Father Dives Back into China, taking Wei-Tai Along

Yale-educated Wei-Tai Kwock surrendered his hard-won company and career to fight for our climate, working with Vice President Al Gore for the non-profit Climate Reality Project.  This wasn’t an obvious path. His grandfathers and father were into business and science. They had all fled China when the Communists took over in 1949, his parents coming to the U.S., his paternal grandparents going to the Philliipines . HIs grandparents never set foot in China again. (See Part 1 .)

Wei-Tai led some of the earliest groups of American tourists on 18-day tours through China.

Wei-Tai’s father  was a different story. He loved to travel.  “When China opened up to the west with Deng Xiao Ping in the early 80s, my dad was keen to go, but you could only get a group visa to China. There were no individual tourist visas. Group tours had started a year or two previously. 1979 was the warming-up period of relations.  So, he joined a group. At the time, Lindblad Tours, InterPacific, and Pacific Delight were the three major American tour companies that were authorized to bring tour groups to China. My dad and I went on the InterPacific tour, which was a company owned by one of his friends, Patrick Yau, of New York City.”

They even managed to visit the Kwok Home in Shanghai where Wei-Tai’s father grew up. and where a distant cousin still lived. His father had great memories of this awesome house that he lived in, because when he was growing up, Shanghai was the Paris of the East.  Even in war, the house was well-appointed.

Wei-Tai remembered walking into that old glorious house. “This three-story house that had chickens walking around indoors, and the paint is peeling off the walls. No maintenance. And, they burned coal to heat it, so there’s these coal-stained walls.  Dirty light bulbs hung from the ceiling. My father’s heart sank.  

Under Communist rule, you don’t own your home, and thus you don’t put any work into it.  You don’t try to improve it. It’s not yours.  And any home that’s gone through 40 years of no maintenance is going to look quite dilapidated.“

While Wei-Tai’s father was disappointed by the look of his glorious old home, he felt pride in the country. “When he saw China as a whole—a country that actually had transportation, had food, clothing, and was not a war-torn country in chaos but an organized place, he greatly admired the progress.  He felt proud that China had come through the Cultural Revolution and was opening up. And that the people behind the iron curtain were actually good people.”

Wei-Tai’s father wanted to know more about the country and the people he had left behind. So, for the next 20-30 years after he retired, he helped Americans tour the country. “Even at the age of 93, he’s still interested in China and travel “
Wei-Tai also became enchanted with the idea of leading tour groups, and for two summers in college led some of the earliest groups of American tourists on adventures through this heretofore closed country.

(To be continued. Next: Initial Impression of Americans)