Could I Have Met This Woman?

Some years back, I overheard my father and uncle talk about a ‘mistress’ my grandfather had when in was in China during World War II. I’m not sure how much they knew about her then.

Since then, some of my grandfather’s old writings have surfaced, and I finally, finally got to reading the part about where he was in China. The answer is no, he didn’t have a mistress. Not exactly. He had sex a few times with sex workers, but those weren’t long-term relationships.

The woman who my father and uncle had referred to was probably a Chinese teenager he helped with math homework and had a friendship with. We have a photograph of them standing together.

She’d offered to become his ‘China wife’ (he already had a wife in the United States, my grandmother). He rejected her because she was too young (he was thirty-nine, she was sixteen) and he intended to leave China when Japan surrendered. That was the end of their friendship, and other people told him she’d changed and broke out into tears whenever she thought about him. He didn’t know whether she wanted the protection of the U.S. Army, whether she had a crush on him, or some combination.

(Context: my grandfather married my grandmother when he was thirty-two and she was nineteen. Some people opposed this because of the age gap, and told him not to marry her because he’d ‘ruin her life.’ They remained married until his death, over fifty years after their wedding.)

He saw her one more time, after she’d joined the Chinese Nationalist Army. He wondered what happened to her. He figured she either died or fled to Taiwan.

I didn’t know about this when I lived in Taiwan. Back then, she might’ve still been alive. She might even be alive now, but the odds are much lower. My grandfather never found out her Chinese name, but his writing has enough clues (age, hometown, parents’ occupation, photograph) that it might’ve been possible to track her down, either on my own (with my Chinese language skills) or by hiring a private detective. I suppose that’s an option even now, though I’m much less likely to establish contact with someone living.

Or maybe she died in the late 1940s.

My grandfather would’ve been dead regardless, but just as he wondered about her decades after the war, maybe she wondered about him and would’ve appreciated knowing that he hadn’t forgotten her. Heck, she spent way more time with him than I ever did.

I wish I’d known to look for her.