A completely true and accurate tale of epic love

Dan and I are star-crossed lovers.

And I'm not talking about the stars of blind rage I see before my eyes whenever Dan somehow manages to flood the bathroom surfaces with water... again. I'm also not talking about the many to-do lists Dan has crossed off in a feeble attempt to contain my maniacal organizing. I'm talking about our place in time and space; our worldlines that keep bumping into each other, falling over, and getting tangled into ridiculous love knots. The heavens conspired to bring us together. History itself brought us together. Yes, I really do think of our life in terms of such grandiosity.

The epic tale begins around the turn of the twentieth century in Imperial China (no really, it actually does). Dan's great-grandparents and their numerous relatives were generally living in the lap of luxury, owning lots of land, owning lots of slaves, and hobnobbing with Cixi, the Empress of China, who gifted the family a ceremonial vest that is still in our family today.

This is Cixi in all her circa-1900 Chinese glory.

Dan's family continued being rich Chinese people for several more decades, until World War Two happened. That put the kabosh on lots of stuff for lots of Chinese people, including Dan's relatives. However, if you once hung out with royalty, your sense of pride tends to hang around, no matter how many bombs are falling on the ground outside your ancestral compound. They still had their rich people snobbishness, and no Japanese invader could take that away.

And then, from somewhere in the north of China, a young army officer came a-courting Dan's grandmother. This was a young woman who was so privileged for the time that she didn't know how to cook because her slave always cooked for her. Normally, her family would have turned up their collective noses at the self-made army officer, but times were hard. Besides, as an army officer, he had access to items like cigarettes and chocolate. He wooed and won Dan's grandmother and her extended family feasted on cigarettes and chocolate until the end of the war. All was good.

The Chinese won the war. The Japanese were driven out of the country, and it seemed like all would be well. But then the unexpected happened. A man named Mao Zedong seized control of the newly-freed country.

Mao: Killed a lot of people, responsible for Dan meeting Grace

According to the new Chinese government, Dan's grandparents were at the top of the hit list. Not only were Dan's grandmother's family members kind of textbook evil landowners, but Dan's grandfather had fought the Japanese under the former Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, of whom Mao was decidedly not fond.

Dan's grandparents wisely decided to flee the country. They boarded the first flight they could to the island nation of Taiwan, which had become the refuge of many Chinese people who didn't like where Mao was going with the nation. As they were on the runway, Dan's grandfather noticed a convoy of Communist army vehicles coming towards their plane... fast. So fast, in fact, that they were rapidly catching up to the getaway jet, which was so loaded down by furniture and clothing that it was barely able to taxi down the runway. Dan's grandfather and the other men on the plane immediately began to toss all of their possessions out of the plane into the path of the oncoming soldiers, and took more than a few passing shots in order to... uh... slow them down. The plane landed safely in Taiwan, but Dan's grandparents were now penniless. The only possessions that they had been able to salvage were a few family heirlooms and Dan's grandmother's favorite slave.

They spent the next several decades in Taiwan. They had several children, lived a life, and learned to cook. By the time Dan's mom met a dashing young professional snack-devourer and mathematician, the riches were long gone. As was the case with the land and possessions of the other members of China's upper classes, the Communists took or destroyed everything that Dan's extended family had ever owned in China. The ancestral compound survived and was turned into an elementary school. (Yes, it really was that big. Sometime in the nineties Dan's parents were actually contacted by the now-slightly-more-sane Chinese government about the status of the compound. Would they like to be the proud owners of their ancestors' square city block of home? His parents declined and the compound was turned into apartments.)

Because they lived in Taiwan, Dan's parents had the opportunity to leave the country and go hang out in America. That was a luxury that not everyone had in the very anti-intellectual environment of pre-Millennium China. After Dan's dad got a doctorate, they settled in Pennsylvania and produced their crowning achievement, Daniel Lo Huang, on a June day in 1985. Their crowning achievement met the instrument of his eternal torment in August of 2003 and married in May of 2011.

So, in short, what do you get when you cross ancestral jades and rubies with peasant serfdom, the Summer Palace, cultural genocide, cooking, statistics, and Lehigh University?

This.

I actually picked one of our more flattering photos for this post.

Star-crossed lovers.