GONG GONGMANDARIN FOR "GRANDFATHER"

Gong Gong (Mandarin for “grandfather”) was a victim of the Chinese Civil War. At the age of nine, he watched as communist guards mercilessly shot his father in the head for walking “too slow.” His surviving family was forced into concentration camps where they suffered physical, mental, and sexual abuse at the hands of corrupt guards. Among the five siblings, two escaped. 

Gong Gong and his brother were smuggled across the Taiwan strait by a sympathetic fisherman. The two lived in poverty, waking up at sunrise each morning to collect enough sticks to fuel their cooking fire. Finishing at the top of his class every year of high school, Gong Gong eventually earned a merit scholarship to attend college and moved to America in the 1960s. Today, Gong Gong lives with Lao Lao (Mandarin for “grandmother”) in the suburbs of Seattle. He still wakes up at 5 each morning. He avoids talking about his childhood, confessing that he cannot recall his story without being brought to tears.