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New Year, New 'Legacy & Lore'

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New Year, New 'Legacy & Lore'

Join in the hunt for my father's mysterious treasure box

Aimee Liu
Jan 4, 2022
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New Year, New 'Legacy & Lore'

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My father, age 4, 1916, Shanghai

Happy 2022 !

I spent the holidays finishing up an assignment that’s consumed most of my energy for 14 months, and today I’m savoring the prospect of concentrating on my own work going forward. That work includes a memoir about my father that I started shortly after his death, way back in 2007. A lot of other books and projects have interrupted completion of Dad’s mystery, as I’ve come to think of it, but my resolution is to finish it this year. And that’s why I’m writing to you.

After posting several excerpts from the memoir over on Medium, I’ve discovered that there’s quite a lot of interest in my research and in my family’s uniquely Chinese-American story. I can’t overstate how much this interest helps as I push ahead with what sometimes seems a Sisyphean writing task. That’s why I’ve decided to devote this newsletter to the Legacy & Lore related to this project, including everything from historical tales of China to the craft of memoir writing.


Here’s the short version of Dad’s mystery:

My father was born in China, the first son of a Chinese scholar-revolutionary and his white American wife, and emigrated to the U.S. at age nineteen in 1932. That much I’d known all my life. But when Dad was dying, he asked me to bring him a box that he said contained a treasure. In the process of hunting for— and eventually finding— that box, I discovered secrets I’d never imagined, including lost family members and shameful betrayals, as well as a fascinating legacy of ancestral wealth, idealism, and tragedy.

I learned only a fragment of this story before Dad was gone, and I’m still piecing it together today. What’s emerging is helping me solve not only the mystery of my father’s enigmatic identity but also the riddle of my parents’ fraught marriage and, especially, my own struggles as a daughter of mixed-race descent.

Such insights are the most exciting and rewarding part of writing any memoir, and it can be frustrating to “sit on them” until the whole manuscript is completed and published. So I’ve decided to take a different route this time, one that I’ve never taken with any of my other books. I’m going to keep snipping and sharing tales from the memoir in this newsletter as I go. That way, you can come along on this wild writing ride. You will keep me honest. And I hope you’ll find Dad’s mystery as compelling as I do. We’ll figure out the ending together!


To get us started, I’ve gathered all my posts to date that are based on my father’s memoir and shared them right here at Legends & Lore. You may have already seen them, but in case you’re new to my work, please click on the links below. I hope you enjoy them!

Legacy & Lore
Family Photos Can Change You
Read more
a year ago · Aimee Liu
Legacy & Lore
When Anti-Miscegenation Laws Reflected the Worst Kind of Bigotry
“Los Angeles Heiress Elopes With a Chink” That headline still shocks me. It shouldn’t. Epithets like “chink” and “Chinaman” may have fallen from favor, but as we’ve seen throughout the past year, anti-Asian hate seethes just below America’s surface. And historically, nothing triggers racist venom like the prospect of “mongrelization.” To prevent intermar…
Read more
a year ago · Aimee Liu
Legacy & Lore
Yellowface in the Family
I was cleaning out my father’s office after his death when I discovered the history of his movie years, stuffed into a soft red and gold Moroccan leather folio. This trove of yellowing newspaper clippings and gauzy headshots thrilled me. Here at last was the archive that would help me piece together Dad’s unlikely acting care…
Read more
a year ago · Aimee Liu
Legacy & Lore
The Foster Sister I Never Knew
I was born three years after my parents gave my foster sister back. As far as my mother was concerned, I replaced her. My father, I’m not so sure. Josie would have been about six by then. My brother, Marc, was seven. I grew up without knowing the first thing about Josie’s existence…
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a year ago · Aimee Liu
Legacy & Lore
Learning to Welcome the Stranger Within
1. When I was three, my family lived in a house in New Delhi with a rooftop terrace where we slept out in the open on hot summer nights. My first memories are filled with that Indian ocean of stars overhead, the desert sky stretching wide and deep and uncannily quiet around us, and the darkness pungent…
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a year ago · Aimee Liu

I hope to dive back into the memoir as soon as I finish this post. Watch this space for the next excerpt.

Until then, I wish you a safe, healthy, and energetic start to 2022.

Thanks for reading!

Aimee

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