MY GRANDMOTHER GRADUATED FROM GINLING WOMEN’S College with a chemistry degree in June 1937, just six months before the Japanese would occupy Nanjing and begin the Rape of Nanking. The afternoon of the graduation ceremony, her entire class served as bridesmaids in a classmate’s wedding. They wore custom-made light green qipaos and daisy chains in their hair and split into two lines that the bride walked between. The class had pooled their money to buy a set of Jingdezhen porcelain and charged my grandmother with ordering the gift, having it inscribed in Jiujiang, and sending it to the newlyweds. But by the time the porcelain was ready to mail, the war had begun, and my grandmother, in a hurry to leave, left the set at home in Xingang. She never found out if her family mailed the gift for her, or what happened to her classmate. Many years later, once my grandmother was in Taiwan, she cleared her conscience by donating a sum of money to Ginling in the name of the class of 1937.

The Rulison school wanted my grandmother to return to Jiujiang and teach, but she had gotten used to her freedom. In spite of the war, missionary schools all over China were hiring, and Ginling graduates were in high demand, especially one with a minor in education like my grandmother. Her parents were long dead, the age difference with her sisters had prevented her from developing a close bond with them, and she had no interest in living anywhere near the thumb of her grandfather as an adult. Eager to explore a new part of China, and still angry at her grandfather for preventing her from going to medical school, she accepted a job with Union Normal School for Girls in Guangzhou.

By then Republic of China president Chiang Kai-shek was waging battles against the Japanese throughout northern and central China. The south, however, remained relatively peaceful, and my grandmother wrote back to Xingang that she had arrived safely in Guangzhou. But just a few days later, the Japanese began bombing the city, targeting transportation and military assets but hitting schools and missions, too. The Union leadership moved the institution into the countryside and rented an abandoned school, but less than a month later the Japanese began to use the school as a landmark for lining up their bombing runs on the train station. Every day Japanese planes circled the school to orient themselves, flew off to drop a bomb, and returned for another pass as the terrified Union teachers and students took shelter in the basement, unsure if a bomb might also fall on them. The school moved again, this time to the neutral territory of Macau, a privilege not afforded to public Chinese schools, which stuck it out in the countryside and hoped for the best. The Union students and teachers crammed into rowboats, covered with tarps and launched at intervals to prevent drawing attention from the Japanese, and floated south to Macau.

While my great-great-grandfather made his harrowing escape to Chongqing, my grandmother remained tucked away in paradise. Macau’s skies were uncluttered with bombers, its streets clear of soldiers, and Union had created a campus out of a group of vacant houses near the beach. Despite the war raging across the border, the school’s laboratory remained fully stocked with chemicals and equipment. Everything my grandmother requested, including scripts for the drama club that she advised, could be procured. My grandmother taught chemistry and natural sciences, and her students scored well on their college entrance exams; many of them went on to become departmental heads at various universities or physicians, fulfilling my grandmother’s dream by proxy. After dinner she would descend the hill and spend the last bit of light walking the seaside. On weekends the teachers took in Deanna Durbin musicals at the movie theater.

My grandmother was introduced to a Hong Kong hotelier who sought an English and Mandarin speaker to tutor his children. Soon she was taking the ferry to Hong Kong during vacations and staying in the Metropole Hotel in the city center. In the evenings she would visit her old chemistry lab partner from Ginling. They would go out for a movie and ice cream or, if it was particularly hot that night, cool off by riding the ferry to Kowloon and back, chatting and watching the lights in Victoria Harbor.

My grandmother remembered her years in Macau as the most blissful period of her life. Then, in December 1941, on the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces invaded Hong Kong. The badly outnumbered British colony fought for more than two weeks before surrendering on Christmas Day. That cut off Macau’s primary supply line. What little food that got into Macau became more and more expensive, until nothing came at all. My grandmother ventured out one day to buy some biscuits and had them stolen right out of her hand. A male teacher happened to be behind her and snatched the biscuits back. Bodies accumulated in the streets and on the doorstep of the Union campus. Rumors of cannibalism spread, and the school’s ayis made it a daily habit to go out and look at the carcasses. No one dared to go out at night. My grandmother began to think about making a run for it back to Chongqing.

At the time the Kuomintang was desperate for skilled manpower and enticed educated overseas Chinese back to the mainland with jobs, free housing, and free postsecondary schooling, plus a monthly stipend. My grandmother found a travel partner in another Union teacher, and they entered China through Guangzhou Bay, which was still a French territorial holding. From there they went through Guangxi and Guizhou, walking, riding boats, and hitching rides with Kuomintang military trucks, sitting on top of sacks of rice and canned goods as dust kicked up by the tires covered them head to toe. They carried just a single large bag each, packed with clothing and food. My grandmother left everything else, including all her letters and an entire suitcase full of photographs, in Macau. They bivouacked in filthy roadside inns, wrapping themselves in their own clean bedding in a futile attempt to ward off critters, but were so exhausted that they slept through the bedbug attacks.

But that would be as bad as it got. And the coolies and porters who carried their bags treated them honorably. After four weeks on the road, my grandmother reached Chongqing. She bunked in a residence for returning Chinese until she found one of her former science professors from Ginling, who used to host pancake and milk breakfasts on the weekends for his students, and who arranged for her to live with another married couple. The professor also introduced her to the director of the education ministry, who saw my grandmother’s chemistry degree and assigned her to the ballistics research laboratory in a munitions factory that had relocated from Nanjing.

The arsenal dated back to 1865, when a Qing viceroy set up the Jinling Manufacturing Bureau. In the aftermath of the Opium War defeats, a group of Qing officials argued for the adoption of Western weaponry and military technology. These “self-strengtheners” proposed opening arsenals and shipyards in each major port, and the Jinling Arsenal, as it became known, was soon making guns, shells, and even rockets. But the self-strengthening movement was concerned only with developing modern armaments, not social change, and like most of the last-gasp Qing reforms, it had a brief period of growth followed by a sharp decline. By the time the Kuomintang took control of the arsenal in 1934, its physical plant was so badly outdated that the new government had to start from scratch.

A supervisor at the munitions factory, believing that women should marry, especially in wartime, introduced my grandmother to a metallurgist from the materials and testing department. He was tall, liked to eat peanuts and play basketball, and came from Hubei province, Jiangxi’s neighbor to the northwest. They married about six months later. I’d asked my grandmother about her first impressions of my grandfather. “It wasn’t as if I took one look and liked him or loved him,” she said. “My professor said to not stay single, it’s better if you’re married, so I listened. I didn’t marry him because I liked him. They just told me that being married was safer and more convenient. So we got married. Whatever.”

During my grandparents’ courtship, my grandfather’s apprentice, a teenager named Chang Guo Liang, delivered the letters they wrote back and forth, walking about an hour between the two departments. Chang Guo Liang remained at my grandfather’s side when the munitions factory returned to Nanjing after the Sino-Japanese War and when the family fled to Taiwan. As the ablest man in the group, he helped them out of plenty of tight situations and literally became part of the family. He lived with them for many years, and when he married, my mother and her brothers called his wife by the kinship term for “sister-in-law.” Now in his eighties, he lived in Kaohsiung, on Taiwan’s southern tip and the island’s second-largest city, where my mother had grown up. Both my grandmother and San Yi Po had told me that he might still have a porcelain jar from my great-great-grandfather’s collection.