Father Takes Mona Lee Locke To See Boyhood Home; `Everything Is Gone' -- Family Ties Tug At Governor's Wife During Sojourn Through Shanghai

GOV. GARY LOCKE and his wife, Mona Lee Locke, are on a 12-day tour of China to promote business, cultural and medical exchanges between Washington state and China.

SHANGHAI - Two days before Gov. Gary Locke makes his much-publicized pilgrimage to his ancestral village, his father-in-law, Larry Lee, made a return of his own to the once grand house he grew up in 50 years ago.

After a day of travel, meetings, receptions and sightseeing, Locke, his wife and her father, a Bay Area businessman who's joined them for parts of the Asia tour, hopped into a minivan for a late-night sojourn into the heart of Shanghai.

The van wound its way through busy, neon-lit streets filled with nighttime revelers until the lights gave way to the darker, tree-lined residential neighborhood, once one of the nicest in town.

"The house was very large," Lee said of the home he lived in with his two sisters, parents and 30 servants. "It had 11 bathrooms and many more bedrooms."

Lee's prosperous family was once part of the country's ruling elite. Family connections include Sun Yat-sen, the man known as the Father of the Chinese Republic - one of the few Chinese historical figures celebrated here on the mainland and in Taiwan.

When the minivan stopped at 360 Xiangyang South Road, the Lockes saw what now is just a nondescript row house. Lee saw his childhood.

"I remember roller-skating over there, playing football (soccer) over there," he said.

He traced the lines of what used to be the front door.

"This used to have beautiful iron work with two lions," he said, "but that was taken away to make machinery by the Communists."

Lee and his daughter paced the sidewalk in front of the three-story house. On the second floor, a bay window looks into the room that used to be Lee's.

His normally happy face turned sad for a moment as he gazed at the bay window. "I remember when I was 8 years old looking out the window and seeing a man murdered," he said. "I saw him stabbed. I saw the blood."

The murder, he later was told, was committed by a pro-Japanese man during the Japanese occupation.

As Lee and the Lockes stood outside the house, the door opened and an elderly woman stepped outside. Lee told her who he is, that his family once owned the house and that he was here to see it once again.

After some confusion, the woman and her husband invited them in, and Lee quickly saw that his boyhood home and all of its splendor has been reduced to small apartments, with 19 families living in the subdivided spaces.

The woman and her husband, whose family name is Chou, showed him around. Past the door is an open courtyard. Clothes hang from lines and plants grow on shabby tin roofs slanted this way and that.

Mona Locke placed a comforting hand on her father's shoulder as the memories came flooding back.

"The garden is gone," he said.

"The fountain is gone.

"The fish pond is gone.

"Everything is different. Everything is gone."

Pictures were taken, thank-you's were exchanged, and the van pulled away. Back at the five-star Portman Shangri-La hotel, Mona Locke embraced her father again, pulled him close and asked if he was OK.

"Yeah, I'm all right," he said. "It's bittersweet."

Earlier in the day, Mona Locke had said she was only beginning to feel the pull of her roots.

"I didn't feel it in Beijing, but I got kind of excited driving through here. I started thinking, `This is where my father grew up.' "

Mona Locke's ties to Chinese history came when her paternal grandmother, Rosa Lam, divorced her first husband and married Sun Fo, the son of Sun Yat-sen.

Sun Yat-sen was the leader of the revolution that toppled China's last emperor and established the Republic of China in 1911. He was named the republic's first president.

The nationalist army founded by Sun Yat-sen later lost a bloody civil war with the Communists.

But Sun Yat-sen remains a respected figure - his massive portrait was installed last week in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to celebrate a national holiday. Some political observers say the portrait's proximity to one of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's is a sign that pragmatics are in power in the Communist Party.

Mona Locke's grandmother never told her much about her second husband, whom she had married after she gave birth to Mona's father.

Sun Fo was educated at the University of California. He served as mayor of Canton, now Guangzhou, and later was minister of finance for the country.

But after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Lam, Mona Locke's father and his sister fled the country.

Today's visit was not Lee's first return to Shanghai, but it was his first time back inside his childhood home.

The governor's parents will join the trip tomorrow. The 12-day mission ends Sunday after the Lockes visit their ancestral village in southern China.