Grandfather's Microscope

About the Book

This is an insightful and moving memoir of a woman who has lived in two worlds: old China and modern America. Born in 1929 to a wealthy family in China, her childhood memories revolve around four unconventional people: a mother possessed by a ghost, an aristocratic grandmother who was an opium addict, a flamboyant father and an elusive aunt. In the background was a mysterious grandfather, murdered at the age of thirty-nine, and a German microscope he left behind. Mei Liu’s early life was marked by family tragedies and dark secrets, and harrowing tales of living under Japanese occupation and Communist rule.

While a medical student living in Nationalist-occupied Qingdao in China, she was black-listed as an anti-Communist by the leftist students. In 1949, as the country was falling into Communist hands, she had little hope of surviving under the new regime. By many twists of fate and with the help of strangers, she escaped to Taiwan while her family remained in mainland China; she would not see them again for thirty years. After graduating from medical school in Taiwan, she immigrated to the United States, and for the next three decades, she immersed herself in neuroscience research, fascinated by its beauty and mystery while struggling with loneliness and her own search for identity and belonging.

At age sixty, she was suddenly and relentlessly drawn into the past. Her journey of self-discovery took her to the place of her birth, where she worked as a professor at Hunan Medical College (formerly Hsiang Ya Medical College). She met with surviving relatives and began to piece together the truth about her unusual family’s history.

Mei Liu’s mother was an early feminist in China. As a teenager, she took to the streets of old China in a palanquin carried on the shoulders of two coolies and protested against foot-binding and illiteracy in women. But when her father died an untimely death, she was forced to abandon her education and marry. When she discovered her husband’s deep dark secret, she had a nervous breakdown. The terrifying collapse, interpreted by the adults as the works of a malicious ghost, was forever engraved in Mei Liu’s memory.

Mei Liu’s father had studied at the Hsiang Ya Medical College, founded at the turn of the century by the Yale-in-China Association. However, her father dropped out of college after one year. His lifelong wish, his Yale dream, was that one of his ten children would become a doctor.

Mei Liu’s grandfather had studied law and education in Japan. The two mementos he left behind, a book of Shakespeare and a German microscope acquired abroad, had left a deep impression on Mei Liu’s young mind. But she would not know about her grandfather’s remarkable life and his place in history until she returned to her hometown in her old age. Only then did she come to realize how her grandfather’s hopes and dreams, symbolized in the microscope, had been the inspiration of her life.

The author has blended tales of an unusual medical career with a rich tapestry of life and personalities in her native China. She incorporates the voices of several generations of women in her family, including anecdotes by her American-born daughters. The book touches on Chinese history, customs, folklore, myths, symbols, poetry and adventure.

About the Author

Mei Liu was born in 1929 in Hunan, China, and attended Shandong University Medical School in Qingdao. She went to Taiwan in 1949, graduated from Taiwan University Medical School in 1953, and immigrated to the U.S. After completing her residency in pathology in Rochester, N.Y., she served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Brown University. In 1989, she returned to Asia and taught at Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and Hunan Medical College in China. She retired in 1997 and now lives in Honolulu.