Allan & Allan

Allan Chadwick Kew was born in 1911 and raised in Shanghai. He and my grandmother, Ailsa, lived in the east until 1949, then spent the rest of their lives in California. She died before I was born, and he followed in 2007. He died the last of his generation, the last hand among the old hands.

That’s all I knew about my grandfather, and our history.

My name belongs to someone I barely knew, and I remember little.

He spoke with an English-accent, had a penchant for wooly cardigans, thick-glasses and shuffled his feet. He enjoyed crosswords and the Queen, and his passion was his garden and grove. Once, I remember watching Cash Cab with him, and every Lunar New Year he sent me a red envelope with $20.

82 years separated us.

I couldn’t blame him being more interested in his roses.

He was solitary. I was told not to inquire.

Enjoy your time in a redwood-lined house that reeked of cedar, not made for entertaining grandchildren.

But I knew he’d lived a life - one my father revered. He named me for him:

Allan Stanley Chadwick Kew.

I inherited his photo albums and pieced together a story he wouldn’t tell.

He was a horse-racer, gambler, soldier, bon vivant. Legends circulate more than truth.

But history interfered in his European Peter Pan forays.

The Kew family was imprisoned by the Imperial Army in the Second World War

They spent four years in Yangchow Camp C, a place long since vanished beneath an airstrip.

Allan shepherded goats; Ailsa worked in the bakery.

Once the war ended, however, repeating the past proved impossible.

The 1949 Revolution came and they left.

The settled in California, that faraway land of reinvention. For Allan, this meant the past never happened.

Nobody knows why.

He owed us our heritage and kept it secret.

Was he Ashamed? Embarrassed? Forlorn? Displaced?

A cousin once demanded answers.

“Allan, are we Chinese or not?”

“Yes!” he said. “But we don’t talk about it.”

But I was too scared. I took a DNA test to verify 200 years of history.

When I ask about him, others offer frank words: womanizer, loner, smuggler, fiend.

I’ll always wish I knew and understood him.

But now I know where I come from.

Photos by Allan Chadwick Kew, Derek Kew and Allan Stanley Chadwick Kew; image of Yangchow Camp C illustration taken from Greg Leck’s ‘Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941-1945’, published in 2006 by Shandy Press.