriages in those days were primarily engineered by parents, my grandmother’s approval was paramount. While my grandmother was brought up in the “old” Chinese way, when foot-binding was the practice, she preferred a more modern approach and did not put my mother through that torture. She liked my father’s Western ways and the possibility of a different type of marriage for my mother.
We think our mother was smitten also. After a few dates, all chaperoned, the question of marriage came up. Like my father, my mother also faced a problem with the occupiers. The family had received an inquiry from a Japanese military officer for the hand of my mother. The only acceptable (though not truthful) answer they could give: she was already engaged.
So Peter Woo and Hung U-Lan, who were as different as night and day and who hardly knew each other, married on September 21, 1943. They immediately fled to China, where some regions were under Japanese occupation and other areas were fighting to retain control. As for so many, the war years were very difficult. My father could not work. My parents had to stay a step ahead of the Japanese, sometimes literally fleeing late at night on foot. My older siblings Helen and Paul were born during this period. My mother was resourceful and strong in ways she never had to be before. To generate cash, she gave her jewelry to my father to sell on the street. She would recount the agreement among fellow travelers on the run from the Japanese that the safety of the group could not be compromised by crying babies.
Years later, I got a glimpse of the trauma when I went to the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! with my mother. She sobbed from the beginning to the end: her whole life was upended by the invasion of the Japanese. The world she knew and grew up in disappeared in the war. Though we heard many stories of danger, escape, hardships, and bravery, I wish that we had heard and asked more about the bond that my parents developed as a newly married couple completely on their own in that chaotic, dangerous world. For example, I inherited a beautiful diamond and pearl gold bangle from my mother that my father bought from another peddler when he should have been selling, not buying, jewelry. I cherish this as part of the love story of my parents. I now know that we should ask, probe, dig deep to get our parents’ love story because this is a source of the magic of our lives.
The Immigrant Life
After the war, my parents returned to Hong Kong. It was supposed to be only temporary. They were planning to resettle in China. But a trip back to Fujien, their home province, sensitized them to another looming event: the onset of the Communist revolution. If my parents thought that their lives would return to normal after World War II, their plans were crushed.
In China, leaving one’s home meant leaving one’s assets and security, as land was the primary currency of wealth. Land was not just a financial holding, it was also part of one’s birthright, identity, and ancestry. Giving it up means an abrupt severing of the bond to one’s past.
I got some idea of what this meant when, in the 1990s, I brought my mother back to her childhood home in Xiamen, a large city in Fujien. The few remaining carved wood panels in the courtyard bore some indications of the home’s former elegance, but different sections and gardens of the home had been destroyed, torn down to make room for a factory, or carved up into one-room apartments. She tried to picture for me not only what the house once looked like, but also the warm glow of family and festivities that took place in that estate.
I also recall the night in the 1960s when my father received a telegram from China informing him of the removal of the ancestral graves from his home. He put down the letter, took off his spectacles, wiped away his tears, and could not speak.
The experiences of displacement by war and revolutions — starting all over again, figuring out how to make a living, finding one’s place in a new society — are very much the story of the immigrants, like my parents, who populated Hong Kong while I was growing up. Some would find their footing and make meaningful progress along a steady track. But others never adjusted to their new position, never found their place in their world’s new order.
Displacement was a common theme of my formative years. My mother, in a society with a new language and new technologies, was like an orchid that lost the protection of the greenhouse. Relatives from China took up temporary residence on our couches on their way to new lives. In the years of the Cultural Revolution in China, some told stories of the brutality of the Red Guards.
And of course, we were all keenly aware that Hong Kong’s status under the British would come to an end in 1997, when the colony would revert to Communist rule. What my parents had faced, political turmoil and regime change, would also be the defining reality for my generation. The hidden gift in this situation for my peers and me was that we seldom wasted time or resisted change. Everyone was focused on creating options and opportunities. Change would come, and it was just a matter of how we would prepare for it. In light of this background, it’s not surprising that leading organizations through change would eventually be my profession.
Given my father’s disappointment at not getting a son when I was born, one would imagine that we would not be close. It was the opposite. I credit this to the ingenuity of my nanny, whom we called Gaga long before there was Lady Gaga. My care was entrusted to her. Every morning I would join my father for breakfast. I was seated at a little table at his side — as children, we did not ascend to the “big” table until we learned our manners. My father would share his eggs and sausage with me. We had a chauffeur who drove my dad to work, and after breakfast my nanny would pack me up to go on the ride with him.
Schools in Hong Kong were so crowded with the swell of immigrant children that grades one, three, and five would get the afternoon shift, while two, four, and six went in the morning. So when I was in first and third grade, I got to ride with my father on his way to work. Even then, he was very proud of my good grades and showered me with admiration for my excellence in work and studies. I remember vividly that in third grade, during one of our rides, I told him that one day I would be a professor with a doctorate. I have no idea where that came from. Perhaps my father was reading one of his favorite magazines and mentioned with admiration some accomplished scholar with a Ph.D. I just automatically declared that, of course, this is what I would become.
My academic drive also provided me with a sense of belonging and worth. As the fifth child — and especially the fourth daughter with a younger brother — I was sort of lost in the shuffle. My two older sisters Irene and Maureen were pretty, while I was a chubby child. Friends of the family would affectionately describe me as “taking after my dad,” when everyone noted that my sisters resembled my mom, a lovely woman. Academic achievement became a safe haven for me, a place where nothing could go wrong, a solution to every challenge and worry. My drive was intense; it came from a place of insecurity and was a way to earn my worth. I was also compensating for my sister and brother who would upset my father with their terrible grades and embarrass my mother at teachers’ conferences.
