- We moved from Greensboro, North Carolina to Flushing, New York in June 2013. Two years after we settled into our routine, Chung wanted to take a course we both could enjoy. I let him decide since I was not interested in doing anything at that time. He chose an art drawing class at a senior center located in Forest Hill, New York. In October 2015, we started our weekly one-hour commute to Forest Hill to take the course. Our teacher-Virginia started us with still life. After two years of drawing apple, orange, flower and vase, she switched us to do portrait. The hardest part of painting a portrait is to catch the expression of that person and the eyes are the essential part of expression. I could hardly make two eyes line up properly, much less catching any expression so I always chose a profile to work on. Chung did not have any problem at all and could finish a portrait in 2-3 class visits. However , he sucked at landscape painting. It usually took him 8-10 weeks to finish one. There was an autumn scene, after 3 months of struggling, he gave up and left it unfinished. Before we joined the senior center art class, he only did one drawing in his life- an architectural drawing which was required in his undergraduate study in Electrical Engineering. He did not do a very good job in that drawing ( he got a C). He told me many years later that at that time he was very worried that C grade might drag down his over all point average thus hurt his chance of getting a scholarship so much needed to continue his study at McGill Univ.( his father just passed away and could not give him any financial support). Luckily he got through and even graduated with distinction. Judging from his performance in landscape paintings in the senior center art class, I can see why the professor at the McGill Univ. gave him a C! We continued going to the art classes till the center was closed due to pandemic in March, 2020.
In early 2018, I decided to translate ‘ The Sutra of Hui Neng ‘ into English. His English writing skill is much better than mine so I always asked him to check my writings and he could always make my writings more palatable to the Western readers. It took 18 months to finish. We self-published it and also uploaded it onto academia.edu in Nov. 2019. At that time, we have already decided to attend my 50th year graduation celebration hosted by my alma mater-National Taiwan Univ. in Taipei, Taiwan. We also booked airline tickets and hotels to visit places in China like Guilin, Guiyang and Lijiang. Of course, like everyone else, we had to cancel all the trips due to COVID-19 pandemic. With nothing to do, we started translating ‘ The Art of War’ by Sun Zhu. It is a relatively short book so we finished it and uploaded it onto academia.edu in August 2020. Shortly after that, he picked up where he left off on English translation of Chinese ancient poems. The goal was to translate 200 poems but he passed away suddenly on the night of Feb. 2, He had already translated 131 and was working on the 132th poem, a poem by Cao Xue Qin , from his famous book ‘ Dreams of the Red Chamber, published in 1784 AD. I am in the process of piling up the 131 translated poems into a book titled ‘ Chinese Poems in English’ and will uploaded it onto academia.edusometime in April. The photo with pine tree scene was chosen by him about a week before he passed.
From 2016 till he passed away, we visited our daughter Ginny and her husband Tolya 2-3 times in Vienna and relatives in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Taipei and Hong Kong, attended a Yu family wedding in Toronto in 2018, visited Great Wall, Terracotta Warriors and Mogao Grottoes in China and La Sagruda Familia in Spain in 2018 and Athens in Greece in 2019. He had a good life and went peacefully. What else could a mortal want ? I just planted 5 trees and wrote these words in the message: ‘ Your name is Pine. May you be around the trees I planted for you always!