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In the early spring of 1938, my grandfather was approached by a representative of Chiang Kai-shek's government and invited to lecture at Chongqing's Polytechnical Teachers' Institute. Chinese forces had recently moved their capital from Nanjing to Chongqing to continue fighting Imperial Japan's brutal occupation of China's coast and cities. China's strongman had been impressed by my grandfather's easy wit and strong command of the Chinese language. Following a chance encounter at a conference in Sichuan's largest city, the two men had struck up a friendship that was to last forty years and enrich both their lives and those of their families.
It was during an extended trip to China's western provinces, where my grandfather had hoped to further refine his already prodigious knowledge of Chinese dialects and languages, that he unwittingly walked into a temple hoping to visit the local abbot, only to stumble, quite innocently, upon Chiang and members of his extended family. The two men exchanged pleasantries but soon became engrossed in a conversation the likes of which his aide-de-camp had never seen him indulge in. At the time, the great man was secretly planning to lead a million Nationalist conscripts in a bloody campaign to flush out Mao's red bandits from Gansu and Shaanxi, rather than fight the Japanese alongside the Communists, as he had earlier agreed to do.
In 1934, Mao's troops had managed to regroup and lick their wounds after enduring a forced march and a fighting retreat to escape Chiang's military advances into their original Soviet base in Jiangxi Province. His army, thinned by hunger, disease and fiercely contested military clashes, had seen its ranks severely diminished, as had those of the First Chinese Soviet Republic. Only a few thousand bloodied and exhausted veterans remained. Strategic plans to finish them off had been drawn up in 1936, but Chiang had been kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang and forced to agree to a truce and a much-hated pact with Mao's Communist Party to fight the Japanese menace together in the East.
A few weeks earlier, after a long and treacherous sea voyage aboard the HMS Bering Strait and a fourteen-day trip up the Yangtze, my grandfather had found himself gazing upon a great alluvial plain, absent-mindedly marvelling at the expertly planted rice paddies over which so many tanned and bare-chested natives toiled night and day.
To get this far into China's countryside, he had managed to hitch a ride in Chiang's private car, which had now stopped to let its half-dozen military officers and their mistresses stretch their legs and smoke the French cigarettes he had bought in Hong Kong upon disembarking at Tsim Sha Tsui. He knew that someday he might call upon this camaraderie to achieve his many aims, dreams and wishes.
Making lifelong friends out of casual acquaintances had always been a gift he had, by now, almost taken for granted. But this time, it was to change his life forever, in ways he could never have anticipated. While China tried to march onward and away from its troubled and tortured past, my grandfather found himself swept up and transformed by events far beyond his grasp, events that were to irrevocably change his life in ways his children and grandchildren would marvel at to this day. China was about to be further put to the sword and torch, but his own fate was about to become even more unexpected than his already storied escape from the impoverished and vengeful hills of his Corsican birthplace.
My grandfather started life as the youngest son of a family of merchants whose fortunes were rapidly diminishing due to an influx of cheap imported salt and a new road, recently built and completed by German prisoners of war as part of reparations designed to punish Germany but also compensate for French economic losses suffered during the First World War. The road brought my ambitious grandfather newfound opportunities to escape the family's trade. But along with the outside world came the Spanish flu and the cheap salt, which had previously brought the family the great wealth and prestige to which these Corsican aristocrats had grown accustomed in their distant and storied past.
The backs of the family's mules, along with its fortune, were soon broken by this newfound commercial route, while the dreaded flu sent most of his siblings and relatives to early and unexpectedly rocky graves.
Shortly after burying a sister and an older brother, in November 1920, he rode the last mule train to the sea and boarded the rusted hulk of an Italian ship ferrying a cargo of wine and tangerines to Sorrento, on Italy's Amalfi Coast. From Sorrento, he made his way to Padua and called on a family friend his father had befriended during the First World War. Over a glass of wine, tomato slices and bruccio cheese, he recounted the family's fall from grace and called upon him to make good on the promises he had made while battling the guns that the Kaiser and his Huns had so fiendishly and abundantly mass-produced in the Ruhr Valley.
Luciano Battesti had met my grandfather's father in the trenches and had been billeted in small, rain-beaten, beet-farming villages between Lille and Cambrai. Even though my great-grandfather was Corsican and Luciano Italian, they had managed to disregard the ancestral enmities between their two countries. Amid the muddied guts and rotting corpses of their compatriots, the two young men had become friends in Pozières and Bazentin.
Four years had passed since that summer, and Luciano could do nothing but mourn the death of his old friend and offer my grandfather a job as a clerical Orientalist at Padua University's Institute of Far Eastern Languages. He remained there until 1922, when he was relieved of his duties after refusing to help Padua's militias torch old books and anarchist manuscripts deemed unpatriotic by Benito Mussolini and his Fascist brutes...
To be continued...
In other news:
A man walks into his house with a duck tucked under his arm. Upon seeing his wife, he announces loudly:
"This is the pig I've been fucking all this time!"
His wife, perplexed and amused, responds in surprise:
"Honey, that's not a pig. That's a duck under your arm!"