I didn't realize how important family history was until after my grandmother died. She was a reporter/actor in pre-Communist China who quite unwillingly moved to Japan right after WW2, but I never asked her anything because most of the time, as a kid, I was too impatient to listen–and I didn't think she wanted to talk about it anyway. Now, nearly a decade after her death, there is one relative left who can tell me about the family's history in Shanghai.
A couple months ago, I flew to Seattle to do a lengthy video interview of my great uncle Henry O. Henry is probably the only actor in Hollywood who survived Mao's Cultural Revolution. Before he came to the US, he was an actor for a national troupe in China for thirty years, and was detained by the Communist regime for being from a wealthy family. He moved to the US in his mid-sixties and has since sustained a successful career as an actor in Hollywood. At age 81, he's still picking up roles–he just came back from filming 2012 with John Cusack and Thandie Newton in Vancouver. I wrote a short article about his life for Giant Robot Issue 55.
(Giant Robot)
