A life of service and self-sacrifice

My father's life spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

Born on Sept 10, 1901, into dire poverty in rural Hunan province during the twilight of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), he both witnessed and participated in some of the most defining events in the last century: the end of imperial China, the humiliations suffered by his country under foreign imperialist invasion, two world wars, a civil war, and finally, before his death in 1997, the rise again of his beloved homeland.

Today my father, Dr. Ho Feng Shan, is remembered worldwide as the Chinese diplomat who overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to save thousands of Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. From 1938 to 1940, his strategic use of "visas for life" to the Chinese port city of Shanghai provided both a means of escape for thousands and a refuge of last resort for some 18,000 Jews.

Besides this humanitarian feat, little is known publicly about the man who was my father. On this 125th anniversary of his birth, I would like to address how Ho Feng Shan became the man he was and how he defined himself and his purpose in life.

My father was exposed to Westerners at an early age. He lost his father at age seven and was adopted by the Norwegian Missionary Society, which had come to his hometown of Yiyang in the early 1900s. He was educated in their schools, and due to his scholastic brilliance, was given a scholarship to study at another Western-based institution, the College of Yale-in-China in Hunan's capital city of Changsha. Subsequently, he earned a doctorate in political economics at the University of Munich, graduating magna cum laude and becoming the first PhD in his hometown.

In his memoir, Forty Years of My Diplomatic Life, my father wrote that education set the foundations of his life: "The schools that I attended, from that of the (Norwegian) Mission, to the College of Yale-in-China … placed their emphasis on the building of character, (and) on learning the values of self-sacrifice, of giving unto others, and of service to society."

My father took this lesson to heart. His was a generation of Chinese who felt that China had been humiliated and persecuted by 100 years of foreign imperialism. They were determined not to allow that humiliation to continue. My father felt that he had been given a full measure of gifts, but they were not only for his personal benefit, but for that of his fellow man and his country. On New Year's Day 1947, he wrote a poem about that aspiration:

"The gifts Heaven bestows are not by chance,

The convictions of heroes not lightly formed;

Today I summon all spirit and strength,

Urging my steed forward ten thousand li."

(Translated from the Chinese by Ho Manli)

Coming from Hunan, a renowned bastion of traditional Chinese education in the classics and in history, my father was steeped in the scholarship and sensibilities of traditional Chinese letters. Although a Western liberal arts education broadened his horizons, the traditions of his homeland and people, his scholarly lineage, and the essence of his culture were woven into the very fabric of his being. At his spiritual core, he remained fundamentally and authentically Chinese.