Some of My Days

Pilwun Shih (also known as Pilwun Wang) was born in Beijing in 1931, the year the Japanese invaded Northeastern China. Her whole family moved from northern China to southern China traveling along the railways from Hankou to Gongzhou, and then through Hong Kong to Vietnam. In 1940 the family moved to Kunming. After the war the family moved to Taiwan, because of its warm weather. Pilwun Shih graduated from Jianguo high school in 1949 and Taiwan University in 1954. After immigrating to the United States, she taught Chinese at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York for thirty years. After retiring in 1997, she continued to live in Ithaca, New York, but then moved to New York City, New York and Princeton Junction, New Jersey. Since July 2013 she has made her residence in Seattle, Washington. She sometimes writes as a way of enjoying her life.

About the author: I lived in Princeton Junction, New Jersey for almost seven years (2007-2013). The landscape of Princeton Junction was different from Ithaca, my home in the US for thirty years. Rather than the immediate hills and waterfalls that I encountered on my daily outings, I walked a terrain full of flatness and street side windings. My walks there were full of twists and bends but I felt my life was going nowhere for me at the age of close to eighty. Fortunately, a senior center was located close to my house. I went to there to do taichi and yoga exercises while also joining a creative writing class. The classes extended my life, but my writing class in particular, also surprisingly deepened my life. I was spurred on to draw from stories and experiences of my long ago past. I tried to recollect those stories from my mother's generation and my own experiences during my early life. Here are the fruits of my creative labors. Anyone who happens by and picks this up to read might say: "Oh, that was when..."

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