Another testimony from a grateful Chinese brother:

Nov. 6th, 2005 was a different Lord’s Day than usual. My eldest daughter, Kathryn, wasn’t feeling well so my wife stayed home with her. My youngest daughter, Tara, and I headed out to Christ’s Church by ourselves. Our friends had just returned from the 2nd annual Christian Film Festival. They had brought along The League of Grateful Sons movie to share with everyone in the afternoon after the meal.

The movie was very moving to me, not only for the stories told, but also by the challenge of honoring our fathers and learning from them before it was too late. I had often thought that we needed to hear and record many of the stories of our parents as all of them had gone through World War II and escaped with their lives. I only knew shades of the stories from when I was young. But those good intentions to hear the stories had never been translated into any type of action. Deuteronomy 32:7 became the verse which would turn our conviction into action.

We discussed the film as a family and I revealed my conviction to finally make a trip expressly for our family to hear the life story of my parents. We decided by Tuesday, the 8th, to go to North Carolina over Christmas to accomplish this. Over the next month, we discussed several times about how to get YehYeh and NiNi (grandfather and grandmother on your father’s side) to tell their life stories. We decided we would videotape my daughters with their grandparents in an interview type format. We would also ask to view old photos and our family tree, which I had seen previously. From what I remembered, I was the 20th generation recorded in the family tree archive.

After arriving in Durham, NC and celebrating Christmas together as a family, we finally got to our main purpose for the trip. We learned of God’s protection over my parents through the war despite several dangerous and life-threatening events. It was very emotional to hear that my grandmothers were both heroines in leading their families to safety from the invading Japanese. We walked through both of my parents’ childhoods, through the Japanese occupation, and the eventual communist Chinese revolution which led to the fleeing of their families to Taiwan.

One of the highlights of our trip was discovering that the family tree of which I was the 20th generation was actually a second volume of the family archives. It had restarted numbering generations when the family moved from modern Shandong province to Jiangsu province. The first volume, I discovered, had an additional 50 generations prior to the second volume! So, including my daughters who were added in 2000, we had 71 generations recorded in our line of the family tree. That was rather mind-boggling to me. Then I learned from my father that the 1st ancestor named Yen-Hui was Confucius’ favorite student and was very famous in Chinese history. A quick google on his name and I was able to date our family line back to 514 BC!

The whole trip was just very memorable for our whole family. My parents were honored, and we all learned so much of our rich family history which my daughters will be able to share with their children and their children’s children.