<Begin Segment 21>

PW: What's her family background?

PY: She's a war refugee from... her family, she was literally, as an infant, carried out of Shanghai in 1949. Her family was split politically. Some of her uncles were in the party, and her parents were not. But one of her uncles was in the party, and some of the uncles were very early in the party. They weren't on the long march, but they were up in, god, where was that? City up in northwest China where it was the Communist center point. So they go to Malaysia where Sara's mother's family is kind of a Shanghai-Beijing family, her father is Fukien. Her father's older brother had a school in Malaysia. And so they go to Malaysia, and that's where Sara spends her young childhood. But at the same time, there was a growing anti-colonial movement in Malaysia against the British. And so she leaves China as the Communists were taking over, and she leaves Malaysia as the British are establishing concentration camps for anti-colonial liberation fighters, and they come to the United States. And that's another long story. Her mother was, as a young child, adopted by an American missionary doctor, Ruth Hemengway, who was one of the first women graduates from Tufts medical school. And how she ends up in China is because one of her classmates, one of her only women classmates was Sara's grand-aunt, who was, had a smart person in the family, saw the family decline, change in China, and used a lot of the last of the remaining family wealth to educate all the kids. Sent them off to London, to America, boys and girls.

PW: And when her parents came to the United States, did they land in San Francisco?

PY: They went from Malaysia, landed on Thanksgiving Day in Boston. So she grew up in Western Mass outside of any Asian American thing. And just another one of the coincidences. Our community just, her mother was a trained nurse in China and became a, wasn't an RN but worked as a, in natal units in hospitals in Western Massachusetts, became acquainted with Philip's host mother. Anyhow, they grew up outside of that and just kind of... I would call them double refugees. And so they came slightly before Ruth Hemengway was active in Western Massachusetts Republican politics, and she was able to get them on a rider in a bill, so they came in kind of on their own thing. I guess around '59... so she comes to graduate school out here, to go to Berkeley, drives across the United States by herself, doesn't know anybody here. Apparently did very well, she got accepted into the State Department, but the war's in the midst of the early '70s, and she turned that down and went on the road for three years. Spent a year in Australia teaching with her boyfriend at that time and then they spent the next year slow boating through the Malaysian archipelago, Indonesian archipelago. They were actually in Laos in '72 or something like that and just kind of, southern Laos, and just like holy shit. And then Chris comes back to the United States and Sara goes to Taiwan to do Mandarin language studies for another year to eighteen months. And so was absent, literally on the road for three years, and then comes back here and then starts this world and kind of Asian American film movement, and then becomes an independent sound recordist for documentary films. A lot of PBS stuff, documentary stuff from the '90s into the 2000s, you'll see her, if not the sound recordist, one of the principal sound recordists.

PW: Did you guys actually get married?

PY: We did, yeah.

PW: Where did you get married and when?

PY: We got married in 1984. I forget the name of the church but it's that Stickley designed...

PW: Swedenborgian one?

PY: Yes, yes.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.