By Richard P. Hsung, Editor of Spring Flower, His Mother’s Memoir
I was in Boston on Christmas Day 2018 feeling aimless and depressed, wanting to be left alone. It was unseasonably warm that day, so I decided to take a run. In a matter of minutes, I was crossing busy Storrow Drive on the footbridge behind the Boston University campus. I turned onto the all-too-familiar pedestrian path that winds along Charles River, and suddenly, the traffic noise quieted. My mother, who had passed away four years earlier, used to run along this route regularly, although in the opposite direction. She lived here from the time she and I emigrated to the U.S. from mainland China in 1980. In those days, my mother and I would run together from our home on Beacon Hill to the same BU footbridge before turning around.
I left Boston to go to college in the mid-1980s, and each time I visited my mother, we’d either run or take long walks along this same path. By her later years, she suffered from clinical depression and then Alzheimer’s, but as long as she was able to, we walked. And we sat on every park bench along the way, especially the ones beneath the deciduous shade trees. Sometimes, we’d watch the sun set behind the vintage Citgo Petroleum Corporation sign before returning to Beacon Hill.
When the Hatch Shell, an outdoor concert venue on the Charles River Esplanade, came into view, I kept running—it was more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit, sweltering to me. Sometime in the early 2000s, the path was extended to North Station and later to Charlestown as the city revamped the Boston Garden area and opened the Big Dig. After winding around the Hatch Shell, I passed an Asian woman who was taking photos on her iPhone. I stopped to tie my shoelace, and she passed me, walking toward a park bench along the river right before the Longfellow Bridge. That was not just any park bench. It was the one my mother and I had sat on the most—hundreds of times, at least, in the 1980s. We called it “our bench.” It was fifteen feet from the water and about fifty feet from the Longfellow Bridge piers.
Although she was born and raised in China, my mother grew up speaking English, having been adopted by American medical missionaries at the age of one. She attended English-speaking schools in China and lived in the U.S. for three years during World War II. In contrast, I knew very little English when I arrived here at the age of fourteen. And I was attending the prestigious Milton Academy at a time I barely spoke or read English. After we settled in Boston, my mother worked hard to help me learn proper English. She spent nights and weekends translating my school assignments, including textbooks, and also Animal Farm, 1984, A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby, and Huckleberry Finn. She’d scribble the Chinese characters between the lines to help me recognize the meaning of the English words. On Sunday afternoons, we would pack a lunch, and after church, we’d sit on “our bench” along the Charles, where she’d coach me until the sun set behind the flashing Citgo landmark. She desperately wanted me to succeed in the language she was forced to stop speaking for decades while trapped in Mao’s China. I was the continuation of her dream.
As you approach the Longfellow Bridge, the running path converges with our bench. A Red Line train was rumbling above when the Asian woman began waving at me to take her picture. I nodded, and she pointed to the river and the bridge and handed me her phone. I suggested what I thought would be the best spot for her to stand, with a view of the bridge and the river in the background. But she didn’t understand what I said and kept walking until she was standing right next to our bench. To my surprise, she sat down on that bench and turned to face the river. Taking a photo of her there would make having the river and the bridge in the background nearly impossible.
I gestured frantically for her to stand and turn around; but she didn’t move. She just sat there, looking straight at the river. Another train was going by, and so I shouted, “At least turn toward me so I can get your face in the photo.” But still, she didn’t respond.
So, I photographed her left profile and tried to get the bridge and the river in the background. As I lowered my body so the lens would be on the same level as her face, she combed her hair behind her left ear while staring in the direction of the Citgo sign. With the left side of her face in clear view, her eyes beaming, I saw my mother sitting there, on our park bench.
After handing back her iPhone, I jogged away, tears streaming down my face. I had been working for the past four years to complete my mother’s memoir, and it had all come crashing to a halt the summer before. I was at a loss and hadn’t been able to write a single word for months. To complete my mother’s book, I had to write her unfinished chapters, particularly the ones that took place during my childhood when the People’s Republic of China was wreaking havoc on everyone, including our family. I found myself reliving the same painful stories that my mother had. Just as she’d experienced in the last years of her life, the stress of writing about the horrors of that era now led to my own depression. I had been angry at my mother for asking me to finish the book and found myself daring her to complete her own goddamn book, four years after she’d passed away. When not cursing, I pleaded for her to stop destroying my life by, at least in my imagination, badgering me to finish. 
Then, that warm December day in 2018, as if she’d heard me, she sat on our park bench to let me know she was with me and had been the whole time.
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Richard Perkins Hsung was born in China in 1966 and was one of the first teens to leave China legally after Mao’s Cultural Revolution. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago and became a professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, retiring in 2022. He spent ten years editing and completing Spring Flower (Earnshaw Books) by his mother, Jean Tren-Hwa Perkins, MD. The three-volume memoir chronicles her life as an adopted child of American medical missionaries, survivor of China’s brutal communist regime, ophthalmologist, immigrant, and mother. Hsung lives in Madison with his wife, where keeping squirrels from digging up his backyard has become a daily scientific obsession. Learn more at richardperkinshsung.com.