Our Dad's Eulogy
& Final Road Trip

Gimpock P. Lew “Jimmy”

August 28, 1923—July 6, 2001

Our Father was born in the town of Gungyik in Toisan County, in Guangdong Province, China, on August 28, 1923. His home village was Kei Mei Tsuen [village] in the Lei Au villages area of Toisan County. He migrated to Hong Kong in the mid-1930s and came to the US at the age of 15 in 1940 by ship on the SS President Pierce, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He served in the US Army and Air Force as an interpreter, being honorably discharged in 1945 and 1952.

In 1954, he met and married our Mother, Inge Ida Lew, who passed away in 1998. Our Mom grew up in Germany and she and our Dad were pen pals after the Second World War. They met in Toronto, Canada and shortly thereafter moved to Sacramento, where my Dad initially worked for the National Dollar Store. He had, however, studied airplane mechanics in high school in Oakland, California [I think that was a mistake] and he eventually worked for most of his life as an airplane mechanic at McClellan AFB, from which he retired in 1985. During the Vietnam War, he spent time as a civilian working for the Air Force in both Vietnam and Thailand.

Dad received a certificate in architectural drafting from the Columbia Technical Institute in Washington, DC in 1946. He put his drafting and construction skill to good use over the years, having built most of the house that our family has lived in since 1963 by himself. He was a remarkable craftsman, able to work with both metal (on airplanes) and wood (on his houses).

He loved to travel, taking his young family on annual summer vacations, which were ‘road trips’ throughout the western United States in our ‘camper’ truck. He and Inge also traveled throughout the world, and he made numerous trips to China over the past decade to trace his family genealogy. Education was also important to him, and he was one of the largest donators to the Lei Au area school in China. The people there will certainly miss him. He was also well known at the Lung Gong Family Association in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Everywhere he went in his travels, he would seek out Chinese restaurants and often meet Chinese migrants from the Toisan region of China. Following his retirement, he became intensely interested in his family genealogy, and eventually traced his lineage back some 5000 years. More than anything else, he considered himself to be a scholar of Chinese history, and though he never received a university degree, he probably knew more about China’s ancient history than most university professors.

He was also devoted to his family, both his children and his extended family of uncles, aunts, cousins and other relatives. He was always finding relatives and making new connections. His best friend, Jimmy Kee of Toronto, Canada, says that Dad was a legend in the Chinese community because of his passion for his culture, his great knowledge of China, and the care that he provided for his extended family.

Our father lived a long, diverse, and accomplished life that straddled both China and America. When he was young, he was very independent and rebellious. He may have been more American than Chinese in that way. Against his parent’s wishes, he married a non-Chinese wife and attended the Catholic church. He built his own home and raised his family of five children in a modern American suburb, sending them to a Catholic school.

He was always intensely interested in the world and its great diversity of places and peoples. As much as I travel in my own work, he has still visited more countries than I have. He was very much a modern man, and very much an expression of American can-do independence. At the same time, I recall how he tried to teach us children how to speak Chinese (Toisan wah), but was not successful, and how he often spoke to us of our extended Chinese family. Our family trips and my separate trips with him often involved visiting relatives in distant parts of the country.

As he aged, however, he seemed to become more and more interested in his traditional ‘Chineseness’. He helped many of our relatives from China to come to the US and over the past decade, he frequently visited his ancestral village of Kei Mei, where he turned his father and grandfather’s home into a family shrine. He developed a passion for learning about his family genealogy, visiting Lew family associations and talking to anyone he could find to help him piece together the 5000-year history of our family, ending directly with his own children and grandchildren.

In that process, he uncovered relatives in various parts of the US who had long lost connections to our immediate Sacramento clan. A little over a year ago, I traveled with him to Houston, Texas, for example, to meet his cousins there for the first time. Even his house became more Chinese with the Lotus Garden (Lin Yuen) that he built and nurtured. He was proud this past Spring of the colorful lotus flowers it had produced.

He had become the family patriarch, overseeing, and helping as much as possible, his relatives spread from Reno to San Francisco. They all appreciated his assistance and greatly respect his wisdom and advice. He was a man of great integrity who was deeply concerned and caring for his family.

Several people have suggested that perhaps our father knew that his time with us was coming to an end. In recent months, he spoke increasingly about his extended family and genealogy with me and others. He recently made his last ‘road trip’ from Sacramento to Vancouver, BC, with his best friend from Toronto, to visit relatives. He told me what a great time he had and how healthy he was feeling, and how he had brought his favorite grandson, Nathan, back to Sacramento.

For me personally, that conversation came after I had returned from 6 weeks in Hong Kong, during which I had visited Kei Mei village. It was the day before he passed away. It seems as though he had waited to talk to me about his homeland one more time; as though he had waited to have Nathan ‘at home’ in Sacramento one more time; as though he was disseminating his great knowledge of the family one more time; and as though he wanted to take that last road trip with his oldest friend one more time.

In reflection, it was a perfect ending to an amazing life story. We all miss him greatly, in part because we miss the warmth of his company, but probably more so in the long run because we appreciate the legacy of family that he built around himself and which I know he wants us all to continue.

Alan A. Lew, Saturday, July 14, 2001

(This is the long version of the eulogy. I (Alan) read a short version at the funeral. )