My grandfather attended University of Nanking , graduating in 1932 with a degree in physics. His career from 1932 – 1946 during the war was not fully known to us. In 2019, two unexpected sources sent documents to my email – one from China and one from England – neatly filling in the missing pieces. From 1932 – 36, he continued at the University as a research assistant and in November 1936, he joined the NRC as a technician for Central Machine Works. His work took him to Sharsus, Hong Kong, Kunming and Chungking. Afterward, in 1940 he joined Mingseng Machine Works and came to the United States for training in US Naval shipbuilding sites.
Sometimes, despite our best efforts to track down clues, we come up empty handed. This was the case during a trip to Nanjing in 2017, two years before those serendipitous documents arrived in my inbox. My brother and I retraced my grandparents’ footsteps on a visit to see the campuses of Ginling College (my grandmother’s alma mater) and University of Nanking in the hope of gleaning more information about their time in Nanking. Instead, we walked away with memorable re-enactments of my grandfather’s old photographs.
