A life of service and self-sacrifice

This hybrid background set my father on a lifetime path in diplomacy. Being well-versed in the ways of the West, he could not only effectively represent the interests of his country, but show the outside world what being Chinese meant, something that was often misunderstood, stereotyped and discriminated against, even to this day.

In his memoir, my father recalled that during his posting to Vienna, Austria, in the late 1930s, most Europeans knew nothing about China. They thought all Chinese men wore queues and all Chinese women had bound feet.

My father took it upon himself to school the Europeans, regularly giving lectures on Chinese culture and civilization. In a lecture at a Vienna Police Academy graduation ceremony, he noted that unlike the West, China, a Confucian society, had never waged a war over religion. He formed a Sino-Austrian Society that was engaged in a soiree of Chinese music, dance and Tang poetry when Hitler's army crossed into Austria in March 1938.

These cultural activities set up a receptive platform for garnering Austrian support for China after Japan's full-scale invasion in July 1937. My father became the face of the Chinese diplomatic mission, speaking before the Austrian parliament and debating his Japanese counterpart.

Throughout his diplomatic career, my father used this soft power outreach to increase understanding and gain local support. In Mexico, he engaged the local Chinese community — especially the young second and third generation Chinese-Mexicans — to present cultural programs of Chinese song and dance. He brought in a Peking Opera troupe to perform Journey to the West in Mexico City's famous Palace of Fine Arts. Through these kinds of activities, he was able to help the Chinese community gain greater visibility and a voice in Mexican society and politics.

But it was my father himself who was the most compelling role model of a Chinese person — urbane, witty, charismatic and dynamic, speaking five languages and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and history. He was also incorruptible, disciplined, conscientious and hot tempered — which I always attributed to his love for the hot peppers of Hunan.

Although he spent most of his adult years abroad, my father's love for his native land and people was fierce and unwavering. He taught my brother and me about our heritage and told us to be proud to be Chinese. He named us after two principles from the Analects of Confucius: "de" (virtue) for my brother, and "li" (propriety of conduct) for me.

Perhaps one of his most remarkable accomplishments was instilling a Chinese identity in a child born and raised abroad. I was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Latin America, living in three vastly different cultural and linguistic environments: Chinese, English and Spanish. My exposure to Chinese culture came entirely from the time I spent with my father at home. He forbade me from speaking foreign languages ​​at home and immersed me in Chinese history and culture with stories such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars and Journey to the West. Seeing China through his eyes, I became Chinese.

That identity has never wavered. At the Boston Globe, I was sent to the front lines to cover a searing racial and class conflict over school desegregation. Being Chinese, I was considered "racially neuter" and therefore unlikely to be attacked by either side. Our team coverage of this crisis won the Globe a Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

When the opportunity came in 1981 to see China, I was already 30 years old and jumped at the chance to help launch an English language newspaper, China Daily, to tell China's story to the world, just as my father had.

Of course, part of China's story is my father's story, which I have spent more than two decades uncovering and documenting so that it can be told with factual accuracy and historical integrity. Above all, I have felt it crucial that this story reflect my father's own conviction — that he was, first and foremost, Chinese.

Over the years, there have been misuses and misrepresentations of my father and his legacy. The most recent example is a real estate agency named Yiyang Fangchan aggressively advertising in the US by exploiting my father's name and legacy to peddle houses in his hometown. The most outrageous of these advertisements was titled: "He saved 18,000 Jewish Lives in WWII. His Hometown Has Homes for $40,000". It compared my father providing a refuge for Jews to Yiyang giving shelter to laid-off Silicon Valley workers.

Another example is a potboiler written by a Chinese-American romance novelist who "re-imagined" my father's rescue activities and family life in Vienna with all manner of melodramatic and ridiculous tropes to cater to the Western romance novel market.

I cite these examples as reminders that the misuse and misrepresentation of an international humanitarian icon like my father damages not only the integrity of history itself, but how the Chinese people themselves are perceived. It is only by strict adherence to the facts that we can preserve and honor who my father was, his legacy and the history in which he played a part.