Monday, June 19, 2017

A00146 - Juliana Young Koo, Chinese Immigrant Who Published Her Life Story at 104


Juliana Young Koo, Chinese Immigrant Who Published Her Life Story at 104, Dies at 111

By JAMES BARRON





Juliana Young Koo, center, being taken to pose for a family portrait at her 107th birthday party at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan in 2012. Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Juliana Young Koo’s family began giving birthday parties for her in 1995, when she turned 90. Ten years later, she took the microphone and addressed the crowd.
“I never give speeches, but I decided that at least on my 100th birthday, I should try,” she wrote in her autobiography, “My Story” (2009). “I have only one secret: That is, THINK POSITIVELY. Don’t dwell on the past; think about how to make the future better.”
It was advice Mrs. Koo followed again and again — when her first husband was executed by the Japanese in the Philippines; when she became seasick on the ship that brought her to the United States after the war (she said it had almost capsized in a violent storm); and when thieves stole her jewelry after she had moved to New York.
She adapted to circumstances as she lived a long, sometimes adventurous, life of travel, good works and glamour, moving in diplomatic circles, attending a swirl of parties, all the while witnessing a century of history.
By 2012, when she celebrated her 107th birthday, guests marveled that she had been born the year that Theodore Roosevelt began his second term as president, the year the Russo-Japanese War ended, the year Einstein worked out the theory of special relativity.
Mrs. Koo died on May 24 at her home in Manhattan after a mah-jongg party — the tile game became her passion in later years — and a birthday celebration for her daughter Shirley Young. Mrs. Koo was 111.
Genevieve Young, another daughter, confirmed her death.
Mrs. Koo was born Yu-Yun on Sept. 27, 1905, in Tianjin, in northeastern China, according to her autobiography. Her father, Yen Yi-ping, was a businessman.
She entered the Keen School, run by Methodists, when she was 14. “At missionary schools with English-speaking teachers,” she wrote in her autobiography, “one had to have an English name.”
She added: “The school named me ‘Helen,’ but there was already a Helen Yen at the school, so I renamed myself ‘Juliana.’ I can’t remember why. I must have read it in a book.”
She enrolled in Shanghai Baptist College in 1925 and became known as “Miss 84,” for the license plate on her car, a number that could be translated as “love and luck” in Chinese, she wrote. But she found the school too strict and transferred to Fudan University, which had just begun to admit women.
Her first husband, Clarence Kuangson Young, was a diplomat who, in the late 1930s, was posted to Paris and then to Manila, as consul general to the Philippines. Mrs. Koo wrote in her autobiography that his “main mission” there was to “raise money from the Chinese community for the war against the Japanese.” She pitched in, as honorary chairwoman of the Overseas Chinese Women’s Association, organizing drives to collect jewelry that could be sold.
The Japanese arrested her husband and his staff in 1942. Mrs. Koo took in the others’ families — cramming more than 25 people into a three-bedroom bungalow.
After the war, she was told that the Japanese had executed her husband. The analyst and commentator Paul French wrote in “Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao” (2009) that Mr. Young had “stuck to his post even after the retreat of General Douglas MacArthur to Australia and the surrender of the American troops.”
“He apparently had the chance to leave with MacArthur’s party” but did not, Mr. French wrote.
Mrs. Koo left for California with her children in 1945, intending to settle in San Francisco. But after arriving there, she realized that she knew more people in New York, so she and the children headed east by rail on the Twentieth Century Limited. She soon heard about an opening for a protocol officer at the United Nations, then in its infancy.
She worked for the United Nations for 13 years, until shortly after she married Dr. V. K. Wellington Koo, who had been the Chinese ambassador to the United States. They moved to the Netherlands after he was appointed to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 1960. He served until 1967. He died in 1985 at 97.
One ritual at Mrs. Koo’s birthday parties was the taking of a photograph. As the years passed, there were more faces to fit in: children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Mrs. Koo was typically at the center of the frame, flanked by her daughters Genevieve, who is known as Gene and was vice president and editorial director of Bantam Books, and Shirley, a former vice president of General Motors and a founding member and governor of the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American leadership group.
Both daughters survive her, with her seven grandchildren; 18 great-grandchildren; four stepchildren; 13 step-grandchildren; 18 step-great-grandchildren; and two step-great-great-grandchildren. A third daughter, Frances Young Tang, who was known as Baby, died.
At the party in 2012, Mrs. Koo was still quite spry, and evidently still thinking positively. She danced with Oscar L. Tang, a financier and the widower of her daughter Frances, as the band played “Moon River.” Mr. Tang had requested a leisurely tempo, but Mrs. Koo would have none of that. As he recalled, “She said, ‘Faster, this one’s too slow.’”

Posted by at No comments:

A00145 - Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, Mother of Elaine Chao

Ruth Mulan Chu Chao (Chinese: 趙朱木蘭; pinyin: Zhào Zhū Mùlán; 1930–2007), the Chinese American matriarch of a philanthropic family, established charitable foundations providing scholarships to more than 5,000 students.[1] Harvard Business School has named the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center in her honor, making it the first building at the business school named for a woman and an Asian American.[2] Four of Chao's six daughters attended the business school, including the former United States Secretary of Labor and current U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao.[3]

Personal life[edit]

Ruth Mulan Chu Chao (March 19, 1930 – August 2, 2007) was born in Anhui, Republican China, daughter of the Honorable Vei Ching Chu (朱维谦; Zhū Wéiqiān) and Hui Ying Tien Chu (朱田慧英; Zhū Tián Huìyīng).[1] She was named for the Chinese folklore heroine, Hua Mulan, the legendary warrior representing qualities of character, courage, and resolve.[1]
Amidst political and economic turmoil of the Chinese Civil War, her family migrated from Anhui Province to Nanjing by 1940.[4] As a child only ten years old, she journeyed alone back to Anhui to reclaim the family's gold that had been hidden away on their land. Sewing it into her garments and passing undetected through checkpoints of the occupying Japanese forces, she returned safely to her family, having secured resources they needed to survive the conflict.[4] Her family eventually migrated to Shanghai, where she attended Number One High School in Jiading and she met her future husband, James S. C. Chao. They each independently went to Taiwan in 1949, and were reunited when he found her name in a local newspaper's listing of recent graduates.[4]
They married in 1951,[1] and began their family, but when she was seven months pregnant with their third daughter in 1958, he had an opportunity to study in the United States, rare for those times.[4][5] They only had resources for Chao's husband to travel to the United States, and it took three years' separation before they were reunited in the U.S.[4] They reared six daughters; four of them attended the Harvard Business School.[2]
After her six daughters were grown, when she was 53 years old, she entered St. John’s University in New York City, and graduated with a master's degree in Asian literature and history.[4]
Ruth Mulan Chu Chao died on August 2, 2007, in New York, after a seven-year battle with lymphoma.[4][6]

Philanthropy[edit]

Dr. James Si-Cheng Chao and Mrs. Ruth Mulan Chu Chao established the Foremost Foundation "to help young people access higher education... while also supporting health care initiatives and U.S.-Asia cultural exchanges."[7] The Foundation has provided scholarship to more than 5,000 students.[1] It has also supported the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)-Career Mentoring Sessions,[8] and the National Committee on United States-China Relations.[9]

Honors[edit]

The Shanghai Jiao Tong University named the building housing its School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering in honor of the philanthropy of Ruth Mulan Chu Chao and her husband, an alumnus of the university.[10]
In 2016, the Chao family donated US$40 million to the Harvard Business School, supporting the US$35 million construction of the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center and US$5 million to endow a scholarship fund for students of Chinese heritage. On the 50th anniversary of Harvard's first acceptance of women into its MBA program, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust said the gift would remind people of the important role women have played in the history of Harvard Business School.[11] At the dedication, Elaine Chao said that her mother "believed that men and women should be treated equally, and she and my father made sure her six daughters were equipped with the tools they needed to realize their dreams...We hope that people will be inspired by the life and spirit of an ordinary yet extraordinary woman."[2][12]
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, June 15, 2017

A00144 - Shobha Nehru, Hungarian Jew Who Married Into Indian Politics

Shobha Nehru Dies at 108; Escaped Holocaust and Married Into Indian Politics

By ELLEN BARRY
Shobha Nehru, left, with President John F. Kennedy and Indira Gandhi in 1962. Mrs. Nehru’s husband was ambassador to Washington at the time. George Tames/The New York Times
NEW DELHI — Shobha Magdolna Friedmann Nehru, a Hungarian Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, married into India’s leading political family and witnessed religious and ethnic violence convulsing both her native and adopted countries, died on Tuesday at her home in the Himalayan foothills. She was 108.
Her death was confirmed by her son Ashok.
Mrs. Nehru was known by her Hungarian nickname, Fori, but did not often speak about her background. After marrying the Indian diplomat Braj Kumar Nehru in 1935, she took the name Shobha (which was selected by her in-laws), dressed in saris and was so thoroughly assimilated that acquaintances often took her for a pale-skinned Kashmiri Pandit, like the Nehrus themselves.
As a member of the Nehru household, she grieved beside the bodies of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, all of whom were assassinated. And at a key moment in the country’s history, she delivered a hard truth to an imperious leader who rarely heard it.
Mrs. Nehru typically stayed away from political matters, but she took the unusual step of confronting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her close friend and cousin by marriage, when she believed that the state of emergency Mrs. Gandhi declared in 1975 had too severely rolled back human rights in India.
She later recalled presenting Mrs. Gandhi with a list of men who said they had been forced to undergo vasectomies during a coercive mass sterilization campaign spearheaded by Mrs. Gandhi’s son, Sanjay. Expecting to encounter resistance from the prime minister, she had asked each man for his telephone number.
“I said, ‘Indu, you know I never talk to you about politics, never, no,’” Mrs. Nehru said in an interview with Indian state television. “‘Please look at this — these are all complaints about sterilization of young boys and old men. You know yourself that there is no need to sterilize. Why?’ She listened, looked at me. ‘But.’ What but?”
Mrs. Nehru’s husband, in his own memoir, reflected that virtually nobody — including himself — was willing to take the risk of alienating Mrs. Gandhi, who resented any criticism of her son. He said his wife was less cautious, and “certainly on more intimate terms with Indira Gandhi than I was.”
“I guess she was like that,” Ashok Nehru said. “She felt she had to get the truth across to her. It was a close family relationship, not a political relationship. She felt free enough to do that.”
Mrs. Nehru was 90 when she asked an Oxford classmate of her son’s, the British historian Martin Gilbert, to suggest some reading material on the history of the Jews. Mr. Gilbert wrote that he was perplexed by the inquiry, having always seen her as “an Indian woman,” until she recounted the story of her childhood in Budapest.
“Auntie Fori wanted to learn the history of the people to whom she belonged, but from whom, 67 years earlier, she had moved away, to the heat and dust and challenges of India,” Mr. Gilbert wrote in “Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000-Year History of the Jewish People and Their Faith,” published in 2002.
She was born on Dec. 5, 1908, into a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family that had changed its surname from Friedmann to the less Jewish-sounding Forbath. Her mother’s family, Mr. Gilbert wrote, was one of the few Jewish families licensed, under the Austro-Hungarian empire, to use the aristocratic prefix “von.” She rarely visited a synagogue except to collect her father after services.
“She used to say, ‘Both my sister and I didn’t believe in all this stuff,’” Ashok Nehru recalled. “She said they would stand outside the synagogue, stamping their feet in the cold.”
An anti-Semitic tide was rising in Hungary, and the family was forced by law to revert to the name Friedmann. In 1919, hoping to stave off a Communist revolution, right-wing mobs roamed the streets, killing Jews.
Fori Nehru and her husband, Braj Kumar Nehru, at their wedding in 1935.
“Once a week my father would travel to the villages to get food,” she told Mr. Gilbert. “He had a house on Lake Balaton. One summer we went there — by train — and I saw people hanging from trees. It was terrible for us children to look at.”
By the time she was 20, strict quotas had been introduced for Jewish students in Hungarian universities, and her parents sent her to the London School of Economics. There she met B. K. Nehru, a member of a distinguished Kashmiri family, whose cousin Jawaharlal was already a leader of the Indian independence movement (and would later become India’s first prime minister).
Her parents were skeptical of the match, Mr. Nehru recalled in his memoir: “How could their beautiful and lovely daughter marry a black man in a distant country of which they know nothing, and who, by his own confession, belonged to a family of jailbirds?”
His parents were skeptical as well. But when the two sets of parents met in Budapest, there was a sudden thaw, Mrs. Nehru told Mr. Gilbert.
“They were sitting in the sitting room,” she said. “I was crying in my bedroom. My future mother-in-law had to go to the loo. She came by my room — saw me crying. She said, ‘We must let them do what they want to do.’”
The Hungarian bride stepped off the ship in a sari and never looked back.
As part of a countrywide tour, she was taken by her future mother-in-law to the prison where Jawaharlal Nehru was being held by the British. Seeing that she was in tears, he later sent her a gently chastening letter, informing her: “Nehrus don’t cry in public. They keep a stiff upper lip.”
Meanwhile, her relatives and friends in Hungary were scattering. Her father was saved by his German housekeeper; her brother, an officer in the Hungarian Army, swam across the Danube to Czechoslovakia; her best friend drove across the border with her son hidden in the trunk of her car.
She was busy with her own crises in India. As partition approached, Delhi was flooded with refugees: Hindus who had been pushed out of Pakistan, Muslims who were boarding trains for Pakistan, mobs pumped with murderous rage on both sides. She learned, after she had helped families crowd onto one such train, that everyone aboard had been dragged off and killed while crossing Punjab.
“Can you imagine the horror?” she told Mr. Gilbert. “For several days we sent no train.”
For the newly arrived refugees, she began an employment campaign, opening a shop to sell the handicrafts of refugee women that grew into a vast network, the Central Cottage Industries Emporium.
She would not return to Hungary until 1949, along with three sons who had never seen her in anything but a sari.
“She used to go out every day, to meet her friends,” her son Ashok, who accompanied her on that trip, recalled. “Many of them had disappeared. Many had been raped by the Russians or killed by the Germans. They were harrowing tales. I remember her coming back crying.”
B. K. Nehru died in 2001. In addition to her son Ashok, Mrs. Nehru is survived by two other sons, Aditya and Anil; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
As the wife of a high-level dignitary, Mrs. Nehru moved from Washington, to the northeastern state of Assam, to London, but thoughts of Hungary’s Jews never entirely left her. She told Mr. Gilbert that at official receptions, she could not bring herself to shake hands with the German ambassador.
“I have a feeling of guilt,” she said. “I wasn’t there. I was safe. The guilt feeling is still with me. Why should I not have suffered?”
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, June 12, 2017

A00143 - Amina Cachalia, South African Anti-Apartheid Activist and Friend of Mandela

*Amina Cachalia, a South African anti-Apartheid activist, women's rights activist, and politician was born in Vereeniging, South Africa.  In 1995, while President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela proposed to Cachalia. 

Amina Cachalia, (b. Amina Asvat; June 28, 1930 Vereeniging, South Africa – d. January 31, 2013, Johannesburg, South Africa) was a longtime friend and ally of Nelson Mandela. Her late husband was political activist Yusuf Cachalia.

Cachalia was born Amina Asvat, the ninth of eleven children in Vereeniging, South Africa, on June 28, 1930. Her parents were political activists Ebrahim and Fatima Asvat. She began campaigning against Apartheid and racial discrimination as a teenager. She became a women's rights activist, often focusing on economic issues, such as financial independence for women.

Amina and Yusuf Cachalia were friends of Nelson Mandela before his imprisonment at Robben Island in 1962. She became a staunch anti-apartheid activist. She spent fifteen years under house arrest throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She was the treasurer of the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw), a leading supporter of the Federation of Transvaal Women, and a member of both the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress and Transvaal Indian Congress during the Apartheid era.

In 1995, Mandela asked Cachalia to marry him. At the time, he had been separated from his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Cachalia turned down Mandela's proposal because she said that "I'm my own person and that I had just recently lost my husband whom I had enormous regard for". Mandela divorced Madikizela-Mandela a year later and married Graca Machel in 1998.

Cachalia was elected to the National Assembly of South Africa in the 1994 South African general election, the country's first with universal adult suffrage. In 2004, she was awarded the Order of Luthuli in Bronze for her contributions to gender and racial equality and democracy.
After her death, in March 2013, her autobiography When Hope and History Rhyme was published.
Cachalia died at Milpark Hospital in Parktown West, Johannesburg, January 31, 2013, aged 82. The cause of death was complications following an emergency operation due to a perforated ulcer.
Her funeral was held in her home in Parkview, Johannesburg, according to traditional Muslim customs. It was attended by South African President Jacob Zuma, former Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe, ANC Deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, former First Lady Graca Machel, former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and fellow activisti Ahmed Kathrada, among others.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)