The Spiritual and Cultural Legacy Left by My Mother

My mother had a talent for writing. Her handwriting was beautiful, and her articles were grounded in real life and rich in emotion. People jokingly called her "Scholar Luo" (our family name is Luo). Many times, she was specifically requested by leaders to write speeches for them. These requests were often urgent, and she would work overnight to get them done.

Among my three brothers, after entering college, I was the one who corresponded with home the most. I also kept in frequent contact with my birth father’s relatives (the Cao family). My father (step father) rarely wrote letters, and when he did, it was usually just a few words appended to my mother’s letters. My mother wrote more frequently, covering topics from daily life to philosophy and interpersonal relationships. Her handwriting was smooth and her writing style flowed like water—it felt like chatting with her.

My letters were generally responses to my parents’ concerns, along with my own greetings. Occasionally, I wrote at length. For instance, my birth father, Cao Zhongxian, was wrongfully labeled a “Rightist” in 1957, dismissed from his job, and died of starvation at a labor farm in 1961. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1978. The Cao family contacted me and asked me to change my surname to Cao. My parents never expressed an opinion on this, but I understood how they felt. After long consideration, I wrote a long letter to my father to express my gratitude for raising and caring for me. I told him I would not change my surname and would continue to be a Shang, but to comfort the Cao relatives, I would consider giving the Cao surname to my future child. He never replied, but the relatives later told me that my parents had shown that letter to some of the extended family. So I know they kept that letter, especially since it was such an important one.

As for the letters they sent me, I did not keep them for a long time. When I went to study in the U.S. in 1991, all the letters my parents had written were lost. After arriving in the U.S., international phone calls were too expensive at the time, so we continued to communicate mainly by letter—roughly once a month or every two months. Most of the time, my mother would write first, and then I would reply. Unfortunately, I still didn’t keep those letters. It wasn’t until around 1997, as I neared graduation and started job hunting, that I began saving their letters. But even then, I just put them all into a large folder without organizing them.

Most of my mother’s letters expressed concern for our lives in the U.S. She always said that she and my father were doing well and that we shouldn’t worry. "You are struggling financially—don’t send us money," she would write. My father always repeated two phrases: "Don’t send money. Don’t come back." Of course, when he said "don’t come back," he didn’t mean not to visit, but that I shouldn’t return to China permanently. He hoped I would settle down and build a life in the U.S. Although he never explained why, I understood his reasons.

After 2000, calling China became cheap using calling cards, and gradually we switched to phone calls instead of letters. Over the decades, I must have sent over 200 letters home, and I believe they kept many of them.

I began to feel they were aging around 2002. In my heart, I wished my mother would write her memoirs. Soon after, she replied that she couldn’t—writing gave her headaches and her eyes were failing. In 2003, I asked them instead to write a brief autobiography to leave behind a record of their lives for us and our children. This time, they took several months to carefully reflect on their past and wrote it out. They placed it in a large envelope and mailed it to me in the U.S. in 2004.

 

 

My father's writing was very simple, mainly consisting of a family genealogy, with a few brief explanations. He said nothing about how he joined the Communist Party, how he enlisted in the army, or how he ended up staying in Zhijiang as a cadre.

My mother’s writing, on the other hand, was much richer and more detailed. She described how, as the youngest child, and being bright, she was deeply loved by her father (my grandfather). Because of this, she was given the opportunity to go to school—something her older siblings didn’t receive. However, due to the muddle-headedness of her own father, she was also engaged at a very young age in a child marriage. Although the engagement was annulled after the Communist liberation, the groom’s family, who held great power in the local area, continued to retaliate and slander her. As a result, for decades, both her father and brothers were wrongly labeled as "counter-revolutionaries," which prevented her from joining the Party or receiving any promotions.

On top of that, her birth father was wrongfully classified as a Rightist, which made the situation even worse. She also wrote about how her brothers and sisters—because of family background issues—were mostly unable to go to college or get urban jobs that would have freed them from rural life. One of her older sisters, my eldest aunt, was so poor that she had no food to eat. She resorted to eating Guanyin soil (a type of clay traditionally believed to stave off hunger), became severely constipated, and, with no money to see a doctor, was ultimately suffocated to death from the condition.

The ten-plus page letter was essentially a condensed memoir.

 

Here is the English translation of your passage:

After reading it, I felt a heavy weight in my heart. I remembered how my mother once told me that after many failed attempts to appeal her case, an investigator came to our home again and informed her that the local commune (which was controlled by the family of the man from the arranged marriage) refused to change their political classification of my grandfather and uncles. As a result, my mother’s opportunity for promotion was once again denied. She cried in front of the investigator. I was ten years old, standing outside the door, feeling completely helpless.

My mother once told me that after my birth father was labeled a Rightist, she had thoughts of suicide. But my grandmother kept encouraging her, and since I was just a few months old at the time, she couldn’t bear to leave me behind. I still remember when I was about one or two years old, my mother would often hold me in her arms and whisper, “Baby, what would you do if Mommy were gone?”

This time, I locked what they had written into a safe.

In 2007, my younger brother in Singapore and I jointly bought an apartment for our parents in the best residential complex in Zhijiang at the time. Later, we hired two caregivers to look after them. When they became seriously ill, our youngest brother, who was still living in China, returned home specifically to help take care of them.

But my parents aged much faster than I had expected. In 2015, my father passed away. When I returned home to visit, my mother had already been admitted to the hospital and was suffering from dementia. When I went to see her, her eyes didn’t open—I didn’t know if she could sense I was there. The caregiver said that when I called out “Mom,” her eyelids seemed to flutter a little. Perhaps she did feel I had come.

At that time, I remembered that my parents must have kept many letters and the things they had written. I searched the house but found nothing. I asked my younger brother, and he said he didn’t know; the caregivers had been living in the house, and he only visited occasionally. Later, when he asked the caregivers, they claimed nothing had been left behind. Most likely, after my parents had both developed dementias, the caregivers thought those papers weren’t valuable. And since we never told them to keep anything, they probably threw them away. But they denied discarding anything.

This was a huge blow to me—a tremendous loss. None of the letters I wrote to them were preserved. None of the essays or writings they had composed remained. Just as photographs record a person’s appearance over time, letters and writing preserve their thoughts, and the communication between us. The photos are still here, but the words are gone. All that’s left is the memory of their outward appearance, but no record of their thoughts or spirit. Appearance is static; thought is flowing. The combination of the two is what truly captures the wholeness of a person. Now that their thoughts and spirit are lost, it feels like their soul is gone.

I’m grateful that I asked them to write an autobiographical memoir while they were still lucid—and that I preserved it. Recently, I sorted through some of the letters they had sent me, and placed them together with their memoir in a binder. Now I can look through them whenever I have time.

 

Reading my mother’s letters, seeing the smooth, flowing handwriting, I could almost feel her presence as she wrote on the page—pouring her love, worries, blessings, and hopes through the tip of her pen. The paper still holds the fingerprints she left behind, the traces of her pen moving with the rise and fall of her emotions. Those continuous, unbroken characters are like flowing water—they seem to speak. And in that moment, it’s as if my mother’s voice is gently echoing in my ears once again.

 

I consider my parents’ letters and the autobiographies they wrote to be precious spiritual and cultural legacies—far more valuable than any material inheritance. Every time I open those pages, I feel as though they are still speaking to me, still alive, still by my side.

Because of this lesson, over the past ten years I have published some of my research on Chinese character pictographs, pictographic calligraphy, and a few essays on Amazon. Although few people buy them, as long as Amazon doesn’t shut down, they’ll remain there. I believe that some things—such as the study of pictographic origins of Chinese characters and pictographic calligraphy—will one day be recognized for their value. It’s far better than leaving them to children who neither understand nor care about them. It’s also much safer.

Although most of my parents’ letters have been lost, the ones that remain, along with their autobiographies, continue to provide me with a rich spiritual and cultural inheritance that will accompany me throughout my life.

Written on May 10, 2025, on the eve of Mother’s Day.