Til Death Do Us Part? Not really!

When we carefully look around, till death do us a part? We find connections between life and death everywhere. The Chinese care about their ancestors; they believe their ancestors always care for and protect them somehow. My grandfather was a salt merchant, the fourth generation and the last salt merchant. When I came to the USA alone for graduate school, I had applied to several schools, but ended up in Syracuse, NY. I did not know its salt history and I was never interested in history. Coming to America alone must have really made my ancestors worried. From their best knowledge, salt merchants could take care of me and my future family. I spent eight years there. We used to go to Onondaga Lake a lot, before and after my son was born, but I never noticed its salt history. Only this year, I learned about the salt history of Syracuse. The salt processing was almost the same as in Zigong, except my ancestors had natural gas to boil the brine.

My ancestor's knowledge obviously was not updated; they must have seen how difficult our life was in Syracuse. I was having an extremely challenging time during my first year; my English was not good enough to simply join a graduate forest biology school. I just had a tough time following the classes. I even reviewed textbooks before the classes and reviewed again afterwards. I was the only foreign student in all the classes. On top of that, my boyfriend in Japan with whom I had kept contact for four years got married. He gave up on us and did not trust American influences on me, and he did not want to come to America and give up his scholarship in Japan. I felt very lost and lonely. On the second day of my second year, Barb and Anthony showed up at my office door; Barb introduced Anthony to me. The three of us walked to our statistics class together. Soon after, Barb found a job and left the school. Anthony and I continued our classes together. I did not have much contact with the other students; they never had any interactions with people with foreign accents. They did not understand me and would not be able to help me. I asked one of the PhD students a question; he tried hard, stared into my eyes, and listened to what I said. I repeated it several times until he understood my question; sadly, he said he was sorry and did not know the answer. Anthony was different from the rest of the students. He was patient and gentle. He tilted his head so he could listen very carefully. He also lent me his notes from other classes and tried his best to help me. Only later, I learned that he had been a transient member of a religious community during his undergraduate studies; he went to Liberia and taught students there and in the New York city area. He came to graduate school to study plant biology, but more importantly helped me. I do not think I could have finished my degree or even to survive in Syracuse without him. The influence of my ancestors or 'fathers of Botany'? "Many of the world's most renowned and exciting ornamental plants-including magnolias, roses, rhododendrons, tree peonies, lilies, and blue poppies-have their origins in China. In the mid-nineteenth century, professional plant hunters were dispatched by nurseries and botanic gardens to collect living botanical specimens from China for cultivation in Europe, and it is these adventurers and nurserymen who are often credited with the explosive bloom of Chinese flowers in the West. But as Jane Kilpatrick shows in Fathers of Botany, the first Westerners to come upon and document this bounty were in fact cut from a different cloth: the clergy". https://www.abebooks.com/9781842465141/Fathers-Botany-discovery-Chinese-plants-1842465147/plp

I could not find a job after completing my master’s degree. My husband applied to many jobs without receiving any response. Our son was 2 years old. My ancestors must have known and guided us to apply for a Chinese flora editorial job. My husband mentioned to me at the beginning that he did not think he was qualified. I asked him to bring home the job description since he did not find anything yet and his postdoctoral position was only short-term. I carefully reviewed the job description and helped my husband apply by adding my own CV to show our range of experience. Later at his interview, we learned that they tried for two years to fill this position; it was the perfect fit. I only needed to help my husband in Chinese every now and then, not much at all since the first drafts were already in English. The Herbaria for the editorial center had the most Chinese plants collected in the early 1900s, many from my home province Sichuan. Many were collected by the 'Fathers of Botany.' Dr. Shiu-Ying Hu ( 胡秀英; 22 February 1910-22 May 2012), a Chinese botanist attempted to start the Flora of China in the 1950s, but except for her extensive card index and a number of manuscripts, did not gain momentum. One of her students ended up teaching at the graduate school in Syracuse where we had attended. Years later, Dr. Peter H. Raven, who himself was born in Shanghai in 1936, enabled the Flora of China to finally succeed. "In 1996 Raven, Axelrod, and Al-Shehbaz wrote a paper on the history of the modern flora of China, Europe, and the continental United States. They said that the three regions have approximately the same geographic area, yet China has two times the number of species as the United States, and three times as many as Europe. They asserted that all three regions had essentially the same flora as of 15 million years ago, but China came to possess the most species because of three reasons. First, China has a tropical rain forest. Second, there is an unbroken gradient of vegetation from the tropical rain forest to "boreal coniferous forests that has persisted and afforded habitats characterized by equable climates during the last 15 million years, when massive extinctions were taking place elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere...such continuity is interrupted in North America by the Gulf of Mexico and in Europe by the Alps, the Mediterranean, and the Sahara Desert." The third reason was due to the impact of the Indian subcontinent with Asia starting 50 million years ago, making a "highly dissected, elevated geography."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_H._Raven".

I needed to work in order for us to be able to afford the house we wanted. With his supervisor's help, the library offered me a part time job, still I needed someone to watch my 2 years old son. I did look into daycare, it cost more than I could make. No one except Anthony's 88 years old grandmother could come to help us watch my son. Nana helped us move into our new house, I thought I made it happen on my own but more players were involved. Anthony has been searching his side of family history for many years now, a recent finding was surprising that it proved not only my side ancestors helped. Anthony's side as well. The oldest house in my city is the Phineas Upham House is less than a mile away from our house, Lt. Phineas Upham was husband of first cousin 10x removed of wife of brother in law of 1st cousin 2xremoved. This person has distance conections on Nana's family tree.

“一日夫妻，百世姻缘。百世修来同船渡，千世修来共枕眠《增广贤文》means "One hundred years of cultivation one can sit in the same boat, and one thousand years of cultivation can lead to marriage." This phrase comes from the Ming Dynasty book "Zengguang Xianwen." Since ancient times, the Chinese believed in reincarnation, people had past, present, and future lives. That is why there is a saying that "a couple for one day, a marriage for a hundred generations," which means that we can be a husband and wife for one day in this life, which is a blessing from a hundred lives of cultivation. There are also similar words: "The Buddha said: Looking back five hundred times in the previous life, only in exchange for passing by in this life." This sentence comes from "Looking Back" by the modern poet Xi Murong (席慕蓉). 一日夫妻百日恩 means one day husband and wife means hundred days gratefulness. A day together as husband and wife means endless devotion the rest of your life; one night of love is worth a hundred of friendship. DNA studies of current human populations and archaeological remains added much more history for both of us. I knew I was related to Native Americans, but never thought I was related to Canadian Inuits (Dorset 200 AD, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture ), and an indigenous Brazilian tribe (Botocudo, 1600 AD, https://dna-explained.com/2015/07/02/botocudo-ancient-remains-from-brazil/ ). I was even more surprised that Anthony and I share the same ancient relative in the remains of a 7th Crusade battle in Lebanon. Also, ancient relatives from both of our families left their bones at Skeleton Lake in the Himalaya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roopkund) at nearly the same time, my side from 1800 AD (genetic distance 20.168), and Anthony’s side from 1805 AD (genetic distances for two individuals 21.168 and 25.838).